Blog of a Genealogist in Training

Kindof a funny new development

2012-01-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

Alright, so I've been working on the initial records survey for a project focusing on finding the origins of Moise Dellibac, and hopefully proving his parentage in the process. My first step here is usually to scour the web for info and resources and that includes checking the website of the local genealogical society. The earliest confirmed location in the US that I've found for Moise is in Iroquois County, IL and as it happens the county has their own society with a pretty informative website . In the database section, they have included indexes to several collections of county records. So, like the diligent family historian that I am, I figured I should probably check all that could apply to my Dellibac family. For the most part, I came up empty which isn't really surprising since it looks like they were only technically in Iroquois County for perhaps the first few years of the 1850s before their home became part of Kankakee County. But I did come up with one rather interesting hit. Of all the records that they could have shown up in on this site, the potential father of Moise (the man who has been believed to be his father by the descendants of Moise's daughter, Josephine) appears in the Index for Criminal Cases. That's right. They don't appear in the tax list, they don't appear in the marriages section, or the online grantee-grantor index, not even the probate or civil court records. The criminal case files. The online index doesn't give any specifics about what Alex Dellibac was being charged with, but there are two continuous case numbers given in the index so I'm hoping there may be some interesting information included within at least one of those files.

It's just funny to me. In all of my initial searching during this first step, I get a hit in the criminal case files for the county. Yeah, that sounds about right for my family :)

Great new resource for Quebec research

2012-01-17T06:38:00.000-08:00

So as I'm beginning a new research project for my Dellibac ancestors from Quebec, I woke up this morning to the following posts from the Eastman's Genealogy Newsletter and Dear Myrtle about a new website for the Quebec Family History Society:

The Quebec Family History Society Launches New Website
Quebec Family History Society Launches New Website

Being a complete newbie to Quebec research, I was unaware of this group so I decided to poke around the website a bit. For the most part, I saw a lot of advice to come in to take advantage of the collections in the research room, with some brief description of a small number of what is available, and names of contacts to look up in case on-site research is unavailable. So initially I wasn't really too impressed. But then I found this page on the site, Research Tips . The page is broken down into topical categories such as Immigration, Quebec Church Records, Land Records, Court Records, Census, Military and Notary. Within each category are a selection of useful bites of information to help you understand what you might be able to find in each categorical grouping, as well as where you might find what you're looking for. In the Quebec Land Records section, the first tip tells you that there are three different land registration systems in Quebec and then gives a brief discussion of usage for all three. The tips section also tell you that the Cadastre system is the only one currently used in Quebec, so if you're looking for more modern subjects, chances are good that you're going to want to consult the Cadastre records. As the three systems did not replace one another, depending upon what time period you're looking at, there could be more than one set of land records for you to consult - one for each of the land registry systems in usage at that time and in that place, up to three sets! Why couldn't we in the US be so lucky!

There is a great array of information available on this page alone, which makes me wonder what may be available to those who decide to become a member. On the "Join Us" page, there is a run-down of the member benefits, which include discounts on research services, free lookups in commonly used collections, free issues of the member periodical, Connections, and various on-site benefits including discounts on registration fees for their workshops and events. The membership fee for an individual is $65 (not sure if that's Canadian or US) but that's right up there with the membership fees of the NEHGS, so that's one of the larger membership fees I've seen. Usually, I alternate my memberships to help with the cost issue so I'm not sure if I'll be able to swing this one anytime soon. But they do offer some nice benefits, and it would be nice to learn more about research in the are by reading their journal, so who knows. Either way, they've already set me up with a good deal of useful, beginning information on how to navigate records for Quebec so if I can ever find out where exactly my Moise Dellibac came from, perhaps these tips will help me find the most information possible.

Great tip from Michael John Neill

2012-01-12T16:30:00.000-08:00

Are you a regular reader of the blogs of Michael John Neill? If not, you should be and here's one example why:

Can the Minister Help with Two Places at Once?

Thinking of trying something new

2011-12-24T05:48:00.000-08:00

Ok, a while back ancestry.com was running a promotion where they would allow access to a handful of World Collection databases for free. One of those databases that was open was the Drouin Collection. For those who aren't familiar with this, it's a set of Catholic church records from primarily Quebec (though I understand there is a sprinkling of records from Ontario and other denominations included on the original film though not in the ancestry collection). The records stretch as far back as the 17th century and go all the way into the 20th. It's a huge, huge collection of the births, marriages, and deaths of French Canada and this was the first time I was able to take a look at any of it since I don't have a subscription to the World Collection, and my French is a little rusty. What happened though, is that my interest turned towards my Dellibac French Canadian ancestors and now I'm thinking I might try and run with it. There are some issues though that have been and/or will prove to be a bit sticky....and I'm not just talking about the fact that it's been more years than I prefer to count since I took high school French. Here's what I know so far:

The Run-Down-

Moise Dellibac first appears in the 1855 Illinois state census living in Iroquois County. He appears to be the head of a fairly young family with himself aged 30-40, a female aged 20-30 (presumably his wife, Anastasia Mombleau), and two males under 10. In 1860, the family is found in Kankakee County (which was formed from part of Iroquois County) with "Moyse" aged 35, his wife age 27, and three boys Frs H 4, Henry 2, and Charles 3 months, all born in Illinois. Illinois took another state census in 1865 where "Moses" is shown in Kankakee County, as of 40 and under 50, a female of 30 and under 40, and three boys 10 and under. In 1870, they are again in Kankakee County; Moise 45, Anastasie 38, F Xavier 15, Henry 13, Charles 11, Moise 4, Narcisse 2, and Josephine (my Great Great Grandmother) 1 month. The last census appearance for Moise is in 1880, where the family is again in Kankakee County. Moise is now 61 years old and his wife "Nestage" is 50. They have 6 children living with them; Xavier 24, Henry 22, Moses 14, Narcisse 11, Josephine 10, Carine 7.

Where the problems begin-

Moise's death: Anastasia was living alone as a widow in 1900 and most family members show that Moise died in Illinois (probably Kankakee County) in 1896. This information is unconfirmed and unsourced. An attempt to find a death record was attempted earlier this year, but there is no record of a death for him at the county courthouse for anytime before or after 1896 and he is not listed in the pre-1916 death index for the state.

When they came over: Through the range of all of these enumerations, the children are listed as having been born in Illinois but both parents were born in Canada. No passenger list has been found for either Moise or Anastasia (with her maiden name or as Moise's wife). No marriage for Moise and Anastasia has been found either in Kankakee or in the Illinois Statewide Marriage Index. This doesn't necessarily discount their marriage however, since the marriage records of Iroquois County for the period covering the 1850s and early to mid-1860s were burned in a courthouse fire in the late 1860s. They could have come separately, perhaps with their parents or siblings and then married in IL or come together as a newly married couple from Canada and started their family once they got here. Either way, there is no marriage record found and no passenger list for either of them.

Names: Also, the names are an issue when searching for this group. Moise is often found as Moses, Dellibac can be spelled any number of ways (including Delibac, Delliback, Deliback, De Lubac, etc.). Anastasia is found with all manner of weird spellings, both for the full given name as well as for a shortened version, like Nestage, sometimes with a random "z" thrown in for no reason. When trying to search for her family, to look for relatives who may have lived nearby, Mombleau could be Monbleau, Mombleaux, Montbleau or Montbleaux, etc. Also, let's not forget that since they were French Canadian, there may be what's known as a dit name that I'm not aware of. I've heard these French call names in several of the NGSQ articles that are case studies for primarily Louisiana families but since I haven't researched anyone of French ancestry before, I've never had to figure this part out. But this may be an issue here and without knowing what that dit name might have been, I don't really know what name they could be under, especially where the passenger list search is concerned.

Possibilities-

Anastasia is found in Kankakee County in the 1900 census living alone as a widow. She is shown as the mother of 10 children, 5 then living, and her immigration year is given as 1848. She is still there in 1910, no immigration year is given, and thanks to familysearch.org I can see that she died in Minnesota in 1919 (her son, Moise/Moses was living there at the time of the 1920 census so presumably she had gone to live close to family right before her death). While this record has been indexed on that site, very little information is shown and it is undetermined whether information was included on the original and just not transcribed onto the website or if the pertinent information regarding birth was omitted by the informant. Either way, I need to order the record just for confirmation of her death, if for nothing else. But that still doesn't help me too much with figuring out when they came to the U.S. and where in Quebec Moise had come from.

For Moise's place of birth, it may be helpful to track down the marriage and death records for the children. However, several of them died between 1855 and 1900 so I will definitely need to comb the death records to find out who died when and then go into the marriage records to find out when the girls married and who they married. The marriage records might end up being the most helpful since place of father's birth was on the marriage registers in Kankakee County around this time. Though Josephine's marriage records (she married a couple of times) don't get much more specific than Canada or French Canada, she was one of the youngest children so it would be worth going after the vital records for the older kids to compare. For all of this, the fact that the family was Catholic might end up helping me pinpoint all of the vital records, if I can find out which church they attended and then whether the records are still extant.

Also, though no death record was found for Moise, he may have had a probate case opened up. When I was in Kankakee earlier in the year, just for a brief look around, I was able to take a look at Dellibac land transactions in the deed books for the years around that questionable 1896 death date for him. There was some activity in that pre-1900 time frame to suggest that something might be going on, but I would like some additional time to see if a probate file was opened. If not, more time to go into what was happening with the land to help me narrow down when he could have died.

Another big thing with this group is that they were constantly living near extended family members. A family group with an older Dellibac is shown directly below Moise on the IL census enumeration sheet of 1855. Alex and Felicite (Gaudreau) are presumed to be Moise's parents by family members, though again, no one has presented any sourced information on this. His first appearance on census enumerations also happens to be the sheet of the Iroquois County IL census of 1855, which could be an indicator that they might have come over together though, like Moise, no passenger list has been found for him. A Joseph Dellaback is also shown on that 1855 census page in close proximity to Moise and Alex as a male age 20-30 with a female the same age. He cannot be found on schedules after that.

So I think that's the full round-up of info for now. I'm not sure if I want to jump into this, it's going to be a lot of work, and I'm not sure how successful I'll be since there are a few things here that will be new to me. But I really would like to be able to at least narrow down when Moise died a little better, and find out when he might have come over, whether it was as a married man or single and he married in Illinois, where in Quebec he came from, and whether Alex and Felicite were really his parents.

...And this all snowballed from one free week of access to one of the World Collection databases on ancestry.com. Kindof hard to think that if all this happens from one database, what would happen if I had full access to the collection? Yikes!

I'm a horrible, horrible blogger...

2011-12-15T18:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know. I'm a horrible blogger. How in the world did the time get so far away from me? I have a few ideas, including some family issues that had to be taken care of, and then we hit on the holidays and now we're a week and a half away from Christmas. Yikes!

I do have a couple of updates though...well, more like one big one. The genealogical writing study group that we were developing back in the summer and fall is now under way, with the first tester group into its 4th month. After the new year, one of our first writing assignments is going to be blog writing so I'll be sure to post for that. Actually, I need to start thinking about what I could write about. It may even turn out that the blog could serve as a sound board for future writing assignments with the group as well. I'm pretty excited about what could turn up from that.

For now though, I'm getting ready for Christmas and then for my first time at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. Never heard of it? Check out the website for the Utah Genealogical Association to get the info. If you're familiar with IGHR down at Samford University in Alabama, SLIG appears to be very similar, just with a different setting. I'll be in the Advanced class with Tom Jones, Claire Bettag, and Rick Sayre. If you're familiar with any of those names, then you might get an idea of the value of the course. I can't wait!

Til then, I probably won't have too much to say but who knows. Something may get stuck in my head and I'll just have to share it here. If not though, I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and I'll see you in the new year!

Have Indiana Ancestors?

2011-09-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

I'm taking some time here to make a plea for submissions to the Indiana Genealogical Society's "Always a Hoosier" and "Once a Hoosier" projects. These two projects highlight individuals who either spent some part of their lives living in Indiana, or those who are buried in the Hoosier state. To make a submission, just go to the IGS website and go to the projects page here then click on either "Always a Hoosier" or "Once a Hoosier" depending upon the circumstances of your subject's life. Then download the appropriate submission form and send it off.

For more info on the "Once a Hoosier" project check here

For more info on the "Always a Hoosier" project check here

[Just as a disclaimer, I'm the editor for the "Always a Hoosier" project. We could really use your submissions so if you have an ancestor buried in Indiana, we'd love to hear from you!]

The fine print wins again

2011-09-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

I was recently reminded of a very important tip: always read the fine print.

For those of you familiar with Illinois genealogy, you'll know the website for the Secretary of State's office, which includes a few online vital records databases (found here). One of these databases is the the Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, covering 1763-1900. Obviously, not all counties are covered for the whole of the time frame in the title. For one thing, not all of the counties were in existence at the same time. So the title is a little elastic on that front. But when I was wondering where a couple might have gotten married, sometime during the 19-teens, I thought I knew that this database wasn't going to be any help. Yeah, I broke that oh so important rule of not reading the fine print and not remembering that the titles don't always tell the whole story. Here's the page that I forgot to revisit while brainstorming on my latest marriage query:

http://www.sos.state.il.us/departments/archives/marrlst.html

What it is, is a county and time range table listing the availability of the county marriage records which are included in the online database. As you can see, some counties are not included at all, while others only include a portion of time within the titles' date range. The county in which I ended up finding the marriage record I was looking for, was Richland Co. Richland happens to have a date range between 1840 and 1915, well after the 1900 limit established by the title. And Richland county isn't the only one with records included in the online database well beyond 1900. The marriage records for Brown, Fulton, Jersey, Menard, Morgan, Pike, Pope, Stephenson, and Wayne counties all stretch into the 1920s within this database.

And you wouldn't know it unless you read the fine print...

Score!! - Finding Newspaper Bibliographies

2011-09-07T05:52:00.000-07:00

One of the coolest things about the genealogical research process, is that success depends upon your usage of a variety of materials - pretty much, everything that is available to you should be consulted. Books that perhaps you never would have laid eyes on before become almost as important as air. Without checking out your sources, including books, you won't break through those brick walls.

One of the most helpful books I've used in the past is John Miller's 1982 work, Indiana Newspaper Bibliography. Like newspaper bibliography books you've probably seen for other states, it is a collection of listings of all known newspapers that were running within the state. It is broken down by county and then by township, and not only gives the names of the papers that ran in each county, but also the dates for each paper, a great tool since some of them didn't last very long, and who opened the press. Not only is something like this extremely useful for finding out when and where there might have been a paper running that could have information pertaining to your subject, but if you have a newspaper man in the family (like I do), these things can become like a second census for you because you can track his movements around the state. It can explain things like why his children were all born in different towns that seemingly have no familial affiliations. So these things are definitely worth having on your bookshelf.

This book has been out of print for quite some time so I've had it on every online wish list I could find (abebooks, amazon, and ebay). I've had no responses to any copies coming up for sale, I contacted the publisher and they didn't have any copies to sell and no plans to put it back in print. If I had found contact information for the author I would have gotten in touch about it. In the meantime, I was constantly ordering the book through Interlibrary Loan and it was getting old. Finally, about 2 weeks ago, I got a hit from abebooks that one had come up for sale from an Indiana bookseller and I jumped on it. It arrived last week and it's mine, all mine!! Finally, I have my very own copy and I couldn't be happier.

I know that Ohio has a similar book for newspapers in its state, by Steve Gutgesell, which you can find on amazon and I've seen others elsewhere too. You can troll around on amazon to check for your own state, or perhaps a better way to do it would be to go on to the Library of Congress website and check their catalog here . Try using search terms like the state's name and "newspapers", or if you're looking for papers within a particular county you can try searching for the county name. I know Kentucky has several localized newspaper bibliographies so for that state, the county search might work best. But try it several different ways and see what comes up. You may find your own piece of genealogical gold within the covers of a book.

Feeling like Hermione Granger tonight

2011-08-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are Harry Potter fans, or have kids who like the Harry Potter movies, do you remember that part in the Sorcerer's Stone when Hermione says she was doing "a bit of light reading" and whips up this enormous book? That's kindof how I felt today. I felt like I needed a bit of a distraction and wanted to take on a little project, separate from the other stuff I've been working on. It turned out to be more than just a little distraction though.

I thought revisiting the possible birthplace of John Kleinert would fit the bill for what I was looking for. I have a copy of his 1885 marriage record, a registry entry from Kankakee County, Illinois, which includes a question about place of birth. For John, the village of Tauenzinow, Germany is shown. So I fired up ole' faithful, ancestry.com , and got to the Meyers Orts Gazetteer here . Meyers Orts is pretty much the answer to decoding all those German place names that may or may not still exist. You find a record here in the US with the name of town as it was known in the 1860s but that doesn't mean you'll just be able to find it on a map. Because of all the boundary changes and partitions of the area now covering Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland and any number of other Eastern European countries, you're going to need help finding that 19th century place name. Meyers Orts is your first step.

Now don't go thinking it'll be quite that easy though. Oh no. Meyers Orts is written in Gothic script. And it's in German. And it's full of abbreviations. So go ahead and pull up the name of your town and see what happens. Think you can do it without help on the first try? If you can, you're way better at this than I am. Luckily, I found a great guide available through familysearch.org. It gives general information about the gazetteer as well as an immensely helpful section on deciphering the Gothic alphabet which makes up the abbreviations, followed by a guide to exactly what all those letters mean. The guide and tips can be found here (you can just click on the guide and tips tabs as you go along to help find the info you need as you need it). There's also a pretty useful wiki here

Here's what the entry for Tauenzinow looks like:

I know what I got from it, namely that this place is no longer part of Germany, but Poland. Now what can you find out about your own pre-WWI German place names? If you're anything like me, you'll find that maybe those German ancestors of yours weren't quite as German as you thought.

Still alive, yes...Standing still long enough to chat, not so much

2011-08-17T05:42:00.000-07:00

So yeah, where do I begin? In the nearly one month since my last post (ugh, I can't believe I let time run away from me!), I've been run through the ringer and really have a ton to talk about, not a whole lot of time to talk about it, and no clue where to begin. How's that for playing catch-up? Besides the usual back to school rush and any number of other things happening here, here's the genealogical run-down.

For starters, in case you haven't noticed, I'm no great writer. I decided from the start that this blog was basically going to be for me alone and if I could write things that would help other people, that's a bonus. So the voice here is extremely casual, and there's very little pressure on myself here. Which is great, usually. What's happening though is that I'm getting very used to writing for myself in that casual style, and not working enough on professional writing and that could be detrimental to achieving some of my goals. Namely, getting a case study published (hopefully in the NGSQ) and working on my certification portfolio material. I need practice and I need to start taking myself and my work more seriously. That's not to say that I'm chucking my light, casual, no-pressure blog. I like knowing that I can talk about my work and not get all stuffy about it. But to help me get on track with where I need to be professionally, I've been working on developing a new writing group based upon the ProGen model. We're having our first "intro" chat tomorrow and will be kicking off the program shortly. This group is going to be a tester to see if the format will work when applied to a writing program. If it does, we've got some plans for future groups. The goal here is to get everyone comfortable with genealogical writing in as many outlets and formats as possible and to get as much practice and experience as possible, while also receiving some helpful, constructive feedback from peers and a mentor. Those already familiar with ProGen will already have the idea. Those who aren't familiar, get familiar. ProGen should be a valuable part of your genealogical education.

So that's been the big pet project for the summer, part one. The second item that's been keeping me away from the blog for any extended time, is more personal. I've recently gotten acquainted with a couple new cousins on a family that I just rediscovered last year. They've both already done a great deal of work as far as record retrieval and tracking down collateral lines through siblings and children and have developed some leads that it would have taken me quite some time to compile. So we've been trying to get on the same page with our research so we can develop a game plan. It's been good to have another project to work with while I'm waiting for the FHL film for Clinton County, Ohio (yes, still waiting). I had been working on the Atkinson family of that area but needed to view some of the county records to help figure out what my next step might be. So in the meantime, I've got a new line of family from Parke County, Indiana, Greene County, Tennessee, and possibly Botetourt County, Virginia to brainstorm about. Once things get settled down a bit more and my thoughts get a little more clear, I have a feeling I'll be talking about them a lot. For now, we'll call them the Newbies :)

Inspired, but stalled

2011-07-20T15:57:00.001-07:00

After listening to ESM's census talk at IGHR (see my previous post about IGHR here ), I'm really inspired to take a stab at something she showed us. One of our class exercises was to go over some fictional information to find the parents of a woman when she and her husband do not appear in the census and there is only one other person living in the county of that surname with no records connecting the two people as father and daughter and no real direct leads as to who the woman's family might be.

The part about this research that really struck me was the topo map that she did for not just the county where the research started, but also the neighboring county. She placed the neighborhood of the only other person of this name in this county from the census (specifically those on the pages before, after and on the same page) on the plat map and then took the federal land description for the subject couple and placed them on the map as well to get a sense of distance. Then she also plopped the county seat on the map to get a sense of where these families were in relation to the county government. As it turned out, the county seat for the neighboring county was actually closer to the subject couple and that was where doing a plat map for the neighboring county came into play because that ended up being the county where another person of the same surname was found, and yet another lead that led to the right potential father.

So what you end up with is a rectangular grid covering the ranges and townships (the example was in a public land state) for two counties. This is probably pretty similar to what you all are familiar with, however I'm more used to platting out individual properties within a particular township so the idea of taking the span out to include several townships and going into neighboring counties is taking things to another level for me. I thought I could really put this to some use for a few of my "stumpers", especially since most of them involve families who were moving around between the IN and OH state borders. To make matters more complicated, some of these border-settling movers and shakers also appear to have been landless and are missing from the deed books, so their situation can really be compared to the example from class.

I'm really excited to try this out, I'll probably start with the Atkinsons from Clinton Co., Ohio since that's the project I seem to be devoting most of my time to lately (you can read a little about them here and here). I'll post a second part to help get a plan going but in the meantime, it's time to get working on ordering the FHL film. I wish it could all get here quickly, I hate waiting!

Another interesting fact from IGHR

2011-07-05T10:33:00.001-07:00

Another of the insightful discussions from the Advanced Methodology course at IGHR this year concerned those Fee Books that you often find on courthouse office shelves and basements. Honestly, I think I can count on one hand how many times I've flipped through one of those books. Let's face it, when you're surrounded by vital records ledgers and wills and estates and court records and deeds and every other goldmine of information that a courthouse has to offer, something with the tedious title of "fee book" doesn't really do much for me. But the truth of the matter is, I was hurting my research and if you've been avoiding them too, you haven't done the best for your work either.

So what can these fee books possibly offer to us that would make them useful in any way? Well the most obvious answer is that you have done work in a burned records county, you know already that records are few and far between and you pretty much have to take what you can get. Fee books are often among the remaining records in these counties for various reasons, including that they were often kept in a different place from the vital records information, so when you're missing your subject in those goldmine records, these fee books may provide the only direct evidence that your subject was even there.

Which brings us to the next point. Our ancestors had civil duties back then, just as we do now. They were also called for jury duty, for instance, and this service was recorded as payment information in the fee books. Like previously stated in reference to the tax records, though this may just be a name and a bunch of numbers which appear to have no rhyme or reason, there could be answers in those numbers. But it's up to you to track down what they mean. Those numbers generally refer to the amount the person was paid for his service to the locale and this number was calculated using such variables as mileage from their home to the courthouse, how many days they were there (food costs), and more. But the mileage from the courthouse could be extremely valuable and I think any genealogist worth their salt could figure out why. Especially if you're trying to determine possible family connections between people of the same surname because you can use that mileage rate to help determine distances from the courthouse and then compare with your family plat map to see who lived closest to your subject and would therefore, be more likely to have a family connection. This is certainly not a source to provide conclusive evidence in this case, but it is definitely a good source to help point you towards some good, solid leads.

So, overall, I think I'm in the same boat as most everyone else. When faced with a will or probate book and a rather drab-sounding fee book, my first instinct is going to be to grab the will book first. But after this truly enlightening part of the IGHR course, I'm going to be sure not to stop with that alone. That fee book could offer up more than you expect, but you'll never know unless you take a look.

Ok, now that the dust has settled...quick IGHR run-down

2011-07-03T05:51:00.000-07:00

Have you ever watched magic happen right in front of your eyes? Gene-magic that is, not sitting in the front row at a David Copperfield performance. That's pretty much how I felt sitting in my Advanced Methodology class at IGHR. You sit and watch Elizabeth Shown Mills perform magic, and it was really something to see. Those few days were about watching a real professional do her magic and then trying to figure out if I can emulate those strategies. That's a big fat maybe (I'm just not one to have a lot of self-confidence in my abilities) but the fact is that now I think I have a few extra tricks up my sleeve to help me get a little further and that's a great feeling.

Some key points from the course included how to get the most out of those tax rolls, how to get the most from census records, and knowing exactly how much is available in military records.

The tax roll and census record exercises from class were absolutely mind-blowing. Think about those tax rolls you've seen. They're basically just names with a bunch of numbers after them. You use them to pretty much place an individual in a specific place at a specific time, tracking them, right? You may or may not have paid much attention to those numbers but if you are one who just glanced at them and moved on, did you know that those numbers can sometimes tell you the vicinity of your subject, helping you identify the neighborhood and his neighbors? One of the best tools we use in our research is the concept of FAN - collecting FRIENDS, ASSOCIATES, and NEIGHBORS when we're trying to solve a mystery on our individual. Tax rolls can be another tool for finding neighbors, even if you're looking at a roll with no columnar headings and/or the list has been alphabetized so that you don't know the original order. I didn't know that, did you? Those numbers can also tell you how much land the person had just by looking at how much value was placed on the land and how much he paid for it.

The census discussion was another one that really changed the way commonly used records can be approached. When you're looking at a census sheet showing your subject, you take note of the fact that they are in that place at that time, whom they are living with, ages and places (where available), and sometimes maybe their occupation. But how often do you check to see what the definitions of those occupations were for that census year? "Farmer" could mean something different than what you think. If someone is listed as a "Farmer" does that mean they own their own land and have hired farm hands, or are they tenant farmers, living off someone else's land? The answer could make a difference to you, especially if you're wanting to track them down through land records. If they're living off of someone else's land, they may not appear in deed books so you could have to track them by tracking the landowner instead and you wouldn't know this unless you knew why that person was written down with the occupation that they were given and that answers is in the census enumerator's instructions. Also, did you know that between 1850 and 1870 there were 3 official copies of the census? Not just one local and one federal as in previous years. For these years, there was the federal copy and then 2 preliminary local copies; one given to the local county clerk and one given to the secretary of the state. The clerk's copy can often still be found in the county courthouses while the secretary of state copy can sometimes be found in the state archives. The third copy is the federal copy that was sent to Washington and is now at NARA. Do you know how many are available for your state between these years? What if one only shows initials for names? If there are other copies available to you, you need to know this because that other copy (or copies) could give you the actual names rather than just the initials. That's a big deal and you need to know that.

A final thought from the class was just how much is available to you if you utilize military records to help solve your problems. You may have found your ancestor's military pension record or found their name in a pension index on footnote.com or ancestry.com, but do you stop there or keep going? Because there is always more that can be found. There are numerous preliminary inventories available, through NARA or through gene-book sites like heritagebooks.com, listing places for you to find other goodies to find your subject. If you find your ancestor's Revolutionary War pension file on footnote and just stop, you're really shorting yourself. You may be able to find records of his pension payment schedule, receipts, etc. all telling you where he or she was picking up their payments. If you've been having trouble tracking them, these receipts can really help you. If you know the person and the general area they were living but you don't know who was with them, knowing who was picking up their payments could really help you. If you don't check out what's available to you, you won't know that there could be more information waiting for you to find and you could be overlooking something that could fill in the blanks to your problem. The key point here was, don't stop looking once you find that pension and/or service record. There is more to be found.

Yes, I'm back

2011-06-27T05:21:00.000-07:00

I've had a busy couple of weeks but I'm finally back home now. I attended the Institute of Genealogical and Historic Research (IGHR) in Birmingham, then came home for a few days and had the chance to do a little research in three different counties - Kankakee County, IL, Lake County, IN, and Randolph County, IN. There was some mixed success on these trips, but some good did come out of it all. I want to post about my class at IGHR first though, once I get settled so be on the lookout for that!

Off to IGHR

2011-06-12T05:18:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Birmingham, Alabama this morning to attend the Institute of Genealogical and Historical Research at Samford University. The Institute runs through Friday of next week and I can't wait to get there! Last year was my first year and it was absolutely amazing; the course (on Virginia) was extensive and meeting the people whose names you see all over the genealogy sites was fantastic. This year should be even better!

SLIG registration opens today!!

2011-06-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that registration for the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy opens up this morning at 9am Mountain Time (10am Central, 11am Eastern). Courses offered for the January 2012 Institute include:

~American Research and Records: Focus on Families - Paula Stuart-Warren, CG, FUGA
~Advanced Evidence Analysis Practicum - Angela McGhie (Angela is the coordinator of the
ProGen study programs and President of the D.C. area chapter of APG)
~Advanced Research Tools: Land Records - Rick Sayre, CG and Pamela Boyer Sayre, CG, CGL
~Advanced New England Research - D. Joshua Taylor (Josh works for the NEHGS and has
appeared on the NBC program, "Who do you Think you are?")
~Welsh Research - Darris Williams, AG
~Swedish Research - Geoffrey Froberg Morris, AG
~Research in the Midwestern United States - Kory Meyerink, MLS, AG, FUGA
~Genealogy Software and Research Tools - George G. Morgan (co-host of the popular podcast,
"The Genealogy Guys")
~Principles of Effective Genealogical Librarianship - Drew Smith, MLS
~Beyond the Library: Using Original Source Repositories - John Philip Colletta, Ph.D., FUGA
~Advanced Genealogical Methods - Tom Jones, Ph.D., CG, CGL

The cost for registration is $400 for those who are not members of the Utah Genealogical Society and $350 for those who are members. The dates are January 23rd-27th.

Boston University Genealogy Certificate course...yay or nay?

2011-05-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

So with the NGS Home Course finished and my personal research kindof frozen right now, I was looking for something else that I can do to make good use of my genea-time when I got an email from Boston University announcing a 4-part payment plan for their Genealogy Certificate program. Considering the cost of the course is around $2600 bucks (not including a slight discount for NGS and APG members) a payment plan sounded pretty good. Good enough in fact, for me to revisit the website for the program and reassess things. Here's what I found:

~The next course starts on September 6th
~The 4-part payment plan is an automatically reoccurring payment made to your credit card in 4 monthly installments
~There are 6 modules; Foundations of Genealogical Research, Problem Solving Techniques and Technology, Evidence Evaluation and Documentation, Forensic Genealogical Research, Genealogical Research Ethnic and Geographic Specialties, and The Professional Genealogist
~It is an online program with short video clips from your instructors, interactive lessons, weekly assignments, and online chats with both your instructor and your other classmates
~There are 3 required texts; The BCG Standards Manual, Evidence Explained, and Professional Genealogy (many of you probably already own these titles)
~This is NOT a beginner course. Instead, it is more like an expansion of the NGS Home Study Course. (If you are looking for a more basic program to get grounded in fundamentals, BU will soon be starting a course on essentials. More info should be forthcoming within the next week or two)
~There is an orientation online prior to the the official start of the course

I was initially a little leery of this program, partially because of the whopping cost but also because I was concerned about overlap with material covered in the NGS course. But the payment plan helps ease the pain a little, as does the discount from being an NGS/APG member, and after speaking with an associate from the University about the course this afternoon, I feel pretty confident that this will go much further in-depth than the NGS course did. Just think of the NGS course as laying the groundwork and the BU course filling in the details. The associate from the University also claimed that their course was geared more towards people who had a goal of working in the field professionally and/or looking to get certified within the next couple years so this might be a good fit for me since that is definitely on my to-do list.

As I said earlier, the next course starts up on September 6th (that is when the online portal will open up and you will have access to your coursework and get your first assignment) so you have a bit of time to think about the pros and cons and learn more about the course itself. Just check out http://genealogyonline.bu.edu/index.htm

Yikes!! New one for me

2011-05-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

I've been working with my Parke County indexing this month and came across a slightly scary new name that I haven't seen before, so I thought I'd share. Check this out:

It was in the probate file for a John S. Kesler. The Kesler part I get; from this indenture, I can read the surname here as Cassler so it's easy to see how that evolved into "Kesler". But the given name! Wow! That's the doozy for me. It looks like Chawntzenbach. If you shorten it to "Chawn" then it would sound like John so even that part makes sense. What surprised me was the given name as it is written here because it's something I've never seen before. I entered the name into both yahoo and google but got 0, yes 0 results. But in google, when I enter "Chawntzenbach" I did get an alternate which was included in the search, Schwarzenbach. For this, there were quite a few search results including a link to Wikipedia which states the name is used for several geographic locations in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Slovenia. There is also a river called Schwarzbach in Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany. All of these could be helpful clues for one so inclined to go digging for this individual.

No, I am not that individual....at least, not today :)

New course offered by NGS

2011-05-10T17:47:00.001-07:00

The blog for the National Genealogical Society, UpFront with NGS, announced a new course offering a couple weeks ago. The focus will be on Civil War records and will make a great addition to their other courses which include a course on Transcribing, Extracting, and Abstracting, religious records, deeds, the census schedules, records relating to the Social Security Act, and of course, the Home Study Course (which I blogged about over several months). The Civil War records course was developed by Craig Robert Scott, CG who many of you will be familiar with from the military track at IGHR, as well as his various seminars at the national conferences. In fact, he will be holding lectures at this week's NGS conference in Charleston. Adding to his incredible resume, he is also the head of Heritage Books, where you can find tons of great titles including those that are often hard to find elsewhere. Oh, and he was also the CG mentor for my ProGen group (ProGen 3) as if all that wasn't enough. Convinced enough to take the course? I am!

I was waiting to post about it until it showed up on the Education Courses page of the NGS website but after reading more about the course on Angela McGhie's wonderful educational blog, I checked again and it's still not listed. The official press release states that it will debut at the conference which begins tomorrow, so hopefully it will appear on the NGS website for purchase soon after that. The release also states that it will be available as a CD-Rom or as a pdf and the cost will be $35 for NGS members (as I know all of you are, right......? :p ).

Speaking of additional courses...

2011-05-08T15:45:00.001-07:00

I've just come across yet another educational opportunity that you all might be interested in. It's called the Regional In-depth Genealogical Studies Alliance, Inc. and it's a week-long course covering a wide spectrum of the research process beginning with reading handwriting, then followed by transcribing and abstracting documents as well as instruction on citations and writing a research plan and utilizing online sources. The idea itself sounds like a pretty darned good idea to me as it is, but then you find out that the course is staffed by J. Mark Lowe and Linda Woodward Geiger, both are very well-known and accomplished Certified Genealogists and I have great respect for both of them. The course will be held in Texas in September this year and will be in Georgia in October next year. If you're interested in finding out more, see the RIGS Alliance website for details.

Have you heard about the new courses yet?

2011-05-07T07:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the web was abuzz over news that there will be a new week-long intensive course selection available through the newly established Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh. The courses will be held on the LaRoche College campus in July 2012 and the instructors are some pretty big names such as Thomas Jones, John Humphrey, Paula Stuart-Warren, D. Joshua Taylor, Claire Bettag, and Rick Sayre. You can read more about the courses here and more of a general overview about the week here .

The opening of another week-long set of courses is great news for those who have had trouble getting registered or have logistical conflicts with IGHR and/or SLIG. I've wanted to go to SLIG for a while now but since it's in January and I have a school-aged child, and of course, my Navy husband, it's a little complicated to make time for me to take a week off and fly to Utah. Summer tends to work better for me so having another summer option, in conjunction with IGHR in June, will work out great. Even better, the course at SLIG that I would most like to take now, Tom Jones' advanced course, appears to have a match at the Pittsburgh Institute. So if I can't get to Utah in January, as I suspect I won't, I can arrange to take it there instead now! That's great news!

No word on the cost yet, but I'm guessing it will be competitive with IGHR and SLIG. Registration opens in February and it might be a good idea to keep the page bookmarked and stay tuned for updates that may pop up between now and then.

Not to start a coup against Illinois records repositories or anything but....

2011-05-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

Here's yet another example of why I have issues doing research in my home state (and try to avoid it at all costs), from a great genealogist over at Midwestern Microhistory

I just have to vent - Illinois is not a fun state to work with!

2011-04-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry. I really am. But I am going to have to use my blog to vent out some personal frustration I experienced today. At least it's genealogy-related. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but I'm a volunteer for Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness for my local Illinois county. If you're not familiar with the site, take a look here . It's basically a site where people who need lookups or research help can hook up with a someone who volunteers to help for free. It's based on geographic area so it makes it pretty easy to find someone where you need them.

I usually just get obit requests but I finally had to take that off my offerings because I was getting more than I could keep up with since I don't live in the town with the big newspaper microfilm collection. So my requests have gone down a bit but at least they tend to be a bit more interesting. This time though, I got flooded with marriage lookups and was anxious to see how things went. If you recall my experience with another IL county Courthouse while I was doing one of the NGS Home Study Course lessons, you may not be surprised to hear the answer.

Today was really just another reason why I can't stand doing work in Illinois. It literally makes me want to pull out my own hair...no, that's not exactly true. It makes me want to pull out the hair of the courthouse employees who are denying me access to records that are in an officially "open records" state. My goal today for all of the requests, was to make sure the records they wanted were actually there and to get a sense of what kind of info would be available to them if they decided to order the copies. Sounds reasonable right? I'm not asking for anything that anyone could deem private, especially since the most recent marriage lookup was for a marriage that occurred in the 1920s. Apparently the Clerk's Office employees didn't agree with me.

First, the security guards at the door to the Courthouse wouldn't let me bring in my camera. Ok, whatever. I'm down with security so if they feel like my Canon Powershot is a threat to someone fine. So I took it back to my car...which was parked back in the parking garage.

Then, when I get to the Clerk's Office, they have a receptionist that told me they had an index for the older records that I could look in. Yeah, that didn't happen. I know what she was talking about. The index to marriage records going up to about 1915 are supposed to be open public records, available to view. They even say so on the Clerk's website. Apparently nobody else knew the deal because they looked at me like I was sprouting marigolds out of my head. So that's strike two.

When I got to the employee with all the information that the receptionist made me write down, she took her time ending her conversation with the employee "working" in the next cubicle, then took the forms and started getting down to business. Until she saw that I had written N/A on the line asking how many copies of each record I needed. Again, she looked at me as if I was sprouting something out of the top of my head. I told her I was doing lookups for other people who just wanted to know if their records were actually there and whether there was additional information. Her concern was apparently that I wasn't planning on purchasing any of the records and made a look at the lady next to her and said "Can we do that? Just look up records if she doesn't even want to buy any of the copies?" When the lady finally said yes, she could, she just couldn't give me any of the information but they could at least check for them, she promptly turned her computer screen away from me so she would be sure I wouldn't see anything and then minimized her window as yet another preventative measure. Unbelievable!

One of my requests had a date range of about 10 years for the date of the marriage. She wouldn't give me a closer range to help my requester out with her own request for copies. But then, when I told her that most of the people I was trying to help out live out of state and may want me to come back and purchase the copies for them and asked what I would need so that they would release them to me, she actually said that "the records are open to the public so just come back, fill out the forms, and pay."

So yeah, all that cloak and dagger stuff to supposedly protect identities when in actuality, they just don't want to release information that brings them income. I cannot express how livid I was. And to make matters worse, this is not the only Illinois county that I've experienced this attitude with. To be fair, it may just be a greater Chicago-land area problem since I seem to encounter this issue more with counties here in North Eastern Illinois rather than further South. I had a much more successful visit a couple years ago when I visited a more rural county further away so maybe that's it; the closer you get to Chicago, the worse time you're going to have trying to access things.

Or maybe it's just me, maybe I am actually starting to grow a flower garden out of my head!

When shared information doesn't add up, Part 2

2011-04-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

So up to this point, I'd been relaying the background on a Williamson family that I have been tracking in Parke County, Indiana. New evidence seems to be pointing to Greene County, Tennessee as their place of origin, or at least, where they lived before moving on to Indiana. To begin my search there, I started looking at the Ancestry.com message boards looking for others who may have already dug up some useful info on Williamsons who may have been living there at the same time as Clement. All of his known children claimed Tennessee as their birthplaces and this group goes back to 1817 so I knew that I should be able to track them there at least that far, and thanks to familysearch.org, I was able to locate an exact marriage date for his presumed daughter, Elizabeth Williamson, and her husband, George Basinger, who were both mentioned in Clement's probate file in Parke County as heirs. With all of the information I collected, it set up an estimated birth date for Clement between 1780 and 1790. I didn't find anyone of that name mentioned in the Greene County, TN message board, however, there was another Williamson found of a comparable age. Thomas Williamson married a woman named Kezziah in Greene County and had several children. More importantly, he left a will which named several heirs. There were quite a few posts from people claiming to be descended from Thomas and considering the closeness in age, I thought that perhaps he could be a cousin or brother. So my first question to the message board was if anyone had done any work on Thomas' extended family, including siblings. I didn't get an answer to that, but I did get a response from someone who had some information to share, though none of it was sourced. What she told me points a big fat red flag at the current state of Williamson genealogy.

It appears that Thomas Williamson named a daughter in his 1836 will named Elizabeth. More importantly, Thomas' descendants are attributing that 1831 marriage between Elizabeth Williamson and George Basinger to the daughter of Thomas, not the daughter of Clement who they may or may not have known about in the first place. Now this creates a problem because either there were at least 2 Elizabeth Williamson's living in Greene Co, one a daughter of Thomas and one a daughter of Clement, or there was just one, the daughter of Thomas and upon his death, Clement adopted her or at least took her into his own family and from there, they left for Indiana where they continued to live in close proximity to one another.

So which one is it? Were there 1 or 2 Elizabeth Williamson's? And if there were two, which is which?

When shared information doesn't add up, Part 1-the background

2011-04-23T12:00:00.001-07:00

One of the projects I've been working on lately has been on rebuilding the family group of the Williamsons of Parke County, Indiana. On my most recent trip to Rockville, the county seat, I was fortunate enough to find a probate file for a previously unknown Williamson in the county which included a list of heirs which included both my ancestor and a man I suspected to be his brother, as well as others that I hadn't known of before. This gave me several new leads to follow so I've been keeping busy trying to figure out where each new piece fits.

I started working with this family about a year ago when I was able to take my line back to a William Williamson, born abt 1825 probably in TN, and died in Parke County, IN in 1858. William's file provided some indirect evidence of a relationship between a Conrad Williamson who was only about 2 years older than William and who petitioned the probate court on behalf of William's widow and called himself brother to the deceased (though I do know that that is not always to be taken literally in early legal jargon, it did point to a relationship of some kind). He too was seen in census enumerations with a Tennessee birth place and that, along with the closeness of age and the petition made a pretty good case for believing Conrad could have been William's brother. So since both had been born in Tennessee, the task was to find out when they came to Indiana and where they came from. I ran into a brick wall.

The probate file I found a couple weeks ago was for a Clement Williamson who died about 1843 (the early probate files rarely give the exact date of death so you usually have to go by the earliest document found in the file to get an estimate) which explains why he didn't show up when I had been seaching for other Williamsons in the county in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. The probate file names his widow as Mary, who is shown in the 1850 census still living in Parke County with her family, and cites William, Conrad, Henry, James and George and Betsey Basinger "formerly Williamson" as heirs.

Clement did show up in Parke County in the 1840 census, along with a household which included 1 male aged 15-20, 1 male aged 5-10, and 1 male 50 to 60. The male aged 15-20 fits the age William would have been at the time and also fits knowing that he didn't marry until 1843. This means the male 50-60 would be Clement himself giving him a birth date estimate of 1780-1790. Directly above Clement's household in the census is George Basinger including a female, aged 20-30 which fits in with "Betsey's" birth date range when tracking her to the 1850 census. Clement Williamson is not found in Indiana in the 1830 census, however, there is a Clement Williams found in Greene Co., Tennessee in that year with a family group fitting. Thanks to familysearch.org, I was able to see that a marriage took place in Greene Co., TN in 1831 between Elizabeth Williamson and George Basinger (which also tells me that the family was still in TN at the time of their marriage). Also found in 1850, living with the widowed Mary, was James Williamson, age 20, which fits in with the male living in Clement's household in the 1840 census and Henry Williamson, age 32.

So from this, so far I can pretty confidently set the family up as Clement and Mary as the married couple, with William, Conrad, Henry, James, and Elizabeth/"Betsey". To find out more about Clement, I figured I needed to start looking at records available in Greene County, Tennessee. So I headed over to ancestry.com's message boards and started searching for Williamsons in that area. I was fortunate to find several posts regarding a Thomas Williamson there who appeared to be of a comparable age to Clement. Here is where things start to get sticky...

Don't forget to check the backs of those documents

2011-04-14T13:17:00.001-07:00

I just wanted to pass along a tip that I sometimes forget about. When you've got a loose document from whatever kind of file, be it a military pension, immigration/naturalization pages, or probate files, be sure to turn over those pages and check the backs for extra info. It may seem unnecessary or unlikely but things can turn up there. It's just like covering all your bases when you're on the trail of someone you're tracking in a family tree.

To show the point, a couple weeks ago in Indiana I had a probate file of someone I'd never heard of before, but he had the same surname the subjects of my research. The family was one that I was looking to rebuild before even attempting to go back another generation, and when I saw the name and date of death of this new person, I was assuming it was probably a sibling or possibly a cousin to my subject. When I started looking at the actual pages in the probate file though, I found a pretty complete family tree on the back of a random sheet of paper that in itself didn't tell me a thing about who this person was. Without looking at the back of that paper though, I wouldn't have been able to figure out that this person was actually the father of my subject! The sheet named his widow as well as my subject, along with his siblings. Some were known, others were not. I now have the name of my subject's parents as well as confirmation of the siblings for him that I did know and a whole slew of new ones to track around for more info. From these names, I've also been able to take the family group back to a county in Tennessee - information I didn't have before.

Check the backs of those documents! You never know what you're going to find!

Probates can help you, so use them!

2011-04-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to get more work done on my Parke County, Indiana indexing project over the past couple of weeks, and came across a great example of the random kinds of information you can find in probate records. And not just those probate records of your ancestors, the probate records for your ancestor's extended family, neighbors and associates. I'm talking specifically about the those treasures known as probate packets in Indiana. I've found that not every state has maintained these and while things like probate order books and court order and estate books are pretty commonplace and can definitely help you when you're looking to verify a date or to confirm various time frames especially well, these ledgers do not include the actual sheets of paper that were shuffled around while the case while was open. That's where the packets come in and these little gems are probably my favorite part of working with Indiana genealogy.

I've posted before about the great luck of finding evidence of an ancestor's extended family on things like receipts found in the packets, but this new example that I found was one that you probably wouldn't normally find. In the probate packet for a decedent there is a letter from the administrator asking to resign his position. In doing so, he also requests that the editor of a local newspaper (which is named) stop printing that he is still in the position and taking care of the estate of the decedent. That's the first bit of great evidence found in this one sheet, because it tells the researcher where they can find printed evidence of the death and if there are still copies of that paper, they can get a copy of the ad. That's not all though. At the bottom of the sheet, the administrator also gives his reasoning for resigning his position by stating that his wife was very ill. Now this could have just been an excuse for him not wanting to deal with settling all of the debts of the deceased, but if you are, by chance, tracking the family of the administrator and find that his family has a woman of a certain age living with him in one census year and then that particular tickmark is missing from his household in the next enumeration, you may have just gotten a clue to the approximate date of death for this man's wife.

The problem with this kind of random information however, is that when people are looking through these packets, they are more than likely looking at only those packets for their subject. In the above example though, the information is pertaining to the administrator. If these packets had been indexed already, we could probably assume that they would be indexed only by the decedent and unless you knew previously of a relationship between the two parties you wouldn't think to check that packet if you were tracking the administrator. Fortunately, these packets have not been previously indexed and in the current format for the spreadsheet, we're including the date of the box where the packets are located, the name of the decedent, the approximate dates of the case, the name/s of the administrators/executors, and the names of heirs with their relationship to the decedent when given. Currently, the indexing is going into an Excel spreadsheet so when people go to search the spreadsheet, they will be able to search however they wish so if they are searching for info on a particular person and that person shows up as an administrator or heir, in addition to being the decedent himself at a later date, all of those entries will appear.

So the lucky researcher who is trying to find information about Cornelius Corkins, for instance, will find out a lot more than when he served as administrator for John Wilson, Sr. Maybe I'll get lucky and find some more great info like this as I wade through all of these packets.

Scots banished to America?

2011-03-24T05:53:00.000-07:00

I received my Virginia Genealogical Society Newsletter this week and one of the many features included is the book review section. In this month's edition, one of the books reviewed is called Directory of Scots Banished to the American Plantations, 1650-1775, second edition, by David Dobson. It is available by going to www.genealogical.com

One of the things that grabbed me, just with the title, was the knowledge that such records were available to do such a compilation in the first place. Eighteenth century passenger records, in particular, are one of those frustrating road blocks in my own research, though not Scotland specifically. The passenger records of the seventeenth century showing those coming to America seem to be better documented and preserved, I think because most people would think "Hey, these are among the earliest settlers. We better save these!" For instance, we know who came to Jamestown through the various waves of passenger arrivals but I still can't find my ancestor who came over from England more than 150 years later. I have seen a few published records of those who came over from Ireland in the 18th century as indentured servants or even convicts, and few other examples of 18th century departures/arrivals as well but it seems like the coverage is so spotty, especially when you try to compare it to the arrival records kept in this country in the later 19th century and onwards. Obviously, this has much to do with the laws and practices put in place at the time, as well as the time itself that's passed which would have a very real impact on the survival of such records. In any case, I was pretty glad to see this title and I know anyone who has been trying to break through with their Scottish emigrants in the time frame covered in the book, might be happy to see it as well.

According to the review in the VGS Newsletter, the first edition of the book was published in 1984 but the author has added to it in this second edition by around 30% by utilizing records
"on both sides of the Atlantic". Corrections and clarifications have also been made to this edition which led to the reviewer's opinion that the 2nd edition was worth purchasing even if you already own the 1st edition.

It sounds like a fascinating reference even though I'm not trying to track any Scottish emigrants. But for those who are, this sounds like a necessity. Happy hunting!

Last American WWI Veteran Dies

2011-02-28T10:09:00.000-08:00

I just saw this article on Yahoo and wanted to post a link to it. A man who lied about his age so that he could be a part of World War I and ended up being it's last survivor and a passionate advocate for a National WWI memorial; it's just the sort of thing the family historian in me loves! This is the kind of story I dream of finding out about my own ancestors and for many of us, the part about his lying to the recruiters about his age is, in fact, very familiar. We always tend to pigeonhole people into whichever military conflicts they may have been a part of based upon age and even the NGS HSC has a military assignment where you are supposed to list male ancestors with their birth and death dates and then list military engagements that they could have participated in. Generally speaking, it's a good exercise for making people aware of as many possibilities for records as they can find, but it can also serve to place blinders on people and if nothing else, here is yet another example of the dangers of doing so. In any case, I thought the article was a nice tribute and offered a little food for thought as well.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110228/ap_on_re_us/us_obit_last_wwi_veteran

Who Do You Think You Are is back...tonight!

2011-02-04T13:47:00.000-08:00

Hey all, just a reminder to make sure everyone remembers to watch Who Do You Think You Are? on NBC tonight. It's coming back after a long time so I'm ready to start watching again. Last season had some really interesting episodes with topics ranging from the Salem witch trials to a Civil War soldier who had previously been unidentified. They were really great and I can't wait to see what's in store for this season. You can find more info on season 2 of this series http://www.nbc.com/who-do-you-think-you-are/. The website also says it has full episodes from season 1, yippee!!

Starting out right

2011-01-31T09:26:00.000-08:00

Ok, there has been a delay with my Isaac "Will" Atkinson project (the volunteer is sick and now there's a huge snow storm getting ready to come through IL and IN within the next couple of days) so I thought I'd take the opportunity to start this one out "officially". That is, to do this one strictly by the book from start to finish. After you get to do things a certain way for so long it's hard to change your ways and learn to do things differently. That is one thing that ProGen and the NGS Home Study Course are good for, amongst others. They both teach you how to most be more efficient in your research. I'm a perpetually disorganized person unfortunately, so I've got my notes on several projects scattered around all other the place. For this one though, I'm determined to make a better start and work according to the methods I should be using for all my projects. Yes, I'm unabashedly ashamed that I haven't been doing so regularly but really, when I am my own boss and neither side of myself is all that keen on confrontation it's not very likely I'm going to tell myself off for not doing so :)

So, back to the subject at hand. While I'm waiting to receive Isaac's death certificate, I decided I would get organized and would start with making a research log to keep track of what I've looked at so far and what each record tells me. I have another little hurdle though since it appears that I lost my scanned copy of Isaac's daughter's marriage application so I'll have to get that back (there's another little shout-out for cloud computing!) one way or another but I'll make do until it's revived. Though I don't currently have Isaac himself pegged in a census yet, at least not with any certainty, I can include the 1900 census of his former wife, possible widow, living with a new husband, new children, and their daughter Esther Atkinson. Obviously, the documents of Esther's marriage, which give the only concrete info currently maintained on Isaac, will have to be included once I get them back in my possession.

The ProGen book (pgs 287-288) state that the research log, also known as a master source list, is basically a list of sources that you have looked into during the project. It helps you keep track of those resources that you have already used and what they told you so you don't end up retracing your steps unnecessarily. The research log can also help you stay organized and keep all your pertinent info together to help you form your research plan and gather evidence for your conclusions. The research log should include:

~the date you used that source
~the citation for the source
~the time period covered by that source (generally regarding original source material, such as a ledger of death certificates which can often span a rather long time frame); you need to mention whether you searched the entire time frame covered in the specific source, or if it was only a portion of it, which you would then state in your log
~the name of the repository where you used it
~if the source mentioned is an original source, leave room for a notation about whether a copy was made and if so, write down the cross referencing info to find the copy of the source
~state whether the search within the source produced positive or negative results; did you find answers to your specific questions, or nothing at all?

What this format is basically pointing to is a spreadsheet like what you would make in Excel, but you can also make a standard table in Word, though it might be a bit more of a task as you continue to build upon that table with additional sources.

So with this in mind, I'm off to work on a research log for Isaac. I don't appear to be able to post Excel files on blogger so I'm not sure if I'll be able to upload it here, but I might be able to come up with an abridged version or scan it and upload it that way or something. In any case, I'm starting this one off right and hopefully I can stick with it throughout the course of the project.

Interesting, interesting...

2011-01-28T12:26:00.000-08:00

Still just dabbling around with my new project a bit today and decided to look around with the Ohio side of things. In the last post, I had taken on a new project in finding out the approximate birth date and origins of Isaac "Will" Atkinson who married in an Indiana-Ohio border county in 1885. At this point, Isaac is a brand new person in a branch of my in-laws family that I haven't done much work on. Pretty much all I have to go on right now was a copy of his daughter's marriage license application stating his name and that was about it. Isaac has not been positively identified in any census enumeration and his wife, Emma Batchelor, appears to have gotten remarried prior to 1900 who could be signaling either a death or divorce for Isaac in the 1890s.

So I started just doing fairly simple searches for an Isaac or a William in Ohio in the 1870 and 1860 census enumerations. In 1860 I found an interesting entry for a family living in Clinton County, Ohio.

The interesting part here is the name of 3 year old Isaac's presumed mother- Esther. Isaac W. Atkinson and Emma Batchelor's only daughter was named Esther. I should probably add a side note here that I'm not jumping to conclusions and saying yes, I've found the right Isaac. That would just be silly. But after doing this kind of thing for quite some time now, I'd be doing a pretty shotty job if I didn't take note of naming patterns and keep my eyes open for children named for parents, grandparents, etc. With good reason, reusing names is an extremely common thing. So I'm taking note of this family and will keep it in mind but for now, that's all.

I did try to find Temple Atkinson and his wife in subsequent census records, since they are fairly young in this 1860 enumeration, but didn't have much luck. There were other Atkinsons living in Clinton County however so it's possible that they were relations of some kind. Again, something to take note of for the future. Thinking ahead in that vein though, if Temple and his family left Ohio or something happened to them and Isaac was left behind, it would seem to connect with the only Atkinson previously found living in Randolph County, IN (the place of Isaac and Emma's marriage in 1885) in the 1880 census working as a farm hand with the Smith family rather than with parents.

Interesting, interesting...(I just love these mysteries!). Can't wait to hear back from the volunteer about whether record of Isaac's death has been found!

New project has some issues

2011-01-27T07:19:00.000-08:00

While I'm waiting for some microfilm on an unrelated project to arrive at my local Family History Center, I decided to revisit some stopping points I left with my Mother-in-Law's side of the family. While I figured out a plan of attack for furthering the research on some of these people, I got attached to a mystery man in the family tree and now I'm determined to find out more about him.

Isaac "Will" Atkinson married Emma Batchelor in Randolph County, Indiana in 1885. The record of their marriage gives no information regarding his date or place of birth and no Isaac Atkinson is found living in Randolph County in 1880. Without this crucial information there are a few pieces of information that are causing some issues-

1.) Considering the geography of Randolph County, an Indiana-Ohio border county, Isaac could have come from either side which expands the search into two states.

2.) Two names; Isaac's marriage record gives his name as Isaac W. Atkinson while the marriage records for his daughter, Esther Atkinson Philips, give his name as "Will" Atkinson. This tells me that William was likely his middle name, but one that he must have gone by which means when I try to find him in census records, I'll have to expand it to include both Isaac and William and any derivations of the two.

3.)Missing 1890 census and remarriage of his wife. Since Isaac and Emma's marriage occurred in 1885, the first census showing their household should have been 1890, which is lost to us. To make matters more complicated, by 1900 his daughter Esther is living in the household of his former wife, Emma, who is remarried. So either Isaac and Emma got divorced or Isaac died in the 1890s which means that the only census I would have to help identify the correct family is the lost 1890 enumeration. That's it. Prior to Isaac and Emma's marriage, without knowing his origins or age, I won't be able to EASILY pick out which person may be correct in the various census enumerations. It may be necessary to make a list of each Isaac and William Atkinson in IN and OH and track them which could be extremely time consuming and not necessarily bring positive results since there is always a possibility that he was skipped or his name was indexed incorrectly or maybe he wasn't even living in either of those states at the time of the enumeration.

So what's happening so far is an expansion of places to look and things to do, rather than a narrowing of possibilities. I need more records and the to-do list is getting pretty big. I decided to start out for the most obvious places and did a check for "Isaac Atkinson" in Randolph County in 1880 but no matches were found. Then I checked the same year and place for "William Atkinson" and found one possibility only. Unfortunately, the William Atkinson found in 1880 in Randolph County wasn't living with his parents. He was working as a farm hand for the Smith family and living in a different township than his future wife, Emma. However, the census does tell us that this William was born about 1856 in Ohio, as were his parents. Attempting to track this person, I searched the 1900 census for William Atkinson (soundex) living in Randolph County, born about 1856 (+/- 5 yrs) and received no matches. Though not definitive, it appears that the William Atkinson from 1880 either left the county or died and death is the more likely answer since when I expanded the search of the 1900 census to include the whole of Indiana, I only found 2 other William Atkinsons; one from a different county who had been married at least twice making a marriage to Emma in 1885 impossible, and the other in a nearby county who looks like he can be traced back to Ohio in 1880, not to Indiana.

After all this poking around with the census records without finding much of a definitive answer, I felt like I needed more information and fortunately, I found it from a lone ancestry.com message board post. Someone was searching for information on Isaac's wife, Emma, and had posted a date range for Isaac of 1857-1892. She didn't say where but her date range fit in nicely with the preliminary search notes that I had taken down. I contacted her to ask where she got these dates from and if she had any further info on Isaac but the post was from many years ago so I'm not holding my breath that she'll receive it. Even if she doesn't though, a proposed 1857 birth date is only a year off from the "abt 1856" birth date of the William living in Randolph County in 1880 with the Smith family, and the 1892 death date fits in well with the remarriage of his wife prior to 1900.

Fortunately, there is a volunteer on Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness who does lookups in Randolph County so I'm hoping that maybe she will be able to take a look for an 1892 death record for Isaac/William. Death records for the county begin in 1882 so hopefully his record of death will be included and may give me some additional info to go on.

If a death record can be found, then it may also be able to order copies of his probate packet. Indiana probate packets can really be goldmines of information so it would be wonderful to have that available for Isaac, who I know so little about. But first, I'm waiting to hear about a death record. Hopefully I'll get good news back from the volunteer soon.

IGHR here I come...

2011-01-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

Well, not yet but in June. This morning I got registered for Course 4: Advanced Methodology and Evidence Analysis at the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research (IGHR) at Samford University. IGHR will be held on June 12-17 this year on the Birmingham, Alabama campus. For more info go to

http://www4.samford.edu/schools/ighr/index.html

...Now What, Post 2

2011-01-09T05:56:00.000-08:00

So with that rather long run-down of what I've done, what I'm doing, and other options to possibly take in the future, I'm left with the question of "Now What?" I've done the conferences and the societies, I'm working on the indexing project and the Always a Hoosier project in Indiana, I've completed ProGen and the NGS Home Course, and I've been to a session at IGHR and plan to attend again this June (P.S., the registration for the 2011 session opens up on Jan. 18th!). So what's left? Actually, a lot. I can't really afford the Boston University course. It's over $2000 and that's including the discount from being a member of APG and/or NGS. It's too much for me. There is the Toronto program, NIGS, but that too is a certificate program and at this point I'm not sold that a full fledged program is the right fit for me anymore. NIGR, or the National Institute of Genealogical Research through the National Archives, would be wonderful to take, being familiar with and knowing how to use the records available at the National Archives is an essential tool. I really think the NIGR should be a requirement for those seeking certification just because of how important it is to know those records. And it works logistically for me because it's in the summer, when my son is out of school and can stay with family while I'm away. And the price is affordable; tuition is $350 for a week-long course. So that's a good possibility.

Beyond that, I feel like what I need most at this point is more field work and more client work. Because of how often I move, thanks to my husband's job with the Navy, I don't have enough experience with the local community to attempt to get work wherever we might be living so my client experience is extremely limited. That makes a big difference to how close I may be to getting a portfolio together for certification because an example of client work is a requirement. Without it, I'm not ready to start the certification process. The question really, is how to find people who might need work to be done in a geographic area that I feel comfortable with. Either that, or get myself comfortable enough with Illinois records so that I can do the work. I do have some IL experience since it's the state I'm from, but I would definitely need to bone up on things before I could feel comfortable doing work for someone else. It would absolutely need to be pro bono but it would be worth it to get the experience.

So right now, the best thing for me to do is keep researching the dark corners and mysteries in my own family lines and those of my family and who ever will let me work on them. I need work! And I need to be diligent about it. I'm thinking maybe I'll open up another project while trying to find someone for whom I can do a project for. I'm thinking I may also take my final NGS course assignment, the narrative biography, and turn it into something that I could submit to a few places as an article. While having a published article is not a requirement for certification, it certainly doesn't hurt.

So I'm going to start with picking a new mysterious project to work on, and I have a few options for that.....

Officially Completed the NGS Home Course...Now What? Post 1

2011-01-08T16:55:00.001-08:00

As most of you who visit the site probably already know, I'm in the process of training myself to become ready for the BCG (Board for Certification of Genealogists) Certification process. What this means is that if I can get my skills up to the point where my portfolio holds up to their rigorous reviewing standards, I would become a "CG", or Certified Genealogist, and that holds great weight for me. Not all professional genealogists are CGs, or have received their accreditation through ICAPGEN (the other credentialing body in the field) and there is nothing that says those who haven't gotten their CG or AG aren't as good as those who do. But to me, being a CG tells my clients that I've made the commitment to standards and good business practice to deliver the best product available to them. It also tells me that I can take the challenges that will come my way and gives me something to be extraordinarily proud of.

So, on this path I've taken numerous steps to prepare, in addition to the rather obvious step of delving into all corners of my own family history as well as that of my husband and any friends who stay awake long enough while I explain what I want to do. But there are still a few things I'd like to get done before submitting a portfolio because I still don't quite feel ready. So I thought maybe this post might be helpful to make people aware of the possibilities if you decide that genealogical education might be for you, whether with the ultimate goal of certification or without it...

1-I joined APG, the Association of Professional Genealogists. Besides getting their publication, as a member you also join a prestigious group of professionals in the field and get listed in their directory to help clients find you. See their site at http://www.apgen.org/

2-I joined the NGS, the National Genealogical Society as well as other societies of interest to the work that I was doing. NGS offers one of the most valued periodicals in the field as well as many courses, such as the Home Course that I just finished. You can read more about NGS at http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/ At the time I first started, I began with the New England side of the family since that was the side I had the most info to begin with so I found the NEHGS, the New England Historic Genealogy Society, to be of immense importance. Like the NGS journal, the periodical for the NEHGS is among the best for those with or without New England Ancestry. You can find them at http://americanancestors.org/home.html.

3-Just to be clear, local societies should not be neglected. Yes, costs for carrying membership fees for all of these societies can be pricey but the importance of the information you receive topped off by the opportunities you can find through the local societies is really priceless. The local societies are also a great way to get connected and bring in clients. Some geographic societies that I belong to are: The Virginia Genealogical Society, http://www.vgs.org/, and the Indiana Genealogical Society, http://www.indgensoc.org/. The VGS is another society that is great whether you have VA ancestors (that you know of yet) or not. Keep in mind that a great deal of our early ancestors either traveled through Virginia or settled there, even temporarily. Somehow, most roads tend to lead there so it's good to have the information included in their wonderful periodical.

4-Sign up for ProGen. If you have any thoughts on possibly taking on clients, whether paying or not, you really should take this course. Not only does it help you understand how to deal with business dealings related to a genealogical business, it also helps point you in the right direction for work that you do for clients, as well as for yourself. Can we say, research reports people? Yeah, it's covered in ProGen. Best of all, ProGen is free! Find info here http://progenstudy.org/

5-Take the NGS Home Course, especially the graded option. This course is extremely in-depth. It literally starts you off with the basics and works all the way up to a narrative genealogy using all of the records you've learned to use throughout the course. And let's face it, if you're going to dive head-first into the vat of research and resources, you might as well take full advantage of it and get some valuable feedback from people who have been there, done that and bought the t-shirt. Graded option all the way.

6-Go to a week long course whether it's NIGR, http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~natgenin/, IGHR, http://www4.samford.edu/schools/ighr/, or SLIG, http://www.infouga.org/index.php?option=2011institute you need to attend at least one of these in-depth sessions. Ideally, all of them at least once because the offerings are different and equally valuable. NIGR is a course with a focus on federal records at the National Archives and considering how standards these records are to our research, it's super important to be able to understand them. It is high on the list of my priorities. The courses available through IGHR and SLIG are similar but both take broad topics like you find at the conferences through NGS or FGS and take you step by step, source by source, and allow you to do coursework to understand them and ask questions of the most recognizable names in the field like Tom Jones and Elizabeth Shown Mills. You will not find a more interesting and valuable week than a course through these programs.

7-Attend the big conferences like NGS or FGS. This is pretty self-explanatory really. While it might not be necessary to attend every year, they can get pricey, it's a good way to network with others and see big names give seminars on some interesting topics. It also looks good in your certification portfolio to let them know you get involved and get around.

8-Get involved with the original records as much as possible. This is an on-going process that you will ideally use throughout your career. While having availability online is great, especially for people like me who live at a distance from their focus areas, there is no substitute for going on-site and discovering how those records are kept, where they are, what's included in them and how they change over time, and getting as familiar with the records in that Courthouse as you possibly can without having them superglued to your eyelids.

That's kind of the rundown that I've got in my head right now but I know there are lots of other ways to train yourself and get yourself prepared and on the right path for certification. One that comes to mind now is the new course available through Boston University. It's been getting some great feedback and would be a great option for those who could swing it. It's a bit pricey for me but slight discounts are available for members of APG or NGS. Also the University of Toronto program (also known as NIGS) comes to mind. Their program is a bit easier to handle financially and is also very well respected. Info on these programs can be found at http://professional.bu.edu/programs/genealogy/ and http://www.genealogicalstudies.com/ respectively.

If I think of anything else, I'll be sure to post it. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to jump into now that the NGS course is over, but I'm sure I'll post about that here too :)

Great articles in the new NGS Magazine!

2011-01-01T06:40:00.000-08:00

Hi all, I got my new NGS Magazine (Oct-Dec 2010) in the mail a few days ago and was really excited about a few of the articles included. The first one is by Debbie Mieszala, CG and is called "The Curious Case of the Disappearing Dude". It's actually the article that made me want to revisit the 1905 New York State census in search of my Ward family members (as described in the previous post). I think we can all relate to having at least one, if not more, of those relatives who shows up for one census enumeration or in one record just enough to peak our interest and then flies by the wayside, never to be seen or heard from again. That is, until you start to dig deeper and start piecing apart your research. Debbie's article tells about her journey towards finding a subject who first shows up as a 2-year-old and then disappears from the records. Along the way, she finds that not just her subject, but his whole family disappears from the records until she starts really tracking those members she can find and those leads open more leads to the others until eventually she has found all but her initial subject but has gained a slew of evidence pointing towards his possible whereabouts. It's a great article and I found it to be pretty inspiring for my own research because I ended up heading right back to the last known location for my own family: the 1905 NY census. So give it a read and see what kind of inspiration you get for your own projects.

The second article in the Oct-Dec 2010 NGS Magazine that I found to be a wonderful resource for future research was Jean Atkinson Andrews' article on neighborhood reconstruction pre-1850. It's called simply, "Developing a Neighborhood of Associates". I think we can all agree that finding the neighbors can be especially important when you're trying to gain as much info as possible about your target person/family. From 1850 onwards, we are lucky to have the snapshot of the neighborhood and to make great use of that, it's common practice for us to take note of those people listed on at least the page before and the page after your subject appears, as well as all those people who appear on the same page. This is even one of the assignments in the NGS HSC, for the lesson on migration, so it's a great exercise to keep in mind. Tracking neighbors can help lead you to birth and marriage locations, places of origin, intermarried families, and lots more. But what do you do when you are looking at a person/family alive prior to the 1850 enumerations? Not only do we lose out on the names of the family members living within a household, but we also lose the neighborhood snapshot because the addresses were not recorded as they were in later censuses and no townships or specifications on where the individuals listed were living within the given county were shown.

This wonderful articles gives you a great idea for how to proceed with creating a pre-1850 neighborhood reconstruction beginning with land entry case files. The author has a subject who can be traced living near someone else and even migrating to another state around the same time as the other person before disappearing from the records. Without the use of those later records, such as death certificates and possible appearances in later censuses, to help give clues to his origin, the author needed to find another way to learn where he came from through other means. Fanning out her research to include his neighbors in the census enumerations she did have for him was the way for her to start. To begin, she orders the land entry case file for her disappearing subject which unfortunately did not give an explicit info on his origins or family breakdown. That didn't mean her research stopped however. Instead, she developed a research plan which dove into the land purchasing process in the state where her subject obtained his land, and studied those who purchased the land near his, where those people came from, the history of the area which they chose to purchase in, and tracking those people both forwards and backwards in the census and lots lots more. What she was able to do was create a grid with information on virtually all of his neighbors and then track them in the censuses and expand her search in the county histories to include those people which then gave her information on migration paths to add to what she had learned about the origins of her subject's neighbors. All of which could be useful tools in finding out where her subject was from.

It's an amazing article to keep on hand for future research not just because it gives us all something else to try when we feel we're at a roadblock with those early censuses, but also because so often researchers just stop once their research takes them to those often-less-than-satisfying pre-1850 census enumerations. They just don't seem to give some people that same high of finding what you want to find as the later censuses do and a lot of people don't seem to be all that keen to put the extra effort into moving forward from them. This article might change that for some people by giving them an option to try rather than giving up. It's a must read!

Jackpot!

2010-12-31T06:26:00.000-08:00

I'm sending a great big thank you to Familysearch.org and all of their indexing volunteers for getting the 1905 New York state census indexed and placed on their website. Last night I was able to find my Great Grandma Ward with her parents and her brother living in Manhattan thanks to the index. I've searched city directories and the 1910 federal enumeration with no luck; George Ward is just too common of a name and I was never sure who was who. Thanks to the index and being able to find them in the 1905 state enumeration, I now have an address to work with to help sort the same-namers out.

The state census for 1905 New York does not provide a heck of a lot of info, but can be helpful just for the sake of being able to locate people, at it is in my case. The house number and street are given, as well as the name of the head of household and the relationships of those living with him. Age, gender, race, place of birth (however this is only given as country of birth, states are not given on the section that I was working with so only "US" is given as POB), whether citizen or alien, and occupation are also given for all in the household. So it's a pretty standard enumeration but since it falls in between two federal enumerations, it can really help you out when you're trying to locate people and not succeeding with the federal censuses and city directories.

It's also nice to have one more enumeration with the whole family together before things start to get dicey. My Great Grandma's mother dies in October of 1905, just a few months after the June enumeration date of the state census, and none of the other members of the family have been found in the 1910 census. In fact, my Great Grandma goes missing until 1930 when she turns up in IL with my Grandma, who is aged 18. So this 1905 enumeration is now the last appearance for most of this family group until I can manage to track them down elsewhere. It looks like things really changed after the Mother in the family died because they seem to just disappear. Getting this address is a great start though because now I can sort through the city directories again to try to see if there was a Ward living at the address from the 1905 enumeration. I'm wondering if perhaps after the death of his wife, the family may have moved from Manhattan though since none of them seem to show up in the 1910 census. I may have found Raymond living as a boarder in one of the other boroughs, but I'm not completely positive that it's the same person. So for now it's a mystery. But I'm very happy to have been given the use of the index to locate them in the first place so that my research can continue.

My gene-presents from Christmas

2010-12-30T06:24:00.000-08:00

My Christmas wish list this year was full of gene-books and boy did Santa deliver. Well, not so much Santa as my family but they did a great job. I got several books that I've wanted for quite some time and just haven't been able to spring for. Here's what I got:

The Great Wagon Road by Parke Rouse

Lord Dunmore's Little War of 1774 by Warren Skidmore

North Carolina Research by Helen Leary (If you haven't checked this out yet, you really need to do so. It's not just an NC book. The info it contains holds true for just about every locality so it really works as a general reference and information manual rather than just a locality specific reference.)

Old Title Deeds by N.W. Alcock

Monongalia County (Virginia) publick claims by Janice Abercrombie

Map Guide to American Migration Routes by William Dollarhide

Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Censuses by William Thorndale

Whew! That's a long list and I'm so so so happy to be able to dive into these titles whenever I want now. Some of them, like the books by Thorndale and Dollarhide and Leary and Skidmore, have been on my wishlist for a looooong time. So now it's time to cross them off the list and start looking for new ones! :)

Still working but I can almost see the light

2010-12-30T06:16:00.001-08:00

Hi all, just a quick post to say that I haven't gotten lost in all the paperwork. I have successfully completed all but one assignment for the NGS HSC Home Course and just need to get my notes for the final assignment out of the notebook and typed into the computer before turning it in. The holidays kindof threw a wrench in my plans since I had a ton of things to do, like everyone else I'm sure, school has been out for 2 weeks, and some car troubles were thrown in for good measure (ugh!) but I am nearly finished now. The final assignment for the course is to write a biography for one of your ancestors. The most difficult part of the assignment was choosing who to write about. Even with most of my assignment written down in my notebook, I'm still wavering of maybe switching subjects and starting over with someone else. That's pretty much why I haven't gotten the thing turned in yet; I can't decide who to write about. But with IGHR registration looming in the background (it begins on Jan. 18th) I don't have a lot of time to dilly dally. The NGS HSC course, graded option, is a requirement for getting in to the Advanced Methodology course at IGHR at Samford University taught by Elizabeth Shown Mills and it needs to be completed before I can attempt to register for the IGHR course. So it's time to put the pedal to the metal and get this thing done.

Are you keeping a research log?

2010-12-03T17:34:00.000-08:00

After sitting in on the ProGen 11 chats this week (I'm the coordinator for this group and it was their first week of official assignment discussion chats), the topic of research logs came back up. This is sort of a hot-button issue for most people because it seems like folks are either meticulous about it or it's something they strive to get better about. One of the blogs I follow, Rootdig.com, also brought up the topic of keeping track of your searches this week and the post is one that I really wanted to share here. Hopefully it will give everyone some inspiration!

http://rootdig.blogspot.com/2010/12/tracking-your-searches.html

Update

2010-12-02T19:34:00.000-08:00

I haven't disappeared off the face of the earth, yet that is. I'm finishing up the NGS Home Study Course this week...hopefully. I have 2 1/2 assignments left to finish up and have the notes ready to be typed up for one of those. So I'm almost there. Whew! I'll be back as soon as I'm caught up! Wish me luck!

Veterans Day

2010-11-11T17:35:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to say Happy Veterans Day to you all. Enjoy it by thinking of and/or spending some time with the Vets in your family!

For me, today is a day to be especially thankful for my hubby, an active duty petty officer in the Navy. Today is also a day for me to think of my Dad, who was another Navy man, as was my father-in-law. I also have many special vets in my extended family, including my cousin and uncle who are Army guys. Coincidentally, I also spent some time finishing up the military records lesson for the NGS HSC today, for which I was reviewing the Civil War Compiled Military Service Record for James Bromagem, my great great great grandfather. And finally, I have a great uncle who was much loved by my mother's family and who died at Normandy in WWII. Today is a day for us to think of him and to be thankful for him as well.

This day is always kindof a sad day to me, thinking of those who were not able to return home and wondering if the next deployment will be the one that could take my own husband away, but taking the time to remember them and what they do and what they did is so important. They deserve all the time and respect and love that we can all muster for them, those who are gone and those who are still with us.

Adventures and Lessons in Finding Julius Bolda's Origins, Post 3

2010-11-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

So while I was trying to figure out what to do with all of this information, I was also trying to find out more about Julius' possible mother (and father/stepfather) who were living in Detroit, MI prior to 1910. I didn't find much, but I did find several message board posts online for people descended from Michigan Boldas who came from Poland. They were all finding origins in the area of Puck, the current location of Wladyslawowo, previously Grossendorf. None of these posts mentioned Julius, but some familiar names were popping up like Frank Bolda (Franz Bolda, who arrived with Julius and his mother in 1887 took on the name Frank while living in Michigan as did a child Franz who also arrived with them and settled in Michigan) and Joseph Bolda (a name familiar to me because that was the name Julius' wife cited as that of his father, as well as being the name of one of the Boldas travel companions in 1887). The only link connecting the Michigan Boldas and Julius prior to the research on the place names and locations in Poland, is the name of his mother from his death certificate because Veronica Bolda arrived with him in 1887 and settled in Detroit with her presumed husband, Franz and another child named Franz who both Americanized their names to Frank. The names Frank and Joseph are pretty common so that really wasn't a super strong link. But having the place name turn up as the origins for descendants of that Michigan line be the same of a possible origin for Julius really does add more strength to the case.

I think that covers the run-down for now. I think what I'm going to do next is try to get Frank and Veronica's death certificates and Frank's naturalization paperwork. Since it's out of state again though and my date ranges are still pretty general, I'm thinking the best way to go about it is to order microfilm from the FHL and see what I can glean from that. I think at some point I can order film of the Catholic records from the area of Poland where I believe Julius came from. Finding a baptismal record would be the ideal situation but I'll definitely need to do just a bit more research to be sure of what's available and what I'll find.

Adventures and Lessons in Finding Julius Bolda's Origins, Post 2

2010-11-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

Ok, so now that I've thoroughly stressed that you're going to need some kind of guide to help you navigate the Meyers Orts Gazetteer of the German Empire for the first time, I can show you why. First though, there was no entry found for a Grossrudorf, so what we found was for Grossendorf:

So we can see 6 entries for Grossendorf on this page (there were also two others shown on the following page but neither of those were in the right area to be the correct location). Each of the different locations was designated numerically. Following that number, there is an abbreviation which specifies what the location is categorized as. For instance, the first possible option with the name Grossendorf has a D. When we check with the family search appendix we see that "D." is the designation for a dorf, or village in English. Next, is the location abbreviation and various information regarding kingdoms and duchies. With this information you can narrow down where the most likely place with this name was located and then compare that to a modern map.

However, I got some excellent advice from a couple of German and Polish specialists including Stephen Danko, who maintains a blog at http://stephendanko.com/. He pulled a handy dandy Polish gazetteer and managed to narrow things down even more and found the Polish name and current name for entry number 5 from Meyers Orts. This Grossendorf is in modern-day Poland and is currently known as Wladyslawowo in the area of Puck. At the time, this information didn't hit me particularly hard but soon enough I had reason to think I had a good lead on this.

Probably should move on to Post 3 now...I told you there was a lot to talk about! :)

Adventures and Lessons in Finding Julius Bolda's Origins, Post 1

2010-11-09T09:49:00.000-08:00

I've been chomping at the bit to get back to this topic and have had so much to post about. Getting sick kindof put a damper on things and also managed to remove me a bit from the conversations that helped bring me to some conclusions and a plan of attack for the future, but I'll try to remember as much as possible to get through this.

So, when we left off with this topic, I had just received the naturalization papers for my paternal Great Great Grandfather, Julius Bolda, from Cook County, IL. Julius arrived in the US from the port of Bremen in 1887 and by the time of the 1910 census enumeration, he claimed to be a naturalized citizen living in Chicago. Because his paperwork was filed before 1906, his naturalization was handled through the local courts rather than the Federal government. When you order naturalization paperwork from Cook County, you get both the Declaration of Intent and the Final Papers. There isn't a whole lot of "new" information given in these pages, but the real prize is pretty much a single question: where was he born? And they're not just asking for the country here, they are asking for the town/village. In Julius' case, his place of birth appears to be shown as "Grossrudorf", right? That one issue became the center of a pretty fascinating conversation a couple weeks ago on the APG list. This is where the fun begins!

Like just about every other "official" record genealogists face in their research, this page has its backstory. First, while it does look like Julius signed the bottom of the page, he did not fill out the information, including that given for his place of birth. Instead, the clerk filled it out which presents us with its own special set of issues. When he wrote the place name, he wrote what he thought he heard, not necessarily the proper spelling of the name. So we can't be real sure at this point whether the name is actually right. Also, his handwriting is suspicious because when we look at the rest of the page, the clerk had several inconsistencies with his letter forms. For instance, lower case "n" and "u" were also shown the same way and more pertinently, his lower case "e" and lower case "r" were also written the same way. Taking these problem with his lettering into account, the name can now be Grossendorf rather than Grossrudorf.

So now that we have a couple of options for names, we throw in the big elephant in the room. These place names no longer exist!! Yep, so even after you think you get this name figured out, you still can't just open up a map and find it. At this point, you need the Meyers Orts Gazetteer of the German Empire and a little help (actually a lot of help) from the research help articles on familysearch.com. Meyers Orts is, fortunately, available for ancestry subscribers here http://search.ancestry.com/iexec/?htx=List&dbid=1074&offerid=0%3a7858%3a0 and the family search article on how to use it is found here http://www.familysearch.org/eng/search/RG/frameset_rg.asp?Dest=G1&Aid=&Gid=&Lid=&Sid=&Did=&Juris1=&Event=&Year=&Gloss=&Sub=&Tab=&Entry=&Guide=Ger_BMD_RefDoc_HandbookGermanResearch.ASP between the two, you have a pretty good chance of success but it is absolutely crucial that you take a little time to go over the German handbook on family search first so you know what you're looking for, how to find it, and what you're going to see on the page. The reason for this is that the gazetteer is written in German script and has entries made up of all kinds of abbreviations specifying certain information. You need the familysearch guide, or some other online guide, to help familiarize yourself with the script and then to help you decipher what it is you're looking at and what information it's giving you.

I'll continue in a second post next...

Sick as a dog

2010-11-02T17:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I had planned on posting about my Julius Bolda information over the weekend/this week but I got hit with something over the weekend and can't seem to shake it. Ugh! So I'll just have to wait to post about the adventures of chasing Julius.

Wow wow wow!!

2010-10-28T18:35:00.001-07:00

Ok, this must be some kind of record. I got TWO sets of records over the past week from the two places I thought I would be most likely to wait the longest for turnaround time. I got the naturalization papers from the Cook County, IL archives and I got the CMSR (compiled military service record) for James Bromagem from NARA. Both of which were sent in just a couple of weeks' time and managed to beat out my order for microfilm from the FHC which I ordered around a week or so before both of them and am still waiting for.

There's really too much to talk about with Julius Bolda naturalization records so I'll save that for the next post. Some of you may have seen the discussion about it on the message board but wow, was it an interesting weekend working on that!

As for the service record, it was for the NGS Home Study Course Lesson 14 on military records. The assignment was to order a record from NARA, which I did online and which may be the reason for the quick turnaround time, and then write a report telling what information is given. The report is to be thorough enough without being just pages and pages of transcription. What it actually sounded like to me, was gaining experience in writing a research report on a record as you would for a client. It just gave me that kind of vibe, very much like something we did in ProGen. So that's basically what I did. I also needed to provide a citation for the CMSR.

This was my first real in-depth work with a Civil War CMSR and it was pretty much as I expected. My experience was what I would term mediocre-not the worst outcome but not necessarily the best either, it falls somewhere in between. The reason I say this is because when I worked at the National Archives, one of my jobs was to give people the files they ordered to be pulled. So when I was working in the research rooms and the pulls would come in, I saw many, many sour faces when they saw the CMSRs come to them. They were more often than not, only a couple of cards and didn't really say anything. We were actually trained to tell people that if they're looking for information on their Civil War ancestors, that they needed to order the pension files rather than the CMSRs for that very reason. It was very very rare that we saw one that was filled to the brim with information. So when I ordered CMSR for my ancestor I was already prepared not to expect much. I already had his pension so I was pretty much only getting the CMSR for this assignment and anything else was a bonus. And, as predicted there is no new vital information given in his service record. It did however, serve to confirm some bits of information that were touched upon in the pension file, such as where he enlisted and a few of the places he had gone with his unit. Also, there was some confusion in the pension file about his unit and the service record helped clear that up by explaining that the initial unit he was in changed names in 1864. So he wasn't in two separate units, it was just one unit that had two different names.

Most importantly, it cleared up the issue of whether he had been taken as a prisoner of war. This was a serious matter of contention in the pension file because his widow claimed that he died as a cause from his getting sick while he was in the service, probably due to poor treatment while held prisoner. There was very little proof shown in the pension however, just one sheet with a remarks section that says there had been suspicion of his being taken in 1862. The service record was a bit more in-depth on the matter because the muster rolls from the time he went missing, in December 1862, until the time he was returned in June 1863, had remarks saying he was missing in action, then presumed taken prisoner, and finally that he had been exchanged and was returned to duty. The packet also contained copies of pages entitled "Memorandum of Prisoner of War Records". These pages told when and where he had been taken prisoner, in this case at Murfreesboro, TN on 31 Dec 1862 (the Battle of Stone River), where he was held, and what camps he was in before returning home. These were pages that I hadn't seen first hand in the service records before, so I was very glad to be able to see what kind of information is available in the CMSRs for those who experienced being POWs.

One thing that I wondered about after going through the packet however, was how in the world a newspaper man ended up being taken prisoner. It was very clear from his service record that James was able to continue his civilian occupation as a printer during his time in the service. I wouldn't think that this would place him in the position of being taken prisoner. That is, until I read this http://www.civilwarhome.com/stonesriver.htm This website describes the battle as being an attempt by the Confederates to cut off the lines of communication. And there you go, that would be why a printer would have been taken prisoner. That is, if he were acting in his capacity as such at the time of the raids. His unit, the 9th IN cavalry, was also there at the time so he could very well have been an active part of the battle. Either way, without the service record, I wouldn't have had this information and I wouldn't have had the details on what he had been doing during the war. This was pretty interesting.

One other tidbit. I have no photos of James or his wife. I have no photos of his parents or his siblings, at least none that I know of. Thanks to one of my very kind, Bromagem cousins, I do have a scan of one of his extended family members, as well as a photo of one of his daughters (my Great Great Grandmother Lillian, who is also the woman in the photo of my google icon) thanks to the son of my Great Uncle Stevens. None of these few images equal the physical description that was given in James' CMSR. Though brief, it is pretty much the only thing I have to devise a picture of him in my mind. He was described as being 5 feet 6 inches tall at age 29-31, with light eyes and light hair, and a sandy complexion. If you look at the photo of Lillian from my google icon, she's got dark hair and dark eyes so I'm guessing those were not features she inherited from her father. But I really do treasure that description. I'm a firm believer that seeing what someone looks like adds a dimension of "realness" to all these facts and dates and information you pick up along the way. Without looking at their face, it can sometimes be hard to make that connection to them and to really feel like they lived. With James, I've felt a connection for some time before now, but that's primarily because I've found so many details about his life and he's been more than just random facts for so long now. But now I have a physical description of the real man and that really adds to the connection I already had.

So while I can warn you that you may not find much more than a single muster roll card in your ancestor's compiled military service record, I can say that there are times and there are instances where that one page may tell you enough.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Same Birthday as yours?

2010-10-23T17:30:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes, I know I don't usually do the group posting things but this time I have one that I know of right off the bat. The parts for this mission, as posted by Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings, are:

1) Is there a person in your genealogy database that has the same birth date that you do? If so, tell us about him or her - what do you know, and how is s/he related to you?

2) For bonus points, how did you determine this? What feature or process did you use in your software to work this problem out? I think the Calendar feature probably does it, but perhaps you have a trick to make this work outside of the calendar function.

Ok, so my ancestor who shares my birthday is my great great great grandfather, Simpson Gilkeson (1830-1899). We share September 19th as our birthday though his was just under 150 years before mine. He was born in Kentucky, I'm not 100% positive in which county yet, and according to his obituary, he and his family moved to Parke County, IN when he was around the age of 4. Not too much is known about Simpson himself. Since his father was the one that we have been tracking because of the migration, and his son was my Grandpa's Grandpa who died in a train accident which my Grandpa was also a party to and told me stories about, Simpson has kindof gotten lost in the shuffle as far as details about the man. Another issue is that there really hasn't been a whole lot to find about him, other than a lively obituary that helps to fill in some of the blanks of his life. No civil birth certificate, no evidence of baptism, no death certificate, no city directory entry, no tombstone or known grave site. All we have are several decades of census enumerations, an obit for one of his children who died young, and his own obit. And thank goodness for that since it's the only documentation we have for his date of birth and any telling of who he was. His obit says that everyone who knew him liked him and called him "Uncle Simp". His marriage certificate is the only civil evidence we have of him right now. That said, we do have the Parke County probate packet indexing going on now, so by the time we get to 1899 I might get some more insight into his life that way.

.......just as a heads up in case you're waiting for the update to that info. We're currently on the 1835-1841 date range so it's probably going to be a while before we get all the way to 1899 :)

Not having much luck

2010-10-21T15:54:00.000-07:00

While I'm waiting for all of my records and microfilm to show up, I thought I'd try to find some additional passenger lists on ancestry. While most of my immigrant ancestors, the Kleinerts, the Boldas, the Siegmunds, all came from parts of pre-20th century Germany, I also have one branch of French Canadians who came over and settled in Kankakee County, IL. There has already been some extensive research on this family, the Dellibacs, including a good deal of research on their Quebec origins. But I was hoping to find a passenger arrival record for the immigrant ancestor, believed to be Moise Dellibac. I've done a quick search on ancestry and came up dry so this one will be a little more complicated than finding the record for Julius Bolda. Maybe this can be my interim project...you know, another one. Apparently I just can't sit still and wait. In any case, this sounds much more interesting.

Want to see Julius?

2010-10-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

With all of this talk about finding the parentage and origin of Julius Bolda, I thought maybe it would be fun to post a photo. At least, this is a photo we think is Julius. I say we "think" it's him because there is no identifying info anywhere on this photo (which is in the possession of my aunt) and we haven't come across any other photos of this person with identifying info to confirm our suspicion. The only reason we think it's him is because the woman he's sitting next to is known to be Marie/Mary Ptak Bolda, his wife (and the informant on his death certificate). Mary lived until the 1940s so we have several photos of her, some of which identify her by name, and with that very prominent widow's peak of hers, she's pretty easy to spot. So with her in the photo we believe this to be Julius sitting next to her. We haven't been able to identify the others in the photo with them yet but it's very possible that these could be the families of Julius and/or Marie, including perhaps their siblings considering the ages of the three people on either side of them. That is something else more research on both of these individuals might be able to help with.

In any case, Julius should be the man in the middle with the hat. Not much of a smiler was he? :)

Waiting waiting waiting..In the meantime...

2010-10-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

I'm impatient, I know that about myself but it doesn't make all of this waiting any easier. I'm waiting for naturalization film from the FHC so I can finish my NGS HSC assignment on naturalization records. I'm waiting for the naturalization file for Julius Bolda from the Cook County Archives (I'm already well aware that I'll be waiting a looooong time for that one) and I know there are other things that I'm waiting for that I've already been waiting for for so long that I've forgotten what they were.

In the meantime, thanks to Jen over at the Chicago Family History blog I remembered the "They Became American" program at NARA Great Lakes in Chicago in November. The speaker is going to be Lou Szucs and since moving back to IL last year it's been hard not to hear everyone talking about how wonderful her lectures and programs are. Even my local library with its virtually non-existent genealogy section has a book or two by Lou in their collection. So I called over to NARA today to see if they still had seats available and fortunately, was able to snag one. The program is on Saturday Nov. 13 at the Pulaski location in Chicago.

So now I'll be waiting for something else but at least this will be fun waiting, as opposed to "when is that envelope finally going to show up" or "I hope my file didn't get lost in the mail" waiting. :)

Finding out about Michigan vital records

2010-10-18T15:36:00.001-07:00

So far, I've figured out that Michigan is a pricey records state. Death records are ordered from the Department of Health , for the whopping sum of $26. That's more expensive even that Cook County, IL and I've been complaining about their $15 charge for a some time now. Also, I don't have an exact date of death for Veronica or Frank so there are additional charges in the search fee there. The couple appear in 1910 but are gone by 1920 so that's a 10 year range at about $3/$4 per extra year they have to search which takes the grand total up to $66 for one record. Yikes!! And there is no online database that I've been able to find to help me out with the year/s of death for this couple. There is an index to deaths online, here , but it only goes up to 1897.

So obviously I need to narrow things down a bit. I've already decided that the Detroit area is going to be the best bet to start with because that is their last known location and they had been settled there for some time. So the main problem here is the time frame. The Family History Library Catalog has a film listing for deaths occurring in Wayne Co., MI between 1867 and 1917. While this doesn't cover our entire search area, it does cover enough of it to be a resource worth checking out. So I'll start there and see what happens. If neither one of them are listed in that film, it's a good bet that they either died in those last years between 1918 and 1920 or maybe they did in fact move.

Another way to go about this would be to try to view the indexes to wills and or probate/estate cases opened in Wayne Co. between 1910 and 1920. Unfortunately, the FHL films covering this topic do not seem to be very comprehensive, one film set only goes to 1914 and the other possibility has next to nothing in the catalog as far as topical info to let me know what years are covered, and without a more concrete date range I don't think I'll be able to find what I'm looking for unless I can find a researcher who can go to the probate court and search the indexes in person. And just to be sure I covered all the easy bases first I checked Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness for possible volunteers to do this and Find a Grave for Frank and Veronica Bolda and came up short on both sites.

This is all just my initial thoughts though. I've still got some reading and researching to see how things in Michigan work and what options are available to me. I will find these people though, and I know I'll be able to figure out what was going on and get some kind of confirmation on whether they were Julius's parents or not. I'm getting there, it's just going to take some more work. It's fun though, so that's ok.

Not to get off the subject but...

2010-10-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

I've just gotten confirmation that I'll be taking on the "Always a Hoosier" project for the Indiana Genealogical Society. This project documents the bios and the burial sites of those born before 1930 and who were buried in the state. Essentially what will be built is giant database to those buried in Indiana, along with some biographical info.

For more info, and to find out how to add your ancestors to the database, check out the IGS website here http://www.indgensoc.org/projects/always_hoosier.php

So go to the website and get your Indiana ancestors added to the list and into the IGS periodical!

Ok, now back to the Bolda stuff! :)

Brainstorming with the Boldas

2010-10-15T10:19:00.001-07:00

So after getting the death certificate for Julius Bolda, I've got some conflicting evidence regarding his parentage. His wife, Marie/Mary, was the informant on the record and while she did give confirmation that Veronica, the woman Julius was traveling with upon arrival to Baltimore in 1887, was his mother, the information she gave regarding his father's name was not the name of the man who was Veronica's husband at the time of their arrival and in subsequent census records. I need to try to find out if this is just a case of a mistake, which is a very often occurrence on death certificates since the person who would be able to identify their parents is not around to name them, or if Veronica had been married previously, or if Franz/Frank also used the name Joseph.

Right now I'm still undecided about whether this is a mistake or not. I knew already that Veronica and Franz, the man she and Julius arrived with in 1887, settled in Detroit and they are found there in 1900 along with their other children,

Several of the children who appeared with Franz and Veronica on their passenger list have since died according to this census, and Veronica claims to have only three children now living-the three living with her. Julius would make the fourth and I'm looking at it (right now) that she was counting her surviving children who were living with them. But that's just one inconsistency found in this census enumeration. Another is the marriage date. Franz and Veronica claim to have been married 29 years. That would mean they would have gotten married around 1871-ish, depending on the time of year and taking into account the June date of enumeration. Julius' birth date, (and this too is a source of conflict) though conflicting, generally falls within the 1868-1869 date (though his death certificate and naturalization index card give 1860-1861 as his date of birth). So far, the earliest record giving his birth date is his passenger list which states he is 18 in 1887 and this is consistent with the est. 1869 birth date. No matter whether he was born in 1861 or 1869, both dates predate Veronica and Franz's given marriage date. As does the existence of another young male traveling with the Bolda family during their arrival in Baltimore.

Josef Bolda, appears to be aged 24. It's also interesting to note that Joseph was the name Mary cited as Julius' father. He's obviously too young to be so but that could be the explanation for where she had heard that name before. Another thing to notice is that the family is arranged first by the head and spouse, followed by children in descending order according to age. In this light, Josef could be seen as being 14 years old instead of 24 which would then make it more plausible for Franz to be Julius' father because without his age to push further beyond the 1871 marriage date from the census, we don't have much more than a couple of years difference between the marriage and the estimate birth date for Julius. A couple of years is much more easily explained then nearly 10. It should be noted though, that when you look at the handwriting on the page, the connecting flair of the first number is more common when the number is a "2" than when it is a "1" so it does look more likely to be "24" than "14" from that perspective.

With the information we have right now, and most of it is pretty speculative at this point, I don't really have a feeling one way or another as to whether Franz, known as Frank in Michigan, was Julius' father. At least not yet. I feel like it's entirely possible for him to have been a child from a previous marriage, and it's not completely unlikely that if that was the case, the father could have been a sibling or a some other relation to Franz, which would explain why Julius was a Bolda even if Franz wasn't his biological father, not to mention the possibility of adoption. But that's thinking that the name issue was more than a mistake. It very well may be just that. Marie may have just gotten the names mixed up, especially since this couple lived out of state and it was unlikely that Julius and Marie would have spent a lot of time together, if any at all. She did use a name that we know was used in the immediate family so I think it's very possible that she just mixed up the names. But at this point, who knows.

There is quite a bit to figure out so I'll be working on things for a while. Now that I have more evidence that Veronica is his mother though, there is definitely going to be more time devoted to tracking the family in Detroit. It's time to start getting acquainted with Michigan records. This will be my first endeavor in that state and right now I'm clueless. I was able to find out a bit about ordering death records from Michigan....

Good news more good news and another mystery

2010-10-15T09:54:00.000-07:00

Ok, so yesterday I headed out to one of the Cook County, IL court offices hoping to get a copy of Julius Bolda's death certificate. The satellite offices of the county can be a great way to avoid the long turnaround time that can happen when ordering vital records through snail mail. The problem though is that not all offices have access to all the records so your success can be hit or miss.

So last time I was at the office in Rolling Meadows I was able to get 3 out of the 4 records I was hoping for. This time I only got 1 out 3, but the one I got was the one I wanted. Julius' record was available and here it is

If we do a quick rundown of the info, we can see the Ward St address that matches both the census records and the naturalization card, and also, as predicted, Mary, his wife, is the informant. So we can be assured that this is the right person. With that out of the way, we can take a look at the info provided. What I was really interested from this record was place of birth information and parentage. Unfortunately, this record isn't much help for the place of birth because Mary just put "Germany". So we'll have to wait for the naturalization paperwork from the county and hope that more details will included there.

Regarding the parentage information, this is where we get another bit of good news, as well as the mystery. Mary confirms that to her knowledge, Julius' mother was Veronica. This is consistent with the theory that the older couple who arrived with Julius in 1887 in Baltimore were his parents. But instead of seeing the name of the head of that family from the passenger list, Franz, here we see that Mary has given the name of Julius' father as Joseph. So there's the mystery. Was Mary just mistaken about Julius' father's name, or was Franz not his father afterall? If this was the case, then that would mean that Franz was Veronica's second husband, but then why would Julius' surname be the same as Franz and not his real father? Unless his real father was related or Franz legally adopted him....

Off to Rolling Meadows today...keep your fingers crossed for me

2010-10-14T05:17:00.000-07:00

Hey all, I'm heading out to the Cook County Clerk satellite office in Rolling Meadows, IL today. I'm going to try to beat the system by going to request Julius Bolda's death certificate in person rather than sending in the request via snail mail. Cook County, like so many other county clerk's offices around the country, tends to have a pretty long turnaround time for records. Fortunately, they have more than one office. Though the main clerk's office is in downtown Chicago, not the easiest place in the world for me to access, there are also suburban offices in the North, Northwest, and in the South so no matter where in Chicagoland you are, there should be a clerk's office somewhat close to you. Rolling Meadows is the Northwest office and while it is definitely more accessible to me, it's still a good 35-40 minutes or so away. But, if they have the records there you can avoid the turnaround time of the snail mail method. The hitch here though is that the satellite offices do not have ALL of the records available to them. The last time I went down there I had a list of about four people for whom I needed death certificates and I was able to get all but one of them. The other one is only available from the downtown location. I'm hoping that won't be the case for Julius.

For those who need vital records from the Clerk's Office, Cook County offers one other option. www.cookcountygenealogy.com is the clerk's office genealogy portal site. From that address you can check for the record you need online and if it is available you can download it directly onto your computer. Millions of records have been uploaded to the site, but not all of them are currently available. Out of all of the records that I've ordered from Cook County, I think only about three or four were available for download through that site. So it is still a work in progress but it's worth a shot, especially if you do not live locally and can't access the satellite offices.

So keep me in your genealogical thoughts today guys, I need some good luck to get this record today! :)

Passenger Lists and Naturalizations- I found him! I found him...maybe

2010-10-10T13:32:00.001-07:00

Ok, in the last post I mentioned that I had just started working on the NGS HSC Lessons 12 and 13, Passenger Lists and Naturalization Records. While they are two separate assignments, and could be done for two different people, for me they kindof meshed into one lucky, and potentially big, find.

So I started out with the passenger list lesson and wanted to take the opportunity to poke around and try to find something new, rather than going with an earlier find I discovered a few years ago. Out of half a dozen 19th century immigrant lines that I know of right now, I only have one potential passenger list for one family group. So this is an area that I definitely needed some improvement and basically, more time to investigate and this lesson absolutely fit the bill. I started trying various name searches on ancestry for the surnames I was looking for in their immigration collection- Dellibac, Kleinert, and Bolda from my side and Norwodworski and a few others from my husband's side- and found some promising hits for Julius Bolda, my paternal grandma's grandfather. He first appears in the 1900 census enumeration living in Chicago, on Ward St, with his wife and family and giving an arrival date of 1892. Great, right? This should be no problem. Well, except there is no Julius Bolda who arrived from Germany in 1892. There is one who arrived in Baltimore in 1887 with a large family, including an older couple presumed to be his parents, and his age is compatible with Julius' estimated birth in 1869. However, the older couple and several of their children were found to have settled in Detroit, MI, not Chicago. It's close, true, but there is nothing in this passenger list to tell me that it's the same Julius. So I decided to search a little deeper.

In 1900 Julius is an alien; he is not naturalized. In 1910 however, he claims to have been naturalized. So, in theory, since he was living in Chicago between 1900 and 1910 and claimed to have been naturalized between those census years, there is a great chance that his naturalization papers went through the Cook County, IL court system. The federal government did not take over naturalizations until 1906 so there are a couple more years on the side of a local court. Fortunately, ancestry has recently updated their naturalization holdings and the place and period needed for a search for Julius are now available and here is what I found:

Julius Bolda, arrived in Baltimore in APRIL in 1892 and lived on WARD St. in Chicago. I put the important stuff in caps because I wanted to make sure I explained them. As for the month, this is one of the important points I read about in the lesson material for the course. When immigrants were asked later on when they arrived, they often got the years mistaken but the months correct, or at least the seasons, because while they may not have kept track of the passing of the years they would have been aware of the seasons, especially those with a farming background whose year would have revolved around the planting and harvesting of crops, which occurred seasonally. So here we see Julius says he arrived in April on his naturalization card and the passenger list we found, showing the Julius Bolda who arrived in Baltimore with the large family, also arrived in April, though 5 years earlier than claimed on the Soundex card. The other key point here is the address. The subject Julius lived on Ward St in Chicago in the 1900 and 1910 census enumerations that we had already confirmed as being the correct person. We also know that the subject Julius was naturalized between 1900 and 1910 so we have a good case.

The address pretty much tells us that the Julius on the naturalization card is the correct Julius. If that's the case, then we can then say that the Julius on the card is probably also the same Julius from the Baltimore passenger list who arrived in APRIL 1887. If this turns out to be true, then we now have the names of several of Julius' siblings as well as his potential parents, Franz and Veronica as seen here:

One way we can try to confirm whether Franz and Veronica were his parents is to order his death certificate. He died in Cook County, IL in 1915 and the form should ask who his parents were. Of course, we have to keep in mind that the informant, whoever that person was, may not have known who his parents were. However, even if the informant didn't know, all is not lost. Considering the size of his family, there is the slight possibility that the informant on his death record could be a sibling who could then be identifiable from the passenger list or census enumerations for Franz and Veronica in MI. I have to say though, I have a sneaking suspicion that the informant for Julius was probably his wife, Marie (Ptak) Bolda, who lived until the 1940s. There's no telling if she knew the names of Julius' parents so it's going to be a gamble. If she didn't, I do have one other option but it's not going to be a fun one. Julius was Catholic so there may be a baptismal record for him somewhere but I would need to order his naturalization papers and hope that he gave his hometown, or at the very least the area from which he came. As far as I can tell so far, his ship, the Donau, left Germany from Bremen which doesn't tell me a thing about where he came from. Getting confirmation of his parentage this way is not going to be easy at all so I'm just going to have to keep my fingers crossed that Marie knew the names of her in-laws. That or that one of Julius' siblings came into town for the funeral and helped out with the informant information.

ProGen 3 is now finished...NGS HSC CD 3 here I come

2010-10-06T05:53:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday was the last day for my peer group and I in ProGen 3. We are now finished with the course. Our last topic was on marketing strategies and business record keeping. We spent some time talking about what has worked for those with running businesses and those who are not currently "in business" yet got to ask some questions. We also spent some time talking about filing systems which was pretty eye-opening. I have to admit, I'm not much of a stickler with the filing. Oh, I have the file folders, and most are labeled, but they're scattered around the house rather than in one primary location. Next to the desktop computer, next to the netbook and printer, on the coffee table under the good reading light...you get the picture. It's not my fault though, really. I use my "files" everyday, whether it's for the ProGen assignments or the NGS HSC assignments, or just for my own project at the time. Ok, I could put them back in the file box or at least keep them all together, but what fun would that be? Besides, I like to be able to sit down, see a file and start getting back into it.

Speaking of the NGS HSC, I've gotten caught up on that now too. I finished up CD 2 with lesson 11 which was on migration. For the first assignment in that section, I had to print out/copy a few maps charting the migration of a family through three generations. I found some wonderful maps at David Rumsey's site, as usual, and was able to chart the Bromagem movement from Monongalia County, VA (now WV) to Montgomery Co., (and later, thanks to county boundary changes, Bath County) KY, to Greene County, OH, to Darke County, OH, to bordering Indiana counties including Randolph, Jay, Wells, and Blackford. I had to look at possible paths to and from each of the locations which was really interesting, to sit in front of maps that were pretty near contemporary to the subject I was tracking, and try to figure out how they would have gotten from one place to another. I found that the Ohio River was probably a major player for the Bromagems because they could pick it up outside Pittsburgh (Monongalia County is currently considered part of the Pittsburgh metro area) and take it into central Kentucky, near where they briefly settled. Then they could hop on the Little Miami River to head up to Chillicothe, OH and from there pick up a short road to the Greene County, OH area. If you still aren't familiar with David Rumsey's map site, at http://www.davidrumsey.com/, you need to head over there, bookmark it, and return as much as possible. The maps on the site are absolutely beautiful, plus pretty essential tools for the family historian.

The second assignment for this section was a pretty big one. I had to choose an ancestor and one census year in which he/she appears. Then compile a spreadsheet with at least 100 of that person's neighbors in that year and do the same for the next census year. So overall, you have a spreadsheet covering two census enumerations with at least 200 total included. Then, you go over both statistics looking for similarities, anything that can help you to group the people and figure how your subject fit into the mix when historical context is mixed with the social background you've just compiled. If your subject moved between the two census years, then you need to find out more, such as what was going on in that particular geographic location that may have contributed to a move. Was it religious? Social? Was there a conflict going on at the time? I chose to follow Emsley McMasters, the Methodist living in the North Carolina Quaker Belt during the Civil War. Obviously I had already discovered that the Quaker Belt area was struggling with some serious, violent and unstable internal warfare during the Civil War, as if being a country at war wasn't bad enough. So I knew that his move was likely to provide a safer and more stable home for his large family (there were 8 children living under his roof at the time of the 1860 census). Indiana would have provided the land but his destination in particular, Parke County, would have provided a strong North Carolina community as well as a community with an established Quaker contingent, so the values would presumably have been similar to what he, and subsequently, his children would have grown up with. It was also accessible to him from the very well traveled Wilderness Road which he could pick up outside Salisbury, NC and take west into Kentucky, where he could pick up the Ohio River and from there, the Wabash River, which runs along Indiana's western border and have several waterways branching off of it in the Parke County area.

All of this information was to be recorded in a report to complete lesson 11. I ordered the final CD of the course last week and it's already arrived so I've been taking a look at the workload and figuring out what needs to be ordered. The lessons this time cover, immigration, naturalization, military records, evidence analysis and kinship, and writing the biography of an ancestor. I did start poking around on ancestry a bit for the immigration and naturalization lessons and I think I got lucky. I'll post about that next...

Still juggling, and adding more to the plate

2010-09-17T04:59:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm still working on getting caught up after my Dad's passing last month. I've got 4 assignments to finish up, 2 for the NGS HSC and 2 for ProGen, my NGSQ group meets next week to discuss a great article by Stephanie Evans (which I'll try to post about soon), I'm getting indexed entries and photos from the project in Parke County, IN and now I've just agreed to be a coordinator for a future ProGen group. Yikes!

The two NGS HSC assignments I'm finishing are Lessons 7 and 11. Lesson 7 is on Church and Cemetery records and I had to order an FHL film to view the records of St Martin's Episcopal Church in Marcus Hook, Delaware County, PA then do an inventory of what was on the roll. It was definitely interesting reading, however there was an issue with the film notes from the familysearch website not matching what was supposed to be on the roll. But for the most part, I did get to see the hand-written entries naming the first vestrymen for the congregation in 1724 and various early 19th century entries for baptisms, marriages, and burials. Cool stuff there. The second part of this lesson was to make a cemetery map. This was one of the assignments I worked on back in June when I took my research trip to Parke County. I did a map for the Linebarger Cemetery which is just outside Rockville, IN. I had some weather and time issues however, so the map is not yet complete as far as getting all of the names and transcriptions but I hope to be able to finish it up in the spring.

Lesson 11, the second lesson I'm trying to get finished up, is the migration lesson. The first assignment is to print out an outline map or other map which you can then use to track the movements of a family group. I'll have to fill everyone in on this more later since I'm still in the middle of doing this but I'm using the movements of my Bromagem family for this one, showing their earliest known beginnings in Monongalia County, VA (now WV), then to Scott County, KY, and finally over to Greene and Darke Counties in OH and Randolph and Jay Counties in IN. The map is supposed to show the possible routes used to get to these locations as well and that is actually the part I'm researching now so I'll get back to that topic here once I'm finished with the assignment.

For ProGen, I'm working on the final 2 assignments of the group- the proof summary and the marketing plan. Initially I had thought to do the proof summary on the proving the parentage of Lillian Bromagen Stevens but once I got it all down, it ended up looking more like a case study than a proof summary. What that pretty much means is that there was no conflicting or indirect evidence. It all pretty much fell into place. The only real conflicting issue is the maiden name for her mother, which I've spoken about here in the past and which is an ongoing work-in-progress for me. So instead, I think I'm revisiting a different Bromagen issue for this assignment. I'll be going back over the work I did to prove that Lida Van Wormer was actually Eliza Jane Bromagen, sister of Lillian and eldest child of James Bromagen and Mary Jane Braden/Hawkins. Again, more on that when I know for sure which way I'm going :)

So that's the sum up for now. I'll have more details coming soon.

Getting back to business...Indexing Project Begins

2010-08-29T07:13:00.000-07:00

Well, admittedly I've gotten VERY behind on my various projects this month. My Dad was in the hospital then hospice before passing away on the 13th and so I haven't done much of anything this month. But something big did happen genealogy-wise that I wanted to share. I started working on getting an indexing project in Parke County, IN started and we've now had two volunteers go in and index and/or photograph probate packets there.

Currently, we have around 700 photos to index as well as an additional number of packets that have been indexed. We started with the earliest records which generally begin in 1833 though there are several pages referring to earlier cases. So we're just getting started. Right now we're looking for volunteers who can go on-site to get the records indexed and/or photographed but now that the info is starting to come in, we're also going to be needing some volunteers to do the typing. Right now we're thinking that once the information is entered into the database, we'll post it on the Parke County GenWeb site which is managed by one of our volunteers. We're not sure yet if the site is capable of holding the massive amount of info, and especially photos, but at least for now that's what we're thinking and if it turns out we need additional space or need to look elsewhere for a home for the info we'll cross that bridge when we get to it :)

So if you live in IN or were planning a visit and may have some time to spare to help index a few packets, please let me know. Or maybe you're not local to the area but would still like to help with the keying-in, drop me an email as well.

This is going to be a HUGE project and we could use all of the hands we can get.

David Gilkison 1948-2010

2010-08-22T14:36:00.001-07:00

My Dad passed away last week after a long, hard battle with colon cancer. He was originally diagnosed in 2001, recovered, and had just a couple of years free of the disease before it came back with a vengeance. He couldn't shake it after its return and even ended up losing one of his kidneys because of it. This last bout was really bad and he had to take aggressive chemo treatments and radiation and nothing was making much of a difference, but he just kept taking more and more hoping that there would be a change. He really fought hard but it was time for his body to rest and for him to have some peace.

He was born in the South suburbs of Chicago and I really can't imagine him living anywhere else, despite the fact that he always said he wanted to retire in California, probably around San Francisco. His mother was the granddaughter of German immigrants and his father came from a long line of Indiana and Kentucky farmers. They divorced when he was very young. He graduated from high school and went into the Navy during Vietnam and managed to come back home. He married my Mom and worked as a truck driver. I always thought he was kindof an anomaly in that profession because he was a whiz with money (I was the only 1st grader with shares in a couple of stocks!) and loved art and art history. He would have been a great art history professor or stock trader I think, he was that interested in the subjects and that good. Not really the kind of jobs that you usually think truck drivers could do, but that was Dad. He was also passionate about his two favorite hobbies-photography and golf. The history buff in him turned his interest towards the works of Ansel Adams and hickory-shafted golf clubs rather than the more modern styles, though he did have interest in the changing faces of his hobbies too.

I'll definitely miss the way he encouraged me, sometimes more like pushing :) and he always seemed to care what was happening with me and what I was up to, just like a Dad should. It's still hard to think that the time has come to say goodbye, but I'm glad that he's finally got some rest and peace.

Here's probably my favorite picture of Dad with his own dad, my Grandpa

Interesting tidbit

2010-08-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if you all have seen the news around the gene-boards about the Tuttle farm in Dover, NH going up for sale, but if not you can find the story here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100801/ap_on_bi_ge/us_old_family_farm_5

Most people are taking an interest in the story because of the fact that the farm has been held by the same family, the Tuttle's, for 378 years (or at least that's what they're claiming). My interest is more personal. My immigrant Stevens ancestor settled in Dover in the 18th century and his neighbors were the Tuttle's, and I've got a few deeds between he and various members of the Tuttle family at the time. As I read the news article, it sounds like the family started out with a much smaller plot of land and over time, added to their holdings so I'm guessing by now the land they hold encompasses my ancestors old plot as well. It's kindof funny to think that the descendants of his neighbors are now selling his old land along with their own, hundreds of years after his initial purchase.

Indiana Probate Packets

2010-07-23T08:49:00.000-07:00

Are you researching an Indiana ancestor who died prior to civil death registration? Can't find his death date? Or researching an ancestor who died in IN after registration but you want more information? Not sure where to look? You may be in luck thanks to an often overlooked resource for Indiana-the probate packets.

On my most recent trip to Parke County, IN I was working on my NGS HSC lesson on probate records. The lesson called for me to do an inventory of the probate holdings available in the county so I was basically just snooping around the back room of the Clerk's Office. While they do have the standard ledgers that you see just about everywhere else, they also have a huge set of metal drawers that look like they're built into the wall. The only identifying info on the front of the drawers are little pieces of paper with typed years on them. So for this trip, I decided to find out what these drawers had inside. Boy was I surprised. Inside, were the complete probate files, often called case files in other states, with loose pages from the probate proceedings. Included in these folded up packets were things like the petitions for administration, inventories, recipts, and any other documents that had been presented to the court pertaining to an individual's probate case. Yes, several of these items were noted in the ledger books so you could find out when someone died from those as well, but with these packets, you're not just reading a notation in a ledger than an inventory was presented, you're looking at the inventory itself. More importantly, you're seeing the widow's petition for the release of the estate which can tell you any number of things such as names of children and whether she could write. You can also find out a great deal about extended family groups, such as the decedent's brothers which can help reconstruct another generational family group.

In one of the probate packets for a family member, I found that the widow did not present her own petition for the estate. Instead, her husband's brother did it for her and prior to this time, I had not been able to connect the decedent with anyone else in the county. Also, in the same drawer, right in front of that probate packet was another, thicker probate packet for someone else with the same surname. So I opened it up and found that this was another relation to my ancestor (I'm not entirely sure but I think it may be another brother) and that my ancestor was actually administering that estate when he died and included in that relation's packet was a receipt from my ancestor's widow showing that the new administrator had paid her for her husband's share of the estate to which he had been working to administer when he died. It was an unbelievable find and one that I wouldn't have been able to make so quickly without those packets. It's one thing to see the same surnames in a ledger book, but it takes quite a bit of work to go through and track all of those people and try to bring out the relationships between them without something like these packets with their personal letters spelling out relationships and things like receipts to tell you that yes, these people were related and had dealings with each other.

As stated initially, these probate packets are held by the county Clerk's Office. While the order books and will books and books of the Common Pleas Courts have been filmed by the FHL, these packets have largely been ignored, probably due to the fact that seeing the proceedings in the order books tend to answer the main question people have for these pre-registration deaths: when did so-and-so die? However, when you want to know more about the person than just when did they die, like what was their widow's name, or who administered the estate, or who were the children, the packets are invaluable. The can even tell you things you hadn't thought of yet like the names of two of your ancestor's brothers and those are all things that can seriously open up your research leading to older generations, maternal lines, and filling in previously unknown children. These packets should not be ignored just because you think you've answered the main when did he die question and that is why they are starting to come to the attention of others, such as the Indiana Genealogical Society, who are beginning the long process of indexing and digitizing these packets to both get them out there for researchers to discover and use and to preserve them for the future. I'm working on starting at least an indexing project for the Parke County packets right now so hopefully they'll start to become available in the near future as well.

If you've got Indiana ancestors, get out there and go through those packets! You never know what secrets they'll have inside.

Few words about KY research

2010-07-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

When I went to Kentucky the week before last for a girls' weekend with some friends from college, I made sure to leave a couple days for some on-site research. I've got KY roots on both my Mom's and my Dad's side, but my main target was Gilkison research in Fleming County and Bath County.

While I had used microfilm of KY records fairly frequently before, ordered through the Family History Center, this was my first time working there in person so I wanted to be sure I knew where I was going and what I was going to find. The one thing that I realized is that where Kentucky is concerned, the county courthouse shouldn't necessarily be your first stop. The Kentucky Archives in Frankfort has tax lists, will books, and marriage information, plus other information sent to them from the courthouses from all of the counties so pretty much, if you hit the Archives first, you'll know whether the courthouse may have more information for you. In my case, it told me right off the bat that I wasn't going to find what I was looking for where I was planning to look.

My target was John Gilkison who married Margaret Manley in 1819 in Fleming County. I was hoping to find more information about him in Fleming County, especially when I discovered the full run of tax lists for the county available at the Archives. As it turned out, he was never taxed there and by 1820 he was enumerated in another county, 1830 yet another, and by 1840 he was in Indiana. And other than his marriage return, there is absolutely no evidence that he was even in Fleming County beyond his marriage and the tax returns helped prove that. What the tax returns did show me were other Gilkerson families there at the same time John was floating around Kentucky providing possible relations to John, including a William Gilkerson who was of the appropriate age to have been a generation older than John (father, uncle, etc.). I was able to track William through about 50 years of tax lists and establish a death range, attach him to a confirmed son and a couple potential others, find him in a deed index, and even find his marriage return from 1799. If I had had more time, I could have searched the tax lists for the surrounding counties to see if and how John was enumerated but that's going to have to wait for another time.

So my biggest tip on Kentucky research is don't jump straight to the courthouses without checking if the KY Archives might have what you need as well. If I had known how complete those tax lists ran, I would just have skipped the courthouse visits on the second day and returned to the Archives to search those surrounding counties for John.

First up, Illinois land grant records at NARA Chicago

2010-07-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

Ok, so yet another of my NGS Home Study Course assignments dealt with Land Grant records. Fortunately, right now I'm living in the greater Chicago Metro Area and can take advantage of the holdings of the National Archives, Great Lakes Region located on the south side of the city.

The assignment is to first determine whether you live in a federal land state or a state land state. The state land states are most easily remembered as those states formed from the thirteen original colonies, states formed by land from these states, and lands used as bounty land from them; Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, Texas, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Hawaii make up these states which are also known as non-public states, of which there are twenty. Ohio also had land which falls into this territory because a good portion of it was used as a military district for veterans.

The remaining thirty states are federal land states because the land they cover belonged to the government after the Revolutionary War. Illinois is one of these states and it is the records of the various Illinois land offices which I was to focus on for the assignment.

The main purpose of the assignment was to do a survey of the records held by the repository you visited. For the sake of time when considering the massive holdings of the National Archives, I was to look at the state I live in and report on what records are available for that state alone. Below is the list that I compiled.

***Notes***

-It should be mentioned that NARA Great Lakes-Chicago location has more than just IL land grant records. Indiana was also included in their catalog and it's possible that their holdings may include Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio as well, though there are two NARA Great Lakes locations and the other is in Dayton, Ohio. For specific information on which land grant records are held at which location you can contact the Archives at chicago.archives@nara.gov or 773-948-9001

-NARA only has land grant records for federal land states. For grants outside these states, where the grants are often known as patents, check the Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office, website at http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/ where you can search the patents online

-The finding aid for land records at NARA Chicago included Illinois land office records which were only available at the Washington D.C. location. For a complete catalog of the land records of the various IL land offices, these records should be consulted.

Illinois Land Grant records available at NARA Great Lakes Region, Chicago, IL**

Chicago Land District (1835-1855)
Abstracts of Cash Entries
Abstracts of Military Bounty Land Warrant Locations
Galena Land District (1835-1840)/Dixon Land District (1840-1855)
Registers of Cash Certificates
Edwardsville Land District (1816-1855)
Register of Final Credit Certificates
Registers of Cash Certificates
Declarations of Consent under the Relief Act of 2 March 1821
Relinquishments under the Relief Acts of 2 March 1821, 18 May 1824, 4 May
1826, and 21 March 1828
Kaskaskia Land District (1809-1855)
Applications to purchase
Register of Credit Certificates
Declarations of Consent under the Relief Act of 2 March 1821
Relinquishments under the Relief Act of 2 March 1821
Relinquishments under the Relief Acts of 18 May 1824, 4 May 1826, and 21 March 1828
Register of Cash Certificates
Receivers Cash Account Book
Palestine Land District (1821-1855)
Registers of Cash Certificates
Vandalia Land District (1821-1855)
Registers of Cash Certificates
Quincy Land District (1831-1855)
Registers of Cash Certificates
Danville Land District (1831-1856)
Registers of Cash Certificates
Shawneetown Land District (1814-1855)
Registers of Cash Certificates
Springfield Land Office (1823-1876)
Registers of Cash Certificates

(I have a Word document/pdf file of the above list also. If anyone would like a copy, just drop me an email)

I didn't forget to blog, I swear!! :)

2010-07-14T04:31:00.000-07:00

Hey all, I just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know that I haven't forgotten about the blog. I was out of town all last week in Kentucky on a research trip/get-together-with-friends things. This was my first on-site KY research trip so I have a few things to discuss with that but I need some time to go over my notes. Also, sandwiched inbetween my Parke County trip a couple weeks ago and the KY trip I just got back from, I managed to head down to NARA-Great Lakes Region in Chicago for a look at their Illinois land grant holdings and I want to go over that information as well. Plus, I'm still working on typing up all the data for the NGS HSC lessons that I've gotten this month. So I'm swamped now. But I'll also be working on starting to get some of it up here too so keep watching for it.

Parke County Trip, Part 2-The Good News

2010-07-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

So I spent my first post on my trip last week (to Parke County, IN) basically talking about the frustrations I found there, and there were a few. This time I can talk about the great stuff I found, primarily in the back room of the Clerk's Office. Besides getting two assignments for the NGS Home Study Course finished while I was working in the Courthouse, I was also able to check out a couple of things for my own personal research. What I found were three complete probate packets. Some areas no longer keep these but Parke County has them going back to about 1833. Two of the ones that I found were for my direct ancestors, William Williamson and Emsley McMasters.

Emsley's packet was pretty standard: it had a page where the two administrators/appraisers signed on, an inventory of his items and their value to make sure that his estate was worth less than $500 (it ended up just under the cut at $488), and because of this, it also had a petition from his wife asking the court to release the estate, including both real and personal property to her. It includes the land description at the bottom which is great because now I can try to match it up to the land description in an entry for Emsley in the 1867 deed book and then try to find it on a map. So that's a little project I can hold on to for next time.

William's packet though, was a little different. For starters, I didn't have an exact date of death for William though I knew that he died probably between 1856 and 1860 so I started with the probate order books first. I found success there when I saw that his estate appointed administrators on May 1, 1858. In the same book, just before William's entry though, were several entries next to the name John Williamson. I had no idea who this person was, he's not one of the other Williamson's living in the county in the 1850 census, so I started looking at the pages with John's estate happenings. As it turned out, a William Williamson was appointed administrator of John Williamson's estate in March 1858 but died the next month, the same as the man I think is my William Williamson. So I pull both John and William's probate packets. John's is first and inside are tons of receipts and IOU's that John incurred prior to his death. Apparently he had tons of debts around town and couldn't pay them all. One of the receipts was this one

This receipt was for Susan Williamson, who was my William's wife which means this was the proof I needed to show that my William and the William that was administrator for John Williamson's estate were the same. It also establishes a relationship between John and William which gets a little more complex once I looked inside William's probate packet. In that one, the petition for the estate was not done by William's widow, Susan, as it was in Emsley's case, but instead it was done by a Conrad Williamson as representative, or "next friend", of Susan. This was a name I recognized from the 1850 census because he and his family lived in the same county and he himself was only a couple years older than William. In this petition he begins by saying he is in fact, "brother of William Williamson". So with these two packets I've now got a relationship between three men, two of whom are confirmed brothers with the third suspected to be either another brother or perhaps a cousin.

For now, I'm thinking John is a brother or cousin, someone of the same generation as William or Conrad, rather than their father because he seems to have been moving around more than someone who was probably in their 70s would have done. He has still not been found anywhere in the 1850 census and he didn't appear as having any land in the deed indexes and books either. His packet didn't have a petition for estate by a widow and he wasn't listed as having any heirs or children either. Keeping in mind his IOUs and receipts that the later administrator (who I'm also tracking to see if there is a relationship there) had to pay that doesn't generally fit the behavior of an elderly man either. But there is still a lot to be done with these two packets.

From two probates, look how much info I've gotten! It was great! I've since found out a little about Conrad too which is nice. He may have lived long enough to have a death certificate in the county which would be wonderful if it turns out that the informant (whether it's a widow or one of his kids) knew the names of his parents, specifically his father. So that's what I'm looking for now. And of course, I'm still on the lookout for John to see if I can get a more concrete hold on how he fit into the family.

Was just catching up on my reading-Ohio recs at Family Search

2010-06-30T05:33:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone! I was just catching up on my blog reading and caught this heads up from Linda at Flipside and thought you should know http://lindasflipside.blogspot.com/2010/06/family-search-record-search-ohio-death.html

Apparently Ohio death records, which had previously been accessible from the familysearch.org's pilot page (with full view of other records with similar search terms) have now been moved to a beta site. I ran into a similar situation a few months ago when the Philadelphia cemetery returns (titled as death certificates on the site because they are are mixed in with later death registers, etc.) were removed as part of a site change. I checked the beta site to see if they were there, and sure enough, they too are listed as part of the record collection on the beta site. So I was really excited to see them back and glad that the Ohio death records haven't been lost either. Check out the site and view the full record collection list to see what's available now http://fsbeta.familysearch.org/s/collection/list

Back from Parke County, Indiana...

2010-06-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

and it was your typical research trip complete with both pleasure and pain :)

The bad news was that two out of the three cemeteries I visited had fairly disappointing results. At West Union Cemetery, a medium-sized township cemetery, I was looking for the stone of Perry Williamson. His 1913 death certificate and obituary both say that he was buried there but after about an hour and a half of walking around and dodging bugs I was unable to find it. If he ever had a stone, and it's very possible that he never did, it's gone now or among the many broken and worn stones that are stacked up against two large trees on the cemetery grounds. Despite the fact that it was a public cemetery, no known documentation regarding lot purchases and/or lot maps exists so for now we'll just have to be satisfied with the belief that he's there somewhere. That doesn't really work for me but there isn't a whole lot I can do about it short of hiring someone to do one of those ground surveys to tell us where the people are...so yeah, if there's anyone out there who would like to donate the funds for that be sure to let me know :)

So then I moved on to Causey Cemetery. Causey, unlike West Union, is a small family cemetery located on a very narrow gravel road and I went to the grounds armed with a copy of a photo of the stone I was looking for. So one would think I knew what I would find. You'd like to think that anyway. I was looking for the stone of the earliest confirmed Gilkeson ancestor-the one who first came to the Midwest from the East. John Gilkeson died in Parke County in the 1850s and his stone was photographed for a local transcription project that fizzled out before accomplishing very much, many years ago. I was estimating that the photo I had of his stone was about 10 years old, maybe slightly less. In the photo, the stone is in great shape, standing straight up, and is well readable. After two walk-arounds not finding it on my own, this is what I found

The stone is now about to fall forward, onto the writing. I don't know anything about cemetery restoration right now, but you better bet that I'm going to get to know a heck of a lot about it very soon. As a private family cemetery, the thought of lot maps and anything written down about who is in this cemetery is almost laughable so the thought that once that stone goes down no one will be able to know where on the grounds he is really makes me itch. At the rate this thing is going down, my son won't even be able to find it if he decides he'd like to see it a little later down the road. And that is not good. So I'm going to be trying my best to save this one and to get a project going to maybe get a full cemetery map done in the event that other stones go down.

So that covers the disappointments for the cemetery day. My final disappointment of the trip came the following day in the Courthouse. I spent the bulk of the day in the Clerk's Office going through the Probate records, doing inventory for the NGS HSC as well as looking up records for my own research. Parke County is fortunate to still have the complete probate packets dating back to the 1830s (though the county was formed in the early 20s, a serious fire around 1830 destroyed those precious early records) and they are in the back room in wall drawers. Did you catch that? "Wall drawers". This means that the packets were placed in the drawers decades ago and obviously the office has accumulated additional modern file cabinets over the years. Those new file cabinets need space somewhere in the room and guess where they went? Yep, about 1/3 of the old probate drawers are completely inaccessible because there are new metal file cabinets, filled with new case files, parked right in front of the drawers. They're filled, that means they are not able to be moved without a dolley and/or some very strong moving guys. And they're filled with NEW cases which means there really isn't any motivation for the staff to arrange any kind of help with moving them just to reach some old stuff that they don't use.

Remember Perry Williamson who I was searching for at West Union? He died in 1913 and I thought it would be great to take a look at his probate packet. Perhaps there would be a cemetery receipt included since several of the packets I viewed that day were filled with final receipts. Well, can you guess where the 1913 drawer is? If you guessed behind the file cabinets, you guessed right. It's on the bottom row all the way over to the right, directly behind the file cabinets. And to make matters worse, these probate packets have not been filmed, abstracted, indexed, nothing so they are basically dead to the world. They're obstructed and inaccessible with not much hope that they will be made available, at least not anytime soon. I'd love to say that some grad students could make it a summer project or something, but without a local genealogical society to back it up I don't see that happening.

And on that lovely note, I'll end the bad news. I'll post about the good news next...

Big score today...and a reminder

2010-06-23T15:38:00.001-07:00

Hi all! Today I went down to my local Family History Center to view a couple of films that I ordered about a month or so ago. One roll was the index of marriages in Fleming County, KY up to about 1890 (up to the letter "h"). The other was the actual marriage book of returns for the county. Once again, I was reminded to never trust the index to be complete. I ran through it and did not see the marriage that I was pretty sure should be there so I swapped rolls and started going page by page through the record book. This wasn't too difficult because the registry entries were in the order they occurred starting with the earliest and worked forward in time so since I had a range I would know where to stop. Sure enough, the second to the last entry on one of the pages was my 1819 marriage return of John Gilkeson and Margaret Manly. Not much info was given but it was at least a confirmation that the marriage occurred in the place I thought it did. And it also served as my second reminder, in about a 2 month time period, that if at first you don't find what you're looking for in the index don't give up. Both today's record and another marriage record I found in a different location were not included in the indexes and were only found by going directly through the record book going page by page.

This can be tedious, but the payoff is huge. And really, what choice do you have? You either put in the time to find the record you need, or you don't, and then you have a big gap in your research. And really, I'm far too partial to having as much info as possible to have large gaps of the unknown in my info if I can help it. So don't give up so easily when searching for your records!

Quick Moment for something Interesting

2010-06-22T18:27:00.001-07:00

Ok, I've pretty much spent all day working on CD 2 of the NGS HSC and while doing the research for one of the lessons I came across an interesting reference. I've heard of locales holding get-togethers/reunions for Civil War vets throughout the remainder of the 19th century and into the 20th century and always thought about how great it would be to be able to have seen them in person. I would kill for time travel to check those things out but today I had a different thought on the matter.

In a county history of Parke County, Indiana there was a brief reference to a soldier's reunion occurring in the county seat, Rockville, in 1875 (no exact day was given). At that time, my only Confederate ancestor (at least the only one that I've found so far) was a fairly recent citizen of Parke Co., having migrated shortly after the war. Part of my assignment was to look at the list of 100+ neighbors living in close proximity to him at the time of the 1870 census; they were all from Indiana and most of the families that I've seen were from Union families. In the little snapshot of a list that I've compiled, Emsley McMasters and his family were probably one of only a handfull of former-Confederates in the area suddenly swarmed by several thousand former Union sympathizers and veterans. I've already posted about my theory that he was probably not a willing Confederate participant, but regardless, it makes me wonder just how comfortable he may have been on the day of that "reunion".

....Oh, and did I forget to mention who the honored guest of the Parke County event was? It was General William T. Sherman. Yes, that Sherman. The Gone with the Wind burning of Atlanta Sherman. Now that's the kind of guest that would make any former Confederate get the warm and cozies, right?

YIKES!!

Just my random thought for the day. One of many anyway :)

Back from IGHR, whew!

2010-06-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

Alright, this is just a post to say, sadly, that IGHR 2010 is now over. It was my first time there and it was wonderful. To anyone who hasn't been yet, I really do recommend it very highly. A listing of courses on the docket for next year can be found here
http://www4.samford.edu/schools/ighr/IGHR_future.html

Also, some news for next year came down the grapevine while I was there. Apparently, they are going to try something new for the online registration process for the 2011 Institute to help with the overflow problem crashing their servers, as it did during the last registration. The idea is to stagger the registration by time so that not everyone is trying to register for all courses at the same time. In theory this could be a big help, but we'll have to wait until January to find out. Til then, I'll be studying up and finishing the NGS HSC course to get ready for Course 4: Advanced Methodology next year. That class actually had a pop quiz on the first day and a good deal of homework throughout the week. Whew! Gotta get myself as ready as possible for that one!

Heading to IGHR

2010-06-13T04:07:00.000-07:00

Hey all, I'm getting to head off to IGHR for the week. I'll be getting together with the ProGen'ers tonight so I may see some of you then. Then tomorrow I'll be sitting in the course on Virginia Military Conflicts and their Effect on Migration, can't wait!

Be back next weekend

Possible new group brewing over on the message boards

2010-06-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

Hey all, not sure how many of you are signed up for the Transitional Genealogist Forum and/or the APG public and private message boards, but over the past two days or so there has been a flurry of activity over discussions on how to attack the valuable substance of "Evidence Explained" by Elizabeth Shown Mills. The discussions are culminating in the beginning of a possible public list group discussion, a yahoo group specifically for the study of the book, and a separate study group loosely based upon the ProGen model. If you haven't signed up for any of the message boards, now may be a good time to do so and then throw in your two cents on the subject. It sounds like a good group for studying one of the most important aspects of our field may be coming soon.

SLIG!!

2010-06-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

Just a quick reminder to everyone that registration for 2011 SLIG (Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy) opens this Thursday (June 10th) at 9 am MST. The early registration fee for this year is $320 and it will be held at the Radisson in downtown Salt Lake City, UT. The Radisson is offering a special rate for those attending and, according to the UGA website, they will also be coordinating room-sharing. For more info on the Institute, see http://www.infouga.org/

Tom Jones will be teaching his Advanced Methodology course this year, and there are several locale-specific courses as well including a New England course with hands-on consultation time from NEHGS experts.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to go yet, but I'd love to. The cost for the registration, plane fare, hotel for at least 5 nights, and meals for all of those days, plus the fact that it's held in January while my son is in school and my husband will most likely be working 16 hour days makes it difficult for me to fathom an attempt. However, I'm working on a plan...I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to come up with something before Thursday because like IGHR, registration for SLIG fills up fast. So if you have even the slightest desire to go, you'd better hop on the 'puter and register early.

Happiness is staying busy

2010-06-06T05:54:00.000-07:00

I've been feeling a little like a chicken with its head cut off lately with so much work. I've been working on two ProGen assignments, editing group members' research reports and figuring out what to do for the big final assignment, continuing work on an ancestry project for my aunt's DAR application, and continuing what I can on CD 2 of the NGS HSC course. Fortunately, most of the assignments for the CD are things that need to be done elsewhere (visiting courthouses, making a cemetery map, ordering church record film/visiting church record repository, etc.) so there's only so much I can do here. I am still working on the Census Analysis and Migration assignment though.

So on top of all of this research and paper work, I'm very happy to say that next weekend is the start of the Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research (IGHR) at Samford University in Alabama! I know several of us registered back in January and it's almost time to head out. I'm flying down next Sunday and the course will last until the following Friday. There were a ton of courses to take, they all sounded great, but I opted for the course of Virginia and its military and migration. Virginia is such a feeder state that I felt it was imperative to know more about what was happening within its borders at a time when so many of my own ancestors were living there and what was going on that could have impacted their decisions to move out when they did. This will be my first year at IGHR and I can't wait.

Another bit of great news is that the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) has extended the early bird deadline for registration to this year's conference in Knoxville, TN. You can take advantage of the savings as long as you register prior to June 21st. More info can be found here
http://www.fgs.org/2010conference/

The last bit I wanted to share was a great article for anyone interested in North Carolina research, especially during the Civil War. The article is from "The North Carolina Historical Review" (January 1984) and is entitled "Neighbor against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Randolph County Area of Confederate North Carolina". It's a fascinating yet sometimes horrifying article about a pro-Union, anti-slavery majority in a Confederate state. I ordered this article to help me gain some perspective on my McMasters family who was living in Randolph County during the War and promptly left immediately after. It's no wonder. If things were bad for the inhabitants of that area during the War, it doesn't sound like it was any better there after. The appeal of land in a land in Indiana that hadn't been touched by the War would have a strong pull to a family in danger of losing everything they had and surrounded by anger and death. This article would be interesting to anyone with North Carolina ancestors, but also to those wanting to know more about the inner struggles going on during the War. We all have Civil War connections and getting a glimpse of what the people living through it dealt with on a day to day basis can be vital to understanding the context of their society. If you'd like to take a look, you can order the periodical from http://nc-historical-publications.stores.yahoo.net/the-north-carolina-historical-review.html or order it through your library's ILL

Things have been quiet here, but busy behind the scenes

2010-05-20T05:47:00.000-07:00

I realized that I hadn't posted here in a while so I thought I should get an update together. Things have been crazy! I was waiting until I had more concrete info to post here but I'll start now and when I have more, I'll post that too. First, I'm still working on my NGS HCS assignments, specifically the lesson on Census Analysis and Migration. My focus is on the family of Emsley McMasters who moved from Randolph County, NC to Parke County, IN right after the Civil War. His was a former Quaker family from Pennsylvania who moved to NC after being read out of his Quaker meetings because of his Great Grandfather's marriage to a woman who was not a Friend (this info was reported through a family website, jamesmcmasters.com and I still need to find the Quaker records to verify it). I've been doing some reading on Randolph County and discovered that most of the families who settled there were Quakers or had Quaker connections which made the county mostly anti-slavery and pro-Union at the time of the war. I've got several articles, found through Persi (available through Heritage Quest at my local library) and also a couple of books ordered through my library's interlibrary loan that are about the Quakers in the area and the climate of Randolph County and North Carolina in general during the 1850s and 1860s. The goal is to determine why the McMasters left North Carolina, though the image is becoming much clearer; the Civil War had a tremendous impact on the county and touched the McMasters personally since Emsley was recently found to have been in a Confederate senior reserves unit at the very end of the war. His Confederate service record is available through footnote. Page 5 is his oath of allegiance, shown here

So research into Randolph County in the 1850s and 1860s and trying to find out what was happening there at the time the McMasters left has been occupying a lot of my time. I've also been looking at Parke County, IN, their destination, for clues on why they might have chosen that area. While info on Randolph County has been easy to obtain, info on Parke County, IN has been scarce. There is very little that can be found about it at the time, either online or through Persi. Most of the information regarding Indiana during the Civil War focuses on the brief conflicts that occurred on Indiana soil, but not in Parke County. All I've been able to find out so far is that the land was good for farming and available for purchase at the time. But the most significant snippet that I've found mentioned a tie in Parke County to the Underground Railroad, which was established in Randolph County, Indiana by the Coffin family. Apparently, a member of this family settled in Parke County prior to the McMasters arrival, thus making it a stop on the Underground Railroad. The Coffins were neighbors to the McMasters back in Randolph County, NC, as established by the neighbor identification required by the lesson. This information regarding Parke County as a stop on the Underground Railroad is only from one or two websites with no great detail available, and I haven't been able to find other, more specific information. I'm still looking though so hopefully I'll come across something soon.

So beyond the McMasters and the NGS course lessons, I've also been working on my Pro Gen assignment for this month, editing and proofreading the research reports submitted by my group members. Last month's assignment was to write up a research report so now that everyone has their reports up, we have to go back and read through them and proofread them. So that will keep me pretty busy for the next week or so as well.

Finally, I had my monthly chat for the NGSQ article group this week. This group meets to discuss various articles from the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. The article for this month was "A Family for Suzanne" by Ruth Randall. It was the 2007 Family History Writing Contest winner and great example of a four generation kinship project. It traces the family line beginning with an enslaved woman, named Suzanne who was born around 1796-1797 and lived her life in Missouri, which was then part of the Louisiana Territory. The article abounds in a knowledge of local law and succeeds in finding Suzanne's family, though she herself was traded at the early age of 3 1/2 years to the family whose surname would evermore be attached to those of her descendants. Her biological parents will probably never be known, the earliest record relating to Suzanne offers no clue as to her parentage, but through this wonderfully and diligently researched article we can place her with her known family. The article tackles the difficult subject, both emotionally and methodologically, of slave genealogy and it recommended both to those interested in the subject as well as those who are interested in Missouri history and genealogy as it offers a great deal of information and helpful hints (through the use of sources, cited in the footnotes) for research there.

I'm exhausted but also excited with all of the work. This month has been full of a lot to discover and research and I'll happily be working on some of this for a while so if I'm quiet, it just means I'm working and I'll get back to the blog as soon as either I can, or I have some new info to talk about.

New Territory

2010-05-02T17:38:00.001-07:00

Ok, so as you ProGen 3'ers know, this month's assignment was to write up a research report on either a simple or complex issue based upon the models given in the chapter and/or the models given in the BCG Standards Manual. I chose a pretty simple issue to be solved and ended up finding myself in brand new territory.

My focus was to find the William Williamson family of Parke County, Indiana in the 1860 census. I had found them in 1850 and believed I had them pegged in the 1870 census, though the family group was drastically different, but couldn't find a single family member in the 1860 census no matter what name variants I used in the search box on ancestry.com. So my first instinct was to draw up a neighbor list and right off the bat I hit paydirt recognizing the Samuel McMasters family within a page of the Williamsons in the 1850 census and only two households away in the 1870 census. The surname was dead giveaway that this family was the key because I knew that in 1871 William's son, Perry, married a Susannah McMasters. Playing the name game, along with the neighbor lists, won the race and I was able to draw up a pretty neat report complete with thoughts for future research.

What brought me into what I have deemed "new territory" was trying to figure out who in the world Samuel McMasters was. I know what you're thinking, "since Perry married Susannah McMasters in 1871 and the family was living so close together for so many years, wouldn't he have been Susannah's father?" Big fat negatory on that one. I already knew that Susannah's father's name was Emsley McMasters from Randolph Co., North Carolina. So I say again, who in the world is Samuel McMasters? And what about the other McMasters families living in Parke County, Indiana between 1850 and 1870; Lewis McMasters and James McMasters, especially. Lewis, James and Samuel all appear on the same census page in 1860, all in close proximity to the William Williamson family, including Perry. But none of these men is the father of Susannah, thus placing her as one of Perry's closest neighbors (though they did live in the same township between the above years).

Well after some serious census searching, and the assistance of a wonderful family website at http://www.jamesmcmasters.us/ , I was able to piece together the family group. James McMasters, b. abt 1791, was the father of Lewis, b. abt 1817 NC, and of Samuel, b. abt 1826 NC, and they all came to Parke County together. Susannah's father, Emsley McMasters, b. abt 1817 NC, was James' nephew through his other brother, Elisha, b. abt 1789. Did ya get all that? Yeah, I didn't either the first 1000 times I was trying to put it all together. I had to draw myself a couple of diagrams complete with a ton of ink scratch-outs. Understandable or not, the bottom line is that the Williamsons were surrounded in their neighborhood by a large family group for more than twenty years and though they may not have been "next door neighbors" to the parents of Perry's future wife, they were "kissing close" to her uncles and cousins.

So now my research is taking me into North Carolina, and this is an entirely new realm for me. I know absolutely nothing about the genealogy of that state. On the up side, it does look like the McMasters family has been researched quite a bit in the past so getting caught up on all of the research should be an interesting path.

My other surprise, stemming from what was initially thought to be a simple research problem, is that it appears that James McMasters' grandfather, also James McMasters, is DAR eligible and led a fairly interesting life. Though he did not actively serve in the Revolutionary War as a soldier, he falls under the eligibility requirements because he appears in the payment rolls for "services rendered"; according to the James McMasters website, given above, he appears to have given the revolutionaries use of one of his horses. He was also apparently blind for the majority of his life and may even have had roots near Chester County, PA, where I have other family ties.

So quite a bit has already come from this "simple" problem for a ProGen homework assignment and so far I think this may be one of the most rewarding practical assignments in the course, as of yet, because of it. You really just never know what you're going to stumble into and genealogy is one of those things that takes every opportunity to remind you of that fact. And now it's time to go, I've got to learn everything I possibly can about 18th and early 19th century North Carolina records and genealogy :)

Wishing I was out in Salt Lake right about now...

2010-04-30T06:31:00.000-07:00

Wow, I'm really not happy about not being able to make it out to the NGS conference this year. My plan was to go to IGHR in June and then to the FGS conference in Knoxville later in the summer rather than the NGS conference since I have some research in Knoxville that I would love to be able to do on-site. Now, due to scheduling, it looks like I may not be able to go to the FGS conference afterall which means missing both national conferences this year. I'm really hoping I can make it work out. But my experience at the NGS conference last year, in Raleigh, was so great I know I'm really missing all of the fun out there now. Not to mention that the site is the home of the FHL; think about it, being surrounded by all those films of records from all over the world. A trip out there is definitely a must, I wish I could have made it out there this time. But, there's always next year. I believe I read somewhere that the NGS conference next year will be in Charleston, SC which is one of my favorite cities, and I have a good friend who lives there too so I'm already planning that one out. Hopefully it will work out.

In any case, I hope everyone out in UT right now is enjoying themselves and taking full advantage of everything happening out there. Have a great time and hopefully I'll see you all in Knoxville!

Not too much happening these days...

2010-04-23T06:01:00.000-07:00

Hey all, just wanted to check in. There isn't much going on here lately. Working on finishing my ProGen assignment for this month, a Research Report. I've only done one "official" report before now, for a friend's very limited project, so this is a great opportunity for me to get familiar with the process. I'm not finished yet but I've got a pretty good outline that I'm building from. I'll probably come back to talking about this later on.

I also ordered CD2 of the NGS Home Study Course this week, so that should be arriving shortly. Can't wait to continue working with this course. CD1, though it contained a lot of very basic exercises, was extremely useful. Sometimes in the course of daily genealogical work, you tend to pass over things that you feel you may not need anymore. Things like pedigree charts just don't seem to warrant your time anymore, but that CD really made me want to come back to them. It'll be fun to get back to the course and continue working on my skills.

The other tidbit I wanted to bring up, is a techie review I saw in Eastman's Genealogical Newsletter this morning. You have to see this! It looks so cool, I'm thinking I know what I want for Mother's Day, or maybe my birthday...
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2010/04/-a-tiny-handheld-scanner-that-slides-into-your-pocket.html

Small Breakthrough Day

2010-04-09T17:38:00.000-07:00

I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again, but when you can't find someone in the census, just think of three things

Neighbors
Incorrect transcriptions/improper enumerations
Page by Searches

Hmmm, now that I've got that written down it doesn't sound all that great. But things are things that I've had thrown at me before which were preventing me from being able to take advantage of a family's census enumeration and it sucks. That's pretty much all I can say about it, having that gap in your timeline for one person is bad enough, but when it's for an entire family group it's more than just irksome. At least to me.

I've looked at finding "missing" families in the 1900 Chicago census previously and if you're at all interested in that, take a look here http://genealogist-in-training.blogspot.com/2009/12/working-with-federal-population.html This time however, I was trying to find the William Williamson family of Liberty twp., Parke Co., IN. If you were thinking I wasn't going to have the assistance of some fancy handy dandy finding aid this time, you get the gold star. But I wasn't hanging by a single thread either.

The William Williamson family first appears in the 1850 Parke County schedule as such:

William-aged 25, born in IN, farmer, no real estate
Serdan [incorrect transcription of Susan]-aged 32, born in IN
Malinda-aged 5, born in IN
Sarah-aged 3, born in IN
Perry-aged 1, born in IN

William could not be found in 1860 and neither could any of the other family members no matter how I searched for them (with and without ages and/or birthplaces, no given names, etc.). I was able to find a Susan Williamson in the 1870 schedule in Parke County but the family group was very different. This time it was

Susan-aged 50, born in IN
Perry-aged 21, born in IN
Joseph-aged 19, born in IN
Louisa-aged 17, born in IN
Wister-aged 14, born in IN

Without the inclusion of Perry, I may not have thought to place such importance on this family. But I was almost positive this was the right family group. Susan is shown without William in this schedule but that still doesn't explain where the family was in 1860 and considering that if this is the same group as in 1850, William must have been alive long enough to father 3 more children before dying and it's possible that at least one of the two eldest children (Malinda or Sarah) could have been enumerated in 1860 with the younger children to further prove that this was in fact the right family. So I had to turn to neighbors. I went back to the 1850 census and wrote down the names of neighbors on the page that William and his family were on, as well as the page before and the page after. I was unable to find the family with the first two neighbors, but when I hit the third I saw a familiar name. One of the neighbors listed on the previous page was named Samuel McMasters, in fact, there were more than a couple of McMasters families all living in the same area, scattered on these pages surrounding William Williamson. The surname jumped out at me because I knew that William Williamson's son, Perry (my ancestor), married a woman named Susannah McMasters. So this was a family pocket and it was very likely that the Williamson's, regardless of whether William was dead or alive by 1860, were probably still living near the McMasters-they would have to be so that Perry could have time to meet and eventually marry Susannah. I was right. On page 94 (written), we see Samuel McMasters enumerated with his family but only two households up the page from him we see this:

First problem, it's super light. Even if I change the settings for the image (obtained through ancestry.com) to normal, without the enhanced viewer, the writing is so faded it's hard to read. Which takes me to problem two. The indexer made an incorrect transcription because of an awful job done by the enumerator. He enumerated the family as being headed by Susan Wm Son and then presumed to ditto the rest of the surname as that of the family above, Higgins, and then dittoed the rest of the family as Higgins as well. So when the ancestry.com indexer went to transcribe the enumeration, they were seeing a very random set of names, letters, and ditto marks. It's clear that though that the enumerator was using an abbreviated form of Williamson, "Wm Son". Honestly, I don't see how I could have found this family if I hadn't just used the 1850 neighbors as a guide, or by just going page by page. That's how messed up this enumeration and subsequent transcription sequence is.

In any event, this is definitely the right family and we can see what's been happening since 1850. Susan is shown as a "widow" so we can definitively say that William is dead. He was born around 1825, making it a fairly early death for him, so the option of divorce was also one that was in my head without the use of the 1860 census. Also, we can see the entire 1850 family, minus William, living with the three younger children shown in 1870 to prove that this is in fact the correct family group. Now we can place several events; William died between 1856 (when the youngest child could have been conceived) and 1860; if the two older daughters married, it was between 1860 and 1870 because both are no longer living with the family in 1870 (as an interesting side-note, these marriages do not appear to have been recorded in Parke County which means either they married elsewhere or they died prior to 1870. I'll need to do a bit more research to figure out what happened to them).

So now I can look into estate records for William Williamson's estate file. I would like to be able to pinpoint his death a little more and find out what was going on with his family at the time of his death. From the census records, it does not look like he was a land owner and he had very little personal property and several children to support. Dying at such a young age, was probably unexpected and it would be great to know what happened to him, as well as possibly locate any nearby siblings that could help me determine the next generation. This is a brand new line though and I'm not rushing through him to try to get to the next line backward. I would also like to do a little research into whether an obit is available for him which could answer some of these questions for me. That would be great! But I'm not holding my breath on that one, I don't have very good luck with obits for some reason. They just don't seem to have been all that important for my ancestors. But maybe I'll get lucky this time.

A final thing to think about is that I do not have a death date for William's widow, Susan, who disappears from the census records after 1870, and I have conflicting evidence as to her maiden name. All of the death records for her known children state that her "maiden" name was Garrison but there is no record of a Williamson-Garrison marriage prior to 1845 when their first known child was born; not just in Parke County, but in the entire state of IN. There is however, record of a William Williamson marrying a Susannah Roberts in 1843 in Parke County. This fits in perfectly since Malinda, their oldest known child, was born in 1845. Susan(nah) was also several years older than William which makes the possibility of her having previously been married more likely. If this is the case, that would mean that Garrison could have been her maiden name, as her children's death records unanimously state, and Roberts could have been her first married name. Again, more research will be necessary to confirm this.

So I've still got my work cut out for me with this family group but it was a great feeling to have a bit of a breakthrough with it today. And just another example of the importance of neighbors, page by page searches when necessary, and keeping in mind that people are not infallible and that they can make mistakes, both in the form of enumerations and in indexing/transcribing.

Ancestor-Approved Award

2010-04-09T15:59:00.000-07:00

Wow, I found this in my comments section the other day and I was so grateful. My blog is still fairly new, less than a year old, and I couldn't believe that someone thought of it for this award. Thanks very much to A Rootdigger!

So now I'm supposed to list 10 things I have learned about my ancestors that has surprised, humbled, or enlightened me and then pass the award along to 10 other blogs. Since I waited to post this until after my research trip run-down was finished pretty much all of the blogs that I follow have already received the award, and some have received it from several different people, but I'll try my best with the 10-things list.

*One of my own surprises was finding family ties to the Witch House in Salem, MA; my Ward family used to live there and they were the ones who eventually sold it to a local pharmacist which I found to be kindof funny. They sold it to a regular every day kind of guy probably thinking that it was just like every other house, and now it's one of the major tourist attractions there.

*I'm humbled by how difficult it has been to try to proof English origins for the man who is thought to be our Stevens' family emigrant. He is supposed to have come over from Bristol, England (whether he lived there or just boarded there, or maybe neither of these, who knows!) in the 1770s and anyone who knows anything about passenger lists knows that the lists for British emigrants during this time are few and far between. Needless to say, he's not listed.

*I'm humbled by how difficult it has been trying to find some sort of connection between the same Stevens ancestor and his alledged involvement in either the Revolutionary War and/or the War of 1812 (in both instances as a sailor). Preliminary research has told me that this is difficult primarily because of the lack of an actual, official "Navy" at this time. Things like Seamen's Protection Certificates need to be searched for sure but who knows when I'll be able to have access to those.

*I was surprised to find a great scandal in the family when I found out why my Great Grandfather was born in Canada...His mother's sister was married to a con-man who swindled some MA people out of several thousands of dollars in the 1880s. They fled to Canada with my Great Great Grandmother and other family members as well, and there was our connection to Canada at the time of my Great Grandfather's birth.

*Following the Bromagem line has "enlightened" me in the sense that it has forced me to learn a lot more about what was happening in the U.S. during the 18th century, both pre and post Revolution. Who knew that part of Pennsylvania used to be in Virginia! Maybe if I had been from one of those counties I would have known but coming from IL, I had no idea!

*I've recently been humbled by the generations of hard working, yet non-land-owning farmers I have on my Dad's side of the family. This is a new line and I'm noticing nothing in the "Real Estate" lines on the census sheets; they weren't working their own land and had very little to call their own and yet they had a slew of children. Extremely large families, staying close together, and working hard from the time they were teenagers. It's hard to imagine but they were like this for several generations. It's really something that makes me reassess modern living.

*Like others who have been looking through their ancestors, I'm humbled by the courage of those who left their homes to come to the U.S.. The Siegmunds, the Boldas, the Dellibacs, and the Kleinerts are the more recent immigrants; those who arrived between the 1880s and the early 1900s. These are the Ellis Island immigrants that everyone tends to think of when they think of their immigrant ancestors. But going beyond that, we have the Mayflower lines who came to a very, very new country to "officially" escape religious persecution and found themselves face to face with a sparce and entirely new environment requiring that they swiftly adapt.

*I've really been surprised by the number of seaman ancestors on my Mother's side of the family. It seems like nearly every branch has a sea-faring male in its progeny. Who knew! Again, we're now Midwestern folks surrounded by corn fields and silos and to find so many ancestors who spent their entire lives on the Atlantic ocean is pretty overwhelming.

*I was surprised to find that the Ward branch of the family has roots in the early years of San Francisco. I knew that we did not have family who settled West, we just don't seem to have been the homesteading, pioneering type of stock. But the Wards did go and try to make some money and be involved in the establishment of the new city. For some, the stay was only temporary, for others it was more lasting but they did succeed in making their mark; James C. Ward drew one of the earliest panoramic sketches of San Francisco which appeared in Bayard Taylor's "Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire"-an account of San Francisco and the 49ers which appeared in the 1850s. As a child, San Francisco was always my favorite city in California. I really felt at home there and it was a great surprise to find out that my Grandfathers felt the same way about it.

*When my Mom and I first started working on our family history, years and years ago, I remember being surprised at how every so often, someone just grabs your attention and won't let go. It's like their name is calling out for you to find their story and you can't stop until you've found it. It's weird really, but that feeling still happens. You never know why you're particularly drawn to that person, or to that particular family, but it just happens and you have to get to the bottom of it. I was surprised to find that back then, but I'm still surprised when it happens to me now.

Research Trip...Final Day

2010-04-09T15:48:00.001-07:00

The last day of my 3-day research trip last week was to the Archives Rm at Daley Center in Chicago. I was finally able to make it down there but had a limited amount of time to work so I focused on the Divorce records. This was a new area for me but it went fairly smoothly. The important thing to note is that the early divorce records, late 19th century to about the mid-20th century, are not held on site. What they do have are the indexes from the Superior Court relating to law, chancery, and divorces. The indexes are on microfilm and are arranged chronologically and then alphabetically by surname of the Plaintiff. Information given in the indexes are the file number, the plaintiff's name and the defendant's name. It's limited but I was able to find what I was looking for and order the file itself (at a cost of $25). The staff has order forms for you to fill out and I was supposed to get an email this week confirming the order (which I haven't received yet) and then they were guesstimating that I was receive the file in a month or so.

So I've got a while to wait, but I'm anxious to see what's inside. I'm not at all familiar with divorce records so it will be interesting to see what will be including. I'm not really looking for anything too specific from this other than the full name of the defendant so as long as he's in there I'll be glad to have it.

IN/IL Research Trip...Day Two

2010-04-08T16:51:00.000-07:00

The previous post was about a very long, but exciting day out to an Indiana courthouse and a few fun sites in IL last week. The second day of my research trip was devoted entirely to exploring the Parke County, Indiana courthouse located in Rockville, IN.

Parke County is located in the Western-Central part of the state and I'm going to go ahead and tell you that I will be making many more trips in the near future and will be posting pictures. I really loved it there. The northern part of the state isn't exactly known for gently rolling hills and winding streams and flashes of green moss, that's more like a description of the Southern, especially South-Eastern, part of the state. But sure enough, that's exactly what we saw upon first entering the county. It was a lovely rural area made all the more quaint by the Parke County sign with the picture of an Amish buggy and the excitement of being the first members of our branch of the Gilkison family to visit the county in roughly 100 years. My Great Great Grandfather, Ira E. Gilkison, was born in this county in 1870 but by 1910 he had moved to IL. His father, Simpson Gilkison, was born in KY in 1830 and moved to Parke County with his family when he was a young child. When exactly the family came to IN from KY was one of my research goals for the day but I wasn't able to accomplish that. Looking at land records in the recorder's office for the 1830s did not show me what I wanted. What I was looking for was the earliest land transaction for Simpson's father, John Gilkeson. What I found instead were a few later transactions made just before his death in 1854, including a pair of sales that confirmed the given name of his wife and also confirmed that she sold her husband's land just after his death. So it wasn't a total waste. But considering that the family appears in the 1840 Parke County census enumeration, I was expecting to find a land transaction showing the John obtained land before that time.

Looking back on it now, I may have made a fatal error. The 1840 census does not include information relating to property ownership so I relied upon the 1850 census which showed that John had $500 worth of real estate. Because of this, I assumed that he would have owned land however, this may not have been the case. It's very possible that, as a farmer, he could have just lived off of rented land, been a day laborer, etc. without actually owning land. Or maybe he just didn't have the means to obtain land for himself until the 1850s, just before his death. My error was that I made an assumption that he owned land because the 1850 census said he had real estate when what I was actually looking for was proof that he was there as early as the 1830s. Normally, I would turn to tax records in a situation such as this (where the subject may not have owned land making personal property taxes and other community taxes a vital resource for placing someone at a certain place at a certain time) but the earliest tax records for the state of IN are 1842, which postdates my time frame; I already know they were here by 1840. So now I need to figure out other options, right now though, it's a loose end. Ugh!

In another area of research, I was more successful. Besides the Recorder's Office, the Parke County courthouse also houses the Clerk's Office which is where I found marriage records going back almost as far as the formation of the county in the 1820s. Here I found several family marraige records, mainly just the standard return in both handwritten sentence structure and the pre-printed standardized form. It was a pretty exciting run though to go through the ledgers and find so many hits. We were able to find all of the marriage records we were hoping for which was great.

We also made a quick stop at the Department of Health, located in the basement, for a couple death records (they did not have one but they had another which had a bunch of helpful info), and headed back up to the Clerk's Office for a look at estate records. The estate record search was surprising in that we did not find record of the estate we were looking for, Simpson's estate, but instead found the estate proceedings of his father, John, which were not supposed to be included in the ledgers according to the dates printed on the spines. So there's yet another lesson from the week: Don't believe what the ledgers seem to tell you. If the ledger says it covers 1882-1900 and you're looking for an 1854 estate, don't bypass it. It may surprise you what you'll find inside because that's exactly what happened to me last week.

So this was a rushed visit to the courthouse and I know I tried to take in more than was probably advisable, but I wanted to get in as much as I could. Next time, I'll focus a little more on trying to find out how to pinpoint the Gilkisons arrival in Parke County better, or on just one or two objectives rather than sticking my head into every office in the building. But overall, it was worth the trip and I can't wait to go back.

I had one more day for a little research and I'll cover that in the next post.

IN/IL Research trip

2010-04-06T05:59:00.000-07:00

I was able to squeeze in a bit of an extended research weekend last week and it turned out pretty well even though I was not able to accomplish 2 of my 3 goals....hmmm, that sounds really bad, doesn't it? But it really wasn't.

Mission 1-Find Great Grandparents' Marriage Record

On Wednesday, I had a full day. I drove out to Indiana to drop my son off with his grandparents and then headed out to Kentland, Newton Co., IN. My paternal Great Grandparents' marriage record from 1914 was at the Courthouse but I was almost unable to get it. Their marriage ledgers, like others I've seen elsewhere in the state, were arranged by year and then alphabetically. Each ledger had its own index rather than having one all-encompassing index. I was not able to locate the entry for my Great Grandparents though, despite having the exact day and year of the marriage (thanks to the Indiana Marriage Collection on ancestry.com). I did search the index section page by page thinking that it was more than likely that my Great Grandfather's surname was misspelled (I've seen "Gilkison" messed up in more ways than I can count) but they were simply not there. So it became necessary to go page by page in the ledger, which I did. I was able to find them eventually, with the correct name and date, they had just been skipped in the index.

It's interesting to note again that I first found their marriage entry in the Indiana Marriage Collection on ancestry.com which is a database made up of information gathered by two agencies: the WPA and a researcher who used the FHL films. The record for my Great Grandparents was sourced through WPA records which presumably means that there was someone personally going through the records at the Courthouse so apparently they did not utilize the indexes for the ledgers alone otherwise my Great Grandparents' record would not have been included. Good to know for the future.

Also good to know, was that the Courthouse not only had the marriage license, but also the applications; the top filled out by the groom, the bottom filled out by the bride and both had their signatures. This marriage occurred in 1914 and from what I could tell by my somewhat brief perusal, all of the records, at least in this particular ledger volume for this time frame, had the applications.

Mission 2-Find gravestone at Sheldon Cemetery in Sheldon, IL

After leaving the Newton Co., IN Courthouse, I headed up Rt 24 about 5 miles and crossed back into IL. Sheldon lies right on the border in Iroquois County. My Great Great Grandfather (the father of the man whose marriage record I had just picked up in Newton Co., IN) lived and died there. He worked for the railroad, something not hard to believe when you visit Sheldon-a town surrounded in train tracks- and died in a train accident there in 1921. The stone for both Ira and his wife (Sarah Williamson Gilkison) are at Sheldon Cemetery which I found, thanks to Google Earth, at the far south of the main road through town. Again, without the help of Google Earth and my handy dandy GPS I probably would have had trouble making my way through all of this rural land. I was extremely grateful for them on this trip and in fact, was feeling so ambitious with the help of my techie gadgets that I went on to....

Mission 3- Search for family gravestones at St. Anne Township Cemetery in St. Anne, Kankakee Co., IL

It was an easy trip North from Sheldon, about a half hour, maybe less, to a little town called St. Anne. Family roots on my father's side run deep in this little village because several branches all seemed to converge on it at the same time. Because of that, I found a number of family members at the little township cemetery there; Dellibacs (my French-Canadian line), Yoders (non-Amish, from PA), and Kleinerts (Polish/German) were all there. It was also just nice to finally be able to say that I've been there. My Dad and his siblings remember several family pilgrimmages to St. Anne as children and I've heard about the town for years but never been there myself. I also examined the community in the 1900 census for one of the NGS Home Study Course assignments on CD 1, so it was nice to be able to see it for that reason as well.

The next post covers the big visit the following day to Parke Co., IN...

Kleinerts and Boldas cont'd...

2010-03-26T06:50:00.001-07:00

So in the last post, I was talking about the little mysteries that opened up after I visited a cemetery and found not only the family members I had been looking for, but someone with the same name as my Grandma's paternal Grandfather as well. But his birth date was about 10 years off and his death date was considerably later than we had believed possible. So was this the right person, or someone else? We ordered his death certificate and found some answers

First off, the John Kleinert in the record who died in 1926 is identified as the John Kleinert buried at St. Joseph's. So we know they are one in the same. Second, his last address is shown as 2638 Ward St in Chicago. This is the real kicker because that is the same address that is found for Julius Bolda in the 1915 Chicago City Directory as well as the address shown for his widow, Marie in the 1930 Census. So the John Kleinert who died in 1926 had been living with Marie, as well as other family members, both Kleinerts and Boldas throughout the years before and since Julius' death. John's brother, Otto, is shown living at that same Ward St address in the 1923 Chicago City Directory, along with members of the Bolda family. John himself is found back in Kankakee Co., in the 1920 census living with his new wife, Marie-the woman who appeared as informant on John's death certificate. I can pretty much say that I'm convinced that this John Kleinert is my Grandma's Grandfather. But that still doesn't explain everything.

The 1926 death certificate shows Marie Kleinert as his wife and someone who was living at the same residence given for John. So if Josephine got remarried in 1910, and we now know that John hadn't died but also got remarried, that means we're looking at divorce. Without currently knowing when John's second marriage occurred (this marriage is not listed on the Cook County Clerk's records website nor in familysearch.org's Chicago marriage records collection and the 1920 census does not ask for the year of marriage; this, along with their residence in Kankakee back in 1920 suggests that the marriage occurred in Kankakee rather than Cook Co but both should be checked) I'm looking at a date range for the divorce sometime between 1900, when John and Josephine appeared together on the census, and 1910, when Josephine remarried.

The Cook Co., Circuit Court maintains divorce records at the Daley Plaza in Chicago which is where I'm headed next Friday so I'm going to make a point of searching the divorce index to find it and ordering the record.

We still don't know why the tombstone has his birth 10 years off from the census. The informant on his death record was his second wife, Marie, and the date she gave on that form does coincide with what was shown on the census records so why was it different on the tombstone. All I've got now is "Who knows!" There were four people on that side of the stone and another group on the other side making a lot of names and dates. Anything could have happened to get the dates confused, mixed up, etc. We will be finding and ordering the marriage record for John and Marie however, to make sure everything fits and I'll be taking note of what John gives for his date of birth for this record as well.

Gearing up for next week

2010-03-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

Things have been a little quiet here lately mainly because I've been enjoying a little downtime. There was no ProGen assignment this month and I haven't started with CD 2 of the NGS Home Course yet. So I've just been doing a little prep work for a few things I've got planned for next week. I'll have about 2 1/2 days to run around a do a little record retrieval and brief research. It's not long but I'm excited. I'm going to stop in Kentland, IN to pick up the marriage record for my paternal Great Grandparents on one day, then on the next day I'm taking a longer trip out to Rockville, Parke Co., IN to look for land records and possibly, if I have time, Probate/Court records. The last day will be spent in Chicago looking up divorce records and possibly some vital records that I haven't been able to get yet. So it's going to be a jam packed few days, can't wait!

In the meantime, I've been biding my time visiting a couple of area cemeteries looking for some family graves and names from my father's side. I succeeded in finding Julius Bolda (1868/1869-1915) and his wife, Marie (Ptak) (1868/1869-1943) at St Joseph Catholic Cemetery in a suburb of Chicago. Julius and Mare were my paternal Grandmother's maternal Grandparents. But they weren't the only ones who showed up in the double-sided plot; Grandma's maternal Grandfather was there too as were a couple of other relatives from both sides of the family. Seeing him there, just outside of Chicago, opened up a few mysteries for me to try to unravel.

John Kleinert (c.1859?-1926), like the Boldas, was an immigrant to this country. Naturalization records still need to be consulted, but according to the 1900 census, he arrived in 1882 from Germany. He settled in Kankakee Co., IL (far south of Chicago) and married Josephine Dellibac (1868/69-1937), a first generation American with French Canadian roots, on 22 Dec 1885. He states that he is 27 y/o, she 17 y/o, and it is the first marriage for both of them. They are seen together on the 1900 census and then things change a bit. In the 1910 census Josephine is found living in Chicago working as a live-in servant. John is not with her, in fact, she marries John Dettman later in 1910. So what happened to John? Did he die? We thought so but hadn't gotten to persue it. Seeing his tombstone at St Joseph's changed that theory because two things were amiss with the tombstone:
1-his date of birth is about 10 years younger than his age on his marriage license and on the 1900 census
2-the tombstone dates that he died in 1926 though we hadn't seen him with Josephine in 1910 and she was even remarried that year

Here's the stone:

So could the John Kleinert buried at St Joseph's be a different John Kleinert? Not likely since he was quite literally, buried with the Boldas, the parents of his son's wife, his in-laws. Also, there was no other John Kleinert who was of this age and certainly not another one who was so intimately acquainted with the Boldas that he should be buried with them. In fact, we even have a picture of John Kleinert standing with the (presumably) newly widowed Marie Bolda. So we dug a little deeper and got the death record for John Kleinert who died in 1926....

Last of a Generation

2010-03-16T08:53:00.000-07:00

I found out this weekend that my Great Uncle Warren passed away. I didn't know him very well, actually I was going to call him this weekend to see if he wanted to get together next week (since my son will be away for spring break) so I could share some of the photos I've gotten and ask him a few questions. I was hoping this spring and summer, now that I'm back in IL, would be a chance for me to talk to him and get to know him a bit more. He was my maternal Grandpa's youngest brother and the last of that family group. I'm finding it a little difficult, and tremendously sad, to think that such a large group, one I'd been hearing about my entire life, is now completely gone. They will all be missed....

My Two Cents on "Who Do You Think You Are"...and then I'm done

2010-03-06T05:52:00.001-08:00

I've noticed a barrage of posts on the new NBS genealogy show, which premiered last night, and all are very interesting. I've read some outright negative posts and some fairly accepting ones too and I can understand the reasons behind both of those opinions.

One thing about the show that I noticed immediately, but that doesn't seem to be getting much notice in the posts, is that WDYTYA has the celebrities (because again, the TV execs probably don't think regular people are exciting enough to draw in viewers) involved in discovering their ancestors...ok, that may be pushing it a little too far. The celebrities don't actually do the work; just like with PBS' "Faces of America" the work has been compiled by genealogists. But the celebrities have to go around to the sites of their ancestors and, shall we say, collect the information from those who have done the work. Not so with "Faces of America" where they just sit at a table listening to the host rattle off whatever information he deems pertinent and exciting enough to catch both the celebrity's attention, as well as that of the viewers. So that was one thing that I did like about WDYTYA. I think it's great to show them getting involved, at least in the small way that they are.

Like everyone else, I think it would be great to show more of the methodology-how did they find all of the generational names? But to be realistic, we have to keep in mind that these shows are not necessarily geared towards the thousands of professional genealogists. It's a show made for the masses, the hundreds of thousands, even the millions of people here who engage in genealogy as a hobby, as well as those who may or may not have thought about their ancestry prior to seeing "Carrie Bradshaw" on the trail of her family history. Keeping in mind their focus, I can say that I like this program better than the PBS version just because I think it's important to show people on the trail themselves rather than being disjointed and just read information off of a page. I think it shows genealogy in a positive way. I think by taking the descendant to the sites that were important to their ancestors, it explains the excitement genealogists feel when that stone has been uncovered; you know, that glazed-over look that your friends and family give you when you're trying to share your excitment at a find gets replaced by excitement when TV and movie stars (for all intensive purposes, "cultural icons") are doing the same thing. So overall, I like it.

....and now we can all move on to other topics :)

Graveyard Rabbits Carnival, 12th Edition: Forgotten Cemeteries

2010-02-23T07:09:00.000-08:00

As I'm still participating in the Geneabloggers Winter Games, one of the categories suggests joining in on one of the genealogy carnivals offered now. The one that appealed to me most is hosted by the Graveyard Rabbits and this month's topic is Forgotten Cemeteries. I've only had one in-person experience with an inactive cemetery that is small and generally falls off the radar, Hillgrove Cemetery in Darke Co., OH. It actually falls right near the border of Eastern IN and Western OH and lies outside two cities, one in each state. I posted about it right after returning from my research trip last fall and managed to get some pretty decent photos of the rather small (thankfully) cemetery. Here's the link to the post with a google earth photo and a photo of the entire cemetery http://genealogist-in-training.blogspot.com/2009/10/part-2-hillgrove-cemetery-darke-co-oh.html

I was really in awe of this cemetery. I've walked cemeteries before, but most were more recent and/or still active. This was the first one I've been to that was older and abandoned. At one point however, it looked like someone had cared for it because there were many, many broken stones that had been stacked up. I couldn't tell whether the person had systematically gone through and tried to match up the broken pieces and then place them where they'd presumably fallen or if it was just a haphazard straightening up. I will pay more attention on my next visit. Fortunately, my ancestors stone was still in tact though it did lean back a bit. I'm hoping to be able to figure out a way to help preserve it as much as I can, though at this point I'm not even sure if there's anything that can be done. I'd hate to think of his stone becoming one of those unknown broken pieces stacked up somewhere. In any case, I am planning another trip to the cemetery, as often as I can actually since it's not very far from from some relatives so that should give me several opportunities to survey the broken pieces and even get a plat done to record who is there and where they are. I didn't have that benefit the first trip and I was extremely worried about whether or not I'd find my ancestor's stone.

There's also another cemetery just down the street from Hillgrove, called Snell Cemetery. I've heard this one is bigger but dates from about the same time. I don't know what kind of condition that site is in but know that there are other relatives buried there, so it's another place on my to-visit list. Hopefully I can stop by and take a look on my next trip out there. This cemetery is a little different than Hillgrove in that the local genealogy and history society has examined this one a bit more closely. They even have a book about Snell, and another Darke County cemetery called Hiller. So it's not quite what I would call a forgotten cemetery. Hillgrove wins the prize for that I guess. Perhaps because of its size...who knows. Whatever the reason, I found it to be a charming little cemetery complete with a huge, ancient tree at the corner spreading it's branches out over the site and shading the resting place. I can't wait to be able to see it in the Spring or Summer when the trees are full.

Some Genea-news, and an important link to share

2010-02-23T06:50:00.000-08:00

Hey all, I had a couple of things pop up in my inbox this morning that I wanted to share. First off, thanks to Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, found here http://www.eogn.com/, which had a topic today about the UK Archives in Kew giving away microfilm. Much of the inventory consists of census rolls but there are also baptismal rolls and rolls relating to seamen and other topics. The registry is worth a look and you can view what's available here, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/microfilm_doc_for_pdf.pdf . Eastman's site also gives more information as well as contact info you have any questions on how to obtain any of the rolls. You can read more here http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2010/02/the-national-archives-of-the-uk-surplus-used-microfilms-offered-for-disposal.html

The second thing I wanted to share was a good place for some techno gadgets that may be useful. I'm not really into the technology side of things but even I have to admit that sometimes it can definitely make life a little easier, if not proving to be a necessity. So a good place that I've found to look for those gadgets, everything from computers to thumb drives and everything in between, is http://www.newegg.com . I am on their email list so I get to see what and when things are on sale. Today's star, for me at least, is an 8 GB flash drive for $22.99. 8 GB!! Can you imagine how much space you can have? Talk about a backup, that would be a great way to save your files from all of the junk swimming around on the web. So I thought maybe someone here might like to take advantage of that deal, and for everyone else, you might want to sign up for their email list. It's just a good thing to have and take a look at. They always seem to have some good deals for useful things.

Tombstone Tuesday...I know, it doesn't happen often here

2010-02-23T06:03:00.001-08:00

I'm doing probably only the second, or possibly the first, Tombstone Tuesday here. I usually don't participate too much because I don't have very many tombstone photos in my collection. Last year however, I found a wonderfully kind researched through Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, found here http://www.raogk.org/, who took photos of a group of family members who are buried in the Chester Rural Cemetery in Chester, Delaware Co., PA. Included among the burials was my 3rd Great Grandmother, Jemima McKeever Taylor. I don't know very much about her really, she was only about 33 when she died in 1873. She was born about 1840, probably in Philadelphia, PA where her father, J.B. McKeever as well as his parents and grandparents, were living at the time. She married Alfred Taylor, who is buried at Chester Rural Cemetery also, in 1861 at Marcus Hook, PA and had 5 children including one set of twins who both died shortly after birth. Her cause of death is unknown but presumably she died from complications during the birth of her twins in 1873 as all three died that year. Her husband, Alfred, raised their three remaining children, including Elizabeth (or "Bessie")-my Great Grandma Ward's beloved mother-and lived a very active life in the community until his death in 1897. Jemima's gravestone reads:"Jemima McKeeverwife ofAlfred Taylorborn 1837died 1873"Her twins, Alfred and Hill Engle, are buried with her and their information is included below her own.

Tally for Geneabloggers Winter Games

2010-02-18T09:53:00.001-08:00

I haven't been doing a very good job at keeping a daily tally on my progress for the Geneabloggers Winter Games, but I have been working so here's the newest tally. For further details on what is involved for each of the categories, visit http://www.geneabloggers.com/competition-categories-winter-2010-gb-games/

I've been lucky enough to get several copies of vital records over the last week and have gotten my citation tally (for category one "Cite Your Sources") up to 23 and I still have a couple more to get done which may bring my total up to 30 by the end of the week bringing a Gold Medal my way. Woohoo!!!

Category 2: "Back up your Data"- This was a pretty easy one for me because I found that most of the requirements relating to protecting and preserving photos has already been done. Lucky break for me. I've signed up with Mozy to help protect my data, as well as backing up several files onto a thumb drive. As for things that are really vital to preserve, they are in two separate safety deposit boxes making everything safe, protected, preserved and it should make for a fairly transition should something happen to threaten everything. This one should bring me a Platinum Medal, the only one so far.

Category 3: "Organize your Research"- Still need to really get to work on this one, though I was able to get a start on it while working on category one. Photos still need to be organized better though so I'm at 3 tasks for this one. Three completed tasks gets me a Gold Medal, but I should be able to attack those photos at some point which would earn me a Diamond or even a Platinum Medal for 4 and 5 completed tasks respectfully

Category 4: "Expand your Knowledge" - This is another category I'm still working on. I've only completed one of the tasks, looking at one of the tutorials on genealogy.com, but I should be able to get 3 or maybe 4 done soon. I will definitely be returning to google maps for this category to map out an ancestral location. I had a great time playing with this program prior to my trip last fall to Darke County, OH and was able to use it to locate a tiny cemetery just outside of Greenville thanks to that program.

Category 5: "Write, Write, Write" - I've did a lot of posting yesterday and some were composed as drafts and pre-published so I've got one task completed. I will probably do one more task, such as participating in a carnival event (such as this one, does that count? :) ). I already have two of the items necessary for two separate tasks for this category so I don't think those count which leaves me with only a couple possibilities. So I'm guessing I'll only have about 2 or 3 tasks completed for this one.

Category 6: "Reach Out and Perform Genealogical Acts of Kindness"- I'm at 5 tasks on this one. I've commented at a new blog, I participated in some indexing at both ancestry.com and familysearch, I joined a society (actually renewed after I had let it lapse), I use the follow feature to follow other blogs, and I invited another genealogist to join facebook. Whew!

So that's the latest tally. Hopefully I can meet my goals, but even if I don't I've already gotten a ton of work done that probably would have just sat for another day (which basically means probably never). So it's already been a great experience.

When one computer crashes...

2010-02-17T14:26:00.001-08:00

Alright, you'll have to excuse this post. It's probably going to be a bit random. But as I posted a few days ago, my netbook crashed so I lost all of the favorites that were on that computer. So this afternoon I was on the desktop, which was my primary computer prior to last May, and rediscovered some favorites that I had saved there. Some of them I thought were worth sharing so here they are:

The ISRR (International Soundex Reunion Registry) http://plumsite.com/isrr/ - This site just looks like a fun thing to keep in mind, especially if you have clients who are preparing for a reunion or who are looking for relatives

The Workhouse http://www.workhouses.org.uk/index.html?Bristol/Bristol.shtml - This was a site that I saved when trying to figure out if there was some truth to a family legend that said one of my Stevens ancestors, the emigrant who supposedly left England for America probably in the 1770s, was a prisoner in Bristol, England during the War of 1812. This site does allude to the fact that what had been a 19th century workhouse, had a history as a prison and more specifically, as a POW prison during the War of 1812. Its name is Stapleton and I have since found out that the FHL has microfilm of prisoners who were released from Stapleton after the war. So far, there's no sign of my Charles T. Stevens, but I haven't finished looking at the film. This site is important because it gives a good deal of background information on a very little known prison during this time. Most people think of places like Dartmoor when they think of War of 1812 POWs and if their ancestor doesn't appear in the lists of for that prison or one of the other biggies, the family history can get discredited. So this is a good site to be aware of just in case one of those POW stories comes your way.

A Primer for New England Research http://www.genealogy.com/genealogy/25_kory.html - Ok, obviously a "primer" can be helpful for whatever basic information it can provide. So for that alone, this was a pretty handy dandy site to keep in mind. But the author of this one, written for genealogy.com, is Kory Meyerink who is also the author of a book on finding hidden sources which is a greatly important resource. So that's two good reasons to check this one out. It may be a little dated, yes, but the basic foundation is still solid. If you need another reason, he gives several recommendations for reference works that are also helpful.

Bureau of Land Management Land Patent Search page http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/PatentSearch/Default.asp? - Pretty self-explanatory. You can search and view original images right from the site. If the images are not included, you can order the files.

Kentucky Land Office site http://www.sos.ky.gov/land/search/ - Have an ancestor who lived in Virginia in the 18th century? Who was involved in some kind of military service during the revolution? Perhaps you have an early Kentucky ancestor? Then you may want to keep this one in your favorites list as well. The Kentucky Land Office site offers several databases for your to search, as well as original (and printable) images online. But just as important is the background information provided for the different records collections. They give a great explanation of the process behind certificates of settlement and preemption.

about.com Genealogy Blog http://genealogy.about.com/b/ - This is the about.com Genealogy channel blog by Kimberly Powell. Kimberly Powell is a well-known genealogist and her blog is filled to the brim with great information as well as posts that just plain interesting reading. If it's not on your regular "to read" list, it should be.

Maureen Taylor, the "Photo Detective" has both a blog found here: http://blog.familytreemagazine.com/photodetectiveblog/?p_PageAlias=photodetective
and a regular site found here:
http://www.photodetective.com/

She uses her blog to show various photos that she has been sent, has in her collection, and/or those which bring up certain aspects of photo identification. Through her main site, you can find out how to send her your own unidentified photos and follow her lecture schedule. You can find out about her WONDERFUL book on either site but my favorite, and one which I think should be on every genealogists bookshelf, is Uncovering your Ancestry through Family Photographs (more info found here http://www.fwbookstore.com/product/1217/genealogy ). Her discussion of how to tell what kind of early photograph you have, ambrotype, tintype, daguerreotype, etc., is worth the purchase price alone.

NARAtions http://blogs.archives.gov/online-public-access/ - If you are a genealogist or even an amateur family historian, you will no doubt rely upon records held by the federal government, specifically the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), to help your research. Keeping informed on what is going on with NARA means you're keeping your eyes on what's happening with those records that are so important to you. In light of all of the proposed changes coming to the National Archives in D.C. specifically, keeping this blog on your radar has become even more important.

Maybe something in this list will be helpful to you. Or better yet, maybe you have your own favorites saved somewhere that may have gotten forgotten.

Well that's a bummer...PA Death Records

2010-02-17T14:11:00.000-08:00

Hey all, I just got word through one of my email lists that Familysearch Pilot has removed the Philadelphia Death Records images (these are the cemetery returns beginning as early as 1803). Apparently someone emailed Familysearch to ask what was going on and they confirmed that the images had in fact been removed. They will hopefully be returning sometime later in the year once some kind of registration system has been developed and implemented. There was no further elaboration on what the "registration system" referred to so I'm at a loss. Those records were extremely useful for Philadelphia research at a time when, for the most part, there was no statewide death registration. Those cemetery returns are in many cases the only proof of the date of death for a subject, other than a tombstone which you may not be able to find without knowing the date of death. Let's just keep our fingers crossed that this issue gets taken care of so the images can return.

As far as I know, the index is still available through Familysearch Pilot so you should still be able to search for people. It's only the images that have been removed. For the very earliest returns, which in some cases were just slips of paper with the person's name and very basic info, this may not impact researchers very much. Like many other record types however, as the years went on the format of the returns got more sophistocated and important information can be found. It really just depends which is one reason why those images are so vital; you just never know what will be included.

In any event, let's just hope this gets resolved soon. Those images, along with the index, make up an extremely important PA resource. For now, if you are interested in the index you can find it here http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#c=1320976;p=collectionDetails

NGSQ Article Discussion Group Today

2010-02-16T09:33:00.001-08:00

Hey all, as usual I've got a lot on my plate but in came the monthly NGSQ article discussion for a nice change of pace. The article for this month's chat was "Life and Death on the Frontier: The Robert and Loana McFarland Family of Boulder Valley, Colorado" by Birdie Monk Holsclaw. If you haven't read it yet, it was the 2003 Winner of the NGS Family History Writing Contest and is a definite must read. Those of you who are NGS members can access the article online through their article archives section. Those who are not members, it's just another reason to go join right now.

As I said above, this is a definite read. There are several reasons really but the top two, in my opinion anyway, are
1-it's a fast read; fast, easy, interesting, pulls you in, not confusing/requiring the reader to make charts in order to follow what's going on
2-it includes all of the key elements of a classic case study; it's the kind of thing you would want your BCG certification portfolio to exemplify (there was even some discussion in our group today about this being part of the author's CG application)

When I say that it includes all of the key elements required of a good, strong case study one of the points I'm referring to is the use of tons of sources of all kinds showing an "exhaustive" search of records. Another is the the placement of the subject within the larger historical context of the time and place. In this case, the subject was Robert McFarland and his family through his second wife. Robert began his life in Vermont later moving to IL and ultimately CO while his children went back to VT and even ID and for all of these places, we see historical selections taken from the time and place and placing each of the subjects within that framework. This article represents what appears to me to have been a pretty big undertaking of research and study of New England, newly formed territories in what would become known as the Midwest, and the frontier at a very early time in its history. I do not have any known ancestors (at least not that I know of yet) who ventured out to the Western frontier, at least none that settled there permanently and remained there so this article was not necessarily something that I would have chosen to read on my own (despite my knowledge that case studies, no matter what their content have value in guiding others on proper methodology) but it turned out to be one of the greatest examples of a case study that I've read up to this point, right up there with the article by Rachel Mills Lennon that we read back in October (here's the post on the subject http://genealogist-in-training.blogspot.com/2009/10/im-motivatedbut-distracted.html ).

My point here is read this article! Actually, either get a membership to NGS so you can read all fo the articles, award-winning or not, or head to the nearest library and start checking out as many NGSQs as you possibly can. They serve not only as models, but as motivators for yourself. They're a great way to see in tangible terms where you want your work to be, where you want your skills to be.

Work for the Geneabloggers Winter Games begins

2010-02-15T06:27:00.000-08:00

I got a little done for the Winter Games yesterday-5 citations and I completed one part of category 6 (expand your knowledge) by renewing my NGS membership. It expired in December and I had to wait until tax refund time to renew. So right now, I'm at the bronze medal level for category 6 and still need to do a minimum of 5 more citations for a bronze medal in the Cite Your Sources category. My intention is to compete in all six categories, probably to varying degrees, but I'm going to try my best to see what I can get done. For more info on the categories and the tasks involved in each, take a look at http://www.geneabloggers.com/competition-categories-winter-2010-gb-games/

Geneabloggers Winter Games

2010-02-13T06:01:00.000-08:00

I'll admit it, although I love reading the Geneabloggers themed posts, I don't often participate in them myself. Not because I don't want to but more because I've either got something else to rant, rave, observe, vent, chit-chit, brag about or because I just don't have the photos or files for whatever the particular theme may be; I am not the holder of family tombstone photos, I've only got about two or three myself right now (with plans for more coming in the Spring/Summer), so tombstone Tuesday would only happen maybe twice. You get the idea. But the new theme to coincide with the Olympic Games in Vancouver this winter is a great one that I think everyone can, and should (to the best of their abilities keeping in mind any other obligations, of course) participate in no matter what their skill level, experience, specialty, etc. may be.

And besides, it's already pretty fun. The first step is creating a flag for yourself. I must say, I liked that part a lot. Here's mine

When you go to the flag site, http://www.wearemulticolored.com/, they ask you where your home is, what other country has affected you, and where you have always dreamed of going. While these questions may be not directly be what we're trying to accomplish or focus on for these games, it is a great start. From those questions, I narrowed things down to just three. I wanted to keep America on the flag because it's my home and has been the home of several lines of both my Mom's and my Dad's families since the 17th and 18th centuries. I like knowing that I have lines with an American history going back to the beginning and continuing to the present and thought it would be important to show that.

The two other flags incorporated into my flag for the Geneabloggers Winter Games are the flags from Germany and from the United Kingdom. I chose the German flag because that is where nearly all of my recent immigrant ancestors have come from. The Boldas, the Kleinerts, the Siegmunds all came from various parts of Germany between 1880 and 1900 and they are all lines that I would love to be able to know more about one day. The other flag incorporated on my own flag is of course, the flag for the United Kingdom. Maybe this was too obvious a choice but I used it because it represents two big research problems-I have three lines that stretch back to America in the 18th century that supposedly came from Britain, according to the passed down family history at least. But I haven't been able to find proof of that for any of them yet. Mostly because immigration records in the 1700s are virtually non-existant, with only a few exceptions, from what I'd been able to gather. So that part of the flag represents both the possible beginnings of those lines as well as the time and commitment it has and will continue to require to prove it.

The next step of the Games will be to start actually doing the work, beginning with citing sources. I need to go back into my files and cite everything that needs a citation. "Everything" might be a little too ambitious, but who knows. 10 citations will get me a bronze medal, 20=silver, 30=gold, 40=diamond, 50=platinum. So I should be able to get into the files this week and figure out what needs to be done. Wish me luck!!

Complete Computer Crash...ugh!!

2010-02-11T14:01:00.001-08:00

Well, after a day of work, including getting the first assignment of three typed up and ready to email out, my computer crashed. I don't know what happened. First it froze, then I opted to restart it, and instead I got the option screen to load in Safe Mode, Last Known Good Configuration, etc. No matter what option I chose however, the computer would not load. We tried everything we could think of and I was feeling just desperate enough today to take the EeePC to Best Buy's Geek Squad when we decided to just wipe it and reload with the system recovery disc. Considering that it was an EeePC however, I had no disc drive so we had to pick one up. The computer is loading now so I should be able to attempt to get it running properly tonight, thank goodness, but I've lost everything that had been stored on it. Any webpages, photos, links/favorites, files, scans, homework assignments, etc. that I had saved there are now gone. The good side to all of this is that I've had the EeePC for less than a year, I got it for Mother's Day, and most of what I loaded onto it initially came from my desktop so I should be able to recover a good deal of what was removed. I'm still going to be lost without my favorites and all of the photos I had saved there.

I almost feel like the fates have been yelling in my ear lately since one of the topics over the past month (at least) on Eastman's Online Newsletter has been the subject of "cloud computing"; where you can store and backup your files through an online server. Even Randy Seaver's site has a new post today about Google Docs for this purpose. Now it's time to take a more serious look at that option and others that are similar. There will be more to come on this, I'm sure. In the meantime, if you're interested check out these links:

http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2010/02/free-or-lowcost-online-backup-for-all-your-files.html

http://www.geneamusings.com/2010/02/using-google-documents-post-1.html

http://docs.google.com/

First I need to get Adaware and Avast set back up on my computer.....