Fast and Slow

This past week I was reading blogs and saw that Becky Jamison at Grace and Glory had posted Curt Witcher‘s presentation on “The Changing Face of Genealogy” at RootsTech. Since I had not attended RootsTech and had heard so much about this address, I decided to watch it to see what all the excitement was about.

It was inspiring, eloquent, uplifting, and captivating. Curt Witcher is a bundle of focused energy, with years of experience and many insights to share. He made a number of points that could have evoked disagreement and controversy in some corners of the genealogy community, but were delivered in such a beguiling and matter-of-fact manner - “It’s fact!” “Get real!” - as to be doubly persuasive for all their upending of time-honored genealogical wisdom.

Witcher said many things that need to be said. Genealogy is not just the esoteric pursuit of a privileged coterie, but an activity that should and must include the participation of many people at many different levels. The changes that have taken place over the past couple of decades in the means, methods, and resources that can be used to pursue genealogy have made this broader involvement possible. They have also changed the expectations of people who take up genealogical research, and Curt Witcher described and advocated for this tectonic shift very effectively and persuasively.

One of the points made by Witcher was that people have come to expect greater speed and immediacy of results in their research, or, as he characterized it, “fun and success” and “real-time results.” This speed, in fact, is what has attracted people to genealogy in far greater numbers than ever before.

This is how I was lured into genealogy. A simple Google search to demonstrate to a colleague the uniqueness of my maiden name led me to information that confirmed family stories of our connection to a founding family of Texas. It didn’t stop there; during the next year I would find all kinds of information unearthed by other researchers as well as make new discoveries of my own. The pace was very fast. I went from knowing nearly nothing about my ancestors to having so many possible avenues of research that I did not know where to start.

So I can confirm Witcher’s assertion about the lure of speed, the desire to find things quickly, the attraction of fun and [quick] success.

And yet ... and yet ...

That’s not all there is.

I am now at a point where I have tons of tantalizing leads on the Moores, enough material on my great-great-uncle William Henry Lewis to write a book, a slew of Fichtelmanns to figure out, an entire soap opera on the Floyds. And much, much more.

I have done too much “spending 10 minutes finding lots of documents.” I cannot absorb everything or even comprehend it. There is just too much.

It is time to slow down, and to do the evaluating and analyzing that Witcher said would come with the faster pace of discovery. I don’t need any more projects, nor am I interested in looking into gadgets, apps, or doodads, unless they will truly make me more productive - not fast, but productive.

I want to look at everything slowly and carefully. Often this means transcribing materials. My piles of untranscribed materials have been sitting there, staring at me accusingly. So I finally got off my duff and dug into them.

And my method of transcribing is labor-intensive (= slow). For the census, I transcribe the information from the digital image to a blank census form, which is then typed into a Word or Pages document, and then copied and pasted to the Notes section on my Reunion program. (And I haven’t even felt silly about doing it this way after I heard Lou Szucs speak - she does much the same thing.)

Court transcripts, newspaper articles, and the like get transcribed at a similarly slow pace. Every time a new piece of information turns up, I enter it into a document called “Clues from [family name] Materials.” This is then converted into a point to be followed up on my “Weekly To-Do” list. In this way I am still making “finds,” but they tend to be smaller finds, ones that fill in little gaps in my information.

At the same time, I have been spiffing up source citations in my genealogy program and cleaning up my genealogy bookmarks. I am also entering information, one person at a time, into Ancestry Public Member trees (now no longer just “cousin bait), which I use to cross-check with my Reunion database to make sure that both have the full list of sources for each item. Again, I have deliberately chosen the methodical and laborious way of doing something.

The source citations and transcriptions should be deadly dull work, but they are not. They are peaceful and calming, and they seem to clear my mind. Research Zen, if you will.

So researchers are not always in pursuit of speed and fast results. And in my case this is not because I am a prissy source-citer or genealogical snob. I’m not even particularly industrious. It is simply because I need to go slowly and carefully right now, else I am in danger of losing control over all the data I have. I know that this information will lead to discoveries, but it needs to be organized and carefully studied. Too many times I have discovered that the clue I needed for a breakthrough was in my hands all along.

Curt Witcher is right: people want “real-time results” - it’s just the way people are.  However, I believe that people do not necessarily want things to move fast all of the time. Instant information may beget the need for instant gratification, but the latter need not be a permanent condition. It’s sort of like romance versus love and marriage: the former comes with fun and excitement, but the latter brings the real payoff. Oh, and the passion is still there.

Best Places for Research?

As I was working on another article this morning, this question occurred to me: What are the best places for doing genealogy research? By “places” I mean cities, counties, and states (or their equivalents in other countries) rather than individual institutions and repositories. However, “best” could be considered in terms of these institutions and repositories at these locations, either for doing on-site research (at the institution or repository) or on-website (online) research. I have not yet been able to take any “road trips” to do on-site research, but I do know which counties and states I have had the best luck with in finding wonderful online resources. For instance, I consider Greenville, South Carolina to be “genealogy heaven” for the tremendous resources made available by the Greenville County Library and Greenville county government, as well as the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. I have also found some great resources for Texas and for some of its counties. Vermont – not so much, at least as far as online resources are concerned, and it may be that a road trip there would be much more productive. (If anyone reading this has had more success with online resources for Vermont, I would love to hear about it.)

And for those who have done onsite research in various locations, which locations were the best and why: friendly and helpful people in courthouses and libraries, lots of local history and genealogy societies with scads of information and helpful volunteers, beautiful locations in which to spend time doing research? In which areas of the world has your genealogy research been most productive?

Getting Hooked on Genealogy, Part 2: Family Legends

From Part 1: “It all started with Google.”

I was trying to show a co-worker that I could google my maiden name, Brinlee, and could be fairly certain that anyone who showed up among the search results would be a relative by blood or marriage. What did I expect to see? Well, you know, other Brinlees.

And other Brinlees did show up, but not all of them were living Brinlees. In particular, there were two Hirams, Senior and Junior, and a George. And their identities and the stories of their lives would teach me a lesson … a fascinating lesson.

At this point I should confess: the seeds for an interest in family research were actually planted early on with me, it’s just that they didn’t germinate right away. Most of these seeds were family legends. The strange thing is that these legends did not get equal respect from me: Why did I absorb and believe the tales from my mother’s side of the family but sneer in skepticism at those from my father’s side?

I believe it has to do with the age at which I first heard these stories. I heard Mom’s stories when I was just a little kid of no more than 5 or 6. I used to beg Mom to “tell me about the Olden Days.” These stories included one about the great-grandfathers who fought on opposite sides in the Civil War and never spoke to one another again after the end of the War, even though their farms were located immediately next to one another. Another snippet passed on by Mom was: “Your (Our?) people from both sides came from South Carolina.”

But it was sometime during my teen years that I heard stories from my father’s side, the Brinlees: all of us Brinlees were related somehow to Collin McKinney, we had German blood and Native American blood in our lines, Grandma took up family research but got disgusted and gave it up when she kept finding horse thieves and other criminals. OK, maybe I believed the Native American part a little bit, because I wanted to and because so many Brinlees have straight dark hair and angular features. And the criminal part was believable, too, because Brinlees were, well, Brinlees. But the German part – I thought someone had gotten confused because one of my Brinlee uncles was married to a lady from Germany. And the McKinney connection? Must have been fantasy; no way we could be connected to this pioneer leader of Texas and one of the framers of the Texas declaration of Independence.

But that was exactly what my on-a-whim search turned up: The two brothers who adopted Brinlee as the spelling for the family name (apparently it was originally Brindley), Hiram Sr. and George, married two daughters of Daniel McKinney, brother of Collin McKinney. Daniel died in 1825, soon after the McKinneys came to Texas in 1824, and Collin and his wife raised the girls. Accompanying the McKinneys from Kentucky to Texas were the Brinlee brothers, who eventually married the girls. So everyone who has a family line spelled Brinlee is related to Collin McKinney. One of Hiram Carroll and Elizabeth Ann McKinney Brinlee’s sons was Hiram Carroll Brinlee, Jr., and one of his sons was Lawrence Carroll Brinlee, my grandfather. And it turns out that there is a German (Palatine German) connection through the McKinneys, too.

Finding the connection was fascinating, but even more fascinating was the way it forced me to rethink my opinion of the Brinlees. What other legends were true? I started to search for other information online on the Brinlees and McKinneys; there was quite a lot. Then I remembered that my cousin Paul had sent me some information on my mother’s mother’s side of the family, the Floyds – “A History of the Floyd Family” by Eunice Sandling – and that this history contained the outlines for a pretty good start on a family tree for the Floyds. If I could find this much information on the Brinlees, what might I find on the families on the Floyd side?

Death Certificates and Obituaries from Greenville, SC

Yes, another cheerful title for a blog post. Previously it was Texas death certificates from the Family Research pilot site (see link under "General"); now I am focusing on death in South Carolina. Texas and South Carolina are my top two research states, and these obituaries and certificates are certainly advancing my research.

The inspiration for obtaining these materials was a posting on the Rootsweb mailing list for Greenville, SC, by a researcher who is local to the area and will obtain and mail the obituaries for a nominal fee. She was extremely helpful and also volunteered to acquire copies of death certificates for some of the people in the obituaries. Some of the Greenville obituaries cover people in Anderson County, SC, as well, so there were several descendants of my great-great grandparents William Spencer Moore and Emily Tarrant Moore, but the majority were for descendants of William Spencer Moore's brother, Bud Mathis Moore. I realized that I need to "strike while the iron is hot" and start entering data on the Bud Mathis Moore family in my genealogy program so that I could find additional names for obituary and death certificate requests, so it has been the Bud Mathis Moore family that I have been researching lately. (A note of explanation: I have been inputting information into my genealogy program by levels, from parents to grandparents, then all the great-grandparents, and I was at the great-great grandparent level. Doing the Bud Mathis Moore family actually means going back to the great-great-great grandparent level, since this means doing the family of Samuel Moore, father of William Spencer and Bud Mathis. Samuel Moore is as far back as I have been able to go at this point, and I do not yet know who his wife was.)

The Moores are one of my main areas of research, and I have benefitted greatly from information shared with me by other researchers. My original discovery that my gg-grandfather William Spencer Moore had a brother named Bud Mathis Moore was due to a posting by a descendant of B. M. Moore, Mary Newton. She introduced me by e-mail to several other descendants and we got in touch with another B.M. Moore descendant who had researched the family. The Bud Mathis Moore connection led to the Greenville connection as the point of origin for William Spencer Moore, and this helped me find the will for his and Bud's father Samuel Moore (establishing him as their father) on the South Carolina Archives website. Recently, while researching the B.M. Moore family, I found two other people who had a lot of information on that family. So there is quite a large body of information on descendants of Samuel Moore of Greenville District, South Carolina, which I expect to be supplemented by more obituaries and death certificates. So ... it appears that this compilation of Samuel Moore descendants will be one of my big projects (I would be something like an editor and co-compiler with the other researchers).

First Experience at a Family History Center

You will notice that my last post on this blog was dated 2 Nov 2008. That does not mean that I was too busy to do genealogy for most of this month; I was just too busy to spend the longer stretch that writing requires as opposed to just fitting in bits and pieces of research here and there. In fact, quite a few things that have helped advance my research have taken place this month. There was actually an entire day I took off early in the month to visit the local Family History Center (FHC) in McLean. The Fairfax Genealogy Society organizes trips to various local (and sometimes not-so-local) research venues for tours and instruction, and this FHC is one of the regular sites visited. The volunteers were very gracious and helpful, and it was tremendous fun to share stories with them and other visiting researchers. The McLean Center has undergone some recent improvements and is a very pleasant setting for research. The Center has numerous research guides and six or seven terminals for accessing online databases. Though there were a number of these databases that were of interest to me, I focused on Footnote, since I already knew that it contained a number of documents of interest, I have not yet purchased a personal subscription, and there were several Civil War service records that I was keenly interested in obtaining.

Here are the service records I pulled: Joseph M. C. Norman, Preston E. Moore, James West Lewis, Richard M. Brinlee, Samuel D. Lewis, Manning P. Lewis, and William T. Sisson. I also printed out a birth certificate for Odessa Beatrice Lewis, daughter of Elizabeth Ann Brinlee and Harve Mulder. The Civil Service records will keep me busy for quite a while; as a matter of fact, I seem to be falling into the genealogy trap of collecting materials without devoting sufficient time to transcribing and reviewing them -- that will have to be one of my New Year's resolutions!

There are still a few more service records and other records on Footnote that I am interested in, but because it takes time to pull the images up on Footnote and the printer at the FHC is fairly slow, there was just not enough time. I look forward to returning for more research, and the Center is open late during the week for an evening or two, so I won't even have to take time off from work to do research. Before the next visit I will probably visit the Family Search website to find materials to be ordered from Salt Lake City. But first, getting to those transcriptions....

Why Genealogy Bog?

No, it's not a typo, although you'll see plenty of those here.  It was a typo at one time, but I realized at the time that it must have been a "Freudian typo," true at least in part:  the piles of papers, books, binders, photo albums, sticky notes and other paraphernalia necessary for research that line the walls of my office and encroach to an increasing extent on any remaining free space, as well as the idea of getting stuck, both in the sense of getting lured into and captivated by family research and in the sense of getting stuck at dead ends and brick walls.