Playing Around with Online Trees

News Flash: Online trees are likely to be unreliable and poorly sourced. Oh, wait a minute, almost every single person who reads this blog is aware of that fact.

So why write about them – again?

Because last weekend I actually went into the Public Member Trees area on Ancestry and started pushing all the buttons. But let’s back up a bit.

In my previous post on this subject, I mentioned that I look at Ancestry’s Public Member Trees when links to them appear to the right side of images pulled up during searches on Ancestry. Some years back I tried a few searches directly through the “Search Member Trees” option and did not find anything useful, so I had not tried a direct search since then.

However, some comments in other articles on the subject and my recent experience in perusing the trees pulled up in my searches (which might be among some of the better trees, since they do link to the images cited as sources) prompted me to play around and search for some of my ancestors in Ancestry’s Public Member Trees, or PMTs.

Did I have any major research breakthroughs? Certainly not. But the format and capability for linking to sources have improved, and I was surprised at what you can learn if you click on enough links.

The following are some observations on ways to use Public Member Trees that I found to be productive when I tried this “push all the buttons” approach. The most obvious (and already mentioned) ones are listed first, with a couple of things that I did not expect listed toward the end.

1. As previously discussed, you can use these trees to find hints for your research, especially for what I call “problem families.” These are not necessarily brick walls (so far no joy on that front through PMTs), but families with gaps: an incomplete list of children, missing dates, etc. For me these are often families “in the middle”: the ancestors are often well researched and the descendants, my “near ancestors,” are also well researched, but this connecting family is not.

Two of the trees I checked out had a couple of extra children’s names for one of these families (Bolin Clark and Elizabeth Dyer of Warren County, Kentucky). They might be incorrect, but they might also lead me to more information on this family (and help to distinguish them from all the other Clark families in Warren County).

One feature I use to make a quick assessment of a tree’s information content on one of these families is to do searches on the family names (the main name and some associated names) in the search box. This will give you an idea about whether it is worthwhile to navigate around the tree.

2. You can ascertain who is researching your line, get an idea of the quality of their research, and contact the best prospects. Again, this one has been discussed. And PMTs serve this purpose only to a limited extent.

There are various reasons for this, including Sturgeon’s Law (“Ninety percent of everything is crud”) and the tendency of “serious” researchers to use many forms to present their research (academic, local history, and genealogy publications; books; dedicated websites and blogs; and, for some, online collections of family trees), whereas more “hobby” researchers tend to favor the last two. And there are still limitations and a bit of “clunkiness” to the formats of these online collections that keep some researchers from using them.

So, despite the occasional gem, what we often pull up is a bunch of dreck. But even this can be useful information to have in its own way. I did not realize how widespread the misinformation on the alleged parents of my great-great grandfather Hiram Brinlee Sr. was until I saw the huge number of trees with “John T. Brinley and Elizabeth Doups,” and many of those had a totally unrelated English Brinley line pasted to him. There is a well-researched hypothesis about Hiram’s parents, but it is not as attractive, because it does not lead past John T. Brindley and the only wife anything is known about was probably Hiram’s stepmother. But I need to know how persistent the “phantom in the tree” is probably going to be.

Play around with the various links and search options on the Family Tree page:

3. Find the “home person” by clicking on the link (usually, but not always, it is the owner of the tree) and then click on “family tree” for that person and his or her spouse (if there is one).

3a. The first purpose of this is to see how closely they are connected to the family you are researching. It is a good sign if your line comes up on that first page (before you click on the “go farther back” button); there is likely to be some major interest in this family on the researcher’s part.

Another thing to remember is that while research can and often does get spotty on these family trees as you get further away from the “Home Person,” a researcher is likely to possess accurate information about who his own parents and grandparents are, and possibly up through the next generation or two as well. The information on this page may be the best that you find in that family tree.

And in at least two cases this information helped me to fill in descendants of an ancestor. For some ancestors, I do “descendants of” research, especially for my main research focus families. Through these PMTs I have found a couple of children that I had missed in putting the families together.

3b. A second benefit is that the “Home Person” may be a close cousin. This is not just the usual distant “research cousin,” but possibly part of the family you grew up with. I knew that at least two of my Moore cousins were “into” genealogy and family research, and through the PMTs I was excited to learn that the son of a another first cousin and the granddaughter of yet another first cousin have also gotten into researching the family tree. I will definitely be contacting these cousins.

Tomorrow: Four more things you may find in Ancestry’s Public Member Trees.

Family Newsletter Friday: 27 November 2009

Norman

Norman research has been interesting this week, and it has actually been a fairly productive week, the holiday notwithstanding. I have reached the part of the Inez Cline history where there are more gaps, but I can fill in some of these gaps.

Found Thomas Wiley Huff (finally) in the 1920 census; Ancestry family trees do not cite this census – he’s sort of hidden. He is bunched together with several of his children in Baylor County, Texas (my own home town – this is through my moms’ family, but the Normans are from my dad’s side): Thomas Joseph, Benjamin Wylie, and William Franklin’s widow Emerit Thurman Huff are all there together with their families. (I was able to use the Salt Pork to Sirloin: History of Baylor County books to help research this family.)

What I’m really enjoying is working with Texas Death Certificates (from Family Search Record Search) again – they contain so much information. Luther M. Huff appears to have been born the day after his father (William Franklin Huff) died of pneumonia and smallpox. Charlie Wylie Huff, son of Thomas Joseph Huff and Myrtle May Carter, died of tuberculosis in 1935 at the age of 28.

Some of these Norman families are in Texas – lots of information; some in California – quite a bit of information; some in Oklahoma – not so much. I wish there were more resources for Oklahoma; there are also a lot of Brinlees there.

Miscellaneous

Found out this week that Vickie Everhart of BeNotForgot and I are related! We are something like 8th cousins, with Christopher Clark, son of Sallie Ann Moorman and Micajah Clark, as our common ancestor.

Many thanks to TCasteel at Tangled Trees for the tip on the 50% savings on Footnote subscriptions for Black Friday! I took advantage and have finally subscribed!

Family Newsletter/Follow Friday 6 November 2009 – A Great Genealogy Week!

This is my first attempt to combine two Friday features, Family Newsletter Friday and Follow Friday. Previously I have included a few notes on some items of interest from other blogs, but really wanted to have a regular feature for reviews and occasional “Best of” posts.

And this week the subject of “Follow Friday” has a connection to one of my two pieces of “good genealogy news”:

Dyer (Floyd-Matlock-Clark)

I was reading one of my favorite blogs, The Blind Pig and the Acorn, when a name jumped out at me: Bluford Dyer. Tipper, the author of the blog, had included a story (which I highly recommend reading) entitled “A Mother’s Love Defied the Bonds of Death (A Mountain Story),” by a lady named Ethelene Dyer Jones. In it Ethelene mentions her brother Bluford Dyer. Well, I have a 5xgreat-grandfather by that name. It is a rather unusual name. If it were Buford Dyer, perhaps it might just be a coincidence, but Bluford? I didn’t think so. I wrote an e-mail to Tipper, who put me in touch with Ethelene. We compared notes, and it turns out we are cousins. Moreover, we just may be cousins twice over, because the two Dyer siblings that we descend from married two Clarks (Bolin and Elizabeth) who appear to be siblings. This was not the only interesting information I learned. It turns out that Ethelene writes a wonderful column called Through Mountain Mists: Early Settlers of Union County, Georgia, for The Union Sentinel, a newspaper published in Blairsville, Georgia. The column deals with the stories of these people and their way of life, and the archives of this column can be found on GenWeb. And she is the first cousin of Watson Dyer, who wrote the Dyer Family History. It’s sort of like being related to genealogy royalty!

Readers of my blog will be aware that I am something of a cheerleader for the genea-blogging community, and I think this instance is strong evidence supporting my enthusiasm. Not only does writing the blogs help to put us in touch with other researchers, but reading them does, too! So if you are writing posts for your own blog or reading the blogs of others, don’t feel guilty for not doing “real research.” You never know where you may find a vital clue or the person who has a lot of information on your family.

Moore

I love having a “History Husband.” I finished transcribing and entering the information from the obituaries from The Greenville News dealing with descendants of Samuel Moore of Greenville (d. 1828). The very last obituary to be transcribed was that of Claude Bryant “Skip” Adair, the husband of Jeanette "Steve" Stephens, a second cousin once removed. His obituary noted that he had been a member of the Flying Tigers, aka the American Volunteer Group, a group of American pilots recruited to defend China against the Japanese during the early days of World War II. My husband found this exciting news and asked me what the fellow’s name was. When I told him, he said, “Oh, yeah,” as though the name was familiar and left the room for a few minutes. When he returned, he was carrying three books: Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and his American Volunteers, 1941-1942, by Daniel Ford; Ding Hao: America’s Air War in China, 1937-1945, by Wanda Cornelius and Thayne Short; and Sharks Over China: The 23rd Fighter Group in World War II, by Carl Molesworth. Trust my husband to be able to come up with a set of reference works on just about any military history subject.

I hope to post soon on the information provided in these books on “Skip” Adair; there is also a little bit in one of them on his wife (my relative), Mary Jeanette “Steve” Stephens Adair.

[Last-minute update as I was writing this post: My husband found a couple of wonderful websites with information on and pictures of Skip and Steve: http://www.flyingtigersavg.com/Bio's/bio-adair.htm and http://www.cnac.org/emilscott/adair01.htm. Fascinating!]

Follow Friday: The Blind Pig and the Acorn

I am sure quite a few of the people who read this blog are familiar with Tipper’s The Blind Pig and the Acorn: Bloggin’ About My Appalachian Heritage, but for those who are not, I’ll just say that it is one of the best blogs around. Tipper writes with wit and style about Appalachian history, heritage, and folk ways. It’s difficult to select my favorite subject, but I’d say Appalachian vocabulary and music are way up there. Of course, there are all the stories and descriptions of growing and preparing food, and Appalachian sayings, and… Let’s just say that every post is a gem. And, as a fantastic added bonus, there is a Pickin and Grinnin in the Kitchen (by Paul and Pap) playlist at the top to help create the proper atmosphere. Go give The Blind Pig and the Acorn a try - you’ll only need to read one post, and you’ll become an addict, uh, devotee, just as I am. And who knows, you might just meet your fourth cousin twice removed, just as I did.

20 Random Things About My Family Tree

Thanks to Jennifer Trahan of Jennifer’s Genealogy Blog for coming up with this idea – I think a lot of us genealogy bloggers prefer writing about our family tree to writing about ourselves!

1. One of my distant ancestors was the pastor of a Brooklyn church that my husband occasionally attended as a little boy with his grandfather (not the same building, I imagine, but still…).

2. Among all the Baptists, Presbyterians, and a handful of Methodists in my family tree, I was surprised to find some Quakers.

3. My great-grandfather Hiram Brinlee Jr.’s oldest child was born in 1864, and his youngest child was born in 1908 (from different wives).

4. My great-great-grandfather Joseph Madison Carroll Norman’s oldest child was born in 1856 and his youngest child was born in 1898 (he had three wives and 26 or 27 children).

5. My great-great-grandfather Hiram Brinlee Sr. and his brother George Brinlee were tried for murder during the days of the Republic of Texas.

6. My (I don’t know how-many-times-great) Uncle Micajah Clark surveyed Thomas Jefferson’s land.

7. My (?6g) grandfather Isaac Norman’s land was surveyed by George Washington.

8. My great-great-great-granduncle Collin McKinney was one of the framers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the Republic of Texas.

9. The above-mentioned George Brinlee, from my father’s side, served under General Edward H. Tarrant, a distant relation on my mother’s side of the family.

10. I am related to Samuel Clemens through the Moorman family (not through either of my Clemens lines as far as I know).

11. I am related to John C. Calhoun through my Hamilton/Calhoun line.

12. Three great-grandfathers, two great-great grandfathers, and a slew of 2g and 3g uncles served in the Civil War. There may have been additional relatives from the Smith line who also served, but since Lizzie Smith is my big brick wall, I do not know who they are.

13. My great-grandfather Hiram Brinlee’s first wife was Dicey Caroline Boone, a great-granddaughter of Daniel Boone.

14. There are an awful lot of clergymen among my ancestors. My family and I are quite surprised at this.

15. One of my mother’s sisters had the nickname “Wreck” because it was said that she make wrecks of all her boyfriends.

16. The parents of Clarence Brinlee (my subject for A Noble Life), James Edward Brinlee and Mary Ann Sims, were first cousins.

17. Two of my first cousins once removed, Guy Leon “Square” Brinlee and Vernon Argos “Bun” Brinlee, were locally famous eccentrics. They would not hunt or kill animals not would they allow them to be killed on their farm property. They never had their house wired for electricity. They led colorful lives with several different interesting professions that I hope to tell about in a future post. There was also a rumor that “Bun” actually got married at one point when his parents (“Hoss” and Myrtie Brinlee) were out of town, but was too afraid to tell his parents, so he just returned home and never mentioned it. I believe I may have found out who he married and hope to get more of the story.

18. Several members of previous generations in my husband’s family were apparently “connected.” (Points to anyone who knows what that means. Hint: His family is from New York and New Jersey.)

19. One of my husband’s grand-uncles was a well-known pianist who died young. There are still piano roll records of him playing the piano.

20. There were Tennessee moonshiners in my older half-brother’s Roberts and Phillips lines. One of them was a bigamist and served on both sides in the Civil War (his 300-page service record contains witnesses’ statements to that effect).