Help Me Out Wednesday: 11 January 2012

This week's question is:

Why would three guys sign a man's World War I Draft Registration card under the certification part? Could it have been because the man claimed "Eyes deficient" as grounds for exemption? The man in question is Marcus Lawson Kinsey (who married into my Norman family) and here are the signatures:

The signatures occur under the statement “I certify that my answers are true, that the person registered has read his own answers, that i have witnessed his signatgure, and that all of his answers of which I have knowledge are true, [except?] as follows:"

Input appreciated!

SNGF: True Confessions About Genea-Assets

Pipsqueak helps me sort papers and folders

I think that I was reading Randy Seaver’s mind this weekend.

Randy's assignment was:

1)  Think about this:  Is all of your genealogical material, which you've gathered over the years, well organized?  Do you have papers, certificates, photographs and other ephemera squirreled away somewhere in your genealogy cave center?  Do you have forgotten digital files, including documents, photographs and notes hiding in your computer file folders?  It's Saturday night, do you know where ALL of your family history information is?

2)  Give yourself a grade (from A to F) on how well you've done with your filing of tangible and digital genealogical assets (two grades, one for each).  Brag about your organizational prowess if you deserve it - you can be a good example to the rest of us.  Bemoan your situation if your files are like mine.

3)  Look through your tangible or digital genea-assets and find something you've "lost," forgotten or overlooked that might add to your knowledge about one or more families.  Tell us what you found, how will it help you, and will you commit to analyze it, source it, and use it? 


Why do I think I was reading Randy’s mind?

Saturday I was going to do some research. I went up to my home office, aka “Genealogy Central,” to start work. The item I needed was under a pile. That pile included some genealogy folders. And on top of the box next to desk were more genealogy folders. I realized that some of these items should go into the folders in the box.

So I took all of the stuff downstairs to the family room, where there is plenty of space to spread out, to sort and file.

Three hours later, the materials were all sorted and filed.

This is why I am giving myself a “B” for organization of hard-copy assets and not a “C”. I must have somehow sensed that Randy’s task this weekend had something to do with organization.

A couple of weeks ago, I did some preliminary organization by consolidating some binders and hanging files into portable file boxes (each box contains materials for a particular line where I have done a lot of research: Brinlee, Moore, etc.):

The materials for most of the rest of the family lines I am researching are kept in binders:

Families for which I have only done preliminary research are kept in hanging files, along with materials on genealogical societies, genealogy publications, and so forth.

So there is a system and I can pretty much find what I need at this point. Still, there are a few odd file boxes and binders that are not organized by family: the items I obtained from my research trip to Greenville, SC still have a separate box (there are materials on three different family lines in that box), there is a file box containing documents that were too large to fit in binders or the shorter file boxes that I use, and I still have a binder full of “miscellaneous” genealogy notes.

For digital files, I would also give myself a “B”. Most of the sub-folders in my Genealogy folder are organized by family name, with sub-sub folders divided into individual generations, and sub-sub-sub folders for digital copies of vital records, newspaper articles, write-ups, correspondence, etc. The remaining folders are subject-based and have a number at the beginning of the file name so that they precede the family names: 1Forms, 2Research trips, 3To Do Lists, 4Resources, and so forth.

The main problem with my digital files is that I have digital files on two different computers (there was a third I used for a while, but I believe I have transferred all of those files to my MacBook Pro). I can access the files on my desktop computer through the Time Machine, but there is a lot of duplication and enough differences in organization between the desktop files and the laptop files that it can be confusing. Transcription projects, collections of newspaper articles, etc. can sometimes be hard to find. And I still need to put my photographs from both computers onto the Time Machine.  So maybe that's a B-.

Bookmarks should also be included in digital organization. Not great - two different browsers + 3 computers = Chaos. This probably brings my digital grade down to a C+. However, I have been working on consolidating everything into a Genealogy Toolbox and have also been using Diigo.

One thing I found while reorganizing was a set of articles from doing a search on “Koehl” on GenealogyBank; the Koehls in these articles were not people I recognized as belonging to my husband’s Koehl family, but could be related, so I filed them under the “Leads” section of the Koehl family binder. The source information has already been written on them.

What has been my big advantage in organizing my files?

I’ve only been doing genealogy for six years.

If I can accumulate this much stuff in six years, what will my files look like in 20 years?

Archives.com So Far

Back in May, at the National Genealogical Society Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, the people at the Archives.com booth generously gave out cards that would enable holders to use a six-month demo account at Archives.com.

I picked up one of the cards, and for the first couple of months I made a few forays onto the site to see what was there, but I did not try out all of the features. Several press releases came out about Archives.com hiring some well-known members of the genealogy community and about the addition of new material, so for the past couple of weeks I have been trying to check the site out a little more thoroughly.

It appears that the overall concept is to add and develop databases that are specific to Archives.com and to supplement this still-in-the early-stages-of-development resource by drawing on existing databases, both free (SSDI) and for-pay (some of the search results lead to Footnote.com, where you need a paid subscription to be able to access most of the document images). This is combined with the capability for building/adding your own family tree (Ancestry.com and many other sites have this), a for-fee service which you can use to request onsite county document searches by members of the Archives.com network, interaction with other members on the Archives.com message forums, and access to instructional materials under the “Learn” tab.

First, I did some searches using some of my own ancestors and some of my husband’s ancestors who had less common names. Here are the results:

I noticed that I got different results from alternate spellings of one of the family names: D’Arco and Darco. This has the potential to be useful; on Ancestry.com, one spelling brings up hits for both spellings.

When I clicked to see the results under the category for immigration records, all the links took me to Footnote, where I have an account.

A search for Brinlees on Military Records pulled up mid-twentieth century enlistment records, but they were transcriptions/extracts, not actual images. Still, it was neat to see some information on my uncles’ and distant cousins’ military service.

The main “value-added” item for me seems to be that Archives.com has some newspapers that Genealogy Bank does not have (= I could not find them on Genealogy Bank when I checked their list of newspapers). The site claims to have images of 100 million pages from newspapers.

The hits under “Cemetery Listings” are not actual hits for an ancestor’s name in a specific cemetery. Instead, the results give the SSDI information on the location where the last Social Security benefits were received, and uses that information to produce a list of cemeteries in that area.

Several times searches or clicking on a result produced an “Oops! An error has occurred” message, but trying again usually (not always) got me through to the database/information.

Other things I checked out:

Message forums: there are a lot of posts, but not many replies. I did a search for a family name, but mostly pulled up error messages.

The “On-Site County Court Records Search” tab has the following description: “Request an on-site county search for any court, criminal, or civil record in the United States. Simply fill in the information below to have someone from our network of court-runners do the job for you - saving you hundreds of dollars and countless hours.” This could be useful, but there was no information on how extensive this network is, that is, whether or not they have all the counties and states covered, and what the level of expertise of their “court-runners” is.

My favorite feature was the “Learn” tab. I read several of the articles and will be checking out the videos. There were some familiar names of people whose expertise I respect, and I hope that the quality of offerings in this area is indicative of where Archives.com will be headed in the future.

Another thing I liked was the ability to set up “Ancestor Alerts” on the site.

I believe Archives.com has brought some people on board who can take Archives.com in the right directions, but right now that seems to be on paper only. At this point it is not worth it to me to pay for this service, as it does not do a significant amount more than the Ancestry-Footnote-Genealogy Bank combination does for me. But I will be keeping an eye on it.

My Top 5 Genealogy Research Books

Last week Marian Pierre-Louis of Roots and Rambles listed the top 5 books on her bookshelf. I thought this was a great idea for genealogy bloggers, because even though there will definitely be books that appear on many of our lists, a few could also pop up that might not have occurred to some of us. It has also inspired me to add a page to this blog, “Genealogy Books I Own.”

This weekend I am finally getting down to listing my Top 5, and a couple of interesting things about my list have already become evident. First, the books on my list do not fit as much into the “regional research” mold as Marion’s books do, and second, the books that are regionally focused are actually a set of books.

1. At the top of my list is a set of about 15 books by Dr. A. Bruce Pruitt in two series of books of abstracts of deeds in South Carolina: Pendleton District/Anderson District/County and Greenville County. Since the Moores and Lewises are my first-priority research focus, this area of South Carolina where they lived before my branch went to Texas is my top geographic area of interest along with Texas. Dr. Pruitt’s books have been instrumental in helping me sort out the families; there were other families of the same name (at least one for Lewis and several for Moore) in Greenville and Anderson. They have helped me to identify associated families and to create a list of likely family members (though I still do not know exactly how many of the probable Moore family members are related). I referred to these books and to Greenville Library’s online indices and finding aids to compile a list of documents to look up before my trip to Greenville last year.

I should mention here that there is another set of books that I also use a great deal for South Carolina research but that I do not own: Brent Holcomb’s books of births, deaths, and marriages extracted from South Carolina newspapers. Some of these are online and the others I have used in the library.

2. Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills. Naming the obvious, of course. I use it for source citations, but not just for that purpose. There are so many different types of sources and information, found in so many forms, in so many places, that it is often difficult know which distinctions to make and how to record how and where I have accessed a particular type of source. I also love the division into categories of sources; this helps me to understand how everything works together and to form a systematic picture of where my research gaps are.

My next three books are all general-purpose guides focusing on American research. At this point my research is at the stage of generation of research plans: where I need to go and what I need to get. These three books are helping me to figure that all out and to make sure that all my bases are covered. Some items I can mail off for and some can be obtained on microfilm from the local FHL, but I also use the results to plan out future research trips (dreaming right now, but I hope a reality later on).

3. Redbook of American State, County and Town Sources, edited by Alice Eichholz. I like the state-by-state organization and the map of each state with divisions into counties, townships, etc. Within each state the records are organized by type or by specialized area of research (“Special Focus Categories” such as particular religious or ethnic groups, immigration, and so forth). This is the first place I go when thinking about research in a particular state. At the end of each state chapter there is a list of current counties (or their equivalents) with the dates they were established and courthouse addresses, as well as a list of previously existing entities (such as the circuit court districts in South Carolina, for example).

4. The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy, edited by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking. The principle for its organization is more or less the opposite of that for #3: by type of records or specialized research subject first, and then when appropriate these are divided into states and localities. This is the book I go to first when thinking in terms of research of a particular subject or specialized area such as immigration or Jewish American research. Genealogical societies and lineage associations are listed in appendices. The notes at the end of each chapter are also extremely useful for finding further information. This book can now be accessed online as part of the Ancestry.com Wiki.

5. Printed Sources: A Guide to Published Genealogical Records, edited by Kory L. Meyerink. The organization of this book is closer to #4, or in other words types of documents and then when appropriate geographical location. As the title indicates, it covers published records rather than the full range of original records, so in theory these are records that could be accessed without traveling to the actual location of origin - through purchase, interlibrary loan, online resources such as Google Books, and so forth, although in reality “some travel may be required.” There are a lot of useful reference lists, bibliographies, and “how-tos” interspersed in this book, so even when there is significant overlap with #3 and #4, this is not a resource that I would want to overlook.

Genealogy Monopoly

Yesterday I received a stunning e-mail from a distant cousin of my husband’s (although she had not known for sure that they were cousins until some recent research proved the connection) in which she was able to tell me which US Fichtelmann was my husband’s ancestor, how he was related to her ancestor, and a lot more information on this family in the United States and in Germany.

I noted with satisfaction that we had been in contact on GenealogyWise and had originally found one another through a post on GenForum.

This made me think about all of the online “contact points” I and other people have left in various places so that other researches can contact us and we can share our research.

In contemplating my online presence, I was struck by how I think of it: This is my genealogy real estate. It may not be actual land or buildings, but investing in it can definitely pay off.

It’s kind of like Monopoly. You buy up a bunch of inexpensive pieces of real estate that pay off small amounts each time someone lands on them. When you can afford it, you buy more expensive pieces of real estate that pay off handsomely when someone lands on them.

But if you don’t invest, you will not make any money. You pays your money and you takes your chances. And sometimes you have to be patient.

I started genealogy five and a half years ago, and almost from the beginning I was contacting people by e-mail (something that the shy, pre-genealogy me would never have done) and placing posts on message boards. I did wait for a year to subscribe to Ancestry because I wanted to make sure I was going to stick with this new obsession before I invested my money.

Ancestry paid off, and this encouraged me to subscribe to Footnote and Genealogy Bank as well, which have also paid off.

Even the free message boards and search sites that you have to sign up for represent an investment - an investment of time. I still get responses from message board posts that I wrote four or five years ago.

So what does my little “real estate empire” look like?

Well, there is Ancestry itself. I have made a lot of corrections and a number of comments over the years, and there have been a few people who have contacted me through those. Recently I began to create and develop Public Member Trees. Often the “sharing of information” through these trees goes one way: people use the information but do not contact the owners. But there have been a couple of nibbles there so far.

Then there are the message boards. I have posts both on the Ancestry/Rootsweb message boards and on GenForum. This is an area that probably needs some updating and additional work, however. It’s a good idea to repost on families of particular interest, especially when we have new information that might provide the necessary clue to other researchers that our families are connected. And I know that I do not have posts for all my families.

Google searches have landed me on several “minor” message boards where I have found contacts and left messages for people to contact me. One of these contacts was able to provide me with some very interesting information on what happened to one of my Floyd lines. A number of GenWeb sites still have their own message boards (or at least archives of them) in addition to the Rootsweb message boards that they usually link to. I have put up “Post-its” on Rootsweb WorldConnect genealogies. There are mailing lists that you can subscribe to, though many of these have been swallowed up by the big message boards.

On Footnote I have tried to create pages for quite a few individual ancestors, even some for whom I have found no documents on Footnote so far. This has paid off with one contact up to this point, but the contact was a major one for me: my Moore-related cousin Paula, who identified her ancestor Freeman Manson Moore as another son of my ggg-grandfather Samuel Moore and with whom I shared a genealogy research trip in Greenville, South Carolina.

I have not discovered yet whether there is a way to have a “presence” on Genealogy Bank, but I have been sharing my finds there with fellow researchers (most, but not all of whom are cousins) to keep the lines of communication open with people with whom I have had productive research collaboration.

And, for all of the initial criticisms of GenealogyWise and the retreat from the early over-hyping of the site, it has paid off to have a presence there. There was Mary Lou Benjamin, the Fichtelmann contact (and this alone would have made joining GenealogyWise worthwhile). There have also been a couple of other people who have made some initial contact that has not been followed up, but who knows? In addition to the page I keep on GenealogyWise, I have added my names of interest to several surname and geographical area groups on the site. This is something else that I should probably update in the near future.

Findagrave is another website that provides opportunities for connecting with other researchers. As some genealogy bloggers have reported, there is also the potential for “turf battles.” In the case of most of the pictures I have been able to take of ancestor graves, there are already at least text entries on Findagrave (but at least I can add the pictures) and often there are already pictures as well.

Some other small pieces of real estate are the surnames lists kept by two of the genealogy societies that I belong to (Fairfax Genealogical Society and Collin County Texas Genealogical Society). One actual “physical” piece of real estate would be a couple of articles I wrote for the Anderson County South Carolina Heritage Book. I would like to do a few more things alone these lines as well.

Then there is the showpiece of my genealogy real estate: this blog. While Greta’s Genealogy Bog has developed into something well beyond my original intentions in terms of purpose, the main purpose continues to be to attract fellow researchers to get in touch with me.

The blog is the piece of real estate that requires the biggest investment of time from me, although I can leave it alone for periods of time and old posts on families will still pull in contacts. I chose the Blogger platform based on the priority that it is given in Google searches. I can confirm that this blog is the single largest and most successful piece of “cousin bait” I have (and imagine that most of my fellow genealogy bloggers have similar results to report). As with any piece of real estate, we probably get more “nibbles” than we do “buyers,” but even some of those nibblers have dropped interesting and useful tidbits even as they munched the free food that was offered during the open house.

One of the really surprising and gratifying aspects of having a blog is that many people who are not related to me have responded or written to me with information and advice that has been very helpful in my research. Sharp-eyed fellow genealogy bloggers have spotted mistakes in location names (hi, Debbie and Janice!), done lookups for me (hi, Cynthia!), pointed me to obscure but useful websites, and much more. A couple of (unrelated) people who are doing research that touches on some of my families have freely shared this information.

I know that there is a lot of potential through Facebook and Twitter for making useful contacts as well. I have all three of my blogs linked on Facebook and have posted links to some of my blog articles there. However, there is a lot more that could be done. Right now Twitter is just too much to add to an already strained schedule, but recently I joined Ancestorville on Facebook and we’ll see what may turn up there.

Another “big-time” resource for generating a lot of contacts that I have not used would be family websites. The reasons? Lack of time and lack of knowledge. Some day, though.

Keeping up e-mail contact with all of these people takes time, but it has turned out to be a surprisingly successful method of turning up more information. When we haven’t corresponded for a while, it’s good to just drop them a line saying something like “How are you? Here are a few things I have found in our line recently. Anything new with you?”. This has actually produced a couple of “brickwall-breakers”! And when e-mail addresses are no longer active, I have been known to “stalk” a contact by doing a Google search on the contact’s name and the surname we are both researching to locate a newer e-mail address.

Of course, we all have to be careful to allocate our resources wisely. We only have so much time and so much money. I do know that one of my resolutions should have been (well, I’m making it now, aren’t I?) to update my online presence and renew contact with all of my fellow researchers.

There is one downside to owning and managing all of this real estate. You can be deluged with information, more information than you can handle and keep up with at times. But who ever said that the life of a real estate mogul is an easy one?

Now where is my Get Out of Jail Free card?

Online Newspaper Archives

As I dig up more and more dirt, er, information on my ancestors through online newspaper archives, I have become interested in finding out exactly what resources are online that I can use in my research.

I originally chose Genealogy Bank over Newspaper Archive because it seemed to have more newspapers to search and they recently had a great sale. However, I kept Newspaper Archive in mind for a future subscription. When I found that a cousin had already found a couple of the articles in Newspaper Archive that I had forwarded to her from Genealogy Bank, I decided to check Newspaper Archive out to see exactly what newspapers they had. A decent collection, but not really focused on the areas I need right now.

A Google search for “online newspaper archives list of newspapers” pointed me to Ancestry’s newspaper page (under the list of ads on the right). The directions under “Search Tips” are to go to the Card Catalog Page, then select “Newspapers and Periodicals,” then “Newspapers,” and from there filter the results by location. (You can also filter by spans of years.) Instead, I decided to scroll through the complete list to get a good idea of which locations are best served by this collection.

On Ancestry, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa seem to have quite a few newspapers represented. There are a decent number of Texas newspapers, but not so much for the areas that I am most interested in. However, there are a few for cities where some branches of my families ended up, and I recently had very good luck with Abilene newspapers there.  Arkansas and Oklahoma seem to have only a few newspapers.

Since my cousin had used the Newspaper Archives database through her local library, I decided to check out my local libraries to see whether they carried the database. I usually access Heritage Quest through the nearest library to me, the Falls Church Public Library. On the library’s website, Heritage Quest used to be listed on the “Genealogy” page with a few other resources, but it now has its own page and I saw no other resources (except ProQuest) listed on the website. 

I then looked up the website of the Fairfax County Library system; I am aware that the main library of the system has a wonderful historical and genealogical resource in its Virginia Room. That in turn led me to a YouTube video about the Virginia Room. There is also a list of online databases accessible through the Library; it includes Accessible Archives (a collection of historical materials previously available only on microfilm), ProQuest, Heritage Quest, Historical Newspaper Index (for nine local newspapers), and NEHGS; some of these are accessible only from the Virginia Room. It does not appear that either the Falls Church Library or Fairfax County Libraries have Newspaper Archives.

I have previously used Chronicling America with good results and plan on checking them out again to see what is new. Miriam Midkiff already has quite a few links up on her website, the Online Historical Newspapers Website. There is also Google News Archive Search.

Wikipedia has a page with a list of free and pay online newspaper archives here. And, of course, for the most complete list, Cyndi’s list has a page here.

My New Toy

Ever since I started planning my research trip to Greenville I have been thinking about getting a wand scanner for scanning documents. I had also heard recommendations on using a camera on the “Macro” setting for this purpose.

Helpful Husband said he would buy a wand scanner this weekend as an early anniversary present, but first I decided to see what I could do with my camera. I used a printout of a will typescript as my sample specimen. The ultimate results with a camera were pretty good, but clarity definitely depended on amount of light; the first image was rather fuzzy, and I had to have strong overhead light to produce the results you see below.




So, being a “belt and suspenders” type of gal, I decided to take Husband up on his offer.

To my delight, the first experiment produced the two images you see below. The first is the jpeg image that comes up in Preview, and the second is a photographic image that comes up in iPhoto.





Some of the documents and images I will be scanning/photographing are bound to pose challenges, but I’m hoping that the combination of methods will ensure some readable results.

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.

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?

Tuesday Tips: Navigating World War I Draft Registration Cards

Although I’m sure I’ll be playing the role of Captain Obvious in pointing out the following, I just noticed something the other night while examining a World War I Draft Registration Card on Ancestry. I have used this Ancestry database quite a bit, but never paid attention to the fact that you can navigate back and forth from card to card on this database just the way you can from one census page to another on the census image databases. After noticing the “back” and “forward” arrows and the fact that there were 800+ images in this particular section of the database, I became curious and used the arrows to see where they would take me. And they took me to other young men with the same last name, in alphabetical order, who lived in the same area (in this case, Greenville County, South Carolina). It was a “Duh!” moment. While I almost always check for these Cards for men in my family tree who were in the proper age range, I never thought of using the family name grouping to find additional family members and make sure I had found all the cards for a family that I could, regardless of how their given and middle names might appear.

Something I have done to make transcribing the cards easier is to have the blank form questions (three forms in all – A, B, and C) in a word document that I can quickly copy into my genealogy program or another document so that only the answers have to be filled in to complete the transcription.

Lessons Learned Sunday: Keeping Up with Correspondence

The other day I got a wake-up call. It came in the form of an e-mail from a distant cousin inquiring to find out whether I was still working on our common line, the Moores, and also asking for a current e-mail address for another distant cousin. It just so happened that I actually had started back to work on this line and was in the process of completing a compilation of the descendants of our common ancestor. I was working on the last group of these Moores, which consisted of the descendants of this gentleman’s (and the other cousin’s) grandfather. I realized I had really dropped the ball on this project. Not only should I have gotten in touch with these Moore cousins immediately, I should have been keeping in touch. For one thing, they can provide me with information on their lines. For another, the cousin who contacted me had changed addresses (and I had to scramble to find the other cousin’s addresses and figure out which one is still good). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, some of my cousins on this side who have been following this research are elderly, so I cannot take them for granted.

One of my mistakes was to underestimate these cousins’ level of interest in this research (turns out both are very interested). The other mistake, however, was letting my correspondence records fall into disarray. I know there are various systems for keeping track of correspondence and that many professional genealogists have some pretty sophisticated and complete systems. However, I believe that even the keen amateurs should have some sort of correspondence records system. For many researchers corresponding with family members, fellow researchers, experts in relevant fields, providers of services, etc. is a vital component of their research.

Instead of a single correspondence log, I keep separate logs in the front of the binder for each family and subject. This now includes a list of the e-mail address of my correspondents (and sometimes snail-mail address for those with whom I exchange hard copy materials as well as telephone numbers for those people with whom I have occasional “Texas telephone calls”), as well as a list of people that I want to contact at some point (mostly posters on genealogy discussion boards). It also has copies of a lot of my e-mail correspondence with them (sorry to those of you who believe in paperless offices – paranoia born of a long, pathetic history of losing e-mail that exists solely in electronic form has led to this state of affairs). What I need to add to these are copies of some of my own e-mails dealing with research; some of these e-mails, lost in the aforesaid pathetic history, could provide a lot of blog material with very little alteration, and being the lazy person I am, that thought really makes me cry. The other addition that is needed is an actual log of correspondence with dates. I could do this in purely chronological order, but I prefer to have a separate section for each correspondent. This would make it easier to notice when I have not corresponded with someone for a while. While this amount of detail might not be necessary for less-active family lines, I think it is essential for the major areas of research. And finally, make sure that main list of contacts is always fully up-to-date, which may include noting which e-mail addresses no longer work.

I hope to include “Lessons Learned Sunday” as a semi-regular feature on my blog. You will notice that I included my own experience (read: mistakes). That’s the idea. Since I have made so many mistakes in the course of my genealogy research, I figured these mistakes would provide plenty of fodder for blog articles and, I hope, help a few people.

Maps!

One of the unexpected and therefore all the more delightful aspects of genealogy for me has been the role played by maps in ancestor research. When I began my research, my expectations for the amount and specificity of the information I would find were very low. As I started to explore sites such as the GenWeb location-specific sites, the discovery of local maps made during the period my ancestors lived in the area and showing the location of the towns, farms, and other important sites was absolutely amazing. I hope to use these maps during future trips to locate the general areas where my ancestors' farms were situated.

Above is an 1877 map of the townships of Hopewell and Garvin in Anderson County, South Carolina found on a delightful webpage (http://www.geocities.com/williamston_sc/Township.html) on Williamston, S.C. created by Wendy Campbell. The farm of my great-grandfather Harlston Perrin ("H.P.") Moore (and his father Spencer Moore before him) is located just above the "H" and "O" in Hopewell, near Twenty-Six Mile Creek. The timing was fortunate, as H.P. and Martha Moore moved from South Carolina to Texas in 1877. To enlarge the view, just click on the map.

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....

Genealogy Blog Finder Found Us!

I admit that I kept checking Google to find out when it would finally pull up this blog in a search (it took a week or so, but now the updates show up pretty quickly after they are posted), and now this blog has arrived in another way - it shows up on Genealogy Blog Finder at http://blogfinder.genealogue.com/! It shows up in the Quick Finder and in the "Personal Research" category. It may appear in some of the other categories, but I haven't checked, yet. Some of the categories of blogs listed are Tips, Resources & Reviews, Personal Research, Locality Specific, Single Surname, African-American, and What's New.

While not everyone's research interests may be the same, it is interesting and definitely worthwhile to check out other genealogy blogs periodically. You can find new ideas, new sites and resources, and new approaches, not to mention some interesting family stories. I have even found some interesting ideas for items for my blog.

(Re)Jump-Start Your Research

If you are like me, there are times when you have to put your family research on the back burner, either because family or work circumstances dictate it or you just need to take a break from genealogy. While I don’t foresee the latter ever being the case with me, I have just come off of several months of relative inactivity in my family research due to the press of family needs. Picking up where I left off hasn’t been easy, but several things have helped me get back into the swing of things and have even made my research more active than it was before in several areas.

First, just try to get back into the routine, even if it involves some of the more tedious aspects, such as looking up and transcribing census information or transcribing articles and documents. This is the work that eventually turns up a piece of information that can “bring your research to the next level.” Humble census work has done this several times for me. Recently I found some important items on my Sisson line in this way (and hope to publish the results in a separate post), including a clue to the father of a great-great grandmother and evidence that her husband, William T. Sisson, is the William T. Sisson listed in Company H of the 25th Alabama Infantry in the Civil War.

When you need to take a break from this kind of research, which often involves close reading of texts and deciphering of poor to awful handwriting, browse your favorite genealogy blogs or genealogy message boards to find research tips and new search tools and resources. In just the past two weeks I have found the Family Search pilot webpage and the digital images of Texas death certificates highlighted below, the inclusion of many digital images on the South Carolina Department of Archives and History webpage, and a new search resource offered by the Greenville Library’s South Carolina Room through which you can search an online index for obituaries which appeared in the Greenville News from 1917 to 1993.

Write to some of your “genealogy buddies,” relatives and fellow researchers with whom you have corresponded to share the results of your research. Find out what the latest news is in their research, or ask relatives questions about their lives or family history. This kind of correspondence almost always adds something to your own research, whether it is new information or ideas for a new avenue to pursue. If nothing else, there is always plenty of family news to enjoy.

Start a blog or open up an account on Facebook or a similar site on which you can post pictures, articles, and transcripts. This is a good way to help organize your research as well as share it. Some of the items you post on a blog may turn into articles that you may want to submit to genealogy journals for publication. In the course of doing genealogy-related searches, other researches may get hits on your blog and get in touch with you (that is something that I hope will eventually result from this blog). My daughter pointed out to me another benefit of posting pictures online, which is that it is an additional backup for these images in the even t of computer failure (and failure to back up through other means).

Each of these four approaches has yielded tangible results for me in the course of just a few weeks.