I know there are at least a few other people interested in genealogy, and I thought it might be fun to swap stories and tips, etc.
It’s been a fruitful year for my research. One of my proudest moments was finding a copy of my great-great-grandparents marriage certificate from 1896 that other genealogists in the family had been unable to locate for years. This also showed that my GGgrandfather and GGgrandmother were, respectively, sixteen and fourteen when they got married, which wasn’t unusual for rural 1890s Alabama. I was also excited to find another GGgrandmother in the 1850 census with her family; she had escaped me for years, primarily because it turned out she was from another county entirely than the ones I had been searching. However, one of my stubbornest brick-walls, a GGGgrandmother known only as “Drucilla”, has resisted all attempts to identify her or her family. Can’t find her in a census before 1860, can’t find a marriage record thanks to the deplorable record keeping in 19th century North Carolina, can’t find zilch.
I also did some numbers crunching, and it’s interesting to see how age gaps play out. For instance, my oldest Ggrandparent was born in 1868, and my youngest Ggrandparent was born in 1897. Move back a generation, and my oldest GGgrandparent was born 1820, with the youngest born 1882. By the next generation, it becomes amazing: oldest GGGgrandfather was born c. 1770, and died in 1843, and my youngest GGGgrandmother wasn’t born until 1850 and lived until 1927!
The weirdest thing for me is my father’s line (i.e. my surname line). My mother’s family was a breeze on most sides- a distant cousin had already done a lot of the work and the biggest problem was finding the connectors- “I know John Lewis Rawlinson was my great-grandmother’s father and I know that his granfather was named Lewis Rawlinson, but which of Lewis’s sons was his father?” type stuff, but once I got that stuff sorted out I was able to hook into sources that traced some branches of the family back to medieval France and Reformation Switzerland (the family’s a lot more Germanic than I thought). There are about two lines that I can’t trace on her side due most likely to illiteracy- the spelling is just wildly off from decade to decade and they’re marked illiterate in the Census (I think they were potato Irish) and it’s hard to make heads or tails of names.
My paternal grandmother’s family I’ve mentioned on the board before. Her father was a paranoiac who lied through his teeth to the Census taker (he’d give his occupation as everything from farmer to tanner to blacksmith when in fact he was a surgeon) and his kids birth years would vary by almost a decade from census to census and his grandfather may well have been a mulatto slave who passed (my grandmother’s hair texture and the shape of her nose would both lend credence to this). Likewise, some of my Cotton cousins (my father’s father’s mother’s line) have done a good bit of work, though the Cotton line disappears in 1790 South Carolina. I would love to learn as a matter of curiosity if they’re related to the Plimoth Puritan Cottons as some of the names (from the common John and Richard to the far less common Sebron, which is very similar to Seaborn [the name of John Cotton’s son who was born at sea in 1633], especially to people of very limited literacy).
But my patrilineal line seems to have been carved out of limestone in 1850. I can find records from that Census in which my f-f-f-f-f, Isaac, is listed as a 50 year old farmer in Stewart County, Georgia, and his wife is named Mary Lee (Lee is her surname) and their sons are listed and my f-f-f-f is the right age, but there is no record of them before or after this. I cannot find the name of Isaac’s father (according to family tradition it was Nathaniel, but I can’t find confirmation) or whatever happened to him or his wife or which of the million Lee families his wife was a part of (my mother also has a Lee line, descendants of Robert E. Lee’s first American ancestors, and I know that my parents were distant cousins through this line but I’m not sure who their first common ancestor was- I do know that they had the same family story about a Civil War soldier named Peter Lee who was my great-grandmother’s uncle and closely enough related to my father’s family for them to know the story, but beyond that not sure).
Something that’s fascinating to me is the ancestors or others who are marked as illiterate and yet they have children named “Flavius Josephus” or “Melisande Penelope” or other exalted names. Also odd is stumbling upon a tax record or deed or slave census for a relative who owned 15 slaves and was worth $60,000 in 1860 [a very wealthy man for 1860 rural Alabama, easily the equivalent of a millionaire today] but who signs his documents with his mark because he’s illiterate. There’s also the woman named Mary Wind in one branch of the family who I’m assuming was an Indian but I don’t know of what tribe (the Wind [{or Uligagi [multiple spellings] Clan was a prestigious “red” (warmaking) clan in the Creek nation so I’m guessing that may be more than coincidental).
What I would really love to have is the DNA testing. As soon as I get the money ahead I’ll gladly spring for the $300. Since genealogy is only as reliable as the virtue of the ancestresses and the efficiency of the record keepers (plus always important to remember that things like adoption were far more informal then) DNA will answer the question of African or Indigenous ancestry. I learned from a really good 3 volume dictionary of surnames that my grandmother’s maiden name, which I knew to be Irish, was in fact originally Polish- they came to Ireland and other parts of Britain in the 16th century- it’s fascinating when you think where all your ancestors were scattered just a few hundred years ago. Within the last 500 years there’s no telling how many Dopers have common ancestors even though they’re from wildly different regions and ethnicities.
It seems my family line’s been mostly found out as far as possible. My biggest find though was finding my 4th great grandparents in the 1850 census. After over 30 years of looking by other cousins I found it. Turns out they wrote a completely wrong last name in there.
I’ve found some stuff in the PRO UK. They recently started allowing you to order scans of old records (if it’s possible) for only a few pounds. Everything in their collection is available. I found out that my ancestor that was invested in the Plymouth Colony was also closely tied to Sir Francis Crane and his brother Sir Richard. Enough so that he was made an executor to Sir Richard’s will.
But enough about me., that PRO stuff is amazing. A good way for any genealogist to go broke.
I’ve always been impressed at how … localized my paternal grandfather’s ancestors were. Basically from 1700 to 1960 every since ancestor was born in the south. TX, AL, AR, MS, TN, GA, SC, NC, VA and the furthest north they were was the very bottom of MD. You’d think I’d have at least one northerner but not a one.
Yes, it is interesting to see some of the farfetched or unusual names people gave their children – times haven’t changed much, it seems. One of my GGGgrandmothers had what I think was a remarkably elegant name: Narcissa Caroline Stafford. Not bad for the daughter of an illiterate Alabama farmer.
Hah, my ancestors don’t seem to have had much to do with Yankees, neither. Maryland and Virginia are the furthest north I’ve traced any of them. Even the immigrants seemed to have headed south for warmer weather as soon as their feet touched American soil. I have seven Confederate soldier ancestors, five from Mississippi, and one each from Tennessee and Alabama.
I am a little jealous of folks with recent immigrant ancestry, as my most recent immigrant ancestor was an Irishman who came over about 1800. All eight of my Yankee boyfriend’s great-grandparents were immigrants, and I’m sure he has a lot more close family left in the “Old Country” than I do.
That ain’t nothin’! If they were double-first cousins or something, that might be shocking. Back then people didn’t worry so much if they had a pair of great-grandparents in common with their sweetie. And it certainly didn’t seem to hurt the fertility levels – plenty of families with not just 6 or 7, but 10, 14. or 18 children.
Well I do got that. I like to think about each grandparent as a quarter, as obvious as that sounds. Dad’s dad was all southern, if you can count 1/32 Cherokee as southern. Dad’s mom was 1st gen Slovakian coming over in the 20s. Mom’s birth mother (German/Italian) and adoptive parents (Polish and Italian) were all 2nd gen immigrants who’s parents came over in the 1890s. The only problem is it makes genealogy very, very difficult. Although I did get to exchange letters with some distant Slovakian cousins.
BTW, what’s a genealogy discussion without roadblock stories.
My surname is Johnson. I have my 2nd great grandfather in the 1880 Moore Co., TN census (twice actually). Both times he’s listed as born in TN and his parents as born in TN. I know he married his 2nd wife, my 2nd great grandmother, in 1879 in Franklin Co., TN. I have looked at (I believe) every single Johnson in the 1870 and 1860 TN census. No luck. You can imagine how much time that took. And all for naught. I even made progress on a Jones line but nothing for the Johnsons in 10 years.
My mother’s birth mother will only say that the father was Portugese/Hawaiian. She claims she forgot the rest. Man I’d love to be able to find my own family in the 1890 Kingdom of Hawaii census but unless she has a change of heart we’ll never know.
P.S. I’m my own 7th cousin. And it’s all cause of what 2nd cousins did in Mississippi. Although truth be told I don’t know a single one of my 2nd cousins but if I did meet one and hit it off then I probably would … do what comes naturally.
You gotta love that census info. My own GGGGgrandmother listed her birthplace differently in every census. 1850: Georgia. 1880: Alabama. 1900: North Carolina. Make up your mind, lady! However, just this past year me and another cousin found what we’re about 80% sure is her natal family living just a few doors down from her and her husband in the 1850 census. All of 'em were born in Georgia.
Oddly enough, for a true-blue Southerner, there don’t seem to be any cousin marriages in my direct family tree. Although I do have four entirely seperate Smith families (two from Georgia, one from Virginia, and one from N. Carolina). Confusing!!
I’ve had a lot of “YAHOO!” moments in this quest, which make up for all the dead-ends that you encounter. Breaking through the roadblock with my g-g-grandfather in the Gray line was a major event. It took me eight months of searching before that happened, but it opened up the line all the way back to Mayflower travelers Bradford and Brewster.
A really special find was locating a book on the Civil War that was written by a participant. When I finally received it, I opened it at random, and there was a photo of Tommy Saunders taken in 1860. The book included the text of a letter he had written, subsequent to his capture at Bull Run. I was able to find enough information about this guy to produce and print a decent paper on him to give to the family one Christmas.
Are there any good programs for this? I have a bit of stuff on my family on one side, and I think I’d like to do some work on my mother’s side before my grandmother dies. I have one program, but it was cheap and a pain in the butt to use and to have kids you have to say someone was married! Makes it a real pain to have to enter a marriage date.
I did keep some of my mother’s things when she died, her brith certificate and things like that to make it easier in years to come.
My greatest triumph was tracing my paternal line back to England. My biggest WTF was the fact that it went back to England. It’s a very Scots/Irish name, and right now I’m stuck in Dorset, of all places. Not much in the way of oral family history in my particular family, so I’ve found out a whole bunch of neat stuff. Now I’m stuck. I’ve found marriage records for my gggg-grandfather in 1830, and I know he was born around 1805, but I can’t find any record of it at all. I’ve been looking around Dorset, but I’ve seen one source that said he was born around Bristol, which is another huge pain in the butt.
And then there’s the maternal ggg(?)-grandfather who just…shows up on the record. No idea where he came from or where he went to. Some indication that he might have had two families, though. One in Nova Scotia and one in Boston.
For those with ancestors in England/Wales (and to heartily supplement the PRO UK), I would recommend FreeBMD, where volunteers are transcribing public records to a free search engine. You don’t get all the information from the results, but it tells you exactly what to order from the PRO, so you don’t get charged for searches. Just photocopying. Only problem with the site is that it only has records going back to 1837, when England started keeping public records rather than parish records. There’s a supplemental site called FreeReg that keeps parish records, but it’s not up yet.
For the Scottish ancestors, there’s scotlandspeople.gov.uk, another good way to go broke. Public records and parish records all in one, for very reasonable rates. I’ve managed to take my grandmother’s line back about 3 generations from what was known on that site alone.
Anyways, now I’m working on getting my Dorset ancestors back to where their name says they should come from. Anyone in Dorset/Bristol willing to give me a hand would be great.
I use Family Tree Maker. Relatively inexpensive and lets you enter tons of data.
With or without a program - DON’T WAIT - start today. Write things down. Every day you wait, someone dies. Brain cells rot away and things get forgotten. I kick myself every time I think of the extended family stories my Dad used to tell and I leave the room or watch TV because I found them boring. He’s been gone a long time and filling in those blanks in damn near impossible. My father’s line comes to a dead stop in Ireland circa 1860 because I don’t know what county they came from. My mothers line goes back to France circa 1600. The French write down EVERYTHING!
I organized my genealogy very much like the examples on Eurostamm. Clean and neat and laid out in a table. I keep track of where I got each piece of data, from censuses, family bibles, deeds, will, etc. Helps me know what’s fictional and what actually has some evidence to back it up. Several other genealogists in my family have spent years chasing what turned out to be the wrong families, based on some half-remembered legend, or because that’s where they believed the ancestor ought to have come from.
It’s difficult sometimes because a lot of the older members of my family get very cagey when you try to ask them about family history. Especially if they think it’s embarassing, or was shameful. My GGgrandparents got divorced in 1904, and just a few weeks ago one of my great-uncles finally told me why: GGgrandpa moved around too much looking for work, and GGgrandma got fed up. It happened in 1904! Anyone who could possibly have been hurt by this revelation has been dead for at least thirty years.
It is fascinating, however, to hear someone’s memories of another person who’s long gone and buried, and know that may be all the living memory any of us will have one day. My great-aunt told me a little about her mother, my Ggrandmother, who died in 1922 when she was just a girl. She got this dreamy look on her face and said, “Oh, she was the best woman. A wonderful person. She was a photographer.” I think that I would be very lucky if, eighty or ninety years after my death, I’m still remembered as a wonderful person and “the best woman”.
My family had some first cousin marriages back in the 18th and early 19th centuries (at which time that was very common all over the country and in Europe) but then cooled it for a bit. What we have are weird mixed up genealogies; for example, my maternal grandfather, Mustang, had an aunt, Becky (his father’s half-sister) who married his grandfather Rawlinson (his mother’s father- she was his second wife, Mustang’s mother was by the first marriage). This made Becky’s children Mustang’s first-cousins as well as his aunts/uncles (throw the word “half” in their somewhere), but wait, there’s more!
The reason that I mentioned that Becky was Mustang’s father’s half-sister is because they had different fathers. Becky’s father was an old man who had adult grandchildren when she was born. One of his adult grandchildren, Paralee (very common name in my family) was married to Mustang’s grandfather Rawlinson and was Mustang’s grandmother. This adds in another level of cousin to her children and Mustang and also makes Becky Mustang’s aunt (by his father), stepgrandmother (by his grandfather) and great-great-aunt (by his mother), and this stuff happened constantly.
By the way, if anybody has 19th century Alabama relatives named (in alphabetical order by surname) Bibby, Cotton, Darby or Robeson and would like to share info, please e-mail me. These are the branches I’ve hit roadblocks on.
I just typed in names of people I knew (grandfather, g-grandfather, etc.) and started working on what information they gave me.
If you’re in Toronto, another good place if any of your ancestors fought in WWI, would be ArchiviaNet. It’s part of Canada’s National Archives. I got info for my Great-grandfather from there.
If you like, send me an e/mail (in my profile) with some names, and we’ll see what we can find.
Uh, I wouldn’t recommend the LDS archives. They’re light on accuracy. I’m a big believer in using source documents (wills, deeds, birth and death certificates, marriage records, tombstones, family bibles, etc.) as much as possible. What’s the point of spending all that time on an imaginary family tree?
Take some paper and a pencil, sit down, and write down what you know. Your name, birthdate, birthplace, marriage dates, etc. Then do the same for your parents and grandparents. Call your relatives and ask for details if you don’t have them on hand. Check the family bible if you have one.
I’m not sure how it works in Canada, but in the USA you need to get back past 1930 to be able to utilize census records. The Census Project will give you all the information about the US censuses, and there’s even a lookup board with some incredibly helpful volunteers. The census will not only show you where your ancestors lived in a given year, but also names, (approximate) ages, names of children, birthplaces, and parent’s birthplaces. Rootsweb is great for contacting cousins. Check the mailing lists and message boards especially.
I agree with your thoughts on the LDS archives, but it’s incredibly simple to use and gives you a great place to start. That’s how I got started on the Dorset issue. I found out from the LDS where to start, and I used it as a springboard to looking through primary documentation on other sites and other sources.
Check with your largest local public library also. Most of them have genealogy collections, but more importantly most of them subscribe to databases that include Census records and the like that you can get into from home at 1:30 am when you’ve got the time and interest. Census records are a really good place to start- prior to 1930 personal names are available so you can see your ancestors names, the names of their children, occupation, etc… Questions vary widely by census and the more recent the census the more that was asked (1800 for example you’re going to basically get the name of the head of the household and his relative age, but in some of the others you’ll get the value of their property or their education level, etc.). Census records aren’t always accurate of course: I have some letters written by my maternal grandmothers maternal grandparents and also one of his farm ledgers written in his own handwriting, and they’re both listed as “illiterate” on the Census. (Of course there’s a possibility that the letters and ledger were written by children or friends who could read, but he also had a job in the offices of a stagecoach company in the 1860s/1870s that would have required the ability to read.)
Kythereia, you posted an earlier thread asking about genealogy. Are there any questions from that thread that you never got answered?
In American genealogy, censuses prior to 1840 only listed head of household and listed the other members of the family as numbers in columns – i.e., males 0-5, females 30-50, etc. From 1850 the census listed each person individually, which is a boon for genealogists since you get everyone’s name and approximate age. Unfortunatly, most of the 1890 census was destroyed in a fire in 1921. The fragments that remain only list about 6,000 of the 62 million people living in the USA at the time.
Of course, black Americans have the difficulty of finding slave ancestors, for whom often only a given name may be known, or whose names may have changed during their lifetimes.