Kansas, Is There A Problem?

Alice and Kathryn, I'm on the trail. Too bad I can't just fly to Pratt right now.

This all started with a list of birth/death days for my deceased grandparents, aunts, and uncles, kind of an "honor our ancestors on their special days" project, which became a topic of interest for my oldest son and me as we noticed that family members' deaths sometimes happen around the same time. Siblings, parents and children, or sometimes a grandparent, parent, and child, will die years apart, but in the same month, same week, or one day apart. It's weird.

To make my list, I worked my way up the family tree and eventually, my Smiths in Kentucky entered the picture. I found that I had no death date for auntie Alice Smith Anderson - just a death year (unacceptable!). Having conducted some half-assed research in the past, I still had no clue what happened to her daughter, 1C3R Catherine/Katherine/Kathryn Anderson Thomas. I did find them tonight in the same cemetery in Pratt, Kansas, along with a death year for Kathryn, which is more than I previously knew.

Kansas seems to be quite tight-lipped about who did what in their state, so on Monday I will call the cemetery to see if they can tell me anything about these ladies. If I have any luck, I'll be able to order Alice and Kathryn's death certificates from VitalChek, maybe, since I'm just a lowly niece and possibly unworthy. Hopefully, since Kathryn died almost a hundred years ago and Alice about fifteen years later, Kansas will take pity on me and cough up their death records.

Why is Kansas being so weird about their dead? Hmmm.

Happily, I will add that this is the kind of project that puts me in INTENSE RESEARCH mode. I'm still learning to add more details in my information for Future Me to see, such as adding the names of cemeteries to my loved ones' burial info - like, why would I not do that in the first place? - or add the entire date to census records (looking on the record for the day and month, not just the year). This is just another project that creates these deep research opportunities, along with the chance to do some of this detailing. I love that my brain works like this. 

There Was An Opportunity

 ... to visit the Family History Library (except it's now the FamilySearch Library) in Salt Lake City today, so of course I milked it. 

After creating a list of my direct line ancestors, mostly to determine whom I had parents for and who needed more work, I observed that my most problematic "problem child" is Mr. Alexander Keethler of Brown County, Ohio. I'm sure he's lovely, except that he has proven to be quite elusive.

While Hubby decided to rove SLC and amuse himself with his camera, I went upstairs to the third floor and found the books, and had some luck with a book of "walked" cemeteries in Brown County. While Alex continued to elude me, I did find his son's wife's mother, Caroline, buried with her parents and sister there. (I know where Alexander died, but have no record of his burial yet.)

A fun time was had and I can't wait until I can go again. 

The Portable, Durable Family Tree

Warning: Swear words

Since things have been so - what's the word? - frightening lately, I've been thinking about the possibility of having to evacuate my home, perhaps in a hurry, to escape whatever foreign or domestic shitbags may be invading or whatnot. 

Being prepared to leave is always a concern, although we're usually thinking of natural disasters causing such a situation, but with the current guy in charge, our chances of some dumb political thing happening within our borders just went way, way up. 

Along those lines, lots of "what ifs" are popping into mind - what if, after the shit hits the fan, I can't get to Ancestry, or we don't have electricity, or while fleeing the area, I forget to bring the laptop? How will I access my family tree? Maybe at that point, we won't really be worrying about such things, but my family history research is important to me, and I will want to have a copy with me. 

Paper copies will become necessary at that point, but bringing a whole stack of notebooks isn't realistic, so I've decided to do something a little different. It's probably nothing that hasn't been thought of before, but it seems like a workable solution for the above problem. 

At my workplace, I bought a stack of hole-punched white 3x5 cards with dividers, loaded onto a metal ring. On each card, I wrote the name of my direct ancestors with a number (1 for Dad or Mom, 2 for Dad or Mom's father, 3 for Dad or Mom's mother), along with their birth and death info, and burial place. 

So here's how a card looks:

1. DAD'S NAME

Father: 2. Dad's Father's Name

Mother: 3. Dad's Mother's Name

Born:

Died:

Burial:

The numbering system is nice because it just doubles. Any father will be double the number of his child, and any mother will be double +1. 

I'm thinking of also adding spouses, children, uncles (on blue cards), aunts (on pink), first cousins, records/sources for each fact, more possibly. 

At any rate, I'm feeling good about this much more portable system of analog family history records. 

Life Sketches

 This is a new project I've embarked upon, hoping to make sure I have all the same information (levels, amounts, quantities, qualities) for each of my ancestors. As one does, I started with myself. Trying to decide on which details to include has been challenging, yet fun. 

As a result of taking this on, new and more accurate information has been discovered: My 2nd-great grandmother Lucinda, wife of Jason Newberry, now has a last name, and parents, and a new family branch for me to explore; my 2nd-great grandmother Elizabeth Ann Zane Fox's death year has been corrected (how on earth was I a WHOLE YEAR off??). 

As the years have passed, more records have been added to the various repositories, which has allowed me to see their actual death certificates, as opposed to viewing only the transposed information. 

It's an ongoing process, isn't it? I'm so grateful that there just doesn't seem to be an end to genealogy projects. 

Checking In With The Folks

While at a genealogy meeting this summer, I met a woman wearing a T-shirt on which a map of the United States was printed. She had added little stars to indicate where her ancestors were from. I want that.

Here's where my stars would be: 

Vancouver, WA

Walla Walla, WA

Gillette, WY

Hysham, MT

College Place, WA

Elkton, KY

Sundance, WY

Fergus County, MT

Thedford, NE

Arlington, OR

Bridgewater, MN

Fall Branch, TN

Norfolk, NE

... and a few others. 

Booo

That's all I have to say. I'm dealing with some frustrating Findagrave stuff. Hopefully it will be fixed soon and I can get my family members' memorials back!

Oh, what the heck

While I'm here, I may as well post something.

My cousin Candace is putting together a cookbook/memory book with our Grandma D's recipes and the grandchildren's memories of her and Grandpa. It's got me thinking about personal histories. I visited my great Grandma Keen's and my Gran's autobiographies here on the blog and reread them. What a magical gift it is to be able to read their words and feel them close by again.

Sometime last December, I decided to ditch Facebook, but I wanted to capture all the family memories I've logged there over the years. So I've been slowly dismantling my account (the "On This Day" feature has been instrumental in that effort). I've been blogging on the family blog every day since then, and adding our Facebook memories and pictures in chronological order. I hope to eventually print it in a book format and make copies to give to my family members.

It feels incredibly good to know that someday in the future, my grandchildren and descendants will be able to read about us and know a little bit about me and my family.

The genealogy space I'm in

We bought a house in August 2018, moved in September. That same week I started the second of two new jobs (#1 started in March 2018). We still have two children in school and year-round soccer, and the other three still live at home and are working and/or attending college.

To say that I've been too overwhelmed by the craziness of my life to spend much time on my genealogical research would be (this can't be stressed enough) a vast understatement.

However, I still love it, love talking about it, love remembering the exciting discoveries, the trips, the cemeteries, the stories. All of it. So much has changed in my life that my genealogy focal points are completely different now, but the love and the strong desire to find and preserve these beloved people and their stories is still very much alive.

Now if I can just get to my computer sometime soon, I'll be back in business.

What are you trying to say??

It's been 18 months since I last posted? Well, I've gone longer.

This morning I learned that a distant cousin of my great grandmother Alice Johnson Keen was killed at Iwo Jima on 27 February 1945. A sergeant in the Marine Corps, he died of his wounds aboard the USS Barrow. That makes the event much more personal to me than it ever had been before. May God bless these brave young men who faced horrific fighting, bloodshed and loss. Freedom isn't free. Though most of them are gone now, their sacrifice will live on forever.

23 February 1945, Iwo Jima
Photo credit: Joe Rosenthal

On a much, much lighter note: on the blog sidebar, I have placed a countdown clock for the release of the 1950 census. Only six and a half more years! I'm excited to see my parents as little children with their families, and also for all the changes in this census - information that will or won't be included, as well as the changes in technology that will make its viewing possible. How much changed between the 1930 and 1940 census releases! This little thing called "The Internet" has improved things vastly (she said understatedly).

If anyone is still reading this, awesome, thanks. May your genealogy endeavors bear sweet and plentiful fruit. 

My Burial List

Like most of my genealogical projects, I have no idea what propelled me to create a burial list; but I must say it's turned out to be quite handy.

I believe it stemmed from a desire to focus on my closest relatives - grandparents, aunts, uncles, first cousins - and work harder on filling in their missing bits of information, as opposed to finding (and becoming overwhelmed by) the "low-hanging fruit" philosophy under which I'd been operating.

By "low-hanging fruit" I mean, "Hey, look, a new leaf popped up on my Rootsweb family tree!" and several hours/days/years later, I was the new owner of several hundred more names, most of which were very, very distant relatives. Not a bad thing, but I've been on my genealogical quest since around 1989, and my PAF program is getting pretty full of very, very distant relatives. (Yes, I still use PAF - only judge me favorably.)

The burial list I generated using the "Custom" printing feature of PAF only includes those closest relatives. Fields include Names, Birthdates, Death Dates, Burial Places - I added Relationship in Word. Once I created the report and "printed to file," I began to organize the names by generations - first my grandparents, then great grandparents listed in order of their placement on my pedigree chart, then 2nd greats, and so on. Grandparents are in bold font, with their children listed underneath.

A typical entry looks like this:

Go on, give it a click

 

Why am I so concerned with the burial places of my close relatives? 

1) I love my ancestors. I like knowing where they are, their last physical presence here on Earth. I like seeing their headstones. I never knew these people but I feel closer to them when I can visit them, or at least look at their headstones via the wonderful volunteers at Findagrave.com.

2) If I know where someone is buried, the odds are good that I have a good amount of information about that person's life - at least from a genealogical research standpoint - from birth to death.

3) I like seeing where everyone ended up. Two people have a large family of children, the children marry and spread out or stay in the same county their entire lives. What were the dynamics that made all of that happen? Seriously, it's fascinating.

4) Having the list helped me zone in on who was "important". Obviously everyone is important, but neglecting my more difficult direct ancestral lines in favor of locating third cousin Harry's military history was a problem, and this has helped me solve it.

If you decide to create a burial list, or have some other method of keeping yourself focused in the midst of so many inherited or downloaded names, I hope you'll tell me about it. :)