Stupid Idaho

Here I am, ripping on the Potato State again (it has a problem with trans people, and I have a big problem with that). $109 for a damn death certificate! And I'm not even allowed to request the damn thing because my relationship to the deceased isn't on the approved list! Could this stupid state suck more??

::::series of deep breaths::::

In other news... I'm getting ready to join a new heritage organization, which is why I'm hoping to procure all the birth, marriage, and death certs I can get hold of. 

I'm already a member of NSDAR through Alice, but would like to add to my list of patriot ancestors, which will require documentation, starting with mine. Of course there are distant cousins who joined, but as far as I know, none of my direct line female ancestors joined, so I can't use their applications like I used Alice's. It's all a big question mark because I have very little knowledge of my patriot ancestors. 

At any rate, I contacted my local chapter of NSDAR online and expressed my interest in reinstating my membership, and heard back from them about paying a reinstatement fee along with my yearly dues, in September. These groups take summer breaks, so I plan to start attending meetings this fall, if they fit within my schedule.

The Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington and I have been emailing back and forth; they're going to send me an application. My Dysarts and Tinsleys moved to the Washington territory before statehood, which makes me eligible to join.  Fortunately these vital records will be mostly available on Ancestry.

Aside from Adina's mother Lena, who emigrated from Germany in the 1870s, my family has been here in America for quite a long time, some since the early 1600s. If I could document my relationships more completely, there are many genealogy groups I could be part of. It's been fun to look through the list and see which ones I qualify for; some of them are so exclusive that members can only join by invitation. Sounds pretty snooty, and I'm not at all interested in the social aspect - but HOW COOL would it be to find out that an ancestor was a member of the House of Burgesses, or Order of the First Families of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 1636-1647, or some such thing.

Finding the documentation and applying to join the groups and becoming a member of the ones I'm qualified for feels like a fun, rest-of-my-life quest. Puzzles are fun.

Genealogy Library - Day 3

Will someone please invent a time machine so I can go back to 1860 and find out if Florence and Frances are the same person??? Or slap the census taker who wrote down her name as FLARNCE? Dude. 

FLARNCE (must always be capitalized) is frankly an awesome name, and while I'm still at the genealogy library and haven't had the chance to try it yet, I imagine it must be a fun name to yell (Kid #2 also pointed this out). Watch out, future pets, one of you will be definitely named FLARNCE - not that you can read this warning.

In other news, I'm reading the obituary of my aunt/cousin Dicie (none of that is a typo) and having a heck of a time figuring out her surviving people. For one thing, one of her half-sisters, a Mrs. Jim Sherfey, is not among my people, and now we get to play "process of elimination" to see which of her sisters Jim Sherfey was married to. (Hopefully it was FLARNCE.) 

Secondly, it's possible that Dicie's "grand nephew" Frank is actually her unmarried daughter Bertie's son - according to Frank, Bertie indeed was his mother. But is this true? 

There was a cute story about how Dicie had been raising Frank since he was brought to live with her from the age of two years old. Bertie was 41 when he was born, so it's possible that she was Frank's mom. I hate to possibly besmirch anyone's name by accusing anyone of giving birth out of wedlock or creating sweet fiction for an old lady's obituary, but in reality, we know people did stuff like this, especially back in ... forever. 

On the other hand, and tossing the whole thing into a tornado, is the fact that Dicie's father had five wives and a total of ten children - only the first four wives had children. Even before Dicie's obituary came on the scene, her family of origin was a fun mystery/nightmare to unravel, and now we get into the big question of whose kid Frank is. 

Frank may very well be Dicie's great nephew, considering she had nine half-siblings and it's possible one of them let her, or needed her help to, raise Frank. He was ten when she died in 1933. I have his obituary, Social Security application, World War II draft application... he's extremely well documented but heck if we'll ever know who his parents are. I wonder if anyone in his family has taken a DNA test. Who knows. 

One thing I do know is that yacht rock is the perfect accompaniment for genealogical research - one must avoid being caught grooving too hard by the staff, though. THAT'S HOW MUCH I FEEEEEEEEEL.... 

LATER: I just found Dicie's missing sibling, Mrs. Jim Sherfey! HOLY HECK I have never heard of this sister. COOL. Dicie's dad now has eleven children and I'm geeking out big time. Her name was Jerusha Keen, and YA MO BE THERE

P.S. I went ahead and merged Florence and Frances. Their missing census records synced up perfectly, just like THAT FROZEN CONCOCTION THAT HELPS ME HANG ON

Genealogy Library - Day 2

Well hello again from Salt Lake City. 

Today I find myself in the classic genealogical version of "fish or cut bait?". Do I spend time cleaning up my family tree, something I can do at home, or do I research the snot out of my brick walls? Research seems like an obvious choice, especially right now while I'm surrounded by books and films and fiche, but the idea of being thorough and perfect is SO tempting! The MyTreeTags on Ancestry are just way too much fun. 

I haven't mentioned this yet (I don't think) but last month, I counted up my couples - great grandparents, 2nd greats and 3rd greats - divided them by 365, and assigned them a yearly spot on the calendar. Each couple has six days when I'll be focusing on just their family. My greats are mostly finished - sometimes I find a new surprise; my 2nds are in varying stages of done but a few stragglers still need help, and with the 3rds - things will get especially exciting around June 18, when they will start their time under the microscope. 

I needed some way to decide whom to work on, when. Otherwise I could lose my mind. Some families' facts have been well documented for a long time, and other families are still hidden under a rock. It's so easy to get caught up in the voluminous information for the established families and let the lesser-known folks wither on the vine.

This week belongs to Elijah Keen and Rebecca Morgan of Tennessee. Eli was a Union soldier in the Civil War, which I think is pretty remarkable, since Tennessee was the last state to secede from the United States. I can't even imagine the stress those folks were under as they had to decide which faction to join. Not all of my ancestors during that era chose the better cause, but Eli did and I'm proud of him. It couldn't have been easy. 

Okay, back to it. 

LATER: Just found another enslaver ancestor.....yuck. 

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.

"Bring Out Your Dead"

Can I just tell you that I love calling funeral homes, cemetery offices and county death record offices? 

Not once have I ever encountered anything other than a helpful, kind employee when I've made the effort to look up a number and get on the horn. 

One lady in South Carolina (SWEET accent) offered to go outside in the snow one January day and take a picture of my relative's headstone and email it to me.

Bless you, employees.  We geeks couldn't do it without you.

Now on to today's character - my great uncle Burt Damon Bathrick*.  Never married as far as I can see, Burt lived what must have been a colorful life.  Born in 1863 in upstate New York to Lysander and Phoebe (who died when he was seven years old), the youngest child by fifteen years - Burt made his way west with his father and landed in Great Falls, Montana.  (Lysander ended up in Wyoming.)

I'm trying not to mix him up with a Bert Bathrick, who was born five years earlier and died in 1923. 

My uncle Burt held a variety of jobs, from railway laborer to beer hall employee to novelty salesman.  Just guessing from the occupations he chose, he is an adventurous, hardworking, gregarious, people-loving soul, who loved his adopted city but wasn't much for sticking around in the same job.  He never owned a home, always lived at boarding houses, which to me says he preferred to take life one day at a time.

I'm about to call Cascade county and see if he did stick around long enough to be buried there.  What's funny is, I find myself mentally stuck in the 1980s way of genealogy-ing sometimes... "So Great Falls, huh... it would be so fun to go there, but it's so far away..."

Then I remember "when" I am.  In these days of instant access to telephone numbers listed online, help is only a few clicks and a phone call away. 

Blessings abound :)

*Why Burt today?  The 1940 Census, of course.  I did an individual search on PAF using my ancestors filter (grandparents and aunts and uncles only) and filtered them by individuals born in the 1840-1941 birth range, so I didn't miss anyone.  Three hundred and ninety-six people I'm looking up.  I've already found new family members all over the place.  Yay :)

Hee. "Graves R Us."

It's funny.

But guess what? I LOVE IT!!! This is the kind of website I've been waiting for, a site with lists of people buried in cemeteries of Montana and northern Wyoming! It's like they had my Smiths and Keithlers and all their kin and my inability to locate all of them in mind!

And it has an awesome name, to boot.

It's been a sweet, sweet day. I decided to mess around with my PAF and see if there were any superfluous families I needed to prune out of my tree, such as the parents of aunts, uncles, or cousins who married into my family. Not that we don't love them or that they're not important, but we can only keep track of so many people.

I was just about to pare down my Vanderpauwert relatives - like, why? How many Vanderpauwerts does anyone ever have, and I'm about to get rid of them? - when I decided to keep Uncle John's first family, the one he had with his first wife before she died and he married my aunt Verne Keithler. I wasn't really going to get rid of them, I was just going to put them in his notes/sources.

But I don't know, they did something to me and I ended up searching their census records and their son Claude's World War I draft card (he died in the influenza epidemic before he ever left Fort Lewis - that was probably a blessing) and pretty soon I was adding his information, which I found at Graves R Us (hee), to Findagrave. And there I found that some nice man had added Aunt Verne and Uncle John to their cemetery, which was awesome, because I didn't even have a death date for Uncle John! Perfect.

So. Thanks, Graves R Us... and way to go with that name.

"I'm so glad you're here, Related-To-Everyone Man!"

"... just for a frame of reference," says Captain Obvious.

One of my fellow staff members at the Family History Center is a lovely retired gentleman who has such enthusiasm for family history, teaching, and people in general, that several patrons show up weekly to have him help them with their pursuits. We all enjoy working with him.

When I met him in November, we started comparing notes on our family trees - where our people come from, what famous people we're related to, the kinds of research we like. I discovered that Gene has an uncanny ability to track down living relatives in everyday places, like at church or in his neighborhood. Whenever he finds a new cousin, he tells us the next time we're together. I used to tease him that he's related to everybody.

Last Wednesday I joked, "We should see if you're related to me."

We plugged our jump drives into the same computer's USB ports, started up FamilyInsight (found in all FHCs, and available for purchase for home use), clicked on the command that would review both our databases and find matches, and...

We're related.

We share two sets of common ancestors: Philippe Cazier and Marie Taine (my paternal grandmother's line); and Jacob French and Susan Warren (my maternal grandmother's line).

Amazingly, my grandmothers are (so far) not related.

Yesterday, as we again looked through our respective data and found these ancestors, Gene excitedly scribbled down my information (this was before we both had the brilliant idea of creating GEDCOMS and copying and pasting them to each other's jump drives - he was that excited). He called me last night with his findings.

"We're ninth cousins, three times removed," he said.

I don't have much information on these people; I found them in the IGI, which is a great place to start but shouldn't be depended on for accurate information. Some submitters are meticulous record-keepers who can back up every fact; others, not so much. I'm motivated now to more deeply research these families and see what I can come up with.

Our ancestors come from the 16th and 17th centuries, so there's nothing obvious to distinguish us as relatives, but it's fun to work with him every week and to now have this added bond.

The same thing happened to my grandparents while they worked at their FHC in the Boise area - one of their fellow staff members shared a line with Gran. Then we discovered that this staff member's sister lives here and is in MY congregation. She and I keep saying we need to get together and compare notes, but it hasn't happened yet. I should get cracking.

It's always fun to find a new cousin.

Having a Good Time, Wish You Weren't Dead

These people are so fascinating. If only I could talk to them, and have them answer all my questions and straighten out all their little complicated-seeming problems...

But I imagine that would take a lot of the fun out of looking for them.

"That's a nice nose! Did you pick it?"

...one of my dad's old corny jokes I still enjoy throwing at my children.

My whole life, everyone has told me I look like my mom. I do look like her - our coloring is very similar, but as I grew older, I noticed our features aren't quite exactly the same... my nose and chin were different, my eyes crinkly-er, my eyebrows arch-ier or something. Our skin is different, too - she tans easily, while I burn and freckle like my father.

This observation led to much mirror-perusing. If I wasn't a carbon copy of my mother, the way everyone seemed to think, then who DID I look like?

And of course, being the genealogy geek that I am, I had to trace the features I saw on my face back to their original source - at least, as far back as the family photograph collection would allow.

I've split my face into four people. I know you were wondering.

From the nose up, I look like Ruby Fox; from the nose down, Jennie Dragoo; my dimples came from my grandfather, Carl Dysart; and my dark haired, dark-eyed coloring (and that of my mother, grandmother, great grandmother, great-great grandfather) came from Lorette Proctor.

And of course, being the genealogy geek that I am, I wonder endlessly about the three ladies and where THEIR features came from. Who does Lorette resemble with her brown eyes? When did this very distinct Dragoo nose and chin first make its appearance, and with whom? Was it a Zane or a Bathrick that Ruby inherited her eyebrows from?

And those pesky dimples! I have exactly one picture of Carl's parents, Carl Sr. and Ruth, smiling. I can't tell for sure but it looks like Carl Sr. is the dimpled grandparent. His son, my grandpa Carl, had them, my mom has them, I have them, and my middle son, who (out of our five children) looks the least like me and the most like his dad, was also somehow born with them.

Adam and Eve's first invention should have been a camera. And film that lasts millennia.

Fun With Death Certificates

Call me morbid, but I love reading death certificates - probably for the same reason I love my grandmother's huge "Modern Medical Counselor" book from the 1940's. Diseases and causes of death are horrible, but fascinating.

ANYWAY... Ancestry.com has an impressive collection of death certificate images, with the LDS Church hot on its heels as more volunteers index records and collections of records are made available on Familysearch's pilot site.

Lately my favorite genealogical amusement is to narrow down people in my PAF file who died in the state in question and within a certain year range, and start looking people up. For example, the Kentucky collection on Ancestry ranges between the years 1852-1953, so after I've set up my list of people who died in Kentucky between those years, I'll search out those people.

By doing this, I've found women's maiden names I didn't have before, parents' names, children who died young whose existence I was unaware of, places of burial including cemetery names, and quite a few new family members I didn't have in my collection. A death certificate is also a great way to verify old information, so even if you think you know everything about Grandma Gert, it's still worth your time to check out her death certificate.

If you're an Ancestry.com subscriber, the easiest way to find a state's death record collection is to head to the home page, then scroll down to the list and map of the United States, then click on that state to see what it offers.

If you're like me and "free" is your favorite price, you can take your chances at the Familysearch pilot site. As fast as those indexers can type, they're indexing and digitizing thousands and thousands of records. They recently passed their 25,000 indexed record milestone and have reason to be proud. I've had some success with Washington state's death records on that website.

Before too long, you too can be living it up with death certificates. Good luck!

Straight to Heaven with That Man

I saw Schindler's List about ten years ago when it was broadcast on the NBC network, and cried and cried - not only for the horrible circumstances the poor Jews went through during the Holocaust, but also for the goodness of one man.

Today I was nosing around Ancestry and saw that among their new databases, Schindler's lists appear for searching. The names of the Polish Jews he saved are listed here, with a few pertinent facts about each one.

To read more about Oskar Schindler's heroism, click here. It's truly inspiring to read of the risks he took, the "laws" he broke, and the help he received from American and Swiss Jewish associations. In a completely dark time in history, he was a bright little spark, doing what he could to shed some light.

Hi there!

Yes, it's been a while... summer's over, school has started, and we just found out we'll be able to move to a nicer home, so I don't see my genealogy days becoming any less hectic. Sorry I haven't been around much.

I keep tabs on a couple of genealogy blogs I find interesting, and at Ancestry Insider, I found this post about Familysearch Indexing.

Indexing is a volunteer program that allows anyone to download images of microfilms and type the information found on them - names, dates, places, parents' names, etc. - into a grid, then send it back to Familysearch headquarters. The volunteers are helping to make a list, basically, of all the microfilmed information in the granite vault near Salt Lake - by name, location, date, subject, etc. This will all be made available online one day, free for anyone to see.

It's interesting work, but as the above post points out, sometimes you find situations that are hard to read about. Still, it's inspiring to know that because of a few minutes you spent volunteering, someone someday will be able to find his ancestors that much more easily.

Just Found Some New Ancestors...

... more German emigrants. I'm starting to think I'm more German than anything else. Although I'm still pretty Scottish.

Christopher Heydrich and his two brothers came from Germany on the ship Robert and Alice (or Robert and Oliver, depending on the source) in 1738. Nif-teeeee.

In this e-book about the Hetrick family, Christopher's signature can be seen and a little more background is given about his family and the circumstances which may have brought him and his brothers to America.

This search started last week when Michelle and I were cemetery-geeking and we found some Hetricks buried in our cemetery. I looked them up in the census and in the Ancestry family trees - not the most reliable source, but a place to start - and sure enough, the Hetricks in the cemetery are related to me. Probably. I feel good about having just cleaned up their headstones (here's one picture).

Other German names in my family tree:
Arndt
Decker
Haizmann
Reed/Reid
Roller
Sager
Schneeweiss (who took on the Swedish name Kyn, which became Keen)
Steinhilber
Strohle
Strudlin
Thierer

All but Schneeweiss and Heydrick/Hetrick are on my dad's side. It's been fun to find that my mother is part German as well. Here we thought she was all U.K.

Have you ever considered how unique we all are? That if one name changed on your family tree, you'd be a completely different person? It's that exact combination of ancestors and DNA that makes you who you are. The only people you share that with are your siblings, and even they are made of a slightly different combination of those same genes. Without sounding too cheesy - it's mind-blowing to me, how very special we are, how no two people on this earth have ever been or ever will be exactly alike.

Poem

I found this on a Findagrave memorial and stole it:

ANCESTORS

If you could see your ancestors
All standing in a row,
Would you be proud of them?
Or don't you really know?
Strange discoveries are sometimes made,
In climbing the family tree
Occasionally one is found in line
Who shocks his progeny.
If you could see your ancestors
All standing in a row,
Perhaps there might be one or two
You wouldn't care to know
Now turn the question right about,
And take another view
When you shall meet your ancestors,
Will they be proud of you?

Author: Unknown

Uncle John Had Seven Wives

What's that nursery rhyme about "When I was going to St. Ives"?

My husband is a fifth-generation Latter-day Saint on every single line of his family tree (more than five on some lines). All of his 2nd-great grandparents were born in places like Tennessee, New York, Denmark, England, Missouri - and ended up in Utah. In his Rowley line, an uncle named John Rowley was the husband of seven wives, including a widowed mother and two of her daughters - and he had children with all three women, along with the other wives. (The mom and daughters are Emma James, Emma Ozella Johnson and Orissa Jane Johnson - wives 3, 4, and 5.)

This is fascinating to me, coming from my LDS-convert background. The most exciting thing going on in my family tree is first cousins marrying each other (and yes, some of them were my grandparents - I know that was your next question).

On a completely unrelated topic: I hope we're all good about sharing our stuff and helping each other, when it comes to our family history records.

A friend I sometimes help with her genealogy has had her hands tied because of one rather bratty cousin who at one point, told my friend to just "forget" about one line because SHE was doing all the research. Now that it's done, instead of sharing it with my friend (making copies, emailing a GEDCOM, etc.), she tells her, "Oh, it's all online now - go look for it there," without any further instruction or help. My friend isn't too computer-literate and has a hard time knowing where to go or what to do. Everytime I talk to her, I can feel her frustration and sadness caused by her cousin's behavior, and I feel like calling up this woman myself and giving her an earful. Who acts like that? It's like having Ancestry.com for a cousin.

I can't imagine what would possess people to act this way. It's like people who won't share recipes. What exactly is the point of that? So no one else can take credit for making a certain dessert? Who cares? If we're all trying to find out more about our families, why on earth would anyone try to impede another's progress?

The best genealogists are the ones who share.