Yesterday...

...I was pleased to receive an email from Ancestry.com. A very distant cousin's boyfriend kindly took my cousin's information and put together a family tree, and invited me to look at it via the Internet. What did we ever do before the Internet?

The family tree focused on the Steen family of Monroe county, Kentucky, and I was able to update my information. The Steens are cousins from the Keen side. The cousin and I are actually 7th cousins - our common ancestors are Matthias Keen and his wife of Virginia. Their daughter married a Copas, and their daughter married a Steen. My great grandfather was also a Keen.

This lit a little fire under me and I spent some quality time gathering Copas family members from Monroe county, Kentucky, off the IGI. I decided to take all of them and put them in my files. This is a project I'm still working on and proves to be very fun, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

Last Tuesday night, I finished my first run-through with PAF Insight (speaking of "what did we ever do before..."). I have quite a few people in my PAF file and found it necessary to run them through, one letter of the alphabet at a time. This last Tuesday, I finished with the T, U, V, W, X, Y & Z surnames. Now I can start running them through again next week, but I'm happy to have the Copas project to work on as well.

I think I'll start doing more of the surname/locality gathering. When there's a surname that's not common - Dysart comes to mind - and they all seem to be gathered in one place, I'm just gonna grab all of them. We're all related somehow, I'm sure.

Back At the FHC

Yay! My fellow staff member's rotator cuff surgery is over with and our shift started again tonight. We had one patron and we had the night to ourselves. I made some good progress.

I put my S surnames into PAF Insight and got some good dates, and while I was thus employed, I noticed that cousin Enoch Shackleford died in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1921, and was buried in his hometown. Wondering if he may have been in prison (I didn't know the guy - stranger things have happened), I looked for him in 1920 to see where he was living. I'm thinking the Leavenworth death place might be a mistake because his entire life, he lived in Greenfield, Dade, Missouri, and barely moved until he was buried there.

At any rate, once I found him in the 1920 census, it opened the door to his whole family. I found all four of his children (all I knew is that he and his wife HAD four children), almost all their spouses, and the grandchildren. I found birth dates and places I hadn't had previously (love that 1900 census) and made some serious progress on that family. And it just dropped out on my lap, practically. I considered my night successful.

Until next week!

Tap, Tap, Tap...

I found more today on my Smith side. My great-great grandparents are John William Smith and Jennie Ella Mobley, and their son Maurice Warfield Smith is my great grandfather. His brother Shelby Russell Smith has been one elusive uncle to find anything about, mostly for a lack of looking.

Just a few weeks ago, I discovered Shelby and his wife Iva Logan Smith in the 1930 census, but sadly their information was very sparse. Either Shelby was being stingy or the census taker was asking the neighbor, because it gave almost no pertinent information. But I did find that Shelby and Iva had two children, Jane and Shelby Jr.

Today as I was emailing back and forth with my uncle, I decided to poke around Rootsweb and when I looked at Shelby's death index record, I found Shelby Jr's right underneath it. It gave his birth and death dates and places. Pretty exciting! That's more than I've ever had about this family. Shelby's sister, Jane Smith, will be slightly harder to find, as she likely married and died with a different last name, but if they want you to find them, they'll help make it happen.

I enjoy getting those little taps on the shoulder. "Look in this record and see what you find..."

I found the coolest thing...

So, after the meeting last month, I'm doing the "go through every single person in my PAF file and fix all the errant names, dates, and places" thing, and trying to find missing counties or European states. We were given a wonderful handout written by a Family History bigwig from the Church (I don't know his name) that gave very specific instructions. Maybe I've already mentioned it but it's that cool - it deserves another mention.

I have some Canadian family members and have tried, several times, to locate an online Canadian county finder with no success. But, when I typed a German city into my search engine, out popped this fun little site (it's actually HUGE) that has maps of every country in the world, along with a list of each city and the state or county or region it's in. Hello??? How awesome???

So I put it in my links - it's called "Maps of the World." Look out, Canadian cities... you're getting new counties soon.

In other news, I leaned on my Dysart relatives - aunts, uncles, cousins - and have put together a new genealogy page to send to everyone. Not everyone was able to open it, so I'm wondering what's up with that, but Uncle Doug emailed today that he'd received it and even passed along a correction. Yay! Now for the Smith side to send in their stuff.

It Was A Happy Night

I had a lady write to me last week after visiting my online family tree, asking about Archie Newton Watson and Doris (I had her first name as "Daisy") Audrey Simpson. FOUND 'EM TONIGHT. Doris' family lived in the same place for over 40 years. Ahhhh... I love it when they do that. I was able to send the lady four census images and Archie's WWI draft registration card image. Love the unlimited access to Ancestry.com at the FHC. LOVE it.

THEN... along came a sister from the other stake who needed some help finding information in the IGI. I hooked her up with PAF Insight and sat with her for over an hour, helping her plug in the new information she found. It turns out that Bri dated her cousin in Tri-Cities, where she's from. Small world. She was very happy about the results and asked if I would be there next week. Yay!

In the meantime, a fellow staff member was helping a young man find a relative and coming up empty, so I joined them on another computer and BAM had a census records in just a few seconds. YES. My staffer teased me about not puffing myself up. I was like, "you're welcome."

I love helping people. I was thinking about doing this as a business but it's so much more fun to give it away for free. :) Who knows, maybe I still will... but as long as I have this calling, I think not.

Last Night's FHC Meeting

What an interesting time it was... and may I just observe, there's nothing like going to a Family History Center staff meeting to make me feel like a fetus. Sister R. even said, "I've been serving at the FHC for 30 years now... I started when I was the age of that young lady right there" and pointed at me. It was a wonderful thing to hear after the conversation I recently had with my mom - "My baby girl's going to be 40!" THANKS. She's just lucky she doesn't have anyone around saying, "My baby girl's going to be 60!"

Sister R. talked to us about the recent changes the Church has made about our program. For one thing, we're no longer "staff members" belonging specifically to the FHC - we're Family History Consultants now, and our responsibilities reach farther. We now belong to our respective wards and work under the jurisdiction of the HP group leader. We'll not only continue to work our shifts at the FHC but will also work in our wards, going into the members' homes to teach them how to do family history work.

Since I was already teaching the family history Sunday school class, my job isn't going to change that much - and going into the ward members' homes was on my agenda to start doing. All of the FHC staff members from our ward will be meeting with the bishop on Sunday to talk about it, and at that time Blaine & Marilyn will probably opt out, as she is also the RS Education counselor. Which means they won't be working with me on Tuesday nights anymore. I'm sad about that.

Then we learned exactly how to enter names, dates, and places in PAF. And even I, who have considered myself a stickler about this, learned a few new things - things I'll have to go into my PAF file and correct. YOWZA. How humbling. ;)

I've received a few emails regarding my Rootsweb family tree, so I need to go through and check those out as well, and probably upload a new one soon. I also found out that my grand-aunt Irene passed away this week and will be keeping an eye out on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer online to see if I can catch her obituary. She had Alzheimer's disease and I imagine she must be quite a bit happier now that she's with her husband, parents and other loved ones. With all this and the new PAF data entry fixes, I have a lot to keep busy with.

New Developments

1) I met a "new" cousin this week. Charlene's actually older than I am, but she found my family tree entry at Rootsweb and sent an email. It was fun to hear from her. She's going to help me update some things about her family. Our common ancestors are Frederick Hetrick and Elizabeth Doverspike. LOVE this online genealogy thing.

2) As a result of Charlene's letter, I finally figured out how to edit my Rootsweb family tree information. I can now add new people as I find them. I was able to ditch the idea of a separate blog for each great grandparent, which was not a fun or easy task. I also wrote to find my old username and password for my old defunct email address, so I can delete the other family tree I'm no longer proud of.

3) I'm going to try and make a website sometime soon - maybe tomorrow. I signed up for the free web page account at Rootsweb as well.

4) I linked my Rootsweb family tree and my genealogy blog together. SCARY. I also uploaded my husband's family tree and linked it here.

Pretty good work for one day.

Yowza, What a Night

I serve every Tuesday night at a local Family History Center with other staff members. I go early every week so my husband can have the car for soccer practice, and this provides lots of great research time.

I had such great success last night that I commented to one couple that there's a reason why I was called to work at the FHC - all the great books I now have unlimited access to. "You get called to work here and you start finding stuff you wish you would have found 20 years ago," the husband agreed. It's so awesome. There are three different sets of volumes about colonial families, just at my little FHC, that have provided a ton of information.

PAF has been messing around with me... it stopped reusing deleted records, and pretty soon, adding new people, I noticed the RINs were creeping up in the 13000s. I knew there was no way I had that many people, so I made a new file. Sure enough - I'm right around 12,100. That's a tad more manageable.

A few years ago, I found Lorette Proctor's family tree in Familysearch and downloaded it, and the colonial families information has come in handy for verification. Good stuff. Last night I found lots of Dimmock information, some Byam, and a ton of Kendalls. For the Dysart side, I found some Tillinghasts.

Other great finds were this Dimmock website, another Proctor website starting with my earliest known ancestor, Evan Proctor, and directions to the Fiske Library in Seattle. Mary Fisk married Abraham Byam Jr.; they had Mary Byam; Mary married Moses Proctor. It would be a fun day trip, running up to Seattle and finding the book about Evan Proctor I found on their website.

And that was my night - Yay!!!

The Bigwigs

I'm fascinated with the family trees of famous people. Abraham Lincoln... Laura Ingalls Wilder... Louisa May Alcott. Louisa's is particularly interesting because of her famous family members. She is related to John Quincy Adams and Oliver Wendell Holmes - all through the Quincy line.

Who were these Quincys anyway, that so many of their offspring should leave such an indelible mark on our history? Pretty nifty.

As yet I can't find any way I'm related to them (not that I'm looking, but it would be cool), but just looking at Louisa's family tree last night and thinking it would be fun to figure out how she and John Quincy Adams were related, I found this website. It threw in OWH for good measure. Pretty exciting!

I also found the Hildreth website last night and between it and the others and the huge stack of papers I copied from books at my FHC, I have plenty to keep me busy. Where to start???

Una & Candace

I just finished a mega phone call with my brother Ernie (nicknamed "Una" by my sister Melanie). He called and asked me about our Scottish ancestors a few weeks ago and I told him about PAF and downloading it free from the Church. Today he downloaded it, and I sent him a GEDCOM of our stuff. He's going to Ireland and Scotland later this year and wants to have some background so that he can enjoy his trip even more.

He told me about his experience with googling Ninian Beall, one of our Scottish ancestors, and had me do the same. I found the wonderful page about Ninian that I put in the links. It's fun having a sib that's ALMOST as interested in family history as I am.

Close on his heels is Cousin Candace, Uncle Doug's oldest daughter and my closest cousin on Mom's side of the family. She's awesome.

Good stuff, man. I love family history. I should get paid to do it, I love it so much. Which reminds me, I need to call Marcie.