Is It Tuesday Yet?

"It's either Tuesday or Not Tuesday." This is how I find myself thinking of the days of the week lately. If it's Tuesday, yay! If it's not, I'm counting the days till the next one.

Tuesday is the day I serve at my Family History Center. Every Tuesday evening, I show up, I plug in my jump drive, I turn on PAF Insight and I go to town.

PAF Insight is a program you can download for $20-ish, and I plan to have it on my own computer someday so I can use it at home too. But I love the usually uninterrupted time with my ancestors. I also love all the books, films and fiche at my disposal, with always more to find in the Family History Library Catalog.

Saturday today = three more days! I've never enjoyed a Church calling so much in my life.

Projects Of Late

First I started a timeline project, which at first was just for fun, but had an interesting side effect: I started researching people with incomplete information. If all I had was their death year, I looked for the day, month, and place. If I had their birth information and could see they were probably dead by now, I went looking for death information - and so on. Since I started this project I've been able to complete scads of records and add even more family members from census records, online family trees, state histories, etc.

Before too long I noticed that I was adding people to the timeline whose names I wasn't sure were "mine" yet. I knew I needed to either connect or weed out those who weren't connected, which started my latest project: the "all related" project. I have over 15,000 names now, and I've been gathering surnames in certain areas that I know must be my relatives - Dysarts in Missouri, Keens and Copasses in Tennessee, Keithlers and Dragoos everywhere - and had found many that I hadn't connected to my people yet.

What I do is do a PAF search, find my name, click on it, click on "advanced search" and under the search options, click on "All related." I started at ,A and look for anyone who isn't related. When I find a family that isn't connected, I try to find them at Ancestry.com and other databases, and if I find the connection, I'll fill in the information. If I can't, I export them to another file, my "not related yet" file. I've since worked my way down to ,Nancy.

Today while working on William Fenton Keithler, son of John W. and Mary A. (I haven't seen how they're related yet and am starting to think they aren't), I found a reference to my great grandaunt, Cecile Verne Keithler vander Pauwert. At Ancestry.com, a book called "History of Montana" is available for viewing and I found great information about her husband John Daniel vander Pauwert's family. I've searched and searched for her and her husband and sons, and that is one tough name. Not only could census takers not spell it or write it legibly in cursive, but the family went back and forth between calling themselves "Vanderpauwert" and just plain "Powert." Also, John being from Holland originally, I found that in Holland, "vander" or "vanden"-anything is like Smith in English-speaking countries.

At any rate, I found Aunt Verne's husband's and sons' birth information and one son's death information, stuff I'd been looking for forever, and was very happy. Gotta love those goofy little projects that every so often have me doing actual research.

Links! Links! Links Galore!

Project Idea: Get a map and put it on the wall, and trace the different family names (grandparents) to where they moved in the U.S. For example, start with yourself and put a pin in the place where you were born, then do the same for your parents, then your grandparents (use different colors of thread for each new surname), and so on. You can see exactly where you came from.

Articles
Branching Out on Your Family Tree by George D. Durrant, April 2007 Ensign - don't forget the aunts, uncles and cousins!
Planning a Family Reunion
Top 10 Genealogy Resolutions

Could We Be Cousins?
My Family Tree
My husband's Family Tree
Tillabee Bathrick's Headstone (My ancestor)
Descendants of Elijah Keen
Jason & Lucinda Newberry's Burial Place (My third-great grandparents)

Fellow Geeks
Cemefairy Genealogy
Renee Zamora's Darn Fine Genealogy Blog

Places To Look - All Free!
101 Ways To Trace Your Family History For Free... and free is the best price
1880 U.S. Federal Census
Arizona Birth and Death Records
Familysearch
Free Vital Records Online - Births, Marriages and Deaths
Missouri Birth and Death Records
Rootsweb
Social Security Death Index
U.S. Genweb - just click on a state for lots of resources!
Utah State Archives - Birth and Death Records
Washington State Digital Archives

(Hint: I found some of these state archives records by googling them. If you know where your ancestors came from, you can google "New York State Records," for example, and see what pops up. I've also had success by googling the names of my ancestors - the ones not named "John Smith.")

Research Helps
Find the county for that pesky county-less town in Nebraska (or any other state).
Get Nosy. 50 Questions to ask when interviewing relatives.
Indexmundi, for all your international place-finding needs.

Training
Free BYU Family History Training!! Now you have no excuses.

And Her Name Is Diana Brandon

Anyone who has any kind of genealogy inklings will be happy for me: last night I had one of those deeply-satisfying genealogy research experiences that reminded me of going out to dinner, eating a HUGE meal that tasted wonderful, and waking up in the morning still full and still thinking "YUM!!!!" Yes, it was that good.

I have an uncle, William Arthur Armstrong Keen, who was a Baptist minister in Tennessee. He had (I thought) four wives and numerous children, including a girl named Dicie Diana Keen who married her cousin, Vanzandt Keen. Dicie was lucky because she got to keep her initials all her life, which I'm sure was important to her.

After years of wondering, and finding out little bits of information about William and his family, I found that he had eight other children but no Dicie was included among them. It was pretty easy to figure out which children went with which wives, but Dicie was a mystery. She didn't show up in any censuses with her family. The wives I had dates for didn't fit with her being their child - some of the wives, all I had was their first and last name. I didn't even know what order they were in (Wife #1, Wife #2, etc.).

Fortunately Ancestry.com hosts a family tree site. This very lovely man who lives in Denver, Colorado, had also researched William and his family, and not only did his family tree give me awesome pieces of missing information last night - they were all documented. YES. They all had a source. You always hesitate with stuff that doesn't come directly out of a book or a microfilm, but all this stuff had a source. Did I mention all of it had a source?

Finally, after all these years of not knowing who Dicie's mother was - which one of the four, except it ended up being FIVE, wives of William Keen - her mother is Diana Brandon. I don't have actual proof of it yet, but it fits. It was very common for women to die in childbirth back then - William lost at least one of his wives this way - and Diana's death date and Dicie's birth date are almost the same.

What I think happened was, William and his first wife Hiley had four daughters, then Hiley died. William then married Diana (I have their marriage date from this nice man, and a source), and I think they had Dicie. All the censuses I've seen her in, Dicie lived with the Jesse Crouch family. I think, having already lost two wives and with four little girls to raise, William let his newborn girl be raised by this family until she was married.

The clincher was when I looked up Diana's family in earlier censuses and found her as a child with her parents. Guess what Diana's mom's name is... it's Dicey. Such a strange little name can only be a family name. So there we had it - Dicie Diana Keen. It seems so obvious to me now, but there's no way I would have known if I hadn't found this nice man's family tree last night.

Long story short: I woke up full this morning. Yay!!!!

Carl Bacon Dysart & Ruth Irene Ackley

Married 4 May 1911 in College Place, Walla Walla, Washington

Gathering vs. Hunting

I feel the need to keep telling my family history Sunday school class to not let themselves get frustrated about certain family lines. I spoke to them about it the week before General Conference and will bring it up again this Sunday.

We all have them - seemingly unfindable ancestors that we beat our heads on brick walls about - and they can be really frustrating. Not that they're personally doing it to us (I hope). We're all given a pedigree chart and told to fill it out and find the missing pieces of information. We get so set on that filling up that "tree" - and the subsequent generations afterward - that we start to settle for nothing less. I've discovered we can't do that.

Some family lines take YEARS, literally. I hunted for a long, long time before finding two necessary marriage dates. Family tradition had placed one date months ahead of its time, making it impossible to find in the record it "should" have been in; the other one, no one had any clue where this husband and wife were married. It took years of searching and not finding and thinking and studying and more searching until I finally found what I needed. On other family lines, I've been sent hundreds of pages of information out of the blue.

Thinking about this reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her parents. In the books, they usually lived pretty far away from the nearest town, and there was no refrigeration then. If they wanted fresh meat, Pa had to kill it, and whatever Pa killed that day was what they would eat for dinner that night. Ma had to be resourceful and versatile. Whether it was a rabbit or a deer - one time it was blackbirds that were eating their corn crop - it was Ma's job to prepare it and cook it for dinner. If Pa couldn't hunt anything, they made do with what they had. Sometimes they had to make do for a long, long time.

It's that way with genealogy. When I first started serving at the Family History Center, I noticed the wall lined with books and wondered half-heartedly if any of my family would be there. I figured probably not. But I noticed that many of them were volumes dedicated to Colonial families. By chance, I picked up a set and noticed that some of the names were common with mine. As I spent more time with these volumes, depending on the location, I eventually found over a thousand names that were my relatives - not anyone I was "hot after", but still worth adding to my family tree.

Since then I've learned to be less a hunter and more of a gatherer. Sure, I still want to complete my family tree as well as I can, and I still have hold-out ancestors who came from obscure places, did absolutely nothing of note (at least, that I can find), and died almost anonymously. And their names! William Johnson? Did he have to be named William Johnson?

However, once I figured out that I was being handed a big crop of blackbirds for dinner, I didn't stop to think that I'd rather have the filet mignon. I took the blackbirds and made do. Those people are no less important than my elusive little grandparents, and in the meantime, it gives me good genealogy "self esteem" to have added that many family members to my PAF file.

I've learned to tailor my information to the available documents, and not vice versa. Most of Ancestry.com is no longer available at the Family History Center, but certain census years still are (1880, 1900, 1920). The 1880 census is also available at familysearch.org. I took my family names, narrowed them down to who would be alive during those censuses, and started looking them up. Since I started doing this, new aunts, uncles and cousins galore have popped up. When the books at the FHC didn't have information about my specific ancestors, I focused instead on the surnames I KNEW must be mine (Bathrick, Dragoo, etc.) and gathered them all, figuring I would find the connection sometime - and on some of them, I have found it.

It pays to gather, and to make do with the resources that are available. I'll keep trying to find those hidden ancestors, but in the meantime, I won't disregard the free stuff that continues to come my way.

JASON NEWBERRY, WHERE ARE YOU?

I am so sick of not finding anything about the man I believe is my grandfather, Jason Newberry, that I'm putting something online with his name on it, just so I can Google him and at least THIS will pop up.

He was born about 1823 in New York state. He married Lucinda, born 1821 in Massachusetts. They had three daughters that I know of, Fannie, Mary Lucinda (my great-great grandmother), and Ida J. He died 12 February 1870 and was buried in the Swezey-Bromley Cemetery in Newport, Herkimer, New York. Lucinda died 28 December 1878 and was buried with him.

In the 1860 census, I found him with his family (I was looking for a little 8-year-old girl named Mary Lucinda and this was the family that matched). They were living in Russia, Herkimer, New York, and a woman named Polly Newberry, 69 years old, was living with them. I believe she was Jason's mother.

I googled his name and found the Swezey-Bromley Cemetery webpage. It gave me their death dates and burial places, along with more Newberrys, including whom I believe to be Jason's parents and other possible family members. Polly Newberry was there, wife of Samuel, and her information matches the Polly Newberry I found with Jason and the family in the 1860 census. I believe Samuel and Polly are Jason's parents.

I called the Newport town clerk today, and she put me in touch with the Herkimer Genealogical Society. I spoke with Barb C., and she will be doing some research for me this week. I didn't ask her to - she offered. That was nice. I was prepared to have her send me copies, and have me pay for them, at least. That might still be the case - I'll find out in about a week. In the meantime, she has my address and email address, and she'll be looking for whatever she can find about this family.

OK, he's out there in Internetville. If someone else googles his name, hopefully they'll find this and feel happy.

NOW It All Makes Sense

1852 NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS SOLVE GENEALOGICAL MYSTERIES

It is New Year's Eve 1852 and Henry HYDENWELL sits at his desk by candlelight. He dips his quill pen in ink and begins to write his New Year's resolutions.

1. No man is truly well-educated unless he learns to spell his name at least three different ways within the same document. I resolve to give the appearance of being extremely well-educated in the coming year.

2. I resolve to see to it that all of my children will have the same names that my ancestors have used for six generations in a row.

3. My age is no one's business but my own. I hereby resolve to never list the same age or birth year twice on any document.

4. I resolve to have each of my children baptized in a different church--either in a different faith or in a different parish. Every third child will not be baptized at all or will be baptized by an itinerant minister who keeps no records.

5. I resolve to move to a new town, new county, or new state at least once every ten years--just before those pesky enumerators come around asking silly questions.

6. I will make every attempt to reside in counties and towns where no vital records are maintained or where the courthouse burns down every few years.

7. I resolve to join an obscure religious cult that does not believe in record keeping or in participating in military service.

8. When the tax collector comes to my door, I'll loan him my pen, which has been dipped in rapidly fading blue ink.

9. I resolve that if my beloved wife Mary should die, I will marry another Mary.

10. I resolve not to make a will. Who needs to spend money on a lawyer?

Of course, birth and death dates in genealogy are important to have. While backtracking one family group, I came upon a death date entry indicating only that the man's demise was "None too soon."

--- Rootsweb E-newsletter

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!