Be Prepared to be Mystified

In addition to surprises, once you begin researching your family history you will encounter at least one mystery, maybe more.  For example, there will be periods where an ancestor disappears, and then suddenly reappears. Where did he or she go? Or a census will list a family member as having one name, and the next census will list a person born the same year but with an entirely different name. What’s going on?

The” name” mystery is usually easier to solve than the “where were they?” mystery.  Early census records were compiled by people – census takers – who wrote down the information given to them by the people they were interviewing.  A name could have been misheard or misspelled. In many cultures, people went by their middle names or call names. It’s possible that the first census used his or her more formal first name, and the second census used the middle name or a nickname. 

In the1860 Census, the first census he appeared in, my great-grandfather’s name was listed as Albert. In the next census, he was Augustus, the next  August, then Gust, then plain Gus. Where the heck the Albert came from, I have no idea, and probably never will. Anyone who might know the answer has long passed.

My biggest “where were they?” mystery involves my great-great-grandfather Thomas, who was born in Oneida County, NY, in 1828. He does not appear in a census until 1870, after he and his wife had moved to Wis. In the 1860 census, his wife Eliza is listed as living with her parents and siblings under her married name, but no Thomas. His brother Charles is listed in the 1850 and 1860 Censuses as running the family farm in Oneida County, but no Thomas.  How does a man escape being listed in the census for the first 40 years of his life? And where in the world was he?

As you dig deeper into your family history, you’ll have to accept that some mysteries are not meant to be solved.  What mysteries lie in your family history?

Discover your roots and watch the branches of your family tree begin to grow.

pjefamilyresearch@gmail.com

For more information on Family History Research services, visit TheMemoryQuilt.com
and click on Family History Research.

Be Prepared to be Surprised

Once you start looking into your family’s history, be prepared for some surprises. In following my maternal grandfather’s line, I discovered what I considered to be an unusual custom. 

Several generations ago, when large families – 10 to 15 children – were the norm and the child mortality was high, it was common to find more than one child within a family with the same name. This would happen after a child died; the next child born of the same gender would often be given the dead child’s name.

To say I was surprised at this custom would be putting it mildly. My initial reaction was that each child deserved his or her own name. And wouldn’t you get a little superstitious when the child with that name keeps dying?  In my family, my grandfather’s grandmother was Mary #3.

But then I began to run into it more and more often. I have heard these children called “replacements,” but have come to believe the custom was more of a memorial, a tribute to the deceased child.   What will surprise you about your family’s history?

Discover your roots and watch the branches of your family tree begin to grow.

pjefamilyresearch@gmail.com

For more information on Family History Research services, visit TheMemoryQuilt.com
and click on Family History Research.

The Census Index Name Game – Part II

Occasionally you won’t be able to find a relative in a particular census. You can find them in the census 10 years prior, and you find them in the census 10 years later living in the same place. What happened in-between?

As I mentioned in The Census Index Name Game – Part I, it could be that their name was misspelled or incorrectly transcribed in the census index, or it could be something as simple as no one was home when the census taker made his rounds.

A tracking method that has worked for me is to choose a neighbor, usually someone on the same page of the census where you found your relative, and see if you can find that neighbor in the census where you’re unable to find your relative. If your family is listed in that census, they should be on the same page as their neighbor, or within close proximity.

Discover your roots and watch the branches of your family tree begin to grow.

pjefamilyresearch@gmail.com

For more information on Family History Research services, visit TheMemoryQuilt.com
and click on Family History Research.

The Census Index Name Game

A rose by any other name¹…Roselyn, Rosella, Roseanne, even Katelyn…could still be your ancestor.

Let’s say you know your ancestor’s name was Rose. It’s quite possible Rose was a nickname, and her real name was Roselyn, or Rosella, or Roseanne.  Even with the correct surname, tracking a relative through the censuses can be confusing if you’re looking for a specific first name, but your relative is listed under another name.

There are basically two ways to look for an ancestor in the census records:

1)      Search the census indexes available through many subscription genealogy online databases,² or

2)      Search the individual, handwritten census pages (online or via microfilm).

The index search is by far the fastest and easiest route, but it’s frequently complicated by errors. These indexes have been transcribed directly from the handwritten census pages, and are often transcribed incorrectly, resulting in misspellings or completely wrong names.

 For example, in the 1910 Federal Census my grandmother Ida Kniss is listed in Ancestry.com’s census index as Ida Brairs. The index transcriber had mistaken a capital “K” for a capital “B,” a small “n” for an “r,” and so on. Because she was living at the time with her maternal grandparents who had a different surname, there was no other family member’s surname to compare it to, making her very difficult to locate using the index.

A similar bad transcription could have happened to your ancestor. Roselyn could have been transcribed as Katelyn, Rosey could have become Kasey.

I was able to find my grandmother only because I knew she was living with her maternal grandparents and what their names were. If I didn’t know that information, I would have had to search for her through the individual, handwritten census pages. That can be an extremely time-consuming task, depending on how large your ancestor’s community was and how much information you have. Add to that the legibility, or more likely, the illegibility of the census taker’s handwriting, and you could spend hours searching for your family.

The fairly small town of Chippewa Falls, Wis., where my grandma grew up had 10 wards in 1910. Each ward has its own set of census records, one with as few as 10 pages, one with as many as 27 pages.  Imagine trying to wade through the census pages for a large city.

If you decide to use the census index records to locate a relative, first check the names of the rest of the family to make sure you have the right family, and then check the handwritten census pages. You might see a different name than the census index transcriber did, because you know what you’re looking for.

If you are unable to locate your ancestor in a census index by keying in her real name, remember: transcription error is always a possibility. Think beyond the actual spelling of your ancestor’s name.  What are the most likely ways the given name or the surname could be misspelled? Always search with an open mind.

Discover your roots and watch the branches of your family tree begin to grow.

pjefamilyresearch@gmail.com

For more information on Family History Research services, visit TheMemoryQuilt.com
and click on Family History Research.

¹Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, 1600; http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/305250.html

²Historical societies or genealogy societies for some small, less populated counties may have indexes for certain censuses available online at no cost.

Making Sense of Census Records – Your second best family history resource

When possible, it’s best to start your family history research with family interviews. Learning surnames and siblings’ names, as well as the names and locations of towns where your ancestors once lived, will be a big help when you start searching the census records.

Knowing at least one complete name, where the person lived and approximately when he or she was alive will make searching the census records easier. On the other hand, you need to remember that the early census records were compiled by people – census takers – who wrote down the information given to them by the people they were interviewing. While most immigrants spoke some English, many did not read or write English. Therefore, names are often misspelled or spelled phonetically and birth and immigration dates may be incorrect.

Even with these errors, census records can be a goldmine of information for the family history researcher.  From the first Federal Census in 1790 to the 1840 Census, only the name of the head of household was listed.  The remaining family members were not named, but counted by category -- grouped by age, gender and whether free or slave.

Beginning with the 1850 Federal Census, a great deal more information became available. Here are a few examples of what you can learn about your ancestors from the census:

• name, sex, age, color and occupation of each member of the household
  (1850-1930)
• married/attended school within the year (1850-1880)
• value of real estate (1850-1870)
• place of birth (state, territory, country) (1850-1930)
• father’s/mother’s place of birth ( 1880-1930)
• person’s relationship to head of household (1900-1930)
• year of immigration to the U.S. (1900-1930)
• number of years of present marriage (1900-1910)
• mother of how many children/number of these children living (1900-1910)
• own a radio set (1930)

The 1890 Federal Census was destroyed by a fire in 1921. Most of the records not burned in the fire were made unusable by water and smoke damage.  Several of the subscription databases are trying to recapture the 1890 data through state, territorial and other censuses and city directories from around that time.

The 1930 Census is the most recent census data currently available.  The 1940 Census data will become available in 2012. By law, the data must be 72 years old (presumably the life expectancy of the average person) before it can be released.

Discover your roots and watch the branches of your family tree begin to grow.

pjefamilyresearch@gmail.com

For more information on Family History Research services, visit TheMemoryQuilt.com
and click on Family History Research.

In Honor of Memorial Day: Getting Information from WWI Draft Registration Cards

You may not have had a Revolutionary War soldier in your family like one of my clients, but you most likely have a soldier or two who served his or her country somewhere in your family line.

My father was a marine. My paternal and maternal grandfathers both served in WWI. Both were privates, both 21-year-old small town boys seeing the world for the first time.

“During World War I, there were three registrations. The first was on June 5, 1917, registering men between the ages of 21 and 31. The second was on June 5, 1918, registering men who had turned 21 since June 5, 1917 (A supplemental registration on Aug. 24, 1918, registered those becoming 21 since June 5, 1918.). The third registration was held on September 12, 1918, and registered men 18 through 45. So, all men born between 1872 and September 1900 who were not in active military service by June 1917 filled out draft registration cards, whether they were native born, naturalized, or alien.”  http://www.eogen.com/USWorldWarIDraftRegistrations

WWI draft registration cards, available through Ancestry.com and other subscription online genealogy databases, can give you some personal information about your relatives that you may not get anywhere else, such as height (tall, medium, short), build (slender, medium, stout), hair color, eye color, place of birth, current address, nearest relative, marital status, name of employer, etc., as well as being able to see their personal signature.  Is WWI military service a part of your family’s history?

Discover your roots and watch the branches of your family tree begin to grow.

pjefamilyresearch@gmail.com

For more information on Family History Research services, visit TheMemoryQuilt.com
and click on Family History Research.

   

Fort Snelling National Cemetery, Minneapolis, MN ©pje

Touching a Part of History

Not every family will have a Mayflower passenger, Georg e Washington or Florence Nightingale as a member; however, everyone has family members that have touched a part of history in some way.  My historical fiction book, “The Memory Quilt,” was based loosely on my paternal grandmother’s family’s experiences during the Cloquet-Moose Lake Fire of 1918. Her family survived the fire, which consumed the towns of Cloquet, Moose Lake and parts of Duluth, by covering themselves with wet blankets and rugs and lying in the bottom of a shallow gravel pit they had dug when building the foundation for their new barn. 

My maternal great-great-great-grandparents came to the U.S. from Germany on a clipper ship. They left Germany on Oct. 2, 1865, and arrived in NY on Nov. 15.  A similar trip taken by so many other immigrants, and yet imagine that voyage: six weeks on the ocean in a ship with no motor, just sails; mom, dad and five kids – the youngest an infant less than a year old. 

In following a client’s paternal grandmother’s line, we discovered that she had several ancestors that fought in the Revolutionary War, and one that fought in the War of 1812. She also had two ancestors that lived in New England in the 1640s, long before the Declaration of Independence was signed, long before the U.S. was a country.  And yet, no one had ever talked about it.


Learning how and where your family has been a part of history, such as surviving a catastrophic event, being part of a wave of immigration from a particular country or having a role in establishing a new, independent nation, is very exciting. Discovering your roots can help you touch a part of history through your ancestors’ lives.


Discover your roots and watch the branches of your family tree begin to grow.

pjefamilyresearch@gmail.com

For more information on Family History Research services, visit TheMemoryQuilt.com
and click on Family History Research.