Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

What’s hiding in your unprocessed documents?

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One of the mysteries I’ve been pondering for years is the whereabouts of my great great grandfather, George Washington Adams (1938-1945) after his divorce in McLean County Kentucky in June of 1920 and before he checked into the National Home for Disabled Soldiers in Danville, Illinois, in July 1922. I haven’t found him on the 1920 census and it’s been bugging the heck out of me. In the divorce, he was awarded custody of his 12-year-old son Wayne Horace Adams (1907-1976) and for the longest time I was looking for the two of them.

A few years ago, I found Horace (as he was known then) on the 1920 census living with his half brother. I blogged about how an indexing error kept his whereabouts elusive. But I still haven’t found George on the census. When I was at RootsTech this year, I did a free consult with a genealogist from Trace, seeking help on the question George’s whereabouts between 1920 and 1922. The genealogist asked me why I wanted to know. I didn’t have a good answer, but I still wanted to know. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any Eureka! moments in that short session, but she gave me some avenues to pursue.

In any case, as I was working through my backlog of downloaded documents during the August 30 x 30 challenge, I processed a couple of newspaper articles that shed some light! It was very exciting. (I found out an article about him visiting a son in Oklahoma in 1921 and returning to Kentucky in 1922, a month before entering the soldiers’ home, with his son, after an extended visit to Oklahoma. I don’t know which son, but it’s something.)

Those newspaper articles had been languishing on my hard drive for two years! If I were processing my documents as soon as I downloaded them, which is always my goal, I would have had this information years ago. This is an inconsequential example, but it shows how these newspaper articles–which can be a bit tedious to process–can contain important nuggets. (Here’s a post I did on how I process newspaper articles.)

Lesson learned. My resolve is stronger than ever to eliminate that backlog, which I’m working on once again in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge.

Small lessons from a cemetery visit

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When I drove home to St. Louis from Walla Walla, Washington, last month I planned my route so that I could stop at the Carleton Cemetery, in Thayer County, Nebraska, where all four of my 3rd great grandparents are buried. These are the grandparents of my grandfather, Crawford A. Brown (1906-1996).

Though I had seen their grave markers on Find A Grave, I think it’s always nice to visit a cemetery in person and make that connection. (I blogged a few years ago about why I prefer in-person visits to cemeteries.)

What I was actually looking for were two shared graves. One was for Newton Perry Brown (1853-1938) and Antoinette Garlock Brown  (1855-1922), my grandfather’s paternal grandparents and the other was for Samuel Vorce Wheeler (1852-1937) and Elizabeth Jane (Jennie) Nebergall Wheeler (1857-1933), the parents of his mother.

I didn’t have the luxury of visiting when the sun was high in the sky (time of day can really make a difference in the quality of your cemetery photos), since I started the day in Wyoming. And I was a little distracted while I was at the cemetery because a pebble hit and cracked my windshield on the way there. Plus I had to pee. So I didn’t spend a lot of time at the cemetery looking for other relatives. But I’m really glad I went.

A couple of tips I occurred to me when I was there.

Look for a cemetery directory of graves. I knew what section of the cemetery to look in for the grave of one set of ggggrandparents because it was noted on Find A Grave. I looked around that section for the grave of the other set but I didn’t it. Then I went back to the entrance to see if I could find a directory. This is what the information area inside the cemetery gates looked like:

 

I wondered about the metal case and lifted the door. There I saw a set of drawers and, sure enough, each contained the cemetery records!

I found the section and plot number the grave and was able to go right to it.

If you’re casting a shadow, consider taking the picture upside down from the other side of the marker. Because it was late afternoon, my shadow was cast onto the gravemarker, which was flush to the ground. But I had the idea of taking it from the other side and just flipping the photo using my phone’s Edit feature. Voila.

Right side up:

Upside down:

I felt like a genius.

I think visiting an ancestor’s grave is a great use of time. I always feel more connected to my ancestor and I absolutely remember where they’re buried if I’ve visited the cemetery. It was nice to drive in the little town where my grandfather was born, even if I didn’t get the chance to spend much time there.

A special 90th birthday present

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My dad, Gene Adams, two days shy of his 90th birthday

I am so happy to be posting again! I left St. Louis on September 6 to drive to 2,000 miles to Walla Walla, Washington, to help my father celebrate his 90th birthday. (He was born 11 Sep 1930.) I drove because I didn’t want to risk transmitting the coronavirus to him and I felt more in control of who I interacted with driving than flying. On the way, my MacBook Pro went belly up and I ended up having to send it in to Apple for repair. I wasn’t up to trying to blog from my phone, so that’s why I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks.

In any case, my computer has been returned good as new (it had a swollen battery that had to replaced) and I’m delighted to be back to blogging.

I had a lovely visit with my father, whom I hadn’t seen since February, and I’m so glad I made the trip. I took four days/three nights in each direction and I drove alone. It was amazing to see this part of the country. I spent the night in two states, South Dakota and Montana, that I’d never been to before. That brings my total number of states visited to 48! I listened to lots of podcasts and I even managed to do a little cemetery research on the way home. (More on that in a future post.)

What I wanted to write about today is the birthday gift I gave my father. At 90, he doesn’t need stuff. Because of COVID, we couldn’t have a birthday party. So, at the suggestion of a friend, I reached out to dozens of people from various parts of his life, asking each of them to send me a 30- to 60-second video wishing him a happy birthday and marking the occasion any other way they wanted to.

I used Trello to track my invitations and responses, which made it really easy. It was such a joy to communicate with these folks and receive their wonderful videos. I ended up with forty videos. I purchased an iPad for him so he can watch the videos when he wants. (He’s a Luddite with no computer and no internet access and no desire for either.)

I put the individual videos on the iPad and also used iMovie on my Mac to string them all together into one video, which I put on the iPad. That turned out to be the way he likes to watch it most. Finally, I bought a lightning-to-HDMI adapter so that he can watch the video on his TV. I did everything manually and found it quite easy, but since then, I have found out about a service that will send out the invitations and the compile the videos for you for a small fee. It’s called VidHug.

He was blown away. Because he’s a Luddite I think he thinks it was a lot harder for me to do than it actually was, though I tried to set him straight. The hardest part was finishing the project without a computer! He really enjoyed hearing from so many loved ones. The video was just plain heartwarming.

This is the best gift I’ve ever given (I’m not great at gift giving) and my father appreciated it so much. I mention it here in case you have an elderly relative (or, really, anyone) you’d like to honor this way.  It seems particularly helpful these days when travel and in-person gatherings are so difficult.

Handwriting: One of the challenges of census research

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Censuses are such a great friend to genealogists. They’ve been digitized and indexed. From 1850 forward they supply household members’ names. And every ten years you get a new batch to work with.

There are lots of reasons to take what’s mentioned in a census with a grain of salt, like the competence of the enumerator or the knowledge of the informant.

But one of the big challenges with census research is handwriting. It’s not just that handwriting has changed through time, so older writing looks unfamiliar.  Often the enumerator seems to have lousy handwriting. (Isn’t it wonderful when you come across a census whose enumerator had perfect penmanship?)  He/she was probably tired after a hard day of knocking on doors. So it’s important to remember when dealing with censuses that a name may not be what it looks like.

This week I’ve been doing tiny projects for my organizing blog and today when I was cleaning out my under-the-desk file cart, I came across a piece a paper I’d created some years ago with census entries for one of my collateral relatives, Henrietta Adams Timmons, daughter of George Washington Adams (1845-1938), whom I write about a lot here. She was living with her father, George, stepmother Della and son, Louis Quincy, in the 1910 census. In the 1920 census was living with her husband, Magellan Timmons, and children Louis, Clayetta and George.

Check out these images from the 1910 and 1920 censuses, respectively. I wrote the names of the people next to the census image.

You can see that Louis’ name is practically indecipherable (and he appears to be called Quincy in 1920, though that’s hardly legible); Magellan has become Michael and Clayetta looks like Sylelta (maybe)? It’s no surprise that Della was indexed Lellar.

The worst part about the bad handwriting of the 1910 census is that the enumerator was George Washington Adams himself!

Of course poor handwriting makes indexing really difficult. Sometimes that means you have to browse, rather than search for your people. I guess my takeaway is that I come across conflicting or confusing names for someone in my family tree, I need to consider whether handwriting might be the culprit.