Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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.

Time for January 30 x 30 check in!

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It’s almost the middle of our January 30 x 30 challenge. For those of you who signed up, how is it going? Are you managing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or organizing or scanning or whatever it is you set out to do)?

My challenge was made a little extra challenging by travel. I was in Walla Walla, Washington, visiting my dad from January 3 to 12.  I’m happy to say that I did manage to research every day, but one of those days barely counts. The day I traveled home (a 12-hour journey by car and plane) I thought I’d get research done on the plane, but when I started working I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind. So the ten minutes I put in was barely productive. I give myself credit for at least trying, but execution was not impressive.

One thing that’s helped me get back on track is that yesterday, back at my desk, I decided to pull out my 2nd great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, which I’d received way back in 2015. At the NGS conference that year, I heard Julie Miller talk about these files: what they contain and how to process them. I immediately requested the complete pension files for my three Union veteran ancestors from the National Archives. I’ve already processed the other two but had not focused on the file of Benjamin Franklin Igleheart. Since I’ve turned my attention to the Igleheart line, this is a natural thing for me to work on.

Once I pulled it out of the file (I haven’t yet scanned it), I saw that I’d started by putting the pages in chronological order and created a source citation for the whole pension file. The next step is to create a source citation for each individual document, print the citation on a label and affix the label to the paper document before scanning the whole document. After it’s scanned, I’ll start transcribing it. Yesterday I spent 45 minutes creating the citations and their labels and got through about eleven documents before having to move on to something else. For the near future, this will be the project I’ll be working every day.

I’d forgotten how great it was to have a project like this that I can break down into tiny bites. I love knowing exactly what I’m going to be working on and I love that there are lots of little milestones in this giant project so I can celebrate my progress.

Enough about me. I hope your challenge is going well and I look forward to hearing about it in the comments!

My 2020 genealogy goals

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I have a confession to make. I’m good at setting genealogy goals at the beginning of the year but I’m very bad at paying attention to them. One of the problems is that in the past I’ve set up complicated (though measurable) goals that I’m not able to keep top of mind. I set a complicated goal chart as part of my 2015 goals and I’m pretty sure I didn’t look at it all year. Another problem I’ve encountered is that my genealogy goals were sometimes unrealistic. In the post linked above, I wrote, “I’ve learned that when I create unrealistic goals I tend to ignore them.” That is so true.

So this year, I’m keeping it simple. I’ve decided to focus on my paternal great grandmother’s line, the Iglehearts, after having spent a couple of years researching her husband’s line. It’s full of opportunity because I have a Civil War Union veteran in that line (Benjamin Franklin Igleheart, 1845-1913) whose Civil War pension file I haven’t yet transcribed or analyzed. I can also trace myself back to the Mayflower on that line, but I haven’t verified everyone in that path. I’m excited to shift gears a little and focus on some different people.

Here are the goals I set out for myself for 2020, which I wrote in Evernote on an airplane ride on January 3. They feel gentle and realistic.

  2. Transcribe Benjamin Franklin Igleheart’s Civil War pension
  3. Trace myself back to the Mayflower by Thanksgiving
  4. Eliminate the downloaded documents backlog
  5. Create habit of processing documents as I download them
  6. Keep logging each research session (including next actions)
  8. Consume purchased learning resources
  9. Watch at least one webinar a week

If I can build a daily-research habit and a habit of watching a webinar every week, this will be a huge win. I think the practices outlined above will help stay in touch with my research and give me focus if I flounder. My goal of cultivating a daily research habit probably will mean lots of 30 x 30 challenges in 2020!

I tend to select a word of the year at the beginning of each year and this year’s word is INTENTION. These genealogy goals feel full of intention and I really think my word will bring me back to them every day.

How about you? Did you create genealogy goals for 2020? If so, feel free to share them!

 

Photo by Hobbies on a Budget via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Preparing for a deep dive

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When I started doing genealogy research almost a decade ago, I was all about identifying my direct-line ancestors and making my tree taller. I committed to not adding anyone to my tree, thank goodness, unless I had at least one documented source that linked that person to my family. But once I added someone and filled in the basic birth, marriage, death and census data, I moved on.

Then, a few years later, I realized that I would benefit from adding collateral relatives to the tree. (It seems painfully obvious to me now, but it didn’t when I started.) All along, I struggled with maintaining focus and, in 2014, I devised a strategy of focusing on one of my four lines per quarter, rather than jumping all over my family tree when I sat down to research.

Three years later, in 2017, I decided to spend a year on one line, my paternal grandfather’s line (Adams) and then extended that year to 18 months. I tried shifting gears to my paternal grandmother’s line (Rasco), but the Adamses keep drawing me back.

The Adams family was the focus of my recent Kentucky research trip. Specifically, I’ve spent the majority of my time on my 2nd great grandfather, George Washington Adams (1845-1938).

When I attended the National Genealogical Society conference in May, I heard Elizabeth Shown Mills talk four times. Several of those talks have inspired me to dig deeper on this ancestor. Her talk on context, in particular, had a big impact. In it she offered an explanation for why context is so important, along with specific suggestions for how to find context for our ancestors’ lives. It really makes me want to try to understand what life was like for this man and his family.

Why George? He fought for the Union in the Civil War, and I sent away for his pension file back in 2015. It was a thick one: 138 documents and 236 scanned pages. But I realize now it only gave me a window into a small portion of his life. I transcribed that file so I became very familiar with his life while he was living in the National Home for Disabled Soldiers from 1922-1933 and the five years after he left it until his death. (He would move from adult child to adult child fairly frequently and telegraph the pension office every time he did it so he wouldn’t miss a check.) But none of those documents gave me an inkling that he served in the state legislature in the 1890s and early 1900s and also was a magistrate during that time. That I gleaned through newspaper research later.

After his first wife died in 1902, he had a seemingly acrimonious second marriage, with two divorce filings (one of which was completed). He had twelve children, and his youngest child was born 40 years after his oldest (my great grandfather, Elmer Henry Adams).

All this interesting on the face of it. But what I want to do is to research it within the context of life at the time he was living. And once I’ve done that, I’d like to revisit the many documents I have for him and look at them in the proper context.

I think I’ll start with more newspaper research. (Instead of searching for familiar names, I’ll actually read the articles.) I’d like to research some of the people who lived around him to help fill out the picture as well. The syllabus from Elizabeth Shown Mills’ talk on context will be a guide for the types of sources I can consult to really paint a picture of the 93 years during which George Washington Adams lived.

But before I get started, I want to process the documents I found during my research trip, which will be the focus of this month’s 30 x 30 challenge for me. But I’m excited to dig into George’s life and times and see where it takes me!

Photo by Amy Lister on Unsplash