Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Found my first immigrant ancestor!

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I’ve been systematically working my way back through my family tree and I recently made an exciting discovery: my first immigrant ancestor! He’s James Brown, who was born in Ireland around 1810. He’s listed in the 1870 census as having been born in Ireland. At the time of that census, he was living in Muscatine, Iowa, with his wife, Martha. She was also was born in Ireland around 1820.

What’s interesting to me is that my family has always seemed quite devoid of ethnicity (most of the ancestors, I believe, came to the US much earlier than the 19th century) and when, as a child, I asked my parents where we were from, England was always the answer. In fact, I surprised my mother when I told her about her great, great grandfather having been born in Ireland. That was news to her.

I feel like this is opening up a new chapter in my family history research!

When names become people

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I wrote a month ago about finding my grandmother on the 1920 census and being surprised that at the age of 13 my grandmother was classified as a farmer. I noted that her brother, Wilson, also a farmer, was 7 and didn’t know how to read or write. I noticed that in the 1930 census, after they’d moved to Washington state, Wilson was in school and could read and write. That seemed like an achievement.

Just now I discovered that Wilson is William Wilson Rasco, aka my father’s Uncle Bill. I remember him when I was a child. He was loads of fun and would howl in pretend pain when my brothers and I would give him “Indian burns” (i.e. rub his wrist in a twisting motion that’s supposed to hurt.) I knew he was a minister, but he never seemed like one to me, because he was so much fun.

As part of my family history research, I came across an obituary for Uncle Bill, in the Seattle Times. He died in 1996 and was a very accomplished and prominent leader in the United Presbyterian Church in Washington, North Idaho and Alaska.

So thanks to the joys of family history research, this person has gone from the name of a seemingly illiterate boy farmer in Texas to an influential minister with a doctorate in divinity. And a man whose infrequent visits delighted me as a little girl.

Incidentally, the obituary contained this nugget:

A 1978 Seattle Times story noted that Rev. Rasco’s fate was sealed at a young age. His mother, wife of a Yakima County orchardist, almost died in childbirth and vowed to commit her son to the ministry.

Since I’m not directly descended from this William Rasco, I haven’t been researching him. But finding his obituary led me to a newspaper story that let me know my great grandmother almost died in child birth and that my great grandfather was an orchardist. Of course, I need to verify this information, but it’s just another tantalizing thing to look into.

Those darn nicknames

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My great great grandmother's death certificate

My GGGM’s death certificate

When you’re looking at names on a census record, or a family tree someone else has  compiled, it’s so easy to get fixated on the person’s formal name. But, in fact, even on formal documents, a nickname might be used. And if you’re using an index, that can make finding that person difficult.

Case in point: I was looking for the death certificate of my maternal grandfather’s mother. I understood her name to be Antoinette Brown. (I haven’t thoroughly researched her…I saw her name on her husband’s death certificate and thought I’d see if I can find hers, since Missouri makes it so easy.)

I figured it was a good guess that she died in the same county in which they lived and in which he died and I searched on “Antoinette Brown,” “Antonia Brown” and “A Brown.” I got nothing. So I searched county wide for all deaths of Browns between 1910 and 1961 (the date range for which images of the death certificates are instantly available as PDFs) and then searched within that page for 1922, the year that, according to an unverified public tree on Ancestry.com, she had died. There were two 1922 deaths of Browns in Vernon County and one of them was a “Nettie Brown.” Ah ha! Nettie could be a nickname for Antoinette. So I clicked the image, and sure enough, her husband was listed as N.P. Brown. My great great grandfather was Newton Perry Brown. Furthermore, her parents’ names matched with the unsourced but reliable information my grandfather had received from a cousin, so I’m confident this is her.

Family Tree Magazine has a great list of nicknames for common female names. So if you’re having trouble finding a female ancestor, that link might help you find some nicknames to search for.It’s a terrific resource!

Civil War reflections

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Last month I went to the Missouri History Museum to see the special exhibit, The Civil War in Missouri. I have to say, the exhibit stressed and depressed me. What a horrible war, particularly in Missouri, which was recognized by both the Union and Confederacy.

Thanks to my family history research, I believed I had people living in Missouri at that time. But I didn’t have that info at my fingertips, so I wasn’t sure who they were and where they lived. (That’s one reason I subsequently downloaded the Reunion app. I blogged about the Reunion app on my organizing business’s website.)

I learned in the exhibit about General Order No. 11, in which all residents of the better part of four western Missouri counties–no matter what their loyalty was–were ordered to vacate their homes and the counties.  I looked at the map at the exhibit and saw some counties whose names were familiar from my genealogy research. The horror of what these folks endured–being ordered, by name, to vacate their homes and told they couldn’t return to the county (or other specified counties) and then having their homes and communities destroyed by government-ordered fire–is bad enough. When I contemplated that my ancestors might have been among them, it made it even worse for me.

A week or so later, I was researching my great-great grandfather, John Jeffries, who was born in 1850. I found him on the 1860 census, living in Putnam County, Missouri. He was living in Bates County, Missouri in the 1870 census. (In both censuses, he was living with his parents.) I knew that Bates was one of the counties people were forced to leave.

I decided to try to look into the Civil War experience of people in Putnam County and started by locating it on a map. My heart was in my throat as I zoomed out to try to ascertain where within the state the county is located.

And I was flooded with relief to see that it’s in the north-central portion of the state, bordering Iowa. I think that means they would not have endured martial law. Of course, I still have plenty of social history research to do to verify that. And they probably endured another kind of misery there.

As I went through those emotions, I was really struck by how personal family-history research is and how it makes history feel very real. When you have a connection to an individual who lived through an historical event, it makes that event more vivid, more urgent.

Another interesting reflection is how having ancestors living in Missouri during the Civil War, which had both Confederate and Union sympathizers, made the war a little less cut-and-dried for me. I grew up in the state of Washington and so am a true northerner. I was taught that the Union was the side of the righteous and the Confederacy quite the opposite. The fact that my ancestors may have been terrorized by martial law imposed by the Union doesn’t make it any less horrible to me. Boy, there’s a lot of grey area there.