Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Why I like to do cemetery research in person

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I am so grateful for the volunteers who post pictures to Find A Grave and Billion Graves. It is such a selfless act and when I can’t see a grave in person I am thrilled when I find ancestor’s grave on one of these sites.

I have a tendency to want to see sources (or a scanned image in the case of documents) with my own eyes when I add them to my family tree. With Find A Grave, seeing a picture is often a terrific substitute.

Recently when doing some research on the McEuen family (part of my Adams line) I was puzzled to see reference to a death date of 1929 on Find A Grave for Ellsworth McEuen (b. 1863), the brother of my great great grandmother, Henrietta Clay McEuen Adams. In my Reunion software, I had his death year as 1928. So I checked the source I’d associated with that 1928 date and it included a personal viewing of his gravestone. When I looked at my photo, I saw that it indeed said 1928.

The Find A Grave photo was less well lit and harder to make out. The wonderful volunteer who took the photo and uploaded the information, Anita Austill, interpreted it as 1929.

Looking at her photo, you can see why:

ellsworthmceuenfagrave

On my visit to that cemetery (the Cumberland Presbyterian Cemetery in Sacramento, Kentucky) two years ago, I was fortunate to have great lighting when taking a picture of that same gravestone. The 1928 date is crystal clear. (Click on the photos to see larger versions).

gravemarker-ellsworth-mceuen-mclean-ky

I’m not criticizing the volunteers who contribute these photos. I know that this gravestone was one of many that the photographer took and uploaded, whereas I was focused on my family members. But it does motivate me to take cemetery trips–which I enjoy!–even though photos are often available online.

Sometimes you gotta browse

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Sometimes you gotta browse recordsI was going crazy looking for my great great grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Igleheart, and his family on the 1880 census. None of my searches of various sites turned him up. I really wanted to find that census, because I knew from the 1900 census that his wife, Mattie, had given birth to 11 children, only three of whom were alive in 1900. I had found five of them, but I assumed that finding the 1880 census would reveal the names of more. (Mattie was 25 in 1870.)

So I decided I would browse my way through the census looking for the family. I had a good idea they were living in McLean county, Kentucky, where he lived before the Civil War. (He fought in that war.) I knew that in 1870 they lived in Arkansas, something I initially doubted but was confirmed in his Civil War pension record. But since they had a child born in 1881 in Kentucky, I felt comfortable trying Kentucky first.

I had found Ben’s mother and stepfather in the 1880 census in Sacramento, McLean, Kentucky, so I started there. I browsed forward a page at a time, scanning the handwritten names. After a few pages, I decided to start looking the opposite direction, so I went back to his mother and started scanning a page at a time backward. Sure enough, just two pages behind his mother, there they were! The words “Igleheart, B.F.” jumped right out at me. His age and his family members’ names and ages matched up. Eureka!

So why didn’t they show up on a search? A simple transcription error. The name had been indexed as “Lylehuist.” When I look at it, I can see why. (I bet you can too, if you squint at the image above.) In Ancestry, where I found the document, I edited the record to add the name Igleheart in order to help others. I don’t see that record coming up on a search of Igleheart, though.

The 1880 family included two children, born in the 1870s whose names I didn’t have. They’ve now been added to my family-tree software. I still have four more children to find.

I have to say, it was really exciting to spot this family. I was in a college library among strangers, so I managed to keep from shouting out.  I did raise both arms in victory, though!

Counted twice on the census

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Counted twice on the censusOver the holiday weekend I spent some time researching my 3d great grandparents on my father’s side, Henry Clay McEuen (1823-1894) and his wife Elizabeth Baker McEuen (1829-1917). They lived their lives in Kentucky.

Henry and Elizabeth had 14 children, the eldest of whom was my great great grandmother, Henrietta McEuen Adams (1847-1902). As part of checking my sources, I was looking at Source 22, the 1880 federal census entry for Henrietta and her husband George Washington Adams (1845-1938) in Rumsey, Kentucky.

The entry for George and Henrietta spanned two pages. When I was looking at the second page, I noticed that Henrietta’s parents were on that page. They were living with nine of their children, along with four grandchildren and Elizabeth’s mother–a four-generation household. I went to add that source to their record in Reunion and saw that I already had a (different) source for them for the 1880 census. I figured I’d duplicated the same source and was surprised to see it was a separate enumeration, on a different date, in a different town. In this second enumeration, the youngest five of their children were with them. The names and ages all matched. It was clear to me that it was the same family.

I did a little googling and discovered that being counted twice isn’t that unusual. The census is supposed to reflect the state of a household as of the census date (which in 1880 was 1 June). But clearly, in the case of this family, it reflected the household on the days the enumerator knocked on the door. I suspect that’s not unusual.

On the first enumeration, on 11 June 1880, in Rumsey, McLean, Kentucky, Henry is listed as 55 years old and a farmer. In the second enumeration, on 29 June 1880, in Sacramento, McLean Kentucky (10 miles away on today’s roads), Henry is listed as 56 years old and a “tobacco speculator” (or at least that’s what I think it says–let me know if you think otherwise when you look at the photo above). A quick look at Henry’s birth date revealed that he was in fact a year older–he celebrated a birthday on 28 June, the day before the second enumeration.

I’m speculating that some time between 11 June and 29 June, Henry and Elizabeth (or Betty, as she was known), packed up their five children under 20 and moved to Sacramento. They left behind the four older children who had lived with them, including Lucretia, a widow, and her four kids, along with Betty’s mother, Mahala Baker. Henrietta and George lived nearby.

I wonder what prompted the couple to move away from five of their kids and her mother. Perhaps Sacramento was a better place to be a tobacco speculator, or perhaps Henry had not bought land yet, so couldn’t call himself a farmer. I look forward to trying to dig into this a little more to see why the family might have moved.

It’s really fun to me how a single discovery like this–a family being counted twice on a census–can lead to further hypotheses and discoveries. If they’d moved in May or July, rather than June, I wouldn’t have had this level of detail to go on.

I love playing detective and I’m grateful to Henry and Betty for providing so many clues!

 

The power of the deadline

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page 1 dave's letter to bea testIn my last post, I blogged about how I needed to reignite my interest in doing family history research. Due to competing priorities I hadn’t done any research in awhile and I was having difficulty jumping back in. I decided to work on research that I could share with my father when I visit him next week. That deadline helped activate me a little.

But I let the deadline get closer before taking action. Last week was an especially busy week with organizing clients, so it wasn’t until the weekend that I finally did something. And that’s because I selected a small, fun project that I could do in the now-abbreviated time available to me.

A little background: A couple of years ago, my aunt gave the great gift of a hand-written letter from my grandfather to his then-fiancee, my grandmother. In it he poured out his personal history in the hopes of putting all his cards on the table before they were married. I read and enjoyed it, but retained only a little of the information in my head. (Though I did blog about some of the insights!) I had my grandfather’s handwriting analyzed by Nancy Douglas. (Fascinating!) I had shared the handwriting analysis with my father, but never the actual letter.

So I decided to transcribe the letter before I leave town. I started on Sunday and it’s been such a fun project! The letter is 37 pages, handwritten. But the writing and spacing are large, so it’s not a daunting task. A little bonus is that the letter, when given to me, was missing three double-sided pages. I found those pages in a bundle of love letters my father gave me this past December. So I’ve been able to scan those missing pages and include them in the transcription.

This project has reinforced to me the power of the deadline and the incredible value of transcribing. In the process of transcribing this letter, I’ve really read it. I’ve taken note of what a good writer my grandfather was (he ended up becoming a newspaper reporter) and what a humorous writer he was. It’s given me a little insight into the similarities between my father and grandfather.

It’s also given me a peek into the hardships he endured as a child and young man and what a hard worker he was. I learned, for example, that in high school he worked after school from 3 pm to 11 pm every school day and all day Saturday and Sunday at a movie theater. And for all those hours he earned $14 a week. That was 1922 and Google tells me that would be $191.40 in today’s dollars. Not a great hourly wage! But he wrote very proudly of his hard work and earnings.

I haven’t yet finished transcribing–it’s a great project to take in small chunks and that’s what I’ve been doing. But I’m enjoying it so much and feel my genealogy spark turning back into a flame!

Here’s my takeaway from this little experience. I realized that I was able to reignite the flame because:

  • I had a deadline.
  • I chose a small, fun project.
  • I’m getting some great insights and easy-to-read access to them later
  • That project will be important to someone besides me.
  • The project can be done in 15-minute increments.

When I finish this, I have that set of love letters between these same grandparents that I can transcribe if I choose. Or I move on to something else. But the nice thing is that I’m working on family history again!