Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

City directories: a great resource, used carefully

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City directories can provide clues--and sometimes red herringsThis quarter, I’m exploring the Adams family–those ancestors from my paternal grandfather’s line. I’ve been fortunate recently to find my great grandparents heavily represented in city directories in the 1910s and 1920s. I’ve also found my grandparents and even my parents in city directories via Ancestry.com.

An individual’s entry in a city directory can provide some great information (depending on the year), including:

  • Address
  • Spouse
  • Occupation
  • Value of personal property

Tracking an ancestor’s address from year to year can be really revealing.

I was thrilled to see in the 1912 Chehalis County Directory paragraphs about each of the towns in the county. About Quiniault (now spelled Quinault), which is the town that my grandfather and his parents were living in that year, I learned this:

Population: 125. A village on Lake Quiniault, settled in 1890, 150 miles west of Seattle, 60 by rail and mail route, northwest of Montessano, the county seat. 40 north of Hoquiam, the banking point, 28 northwest of Moclips, the shipping point. Mail stage tri-weekly to Hoquiam ($4.00), to Humptulips ($2.00). A.V. Higley, postmaster.

That paints a picture of a very remote place, doesn’t it? Quinault is located on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. The occupation of my great grandfather, Elmer, was listed as farmer. I can’t really imagine what life was like there in that small town, so far from everything, with four small children.

One thing I’ve come to realize about city directories, however, is that offer a snapshot that may look very different than reality. For example, I know from my grandfather’s letter to my grandmother that his parents did not live together in Olympia.  You would not know it from the Olympia city directory, where both Elmer and Hattie are listed at one address year after year. Similarly, my parents are listed in the Spokane city directory in 1954. I know that in fact they were stationed in London at the time. (My father was in the Army.) So as much as I love finding an entry in a city directory for one of my people, I’m learning to not take the information as gospel.

Looking for my grandfather’s birth home

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Looking for my grandfather's birth homeI’m in Portland, Oregon, doing some business planning my friend and colleague, Shannon Wilkinson. (This is something I try to do annually, and it really pays off.)

As I discovered earlier this year, my paternal grandfather, Dave Adams, was born in Portland. The birth announcement I found for him listed a street address for his parents, 749 Roosevelt Street. So I thought while I was here I might see if I could find the home his parents were living in when he was born on November 12, 1904.

Last night, after dark and in the fog, Shannon and I found ourselves near Roosevelt Street. (I had told her about it on the phone when I first found the birth announcement, and she remembered.) As it happens, due to the addition of freeways and an industrial plant in that area, only one residential block of Roosevelt street remains. So it was easy to narrow down our search.

However, some time in the 1930s, Portland changed its numbering scheme for its addresses. The block we were in was the 2200 block. My quest today was to find out whether the last existing residential block of Roosevelt happened to be the same block my great grandparents lived in.

Thankfully, Shannon is savvy about online resources available in Portland and she pointed me to Portland Maps, a city-run website that provides loads of information on each property in Portland. I had written down the address of one of the houses, so I looked it up.  I was able to click on historical permits on that house and the houses around it until I found a permit old enough to reveal the original address. I learned that 2354 Roosevelt was 780 Roosevelt back in the day. I clicked on the next house west and saw that it had been 782 Roosevelt, so I knew I was going in the wrong direction. Unfortunately, there were only a couple of houses east of 2354 Roosevelt, so it became apparent that my great grandparents’ house was one that was destroyed in order to make room for the freeway.

A look at the plat map of Portland in 1906 showed that the whole area had been residential. Shannon and I agree that the turn-of-the-century houses we saw in the last remaining block of Roosevelt probably are a good representation of where the Adams family had lived.

While I was ultimately disappointed in the outcome of this fun little research project, I’m thrilled to have a feel for the kind of housing my ancestors lived in 110 years ago. I’m so grateful to have this information available to me at my fingertips but also glad that I saw those houses in person.

Incidentally, I used the Research Tracker in my Family History Organizer notebook in Springpad (available to you by clicking here) to track this project. I’m finding it a really easy way to keep track of my research without feeling overwhelmed by a big spreadsheet.

Focusing my efforts in 2014

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My strategy for focusing my genealogy efforts in 2014In December every year, I take some time to set some goals. I set them for my organizing business and for my personal life. This will be the second year I’ve set goals for my genealogy research. (If you want, you can read the goals I set last year.)

In thinking about my genealogy goals for 2014, I realized that I really want to be more focused and organized in going about my research. I still struggle with not knowing what to work on in any given session. And that lack of focus makes it hard for me to actually get started.

I just hit upon an idea that I think I’ll try. I’m going to assign a family line to each quarter of the year. In this structure (which I just thought of, so it’s still evolving in my head), I won’t be limited to working on that line necessarily, but if I don’t have something else specific I want to do, I will work on the family line assigned to that quarter.

I’ve decided that the schedule will be as follows:

  • 1st quarter: Adams (my father’s father’s line)
  • 2nd quarter: Brown (my mother’s father’s line)
  • 3rd quarter: Rasco (my father’s mother’s line)
  • 4th quarter: Jeffries (my mother’s mother’s line)

At the start of each quarter, I’ll take stock of where my research lies. I’ll use my progress tracker to see what census, vital and military records I’ve already located.

During each quarter, I’ll try to do the following for each of the lines:

  • Fill in the gaps on my progress tracker
  • Make sure my surname files for that line are organized on my hard drive
  • Ensure that everything in my paper files for that line is also organized on my hard drive
  • Fill in collateral relatives on my family tree in Reunion
  • Search for sources for unsourced data provided to me by cousins
  • Go up at least one generation in verified information
  • Attach photos to my family tree in Reunion

What I like about this idea is that it should keep me more focused. And help me feel less overwhelmed. It should get me past the “what should I work on today?” question that can be such a barrier. And, perhaps best of all, it gives me some specific goals and a deadline–the end of the quarter. (I love a deadline!)

Little clues from personal correspondence

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daveandbea50As I said I would, I waited until I was on the airplane to open the letter from my grandfather, Dave Adams, to his sweetheart, Beatrix Rasco, my grandmother, which my aunt had given me. (That’s the picture from their 50th wedding anniversary announcement at left.) While the letter is 36 pages long, my grandfather’s handwriting was large, and he left ample white space, so it took me no time at all to read it. (There were also several pages missing!)

My grandfather opens the letter by explaining that it is a confession of sorts. He wrote:

“…[B]ecause I have absolute faith in your love, and believe that you will try to understand me, and most of all, because I’m going to clear the path to our marriage at Christmas–or block it–I’m going to write the whole thing. If I could see you–and boy how I wanted to–I could explain the whole matter with a fine chance of getting across, for in my mind there is no guilt….I want to resassure you before I start that no girl is implicated. I fooled you, didn’t I, honey? But as far as I’m concerned, it’s much worse.”

You can imagine that I was chomping at the bit to find out what he was going to confess! But there weren’t any major revelations. (That would have been too easy, right?) Instead I got little clues about how grandfather lived as a child and young man, and some more insights into his parents’ estrangement. I learned that there wasn’t a big blow up or event that led to their separation. Rather, due to economic necessity, my great grandfather, Elmer Adams, lived where he worked and my great grandmother, Hattie, stayed in a more populated area (Olympia) and rented rooms in their house to earn income. Eventually, they decided to make the arrangement permanent and my grandfather was informed by his sister, and then his mother, that the couple would never again share a home.

It led me to think about how our social norms have changed over the last 85 years. Things we wouldn’t bat an eyelash at now (having parents who were separated, for instance) were a potential reason not to marry someone, apparently. My grandfather wrote in his letter that he asked his sister, Dora, if he should “let the fact that I have no united home keep me from marrying. Dora said ‘absolutely not.'”  His siblings gave him the courage to confess his family’s checkered history and ask for his sweetheart’s love and hand in marriage.

I did pick up a few facts that I hadn’t known:

  • My grandfather and his family lived in Portland, Oregon (where he was born on November 12, 1904), until he was four, when the family moved to Quinault Lake, on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. On today’s roads, that’s a 185-mile trip. In the letter, my grandfather mentions that 50 miles of that journey was traveled on the first road ever constructed to the lake (what a remote place that must have been!) and that he made the trip with a broken leg, tied in a box.
  • I didn’t learn why my grandfather’s family emigrated to Washington from Kentucky in the first decade of this century, but I did learn that they made a trip back to Kentucky when he was 10 for a visit that lasted a half year. That must have been a big adventure!
  • I learned that my great grandfather, Elmer, was an industrious man with a propensity for bad luck.  When the U.S. became involved in World War I, he started a spruce mill to create lumber for airplanes. It wasn’t an easy task–he had to build a road up a hillside to the mill site and it took a year before he turned out his first lumber. That happened about November 7, 1918, just days before the end of the war. My grandfather wrote in the letter, “The first day the mill made expenses, the Kaiser quit. I reckon it was because he heard I would be a year older the next day and would probably go warring after him.” With the war over, the demand for spruce evaporated. But the government made good on its promises and Elmer ended up being reimbursed for his loss. Next, Elmer started a logging business in the capital city, Olympia, but a gasoline shortage meant he couldn’t get his logs to the railroad. The letter details other ventures that resulted in a whole lot of hard work but not a whole lot of money.

I treasure this letter because it’s full of love, humor and honesty. I love that my grandmother read it and married him anyway (just a month later). They were married for 58 years, until Dave died in 1986. I worry that we’ve lost the art of letter writing to the expediency of email and, worse yet (from a permanence point of view) text messages. It makes me wonder if future generations will experience the thrill of this kind of discovery from their 21st-century ancestors!