Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

30 x 30 wrap up

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My March 30 x 30 challenge ended yesterday. I challenged myself to do 30 minutes of genealogy research every day for 30 days (in this case, March 1 to 30). Some of you said you’d join me.

For me, this was a successful challenge! As in my November 2016 30 x 30 challenge, I spent a lot of time transcribing. I will say that having a project like that makes the challenge easier because it was always there for me to turn to. But it wasn’t completely about the transcribing. Here’s what I accomplished:

  • I did at least 30 minutes of research for probably 28 days (a couple of days I forgot!).
  • I transcribed 24 documents in the Civil War pension file of my 2nd great grandfather, George Washington Adams (1845-1938).
  • I abstracted six documents in that pension file.
  • I made a few breakthroughs in researching that 2nd great grandfather’s second family.
  • I managed to stay focused on the Adams family, my goal for 2017.
  • I remembered to log each of my sessions! (Full disclosure: For the transcriptions, I counted checking off a document on my checklist logging.) I feel like I’m slowly building up the research log habit.

I can tell you in all sincerity that if it weren’t for this challenge, a fraction of those things would have been accomplished. Some days I just didn’t feel like thinking about my research, but because of the challenge, I pulled out that pension file and started transcribing. It has 138 documents and I’ve transcribed 89 if them (almost two-thirds!) and abstracted 31. I still have a ways to go, but thanks to this challenge, the light is starting to shine at the end of the tunnel.

How about you? If you participated in the challenge (or a variation of it), how did it go?

Take another look at your documents

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A recurring theme I heard at RootsTech this month was the value of taking a second (or third) look at the documents you’ve found. I know that I almost always see new things when I do. I think that’s because I’m becoming a better genealogist. And I’m learning more about my family, so my eyes are open to more clues.

When I was flying to RootsTech, I re-read the divorce case documents I’d received in January for my 2nd great grandfather, George Washington Adams (1845-1938) and his second wife, Della (1870-1943). I’d read the whole divorce file at least once before but it wasn’t until this re-reading that I realized that the couple had had a daughter who was born and died between the 1910 census and the time of the divorce in 1920.

Since I noticed that little detail, I was able to find her death certificate at the Family History Library (with the help of my friend and professional genealogist Maria Tello). I was so glad I’d taken a few minutes to re-read that document in preparation for my trip to the Family History Library.

In her RootsTech session, Digging for Details: Getting the Full Story, Jen Ballwin of FindMyPast spoke about the value of mining every single detail from a document. She said that you should “treat each document like it’s the only document you’ll ever find on that ancestor.” I think that’s great advice. If you haven’t already been doing that, you’d be well served if you took the time to go through your documents again and record every teeny detail.

That might feel like an overwhelming proposition (I know it does to me). But like everything else that’s overwhelming, the key is to break it into small parts.

Since my plan is to focus on just one family line in 2017, I’ll see if I can’t spend some time re-examining all the documents I have for a particular ancestor when I’m researching him/her. I think the exception will be those documents that I’ve already abstracted and transcribed. That process gives me the chance to be really thorough and I find that details come jumping out at me. So I’m pretty confident I’ve mined those well.

It can be really tempting to limit ourselves to looking for new documents and checking documents off a checklist as we find them. (That checkmark makes you feel so accomplished!) But if we don’t make the most out of the information contained in the documents we find, we’re not doing ourselves any favors. Go ahead, take a second look!

Illustration by Kate Ter Haar via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

The joys of newspaper research

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This past month or so, I’ve been focusing my genealogy research on a small family unit: My great great grandfather, George Washington Adams, his second wife, Della, and their children. Even though I’m not directly descended from Della, their story (which I picked up on thanks to George’s Civil War pension file) has fascinated me and I’ve been trying to learn more.

I was able to connect some of the dots when I was at the Family History Library last week–many thanks to reader Maria Tello for helping me out there. I even found the death certificate for a child who was born and died between censuses, whom I hadn’t been aware of. With the connected dots I was able to verify some (and debunk some) of the information that was on Della’s Find A Grave page. That page referred to a couple of newspaper articles in the Daily Olympian of Olympia, Washington. I have a Newspapers.com subscription and looked up those articles there, but couldn’t find them. Nor were they available on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site.

When I was at the Expo at RootsTech, I stopped by the Genealogy Bank booth and quizzed them about what makes them special. The representative told me that something like 95 percent of their content is exclusive, so most of the articles they have are not available elsewhere. That was enough for me to give it a try. Taking advantage of the RootsTech discount, I signed up for a year for $60.

My very first search hit pay dirt. And since then, I’ve found more than a dozen really useful articles on this family. It’s not that the family members were famous; it’s just that the newspaper reported on little things, like club meetings, birthday parties and military promotions. And, of course, deaths.

I think my two biggest a ha moments were these:

  • I saw a photo of Della…it’s so nice to see what she looked like! (That’s the photo, above.)
  • I learned that Della and my great grandmother, Hattie Adams, were in the same chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans club together, so I’m assuming they knew one another. Hattie was married to Elmer, one of George’s sons from his first wife. Henrietta. Since Della married George after Hattie and Elmer moved from Kentucky to Washington, I didn’t know whether Della had a relationship with George’s sons who lived in Olympia. Nor do I (yet) know why Della migrated to Washington from Kentucky after she and George were divorced. But that little bit of information makes me want to learn more!

The other thing I’ve enjoyed about looking at these old newspapers is learning a bit about daily life and also realizing that things aren’t all that different now than they were then. Some of the newspaper articles could have come out of our newspapers!

I learned about a few historical things I hadn’t known about (unrelated to my family) as well. I clipped some articles and put them in an Evernote notebook called “Historical observations.” For example, apparently some counties in northern California, together with some in southern Oregon, announced they were planning to secede from their respective states and form a 49th state, called “Jefferson.” This was in 1941. That was news to me!

If you haven’t mined newspapers for information on your family, I encourage you to do so. Based on my experience so far, Genealogy Bank is a worthwhile investment, if you have the money to spend.

Go ahead, contact that courthouse!

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Not all genealogy documents are available on the internetLike many people, I rely primarily on documents I find by searching the internet. When do I library or cemetery research trip, I find information not available online, but when I’m in my office, I search online and if I don’t find what I’m looking for I typically move on.

I know it’s possible to contact courthouses or state archives for documents but over the years I’ve done little of that. In the last couple of weeks, however, I hit the jackpot when I took that extra step.

I’ve been working on transcribing the Civil War pension file of George Washington Adams, my 2nd great grandfather. In it was a divorce decree for his 1920 divorce from his second wife, Della. (I’m descended from his first wife, Henrietta.) That piqued my curiosity because it gave George custody of their “infant son” and the only son I knew about was 12 at the time of the divorce. I wondered if there was another son and also why the 75-year-old father was given custody over the 50-year-old mother. The decree referred to pleadings and depositions in the case and I wanted to get my hands on those. It was Christmas, so I couldn’t pick up the phone (and I don’t like picking up the phone), so I wrote a letter to the Circuit Court Clerk of McLean county, Kentucky.

To my delight, just a few days later, she got back to me telling me that the documents I sought were in the State Archives and giving me a little extra information to make easier for the archivist to find them. She also gave me a phone number for the Archives. So I called and talked to a lovely young man and gave him a credit card number. That very same day he emailed me photos of the entire file. I think it cost me $8. If I’d wanted, he would have mailed a certified copy but I didn’t want to wait that long. (And get this: He added another divorce petition that I didn’t even know about! Six years into their 14-year marriage, Della filed for divorce from George, but she must have dropped it.)

The 30-page divorce file he sent had numerous depositions and probably sparked as many questions as it answered, but it’s another treasure trove. Turns out there was only one son from this marriage, Horace, who was indeed 12 at the time of the divorce. I don’t know why he was called an infant in the decree. But George went into the Old Soldier’s Home just two years later, so now I need to find out what happened to teenage Horace!

Neither the pension file nor this divorce file are available online, though I did order the pension file online. Both are outstanding sources of information about this ancestor. I’m processing the divorce file like I’m processing the pension file, by transcribing the documents and properly sourcing every fact I glean from them.

I encourage you to look beyond those documents available online, even if you’re not in a position to travel. There’s a whole world of documents that haven’t yet been digitized!