Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Making connections

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Brown family, before trip to Nebraska, 1922

1922. My grandfather, Crawford Brown, is the boy on the left. The family drove that car to Nebraska from Missouri shortly after.

So far, for me, genealogy has been a fairly solitary pursuit. That’s kind of how I like things. I like to go at my own pace and I tend to stick to myself.

That’s not necessarily a good idea, as I discovered this week. On Sunday, I was contacted through this blog by my mother’s first cousin, Jerry Brown, who, along with his sister, Judy, has done extensive genealogical research. We corresponded a little, and then he introduced me via email to a whole bunch of Brown cousins, including some who live in the area I’m hoping to visit on a research trip, and they’ve been reaching out to me. (You can read a couple of the comments I received from them in the comments on this post.)

It’s been wonderful–what a friendly and loving family. They shared reminiscences of my grandparents (their aunt and uncle) and also shared some amazing family photos, including the wonderful photo above, which was sent to me by John Laflen.

The Browns have been so wonderful, it makes me want to reach out to other parts of my family, too.

If you’re reading this and you’re one of my Brown cousins, thank you! I look forward to meeting you in person. If you happen to be related to another part of my family, please feel free to leave a comment. I’m so glad that Jerry Brown did.

Planning a genealogy research trip

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I live in St. Louis and my maternal roots go back to western Missouri. My mother was born in Jefferson City, but moved to Spokane, Washington, in 1936 with her family. I grew up in Washington and always knew I had Missouri cousins. Though I’ve lived in Missouri for 23 years, I’ve yet to seek out those cousins, nor travel to the area (some four or five hours away) to try to track down genealogy records.

But now that I’m back into the family history research, I’m itching to go on a genealogy research trip. Looking at my calendar, I see that I have three free days next week, so the thought occurred to me that that might be just the time to take a little road trip to look into the Browns and the Jeffries.

Of course, as an organized person, I know that such a research trip will require some planning if it’s going to be productive. But I have to admit that when I think about planning it, my head starts spinning a little. So I figure what I need to do before I take such a trip is the following:

  • See how many of the four western Missouri counties in my database I can realistically fit in a quick trip
  • Choose the counties I’d like to visit
  • Figure out what family members I’d like to research, what records I already have and what I’d like to track down
  • Locate the cemeteries where I know folks were buried, based on death certificates
  • Create a list of other family members who might be buried in those cemeteries
  • Find out where I might be able to obtain the records I seek
  • Know just what I’m looking for when I go to courthouses or libraries
  • Figure out where to stay
  • Figure out driving routes
  • Ask my mother for names of cousins I might reach out to

When I write it all down like that, the spinning in my head slows down somewhat. I need to remind myself that I don’t have to get everything done in one visit. I can take plenty more road trips. But I do want to put some planning into my first one so that it’s at least somewhat productive.

This sounds like great fun. I will post the results (and some photos) here, after the research trip takes place!

Playing with Ages in Reunion 10

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I haven’t had a lot of time to play around with the Reunion 10, the family-tree software I use on my Mac, but one thing I have enjoyed is the Ages feature. I don’t know if this was available on Reunion 9, but if it was, it wasn’t as accessible.

Here’s how it works: Click on a couple in the Family View and on Ages in the left sidebar and in the right sidebar you’ll see exactly how old they were at the various that are entered in their event database. (You can toggle between the two members of the couple.)

For me, this brings these people back to life. I see, for example, that my maternal grandmother, Susie Brown, was 22 years, 9 months and 4 days old when she married my grandfather. And that she was between 25 and 33 when she moved from Missouri to Washington state. (I know that trip occurred in 1936, so she was actually 28 or 29.) I’d always known that my mother was 3 years old when that migration occurred, but I’d never thought about it from my grandmother’s perspective.

Perhaps since I always remembered my grandmother as an old person, I never bothered to think about what it must have been like for her, as a young woman, to move to a strange (perhaps exotic) part of the country. I haven’t really thought about what the over-the-road trip (this was before airplanes were commonly used) with two small children must have been like.

Of course, this makes me wish I’d quizzed her and my mother more when I was growing up. It’s not too late to ask my mother, but she’ll have no memory of the actual move. But she can share family lore.

Simply playing around with the Ages feature on one relative has sparked a whole line of inquiry. I can’t wait to see what it sparks as I use it more.

Fruits of my family visit

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When I visited my parents earlier this month I had high hopes of gleaning some facts and solving some mysteries. Alas, my parents didn’t have the information I sought.

I did, however, go through a box of old photos in my mother’s closet that she had taken after her mother died. They were mostly photos that her mother-in-law had collected. Unfortunately, most weren’t labeled, but there were some gems in there.

Wheeler Family 1903, Nebraska

My great-grandmother’s family, in 1903, in Nebraska

Here’s one of my favorites. It’s my great-grandmother, Rhoda Wheeler, before she became Rhoda Brown. The photo was taken in 1903 and the family lived in Carleton, Nebraska (Thayer County). Rhoda’s father owned a hotel. That’s her in the back row, second from the left. She’s only 16 in the photo. Those are her identical twin sisters in the middle. There were many photos in that box of the twins through the years.

(Click on the photo, then, if necessary, click on it again in the next screen and you can take a good look at this family.)

Photos like these always amaze me because they feel so real. The expressions are so dour, you wish you could read their minds. I look forward to learning about all the people in this photo!

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When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.