Organize Your Family History

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Processing newspaper articles (screencast)

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Last week I blogged about how I’ve been finding newspaper articles about my father’s family in Olympia, Washington, in the first part of the 20th century. Despite being the state capital, Olympia’s newspaper has a decidedly small-town feel. I was able to find a couple of dozen (if not more) articles about my family, each of which gives me a little nugget of information and a little more of a sense of how they lived.

This morning, I created a twelve-minute screencast of how I process these articles. If you haven’t set up a process yourself, you might find it helpful.

As I said in the screencast, this is one of probably many ways to do it and it’s not necessarily the best way, but it works for me.

To summarize the steps, here’s what I do:

  • Click on the article in Genealogy Bank
  • Click the PDF button to get a pdf of the full page
  • Open the page in Preview
  • Zoom in on the article itself
  • Use Grab to take a screenshot of just the article, in an easily readable size
  • Name the full-page pdf, using my file-naming protocol, and file it in the Surnames folder
  • Copy the name and paste into the filename of the zoomed-in snip, adding the word “snip” to the first part of the file name
  • Add one fact from the article in Reunion, creating a source record for the article
  • Paste the source information from the Reunion source record into the Comments section of the two image files in Finder
  • Move the full-page and the snip file from the Surnames folder to the appropriate subfolder for the person mentioned in the article
  • Drag the image files into the Multimedia area of the source record in Reunion
  • Glean the rest of the information, attaching the newly created source to each fact

Watching the screencast will probably make that more understandable.

I hope you find it helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Using newspapers to fill in the blanks

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I’ve been limiting my research to the Adams line of my family this year. I love the focus that gives me and there has been no shortage of information to ferret out!

Recently, I’ve been looking at newspaper articles in Olympia, Washington, where this family lived in the first four decades of the 20th century. The Daily Olympian (which I access via Genealogy Bank) was full of articles about things we wouldn’t consider of much interest today (like family members who live in the same town visiting one another). These articles help paint a picture of my ancestors’ lives and occasionally help connect dots.

For example, I read that my great great grandfather’s second wife, Della Adams, was critically ill in 1930 and that her son, Wayne Horace Adams, traveled to be at her side at the hospital all the way from Maryland, where he was attending the U.S. Naval Academy. I don’t know how he traveled cross country or how long it took, but it reveals a devotion that is an interesting detail as I try to piece together this family’s puzzling early life. In 1919, according to divorce documents, Della abandoned Horace (as he was known then) to the care of his 74-year-old father (my great great grandfather, George Washington Adams), when he was 12. As a 23-year-old he crossed the country to be with her when she was critically ill. By then, his father was living in the National Soldier’s Home in Danville, Illinois. (Della recovered from her illness and  lived another 13 years.)

These newspaper articles also have allowed me to see how active my great grandmother, Hattie, was in various societies, like the Daughter of Union Veterans and the Daughters of America. I’m also learning the various cities where my grandfather’s sister lived. And I came across a delightful article on a badminton tournament that my own grandparents played in together.

I have the good fortune that my grandfather, Dave Adams, was a reporter for the Daily Olympian when he was in his twenties. So I was able to find some first-person articles that gave me some insight into his life (as well as a picture of him at work). I think my favorite was when he wrote about participating in a spelling bee. He was an excellent writer.

I spent a few hours on Sunday with the newspaper and was faced with the challenge of whether to be selective about which articles I downloaded or to take everything I found. Downloading and processing the articles can get quite tedious, so I wanted to be selective. But I know that even the smallest detail might shed light on a future quandary. (Of course, I have to bear in mind that newspaper articles are not always accurate, but they can provide some great clues.)

So I downloaded with abandon and decided that a few of the articles would reside in the appropriate person’s folder on my hard drive without necessarily getting entered as a source in my genealogy software. But the vast majority are being used as sources because a nugget–even if it’s just a data point about residence–can be gleaned.

In the near future, I plan to outline here how exactly I process these newspaper articles, in hopes that it will be helpful. (I plan to do a screencast.)

How about you? Do you use newspapers in your research? What’s your favorite source for relevant newspaper articles? And what’s the most helpful thing you’ve found in your newspaper research?

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.

Solved! The mystery of my grandfather’s birthplace

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daveadamsbirthannouncementI’ve been frustrated by a little mystery surrounding the birth of my grandfather, David Adams. I knew from the Social Security Death Index that he was born on November 12, 1904. According to census records, he was born in Oregon. In the 1900 census, the family was living in Sacramento, Kentucky. In the 1910 census they were Quinault, Washington, where my great grandfather, Elmer Adams, worked as a farmer.

I visited my parents earlier this month and I asked my father why the family moved from Kentucky to Washington. He said it was never discussed, so he had no idea. When I told him that the census records indicated that his father had been born in Oregon, he was surprised. He had never known the family to live in Oregon. We guessed that perhaps they traveled to the big city of Portland for the birth. That gave me an idea: Why not search for a birth announcement in the Portland newspaper?

Today, I finally had a chance to do that. Thanks to the State Research Guide for Oregon put out by Family Tree Magazine, I was easily able to find the Historic Oregon Newspapers website. A search on the words “Elmer Adams” within five words of one another, limited to newspapers published in 1904, garnered seven results. Only one of those articles was published after November 12. A click later, I saw it: a birth announcement for a son born to Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Adams on November 12. It appeared in the November 30 edition of the Portland, Oregon, Daily Journal. The two-line announcement also gave a street address. Apparently, they were living in Portland when they first moved west! (My grandfather’s sister, Dora, was born in Kentucky in 1902, so the move west must have taken place  a year or two before my grandfather’s birth.)

Without a place of birth, I’d been unable to request a birth certificate for my grandfather. But now, knowing he was born in Portland, I visited the state archives’ website and was able to order his birth certificate. This should arrive in just a few days.

I’m very excited! It’s been bothering me that I didn’t know where my grandfather was born and I can’t wait to get my hands on his birth certificate.