Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Preparing for a deep dive

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When I started doing genealogy research almost a decade ago, I was all about identifying my direct-line ancestors and making my tree taller. I committed to not adding anyone to my tree, thank goodness, unless I had at least one documented source that linked that person to my family. But once I added someone and filled in the basic birth, marriage, death and census data, I moved on.

Then, a few years later, I realized that I would benefit from adding collateral relatives to the tree. (It seems painfully obvious to me now, but it didn’t when I started.) All along, I struggled with maintaining focus and, in 2014, I devised a strategy of focusing on one of my four lines per quarter, rather than jumping all over my family tree when I sat down to research.

Three years later, in 2017, I decided to spend a year on one line, my paternal grandfather’s line (Adams) and then extended that year to 18 months. I tried shifting gears to my paternal grandmother’s line (Rasco), but the Adamses keep drawing me back.

The Adams family was the focus of my recent Kentucky research trip. Specifically, I’ve spent the majority of my time on my 2nd great grandfather, George Washington Adams (1845-1938).

When I attended the National Genealogical Society conference in May, I heard Elizabeth Shown Mills talk four times. Several of those talks have inspired me to dig deeper on this ancestor. Her talk on context, in particular, had a big impact. In it she offered an explanation for why context is so important, along with specific suggestions for how to find context for our ancestors’ lives. It really makes me want to try to understand what life was like for this man and his family.

Why George? He fought for the Union in the Civil War, and I sent away for his pension file back in 2015. It was a thick one: 138 documents and 236 scanned pages. But I realize now it only gave me a window into a small portion of his life. I transcribed that file so I became very familiar with his life while he was living in the National Home for Disabled Soldiers from 1922-1933 and the five years after he left it until his death. (He would move from adult child to adult child fairly frequently and telegraph the pension office every time he did it so he wouldn’t miss a check.) But none of those documents gave me an inkling that he served in the state legislature in the 1890s and early 1900s and also was a magistrate during that time. That I gleaned through newspaper research later.

After his first wife died in 1902, he had a seemingly acrimonious second marriage, with two divorce filings (one of which was completed). He had twelve children, and his youngest child was born 40 years after his oldest (my great grandfather, Elmer Henry Adams).

All this interesting on the face of it. But what I want to do is to research it within the context of life at the time he was living. And once I’ve done that, I’d like to revisit the many documents I have for him and look at them in the proper context.

I think I’ll start with more newspaper research. (Instead of searching for familiar names, I’ll actually read the articles.) I’d like to research some of the people who lived around him to help fill out the picture as well. The syllabus from Elizabeth Shown Mills’ talk on context will be a guide for the types of sources I can consult to really paint a picture of the 93 years during which George Washington Adams lived.

But before I get started, I want to process the documents I found during my research trip, which will be the focus of this month’s 30 x 30 challenge for me. But I’m excited to dig into George’s life and times and see where it takes me!

Photo by Amy Lister on Unsplash

Time of day matters with cemetery photos

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As I’m processing the photos I took on my Kentucky research trip, I’m realizing an important aspect of research-trip planning that I hadn’t taken into account: the time of day I visit cemeteries.

On my June 2019 trip, I visited two cemeteries I’d seen in October 2014. I took pictures in both cemeteries on both trips–there was more to discover on my second trip, since I knew more about my family tree. One thing I noticed is that my 2014 photos taken at noon at the Sacramento Cumberland Presbyterian Church are so much better than the ones I took at 6 pm in my June 2019 trip to that cemetery. (The I visited the other cemetery, Poplar Grove Cemetery, at the same both trips, about 2 pm.)

Taken 16 Sep 2014, 12:07 pm

grave marker taken in good light

 

Taken 24 June 2019, 6:04 pm

grave marker taken in poor light

I understand there are all sorts of variables that can go into getting a great shot, but you can see that the first photo, taken on a partly cloudy day at noon, is much better than the second photo, taken on sunny June day at 6 pm. It doesn’t help that the grave marker faces east! (Since I knew I had a great shot of that grave marker, I didn’t worry much about the quality of that second photo.)

Here’s another example, of the marker for my second great uncle, Ellsworth McEuen, in the same cemetery:

Taken 16 Sep 2014, 12:35 pm

Taken 24 June 2019, 6:03 pm

 

On my next research trip that includes cemeteries, I will do my best to visit them when the sun is high to avoid these challenges!

Processing the information I gleaned on my research trip

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1912 divorce caseI hope I’m not boring you with my research trip! It’s taking up most of my genealogy-related thoughts these days. After a glorious five days focused solely on family-history research, I’ve had to get to back to other responsibilities. So it seems really important for me to have a plan in place to to process all the information and photographs that I captured during my trip. In the absence of such a process, I think I’d be in real danger of losing some valuable information.

I put together a little plan to capture all this information and I’m in the midst of these efforts now. Today, I thought I’d share what I’m doing to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

These are my areas of concern:

  • Documents captured by my phone camera
  • Printed documents that were waiting for me at the Daviess County Public Library
  • Photographs taken at cemeteries
  • Questions/challenges that came up along the way

On this trip, most of the documents I captured took the form of photos on my phone. If I’d planned better, I would have taken them through an app, like Genius Scan, that makes a tidier photo, saved as pdf, and prompts me to email it to myself or export it to Dropbox or Evernote or elsewhere. But I didn’t plan that far in advance and instead just clicked away on my phone. This would be a problem if I let them languish on my immense, ill-organized photo library on my phone. So instead, I’m moving each important image from my phone into my Surnames folder and renaming each using my file-naming protocol, just like I do with downloaded documents. I’m giving priority to this process (rather than to actually gleaning all the information from the document immediately), so I’ve created a folder called Documents found on my 2019 Kentucky Research Trip, where I’m placing the renamed files to process soon. As soon as all the photos are copied from my photo library, I’ll process each of them just like I process documents I download.

The printed documents I’ll simply scan and either put into that holding folder or just process them right after scanning. There were only a handful of those, primarily obituaries.

Believe it or not, I did no photocopying and no scanning at any of the repositories I visited. I just took pictures with my phone. If I’d been getting information from large books, I would have wanted to use a machine to copy or scan. But most of what I looked at were loose pages from vertical files or case files so the phone was very easy. (And encouraged by the repositories.)

With the cemetery photos, I’m copying particularly helpful ones to my hard drive just like the documents. They’ll go into my folder structure, be filed by ancestor and used a source document in Reunion.

As for the questions and challenges, I did a pretty good job of keeping a log in Evernote each day, taking of note of next steps and questions that came up. I could leave them there, but what I think I’ll do is move them to Trello. I’ve been wanting to experiment with Trello for my genealogy task list. (I use it for so many other things in my life and business.) On July 4, reader Jerry Hereford was generous enough to share how he sets that up in Trello in a comment on this post and I want to give his method a try. You can bet that I’ll be writing about how that turns out!

It was really important to me not to let real life grab all my time before I set up a system to fully benefit from everything I learned on the research trip. For the next month, probably, that will be my focus. I really need to act on this information while it’s fresh in my mind!

If you have any suggestions for other things I need to do, I’m all ears!

What I did right (and wrong) on my research trip

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My long-awaited research trip to Kentucky took place last week, June 24-28. I drove 3.5 hours to McLean County on Monday morning, arriving in time to visit the McLean County family history research center, as well as the McLean County Public Library’s genealogy room and three cemeteries. It was a full day!

As I mentioned in a post while on the trip, the bed and breakfast where I stayed was across the street from the funeral home that was called in when Bonnie Adams, the daughter of 2nd great grandfather, George Washington Adams (who was the focus of this trip) died at age six from influenza in 1919. Spending time in the small town of Calhoun (population less than 1,000) where that family lived was very powerful. Visiting the cemeteries where my family members were buried is an experience of deep connection. I also realized how many more names I recognized this time, compared my first visit there in 2014. I know so much more about this branch of my family than I did five years ago!

From McLean County, I traveled on Tuesday morning to Owensboro (just a half hour away), where I spent much of the day in the Kentucky Room at the Daviess County Public Library. My discoveries weren’t huge, but, thanks to the helpful librarians there, I was able to find an 1895 newspaper profile of George Washington Adams (1845-1938) that originally appeared in the Louisville Courier. It gave me information about his political career (something I hadn’t been aware of before June of this year) and, best of all, it included a sketch of him! That’s him at the top of this post. Ryan, one of the helpful librarians in the Kentucky Room, commented on George’s “epic beard.”

After a hearty lunch in Owensboro, I drove 2.5 hours to Frankfort, where I checked in at a very private Airbnb property that is just a block from the Kentucky Historical Society, as well as walking distance to lots of downtown restaurants. Its entrance was in the back of the house, facing the Kentucky River. It was a great little getaway in the heart of town.

I stayed in Frankfort three nights. The three places I was keen on going were the Kentucky Historical Society’s research library, the Kentucky Department of Library and Archives (KDLA) archives research room and the Kentucky Office of Vital Statistics, where I wanted to get my hands on the long form (handwritten) of Bonnie Adams’ 1912 birth certificate. This child’s name on her death certificate is Bonnie and on her grave marker (which I saw this trip) is Bonita. I had sent away for her birth certificate in 2017, but the non-original computer-generated short form I was sent listed her name as Gliolia, the name under which it was indexed. I was curious about the handwriting that would make “Bonnie” look like “Gliolia” so I was happy for the chance to get my hands on the hand-written original version of the birth certificate. Guess what? The handwriting was actually quite clear and it looks all the world like Gliolia. So I don’t know what’s up with her first name. It’s another new mystery to explore. This long form gave more information than the short form I’d been sent–including how many children her mother had had who were still living and her parents’ occupations. Note to self: If I send away for another birth certificate in Kentucky (or perhaps elsewhere), I’ll request the long form.

I had spent as much time as I could prior to the trip trying to identify things to look up in these repositories. I knew that I wanted to look at vertical files, which I did at the first three places I went. At the KDLA I was able to examine the original documents surrounding the 1920 divorce of George Washington Adams and his second wife, Della. I also saw the divorce papers for a 1912 divorce filed by Della against George that was apparently dropped.. Thanks to the great researchers at KDLA, I’d actually been sent these documents in 2017 but the type on one of the pages was very faint. Thankfully, the original was perfectly legible, so I was able to take a photo of the document and, while I was there, I went ahead and transcribed it. (It was just a page and a half.) That made me so happy because I’d been straining to read the document I’d been emailed.

My other achievement was that I was able to prove the parentage of a 3rd great grandfather, Henry Clay McEuen (1823-1894) who was the father of George’s first wife, Henrietta Clay McEuen Adams (1847-1902). Connecting Henry to his parents, Felix McEuen (1794-1872) and Lucretia Mentelle McEuen (1899-1875) allows me to explore some interesting information my aunt had given me in the form of an unsourced family history that provides details about Lucretia’s parents, Augustus Waldemard and Charlotte Victoire Mentelle, who were prominent early-19th century citizens of Lexington with connections to Mary Todd Lincoln and Senator Henry Clay (John Quincy Adams’ Secretary of State). I’d been tantalized by that family history but didn’t want to explore its clues until I’d proven my connection to the family.

This was definitely a successful trip, despite the absence of huge “Eureka!” moments. While I was away, I made a few notes of things I think I did right and things I could have done better.

Things I did right:

  • I kept my schedule loose and maintained flexibility. It was nice to be nimble.
  • I narrowed my focus to a few key questions so I didn’t get too overwhelmed at all the possibilities of things to research.
  • I studied the respositories’ rules and regulations so I wasn’t taken by surprise.
  • I asked for help while I was at the various sites; this is something I got better at as I went along.
  • I wrote ahead to the Daviess County Public Library. They pulled requested resources and had them waiting for me!

Things I could have done better:

  • Ideally I would have educated myself even more on the holdings of the repositories, because I was still a little unsure of what to look for next while I was there.
  • I wish I had visited the funeral home in Calhoun, since I was right there, and asked if they had records on two of my grandfather’s brothers, who died in 1899 and 1902 as very small boys. I have no information on them beyond newspaper accounts of their tragic accidental deaths. (Thank you for that suggestion, Maria Tello!)
  • In retrospect, it would have been wise for me to have gone to the McLean County Courthouse just a block from where I was staying. I was under the impression that I’d more easily find what I was looking for at the KDLA, but it turns out there were some gaps in the microfilmed records there and the archivist suggested I check the courthouse. Alternatively, if I had chosen to go to Frankfort first, I could have visited the courthouse when I got to McLean county and checked out those missing resources.
  • I wish I had taken the time at the end of each day to process—or at least carefully read—everything I photographed during the day. It wasn’t until the last day of my trip that I realized that I had documents in my possession that made the vital connection between Henry and Felix McEuen. I had found that document on the first day!

Of course, like everything, the trip didn’t go perfectly. But I think it went very well and I’m really satisfied with my planning and what I was able to find. I’d forgotten to take into account the mental exertion of full days of research five days in a row! By Friday afternoon when I left for my five-hour drive back to St. Louis, my brain was full and I was ready to stop.

I’m really grateful for this opportunity. Getting away from daily life and really focusing on my research was a special treat. If you have the opportunity to do it, I heartily encourage it!