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Just noticed this thread (I don't wander in here much) so I figured I'd drop in and say hello given my on-again-off-again focus on the topic. I, like others here, inherited a lot of the tree that I've been building on, so I've had time to evolve from the careless data packrat to diligently verifying from primary sources (It's always nice to find a genealogy in the Register or a book written on some branch or other, but it's distressing how often these fail to point to where their info came from). In the process, I think I've built my tree twice and I'm on my third go now, this time trying hard to stick to primary sources where possible (though at some point I'm gonna have to re-discover some of those poorly-cited documents that are still dangling off my tree). Anyway, some comments... Bilirubin posted:Feeling a little odd. My cousin sent me a few obits for distant relations that had also moved to NA, but to Canada and not the US. Since I now live in Canada I decided to have a go finding the survivors. It took only 10 minutes until I had tracked them down, including FB profiles and other contact information, which I passed on to her. The odd feeling comes from knowing just how damned easy it is to track a person down this day and age with only minimal initial information to go by. It's nuts, isn't it? Last year I found a distant cousin on Facebook solely based on the username (real name!) they gave on Find-A-Grave and some extra pieces of information to pin down a general location. By the way, with respect to local databases for genealogy information, it's been an ongoing struggle, especially since I haven't really found a nice way to publish it in a way that's in my control. As much as I like platforms like Rodovid and Geni, I like keeping my citation management intact. For local management though, I always come back to GRAMPS, even if its citation management is woefully underdeveloped. I don't know why there aren't more user-friendly tools with good citation management. I don't like having to shoehorn repeated citation information into the wrong fields, but at least their place hierarchy handling is actually quite decent now. Crotch Fruit posted:I have some documentation going back approximately 3 or 4 generations to when my family ancestors migrated over from Germany, although the research was done by my grandmother who died over a decade ago. Simply put, I would like to verify some of the information as none of the records look very official, but I am not sure where to begin searching. Goolge is more than happy to direct me to ancestry.com and other poo poo that wants a credit card number, I am assuming the information should be available free somewhere? Are things like birth certificates and other government records freely available? Access to online records over the past few years has improved so crazily that I continue to astonish myself with the branches I've been able to build and verify without leaving my apartment. I'm still amazed that I nearly perfectly verified an inherited family tree of my ancestors who lived and died in Bohemia and Moravia from various record archives posted online, a task that I never dreamed I'd be able to do in my lifetime without spending weeks in the Czech Republic poring over church books. So you'd be amazed what you'll find if you dig hard enough. That all said, some specifics that might be relevant to you, given what you've said:
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Jul 11, 2016 06:28
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Bilirubin posted:Hello and thanks for that excellent information! Yeah, I have generally found that descent from nobility tends to be sketchy at best. One branch I've been eyeballing (but haven't confidently connected to yet; it's still pending one or two anecdotal-quality links in New England) is the Josselyn family, which has some dubious quality before the 1200s. Ironically, it also features no royal links in that whole line despite its reported age. The other branch is stuck at the turn of the 18th century in Bohemia with two as-yet-unverified individuals and another troublesome guy who is in the right place but possibly at the wrong time who prevent me from linking up to another hand-me-down nobility family tree. So yeah, those nobility links are nothing but trouble in my experience! skipdogg posted:Some of the best stuff I found was in newspapers though, the amount of information published in them back around the turn of the century and before was crazy. Mrs. So and So is visiting family and will return in 3 weeks. The newspapers from 1890 to 1910 filled in so much previously unknown information about my family it was awesome. Those turn of the century newspapers are great, if still under-digitized. I found one claim recently about a distant cousin who was shot by some guy in Atlanta during a fight the other guy started by calling him a slur (the newspaper leaves the word unsaid, but since the cousin was Jewish, you can probably guess what it was). The story went on for several days as the shooter hid from the police until the cousin was out of the hospital. It's also kinda fun to see your grandfather's name mentioned as participating in some patriotic parade when he was 5 years old. Crotch Fruit posted:Well hell, I got onto familysearch.org. . . and someone has hosed up the records. Long story short, some random stranger on the internet apparently entered the full name and deathbed of my great grandfather for my grandfather, and also messed up the name. . . My grandpa's name is <A> <B> <C>, my great grandpas' name is <B> <A> <C> (hell, am I allowed to just put my ancestors full name in the genealogy thread or would that be like self doxing?) so it's easy to get the two confused but still kind of annoying to know the site's information can be updated by anyone. Ugh, yeah, that's obnoxiously common, but one learns to live with it, I suppose. As for "self-doxxing", consider me rude, but given how sensitive personal information is these days, I no longer feel comfortable listing the grandparents of anyone living, just because how easy it is to find people from that, even though the old-school practice is "anyone dead is fair game" Crotch Fruit posted:So, I've half rear end verified the origins of my family up to 5 generations ago when my ancestors migrated over from Germany, I am assuming the search will only get more difficult internationally. Also, I have found either a typo or my last name was modified from "John" to "Johns". Depends. Jumping the Atlantic is pretty difficult, but it's not always impossible. It usually comes down to a combination of researching as much about the immigrant and their family as possible and a little bit of luck. Some of my luck has involved my ancestors alternately:
The best shot you have at finding something if all you have in your immigration/naturalization/census records is "Germany" everywhere is by doing a cursory search for the marriage or birth record in the German register indices on FamilySearch. Again, this often comes down to luck, but I've found at least two of my ancestors' German records this way, so it's not a completely impossible task. Just be aware that it's not uncommon to find middle names and other baptismal names you didn't expect, so you'll still want to do as much limiting on other criteria as possible (age or parent's names, for example). I won't lie that it's easy to make that jump, and it can often take time to gather enough American information to make an educated guess, but it's not impossible. Just keep researching, and you may well be able to make that leap given enough time. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jul 13, 2016 |
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Jul 13, 2016 00:00
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) but whatever, possible since its an old English name, and there were knighthoods involved further back so it makes sense these records exist given the high standing of the family. Welp, one of the wives of one of the knights turns out, if true, a descendant to the sister to Anne Boleyn. This will require serious scrutiny because people love to write themselves into important past events. Nevertheless, conversation with my mother has now turned into something like
Interesting though, how if true, the fortunes of that family ebbed and flowed based upon things like "who did you side with in the War of the Roses" and "Who did you side with in the English Civil War"
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Crotch Fruit posted:I do have the full name and city of birth for my great great whatever 5 generations ago relative from Germany, and a good 10yr estimate of when he was born. If you've got a city and it's not too big, then you're in good shape. The FHL has many (but not all) German church registers on microfilm, and in most towns it'll either be in the single Lutheran (Evangelische) or Catholic (Katholische) church in town. Larger cities can, of course, have multiple parishes, and then it comes down to trial and error. Also note that you could still be unlucky, like me, and have some relatives be born in a city in which the FHL never got microfilm copies. There probably are still copies in that case, but you'd have to actually go to Germany (or get a local German genealogist) to look them up. By the way, you'll probably want to double check that your ancestors didn't live east of the Oder-Neisse Line. I believe most of those archives went to Poland directly when the land was handed over after World Wars I and II, and I'm not sure what the condition of or access to those records is, since I haven't needed to do so (the few Jewish records I've hoped to find there are kind of a poo poo show for obvious reasons, so I can't really offer any useful lessons from my experience) Note that working with German Kirchenbuchen can be tricky, because not only do they rely on knowing German, but German Cursive (Kurrent) handwriting as well. I personally recommend getting high quality copies of any documents if you can, because it can take time to decipher them if you aren't familiar with it (and you probably aren't familiar with it). Getting such copies may not be possible with FHL microfilms. I know the several German Kirchenbuchen films I've looked at have a label asking for no copies to be made for whatever reason (though none of the FHCs near me appear to have microfilm copiers/scanners anyway).
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Jul 13, 2016 07:02
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diremonk posted:I've got a question for the thread. What is the best way to find out information about someone from the early 1900's? Newspapers are surprisingly good resource for between 1900 and 1950 or so. Depending on where he lived, you may have luck with one of the several online newspaper archives, but I strongly recommend checking out which of your local libraries have access, if any, since the services themselves are expensive if you aren't lucky enough to have Google's old newspaper archive covering your city. Since it sounds like New York City is one of your places to look, I can unfortunately state with some certainty that newspapers may not help you out much on that end since it was too big to get nice local coverage, but still, it's not a bad idea to do a name search just in case. There are a ton of local resources for this, but there are a few big ones to consider if you look. Ancestry has some, which usually dovetails with Newspapers.com's selection, but not universally. Newspapers.com itself is often not available at nearby libraries, so you might want to check before you sign up for a 7-day trial. If I remember correctly, NewspaperARCHIVE.com is available at your local Family History Center, so that's an easy place to check as well.
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Aug 27, 2016 04:38
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HJB posted:Part of what I do involves reverse genealogy of sorts, as in looking up people as far back as the 16th century, finding out about their lives, and picking up BMD information as I go. It's not too helpful for those working backwards but I can recommend a few sites to check out besides the ones mentioned. The main one is archive.org/, it carries a lot of stuff that's also on Google Books but there's plenty besides, plus the search is fairly intuitive, as is the reading function, and most texts come with (an automated) text-only version for Ctrl+F-ing through. This is a good recommendation. Like you implied, it's particularly good for old journals if you happen to have some ancestors from Massachusetts and thereabouts, as Google Books can get flakey with The Mayflower Descendent and the Register, even pre-1923. HJB posted:For British history in particular, you've got the National Archives (you can search freely for top-level information, but wills etc. you have to pay for to get the full thing), British History Online, which is mostly free to search and read, and for more localised information a good tip is to Google FamilySearch plus a place/church name, as the site has information on where to find records for practically every church in the UK, some of which will be free (Whitechapel St Mary for example has links to marriage records buried away in genealogy books hosted on the Internet Archive). I'll have to check this out. I have been meaning to follow up on a birth index record for Stepney in the 1850s. I'll also throw in FreeReg as a good source of indexed church registers. It helped me potentially close the loop on where two English immigrant siblings were born (I've been meaning to write in to a journal about my findings, since these two have already had maybe a half dozen articles mention them and their parents in the past 100 years)
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Sep 5, 2016 02:51
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Powaqoatse posted:It's super easy to get caught up in the excitement of long and notable ancestry lines when you start out. I know I was less than critical in the early days of my research and I've had to correct some mistakes later on. Luckily none too embarassing. Agreed. I use collaborative sites very sparingly for this very reason. They're fundamentally at odds with the idea that different genealogists may place different trust levels in the information they read. The worst case leads to the "questionably long descent" problem, but there can be more insidious issues as well. One of my ancestors, for example, is "widely" assumed to have remained married to his wife for many years in early 19th century Kentucky, in part due to the most popular genealogy book on this family name saying as much. But a few years ago, my uncle and I pieced together some evidence that strongly suggested that they had separated before his death, which was far earlier and in a completely different county than we had thought. As a result, I'm convinced that "novel" (properly-sourced) research is still best suited to keep on independent journals and websites, especially when so many amateur genealogists have not learned (or don't want to learn) about proper research citation practices. Don't get me wrong; the sites are invaluable for research leads, because a lot of the info on them is at least partially correct, but if a tree doesn't have citations I can check myself, I don't even try putting it in my tree until I've got more proof.
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May 31, 2017 21:51
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Speaking of names, I'm having a hell of a time right now wrestling with one family who cannot seem to keep their names straight. Bechmanns that turn into Pechmanns and back again, children who are born with one name and die with another (I've got more than one Elise that became a Lizzie when they died in childhood), a father whose name can't stay put (Georg? Louis? Ludwig?), two surviving children whose names don't match their birth certificates at all (a Johanne becoming a Lucy/Louisa, a Henrietta becoming a Laura), and one child whose entire name seems to change when their mother remarried (the aforementioned Johanne, who apparently doesn't even remember her real father, judging by her continued claims to the contrary; though, to be fair, he may have died 6 months before she was born) It doesn't help that this is all happening around the 1880s in New York City when one of the surnames involved is super common, so between the missing 1890 census and a lot of mid-decade deaths, it's all quite infuriating and makes it hell to be certain of anything. About the only thing that's helped me keep my sanity is that at least the surnames, census records and birthdays (sometimes not even years are right!) seem to help pull it together at all. Hell, just yesterday I got a marriage record in the mail that finally helped to prove that the 1900 census record of Johanne/Louisa is actually her, and it still managed to give me a curve ball in the form of a poorly legible bride's mother's maiden name that doesn't match anything I've ever seen before. And yet the bride's mother's mother is almost certainly living with them in that 1900 census record, so even that garbled mother's surname isn't a huge block. It's just one more thing I can't yet explain away. (At least it explained the claim that this husband was born in Delaware in the 1900 and 1910 censuses: apparently the informant had taken the husband's birth COUNTY for his birth state. God, what a mess.) Given that this family is second generation German immigrants, it's probably a case of saints names, at least for the given names, but it's obnoxious when you aren't working with christening records that might help actually piece it together.
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Jun 6, 2017 20:45
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Yeah the 1892 census was some circumstantial evidence that helped to link the family a bit closer together, even though most of the people in question had died by that point. It still managed to help confirm that Johanne/Louisa/Lucy was linked to both the grandmother and father I thought she was. Unfortunately, the one before that is 1875, which would be perfect as it's right in the middle of these problematic Bechmann records, except that the Manhattan records I'd need no longer exist.  EDIT: Fortunately, as I've said previously, the records are slowly coming together in spite of these hurdles. I found the probable "Lizzie" death records, last week, for example. When I get around to requesting those from New York and cross-referencing them with any info Green-Wood Cemetery still has (where most of these people were buried), it might just give me pointers to which church might have the christening records that will sort this out once and for all. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Jun 6, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2017 21:30
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Oracle posted:Well poo poo. I must say I've been pleased at what HAS been made available online, so far (I was pleasantly surprised when I first discovered that the Suffolk County, Massachusetts probate records were already digitized), but it sure seems like there's a long way to go still. I'm sorta in the same boat with Archion and some Czech land records. They're obviously hard at work digitizing them, but I'm still waiting for the ones I really need to actually show up online (of what I'm looking for, Archion so far hasn't uploaded anything the FHL microfilms didn't already cover, or the regional church isn't part of Archion in the first place  )
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Jun 26, 2017 17:04
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Speaking of genealogy software, while GRAMPS has been largely satisfactory for tracking my research, I've been doing some digging around lately for something that can help provide a decent web presentation of my findings and haven't really been all that happy with what I've come across. I'm not especially interested in the "global family tree" models of Geni, WikiTree and the like, but I do rather like a bit in how they present their data, especially the wiki-influenced sites that can mix structured data with unstructured text. I've gotten the impression there aren't really many good solutions for standalone sites that hit the same level of flexibility, but I'd be interested to hear what you all have looked into for presentation (heck, even if that's more about actual paper publication than anything else)
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Jun 30, 2017 05:40
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Oracle posted:What's the point of your presentation? Are you wanting to share with family? Are you doing some kind of research project where you have to show off your findings? What's more important to you the data itself or presenting it prettily? It's mostly about sharing with family, so "pretty" is more important than the data, which is one of the reasons I've been more drawn to the narrative-like wikis than anything else. I like citations myself, but I kinda doubt the family would care as much about them as I do. On top of that, the topic of a "Flickr, but for family photos" has come up more than once in conversations with my folks given how many scans of family photos I have. Of course that is far enough out there that I suspect a "viable" solution would have to be self-hosted so that I could build that feature into it manually, as I doubt that there is anything quite like that. EDIT: That's not to say that sharing the data isn't an important secondary goal, but as you rightly imply, that might be better served by other means than a website. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jun 30, 2017 |
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Jun 30, 2017 16:18
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Owlkill posted:I wonder what the worst thing (if they're willing to talk about it) fellow goons have turned up about their ancestors is? One of my ancestors was indicted for stabbing but found not guilty. Of course this ne'er-do-well had already had the courts attempt to take his kids away from him, following the liquidation of a bunch of property to pay a large amount of debts. I don't know if the motion succeeded, but he and his wife seemed to both plead for divorce before he died (probably) alone on the western Kentucky frontier in the early 1820s.
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Aug 19, 2017 14:32
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Note that Archion doesn't have everything. In particular, it specifically covers the Evangelical Lutheran church, so if your ancestors were Catholic Bavarians, you probably aren't going to have any luck with the site. Also, not every Landeskirche has signed up, so if you think you've got relatives coming out of Prussian Saxony (like me) you're completely out of luck and will have to travel to Germany or hope you've got access to a reliable Ortsfamilienbuch that contains extracts from the relevant records. Finally, a LOT of records from Landeskirchen that ARE part of Archion still haven't been digitized yet. For example, even though they're slated to appear on Archion some day, if your records are in the Evangelische Archivstelle Boppard because they were from Hesse, Saarland or the Palatinate, you'll have to wait it out. Similarly, Saxony proper isn't slated to appear on the site until some time next year, as they only joined the Archion effort in the past few months.
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Aug 30, 2017 08:11
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Tortilla Maker posted:Merinam was noted as Samuel's mother's surname. The first reads "Merinam," the second "Moriman," to me. The second makes me wonder if it's not a mangling of the surname "Merriman" though. I guess in a stretch it could be "Merriam" too, but I'd check "Merriman" first.
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Sep 9, 2017 16:01
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Brennanite posted:Has anyone had any luck ordering death certificates? My mom wants me to use it as a launching pad for getting my grandmother's hospital and mortuary records. I’ve ordered them from New York City and literally just mailed off a request for a pair from California. It’s usually pretty straightforward if you know where/when they died. Especially if you have an index to cross-reference against (as both NYC and California do)
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Dec 16, 2017 22:17
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Brennanite posted:I do have an index to cross-reference against; I was just wondering if anyone had run into problems with anti-identify theft statutes or whatnot. It's been 60 yrs, but I think some states have a 100 yr waiting period if not the person, their spouse or child. Maybe that's for birth certificates though? Birth certificates are usually much more tightly controlled than death certificates for that reason, assuming you’re not a direct blood relation. Each jurisdiction has its own rules of course, so it’s worth reading up the rules for the one you’re querying. Usually these rules are available from whatever agency or website you’re placing the order on; the FamilySearch wiki will also typically summarize them as well. For example,
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Dec 17, 2017 17:09
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Out of curiosity, has anyone here who has done US research made any FOIA requests for dead relatives with the FBI, USCIS or the Department of State? I’m preparing to file a couple for a handful of relatives who seem most likely to have records and was wondering if anyone had experience with the process. Similarly, has anyone had any experience requesting A-Files for people born before 1910 from the National Archives at Kansas City?
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Dec 20, 2017 01:51
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Powaqoatse posted:I can only speak to applying for access here in Denmark.. Censuses are tricky and prone to having misspelled entries and errors, especially when immigrants are involved, so you may want to look for other sources to help give you pointers before you come back looking for censuses. A case in point: This past summer I believe I finally found out what happened to a long-lost relative, Anton Pustka, who was previously only known to have died “in the United States”, after leaving his only daughter behind with his father-in-law in Moravia. In my original searches some years back, I found no census records. However, I was able to come at the problem from a seemingly consistent (if under-documented) death record in St. Louis. But with only an eerily consistent age and name to go on, how was I to trust that this record was really of my relative? This summer, while on a trip to St. Louis to see the eclipse and do some genealogy research, I was able to crack the case, first by finding St. Louis city directory listings. This gave me an address. Only then was I able to come back and find a census record, by using the address from the city directory to locate the enumeration district that Anton Pustka would be recorded in, referencing the maps that were originally used for this purpose, as the death record had not filled in his place of residence. It turned out that this relative was not recorded as “Anton Pustka” of Moravia in the 1900 census, but as “Anton Putsca” of Hungary. Still, his birth month was correct, as was a reference to his year of immigration, which matched a passenger manifest I had found previously, but had no way of firmly linking to the Anton Pustka in Moravia. Of course all this was helped along by discovery (at the same time) of a separate record of Anton Pustka mysteriously “unable to be found” in Moravia to serve a debt to, thereby requiring his father-in-law be charged with paying it, a mere month after his immigration record in the US. It should also be noted that, despite all this, I still have no idea where his record might be in the 1880 census (He was evidently in St. Louis for only the few years before his death), nor what happened to his wife (though I now have a curious lead in some British censuses at the same time) Now this isn’t saying that it will be so easy for you since your immigrants came over right before the ill-fated 1890 US census, the vast majority of which was lost in a fire. And of course it is not helped by the fact that both(?) of your subjects are women, who will lose their name upon marriage. Even so, you may have some luck filling in the gap with local records to get you to 1900. For example, if they stick around in New York City for a few years, they may turn up in the 1892 New York State Census, which is a helpful proxy for the 1890 US census. TL;DR: Because censuses sometimes have gross misspellings, I recommend looking for other “curiously accurate” records of other kinds, like marriage, death, and probate records, and working backwards from there. Christine in particular might be findable from children who list her original surname as their mother’s maiden name upon marriage. But here, you’d need some idea of where Christine may have gotten married. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Dec 20, 2017 |
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Dec 20, 2017 17:11
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Wikitree has some instructions on how to split a GEDCOM using selected family tree software.
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Dec 21, 2017 18:18
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ComradeCosmobot posted:Out of curiosity, has anyone here who has done US research made any FOIA requests for dead relatives with the FBI, USCIS or the Department of State? An update on these: I ended up filing with the FBI on their electronic FOIA site and skipped the others for the time being. It was fairly painless but you should make sure you have a solid proof of death for more recently deceased individuals (not an issue for the two I requested). No records found though, so I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t have a reasonably good reason. The A-files were also painless. You can search for whether or not your ancestor has a record in the files online (this only applies to people born over 100 or so years ago; the remainder require a FOIA from the USCIS). The response was quick (possibly because it was the holidays) and the record had quite a bit of interesting bits of information. Most of the bits I already knew from digitized Viennese parish registers, but it was interesting to finally find out who sponsored this person’s citizenship and his movements in the US once he arrived. Ironically, I don’t know if they actually ended up naturalized, since they moved right before the final naturalization interview. There’s a letter from them to this effect, but nothing dated afterwards so there’s no way to know for certain if they naturalized in the end. Finally, I ended up signing for a monthly subscription for Newspapers.com the other day since the library edition apparently doesn’t carry the Publisher add-ons I was hoping to search (mostly in the LA Times). I figure I’ll unsubscribe at the end of the month since there aren’t that many people in recent history likely to require newspaper searches. If anyone wants some clippings made and forwarded to them I’d be happy to help over the next month while it’s paid up. I still don’t know why Family History Centers don’t have access to the site since Ancestry runs it, if I recall correctly (and it isn’t strictly covered by Ancestry’s own newspaper collection).
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Jan 9, 2018 04:01
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Krankenstyle posted:
If you’re looking for an address, I’d prioritize that death certificate. The probate may contain information that would help identify their address if they had real estate, or if the probate turned into a full-blown court case involving court summons. As a general rule, though, American probate proceedings don’t usually include anything other than a city and county name. Death certificates usually DO have their location of death, however, and would probably have just what you’re looking for.
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Jan 13, 2018 01:16
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hypocrites.
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Krankenstyle posted:Also just noticed that whoever filled out the gender column for the passenger list I quoted on the previous page had their head up their rear end: Passenger records are about as reliable as census records in my experience. Both are taken by third parties from information that is relayed by someone else who is usually not the person described, sometimes by voice. As a result, both kinds of data are particularly prone to misspellings, rounding of dates (since they use ages not dates), misquoted occupations, and so on. They’re still fairly accurate on the whole, but it seems like at least 1 in 10 familial entries has an error of some kind.
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Jan 13, 2018 01:46
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If the individual naturalized before the 1890s (or didn’t naturalize at all) and didn’t live to appear in the 1900 census, good solid proof of immigration can be hard to come by without some received stories that help piece it together. The stronger piece of evidence of the two you have at the moment is the cavalry record. In my limited experience, men who fought (for the Union at least) were originally organized into companies of individuals from the same county. For example, Company K of the 10th Illinois Cavalry consisted exclusively of individuals from Brown County, a sleepy county of only 10,000 residents at the time. Another small, but potentially relevant point in favor of the Cook County record is that Union cavalry members were required to provide their own horse as part of their service. If John resided in Cook County prior to his death, chances are good that he would have joined a cavalry company from that county, and his status as a farmer would very probably provide him access to the horse he would need to join the cavalry (especially if his estate lists one as a possession). The Iroquois County record, on the other hand, looks somewhat promising but is flawed for reasons that should be obvious:
None of these points are necessarily disqualifying, and indeed the middle initial and English origins prevent the Iroquois County record from being easily discarded, but the questions above cannot simply be brushed away with “Well, the record is wrong” since it seems unlikely that a draft registration (or, for that matter, probate record) would be in these points. So in summary, I would file the Cook records as having the balance of the evidence in their favor (unless otherwise disproved), while the Iroquois record needs more evidence. Some questions I would consider for next steps to firm up these assumptions:
You could also search immigration records to find out when he may have immigrated, but since these records would precede his time in Illinois, the best they could do would be to cap the range of dates you’d be looking for court and land records. Finally, while I feel like it is a long-shot, if you can pin down the location of death to something more specific than Cook County, you may try looking to see if church records of nearby churches were kept that might list his death. Of course there may be no such records if he never affiliated with a church, and it might be difficult to identify his denomination in any case (probably Episcopalian, but it is hard to be certain).
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Jan 17, 2018 17:17
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Owlkill posted:Through a bit of Googling and Wayback Machine use I managed to find the text of a book written in (I believe) roughly the 1880s, which is a history of Chebanse. Yeah, a large number of local and county history volumes came out in the late 19th and early 20th century. Although the biographical sections can be hit or miss if your relative wasn’t alive or wasn’t prominent enough to get a spot, as you found out, they also tend to have rich amounts of military details (often duplicated from official roster lists and military action reports). Other than that though, it sounds like those pension records are your best bet. I haven’t used Civil War-era pension records before, but I have been meaning to do so for one relative, whose husband never returned from the war. She applied for a pension late in life though (after 1900) and her husband is marked as having deserted his post about a month after being reorganized from a guard duty role to a new army unit in 1864, so I’m not particularly hopeful that the record will have much. Even so, I still should apply for a copy while I’m thinking about it. I did manage to find a copy of a War of 1812 pension record for another individual in my tree, but that particular record ended up doing little else but confirming that he served and was wounded, without giving me any clue as to where he was living in the 1820s when he filed paperwork for it, or when he died, which is what I really want to know.
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Jan 18, 2018 22:18
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As long as we’re talking about shaking the tree to see what falls out of relatives, don’t forget to reach out to cousins (especially your parents’ cousins) as you might learn a thing or two from them as well. As a case in point, I was recently browsing Ancestry for information on some relatives that I’ve been over several times in case something new had been indexed, and stumbled across a nearly complete tree down to my grandparents’ generation on a branch where I thought I was the only one doing research. It turned out that one of my parent’s cousins had done genealogical research on the family before he passed away in 2016. I reached out to his widow (who our side of the family barely knew due to a falling out between this cousin and the rest of the family) and as a result, as of this past weekend I am now the keeper of a 19th century German hymnal that contains valuable family records handwritten by two of my immigrant ancestors (along with several baptismal records and a naturalization certificate). Combined with corroborating evidence in the form of birth certificates and marriage licenses, these heirlooms have inadvertently opened up an entire branch of the family I had never heard of! I had previously found evidence that a great-great aunt had married once before the marriage my family had already known about, but knew little else than that it had happened. Among the heirlooms I received was a baptismal record for a child that, given the timing and names of parents, had to be of the first marriage (my cousin had not known about the previous marriage and had not known what to make of this kid or how he was related). Sure enough, armed with this knowledge and digging a little deeper, I found that this great-great aunt (born in the US) had married a man 30 years her senior and had at least one child in 1905. And yet by 1910, she, in her mid twenties, is back living with her parents in New Jersey, under her maiden name, while her 5-year-old child is apparently living in southern California with his fifty-something father. And yet she had somehow ended up with a photo of her son and his baptismal certificate which she presumably kept her whole life. (She never had any other kids and ultimately ended up running her own business in the 1940s and 1950s) So now I have a new fascinating story to research and new relatives to flesh out. And this just goes to prove what sorts of strange stories you might be able to uncover by contacting your cousins.
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Jan 26, 2018 02:16
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Krispy Wafer posted:We've always been told my great-grandmother on my dad's maternal side was half Cherokee... You have described the story of pretty much everyone not already a member of the tribe who claims they are “part Cherokee.” But you still might find a little Arabic or Subsaharan admixture in such cases. The edges of civilization in the 1600s and early 1700s were wild places for sure (Lumbee Indians, Melungeons, and the like)
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Jan 26, 2018 06:26
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Krankenstyle posted:Yea I got into a wikihole on long genealogies some time ago. There are some really long lines you might connect to around. I haven’t proven any nobility myself, but I have been handed down a tree that purports to show noble roots. The only problem? Two (currently) undocumented links between about 1610 and 1690 and a guy living around 1790 who has, so far, evaded any attempts to firmly confirm his birth parents. But if I can successfully nail down those people and link them to the one noble who lost his lands after the Battle of White Mountain, the rest of that tree (back to 1402) should fall into place, as there are several old encyclopedia entries and such that summarize that family. And hey! At least I have names for these people, so I have SOMETHING to work with. Someday the Plzeň archive will get around to digitizing the manorial records that will be able to prove or disprove it all, but so far no dice.
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Jan 27, 2018 00:25
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Krankenstyle posted:Plzeň should have p good odds I think, afaik there's a lot of records in that area that survived the tooth of time (obv also a lot that didn't). Yeah, the manorial records in question to assist with one of the consist of 2.8m of shelving dating back to 1712 and another with 172m of shelving dating back to 1622 (both early enough to at least figure out what is up with that guy living in the 1790s). I’m less certain about what I’m going to do when I actually do get back to the 17th century for certain though, since these families seem relatively mobile for people whose occupation is “farming” and manorial records start getting spotty at that point (see: 1712 for the one estate). But it’s all moot so long as they keep not actually digitizing these records. I don’t care about the land records from Rokycany guys, gosh! The waiting game I have to play with Archion and these other digitization efforts is really the hardest part.
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Jan 27, 2018 01:36
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Oracle posted:That's downright beautiful compared to some of the poo poo I've had to wade through. Kurrent is the devil’s hand.  Still bashing my head on this particular page and others like it. I read similarly to Krankenstyle: quote:Marriages 1618 skipdogg posted:I think I'm making progress. Here's another image of the same info, I think it came from an index but it might be a little clearer I read as: quote:John Bridge sonn of John Bridge of Rayne } Note that the double “f” is intentional in both cases. In early modern handwriting, there was no easy way to differentiate a lowercase “f” from and uppercase “F”. Therefore, the custom was to use a doubled “ff” to stand for capital “F”. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 22:31
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Looking around Braintree on a map, perhaps John Bridge the younger (in the first excerpt) is “of Felsted”? I’m still not certain whether or not the “moor” that I read should actually read “were”, but only because the full place name doesn’t make much more sense without the “moor”, and “were” seems like a stretch to read from that. EDIT: Now that I think of it, if that second clipping is from a duplicate register, I could definitely see the first reading “Brayntreed wear” instead of “Brangetford moor” or something similar. ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 22:58
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Krankenstyle posted:e: Could be the ye ligature is actually a strange &-ligature: "Walther, the son of John Bridge & Phillis his wife, was baptised." Probably a Tironian et.
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Feb 1, 2018 16:39
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skipdogg posted:So a bit of background, I'm researching John Bridge the Puritan (Deacon John Bridge), who came to America circa 1633/1634 as part of the great migration, and well there's a ton totally incorrect information about his origins. I wasn’t sure if this is what you were doing, but if so, you should definitely go mucking about in the Massachusetts court, land and probate records for him and allied families. I’ve been doing a bit of reading literature on a couple of other Puritans lately (not to do new research per se, but just to properly cite stuff that goes into my tree). You’d be surprised how a number of conclusions have ended up falling together from these sorts of inferences from American records. When you get a chance, you should take a look at the various articles Clarence Almon Torrey wrote for The American Genealogist in the mid 1930s on the English origins of Edward Gilman, Samuel Lincoln and the wives of Rev. Peter Hobart. (They should all be easily found in the American Ancestors databases by those names) Some of his lines of reasoning in each of these cases might give you some ideas for new angles of research.
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Feb 1, 2018 20:32
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skipdogg posted:He's pretty well researched, or so I thought anyway. Robert Charles Anderson's comments on him is what got me started digging. Yeah Anderson is good but not perfect. For example, he’s hesitant to peg the second wife of John Leavitt of Hingham as Sarah Gilman, claiming that the association of John with (his brother-in-law) Daniel Cushing is interesting but not enough to be certain. This would be true if this was all we knew, but Anderson apparently is not aware of the fact that the court records of old Norfolk County (and, by proxy, the published, collected probate records of New Hampshire) explicitly have John Leavitt of Hingham acquiescing to the administration of Sarah’s father’s estate in Exeter, New Hampshire (the aforementioned Edward Gilman) by his wife Mary, after the court requested that Gilman’s children explicitly do so. I can only assume he either is just recapitulating others’ published research (I don’t believe the Gilman estate administration has been published as part of a sketch on Gilman or Leavitt, although the record itself has been published twice; most of the Gilman research cribs from research first published in the 1800s) or hasn’t really completed research on post-1634 Great Migration participants (Gilman immigrated in 1638).
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Feb 1, 2018 21:31
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Facebook has been an interesting tool for reaching out that’s for sure. I recently made contact with some second cousins who live in Australia that way, as well as a distant cousin who helped fill in some pieces of the puzzle on another branch that I hadn’t yet pieced together. Of course the latest contact I had was by way of my mother receiving a message on 23andme. She sent me an email yesterday asking “oh do you know this person so-and-so? This person contacted me because they have a connection through them.” Fortunately for that cousin, I’d filled in enough of the tree to place them pretty exactly. Doubt I’d learn that much but maybe they’ve seen a particular bible record I’ve been looking for more recently than I have 
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Feb 3, 2018 18:04
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Well my genealogical quest has quite suddenly turned into a long-term archival project. Over the past weekend I traveled out to visit my uncle to go through some documents he had kept from his parents. Among them were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of letters my grandmother sent to her family and friends that she kept copies of. Some will, of course, help flesh out the tree, but I expect most will end up merely serving to paint a picture of her life that I never got to see, as she was too ill to communicate well with us grandchildren by the time we were old enough to really understand her. It will be a daunting task to prepare it all to be sure. Although much of her correspondence after 1955 was on typewriter, she grew up in Czechoslovakia and half her letters are in German, and the rest feature characteristic code-switching between German, Spanish and English. It is even more complicated by the fact that, while her generation has mostly passed on, her children still survive, so I need to take particular care of family sensitivities with this work. What she was willing to write to a friend she may never have intended her children or grandchildren to see. So all of this demands careful curation and annotation of these works in order to properly frame and portray what is worth portraying. But I think it will be a great and fun challenge to try to transcribe it all faithfully and present it in a way that presents her as a fully fleshed out person with needs, desires, and opinions (to me at least). Plus, who knows what stories are hidden within? Even without reference to these letters, the documents also included some revealing papers that uncovered (for the first time) what really happened to this family during and just after World War II. To this end, one big outstanding task that I look forward to tackling in my next visit relates to several diaries that my great-aunt kept between 1939 and 1945. From the bits of German my uncle was able to read, these diaries paint a potentially fascinating picture of a teenage woman dealing with the twin tribulations of coming of age and coping with the reality of total war and its impacts on Prague. So there’s a lot to do now and I’m certain to be busy with work on this for months, if not years, to come.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:19
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Little Miss Bossy posted:Oh that makes me soooooooooooo happy! I get absolutely infuriated by some trees I see on Ancestry... especially things that are just obviously simple mistakes, but people are too lazy to check. For example, an ancestor being listed as born in Boston, MA in 1523 even though it had not been settled yet and it's obviously Boston in Norfolk, England. I mean, take some time and care and think, people. I think I’ve discussed this before in this thread, but I’m big into documenting stuff these days, to the point that I’ve been methodically double-checking all of the “received” genealogical trees that people have published. It’s been a pain and I definitely have been taking breathers since even one family from the 1680s takes ages to verify even with all the online sources that exist these days, but I’ve definitely come across things that contradict even those trees (or, more often, an absence of evidence supporting their claims). So yeah, ask me about the many hours I’ve spent “leafing” through the first volume of Hingham, MA’s vital records.
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Sep 24, 2018 17:25
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Oh dear me posted:No, I mean that the sources can be fine (original baptism/marriage/burial records) as far as they go but still not enough to justify people's conclusions, because names were so common. I do sorta fret a bit about (as an example) Massachusetts vital records when they aren’t explicitly grouped by family. Okay, so a kid with that name was born to parents with certain names. The name might be unusual, but how do I actually know it’s my family other than the fact that the received wisdom says it is and the date and place “seem right”? Maybe you have a will that can help? But not everyone died with a will... And then what? As a (particularly bad) case in point, I have an ancestor in the 1780s/1790s, the parentage of which is unclear. He just sorta appears in Kentucky, has kids, and dies. However, if you look for his name you might come across a 19th century genealogy book that has someone with the same name who was born in Connecticut at about the right time with a note that “family tradition says he went west”. Do I connect these two personas? How on earth could I justify it to myself? It seems plausible, but where the hell am I gonna find proof? I suppose these sorts of problems are just the way things are. A related Kentucky branch, the Harneds, was miraculously connected to three brothers in New Jersey to the point that the family association generally accepts it (I still don’t know who made that connection or how). Theory then supposes that these three brothers are PROBABLY related to a Harnett who moved to Long Island in the previous generation, but even the family association is skeptical about that connection, because there’s nothing about the Long Island Harnett having kids or about the parents of the New Jersey Harneds. But that’s how research goes. In short: Ancestors who moved around from state to state are nuts to track. I can’t even imagine how difficult my current nuclear family would be to track. I don’t think we’ve spent even two consecutive censuses in the same city in my entire life.
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Sep 24, 2018 20:28
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Krankenstyle posted:I know, nothing's free. My rule of thumb has generally been “If Google Books returns a search result that they’ve clearly scanned by a university library but won’t show users for unknown reasons that clearly aren’t copyright related, HathiTrust will have it.” For some reason I think the college libraries who are members of HathiTrust have asked Google to not display them on Google Books despite the fact that Google did the scanning. No idea why though.
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Dec 14, 2018 23:56
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nashona posted:OK don't doxx me. I am a academic librarian and I send materials to HathiTrust. The Authors Guild lawsuit is one reason it won't show up in Google Books I believe. All of the books Google scanned from mpow were embargoed during the lawsuit and after because of it. The university's lawyers had to sign off on making them available. Also, I think that Google Books only contains this items scanned by Google or are in the U.S. Public Domain. So mpow digitizes in house now and sends them to HathiTrust. The first part about a general embargo on books scanned after a certain date may be. There are definitely 19th century books (clearly out of copyright) that HathiTrust has that are “scanned by Google” that Google itself won’t show.
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Dec 15, 2018 08:24
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Krankenstyle posted:Can I get one of you guys to check out a thing on hathitrust for me? There’s a footnote on p. 245 that mentions that name. I’ll try to transcribe it a little later since I’m on my phone right now.
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May 21, 2019 16:32
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