Friday Find – Unknown Siblings

First, I’ll apologize in advance for writing this without my research notes in front of me.  I have documentation, but I won’t be able to cite it here (Bad genealogist!  Go lie down by your reference manuals!).

While researching my great-grandfather, Edmund Batchelder, the other night, I found something that I didn’t expect.  My grandfather had three sisters, not just one.

While growing up, I had only ever heard of and met my great-aunt Helen.  She was the younger sibling of my grandfather, and the only girl.  When her mother passed away, she took on part of the role of raising her younger brother, my great-uncle Ken.  Aunt Helen and Uncle Ken had always been close, living on opposites of the mountain from each other, but visiting frequently.  Family and relations were always a topic of conversation at family reunions and other gatherings.  So why had I never heard of the other two sisters?

Both were stillborn.

While researching Edmund, I naturally looked at census records.  The 1900 and 1910 Federal Census records list the number of children born to mothers.  In Edmund’s case, I noticed that both his first and second wives had more children than I was aware of, and in each case, the unexpected child was not living at the time of the census.

Digging into birth records, I found the reason why.  I found the two girls, both children of Edmund, one born to each mother.  On each birth record, only the surname was listed.  For the child of the first mother, I found a death record, dated the same day as the birth.  The death record noted “stillborn”.  In the second case “stillborn” was noted right on the birth record.

I doubt that Aunt Helen, Uncle Ken and my grandfather ever knew that they had other sisters.

The point of this, and what I reminded myself, is to always pay attention to what the records are telling you, even if it doesn’t match the reality that you’ve come to expect.  In my case, I “knew” that the family had only one girl.  As it turns out, the family really only had one *surviving* girl.  The other two died before even being named.  It also told me something about my great-grandfather.  We were raised to believe that he was completely grief-stricken due to the death of his second wife, which is how my relatives described his behavior in later life.  In truth, losing his second wife was one more loss in a line of losses.  As strange as it sounds, knowing this makes me feel a little closer to a man I’ve never met.

Motivation Monday – Spiraling Into Control

A recent post at Bridging the Past about “Pinball Genealogy” got me to thinking about the various ways that I’ve structured my research in the past.

I think I started, like many people, by outlining what I could remember about my family.  This included parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, and so on.  There wasn’t much of a structure; it was more an emptying of my head.  It also wasn’t really research.  It was documentation.

Next, I recall going through family documents and entering data from the information that I found there.  Again, it wasn’t really research, though there was some searching involved as I started to piece various sections of family together.

When I finally did start researching, in the true sense of the word, I had two approaches.  One approach was to try tracing a specific line back as far as I could document.  I always seemed to get distracted by some interesting ancestor, though, which would lead me off in a tangent.  This wasn’t always bad, but it didn’t feel like progress.  The other problem with this approach is that I would become bored looking at the same family all the time, leading me to drop my research completely for months on end.  My second approach was more fun.  Basically I would research whichever ancestor was calling to me at that particular moment.  I like the spontaneous nature of this approach, but it definitely leads down the Pinball Genealogy trail, and again, didn’t really feel like progress.

To motivate myself, I’ve tried a few different approaches.  I think I’ve finally hit on one that I really like.  It allows me to not focus on one family for too long, but still make progress on my research.  Since reading the Pinball Genealogy post, I’ve started calling it Spiral Genealogy.

What I’ve been doing for the past few months is to research one generation at a time, along all lines possible, one person at a time.  I started with my youngest daughter as the first generation.  Once she was researched (I pulled her birth certificate out of storage) and documented, I moved onto the next generation: myself and my wife.  I documented our births, wedding, and children, and then moved on to the third generation, starting with my father.  Looking at this process on a circular pedigree chart, it forms a spiral, working outward from my children, moving in a clockwise direction from patrilineal to matrilineal lines.

How has this helped my research?  First, it allows me to literally see my progress as the spiral grows.  This keeps me motivated to add more.  For each new person, I create a small research plan, outlining a timeline of their life based on what I already know.  Using this timeline I can take a survey of what documents are available for research.  Since I’m working with the same generation, and therefore generally within the same time-frames, I can focus much of my research on the same sources in many cases (census information, for example).  Unlike when I was researching a single line, however, I don’t get bored working with the same family.  Once I am finished with one person, I can move onto the next, which may move me to a different area of research.  My wife’s family, for example, comes from Italian immigrants.  This is a much different look than my own generation upon generation upon generation of New England ancestors.  Eventually, though, when I reach the top of the spiral, I get to return to my familiar roots, and say hello to those people that I may have first met when I was documenting the previous generation.  I then get to work with those people in more detail, taking someone who may have just been a name on their daughter’s marriage certificate, and digging into their story, filling in details of other children, occupations, migrations, and so on, and hopefully being introduced to their parents, the next level of the spiral, along the way.

Spiral Genealogy has been a great way for me to stay focused and motivated.  This high-level approach, so far, has worked wonderfully.  What methods do others use to approach their high-level research plans?

Tuesday Teachings – NGS-HSC Lesson 2

Sitting Bull (Library of Congress photo)

A couple of weeks ago I covered Lesson 1 of the NationalGenealogical Society’s Home Study Course.  While Lesson 1 was pretty basic, Lesson 2 added in a bit of fun.  At least, I thought the lesson was fun.

The lesson’s focus was family traditions, in particular, those genealogical stories that get passed down from generation to generation.  The first written assignment for the lesson was to recount a family legend, then write a research plan for either proving or disproving the legend.

In my case, the family story has always been that we were descendants of the great Sioux Chief Sitting Bull.  My cousins and I had all heard the story from our grandmother, though I don’t recall there being any details of exactly how we were related.  Growing up, I never had any reason not to believe the story.  At that time, my father’s line had already been traced back to Barnabas Davis of Charlestown, MA, so the link, I had always assumed, was on my grandmother’s side.

It’s sort of fun to think that you might be related to someone famous, but, as I started to become more serious about genealogy, I had my doubts about the story.  After all, every line that I traced in my family tree always led back to early settlers in Massachusetts.  Occasionally I would make a half-hearted attempt to prove or disprove the story, but mostly I stayed away from it.  It was a fun family tradition, and I didn’t want to be the one to end it.  That’s not to say that I stayed away from that line of my family tree, I just never definitely said yes or no to the question of Sitting Bull being an ancestor.

Lesson 2 of the HSC was a good excuse to finally state a conclusion.  Though it might be a disappointment to the living family, Item 1 of the Code of Ethics for the Association of Professional Genealogists, of which I’m a member, states “Promote a coherent, truthful approach to genealogy, family history and local history.”[1]

In other words, don’t state something as fact if you don’t have evidence to back up that fact.

Coming up with an argument for or against Sitting Bull being an ancestor was fairly easy.  A quick Internet search turns up that Sitting Bull has only one known living male descendant, Ernie La Pointe.[2]  This is strike one against the story being true.  The Internet being what it is, more evidence is needed though.

The most definitive way to prove or disprove the story is to trace all ancestral lines back to before Sitting Bull’s birth.  Sitting Bull lived between the years of 1831 and 1890.[3]  Some of my ancestral lines have been traced back that far already.  The first written assignment for Lesson 2 called for a research plan.  For this lesson, I included pedigree charts with the proper citations for my evidence sources, showing what information I had already gathered toward proving or disproving the story.  I then outlined my plan to trace the unknown lines back to before Sitting Bull’s birth.  My conclusion, based on evidence available so far, is that it is highly unlikely that I am descended from Chief Sitting Bull.  The grader for this lesson agreed with my research plan, and also agreed that it is unlikely that Sitting Bull is an ancestor of mine.

For the record, I still haven’t traced all the unknown lines back, so there is always a small chance something interesting might turn up.  I have one ancestor that one document claims was born out west, though other evidence points to him being born in New England like the rest of his family.  No other evidence has turned up to give me any reason to believe that the legend is true.

Assignment two of the lesson is to dig out some of those items in your collection that have been passed down through the family and document them.  In my case, this meant a few books, some hand-written notes, and bundles of pedigree charts.  Documentation of these items included writing a proper source citation for each item, and writing a brief description of how you came by the item.  This assignment is a good time to practice those citations.  Inaccurate citations seem to be the number one reason that lessons are returned for resubmission throughout the course.

To see more about the NGS Home Study Course, see my other posts:

• Tuesday Teachings - NGS Home Study Course

• Tuesday Teachings - NGS-HSC Lesson 1

[1] "Code of Ethics." Association of Professional Genealogists. http://www.apgen.org/ethics/index.html: accessed 2/12/2013

[2] "Sitting Bull Family." Sitting Bull Family Foundation, Inc. http://www.sittingbullfamilyfoundation.org/tatanka_iyotake_tiospaye.html: accessed 2/12/2013

[3] "Sitting Bull." Sitting Bull Family Foundation, Inc. http://www.sittingbullfamilyfoundation.org/tatanka_iyotake.html: accessed 2/12/2013

Marriage Record Monday – How Not to Find What You’re Looking For

Proprietor's Records, Volume 1

One of the assignments for the National Genealogical Society’s Home Study Course is to do a survey of local marriage records.  The idea is to become familiar with what records are available, and to do some on-site research.  Part of the assignment is to find the earliest marriage record at the repository, and compare it to other marriage records from later years.  Simple, right?

Yes, unless you’re an easily distracted history geek.

Early this afternoon, during my lunch break, I visited our local town clerk’s office.  This was actually my second attempt at working on this lesson, as when I visited the town hall last week, no one appeared to be in the office.

The clerk was extremely friendly, asking what she could do for me.  “I was hoping to take a look at the town’s marriage records,” I said.

“What era?” She asked.

“Erm, all of them?” I mumbled.  I then explained that I was working on a research class, and was trying to find the earliest marriage record that I could.

“Ah,” she said, leading me into the vault, “Grab that foot-stool over there.”  She took me to the corner of the vault and pointed to the top shelf.  “There’s volume one.  It could be in there.”

As she left me to my work, I started looking around.  Ledger books filled the walls.  Most of them, it appeared, were land records.  This wasn’t my first time in a records vault, but it had been some time, and I quickly got that “so much information, so little time” feeling.  I dragged the short foot-ladder over to the corner, stepped up, and lifted down Volume 1 of the town’s Proprietor’s Records.  As I started carefully leafing through it, I realized that I was holding original records in my hand, written by a clerk over 250 years ago.

My inner history geek kicked in.

Forget the earliest marriage record.  What about the earliest overall record?  Was that here?  Was it lost?  What else was in this book?  I took the book from the shelf and headed for the research table in the main room.  On my way out of the vault, I spotted another volume.  “Church Records” read the printed spine.  “Right,” I said to myself, “Looking for early marriages, better grab that one too.”  I sat down and started reading, fascinated that I was looking at the first record of the town.  The town charter, written 11 August, 1761, was sitting in front of me in gorgeous English phrases.

“Province of New Hampshire

George the Third, By the Grace of Great Britain France and Ireland King Defender of the Faith…”

I was hooked already.  I looked through the entire book, picking out phrases about land grants, trades, and life in general in the mid-18^th-century.  At some point I remembered to look for marriages.  I opened up the book of church records and copied down the first marriage that I found.  21 Oct, 1882. Being a sucker for anything from the 1700’s, I quickly went back to the first book, keeping in mind that I was looking for recorded marriages, but still mostly seeing land records and town dealings.

At some point I looked up and realized that the town clerk was gone.  She had gone to walk her dog.  Smiling at life in small-town Vermont, and realizing why no one was around last week when I visisted, it was probably at this point that I remembered that I was on my lunch break, and had to go back to my real job in a few minutes.

Grudgingly, I closed the books and put them back in the vault.  As I put my coat on, the town clerk returned.  I thanked her for her time, and told her that I’d likely be back tomorrow.

Hopefully I’ll be able to stay focused.