FamHist

"Please Pardon Momma from Jail"

2009-11-09T17:53:00.002-07:00

Genealogical research often takes you down many paths, sometimes just because they are so interesting. After several hours of reading interesting documents, this series of documents remained in my memory.

Dear Sir, Would You Please Pardon Momma?

18 Mar 1895 | Logan, Utah

Thirteen year old Polly Beardall found herself raising her siblings due to unfortunate events in the lives of her parents.

Apparently, her father John Gell Beardall left home in 1891 or 1892 saying the was going to Oregon to look for work and was never heard from again. He left his wife, Eliza Richards Beardall and four living children to fend for themselves in Logan, Utah.

Polly was the only daughter in the family. On 18 March 1895, she wrote a letter to the legal authorities asking them to release her mother from jail because Polly had been raising her siblings for over seven months and was worn out.

Her mother, Eliza Richards Beardall had been incarcerated for involuntary manslaughter in the county jail in Logan, Utah. The details of the case aren't revealed in the pardon documents.

Read Polly's poignant plead in this letter asking for her mothers release from jail so she could come home and care for her family.

I Scarcely Know What To Say

27 Mar 1895 | Logan, Utah

U. S. Attorney, J. W. Judd was asked by Judge W. C. Maginnis for his opinion in Polly's pardon request.

Judge Maginnis was at a loss of words as he started penning his letter to Judd. The impact of young Polly's letter on both of them was obvious in their letters.

Maginnis stated that he didn't think it was good for the children to be put in the care of their mother.

On the surface, this would seem to say that she was an unfit mother, but there is little doubt he meant that due to the indigent circumstances of the family, Eliza would struggle to support, feed and clothe her children.

Governor Vest .... The Decision Is Up To You

29 Mar 1895 | Logan, Utah

U. S. Attorney, J. W. Judd was asked by Judge W. C. Maginnis for his opinion in Polly's pardon request.

Judge Maginnis was at a loss of words as he started penning his letter to Judd. The impact of young Polly's letter on both of them was obvious in their letters.

Maginnis stated that he didn't think it was good for the children to be put in the care of their mother.

Governor Vest .... The Decision Is Still Up To You

29 Mar 1895 | Logan, Utah

U. S. Attorney J. W. Judd, wrote a letter to Utah Governor, Caleb W. Vest stating that he couldn't provide a recommendation for pardon, placing the decision on Governor Vest.

Release and Marriage

May 1895 | Logan, Utah

The pardon was granted on 1 Apr 1895 by Governor Vest and Eliza was released to go home and care for her family.. On 18 May 1895, Eliza married Azial Litchfield Riggs of Logan, Utah.

Two children, Fred and Maud, were produced from this union. Azial died when the children were in their teen years and Eliza again faced the difficult task of working a farm to provide for her family as a single mother.

Eliza died on 21 Oct 1936 in Wellsville, Utah.

Technorati Tags: Genealogy,Research,Pardon

History of the Dutch Oven

2009-11-02T23:16:00.002-07:00

I've always enjoyed eating superior food cooked in a Dutch Oven. My father used it as his only cooking pot whenever he was outdoors and frequently at home. I used to almost pray that mom would be gone for an evening so he could cook ‘trail fare’ for dinner.

Don’t get me wrong. Mom was an excellent cook and loved preparing meals for the family, but Dad – well, Dad cooked ‘Man’ food in the Dutch oven or cast iron pans. Even today, the whiff of cooking onions or garlic immediately restores a scene in my mind of a six-year-old young man, salivating at the smells and staring into the steaming contents of a Dutch oven.

Just writing about it caused the flashback memory and like any good Pavlonian dog, my mouth is watering yet again.

Today, when my family and I cook using our Dutch ovens, we frequently hear the same refrain:

“Delicious!” “Devine!” “Oh My Gosh!”

How did my ancestors stay so thin with food this good? Tracing the cooking preferences of my male ancestors for four generations, I’ve found that they were all Dutch oven masters. My early pioneer ancestors designated the Dutch oven as their only cooking pot when crossing the American plains. They never lost their love of them.

When I visited Grandpa as a youngster, he would roast potatoes in a fire when time was of the essence, but when we wanted to enjoy a good meal, his Dutch ovens were the tool used to create the feast.

Of course our family has continued the tradition. It wasn’t hard to convince our wives that cooking with the ovens was ‘Man Territory’.

The Dutch Oven: Utah's Official State Cooking Pot

The IDOS (International Dutch Oven Society) wrote about the history of the Dutch oven in Utah years ago:

“In 1997, the Utah State Legislature approved House Bill HB203, designating the Dutch Oven as the State Cooking Pot. The following information was generously sent to the Utah State Library by the International Dutch Oven Society located in Logan, Utah. Utah is not only the headquarters of the Society but the site of World Championship Dutch Oven Cookoff which is a major event of the Festival of the American West. (Held on 2 August in Logan, Utah this year.)

When the early pioneers came to Utah they used a number of things such as lumbering prairie schooners, teams of massive oxen, mossy wooden water barrels, and heavy dresses which almost dragged on the ground. For most of us, such common pioneer artifacts are difficult to relate to or use in our lives today. However, there is one very popular pioneer indispensable which thousands of Utah families are using in their everyday activities. It not only looks the same but is still made basically the same way--the tried and true Dutch oven.

Explorers like Jim Bridger and Peter Skene Ogden used the kettle versions on the trail but appreciated the standard three-legged, flat top with a rim version together with its "lite" breads, tasty fruit cobblers and delicious stews when they wintered in. Mount ain men who rendezvoused in Cache Valley in the 1820's used them and Osborne Russell in his Journal of a Trapper writes about how much they appreciated having some greasy, grizzly bear meat to cook because the cast-iron pots needed re-seasoning after boiling roots for meals the previous eleven days.

Pioneer trains gearing up near Independence, Missouri were given a list of essentials with the Dutch oven at the top of the list, the people-powered handcart companies chose to include the heavy pots for their long pull to Utah and the miners digging in the canyons around Bingham, Price and Cedar City counted the black pots almost as essential as their picks.

It's been asked why Dutch ovens are used by more Utah families than other states and perhaps it's because for Utahans, families have a special significance and particularly their pioneer forbearers. It's a unique and generational bonding experience for families to gather around a campfire after a meal from the same kind of Dutch ovens and tell the stories about and history of their pioneer ancestors.”

If you, no, when you decide to acquire your own ovens, buy the best. Stick with Lodge ovens and ONLY use Kingsford charcoal. Be sure to avoid any charcoal that his any fuel infused in the briquettes.

The formula to create a 350 F oven temperature is simple. If you have a 12” oven, put the number of briquettes equal to the size of the oven minus two under it and plus two on the top. So, for a 12” oven, 10 briquettes would be under and 14 on top for most meals. If you are cooking bread and cookies, you’ll want to move one or two of the briquettes to the top from the bottom.

Never clean your Dutch oven with soap. Heat them in hot water and wipe them clean. Eventually, a highly prized black patina will develop that is better than Teflon and won’t cause any chemical health problems. Remember that the pores of the metal open up a little when the oven is hot and washing it with soap will not only ruin the black patina but the soap will be trapped in the pores as the metal cools and contracts. Your next meal will taste a lot better without the flavor of Dawn detergent.

Be sure to wipe your oven very dry after every use. You may want to coat the surfaces with a light spray of Pam after it is cleaned. Our family lives in a low humidity environment and we don’t have to worry about rust on our ovens when we store them properly. Consider the humidity factor in your own storage plan.

We’ve found that with a little thought, anything we can cook in our home ovens can be cooked in our Dutch Ovens. And the taste? Well, there aren’t many leftovers to put in the refrigerator.

Here are a few basic ‘good eatin’ recipes that we enjoy. Sorry, the top award winners aren’t in this group. They are guarded by lock and key and my poor memory of where the key is kept.

DUTCH OVEN POTATOES

6 large potatoes

5 carrots

2 medium-sized onions

1 lb. mild cheddar cheese

1 can cream of mushroom soup

salt and pepper

Peel and slice potatoes and carrots, 1/4 in. thick. Slice onion rings 1/4 inch thick, cut into fourths. Place potatoes, carrots and onions into 12-inch Dutch oven with 1/8 inch oil on bottom. Salt and pepper to taste. Cook 40 minutes, stirring frequently. Add soup and stir thoroughly. Cook for 10 minutes. Add grated cheese over top of potatoes. Cover to melt cheese. Serve.

BARBECUED SPARE RIBS

4-6 slabs spare ribs

Brown ribs in Dutch oven. Mix sauce ingredients together. Warm to dissolve brown sugar and spices. Cover ribs with sauce. Cook for 90 minutes.

Sauce:

1 medium onion

3/4 cup ketchup

1/4 cup water

1 tsp. salt

1/4 cup vinegar

2 tsp. mustard (wet)

1 tsp. paprika

1/2 tsp. garlic powder

1 tsp. chili powder

1/4 - 1/2 tsp. red cayenne pepper

CHICKEN STIR FRY

4 chicken breasts cut into bite-size pieces

broccoli, carrots, celery, mushrooms, green onions, pea pods

1 can water chestnuts (drained)

Cook vegetables in a little oil until tender. Add water chestnuts.

Add 2 cups chicken broth. Bring to boil and cook 3-5 minutes.

Thicken with 1/4 cup soy sauce mixed with 3 tbls. corn starch.

SWEET AND SOUR PORK OR CHICKEN

1 lb. chicken breasts or lean pork

1 egg yolk

1 tbls. corn starch

1 tbls. water

flour

Cut meat into bite-sized pieces. Mix together egg, salt, cornstarch and water. Add meat and let stand 10 minutes. Remove meat pieces, dip into flour, deep fry several minutes in hot oil until lightly browned. Remove from oil and drain on paper towels. Continue cooking meat pieces until all are browned. Wipe out Dutch oven.

Vegetables:

1 large carrot, sliced

1 green pepper, cut into chunks

1/2 onion, cut into large pieces

1-8 oz. can pineapple chunks (drain, save juice)

Sauce:

pineapple juice plus water to equal 1 cup

1/2 cup ketchup

1/4 cup vinegar

1/2 cup sugar

3 tbls. corn starch

Mix together and set aside.

Into clean Dutch oven, heat 1 tbls. oil. Add onion, carrots and peppers. Stir fry until vegetables are tender. Push vegetables firm center, add sauce. When mixture boils, add meat. Mix all together. Cook 3-5 minutes. If too thick, add a little water. If not thick enough, mix a little cornstarch with water making a thickening. Add until desired thickness is achieved.

Technorati Tags: Dutch Oven,Pioneer,Cooking,Ancestors

Good Morning! Who Died?

2009-10-21T11:44:00.000-06:00

I may be unique, but I doubt it. Every morning I arise, mumble “goo morgan” to my wife and then stumble off to glance at the front page of the newspaper. My real goal is to read the obituary page however. Did any of my extended cousins or their spouses die?

Unfortunately, too many of them seem to be doing it now. Also unfortunately, I’ve read the obituaries of too many younger folks and acquaintances in the last few months. Frequently, the names on the obituary page are familiar but I can’t remember exactly how I know their name. I dutifully read dozens of obituaries every month of people that I don’t know. Sometimes though, the listing is about a cousin that I’ve only met through my genealogy database.

Genealogy. That of course is the real reason I read so many obituaries every month. I would read them to hear about friends and extended family anyway but not with such refined searches except for the possibility of finding genealogy ‘gold’ hidden in the listings.

Obituaries are invaluable resources to genealogists. The facts in them are often wrong or “off” a little because of the stress on the family at the time but the names and places are generally accurate.

Some obituaries are only sparsely populated while others are rich with details about the person and their life.

Obituaries from the turn of the century are often lengthy stories about the deceased individual.

The obituary for one of my great grandmothers is almost a half page long, complete with her photo and comments by friends and religious leaders. When I found it, I didn’t even try to obey the ‘Silence’ signs in the library. “Hah!” “Look at that!” My exclamations gained the attention of everyone on that floor. I could only manage a grin and a finger point at the page before finally telling them that “I found my great grandmother”. Shaking their heads at the eccentric behavior of one of those ‘genealogists’, the other patrons went back to their studies and research.

The smile on my face stayed in place all day. I greeted everyone a little more cheerfully during the visit and had extreme patience with the young desk attendant who tried to restock the paper in the copy machine.

Frequently, I find obituaries or death articles in digital newspapers online. Sometimes, I can’t imagine why they are in a newspaper from a distant town, but am grateful because the local newspaper of the time was destroyed by uncaring corporations who purchased the name and subscriber list of the local publication, but had no interest in the years of published content.

Absent the indexing and hosting of online digital images of newspapers, I wouldn’t have found the majority of the obituaries now safely stored in my sources folder.

Are you enjoying similar success with similar finds in your own research? If you haven’t, don your Sherlock cap and enter into the fray. Today is a good day to put a smile on your face too.

When you have thoroughly mined the Internet and need to physically visit a library, take the stairs and not the elevator. Unfortunately, they probably won’t be quite like those in this video though.

Technorati Tags: Genealogy,Obituaries,Famhist,Lineagekeeper

Find-a-grave Comes of Age

2009-10-15T23:37:00.000-06:00

When I started posting tombstone photos and histories on the Find-a-grave website over nine years ago, the site content was still fairly small. On rare occasion, I’d find a photo of the marker of an extended family member, but that was enough to encourage me to continue posting.

Eventually, I posted a request for the photo of my 4th great grandfathers tombstone in Massachusetts and a wonderful volunteer quickly responded and posted it on the Find-a-grave site. I couldn’t travel there and felt the way people who had thanked me for posting tombstone photos from my area of the world.

Four or five hours on a Saturday morning photo shoot usually produces 300 – 400 photos to post on the site. It takes me far longer to rotate, tweak, resize and crop the images than taking the photos, but that is ok because I usually find that at least some of the photos are of the markers of my own extended family. If I could post the photos quickly, I probably wouldn’t read the names so closely or allow them to ‘ring the bell’ in my memory that causes me to search my databases for a possible family tie.

Sometimes, a search of the site turned up a marker for a family member that I’d had a difficult time finding. Even though the tombstone information usually included only their name, birth and death years, the information still provided a death date and location that I could use to help in my ancestral quest.

I often commented that I wished there was a way to link the memorials together as families because not only could my links help other people searching for families members memorials that I’d created but links created by others would certainly be of equal value in my own ancestral quest.

Then one day earlier this year, my wish was granted by the kind folks at find-a-grave. Users had seen the site slow down over the years and at times it was neigh unto impossible to keep a working connection long enough to post a string of new records. We received a note asking us to be patient because the system was being ‘worked on’.

Worked on it was, because late one night the site failed while I was posting. When I tried it again an hour later, it was up and running and the search speed was terrific. The migration to new servers was completed. Not long thereafter users noted some new changes on each memorial. We could LINK Records!

Since then, I’ve seen a substantial increase of messages regarding records I’ve posted on the site. The notes asking me to link records that I’ve created to the records of their parents, siblings, children. With them, I spend time creating the links for families that are posted.

We are also posting a lot of individual photos, histories, family photos and other information that are turning the site into a wonderful genealogical resource. Several weeks ago, I found the full descendancy of one of my ‘lost’ great granduncles that a distant cousin had posted. They did a masterful job by including numerous death certificates, documented histories and comments that allowed me to track and verify the information independently.

I’ve since found that it wasn’t a one-off experience. Other difficult-to-find lines are starting to surface. Click, click, click and I’m climbing the tree back to our common ancestors. Nice!

Mentioning my photo forays and postings to cousins in England, I soon received emails from them with photos of the tombstones that they passed everyday on their morning walks. Their notes asked if I’d post them so the families of the deceased might have the images available to find in their own quests. Nice twice. I couldn’t visit England to take the photos and truth is … even if I did visit, I’d be too busy finding my own ancestral records and homes to take time out to take photos of tombstones in locations I had no reason to visit.

If you haven’t visited Find-a-grave for a while, visit today. Check to see if some of your own ‘lost’ relatives have been found and linked by a kind unknown cousin.

If you don’t already have an account, sign up and join in the fun. It’s free! Pay-it-forward by taking tombstone photos in your area and posting them on the site. Payment will return to you. Possibly in unlikely ways but always with a lot of interest.

Technorati Tags: Find-a-grave,Genealogy,FamHist,Lineagekeeper

Watching Over My Shoulder

2009-10-04T14:07:00.000-06:00

Like many of you, I spend considerable time doing genealogical research on my family lines. My forays into the past often overtake my perception of where and when I am. My mind and efforts constrict to a fine focus on the quest to find records, proofs, information and details about my ancestors lives. I put headphones on, start the music or video library playing in a small window on my left screen for background ‘noise’ and leave the world to fend for itself.

Frequently, I don’t remember eating, drinking or involvement in any other activity until I notice that the sun has arisen again and that I’m so stiff it is hard to stand up. My sweet wife has apparently brought sustenance to me and checked on me from time to time to confirm that I’m in a ‘genatonic’ state and not a catatonic state, although I was on my own during the wee hours of the night.

Sunday afternoon has magically transformed into Monday morning. If music was playing at the beginning of my session, it is still playing. My library is large enough to play new songs continuously for days. I’ve been unconsciously entertained the whole time. If a movie was playing when I moved into my ‘genamension’ (genealogical dimension), it is still playing. I have no recollection of restarting it over and over nor do I remember viewing any of its scenes. The permanent ringing in my ears was offset by the soundtrack, which helped keep the world at bay so I could concentrate.

Glancing down, I realize that I’m holding a document in my hands from my quest. On rare occasion it is the original that I’ve retrieved from my files, but usually, it is a copy that I’ve found while I’ve been traversing the halls of time. Often, there are stacks of printed documents to the side of my keyboard, waiting to be filed in sleeves in my storage binders.

Checking the records in my database, I note that I’ve dutifully transcribed them as sources in the records for the associated people. Their respective document images have been cleaned up, straightened, resized, linked to my database sources and saved in the various source folders on the multiple storage drives that I use to store my records. I marvel at all of the records that are now online and on pilot.familysearch.org.

Reading the image of the last found death record on my right screen brings a image of the person to my mind. I know them on some deeper level than just the dates and places that I’ve discovered in my genamensional journey. Often, I know what they sounded like, what they wore and how their houses and farms were organized.

I am inseparably bonded to them from that point in time on.

Where did that knowledge come from?

Someone has been watching over my shoulder.

They have been whispering to me all night long, guiding my quest, cheering me on and celebrating when they are finally ‘found’. They are mine now. I am theirs. The bond and ties have and will be made permanent in the coming days.

If you are intently involved in a similar quest for your own ancestors, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If anyone were to ask you about a member of your ancestry that you’ve worked diligently to find, then they need to be prepared to sit down and listen to you describe them and their story. They have become part of the fabric of your being. Indeed, you are inseparably bonded to them.

On the web, the story of Sara Beth’s quest to find her 5th great grandmother, Sylvia Lewis Tyler, in her blog postings resonates with us, because we understand exactly how she feels. We know why she is so excited to have touched Sylvia’s journal and to have found her grave. We celebrate her discovery with her.

I’m looking forward to celebrating the discoveries of others who are seeking to know their own lineage and family history. BYU Broadcasting has created a new program called, “The Generations Project” that will start airing in January, 2010. It is already on my calendar with a reminder that will start flashing on January 1 to find the exact time of its broadcast.

The sneak preview on the site shows a young lady who has slipped into her own genamension as she progresses from painting concentric circles to start her new painting to their unknown ancestral relevance in the process of her ancestral quest. The full show should be fascinating.

What are your genamensional stories? Post them on your blog and send me a note. I’ll link them here.

Technorati Tags: Genamension,Family History,Genealogy,Lineagekeeper

Just Try Another Window

2009-09-20T16:49:00.001-06:00

While trying to help one of my wife’s cousins find a remarkably hard to find Utah Death Certificate online today, I noted a new feature that has been added to the Utah Death Certificate Index.

We know that census records often contain spellings that are a best effort by the census taker, either because they couldn't spell, didn't hear the name clearly or wrote exactly what was said in the brogue of the speaker.

Unfortunately, that same rule also applies to some degree with early death certificates.

In this case, my wife’s 4th great grandfathers name is Lars Mouritsen. I finally found his death certificate under Mountsen.

Growling about the number of spelling combination's I'd tried to that point, another thought came to mind.....

Checking my database, I noted that we didn't have a copy of the death certificate for his wife, Maren Sorensdatter Mouritsen. I couldn't imagine why I'd forgotten to get it long ago but as soon as I started to search for it, I discovered the reason. The culprit was another spelling 'opportunity'.

After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, I finally manually went to the Utah Death Certificate Index page looking for a 'hints' link. (yes, ladies, men will eventually abase themselves to the point that they read instructions).

Fortunately, I was able to forgo that fate. A new set of search fields has been added to the index page that allows searches by death day, month and year as well as by county.

As you can see from the screen cap of the way Maren's name was written on her death certificate, there was little chance that I would find it .... who knows how the indexer read it, let alone the fact that she was apparently called by a nickname, “Maria”.

The new search fields, allowed me to simply enter Maren's death date and Cache county in the fields and bingo.... we now have a copy of her remarkably incomplete death certificate....

So, if you have problems finding the death certificate for your family member in the Utah Death Certificate Index, don't bother reading the instructions. Just scroll down the page a little and use the dates and or county fields to resolve your quest.

Men .... you are welcome.... the tragedy of having to read instructions is avoided yet again...

Technorati Tags: Death Certificate,Utah Death Certificate Index,Genealogy,Lineagekeeper

I Wear A Seat Belt When Doing Genealogy

2009-08-17T13:52:00.001-06:00

I always wear a seat belt. It makes it harder for aliens to suck me out of the window of my car.

Like most genealogy fans, I’m addicted to researching my lineage and associated families. The addiction started over a half century ago and if anything has intensified every year since then.

Many other researchers from around the world with my surname have contacted me over the years hoping to find common ancestry and to share research efforts. Surprisingly, very few of the folks are related to me prior to the early 1400’s. We wish we could find a closer tie, but alas, it hasn’t happened so far.

One of my ‘cousins’ has been in contact with me on and off for many years. He hit a brick wall early in his research and hasn’t been able to topple it even with his most intense efforts. Finally hoping to find a keyhole that peers into the lineage I’ve traced, I was asked if I’d take a DNA test hoping we’d find enough of a match to at least provide some encouragement in his quest.

Unfortunately, he asked for the DNA test results of an alien.

We waited for weeks before the first set of results arrived. Opening them, I was relieved to see that the lab agreed that I was alive but was sad that there weren’t many other facts to explore. About a month later, the rest of the results arrived. My ‘cousin’ and I may be related, but if so, it is only because we both have two legs.

Intrigued with the concept of genealogical ‘research’ through DNA, I started reading about how to correctly interpret the results of DNA tests.

That may have been a bad choice on my part. Thus far, I’ve found that I have almost no DNA ties to any other human on record.

I think I’m an alien.

I was born 14 years after my next closest sibling and due to size, coloring and interests have often wondered if I was left on the back step of my parents home and they never got around to telling me.

My oldest brother took my mother to the hospital when I was born because my father wasn’t home at the moment. He and my mother told me the story many times. My mother even elaborated on the story noting that the doctor said, “It’s a Boy! He has Red Hair!”, to which my mother replied, “That’s not Red, that’s Rust!”

I’ve always enjoyed that story but now that I’ve spent so much time trying to find DNA ties to other humans, I’m more disposed to believing that I was dropped off at my parents home by aliens. I’m probably part of a major alien conspiracy that hasn’t been exposed yet.

How are you doing with the results of your DNA tests? Are you part of the alien conspiracy too or have you been able to use them to prove ties to the humans?

To the other aliens out there, I say, “Aliens Unite!” We may create a whole new area of research in the fascinating genealogical quest that humans enjoy.

I’m sure they’ll still accept us. Source documentation may be harder for us, but think of the family stories we’ll have to tell!

See you in the Family History Library or on the Mother Ship.

Technorati Tags: DNA,FamHist,Genealogy,Family Stories,Family History,Lineage Keeper

The Indefatigable Thomas Ashton

2009-08-15T01:10:00.001-06:00

Born in Parr, Prescot, Lincolnshire in 1813, Thomas Ashton was the only son of Joseph and Catherine Cawley Ashton. Joseph was a silver smith by trade and Thomas picked up the thrill of working with his hands and mind at a young age.

He married Mary Howard in 1836 and the couple quickly had two children. In 1840, Thomas and Mary heard the message of Mormon missionaries and were baptized into that faith in 1840. On the 8th of November 1841, the couple boarded a ship at Liverpool and migrated to America to join up with other members of the church.

Three more children were born to the couple in Iowa. Unfortunately, the family was driven from location to location by murderous mobs along the other church members. They eventually moved to Nauvoo, Illinois where they established a comfortable home for their family. Once again, the mobs began to attack. They were forced to leave Missouri after Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued his infamous Missouri Executive Order 44, or the ‘extermination order’ of all members of the Mormon faith.

After years of enduring privations and stress from their attacks, Mary to become so ill that she died in August 1849. Thomas was left alone to raise five children while trying to yet again build a home, make a living and provide service to his church.

Calling on his metal and woodworking skills, he helped craft the famous old ‘blunderbuss’ cannon out of an old steamboat funnel during these years. It made a great noise but wasn’t used to kill the mobsters.

Once again, the Mormons were forced out of their homes by mobs, fleeing across the frozen Mississippi River during the winter of 1846-47. They settled in Winter Quarters, Nebraska in tents, wagons and sod homes.

The strain on the people and Thomas’ family was terrible. Fortunately, he met and married the twenty-one-year old Sarah Elenor Mills there in September 1849. His children again had a mother. On August 1850, Sarah delivered a son to the Ashton family, but once again the privations of their situation was felt. Three days later, Sarah passed away, leaving Thomas alone with six children, one of which was a three-day-old baby.

The family struggled to stay alive that fall and winter, enduring conditions that can hardly be imagined today in most areas of the world. Fortunately, they met Araminta Lawrence, a twenty-year-old lady who was born in Canada. On 17 February 1851, the couple married and Araminta became the ‘instant’ mother to five children. Thomas hadn’t been able to raise the baby in the months after the death of Sarah and he had been given to another family to raise.

In early 1851, the family left Winter Quarters with the Morris Phelps company using handcarts to carry their meager possessions. When possible, the children rode on the cart and on occasion Araminta was able to get a brief respite from walking, but Thomas walked the entire distance from Winter Quarters to Salt Lake Valley.

Thomas eventually made a home for his family in Lehi, Utah after working in Salt Lake and Weber valleys for several years. Another eleven children were born into the family by 1875.

Araminta was a tremendous woman and admiration for her love, tenacity and homemaking skills are still celebrated by her descendants.

Thomas served on the Lehi City Council twice, first from 1854 though 1866 and later from 1877 through 1878. He was the water master in the city from 1861 though 1871. Along with running a farm, he was also a carpenter, building engineer and stone mason.

Utilizing his skills to work stone, he helped build both the Nauvoo and Salt Lake Temples.

Araminta passed away on 10 Jun 1891, worn out after 59 years of life as a heroic frontier wife and mother. Thomas’ life was filled with family, service and enjoyment when he passed away at age 89 on 22 January 1903. He and Araminta are buried in the Lehi City cemetery.

Technorati Tags: Ancestors,FamHist,Genealogy

The Family History Expo Comes To Town

2009-08-14T19:59:00.000-06:00

For folks who live in or around Utah, good news is on the immediate horizon. The Salt Lake Family History Expo will be held in the South Towne Expo Center on August 28th and 29th.

Holly Hansen notes that FamilySearch is offering training for LDS Ward and Stake Family History Consultants at the Expo. All should have been notified via email, but if not, they can update their email address or register at: http://consultant.familysearch.org

Busy folks have an option to fit in a couple of classes and a visit to the exhibitors hall this year too with the addition of single class registrations for $12.00 each.

Professionals associated with family history can grow their businesses by doing onsite consultations and distributing their business cards at the tables set up for them in the Exhibitors Hall. They should contact Holly if they want to participate.

Ancestry.com is giving a FREE copy of Family Tree Maker 2010 to every banquet attendee. There will also be 10 drawings for gifts that are valued at $400 each.

All of the details about the Expo can be found by clicking here.

See you at the Expo!

Technorati Tags: Family History Expo,Genealogy,Salt Lake City

The Tale of the Tail

2009-07-31T16:32:00.001-06:00

I continue to receive requests for more ‘Elwood Drew’ stories. Apparently, tales from his life are as funny to others as they have always been to me.

Born prematurely in the early 1900’s, the midwife didn’t think he would live, so she put him in a shoebox wrapped in a blanket and stuck him on the open oven door of the wood stove in the kitchen. After caring for his mother, she was surprised to find him still alive when she went back into the kitchen.

When a horse stepped on his foot as a youngster, the horse shoe perfectly cut off his little toe. He picked it up and took it to his mother who proceeded to clean both the toe and his foot and then sewed the toe back on with her needle and black thread. I know this happened because he used to show the scars to me when I’d complain about getting immunization shots at school.

I remember watching him use his pocket knife to carve out several teeth that were bothering him when we didn’t have the money to go to the dentist. Home remedies and home doctor’n were not strangers in our family.

The older generations were tougher than us I suppose.

Prior to World War II, my parents lived in Park City, Utah, where my father worked in the mines. One of my mothers brothers lived with them while he too worked as a miner.

For various reasons, boils and carbuncles were more common place back then. If you’ve ever had one or more of them, you understand how painful they are.

Late one evening, Dad and my uncle decided to use some ‘medicinal’ whiskey to try and fix a couple of extremely painful boils that were on the posterior of my uncles anatomy.

After testing the whiskey for poisons, they found that they’d used all of the contents. Dad turned and put the empty bottle on the coal stove in the kitchen to warm it up with the intent of using it to draw out the core of the boils as it cooled down.

Dropping his drawers, Earl presented the awful swellings to my father for remediation.

Dad put the mouth of the hot whiskey bottle over the worst offender and then they waited for it to cool and create the intended suction to pull the core free.

When telling me the story, he said that everything didn’t go quite as planned. The boil wasn’t quite ‘ripe’ and the core wouldn’t come out. The rapidly cooling bottle began to suck Earl’s posterior inside the narrow neck of the bottle.

Dad said that when a little over an inch of boil and surrounding flesh had been drawn into the bottle, Earl’s aplomb vanished and he began to dance around the kitchen exclaiming all kinds of things.

Apparently, his thought process increased significantly, because he rallied long enough to run to the side of the cast iron stove where he could literally, “twist and shout” and strike the bottle against the metal.

There must be a certain skill set required to break a whiskey bottle attached to your tush by swinging it against a stove, because it took a number of swings to do the trick. After each swing, Earl’s exclamations became louder and the suction seemed to consume even more of his tender flesh. Finally, the bottle broke and released its embrace on his rear assets.

Of course, by that time, all of the family had been awakened and had run downstairs to see who was being killed in the kitchen.

There was less psychological damage to the minds of my older siblings who witnessed the naked tush of our uncle than you might suppose. None of them ever exhibited any lasting effects from the vision, but from time to time, I have witnessed tears run from their eyes when they’ve been together and revisited the ‘Tale of the tail’.

Family stories are a treasure. I hope you are recording your own stories.

Technorati Tags: Grandpa,Diaries,Family Stories,Family History

Cosmo, Cuthbert and Cudbear

2009-07-24T23:38:00.002-06:00

My 5th great granduncle, Cosmo Gordon was born in 1748 in Clashdow, Morayshire, Scotland. A descendant of the Gordon, Stewart, Grant, MacWilliam and O’Laggan families / clans in northern Scotland, Cosmo was the oldest son in the family. As such, much was expected of him.

Living in the Gordon Castle and surrounding properties presented opportunities for education that weren’t enjoyed by all of the residents in the area. Eventually, his education and desire to succeed in life were rewarded with wealth and notoriety.

Cosmo met beautiful young lass named Magdalen Gordon and fell in love. I haven’t been able to trace Magdalen’s lineage beyond her father yet, but have little doubt that they were related to some extent.

Two of Magdalen’s brothers were entrepreneurs by nature, a trait that matched Cosmo’s own inclination.

George Gordon was a coppersmith from Banffshire and his brother Dr. Cuthbert Gordon was a dye merchant from Leith.

One day, while mending a copper boiler in a dye house in London, George noticed the orchil (reds) dye being used was similar to the dye used in his native highland home.

The sight sparked an idea in George’s mind. Talking it over with his brother, Cuthbert, who had training as a doctor and chemist, the pair knew the red and purple dyes used at home were made from lichen that grew on rocks and old wood ruins.

After some experimentation, the pair discovered a secret formula to extract a permanent, non-fading dye from the lichen.

Telling their brother-in-law, Cosmo, about their discovery, the trio decided to go into business with Cosmo providing the financial expertise and many of the contacts in the marketing world.

The dye became famous because unlike other dyes on the market, it didn’t fade in the light. The trio patented their process in 1758 under British patent no. 727 and named it “Cudbear”. The name was unique because it was named after Cuthbert.

An entry on Wikipedia details the extraction process:

“The lichen is first boiled in a solution of ammonium carbonate. The mixture is then cooled and ammonia is added and the mixture is kept damp for 3-4 weeks. Then the lichen is dried and ground to powder. The manufacture details were carefully protected, with a ten-feet high wall being built around the manufacturing facility, and staff consisting of Highlanders sworn to secrecy. The lichen consumption soon reached 250 tons per year and import from Norway and Sweden had to be arranged.”

Eventually, Cosmo became a Deputy King's Waiter of the Customs of the Port of London. In that position, he found huge errors in accounting and theft in the tobacco warehouses. Presenting his evidence and recommendations to Prime Minister, William Pitt, on January 6, 1786. He was subsequently appointed Comptrolling Surveyor of the Warehouse in London.

Cosmo’s recommendations were introduced into a new law to stop this type of theft and accounting manipulation resulting in huge increases in tax revenues to the governments coffers.

Passage of the new law was not easy because so many well connected people had benefited from the graft. Mr. Pitt instructed Cosmo to be in attendance to all discussions of the law in the House of Lords to explain the proposal, illuminate the graft and address the opposing statements and efforts by the Lords who opposed the law. After a long and arduous period of time, Mr. Pitt was satisfied that Cosmo had represented the proposal so well that he pushed for approval. The law was subsequently passed in the Act of the 29th George III cap. 69.

Cosmo was promoted to Principal Surveyor of the Tobacco Warehouse, at the desire of the Commissioners of the Customs. He traveled throughout England and Scotland arranging import agreements, procedures and documentation for several years thereafter. As he had expected, graft and mismanagement was rampant throughout the the import activities in every port.

The Commissioners of Customs moved on his recommendations and much of the corruption was stopped. Of course, not everyone in government, or even among the Commissioners were happy with these actions. They had benefitted from them and thus, Cosmo accrued numerous well-placed enemies in government.

Eventually, the acrimony in their hearts moved them to action. Cosmo was forced out of his prestigious position in London to a lesser assignment in Liverpool where he lived the rest of his life.

Magdalen Gordon died on 24 Oct 1796 in London.

Cosmo eventually remarried. On 12 Jan 1808, he and Mrs. Sarah Butler were joined as husband and wife.

Cosmo and Magdalen had two children:

Thomas Gordon of whom it was said that he "seemed to possess rather more than common abilities, and never was sent to any school except to learn French, having acquired all the knowledge he had under his father. Indeed he was almost self-taught, for he used to say that what one had heard and seen and could not teach himself to do it was not worth being taught it. He prided himself in his penmanship and accuracy in accounts, and at the time of his death he kept as elegant a set of mercantile books as any in London." He died October 1798, in his 19th year.

Robert Henry Butler Gordon, who was third mate in the Albion East Indiaman and died the preceding year at Bencoolan, on his voyage to China, in the 24th year of his age.

With his death, his branch of the Gordon family surname ended although the Gordon name was carried in the names of many generations of the descendants of his only sister, Elizabeth Gordon, who married Major James Logie.

Technorati Tags: Scotland,Gordon,Genealogy Customs Commission

My Mother Was a Quilter

2009-07-16T23:34:00.002-06:00

A cascade of vintage quilting fabric brought back memories of growing up with a mother who was a quilter. As the caboose in the family, I frequented the quilting bees she attended because there was no one at home to tend me.

My parents raised my older siblings during the depression and were grateful to have the cloth from flour sacks to make pajama’s, aprons and probably play blouses to wear under my sister’s jumpers.

Even though I was born two decades later than them, I also heard the constant refrain; “Wear it out. Use it up or do without”. The extreme lessons learned in the depression never left my parents minds.

Hence, the pattern of the vintage fabric produced a flashback of laying my bored, tired young body under a quilt frame with a quilt stretched across it. Surrounding me were the legs of a dozen women wearing similarly patterned dresses, thick hose and ‘sturdy’ shoes. I can still hear their constant chatter, laughter and the occasional ‘Ouch!’ from an errant stitch. Once the “chickens in the coop” started to cluck, my eyes rarely stayed open for more than two minutes. Maybe someone should sell that sound as a sleep aid for children and men.

Of course I married a quilter. Not necessarily by conscious thought, but certainly to my delight. The craft has passed on to our daughters and daughters-in-law. When I sit in my chair in the living room and they all gather to discuss their latest projects, designs and favorite fabric patterns, the two minute rule is still in effect. Cackle, cackle, ….. snore….

Unfortunately, all of the guys in our family think there is a downside to our wives hobby. Sometimes we are dragged by them, (usually screaming), to a fabric store.

Reading the Pickles comic strip makes me think its creator has a copy of the security tapes from my visits to these stores. I’m obviously the inspiration for the strips covering this subject.

Mom’s quilting legacy lives on in the current generations. They don’t make many quilts out of old Levi’s and worn out shirts like Mom did, but they do help several quilting stores remain viable in our area.

I’m glad the legacy is being passed on to our granddaughters. They are full of creative ideas and are bonding with the older quilters in the family in ways that make me smile.

I wonder how far back the quilting talent can be traced in their lineage. It was probably less ‘fun’ for the earlier generations. Our grandmothers were sewing clothing to wear and quilts to warm their beds rather than the current creations that are produced under less pressure and thus with probably a little more enjoyment of the work.

Looking at some of the designs in my grandmothers old quilts makes me think that there was more than a little whimsy stitched into their designs though. The patterns are obvious, but when you explore the stitches closely, you often discover the quilters initials and other signature stitch designs. If you spend just a few minutes more, you can see the elongated, crooked and loose stitches that were made by the young folks in the family who were being taught the craft as they sat in on a quilting bee.

All the quilts our ladies have made are Treasure. Pure Treasure.

That’s family history you can touch!

Technorati Tags: Quilting,Grandmothers,Crafts,Great Depression,Family Legacies

The Twig That Knocked Down A Brick Wall

2009-07-15T01:26:00.004-06:00

None of the descendants of Hiram Anderson had been able to find his ancestry. A single scant clue to his lineage was in the note stating that he was born ‘on the north branch of the Potomac River.

Single individuals and cousin groups had searched for the meaning of this phrase for years. Finally, two cousins who live many states away contacted me via the web and our ancestral musings rekindled the quest.

I lived closest to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, so the task to spend whatever time required to break this brick wall in our ancestry fell to me. There were only two days available in my schedule for months ahead, so I spent them at the library from door opening to door closing. If a book or film had any reference to any Anderson in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia or West Virginia, I copied the page, listed the source reference on it and tucked it into my briefcase to review later during late night hours at home. My time in the library was too valuable to spend any of it analyzing the pages.

There were a lot of promising clues but none detailed any facts that could tie our Hiram Anderson to the Anderson families in that area.

Night after night, I extracted the facts on the photocopied pages into a new database that I’d created for this quest. All the handwritten notes, drawings and poor copies were scanned and enlarged to be studied on my computer monitors.

This activity continued for weeks with no success and then one night I noticed some tiny writing on the branches of a hand-drawn image of a family tree. Hiram’s uncle had long ago drawn the tree for his extended family and a copy of it survived to be published in a family history. When I enlarged the area of interest by 500%, Christmas arrived early.

There, detailed in small print, was the name of Hiram Anderson with the correct names of his siblings. He was the son of William Anderson and Nancy Ann Forshee. The puzzle pieces all fell into place. Because his parents names were in the database that I’d created from the research copies, I was able to construct both sides of Hiram’s ancestry for several generations.

Hiram's parents move their family from Anderson's Bottom in Hampshire County, Virginia west to Fairfield, Ohio in April 1806. In February, 1807, Hiram's mother died leaving William with six children. The youngest, Rachel, was only two years old at that time. The family struggled to survive on the frontier, building a log home, clearing the land for farming and growing enough food to eat.

As with most early settlers in frontier settings, births, marriages and deaths were usually only recorded in a family bible, if they were recorded at all. This was true for the Anderson family.

William Anderson's father, Thomas Anderson, served as a captain in the Revolutionary War and was involved in the surrender of Cornwallis that effectively ended the war. He had also served as a captain in the local militia protecting the settlements in western Virginia from attacks by the Indians and British. Both he and his father, William, knew George Washington personally. As a young man, General Washington worked as a surveyor and frequently stayed with the Anderson family. Service to their country and fellow men was deeply instilled into the hearts and minds of the men of the Anderson family.

At the outbreak of the War of 1812, William Anderson and three of his brothers joined the militia in defense of the fledgling United States against the British and their Indian warriors. Three of the brothers didn't survive to returned home. Among them was Hiram's father, William Anderson, who had died at Fort Malden, Ontario, Canada. Hiram was left to support and raise his younger siblings alone.

No wonder birth, death and other records were difficult to find. A move to the frontier where record keeping was scarce. A mother dying soon thereafter leaving a husband and six children scrambling to survive and carve out a home and farm from the raw land. A war that took the father from the home to never return.

I'd love to shake the hand of my great grand uncle who drew the family tree so there was a record of Hiram's lineage that was created by someone who knew him personally.

Fortunately, several primary and many secondary sources were in the stack of copied records about the Anderson Family. Because I had time at home to carefully sift through the pages, details emerged that helped fill blank lines in my database. They also pointed me to other areas to search including specific documents and sources that were in the Library in Salt Lake and some that required written requests and associated fees.

The twig on the tree expanded to bring down our brick wall. To date, we have only found circumstantial evidence of Hiram’s ancestry in other records. The hand-drawn tree by his uncle is the only record that lists Hiram with his parents.

Sometimes the smallest clues bring great rewards. Moral: Never give up. Check, double check and even triple check all of the data from your research. The smallest element may be the seed that expands to break down your brick wall.

Technorati Tags: Brick Walls,Family History Library,Documents,Data Mining

1,000th Cousin Contact

2009-07-10T14:39:00.001-06:00

1,000 extended cousins have now contacted me after finding my websites. Years ago, I wondered if the effort to create the sites was worth the investment of time. I wish all of my investments had such fantastic returns.

The contacts have been mutually beneficial for all of us. I share information that I've found about our joint family during my lifetime of research and they share information that they have inherited or have found in their own ancestral quest.

All of us have unique perspectives and advantages of local resources and family knowledge. The combination of our efforts in continued research always produces more than the sum of our two data repositories. Perhaps it is generated by the spark of renewed interest resulting from our contact, but it is probably due to many factors especially the complimentary engagement of our skills and perspectives.

If you are reading this you are probably already using the Internet and social tools focused in genealogy in your own quest. If you aren't enjoying a lot of contacts yet, don't give up. Keep posting your successes, your brick wall lineages and the surnames and locations you are researching.

Help others if you can. You'll always receive substantial interest from this investment of your time, talents and resources.

Technorati Tags: Cousin Contacts,Brick Wall Genealogy. Genealogy Social Networks

Grandpa Liked To Sing

2009-06-27T12:17:00.000-06:00

While working to put additional information on the fact frames associated with my ancestors, I turned the music to random play. A male baritone voice cycled into play as I added information to my grandfathers record. I was immediately reminded of the stories I’d heard of his life long enjoyment of singing.

Looking through the words I’d added to his history over the years, the only mention of his singular public expression were the words, “Grandpa liked to sing”.

The stitching of the word quilt that covered his life in my genealogical records didn’t contain one of the most important design elements. This very private man had one sustainable public facet during his life. Grandpa liked to sing.

My mother often described her two bedroom childhood home that housed ten or more family members. They were crowded into every space, especially at night. Even the screened back porch had cots where grandpa and some of the boys slept year round. Privacy was just a word.

Grandma cooked from sun up to well after sun down, day after day, year after year, regardless of the temperature in the kitchen. The old coal stove probably didn’t cool off completely for thirty years. When it wasn’t heating or baking food, it was warming water for baths and with that many family members, even semi-daily baths taxed its ability to heat enough water.

The large family required a lot of food and the family raised and grew almost everything they consumed. Grandpa augmented the meager earnings from their “cash crops” with his skilled blacksmith hands.

I only remember really talking to him a few times, even though he lived until after I was married. He was a shy kind of a fellow unless you were working with him or in his presence regularly.

Mom said that he would arise at 4:30 a.m. every morning and start the fire in the kitchen stove while the rest of the family slept. The daily ritual always included numerous selections in his strong baritone voice.

While the stove warmed, he would prepare a pot of coffee, gather enough wood to feed the stove until his boys got up to do their chores before school and then he’d stare out of the window above the sink trying to read the sky for the weather of the day. And he would sing.

In the winter months, he stayed in the kitchen to drink his morning cup of Joe, but when the temperature was twenty degrees or warmer, he sat on one of the two steps on the front porch and serenaded the neighborhood.

I’ve been told by several of those who were kids in the area during the years, that they loved waking to his songs. He sang old-timey songs, love songs, songs of the season and songs that he made up.

He didn’t take requests. In fact, if anyone approached him or even glanced at him with too much interest while walking down the street, he’d immediately stop singing and go inside. He was a shy kinda guy.

When I was five, he took me out to his blacksmith shop one afternoon while he worked to repair the rakes on a hay rake. Even though I was a small town kid, I wasn’t a farm kid and was basically useless pumping the bellows. At least, I was until he taught me the rhythm of the pump. Singing a song with emphasis on the final word in each stanza, he showed me how to keep the heat in the hearth just right so he could work the metal with his hammer on the anvil for a few minutes before returning it for more heat.

It was an unusual day in my experience with him, because while my reedy five-year-old voice called out the bellows-pumping ditty, he sang harmony and circled my tune with layers and layers of beautiful music. In fact, it was so beautiful that he had to remind me to start pumping again several times when I stood in silent amazement at music coming out of this quiet man.

He sang to his dog, to his sheep and to a cow that day too. They liked it. I could tell. Their heads all popped up and they all moved to the point of their pens and pastures closest to him when he turned to face them over the bellows. It wasn’t a new experience for them, but like me, they all stood still in rapt attention to the generator of such beautiful sounds.

Grandpa sang at funerals in town with three other fellows during most of his life. I suppose he knew that the attendees weren’t going to ask him to sing a song just for them at those times and as one of four, most of the limelight spread away from him even though his voice was the pillar that supported the less dynamic notes sang by the others.

Some say that if he ever had a little liquor, his shyness retreated a little but even then it was contained among his circle of friends who each had a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon in their paws.

I wish I’d heard his morning concerts, but never did. I asked him to sing a few songs once when I was sixteen, but he declined.

Grandpa was a shy kind of a man.

Technorati Tags: Grandpa,Histories,Singing

GPS and Lost Graves

2009-06-17T12:34:00.001-06:00

I’ve visited the grave of my great grandfather a number of times over the years. It was usually covered with Memorial Day flowers as were most of the graves in the cemetery. It is a memory of a sea of color and fragrant smells – folks greeting each other, pointing to headstones and markers – a reunion of sorts.

In the last decade, mylar windmills, balloons and plastic blossoms have almost overwhelmed the iris, peonies, babies breath and snowball floral tributes left by us older folks. There seem to be fewer of us visiting the burial locations of our families now. There are too many big boy toys, outing distractions and to some degree, lack of respect for our lineage that has become associated with Memorial Day in recent years.

I try to show our grandchildren where their ancestors are buried with pilgrimages to the cemetery every year or so hoping they will retain the ancestral memories after I’m gone or can’t remember them myself in some future day.

Apparently that future day is arriving even as I write this note. I couldn’t find my great grandfather’s grave this year. I couldn’t find my aunt’s grave.

There are only 20,000+ burials in the cemetery where their bodies reside and the old parts really haven’t changed that much but apparently someone moved their graves during the past couple of years.

At first I chuckled. Then I frowned and visually searched for the familiar landmarks that I’ve known since my youth. Finding some of them, I tried to triangulate and ‘walk to the graves’ like I’d done as a young man. That didn’t work. Someone really had moved the graves!

Apparently, the only thing that had moved were a few synaptic links in my brain because after an hour of walking up and down row after row of markers, I finally found the headstones. I enjoyed reading the markers during my walk but had other graves to visit, clean and photograph that day.

I’ve visited the graves of my ancestors in Plymouth, Massachusetts several times, but during the last visit, I couldn’t walk right to the ones that “I was sure of”. When have you fly across country to visit a cemetery, ‘wasting’ time to find a grave that you knew you can ‘walk to in my sleep’ but can’t find any longer is an expensive and frustrating exercise.

Could it be that I’ve now been to so many cemeteries in so many locations that they are starting to merge in to a blended picture in my memory? Probably so. Have I lost synaptic connections? Probably so. Hence, I purchased a GPS specifically for my traveling genealogy kit.

Now when I visit a cemetery, any cemetery, I record the lat / long coordinates of the headstones of my ancestors. That data is entered in my database directly tied to their burial data. Yes, I know that my commercial GPS handheld is only accurate to 14 feet or so of the real spot I’m standing on, even if it has acquired eight or more satellites, but, that means that I should only have to walk a maximum of 28 feet in any direction to find the grave in the future if I can’t ‘walk to it in my sleep’ that day. I can do that in short order.

I record the information on Find-a-grave, Names In Stone, Picasa, Panoramio, my own genealogy sites and other websites when I post headstone photos on them as well. Maybe the information will help someone else in the future. Additionally, I can use my web enabled cell phone to look at those sites and remind me where the graves are located in future visits.

One thing is certain. I will continue to visit more and more cemeteries in the future. The blended memory picture of them in my mind will continue to meld into an even more generic image as time goes on. I’ll probably forget how to exactly walk to even more of the graves too.

I won’t be alone. You’re all walking down the same path with me. Some of you are ahead of me. Some of you are behind but if you love to visit cemeteries like I do, you are right on track to arrive at the same destination eventually. If you haven’t purchased a GPS handheld or have the software in your iPhone or other device, you might as well put one on your ‘stuff I want list’ so your family and friends will know what to get you for Christmas, birthday or graduation.

Once you start documenting the exact location of graves, you’ll find that it adds to the fun of cemetery visits and you too will be able to find your great grandfathers grave in the future.

Technorati Tags: Cemetery,Lat-Long,GPS,Photos,Headstones

Grave Dowsing ~ More Stories

2009-06-09T18:18:00.000-06:00

In a recent post, I briefly covered an article about dowsing for graves that I’d stumbled upon. The article was the first that I'd every heard of anyone using dowsing for that purpose.

The response to my post was surprising. Apparently, there are a lot of folks who engage in this activity to locate lost graves.

The University of Iowa has a good treatise on the subject found here. The document will download as a .pdf file.

In 2005, Dick Eastman posted about a grave dowsing experience by Tom Corey on the Oregon Trail. As usual, his readers have posted some interesting comments in response to his post.

Linda Bell wrote about dowsing methods used to find county graves for the North Forty News. Dowsing plays a key role in finding graves on the Roberts Ranch in Livermore, California.

The Archer Cousins Genealogy website has an article that covers their experience in dowsing to find the graves of family members that includes photos of their efforts.

The Hughes and Related Families site has a detailed article that covers the theory, tools and methods used to dowse for graves.

Jay McAfee posted an article written by Thomas A. Markham about dowsing to find old graves in a GenForum post in 2004.

Glenn Adams wrote an article on his blog about his use of dowsing rods in the search for the bodies of a murdered couple.

Wendell Culberson of the Mississippi GenWeb site wrote a great article on his experiences in finding lost graves in Shelby County, Illinois.

Chris Dunham of The Genealogue blog quoted an article about grave dowsing that was published in the Wichita, Kansas Eagle newspaper.

Brenda Marble wrote a detailed article for the cemeteries.missouri.org site about grave dowsing and the tools and methods used in this activity.

The list of articles about Grave Dowsing is surprising long. A Google search for “dowsing for graves” produced over 1,200 hits. Needless to say, I was surprised by the number of results given the fact that I’d never heard of the subject before finding the “Old Ways Help Women Find Old Graves” article two weeks ago.

Are you familiar with these efforts to find lost graves? Personally, I don’t have interest in the occult or entities that use dowsing to tell fortunes, the sex of unborn children, etc. As I noted in my first post on the subject, I’ve used dowsing rods to find water and power lines as simple convenience. I’d witnessed dowsing to find water lines as a youth and as a young man working for a electric utility. Simple tools. Simple needs. Quick and accurate results were produced followed by putting the hastily constructed wire wire rods in the trash or bent back to their normal shape for use in construction.

Reflecting on it, I suppose I always thought the metal dowsing rods simply reacted to gravitational disturbances created by buried metal pipes full of water or energized power lines. Tenuous reasoning I know, but who cared. The job they were used for got done faster with them than without. I gave the dowsing rods no more thought than I would a tooth pick at a restaurant.

But dowsing for buried bodies? What is that all about? How does it work? Is the power of the human mind greater than we’ve been able to measure thus far?

Apparently so, or at least it is so for some folks.

You’ll note that the people writing or quoting the articles above have had success using dowsing to find graves. It’s just an example of folks having a small need that can be difficult to impossible to resolve via normal means, yet by exhibiting a little faith in oneself followed by the use of simple tools focused on a specific subject seems to bring results.

Whether you decide to dowse for graves or not, research of the subject provides interesting reading. I probably won’t use my bent up old galvanized tie wire rods for this activity, but who knows, maybe the need will arise for some unforeseeable reason in a future day. If so, I wonder if it will work for me? I guess I’d shouldn’t think about it too much and cobble up the works.

Technorati Tags: Dowsing,Graves,Tales

The Problem With Primary Source Documents

2009-06-07T16:34:00.002-06:00

We know that primary source documents always are desired to assist in proving our lineage. Can we count on their accuracy?

The answer is NO. They frequently contain errors. Dates are wrong. Locations are frequently wrong. Names are wrong or misspelled. Why does this happen?

Looking at my great grandmother’s death certificate, I immediately noticed that her name was different than the one written in various publications and family records.

Great Grandma’s birth name was “Helen Marr Farrar”, yet the name listed on the certificate is “Helen Mary Drew”. Did the recorder hear the information wrong or accidentally write a name frequently used in his family?

That is one possibility. I make the same error at times. However, her certificate offers a greater clue to the problem. The informant listed on the certificate is "Lula H. Johnson”. For some reason, great grandma’s death information was given to authorities by her niece rather than by any of her six children that lived in the area.

Can you provide the full birth name, birth date and parents names for your aunts and uncles from memory? Not many of us can. Lula, was probably helping the family take care of ‘foot work’ while the children arranged the funeral, burial and mourned the loss of their mother.

We know that the birth information listed on a death certificate is suspect. It came from someone’s memory. The only facts that should be correct on the certificate are the name, death date and place and burial date and place and yet, even they are ‘suspect’.

The birth information and even the parents names on death certificates are secondary sources at best.

One of the key indicators that grandma’s name was Helen Marr was a letter from her “family historian” granddaughter that states that great grandma was named after her mothers sister, Helen Marr Tirrill.

Wondering if “Marr” was a rare name in that day, I searched for others that may have had the name and was surprised how frequently it was used. A misspelling was undoubtedly less of a factor than I initially suspected.

Errors abound in the birth and death certificates that I’ve found for my family. In fact, they are more common than not.

My aunt died as a young child in the now non-existent town of Knightsville, Utah. My grandparents lived in the area when grandpa had a wagon and horse team hauling supplies and anything else needed between Salt Lake City and the remote mining towns in Juab county.

The informant listed on Gladys’ certificate was my grandfather but unfortunately, the registrar, Mr. E. J. Howell incorrectly recorded her burial location. It states that aunt Gladys was buried in the American Fork, Utah cemetery, yet she and her baby sister are actually buried side-by-side in the family plot in the Alpine cemetery.

Was she initially buried in American Fork and later moved to Alpine? No. Her uncle Charles and aunt Ada were buried on the plot in 1901 and 1904 respectively. Two other aunts and an uncle died as babies and were buried on the family farm in the late 1880’s – early 1890’s, so the family didn’t own the cemetery plot then, but by the time their eldest son was buried in 1901, they owned or had purchased the lot.

Gladys was buried in Alpine not in American Fork. The “primary source” information on her death certificate is wrong.

I wonder how many errors exist in the thousands of certificate that that I’ve collected over the years yet don’t have enough other information to cause me to suspect errors in them. There are probably quite a few, but since I know that even “Primary” source documents frequently contain errors, I still list them in my databases with the highest level of confidence. What else can be considered a “Primary Source Document”?

You have the same problem in your own source documents. Don’t let it throw you. Don’t obstinately argue over minor factual differences with other researchers. Establish a rule in your negotiations with others declaring that the primary source documents are the base used for accuracy but that codicil statements can be added to that knowledge to argue or exhibit additional information to consider in the decision of the ‘true facts’ associated with the record of your family member.

Technorati Tags: Primary Source Documents,Death Certificate,Marriage Certificate,Birth Certificate

Dowsing For Graves And Other Wives Tales

2009-06-05T01:14:00.002-06:00

If you are like me, there are graves of your extended family that have either lost their grave markers or were never marked for a variety of reasons.

In my family, three of my great aunts and uncles died as youngsters and were buried on the family farm in Fort Canyon, above Alpine, Utah. I made a post about them called “Little Ones Lost” earlier this year.

Today, I found an article titled, “Old ways help women find old graves” that describes the efforts of Cate Culver, who is using dowsing rods to find old unmarked graves around the Pioneer Cemetery in San Andreas, California.

As expected, scientists say that dowsing doesn’t work and that her efforts are a waste of time. Unfortunately, the soil in that area is less ‘soil’ than rock and has a fairly high copper and other mineral content. The article notes that ground penetrating radar won’t work in the area due to the terrain and of course, officials aren’t going to grant permission to open the suspected locations for ‘no’ reason other than to prove that the dowser can find old graves.

Long ago, I was surprised when I was first told that dowsing didn’t work and that it couldn’t be proven. I’d grown up watching people dowse for water, power and other buried lines with great success. In fact, when I was told that dowsing was bunk, I had actually dowsed for a long lost water line that was leaking the weekend before. Running water could be heard in a pipe that entered the basement of our home but wasn’t attached to anything inside.

Curiosity got the better of me one Friday evening, so I pulled out the dowsing rods, marked the location of the pipe on the lawn and started digging with a shovel. The location was about 100 feet away from the city water line feeding our home.

While dowsing, I had flagged a couple of 90 degree turns in the route of the line.

A few hours later, my wife was less than happy to find about forty feet of five foot deep trench winding its way through our north lawn.

Yes, the water line was exactly where I’d marked it and at the depth the rods had indicated. No surprises. The trench was so long because I had to follow the line to find the leak and then to clear enough length of pipe so that it could be lifted, cut, spliced and tested for new leaks.

As it turned out, the water originated three hundred feet south in the basement of the neighbors home. They had owned our home before building their new home. The water lines to the chicken coops that used to be on the back properties had originally fed from our home. When they built the new house, they simply capped the water line in the basement of the old house and fed it from the new house. Finally, decades later, the old water line deteriorated and began to leak.

Being on the end of the shovel doing the digging, I’d long ago decided that the dowsing rods had better work or you were only involved in a less than satisfying way to exercise.

We often used dowsing rods to find buried power lines when I worked for the power company. The younger generation had to use the expensive tools that semi-find electrical fields, but the old hands just grabbed a pair of iron tie wires, bent one end of each long enough to use as a handle and marked the line. No big deal. Fast, accurate and easy. And because the fellows were doing the digging by hand, the marks had to be accurate due to the seemingly never ending layers of river rock or they’d never use their dowsing sticks a second time. Inevitably, the dowsing marks were always more accurate than those created the using multi-thousand dollar buried line identification equipment.

I’ve continued to use dowsing rods to find the dozen or so telephone drop lines that cross our orchard when I’ve installed fence posts, sprinkling systems and other buried features in our landscaping. Thus far, they’ve always provided 100% accuracy. I guess that I need to read the scientific reasons why the rods don’t work but really don’t want to. If I do, I may believe the scientific reasons and then the rods won’t work any longer. After all, scientists are rarely wrong. Right?

Over the years, I’ve chatted with folks from all over the world who have dowsed to find water and other buried features for all of their lives with great success. They grew up using them and apparently, none of them had been taught that dowsing doesn’t work either.

My ancestors dowsed. Their ancestors dowsed. Maybe you have to have a naive faith that dowsing works for it to work for you. Maybe it is tied to string theory or quantum mechanics. Maybe you have to acknowledge that the laws of the universe are a lot stranger and more elastic than all of us whiz kids realize.

Maybe the old healing and ‘wives tales’ medical remedies that my mother, grandmothers and great grandmother taught and practiced don’t work either. I guess you’d have to convince the almost invisible scars on my body that the old remedies didn’t work though. While in that discussion, maybe you could tell the adjacent scars from wounds that were ‘healed’ by doctors that they shouldn’t be so big and ugly because they were treated by highly educated men who convinced me that my ancestors old remedies didn’t work. But that topic is a whole other discussion.

I wonder how many of the old remedies and ‘ways’ have been relegated to the pit by us as we’ve become more ‘educated’ over the generations?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m absolutely delighted to be living when so many medical, technological and other advances have been made to make our lives so much physically better than those of our ancestors, but I wonder what we’ve lost in the process of worshiping our scientific ‘Gods’.

What commonly practiced old ‘Ways’ and ‘Remedies’ in your ancestral history have been lost? Post a note and let us know.

Don’t necessarily expect us to believe them though. Maybe you can ascribe our unbelief to our being taught that they don’t work and hence our faith in them being literal is missing.

Remember, my dowsing rods ’don’t work’ either and most readers will probably assign me to the group of ‘characters’ of a past age. That’s ok. We’re relatively happy in our ignorance….. and, before you ask, no, I don’t dowse for water or power or telephone lines for anyone else. Who’d believe that it worked in today’s world anyway?

Technorati Tags: graves,dowsing,remedies,ancestors,wives tales

Gold In Your Drawers

2009-05-28T22:31:00.004-06:00

Sometimes we have to look in the mirror and shake our heads in wonder. The person in the reflection doesn’t look as dumb as they feel, but it is hard to argue with facts.

I’ve looked for clues to aid in the quest to find of one of my ancestors for years. The results were always the same. Nothing. I’ve reread my research notes, rethought my research strategy and recommitted it to writing. The new plan required plotting possible migration routes of my ancestors, deep delving into the Family History Library Catalog and subsequent printing of dozens of pages of source materials that need to be explored at the library. A hand clasp binder is sitting on my desk bulging with these pages, group sheets, summaries of old research activities and the new plan.

I won’t need most of them now. One last reading of a page that I’d photocopied over a generation ago resolved much of the issue. I had to reread it four or five times to believe what I was seeing. I even suspected that it was a ‘new’ page that someone had slipped in to my file. Surely, I couldn’t have missed that brief sentence so many times ….. but of course I had.

We are creatures of habit. We form impressions that often eclipse reality. I remember reading the document on a microfilm reader when I first found it. I took notes from the page and even traced some of the hard to read writing on the page that day. I’ve probably looked at the page and the photocopy of the microfilm page a hundred times since then but my mind knew what it contained, and hence, the little sentence was apparently ignored, skipped or had become invisible to my mind.

How often have you reread your old research notes and reviewed the documents you’ve collected in your own ancestral quest? If you haven’t used a fine tooth comb review of them lately, make an entry on your calendar to look through them again. Mine them for hidden Gold.

Perhaps we have to turn the paper 50 degrees side to side to see something new. Personally, I’ve found that reading the data out loud is the best method to restart my frozen cognitive research review process. My ears hear information that the lobes of my brain used for reading seem to obscure.

Give it a try. You’ll probably find real treasures in your papers. Treasures that you’ve owned for years. Treasures that may open new windows in your quest.

Once you have finished your perusal and have then settled down enough to stop exclaiming your wahoo’s (and some of the grin has melted off your face), walk to the bathroom, turn on the light and take a good look at the clueless person who is staring back at you. Do they look any smarter now?

Lesson learned. Go a little slower. Review frequently. Look at the data through a different window. Gold. There is Gold your drawers!

Technorati Tags: Certificates,Genealogy,Documents,Data Mining

Recording Life ~ Fishing

2009-05-09T02:33:00.001-06:00

My father had a unique skill in interpersonal relationships. Without selling someone something they didn’t want, he could nonetheless divert their objections as if he was Obi-Wan in the Star Wars movie.

The power company needed to install a new feeder circuit in a fast growing city in Utah. Everyone wanted the power for their homes, offices and stores but none of them wanted the power lines necessary to provide that service. Frustrated with months of fruitless conversations, public meetings and incentives, the district manager responsible for the city turned to my father.

“Elwood, I’m taking you out of your position as foreman and am giving you a car, line plans and little if no money.” “Go get the right-of-way we have to have to upgrade that feeder circuit before the whole south end of the city goes black!”

Great! An assignment that had stymied numerous ‘professional’ right-of-way agents, management and even high level city officials. “Get the right-of-way”. “Much of the city will be in a permanent blackout by July - three months away.” “You have little money to spend.” In those days, little money was the $100 contingent fund in district offices. Management authorized their district managers to spend up to that amount without having to go through an arduous budget hearing.

Opening the rusted trunk lock on the 1962 Ford, he placed a bucket full of wood stakes, wood lathe, fluorescent marking tape and a hammer inside. A puff of smoke always followed the vehicle when a foot pressed the accelerator. Two hundred plus thousand miles of start, stop, idling driving in a city will cause that problem in a meter reading vehicle.

Within three weeks, Dad’s uniquely calm reasoning had awaken the common sense in all but one property owner along the route. He hadn’t approached the old man yet. Having heard the stories by the legions who had preceded him in the quest, he opted to resolve the issue last and with finality.

Wearing his normal tan Dickie work shirt, shrink-to-fit Levi’s with rolled up cuffs, work boots and a shirt pocket full of pens, pencils and a plastic template, he told the old man answering the door that he was there to finish driving the last stake in place before construction started the next morning. The old man shouted, “What power pole on my property?” “You aren’t doing anything on my property!”

Giving the old man a look of pity just as you would to a dunce and with a slight shake of the head, Dad pointed to the four foot tall lathe with four six-foot-long tails of fluttering survey tape centered in front of the man’s living room window. “It’s going in there.” “We’ll be here at 7:00 a.m. and I just wanted to let you know to not sleep in tomorrow.”

Sleep in? The old codger probably hadn’t slept past 6 a.m. in his life. Dad knew he was always up working around his house or yard shortly after 5:00 a.m. every morning.

With his hands on his hips, Dad looked at the stake then up at the living room window and back down again at the stake. Shaking his head, he unrolled the maps. “I’d have put it a little that way - closer to the house if I’d have designed the job, but it looks like one of the engineers has definitely taken your view into consideration.”

“What?” “A pole in front of my window is taking my view into consideration?” “Are they crazy?” Commiserating with the old man, Dad agreed that a fifty foot tall pole was hard to interpret as a window even with the best imagination, but that’s what Dad’s ink dot on the plans said … “See?” “Don’t worry, the auger on the truck is only 28” wide. In this rocky soil, the hole will get bigger as it bounces around, but it shouldn’t end up being much over four feet wide when we’re done.”

You know the rest of the story. After ten minutes of arguing, Dad let the man move the lathe stake to the fence line and pound it in the ground --- right where he wanted it when he arrived that morning.

Turning to leave, he heard the old man say, “See. You can’t push me around. I’m a better negotiator than all of you”. Yep. Dad had brought out the best common sense negotiation skills from the old man.

Flash back to the early 1950’s. A stream fisher all of his life, he frequented the hard to access streams where the big fish lived. The Ute Indian Reservation in eastern Utah includes the south slope of the Uintah Mountains. Rock Creek was a favorite stream for serious fishermen but it was both expensive to fish because of the fees associated with the permit and the permit restrictions themselves.

A fishing trip was needed. If you stayed just a little to the west, there were excellent streams to fish. The old Plymouth and LaFayette were loaded with tents, grub boxes, sleeping bags and fishing gear. My sister, brother-in-law, mother and myself enjoyed the two hour ride to the campsite.

Early the next morning, Dad and Roy went fishing and fishing was good. Some were released. Many were kept for breakfast back at camp.

Splashing behind them got louder. Looking up, they saw a federal game warden riding up on his horse. Dad lifted the front brim of his old fishing fly covered Stetson to get a good look at the wardens face.

“Good morning.” “How is the fishing this morning?” “Oh, its not too bad. We’ve released all the smaller ones. We just need enough good pan sized Brookies for a good breakfast.” “What fly are you using?” “Well, according to Ken Aycock over in the Basin, these rock roller flies are the best and they seem to be working this morning.”

“Ken Aycock?” “You know Ken Aycock?” “Sure we work together. I’m out this way working on projects all of the time.” “Do you know …. “ The list of names and places started to flow.

Staying close to hear when the power of the law was going to drop on them, Roy finally moved away to fish up stream while they talked.

When he came back almost an hour later, they were still talking. The fishing creel on Dad’s hip was still full of grass and trout although they were both getting a little dry. Dad’s old bamboo fishing rod was still in his left hand. The three pound test leader and fly was trapped between his palm and the pole.

Finally, the warden tired of reminiscing and comparing notes on people and features in the area. “Well, I guess I’d better ask to see your fishing licenses and permit.” Roy’s heart stopped and his blood ran cold. Fishing on the reservation without the permit could result in a thousand dollar penalty and loss of fishing rights for a long time.

Dad turned his head and the warden could see Dad’s fishing license in its plastic holder neatly tucked under the hat band on the right side.

“Well, you do have a permit too don’t you?” With a guffaw, smile and a headshake, Dad said; “You don’t think we’d be fool enough to be fishing here without one do you?” Apparently, the music of the conversation still echoed through the mind of the warden. He turned his horse and started off saying; “No, I don’t suppose you would.”

Roy claims he didn’t start breathing again for twenty minutes, but everyone knows that even standing in water the temperature of ice, humans can’t hold their breath for more than fifteen minutes.

As I remember, the fish were very good eating although I was really hungry by the time they arrived back in camp to be cooked.

Another Elwood Drew story to add to the book. There are hundreds of them. Probably thousands. Forty years after his death, I still hear them from time to time, especially from people who were children in the families that received his quiet assistance.

There are choices. There are consequences. Paying it forward will eventually rebound to your own assistance.

I suppose you’ve recorded your own similar family stories so they won’t be lost in the next generations. Without them, how will your grandchildren know your parents and grandparents? Don’t let them be lost to time.

Spend a little time and effort and record your own precious family stories. They are the flavor, texture, smell and substance that extend the memory of our ancestors.

Technorati Tags: Family Stories,Pay It Forward,Journals,Drew

More Genealogy Research Aids

2009-05-03T17:39:00.000-06:00

Author and podcaster, Lisa Louise Cooke, posted a new vidcast on her site recently about a new ‘beta’ tool called Google News Timeline. The timeline tool displays news, magazine, book and other documents that discuss events in history. Enter keywords and / or dates in your search and you’ll see results presented by day, week and month of the year. Google News Timeline is a significant resource to family history researchers.

See Lisa’s vidcast at the bottom of this post.

The Google News Timeline is located here.

Of course, published materials decrease significantly the farther you go back in time, but don't let that deter your timeline searches. You may be surprised with the results from these searches.

Recently, I noted that the New York Times is now posting a lot of old articles on their site. Search for names or events on the search box on the site. The old articles are in .pdf format. Most are free but some of the more lengthy articles require a subscription to the archival services at the Times.

Listening to Lisa's vidcast, I wondered if she had ever seen the wonderful articles about the San Francisco earthquake that the USGS has posted. They include Google Earth (free download) files that show the fault lines and 'shake' values of the quake during the event. Additionally, they have added before and after photos showing the destruction down to the house level. Even though the earthquake is called the 'San Francisco earthquake' it affected a significant section of California and the Google Earth files show its impact in those rarely noted locations.

If you don't have Google Earth installed on your computer, download it from here, then install the free program. The files associated with the earthquake are listed as links on in the articles on the USGS site. Browse to the links from the home page and you'll see them under each article heading.

If you haven't used Google Earth before, you are missing a real treat. Not only does it let you view all locations on the earth, but it also includes the sea floor topography for all the oceans on earth and it also includes a full view and tour of all the celestial bodies.

Why am I focusing on Google Earth? The answer is simple. Technology has pushed through the brick and mortar walls of schools and extends knowledge, learning and research opportunities to our home computers, mobile laptops and mobile phones. Google Earth is one of the tools that enable the spread of virtual education and knowledge.

Mashups of various technological tools allow educators and folks like you and I to create interesting presentations of our research, stories and topics of interest in ways that exceed anything known just a few short years ago. We are only limited by our imagination and desire to learn the use of technology. The technological tools that most family history researchers will embrace is actually very simple to use. We just have take the time to read the instructions and then apply the knowledge.

I know most folks think they can't create presentations, podcasts or vidcasts, but you really can. Believe it. You CAN produce presentations that will help you in your ancestral quest. They WILL draw the interest of family members and others who are researching your common lineage if you post them on a blog or on your website and tell folks about it.

Now is the time to use the tools at hand to accelerate your research efforts. Go for it! You are the only person saying that you can't do it. You know how much you love proving wrong that surprisingly older stranger that you see in the mirror every morning.

Start today by installing Google Earth. Then use it to find the cemeteries where four or five generations of your ancestors are buried. Mark them and create a slideshow of them to show to your family. Change the angle of the inward zoom. Spin the earth under you. Label your bookmarks. Put them in the order you want then save the file.

Once completed, you'll be able to send the file to family members and other researchers. Remember that sharing a file like this almost always produces information in response and it frequently is the information or clues that you are seeking.

In another blog post, I referenced a Google Earth file that takes you on a flight to all the cemeteries of my ancestors on the island of Bornholm in the North Sea. Now that you have Google Earth installed on your machine, download my file from the link near the bottom of the posting and see how a simple file used for genealogical purposes looks on your screen. It is very simple presentation but it only took me ten minutes to create and it graphically conveys the information I wanted others to see in a format not available before.

One last time… Try it ... Mikey, Gina, Charles, Annette (insert your name here).... You'll like it!

Technorati Tags: Google Earth,Google News Timeline,Mashups,Genealogy

Christmas in April

2009-05-02T01:08:00.000-06:00

Christmas came to our house on Apr 30th this year. Years ago, I saw the diary of my great grandfather, David Lewis Drew, in Copperopolis, California. One of my older distant cousins had it in his possession. He allowed me to take one photo of it and then sent me on my way. When I developed the film, none of the photos on it were any good. The film stock was bad from the factory.

When my cousin died, his attorney called and asked if I had anything coming to me. I mentioned that my cousin said I could have the diary, but that was the end of the conversation. I never heard from him again.

Last week, a second cousin in California found my website and sent me a note. She'd had the diary in her possession since the death and had recently looked at it with renewed interest. Searching the web, she found my family history website and sent me a note

Long story short. The journal is sitting in front of me as I write this note. I can't keep it but I'm touching it and will scan the pages. They contain all my great grandfathers recorded thoughts during his first year in California during the tail end of the gold rush. He left Plymouth, Massachusetts, sailed down around the Cape in a very long voyage and joined the rest of multitudes who were looking for their fortunes.

Long ago, I transcribed the diary text from an old historical newsletter found in the Calaveras County Historical Society vaults. It can be seen here.

Two contiguous entries state that he finished the Bible and started reading it again the next night. I love those two entries.

Over the years, several folks from around the country have contacted me about the diary. Their ancestors are mentioned in its pages. One of them is a professional genealogy speaker and uses my site and the entry about her great granduncle in her speeches. I just talked to her and am going to send her a copy of the image for that page, etc. She is as excited about it (her soon to be “held” treasure) as I am about my good fortune.

Looking at the names of great grandpa’s mining partner and other associates, I decided to find out who they were in life. Two of the three men he partnered or worked with in the gold fields were his distant cousins! In fact, his primary partner, Len Covington, was a distant cousin seven times over. That happens when families live in the same area like Plymouth, Massachusetts for three hundred years before the descendants start to scatter around the world. The other part-time partner was ‘only’ a cousin four times.

Did these fellows decide to leave Plymouth for the wild and woolly gold fields in California together? I’m trying to trace down any ship passenger records to see if they traveled together. It was a very long trip across land and many of not most of the folks from Massachusetts who participated in the gold rush traveled went by ship. Apparently, some of the intrepid young men opted to sail through the Gulf of Mexico and hike across Panama where they took passage on another ship to Sacramento.

The remainder took the long journey south around the Cape of South America and then back up the west coast of the Americas to Sacramento. No matter which path these folks took to find their fortunes, the trip was long and arduous.

Now for the rest of the story... Also in the package were a dozen photographs of David Drew's family in California. Working from the smallest photo to the largest, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I think I have a photo of my brick wall ancestor, Thomas Farrar! I've looked for him for over 50 years. I can't prove it yet, but will spend considerable time trying to find out the truth behind the photo.

Next were photos of all of David's children except my grandfather (he ran away to Utah at age 16 and apparently was disinherited from the family).

I was finally down to the last photo. It is in the largest old mounting cover. Opening the flaps, I found a photo of my father and aunt when they were youngsters. It was obviously taken during at the same photo setting as a photo we have but none of the living descendants of my Utah Drew grandparents have ever seen this pose before. It is in mint condition... Wonderful... AND I like the pose better…

I know a few of you have had similar experiences like this during your own ancestral quest and can appreciate my excitement.

Christmas presents? They are nothing. It was Christmas at our home on April 30th. The photos and diary are valued beyond price in my opinion.

Technorati Tags: Diaries,Family Histories,Family Stories,Handwriting,Journals,Photos

Spanish Flu of 1918 – 1920

2009-04-26T15:09:00.013-06:00

With all of the news today of the outbreak of Swine Flu, my thoughts were drawn to stories my mother told me about her experience with the Spanish Flu in 1918 – 1920.

The Spanish Influenza or “La Grippe” (flu) was a pandemic that spread through almost every location on earth. It was an indiscriminant killer, taking rich and poor, old and young victims. Declared a crisis in March 1918 it continued in a pandemic state though June of 1920. The total count of its victims ranged from 20 to 100 million people worldwide.

At my grandparents home in Utah, the family was quickly infected and were quarantined to their home. Mom related that extended family and neighbors had to bring fresh food and milk to their doorstep and yell through the closed windows to alert the family to retrieve them after the benefactor backed away. No face to face or touching contact could be allowed.

Their home only had two bedrooms but housed nine sick children, two sick parents and two sick grandparents. She said that the children were put in two bed in the same room and laid out head to toe in alternating rows. Most were too sick to stagger out to the outhouse and multiple honey buckets often littered the floor.

Her grandparents were too ill to get up for weeks to help her desperately ill parents care for the children. As one person would improve enough to rise from the bed, they would be replaced by one of the caretakers who was now too ill to stand.

Their doors were marked with quarantine signs to keep people away. Wearing masks, a few brave souls would break quarantine from time to time to clean up the home, do the washing and bring in prepared meals. These actions violated the law and exposed the benefactor and their family to the illness too.

Fortunately, none of the family died although Mom’s description of their illness indicated that they often felt or looked like the walking dead.

Worldwide the situation was equally dire.

Not only were the meager medical facilities stretched to the breaking point, the doctors and other medical personnel were also ill.

In almost all locations, people had to take care of themselves, neighbors, family and friends. The medical system simply could not handle the enormity of the pandemic.

According to newspaper articles at the time, between 300,000 and 350,00 people had died in the United States in the three months spanning between September 15, 1918 and December 6th, 1918.

An article in this posting goes on to state that the record keeping was poor and that the number probably exceeded that estimate.

The world was in a state of panic and despair from not only the pandemic but the terrors of World War I. A newspaper article dated 19 Nov 1918 stated that more people were dying in the United States from the flu than as U. S. soldiers fighting the Germans.

Victims were ordered by local authorities to not leave their homes. Special deputies and health officials were authorized to enforce the orders in the hope that containment, no matter how brutal to the afflicted would help contain the pandemic.

Personnel and resources to bury the dead were stretched so severely that even small communities in rural Utah struggled to keep up.

Public gatherings, like funerals, were outlawed. If they were still alive, parents were frequently too ill to attend the burials of their own children, spouses, parents, extended families and friends. Indeed, attendance by more that a couple of family members was construed as a ‘gathering’ and hence fell under the penalty of the law.

By January 1919, the death rate in the United States had increased to 19.6 per thousand individuals. The corner had not yet been turned, but in ensuing months the number of new cases would begin to decrease. Unfortunately, the flu frequently started to take the caretakers. They were worn so low by exhaustion that any semblance of resistance in their immune systems was compromised.

By early March, 1919, the government inserted a constant stream of news articles alerting Americans that survivors of the flu were now coming down with Tuberculosis.

Survivors bodies and immune systems had been sufficiently weakened to the point that yet another scurrilous disease had seized the opportunity to infect them.

Despair and feelings of hopelessness spread around the world. Illness upon illness afflicted mankind in addition to the terrors and destructions of war.

Of course, many flim-flam men came out of the woodwork with Patent Medicine cures. Desperate to find anything to treat and prevent further illness drove millions to purchase and take these often toxic mixtures.

Governments told their citizens to not purchase patent medicines because they were a waste of money. If people felt symptoms of the flu, they were instructed to have medical examinations several times a month and to “build up your strength with right living, good food and plenty of fresh air”. “Become a fresh air crank and enjoy life” statements concluded the advice.

The U. S. Navy has created a website that details the impact of the Spanish Flu Epidemic on their branch of the military. They noted that victims suffered from “pneumonia and fatal pulmonary complications” and that “they literally drowned in their own body fluids”.

Stanford University has written that the “Spanish Flu” or “La Grippe” was a global disaster. They state that “the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 years” because of the extreme virulence of the flu.

Until reading the news of a possible pandemic today, I was felt far removed from the terrors that Mom described in her stories. I had few to no reference points in my experience that allowed me to appreciate the scope and impact of the experience in her life.

Today, the CDC, calls the 1918 Influenza pandemic “The Mother of All Pandemics”. No wonder the survivors were so abraised by the experience. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that I haven’t read more references to it in my ancestors surviving notes and journals. No doubt they were too busy working on their farms and in their homes to take time to record something that was such ‘common knowledge’ among everyone on the planet.

When we are researching our lineage, we have to study their environmental and societal events and conditions to really have any many of us have looked at our appreciation of their lives. How many of us have looked at our records and quickly spotted an inordinate number of deaths in the families of our ancestors during the four years of the Spanish Flu pandemic?

Have we even considered the causes of the deaths and tried to envision combined impact of illness, war, stress and family deaths in the lives of our ancestors?

Lesson learned again. Event timelines overlaid on the life spans of our ancestors should be studied in detail to aid in the creation of our research plans. Failure to do so will severely impact our research success.

In our own lives, let’s hope that the current Swine Flu outbreak won’t turn into the life altering event that will be overlooked by our descendants. We need to regularly write in our journals and include the events of our lives with some supporting news articles and related information so our they have the reference points needed to envision our lives and times.

Technorati Tags: Spanish Flu,Pandemic,Small Town Newspapers,Utah Digitial Newspapers,Research Tips,Newspapers,Town Histories

The Execution of Small Town Newspapers

2009-04-15T12:24:00.001-06:00

If your part of the world is like ours, less ink and paper is being published that has any resemblance of the community that existed in small town newspapers of days gone by. Electronic media is probably the main culprit but coupled with corporate greed (need?) to ever increase the bottom line, their demise has been assured.

Newspaper organizations are laying off employees, reducing the number of pages in print by half and are becoming generic given that here only seems to be ten or so newspaper journalists remaining in the world. Everything on the page seems to come from a common pool of articles created by one or two news organizations. Pool all the daily and weekly articles together and the price per word goes down when you shop from the same trough.

Today, we rarely read about weddings, golden anniversaries, missionaries and who visited whom. Instead, the news organizations have created “Community Posts” sections on their websites. These sections were supposed to replace the hard copy weekly publications that we’ve loved for generations, but alas, they are nothing more than headline grabbers from the normal paper sprinkled with an occasional community concert, play or scout activity notice.

Gone are the papers we loved for generations. Gone are the informative articles that were like manna to genealogists.

Looking back through my own research, almost all of the ‘knowledge’ about the lives and personalities of my ancestors came from small town papers. At first glance, I thought that their surviving letters and notes probably had the edge, but on closer inspection of my files, it quickly became apparent that my memory was wrong.

I love touching my collection of letters and notes because my ancestors touched and created them. That alone has a big impact on how I perceive them as data mines and probably biased my thoughts that they provided the majority of the personality facts about my ancestors. In truth, most of my knowledge about them came from the thousands upon thousands of small town newspaper clippings in my files.

My mother was a perpetual newspaper article clipper with a determined focus on any that contained information about family and friends, near and far. A few years before her passing, she asked what I wanted from her estate. The answer was easy. Her genealogy and the newspaper clippings. In my opinion, nothing else had value by comparison. The clippings were significant additions to my own family history research documentation. The smell of the clippings has gifted the atmosphere in my office and genealogy library rooms in our home with the patina of old newsprint and documents. The hard core genealogists among us know that we’d rather smell that scent than the most expensive French perfume.

Knowing that the pages of the small town papers were dripping with much more information than mom had collected, I called the editor of the small town papers in our area a couple of years ago hoping to wrangle access to their storage library. With some vehemence, he related that the new owners, a national chain of mid-sized newspaper titles across the country, had ordered all of the old papers be trashed. Gone were the 100 plus years of the American Fork Citizen, the Pleasant Grove Review, the Lehi Free Press. “Trash the 'd___’d” things right now while we watch. We need the room for other things”. He was still as sick at heart as I now felt.

I argued the act was a capital crime in my book - that I’d have stored them myself - that I’d have digitized them for posterity out of my own pocket. How could anyone be so blatantly stupid to destroy them? Pound for pound, page for page, the small town newspapers contained the richest content in that medium for a genealogist. Now the old brittle yellow pages have turned to compost at the local land fill.

Small town newspapers of old will never be recreated in the modern world. Our times are too full of identity thieves, privacy laws, and the sons of Satan who feed on society through theft and deception. A current day recreation of the folksy articles in the old papers would be too inviting to these miscreants. We already have to guard homes during funeral services for family members because the bad guys know that the family will be gone at a set time and date. What would they do with the details found in stories of days-gone-by in a current day setting?

Fortunately, not all of the old papers have been lost. Many colleges and other entities are digitizing some of the old papers and making them available to us through the web, libraries and other similar venues. If you haven’t taken the time to find them and explore their content rich pages in your own ancestral quest, today would be a good day to do so. Don’t just read these words and nod in agreement. Dive in and find the genealogical Gold that awaits you in their pages.

In an earlier post I wrote about making the ‘Essence of New Mown Hay”. I wish someone would create the scent of yellowed old newsprint. A puff or two during our electronic forays into the old papers would add the aroma required to enhance the research experience. Add a weathered old page or two of a current day newspaper for texture, turn the lights low and clutter your office. Ahhh…. the cozy feel of researching old newspapers like it used to be in “the good old days”.

Technorati Tags: Digital Newspapers,Small Town Newspapers,Utah Digitial Newspapers,Digital Collections,Genealogy,FamHist