Obituaries

In your diligent research, don't forget to check obituaries to assist you in piecing together the complete family tree. Vital records are good documentation, but they don't answer all of the genealogical and historical questions. I've never been one to only search the direct line- I'm a mother so I want all of the family on the family group sheet and then I also have the advantage later of possibly using that information from the horizontal line to find the clue that I might need to solve the mystery of family migration or where the family burial plot might be, and so forth.

Obituaries not only give the vital statistics, they also list occupations, church and fraternal organization memberships, surviving descendants and where they now reside and other biographical details that may be of assistance to you as a researcher. For example, whether or not the ancestor was an early settler, a local official, served in the military, or other notes of interest that the populace may have known at the time but information lost to you in succeeding generations. I especially enjoy the detailed descriptions of personality, acts of kindness and general experiences written lovingly in older smaller community obituaries.

Getting organized?

You know, I have to confess publicly that I'm a "stackoholic". Stacks and stacks of family groups sheets, pedigree charts, research notes, copies of book pages and documents, census extractions, other people's correspondence about our shred family history, files with possible leads and links, and so forth. Now multiply thiry years of genealogical research, history research, saved letters and pictures, inherited piles of other materials that couldn't be thrown away as the grandparents died and you may have a glimmer of an idea of my dilemna!

What system do you use to tame the paper monster? How do you organize all of your research?

Has the computer age made your life easier or created twice as many stacks because we all know that you need a hard copy of what you have electronically stored? And how many of us started out on the old Apple II, in what seems like eons ago, and have upgraded computers numerous times and now have to deal with all of those complications as well?

Minnesota Death Index Online

One of Minnesota's most useful online tools is the Minnesota Historical Society's online death index, covering 1907-1996. The website is http://people.mnhs.org/dci/Search.cfm The search engine is quick and I can also use truncated last names if I'm unsure how the spelling may have changed for ethnic names.

One may search by last name, with or without Soundex, by exact year of death or a range of years, by exact county or all counties, and by the mother's maiden name for 1905-1907 and 1955-1996 (VERY handy when researching common surnames and large familes). You can have the staff make you an uncertified copy for $8 or you may copy it yourself onsite for 30 cents.

Remember that death certificate information is only as good as the informant who answered the questions regarding the deceased's other vital statistics, such as birth date and birth place, parent's names, marital status, and so forth. The certificate will also note the cemetery where the body is buried and I have used that information to check with the sexton for other possible family members buried in the family plot.

County Histories

Once again, I am AMAZED by the detail in 18th and 19th century county histories and the clues they give us to trace an ancestor and their family back in time, occupational notes, memberships in local churches and organizations, burial information, marriage information, information on the spouse and his/her birthdate and parents, and usually all of the children born to the couple and then back to the geographic locations of orgin! Even for relatively recent immigrants who made an impression in the local economy or served in the community, there may be entries in the town histories usually also written up in the county histories. Make sure to check the index, if there is one, and check to see if a local genealogical or historical society has produced an index to make your research easier. (I have gone through 600 page county histories page by page searching for ancestors, when there hasn't been an index, and I always keep my fingers crossed that some kind person will have indexed a county history that I may need.)

The indispensable guide to U.S. published county histories is A Bibliography of American County Histories complied by P. William Filby, of course. Organized by state and then listing all of the known county histories, this guide can assist in your quest to flesh out the pedigree charts. Remember to also check for county boundary changes over time, as populations grew, the county may have been divided several times. I find the Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Censuses, 1790-1920 by William Thorndale and William Dollarhide most readable for that task. My local Family History Center has a reference copy of both of these books available.

Even Common Surnames get Misspelled

While researching a family with a common surname in the federal censuses yesterday, they remained in the same county and town in Illinois for forty years, unlike some of my ancestors with gypsy feet gone somewhere else further west EVERY census! While I found them easily in the 1870 and the 1900 Lee County census as Jones, I couldn't find ANY of the family members in 1880, which has been thoroughly indexed. My decision was to go page by page in the town that I had found them in both sides of this census and on pages five and six, there they were but the surname was unmistakably spelled James. Everything else matched perfectly!

Now I have a theory here (as I am wont to do in these matters), since the son's name was James, could the census taker have just been tired/careless in writing the surname? Or was this a duplicate copy and proper care wasn't taken in handcopying all of the entries and non one caught the error when checking for accuracy? The main purpose of the census was to get an accurate count of population after all, for the House of Representatives apportionment, not the specifics of each family, although genealogists are certainly happy about the increased detail the federal government desired on subsequent censuses . We've all had those moments where our brain seems ahead of our hand and while I will never know for certain, I was grateful to have found them.

South Dakota and Settlement by Homesteaders

While there are only eight South Dakotans today to the square mile, many homesteaded the territory and state after the Homestead Act of 1862. About 270 million acres of land was claimed and settled under Lincoln's Homestead Act, including the 160 acres my Great-Grandfather claimed near Winner, Tripp County, South Dakota. One had to live on the land, build a home, make improvements, be at least 21 years of age, and farm for five years as well as a total of $18 in filing fees to own the land. In fact, the Homestead Act remained in effect until 1976 and Alaska was one of the last places that homesteading was an option.

My Great-Grandfather was very proud of his Homestead certificate, as it was signed by the President of the U.S. and demonstrated his years of struggle and sacrifice. The original is till kept in the family, even though Great- Grandpa left South Dakota for the farm lands and ministry calling here in Minnesota almost a century ago. The area he settled in has winds of an average of 25 mph year round- it just doesn't quit. He and his wife lost their three eldest children in a drowning incident in South Dakota that my Grandfather witnessed when he was eight and then had the terrible duty of runing home to tell his mother what had transpired. The local residents used barbed wire to drag for the bodies and a triple funeral was held several days later. The sorrow of this event haunted my Great-Grandmother, who was pregnant at the time- her daughter was born deaf and legally blind. Great-Grandma Koenig died eleven years later herself of cancer and a broken heart.

South Dakota trip

Last week I took my three youngest with me on a trip through South Dakota along I-90 from east to west. Of course, the weather was still the long HOT stretch and we had 92 to 96 degree days every day and slept in our tent along the way. They had chosen Mount Rushmore as their "must-see" site and so that is where we started! Then on to the continuing Crazy Horse Monument, 17 miles away, with its Native American Museum, and over to Jewel Cave, which was cool relief from the heat! We finished off that day with the laser/light show at Crazy Horse, whose finale is a rendition of "I'm Proud to be an American".

We also took in Reptile Gardens with its prairie dog village and alligator wrestling show, the Black Hills, the driving/hiking loop in the Badlands, a sod house display, and the Corn Palace over in Mitchell. We ate our share of ice cream cones to beat the heat and I think we drank enough water to float a battleship.

My other two hour excursion was to find the 94 year old, four foot tall tombstone of my Great-uncle and Great Aunts who drowned together near Winner, Tripp County, South Dakota in 1911. Unfortunatley, we were unable to find the tombstone, which means I'll be looking into whether or not the farmer whose land it is on removed it, since it was a single stone on the old Koenig homestead at the turn of the last century. This is disturbing to me as a family historian and a genealogist, especially because I had the same experience with a Dupuy ancestor and his two daughters buried in Hopkinsville, Christian County, Kentucky a few years ago. The farmer had taken the stones out, plowed over the burial site and it is now gone from view and history!

FEEFHS Conference

August19 thru August 21 St. Paul's Sheraton Four Points Hotel hosts the 2005 Federation of Eastern European Family History Societies conference with over ninety topics in sixteen sessions. The opening session is Dee Simon on "Dare to Discover- Extending Research into the Eastern European States" followed by sessions on research in Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, the Ukraine, the Balkans, Finland, Norway, Lithuania, and Switzerland and various applicable research topics, such as using the Meyers-Orts Lexikon, Cyrillic alphabet, reading Latin, Hamburg Passenger Lists, ethnic group settlements and migration patterns. I will be a speaker on Saturday August 20th at 2:45 pm. on the "Genealogical Resources of the Immigration History Research Center".

I am excited to have the national forum speaking experience, which I hope to continue in the future, along with publishing articles on my areas of knowledge and expertise in genealogical publications. I am also looking forward to meeting two of the speakers whose work I have read over the years, Larry Jensen and Ed Brandt. You can see the conference information at:
http://www.rootsweb.com/~mnggs/FEEFHS.html

Genetic Genealogy

This week's issue of Time magazine, July 11, has an article on genetic genealogy entitled: " Can DNA Reveal Your Roots?" I've been reading and interested in the topic for about five years, mainly watching as the Sorenson project, formerly out of BYU, on molecular genealogy taking off. The jist of the article is that one can now determine Cohanim (Jewish) descent, the tribe(s) in Africa that one has descended from such as Oprah Winfrey and Spike Lee, percentages of ancestral lineage from ethnic groups, and connecting living relatives and common ancestors.

For serious researchers of genealogy, there is no Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) for genetic genealogy (yet!) but the article does include the success of the Little family of southern descent in Alabama using proven common genetic markers to pool their research together back to 1680. Obviously this cannot be done without the traditional pedigrees and family group sheets but the common ancestral gene "conclusion" may encourage reseachers to skip generations to get back to the oldest ancestor possible, sans legitimate documentation. Genetic genealogy has many potential benefits, such as identifying genetic predispostions toward inherited diseases and conditions but as with most new technologies and theories, there is the downside and potential for misuse. Much like when I used to roll my eyes when someone would proudly tell me that they had traced "their ancestry all the way back to Adam" (how do they prove medieval pedigrees substantially?), I am concerned about the "shortcut" allure of misapplied genetic genealogy results. But at the same time, I am excited about the possibilities of assistance through genetic profiles to solve some of the "brick walls" in my own research.

A Genealogy Poem by W. Brestal

"Genealogy is my pastime, I shall not stray
It maketh me to lie down and examine half-buried tombstones
It leadeth me into still courthouses, It restoreth my ancestral knowledge
It leadeth me in paths of Census Records and Ship's Passenger Lists for surname's sake
Yea, though I walk through the shadow of Research Libraries and Microfilm Readers
I shall fear no discouragement, for a strong urge is in me, the curiosity and motivation they comfort me
It demandeth preparation of storage space for the acquisition of countless documents
It anointeth my head with burning midnight oil; my Family Sheets runneth over
Surely Birth, Death and Marriage dates shall follow me all the days of my life
And I shall dwell in the House of a Family-History Seeker forever!"

Check the Neighbors in the Census

Now I know it's been said MANY times over but when researching the territorial, state or federal censuses, always check the neighbors for the missing married into the family son-in-law, daughter-in-law and father-in-law and mother-in-law families. I was working on one of my Wisconsin- Minnesota German immigrant lines this weekend and found three of the married-in families living within six houses of one another in a small town on the federal census pages. Usually when I first use the census, I don't know all of the families that marry into the particular line, but now that digitized images of the census pages are so readily available, it is easy to recheck the families living nearby once I know who the sons and daughters marry.

Remember to also check as many of the censuses as the family may appear on, since on the census taker may have taken the time to write a new clue about the exact village, state or more specific area that an immigrant ancestor came from. I also like the 1900 and 1910 federal census notations on how long the couple has been married, number of childern and number of children living. I have found a few missing babies this way! Check the church cemetery or nearest local cemetery and the online cemetrey indexes that are also increasingly available online.

Verifying Research

Hopefully you had a chance over your three day holiday weekend to reflect upon and act upon your own genealogical pursuits ! Let me stand on the "soapbox" for a moment and remind us all of how important it is to verify research!!!!!

Lots of patrons at the local Family History Center and genealogy students at all levels believe that whatever has been "published" (whether in book format or web page format nowadays), it MUST be true. Not always- beware the genealogical mistakes that are published and then reproduced many times over on a particular family line, till arguing with another reseacher that the evidence doesn't support that the two families are connected almost gets you flogged or disowned. Take the time to first identify and then verify the documenting research. There is nothing finer than a researcher sharing their pedigrees and family group sheets as well as reasons and conclusions, along with their sources! And a true researcher would be humble enough to acknowledge and correct a "published" mistake on the famly line.

If a conclusion doesn't match up with what you know on a researched family line, check to see which sources were used- again, family rumor doesn't take precedence over actual documentation, such as vital records, tax and records records, and censuses. Many a family "relation" or birth or marriage date may have be "doctored " for various reasons along the way. It is our duty as good researchers to keep the errors out and correct mistakes gently.