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Checking Out the Czechs

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Did you know that the regional archives in the Czech Republic
are in the process of digitizing their records? More about this later in this post.

The theme of this post is two-fold. First, I want to reiterate once more that a genealogist never knows where precious information may come from. No matter how distant, we should never overlook any possible source.
Two heads, 1830, A.H.Maurer ,public domain, wikimedia
 
And second, two heads collaborating on a research question are so much better than one.



In my blog post of September 19, 2011, I wrote about the pleasures of working with another person to tackle genealogical research. I have been very fortunate to be partnering with my sister, Monique Whitman, to ferret out the details of our Czechoslovakian Holub ancestors’ lives.


It’s amazing how much more two can unearth than one!
Monique asked our mother’s advice on whom she might contact in order to find out more information on our maternal grandfather,  Frank (Frantisek in Czech) Holub. Well, our mother recalled that Frank had remarried when she was about twelve. Monique did some serious sleuthing and found that Frank’s second wife was Angeline (Ann) Oslakovic Holub, they married in 1939, and the marriage lasted the rest of Frank’s life.

During her research, Monique discovered a relative of Ann’s who is still alive! When she contacted him, he not only remembered Frank Holub, but he had Frank’s baptism record from
CIA Czech Republic map in public domain, wikimedia
Czechoslovakia (The Czech Republic.) Who knows why or how he had this document. But it just goes to prove that we genealogists never know where our next record will be. Here is the baptism certificate:


As you can see, the document is in Czech. Monique used some on-line translation sites, such as Google translate to figure out the headings on the left side of the certificate. Here is what she came up with:


Politicky okres = political district

Soudni okres = judicial district

Misto narozeni cis domu = birthplace

Krestni List. = baptismal certificate

Den, medic, a rook = day, month, year

Narozeni = date of birth

Krtu = baptism

Dubna - April

devatenact set tri = nineteen hundred and three

Jmeno ditete = name

Nabozenstvi = religion

Rimsko katolicke = Roman Catholic

Loze = box, bed, club, society

Otec = father

Matka = mother

Praze = Prague

Knez = priest

Kmotr a svedek = Godfather and witness

Porodni baba = midwife

Now we had a structure to begin to understand the document. But the need to know more was too great for me. What I needed was a human translator! I decided to check out the new Czech society I recently joined, the Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International, to see if they might have a listing of translators. And yes, right on the first page, left column was the link I was looking for: Translators. When I clicked on the link, I found an alphabetical list, read the descriptions of people’s research expertise, and chose Judy Nelson. I e-mailed Judy to discuss her services and was amazed and delighted when she sent me this translation the next day:
(upper left - ) Czechoslovakia, district Benesov, county Vlasim, town born Naceradec no. 139.
(upper right-) book 8, page 208
Baptismal Certificate
Born 20 April 1903, nineteen hundred and three
Baptized 26 April, 1903
Name of child Frantisek (Frank, Franz)
Religion  Roman Catholic
Legitimacy - Legitimate
Father Josef (Joseph) Holub, born at Volesne, Benesov, a cottager at Naceradci no. 139, legitimate son of Jan (John,Johann) Holub, worker at Volesne and Antonie (Antonia) born Zemanove (Zeman) at Dolni Lhoty (Lhota), Ledec.
Mother Marie, born at Prague, book 2, page 441, illegitimate daughter of Marie Lojinove, legitimate daughter of Vaclav (Wenceslaus,Wenzl) Lojina, worker at Bukove, Pribram and Barbora (Barbara) born Krasu (or Krasn) at Rosovic, Pribram.
Priest - Antonin Filip, priest at Naceradci.
Godparents Frantisek Hausner, shoemaker at Horni Lhota no. 7 and Barbora, wife of Antonin Kroupa, farmer at Lhota 4.
Midwife - Terezie Doubkova, examined (like licensed) at Naceradci no. __.
At administrative office at Naceradci.  the 7th February 1924.  Alois (Louis) Strnad _____ (his title, illegible)

From this document, we finally found out the name of Frank’s mother – Marie Lojinove born in Prague. Oh, what joy! None of the American records that Monique and I had found mentioned Frank’s mother.
Načeradec, the Czech Republic, 2009 by cs:ŠJů, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

We also saw that our identification of Frank’s father as Josef (Joseph) Holub living in Naceradec was corroborated by this record.

In addition to translating the baptism record, Judy alerted me to the fact that the Czech Regional Archives are digitizing their records. Now Monique and I can search for the records of Frank Holub’s parents and grandparents and even further back.


Teamwork pays off in many ways in life, but in genealogy the rewards can be amazing. If you want to move forward in your research, it is to your advantage to find others with similar interests. Joining genealogical societies, like the Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International, is one way to find communities of people to work with.
And looking closer to home, you might find siblings and cousins who are eager to join you in unlocking family history.






Categories: genealogy groups

Revelations Through Letters

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We genealogists look at many different records in our search for information on our ancestors, including vital records, as well as court, land and military records. But some of the most intriguing documents, if you are lucky enough to find them, are first-person remembrances and interviews.

I used to think that only “famous” families had books written about them. But as I have pursued my own genealogy, I have found that ordinary families, too, have had a person or persons so interested in preserving their history that they have made a published record of their findings. The professional term for this historical record of a family is a genealogy.
I have not yet found any Spears genealogies pertaining to my line, but I have been fortunate to find interesting source material about my Johnson forebears. Sallie Atkins, whose husband’s DNA matches my brother’s, has been researching our shared Johnson, Shelton and Franklin cohorts for over thirty years.
Sallie introduced me to a collection of letters on our families between Hobart Oscar Franklin (b. 1915 Cabell County, WV) and Kenneth Charles Wilde (b. 1932).

Both men, who descend from the same Franklin ancestor, had spent years independently researching their family lines. Then in the 1980, they somehow came across each other (way before the internet made it easy to find people) and began corresponding for the next twenty years about the family lines they had in common. And what a boon for everyone who shares their ancestors! I have mentioned before in my blog post of September 19, 2011 of how you can really make leaps in your research through working with others.

 In their own research, they each had used a combination of first-person interviews with court and census records in their efforts to find out all they could about their early ancestors. Also, both men also were familiar with Fred Lambert, a family historian in the early years of this century who traveled all over West Virginia interviewing  people and recording their stories, and referred often to his work in their letters. During their correspondence, Wilde and Franklin were able to pool their information, check their theories, and see what their family sources had to say on the same topics.

Franklin had the advantage of being born earlier in the twentieth century. When he started delving into his family history, several living relatives, including his mother, Luverna McComas Franklin, (b. ca.1868 Lincoln County, WV) and aunt, Viola Franklin Midkiff (b. 1867), had been around long enough to either remember some of the early ancestors or to have heard stories from people who had actually known some of the forebears who had passed away before his birth. And lucky for us, they were willing to share this information! At least some were.

What were some of the themes that came up in the letters between the two family historians? As you might expect, one of the recurring subjects was tracking the migration patterns of the associated families. The Sheltons, Franklins, and Johnsons had moved across colonial Virginia through the counties of Lunenburg, Halifax, Pittsylvania, Amelia, Henry and Patrick Counties before going to Surry and Buncombe Counties, NC; they ended up in Cabell County, WV in the early 1800s. We genealogists always want to pinpoint the time and place that each of our ancestors lived and when, where and why they moved. 

Wilde and Franklin used the Virginia Court of Common Pleas records to track the migration of their ancestors by their court appearances. In colonial times, people went to court often to settle debts and to air other differences they had with neighbors (see my blog from January 28, 2013 for more details on the workings of American Colonial courts.) Wilde and Franklin also used County lists of Tithables, another type of court record, to place people and find out who their neighbors were.

The two researchers also used the US Federal Censuses, especially the 1790 and 1800 Virginia and North Carolina census documents, to aid them in placing ancestors and in tracing their movements during the decade between 1790 and 1800. Because of their meticulous study of the records, I was finally able to see how my families had crossed from Eastern Virginia to the southern part of the state and then into North Carolina.
County Map of Virginia, and North Carolina, 1860, Samuel Augustus Mitchell, Wikimedia, public domain.
A second recurring theme was the question of whether or not there were Native American ancestors in the family as was rumored over the years by various Franklin folk. When Hobart Franklin asked his father about this, he was met with stern silence. This is what he wrote to Wilde about the subject of ethnicity of the family: “I am so ignorant about our Indian ancestors. It was such a hush-hush in our family. Dad wouldn’t talk about his people…” (p. 559). But his Aunt Viola and mother both agreed that there was Indian blood in their family.

For his part, Kenneth Wilde wrote that he experienced the same “refusal to talk” or acknowledge the fact of Indian ethnicity in his branch of the Franklins.

Another aspect of the Native American heritage stories that Wilde and Franklin bounced back and forth was trying to “flush out” the details of a possible ancestor, Mary Franklin, (also known as Glumdalclitch, although no one knows why she was called this) who supposedly was all or part Native American and who may have married a Franklin or had a father who was a Franklin, according to which testimony you looked at. 

This quest to find out about a particular individual, in this case Mary Franklin, shows how family genealogy leads researchers to study history.  In a query to The Franklin Fireplacein April 1979, Wilde wrote that Mary “may have been one of the Cherokee women prisoners who were captured by General John Sevier of Tenn on a Cherokee Expedition sometime prior to 7/28/1781.” Perhaps this is the query that Hobart Franklin answered that began the long correspondence. As the two batted their information and theories on Mary Franklin back and forth through their letters, they were able to put together testimony they had gathered separately from different members of their families.

Another theme that recurs throughout the correspondence is the effort to untangle family relationships, as in “Who’s your daddy?”
Any genealogist who has been researching for any length of time recognizes this question. Franklin and Wilde were trying to find out who fathered the two sons of Mary Franklin, the Indian woman introduced above. They relied on family testimony as these births occurred in the late eighteenth century, too early for birth records. Also, they could find no marriage records for Mary, and they wondered if perhaps she never married. 

One of Mary's sons, William Duckworth Franklin Shelton (known as “Duck”, b. ca. 1798), was said to be fathered by Roderick Shelton as noted by the two researchers. But they found no documentation (and, to my knowledge, none has been found since) to confirm this contention. According to Hobart Franklin, some indirect evidence of Roderick’s possible parental relationship to Duck is that Roderick cared for and supported him. But Duck, according to Wilde, called himself “Franklin” after his mother.

Franklin and Wilde had both heard that Mary Franklin had a second son, George “Rock” Franklin (b. ca. 1801). Wilde said that Rock always contended that his father was Solomon Stanton. Again, no documentation has been found to corroborate this theory.

So, what have I learned from the discovery of the correspondence between Kenneth Wilde and Hobart Franklin? For years I have been reading stories about the Sheltons, Johnsons, and Franklins on rootsweb, genforum and other places on the web. But most of the writers of these stories list no sources. One of these stories was about Mary Franklin (Glumdalclitch) and her children. With the Wilde/Franklin Letters, I now know where these stories, that were showing up all over the internet, came from.

After seeing how the two researchers used their letters to try out theories, to check the accuracy of each other’s family stories and generally to further their life’s work, I am even more convinced of the value of being part of a community of genealogists.

  Genealogies, first person interviews and letters are wonderful additions to a genealogist’s record collection. Look for genealogies, manuscripts, and letters about your family lines. Search in the libraries in the counties where your people lived; use the on-line catalogs. And if you’re young enough to have older family members still living, don’t miss the opportunity to ask them to share their stories. Be sure to record them. And after you collect a whole lot of oral testimonies, you might consider combining this information with the results of your other research to write a genealogy of your family.

Marshall University, 2006, Youngamerican (talk), Creative Commons unported license
As I missed out on interviewing many living witnesses since I was born in 1945 and didn’t become interested in researching my family history until the late 1990s, I will be eternally grateful for the written legacy of Fred Lambert. He spent years traveling around West Virginia interviewing people about their families. He cared enough to preserve his findings about his and my ancestors by leaving his research to Morrow Library at Marshall University  in Huntington, WV. And of course I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Hobart Oscar Franklin and Kenneth Charles Wilde.

Categories: document types, research terms

Organize it -- Add Categories to your blog

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Have you ever needed something but didn’t realize it? Well, that happened to me this week. I was looking at genealogy blogs at geneabloggers and saw one that had “categories” above the labels list (I can’t remember which blog this was.) 


What a wonderful idea!! I looked at my blog and noticed that I had over 150 labels in my labels list! And being a born organizer, I realized that for my readers, I needed to organize these labels into categories. Actually, I would be organizing the posts, with their corresponding labels, into categories.

I first went to google and searched under “adding categories to blogs.” I came across an entry with the title: “Add a Categories section to a blogger Blog blog.” When I clicked on the title, I came to a blog called “Blog Know How” and there was a whole list of categories at the top!! I studied the post from March 19, 2009 (so this idea of adding categories to blogger has been around long before I knew I needed it!) I even printed out the post to study it more.

The author of this blog (I couldn’t find a name under “About Me,” but her handle is “The Wizz”) listed 12 steps to follow to add categories to your blog. But before I could start following the steps, I had to do some preparatory work.


First, as the author suggested, I had to come up with groupings (categories) for my labels. This is how I did it. I went to the home page of my blog. On the right-hand side of the page is the list of labels. I highlighted this list, copied it into a Word file, and printed the file. Then I was able to analyze the list and come up with these 10 categories ( I put an abbreviation after each catetgory except for the first one):

DNA, Document Types (DT), Genalogy Community (GC), Genealogy Education (GE), Genealogy Groups (GG), Genealogy Professionals (GP), Genealogy Tools (GT), Research Terms (RT), US citizenship (US citz), and US Agencies (US Ag)

Next, I went to the "Design" page and clicked on “Posts.” A chronological list of all my posts came up and under each post were listed all the labels associated with that post. I highlighted this list, copied it into a Word file, and printed the file. Then I looked at the labels for each post and put my category abbreviations over the appropriate labels.

I was ready for the final step. I had to add the appropriate category names to each post’s list of labels. I returned to the Post List on the computer and started with this post:
         Get More Bang for Your Genealogical Buck –cluster genealogy, cohort
Edit | View | Share | Delete

The labels associated with this post are “cluster genealogy” and “cohort,” both of which fall into the category of “Research terms.” So I clicked on “Edit” and added “Research terms” to the label list. Now the post entry looked like:

         Get More Bang for Your Genealogical Buck –cluster genealogy, cohort,research terms
Edit | View | Share | Delete

Finally, I was ready to return to 
 the twelve steps provided by The Wizz  and in short order, I had my ten categories on my home page! What a beautiful sight. I am so grateful for the information, ideas, and education that the genealogy and blogging communities regularly share with everyone. And a big hand for The Wizz!

"H" is for Heritage Books

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On May 4, 2013, I attended a day-long educational meeting, held at the Georgia Archives, of the Georgia Genealogical Society. This was my first visit to the Georgia Archives, and as I mentioned during some earlier blog posts, you never know what materials you will find in a library or archives.
No matter what town, city or state you find yourself in, the local library and genealogy society will likely have some out-of-state material.

I was amazed to find several shelves of books on North Carolina (as well as many other states) in the Georgia Archives. I came across what is known in genealogical circles as a “heritage book.” This type of family history can focus just on one family, as in the heritage of the Shelton Family, or can focus on many prominent families in a particular county, as did the book I found in the Archives -- The Heritage of Old Buncombe County Volume I. Before I discuss this particular heritage book, I want to talk about this genre of genealogy books in general.

Connie Lenzen, a Certified Genealogist, talked about “county-level heritage books” in the article, Heritage Books and Family Lore, that she wrote for the National Genealogical Society’s journal, the NGS Quarterly

In this article, Ms. Lenzen first describes family lore or oral tradition as “one of the oldest sources of family history and one of the least reliable.”  We all have come across these family stories that have been passed down from one generation to another with no documentable source detail. Did the story really happen?  


Onkels Rekruten by Gustav Igler, Illustrirter Katalog der internationalen Kunstausstellung im Königl. Glaspalaste in München 1883, 4. Auflage, München, September 1883, wikimedia

It’s only fantasy until documented facts are brought forth. Ms. Lenzen cautions family historians to carefully evaluate and try to verify these stories  -- whether they come across them from interviewing family members or find them in “county-level ‘heritage books.’”

In the article, Ms. Lenzen provides an excellent definition of these county heritage books and how they often come about:
“As commonly structured, their publishers focus upon an area (geographic), solicit local-(genealogical) society sponsorship, invite area residents to submit family sketches, and then publish the contributions unedited and – almost invariably – undocumented.”

Forewarned with this information from Ms. Lenzen, I opened The Heritage of Old Buncombe County Volume I:


Used by permission from OBCGS

From the title page we see the book was published by The Old Buncombe County Genealogical Society located in Asheville, NC. The mission of the Society is stated right at the top of its website: " ...to serve the community through its publications, workshops and otherwise as a medium of exchange of genealogical information."

Map of Buncombe County, North Carolina, United States with township and municipal boundaries, US Census, Ruhrfisch, June 2007, wikimedia

In the book, the selected families from different parts of Buncombe County are presented alphabetically, and I was so excited when I came upon “Roderick Shelton and Descendants” # 571, p. 324. I looked at the author and another surprise – it was Kenneth C. Wilde, the researcher I introduced in my post of May 24, 2013. Because I already knew of Mr. Wilde’s professional research background, I was sure that I would find sources in his article. He cited Buncombe County land, jury and census records. Mr. Wilde also included “family lore” about Glumdalclitch, a.k.a Mary Franklin, whom I introduced in the May 24, 2013 post, but he used the word “claimed” to let his readers know that this story is just that, a story, until documentation is found.

One of the most valuable parts of the article for me came at the end when Mr. Wilde listed his lineage or Ahnentafel, starting with William Duckworth Franklin, said to be the son of Glumdalclitch, the ancestor that we may both have in common. We all love to compare our family trees.

 Family record of [blank] / Chapman Bros. Lith. Chicago. c1888,  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

What have I learned about heritage books? They can provide an introduction to families in a county, give some local color and be a good resource. But the careful genealogist must be sure to check the information to see if sources are given. Where to find heritage books? Be sure to check libraries (on-line catalogs), local genealogical societies, and family search wikis, see my post of March 12, 2013, to locate individual and county-level heritage books.

Remember, a heritage book is just one tool to get you started. If you really want to ascertain the authenticity of the information in a heritage book, follow the five steps outlined by Connie Lenzen in her article  Heritage Books and Family Lore which involve thoughtful analysis of the story and checking of the “facts” in period sources.
Categories: genealogy groups, genealogy tools

Counties Have Genealogies, Too

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If we look at the meaning of the word “genealogy” online, on the Merriam-Webster site, we find several definitions, including:
“an account of the origin and historical development of something”
This definition is helpful  because it makes us aware of the broader meaning of the word “genealogy” that includes more than just people. When we research the genealogy of our ancestors, we have to remember
that geographic places (rivers, streams, mountain peaks etc.) and man-made places (towns, counties) also have genealogies.

View from a bridge over the Smith River, Fieldale, Henry County, Virginia., MarmadukePercy, 24 April 2010, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Melinda Kashuba has written a very helpful book (the author is updating the material for a new edition) for genealogists, Walking With YourAncestors,
Used by permission of author 
that teaches how to use maps and geography to research the comings and goings of our forebears. We learn a very important fact in this book: counties in America (during and after colonial times) were not fixed. Rather they were fluid. Often counties divided and then divided again, forming new counties. Some counties get eliminated in this process.

What were the reasons for these changing boundaries? Kashuba gives several reasons. If you have traced ancestors during colonial times in America, you already know about land speculation. In Kashuba’s words:

New counties were carved out of sparsely populated regions for the purpose of promoting settlement because being part of an established county rather than unorganized territory was thought to be an effective selling point.” (p. 43)

Another reason for an existing county to be divided is explained by Kashuba:

Residents often promoted separating into a new county, particularly when the trip to their current county seat was especially onerous. The ideal trip from the outlying hinterland to the county seat and back would be about a day’s time. Smaller counties were often created to satisfy these complaints by residents.” (p. 43)

This desire of residents to have a county seat nearby is of great significance to genealogists. The way that residents could let their desires be known is by petition to the legislature and thus a record was created!

The Library of Virginia has an on-line, searchable database of legislative petitions.
You can find the title of a petition, the county it came from, the date it was filed and where it is located in the library. Unfortunately, you must go to the library in order to view the document on microfilm.

Facebook logo/icon introduced in April 2013, 19 April 2013, Facebook, Inc.
Wikimedia, in public domain.
Now, if you don’t live in Virginia, getting to the Library could be a problem. This is where belonging to a genealogical community is so valuable. Lincoln County GenealogicalSociety of WV has a group on Facebook, LCGS WV, where you can share information and ask questions.  Patty Butcher Tyler, a member of this group, transcribed two petitions, that she found in the Library of Virginia's legislative petitions collection, from Cabell County, WV residents, requesting a new county be formed. Both petitions, one dated 1840 and a subsequent one dated 1860, were sent to then Governor of Virginia, John Letcher (who served as governor from 1860-1864) in 1860.

Governor's House, Richmond, Va, Mathew Brady, ca. 1860 - ca. 1865, National Archives and Records AdministrationARC identifier: 524418, public domain.

These petitions are a godsend to genealogists because they can be used to place ancestors in a certain time/area. And their neighbors are also shown as signers of the petitions. Finally, we are so fortunate to have the original signatures of these petitioners. I am so lucky that my ancestor, Franklin Johnson, was one of the Cabell County, WV residents who wanted a new county.

Patty ButcherTyler first published an article, including some of the pages from the petitions, in the Lincoln Standard . Here is a page from the article showing the second petition with Franklin Johnson’s signature:
 
 Library of Virginia, Richmond, Legislative Petitions, Reel 32, Box 45, Folder 56 Petition of Citizens.

Now that we have seen how legislative petitions can be helpful for genealogists, let’s return to county boundary changes and see how these changes affect research. Melinda Kashuba cautions researchers:

To be efficient and successful in the research of a specific locality, you need to know what jurisdiction that locality fell under during the time your ancestor or research subject lived there. Your ancestor may not have traveled any farther than from his cabin’s porch to the well and back and spent his entire life in one place, but the territory he lived in became a county and that county became part of a state. Those county boundaries may have moved and shifted over time as new counties were added and old counties were abolished….Your ancestor may disappear from his county’s records, when in actuality the boundary shifted and suddenly he and his family were recorded in the records of a different  county.” (p. 42)

My Johnsons and their Franklin and Shelton cohort families lived near Peter’s Creek in Virginia in the 1780s to early 1800s. In order to see what county Peter’s Creek was in from the earliest colonial settlement to the 1800s, I needed a tool. AniMap is a database mapping program that “contains more than one million locations of: cities, towns, townships, courthouses, cemeteries (and geographic features) listing over 50,000 places no longer in existence.” (CD jacket of AniMap 3.0.2)

Used by permission of AniMap
When I plotted Peter’s Creek in Virginia in AniMap, here are the county changes I saw:
Date
County
1669
Charles City
1703
Prince George
1745
Brunswick
1749
Lunenburg
1765
Halifax
1773
Pittsylvania
1782
Henry
1791
Patrick

In AniMap, you plot a place and the program shows you the changing county boundaries of that place. A caveat is that minor geographic features or towns from two or three hundred years ago may not be in the AniMap database. If your feature is not in AniMap, chances are that another neighboring place will be in the database.

When you begin using AniMap, I suggest that you print out the manual (available when you install the program) to help you master the steps of “plucking” or selecting the place you want to know how the county changed over the years and “plotting” or placing that feature on the map.

An online database of geographic features is the Geographic Names information System (GNIS) at the United States Geological Survey.

USGS office, 30 July 2010, photographed by Billy Hathorn, Wikimedia, 
This database contains over two million feature names in the US and its territories. It's a great place to start searching for ancestral place names.


In this post, I have discussed the genealogy of counties in America and how important it is to know the county your ancestor lived in and to realize that the county may have changed several times over the years. In order to find an ancestor’s records, you may need to search in several counties. I have highlighted AniMap, a very helpful software program that lets you know with confidence the county your ancestor was in at what time, and GNIS, an online gazetteer.

Categories: document types, genealogy tools, genealogy groups, genealogy professional

I Need Your DNA!

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In the past, all that genealogists wanted from possible cousins was their family tree. But since the advent of DNA testing, made available to everyone at an affordable price thanks to companies like  FamilyTreeDNA, "23 You and Me" and Ancestry, we now want suspected cousins to hand over their DNA!

Genealogists welcome the opportunity to further explore ancestry that DNA testing gives us, and we have trouble understanding why everyone doesn’t jump at the chance to take advantage of this new and wonderful technology.

On the other hand, we all recognize the assaults on privacy that are an everyday nuisance in our modern society. So when we cold-call a possible cousin, we have to be prepared for a cold reception. At the very least we may be seen as a solicitor, or we may be suspected of scamming or perpetrating identity theft.
No Soliciting, 10 June 2007, Marcus Quigmire from Florida, USA, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.


I had the opportunity recently to hear Bennett Greenspan speak at a conference sponsored by the South Carolina Genealogical Society about one of his experiences asking a possible cousin to take a DNA test. He had met Alan Greenspan, at a conference. When they chanced to meet at the beginning of the event, Alan, seeing Bennett’s name tag, said “Oh, we might be related.”
At the end of the conference, Bennett caught up with Alan and asked him if he would take a DNA test to see if they were indeed related. And very politely, Alan declined.

When we brave a cold call to a possible cousin, how can we minimize the chances of having the person immediately hang up and maximize the opportunity of having a conversation? Before you can get to the point of asking someone for something, you must first give the person a reason to listen to you.

I think here is where I should tell you my qualifications to be writing this guide to persuading people to share their DNA. Before I made my first call, I decided I would pay for the test if my target would agree. You may decide to negotiate when you begin “courting” a possible relation. I started with my brother, Roy Spears, about four years ago. This took a little work as my brother wasn’t sure about the privacy of DNA testing for genealogy. But when his questions were answered, he agreed to be tested. After my success with my brother, I decided to seek DNA from my paternal first cousin, with whom I had had no contact since we were children. In this instance, I needed more time to develop a relationship before I could hope to have a chance to get a “yes” to my quest.

When my brother’s DNA results came back (I used FamilyTree DNA as my testing company), I had two matches: “Frederick Johnson” and “Asa (Carl) Atkins.” I didn’t realize until later that matches other than “Spears” (my birth surname) are a red flag.
It wasn’t until Sallie Atkins, the wife of Carl, e-mailed me that I had a big surprise. Sallie said that she had been studying the Atkins and Johnson families for over thirty years, and she had come to the conclusion that her husband and my brother were both Johnsons! We became friends and decided to look for a living Johnson from this line so we could check his DNA against my brother and her husband.

We were fortunate in that our Johnson/Atkins/Spears ancestors lived in a small town so the number of Johnsons I had to call was manageable. Actually it was the second person I called who turned out to be the one!! It took the combined efforts of Sallie and I (and two personal visits) to form a relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. But eventually he agreed to take a DNA test, and the result confirmed Sallie’s conclusion of how we were related. Both her husband and my brother (and me) are Johnsons!! 

From this auspicious beginning, Sallie and I have recruited more possible cousins to share their DNA with us in the cause of tracing family lines and seeking to solve puzzles that have challenged researchers for decades. So far we are at 7 successes out of 7 tries!

In addition to my track record on obtaining DNA tests, my second qualification is a skill I possess. I have been told by many people that within a few minutes of meeting them, they feel comfortable talking with me. I think it safe to say that this ability is paramount to gaining a person’s trust.You may wonder if this is something you have to born with, but I believe anyone can learn to put people at ease through practice. Now let’s talk about the steps to follow in a DNA-seeking scenario.

Woman Talking on the Phone, National Cancer Institute, 
July 1990, image is in the public domain.
You dial the number of a possible cousin. When the person picks up the phone, you have just a few moments to separate yourself from “nuisance” cold-callers. With a smile on your face (even though the person can’t see you, a smile affects your tone of voice and your manner in a positive way), say your name, that you are studying family history, and that the two of you may share a common ancestor. Then wait for a response. If the person seems at all interested, move to step two.

This is the point where you want to show the person that you respect his/her time. Ask if this is a good time to talk. If the person says that it isn’t a good time, ask if you might call again. But if the person signals that it is okay to keep talking, then do so! It’s important to strike while the iron is hot!!

Step three is where you establish a connection between the two of you. Here’s where you have to be well prepared and know the family line backwards and forwards that you believe the two of you share. Start by asking, “Is this your father’s name?” And go up the
ancestor chain to the great grandfather. Most people won’t know the names of their ancestors past their grandfather, but you may get lucky.

Now that you have the person’s attention, you need to establish some common ground. After all, sharing an ancestor 50-100 years ago may not mean much to a non-genealogist. Before you even make the call, consider some things you might share with the person: locality in the US, job status (working or retired), field of work, children/grandchildren. Talking about these topics can help start a relationship.

As you come to the end of your call, offer to send a family tree or a photo of a common ancestor. Ask if the person has any questions.
Sometimes people have a family story they have heard over and over and wonder if it is true. You may not know if the story is authentic, but it gives you something to look into and raises your standing with the person.

I believe that getting people to say yes to a DNA test is a lot like getting people to yes to many things in life, including coaching a little league team, attending a charity event, or agreeing to chair a church committee. In 2006, Brian Clark started a popular blog on marketing that is still going strong. Dean Rieck, a recent guest writer on Copyblogger, wrote a post called  “Six Ways to Get People to Say ‘Yes’”, where he explains compliance triggers– six things you can do to get a person to comply with your request for a DNA test.

One of the triggers Mr. Rieck discusses is “reciprocity”: if you do something for someone, the person feels more obligated to return the favor. So you start with offering to send some family information. Another trigger is “liking” – Mr. Rieck reminds us that people are more likely to comply with a request if they know and like you. That’s why you want to be patient in your  DNA-seeking. Remember, it’s hard to turn a “no” around, so don’t ask too early. Take time to build a relationship.


In conclusion, although DNA testing has changed the world of genealogy research in a dramatic way, it behooves all of us to remember that this tool doesn’t replace other research avenues (including vital records, land, census and court records.) Instead, DNA testing is one more arrow in our research quiver.
Also, in order to make use of this wonderful tool, we have to learn how to persuade those who possess the DNA we need to agree to take a test.

Categories: DNA

A Trunk full of Treasures

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How often do genealogists dream of finding a trunk in a relative’s attic, filled with family documents and photos?
 I had the opportunity last month to meet someone (distantly related to me through the Shelton/Franklin lines) who had such a trunk, although in this case, it was a suitcase.

About six months ago, I saw in the rootsweb.archives, a message about the Sheltons that mentioned an “Alice Lockman” who had a family bible! 
Now that got my attention. I decided to try to find Mrs. Lockman by using some tools available to all of us for free on the internet – the whitepages, anywho or pipl.

When I contacted Alice by telephone, I was so pleased to find out that she is a genealogist who has been studying the Sheltons and related families for many years (she is in her 80s.) Sometime during our talk, Alice mentioned that the family bible had somehow gotten lost, but that she had a “suitcase” full of 30 years of research.  This was the first time in my family history research that I had run across the proverbial “trunk” or, in this case, “suitcase” full of documents. I cannot tell you how excited I felt. We had a lively conversation about some of the family stories including  about Glumdalclitch (see my post of May 24,2013.)

After several more telephone conversations, I asked Alice if I might come to visit her and look at her research, and she was excited to share her discoveries. I learned something very important at this time – many times we might feel hesitant to ask someone we don’t know well if we could look at their research. We fear rejection. But we overlook a human characteristic, highly developed in genealogists:  the desire to show what we have done.

From http://www.vupointsolutions.com/
I prepared my tools for the trip across several states to look in Alice Lockman’s suitcase. My husband was coming along to help with this task. First, I packed my VuPoint portable scanner in case I need to make copies of documents or photos at Alice’s home. I also packed my digital camera (see my post of Oct 9, 2012 to help in making copies if we had a lot to do. I wanted to be sure that I didn’t overstay my visit and wanted to be respectful of Alice’s time and health.

When we arrived at Alice’s home, she and her daughter welcomed us and we chatted awhile. I was excited to get down to the business of finding family history. Remember that I had not experienced this before -- going through a researcher’s life-time collection of documents. I knew my time was limited so I wanted to make the most of it:

Pat Spears photographed by Bert Schuster, May 2013

I noticed that the collection was actually individual papers and many, many personal letters in their envelopes. 
I wasn’t in a library or an archives, but in a home. So there was no “finding aid” of table of contents. Although I’m a researcher and a born organizer, I saw that this was a big task. Well, I just jumped in. I decided to concentrate on the letters. And this was fortuitous as I found some information that was new to me and vital for my family research.

As I looked at the first few letters, I learned about another researcher of the Sheltons/Franklins/Johnsons, in addition to Hobart Franklin and Kenneth Charles Wilde (see my post from May 24, 2013), one who had corresponded with Alice. This researcher was Richard Gosnell, who was related to the Sheltons through his great grandmother. I found the familiar discussion about Glumdalclitch’s son William Duckworth Shelton Franklin in the correspondence but with a new twist. This passage demonstrates what happens when two researchers "talk" with each other about family stories and try to coax out the "facts" from all the lore:

March 11, 1982, Richard Gosnell to Alice Lockman, p. 1
Here is the above passage transcribed for easier reading:

"In the short time that I have had to review the data, I do have a few questions. First, on the family of Roderick and Sarah Briggs Shelton, I noticed that your brother, Charles, listed a son William. I also noticed that a son William was listed on the interview with "Bud" Shelton....At first I thought that this was a reference to Roderick's son, William Duckworth Franklin by Glumdalclitch, but now I'm wondering if Roderick and Sarah also had a son named William."

In the same letter, I found that Richard was also corresponding with Kenneth Wilde: 
March 11, 1982, Richard Gosnell to Alice Lockman, p. 1

I made another very interesting discovery in the Lockman-Gosnell letters, something that has enriched my knowledge of the way my people lived in Madison County, NC in the early 1800s.
Map of Madison County, North Carolina, June 2007, taken from US Census website and modified by User:Ruhrfisch.

 In Richard’s letter of March 11, 1982, he introduces Alice to a fascinating piece of US history (the scan was not legible so I have transcribed the section below):

“If you could locate a copy of the book, ‘The Child thatToileth Not’  (go to the bottom of this page to access the full text) by Thomas Robinson Dawley Jr. (Princeton University Press 1912), I’m sure that you would be interested in reading it….Dawley was appointed as a special investigator by the U.S. Labor Dept to investigate child labor conditions in southern textile mills and to compare the lives of the children in the mills as contrasted to their former lives in the mountains where so many of them came from. Much of Dawley’s investigation was in Madison County, particularly the (Shelton) Laurel section.” (March 11, 1982, Richard Gosnell to Alice Lockman, p. 2)

There was controversy over the report as Dawley describes in the preface, and it was not published by the government. Because he praised the mills as saving children from the hunger and soul-killing toil of the farm, some people familiar with factory conditions thought he was in the pay of the textile industry. But after much effort, Dawley got his findings published privately. Regardless of the controversy, Dawley’s book gives us a rare glimpse into the lives of both adults and children who lived in the late 1800s in North Carolina. These words from the book paint a sad picture of the life of farm children:

“I seemed to hear the cries of their children from their dismal abodes. My thoughts reverted to their half starved bodies and miserable diet of crude corn meal and fat pork, and I could see their begrimed faces and partially clothed bodies draped in filthy rags.” (The Child that Toileth Not, p. IX)

In the early 1900s, a photographer and social reformer, Lewis W. Hine took photographs of mill workers and farm families in many states, including North Carolina and Virginia.
County Map of Virginia, and North Carolina, 1860, Samuel Augustus Mitchell, Wikimedia.

His work provides a companion to Dawley’s photos that appear in his report. In the photo below, Hines shows child laborers in a North Carolina cotton mill:

Some of the sweepers in a cotton mill. North Carolina, 11/1908, National Child Labor Committee Photographs taken by Lewis Hine, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Next, we see a female child worker in a North Carolina textile mill:

Two young girls working at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, NC. November 1908, National Child Labor Committee Photographs taken by Lewis Hine, Library of Congress.

 Another Lewis Hine photograph of a farm family in VA from the early 1900s, provides a glimpse into what Mr. Dawley saw during his research.


Part of the family of R.D. Thomas. He and a boy of 15 are working in the Century Cotton Mill, South Boston, Va., 1911 June, National Child Labor Committee Photographs taken by Lewis Hine, Library of Congress.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing I found in Dawley’s book, from a family historian’s point of view, was a reference he made to the Sheltons. Richard Gosnell remarked upon this story in his letter to Alice. Here is Dawley’s description of how Shelton Laurel got its name:


Walking Bear, ca. 1850s-1860s, Antoine-Louis Barye,
 in public domain, Wikimedia.

“My host (Jemerson Tweed) was well informed respecting the early settlement of the country. He said that the first settler in those parts was a famous hunter who came over the mountains in Tennessee from Virginia. He had a pack of dogs almost as famous as himself. As long as there was a bear anywhere in the country, he was sure to get it. The name of this bear-hunter was Shelton. He made his last stand on one of three tributaries to the Laurel River which became the Shelton-Laurel, and which in turn gave its name to that entire section of country, notorious for its feuds, fights and killing scrapes.” (The Child that Toileth Not, p. 170)

But Jemerson Tweed had more to say about the Sheltons, and Dawley faithfully recorded his words:

Cumberland Gap, Oct. 2005, Aaron/ConspiracyofHappiness,

“The Sheltons were said to be a tall, hardy race from England, who preferred hunting and fighting, to settling down in one place, and pursuing the peaceful occupation of farming. The name may be traced down through the Virginia Mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, and it is said that wherever the Sheltons are found to this day, they are known for their fighting proclivities. On the upper Shelton-Laurel in the vicinity of where the original Shelton made his last stand, it is estimated that more than two-thirds of the families bear the name of Shelton.” (The Child that Toileth Not, p. 170)

Oh, how we genealogists love oral testimonies! Of course, we have no proof of the accuracy of Mr. Tweed’s reminiscences or of his motives for sharing them, but it is such stories that inject life into the names, dates and place names that fill our family history sheets.


I am in debt to Alice Lockman for allowing me to read her correspondence with Richard Gosnell, to Richard Gosnell for his discovery of Thomas Robinson Dawley Jr.’s book, and to Mr. Dawley for his efforts to record for posterity the conditions of the lives of the pioneer families of North Carolina’s Shelton Laurel.


I leave you with the reminder that you never know what you will find in your research. For that reason, I recommend following every lead that you uncover.
The Detective's Barnstar, 25 February 2007,by  ChrisO
released to public domain by author, Wikimedia
 Even a brief mention of a name in an old message on genforum.com or rootsweb.com can lead to spectacular results if you invest the time and energy into following up.





Categories: document types, genealogy tools, genealogy community

Checking out the Czechs – with a Personal Guide

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My husband, Bert, and I have been planning a trip to Europe for about a year. One of the most indispensable tools in planning our trip has been Europe Through the Back Door 2013by Rick Steves.

Used by permission of author

 Rick has guided us through packing light
and finding the best phone for use in Europe to how to make friends with local people and identifying the memorable sights to visit, and so much more. And all of this must-have information is written in an entertaining, easy-to-follow style. 

Earlier this year, my sister, Monique, made a fantastic discovery through lots of good research techniques. She located our maternal grandfather’s (Frank Holub) baptism certificate from the Czech Republic (see post of April 22, 2013 for more details.) This document provided us with a wealth of detail, including the place, Naceradec, Czech Republic,

Načeradec, Central Bohemian Region, the Czech Republic, 3 May 2009, cs:ŠJů, Wikimedia. 

where Frank and his family were living at his birth in 1903. The country was then known as Bohemia.

 Bert and I decided to begin our European trip by flying into Prague

View over Prague Old Town, Czech Republic, 15 May 2008, Petritap, Wikimedia.

as Naceradec is just 39 miles or 64 kilometers  from the capital city. To help prepare for the visit, we checked out Rick Steves’ book, Eastern Europe.
Used by permission of author

 Although Steves does give some information about Prague in Europe Through the Back Door, we wanted a more in-depth picture.

I was excited about visiting Naceradec but had some concerns about not knowing the language. I was hoping to find a cemetery that might have some Holub graves and maybe the church where Frank Holub was baptized. But our time was limited and I didn’t know how much I could accomplish. Then, as sometimes happens in life and genealogy, what I needed appeared!! As I was reading Eastern Europe, I came across a section on p. 70 called “Tours in Prague.” You can imagine my joy when I read this passage:

To get beyond the sights listed in most guidebooks, call Tom and Marie Zahn from P.A.T.H. Finders International. Tom is American, Marie is Czech….Their specialty is Personal Ancestral Tours & History (P.A.T.H.) – with sufficient notice, they can help Czech descendants find their ancestral homes, perhaps even a long-lost relative.” (p. 71)

In Steves’ book, you will find Tom’s and Marie’s web site: www.pathfinders.cz and an e-mail address: info@pathfinders.cz. I immediately sent a message:

Hello Tom and Marie,
My husband, Bert Schuster, and I are traveling to Europe this year. I am a family historian and very interested in visiting Naceradec where my grandfather, Frantisek (Frank) Holub was born 20 April 1903. I attached a copy of Frank's baptism that my sister received from a relative here in the US. This is a recent discovery and was very exciting.
The Holub family lived at house # XXX (not listed for privacy) in Naceradec at the time of Frank's birth. 
I am hoping to visit the cottage and to see if any Holubs are currently living in the area. 
We are interested in having you be our guides.
Pat

Here is Marie’s first response:

Dear Pat,
Thank you for contacting us.

We would be happy to help you visit Naceradec, try to identify the house No. XXX where Frantisek was born, visit the parish church he was baptized in and try to locate living relatives in the area....Thank you for sending the copy. Please let us know what date would you like to travel to Naceradec and how many people will be joining you. We will send you our proposal when we hear back from you. You can visit our site at www.pathfinders.cz for more information about our services. You can also visit www.pathways.cz for more travel information.
Do not hesitate to ask questions. We will reply as soon as possible.
Best regards from Prague
Marie





From there, we discussed fees and payment and arranged for us to send a deposit. Now the fun  part began. We waited to see what Marie was able to find.
And soon came Marie’s first report:

Pat,
The community your grandfather Frantisek was born does have its own parish church and it is the church where the child was baptized. Parishes also have cemeteries and therefore in Naceradec, it will also be possible to visit the cemetery.

Part of making the local contacts is arranging for the church to be opened during your visit. We will try to arrange this so that you can see the church inside as well.
I will be your guide - driver on Sept. 5th and I will come to your hotel at 9 AM to pick you up. Please let me know if this time meets with your approval.
As for your question about the cemetery in Naceradec, burial traditions in the Czech Lands are similar to those of all parts of Central Europe. The lack of land available formed the burial traditions and cemeteries could stay relatively small. It is good to visit the cemeteries though since we can find a forgotten grave site. It would not be the first time it happened.
Best regards from Prague
Marie



In short order this amazing message came from Marie:

Dear Pat,
We are sending the results of the Local contacts in Naceradec.

We contacted the local office in Naceradec and spoke to Mrs. Svecova. She was very helpful and identified the house No. XXX in the present town. The house is still standing, did not change so much in past years and still is owned by family Holub. The present owner is Mr. XXX Holub who was born in 1934. I am trying to determine now, what is the relation between your and his ancestors…I hope a visit will be possible.
We have arranged for the church to be opened during your visit. Mrs. Svecova also asked that we stop at the local office before you leave the town.

Best regards from Prague
Marie


None of this information would have been easy to find on my own. The language barrier, time constraints and lack of local contacts would have made it unlikely for me to have found this wonderful news on my own. Again, I recommend working with genealogy professionals, (see post of November 5, 2011 for more details) such as Marie Zahn. I will report back in this blog on our trip with Marie to Naceradec.

Categories: genealogy professional, genealogy tools



What a Heritage Guide Can Do for You

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Most of us are familiar with tours and tour guides. Tours come in large and small sizes. I saw many while traveling in Europe this September. The hallmark of each was an energetic person holding an umbrella/flag high in the air, striding in front of a group of tourists.
David Vignoni,  Icon from
 Nuvola icon theme for KDE 3.x., Wikimedia.
I worried that if I ever was on such a tour, what would happen if I couldn’t keep up with the flying umbrella/flag? It wasn’t until planning this European genealogy trip that I learned about a different kind of tour guide – the ancestral or heritage guide.

The fact that I don’t speak Czech was the main impetus for my thinking about getting some help for my visit to the Czech Republic to find my grandfather’s ancestral home.

In my post from September 1, 2013, I wrote about how I found my personal guide to the Czech Republic, Ms. Marie Zahn of P.A.T.H. Finders International. Now let me describe our trip.

On Thursday, September 5, 2013 at 9:30 a.m., Marie picked up me and my husband, Bert, at the Best Western Kinsky Garden, our hotel in Prague. The Kinsky Hotel was a great choice for location, service and price, and we found it through Delta Vacations. Marie is a great guide to have in Prague as she is a native and very knowledgeable. 

Honza Groh, 7. 05. 2008, Memorial
of seven czech paratroupers…., Wikimedia.
As she drove us out of the city, Marie pointed out two of the main attractions we happened to drive by. The first was the Heydrich Terror Memorial, a tribute to two Czech heroes who assassinated a high-ranking Nazi in Prague. The second was “The Dancing House”, a building designed by two avant-garde architects, Vlado Milunić, a Croatian-Czech and Frank Gehry,  a Canadian-American, in 1992. The style is unusual in a city awash in medieval, Baroque and Art Nouveau architecture.
Maros M r a z, August 2004 Dancing House, Wikimedia.

After we left Prague, we soon were in the countryside. We saw large, cultivated fields interspersed with forested areas.
ŠJů,  31 August 2012, NihošoviceStrakonice District
South Bohemian RegionCzech Republic, Wikimedia.

We asked Marie about the huge farms; she explained that after the fall of Communism, many farmers whose lands had been collectivized, regained their land. But as in America, it’s difficult nowadays for small farmers to make a living. Many sold their land to developers, and the result is that large, corporate farms abound where most people in agriculture now work.

We saw cars parked in the forest areas and Marie explained the Czech national pastime – mushroom picking.
Karelj, October 2008, Boletus badius, 
Czech Republic, Wikimedia.
It seems that Czechs of all ages love to go to the woods and search for mushrooms. And Marie told us a joke: on a mushroom hunt, a non-Czech asks, “Are any of these mushrooms poisonous?” The answer is: “All mushrooms are edible, but some only once.” I’m glad we were ancestor-hunting.

When we reached Naceradec, we first stopped at the Administrative Town Office
Pat in Naceradec in front of
Town Office and Church
Book by Eva Prochazkova
where we met Mrs. Svecova with whom Marie had set up this meeting prior to the trip. Mrs. Svecova presented me with  a book on the history of Naceradec. It has many beautiful photographs from different eras in the town’s life. And best of all, there is a summary in the back that is in English!

Our first stop was the Catholic church of Naceradec which Mrs. Svecova unlocked for us. My heart was filled with emotion as I stood before the very same building where my grandfather was baptized and attended services.
Entrance to Naceradec
Catholic Church, Sept 2013
Altar Naceradec Catholic Church,
Sept 2013
Although I have toured many churches in different countries, I felt very different being in the church of my ancestors.
 While to most people, the altar and the decorated ceiling would be the sights to see in this church, to me, the baptismal fount where my grandfather was baptized was place that drew me.
Baptismal Fount Naceradec
Catholic Church, Sept 2013

Our second stop was the World War I memorial
WW I Memorial Naceradec Town
Square, Sept 2013

in the town square. This is a familiar site in many European towns but again, this was special to me as two people with my grandfather’s surname were etched onto the monument: Josef Holub and his son Rudolf. I don’t yet know how these Holub men are related to me, so I will be doing some research.
Close-up WWI Memorial Naceradec
Town Square, Sept 2013
The next to last stop was the town cemetery. We weren’t sure what we would find there except Mrs. Svecova had told Marie the number of the one Holub grave. Before we left for Europe, I had asked Marie if Czech cemeteries followed the same practice as some other European countries of only leasing graves for a certain period so that they can be used again. Marie responded that this is indeed the case in the Czech Republic as well.

We came upon the Holub grave
Grave Naceradec, Josef Hrolicka
 and Rudolf Holub
and I immediately noticed two things. First, two different families were buried in the plot and second, the plot looked somewhat neglected. The grave marker was made of glass and very hard to read in the sunlight with the reflection factor, but it looked like a Rudolf Holub was buried on one side. Now there were two Rudolf Holubs to investigate: one who died in WWI and one who was buried here in 1977.

Our last stop in Naceradec was the house where my grandfather was born. A Holub family lived there and was waiting to welcome us. The house was the last one in a small lane. We parked in front and Mrs. Holub (I have not used first names for privacy) came out to greet us with a warm smile. They had just returned from their daily visit to the hospital where Mr. Holub was under treatment. As I walked through the front door, I felt very emotional as this was the same threshold my grandfather and his family crossed in their daily lives so many years ago. We followed Mrs. Holub into the kitchen where Mr. Holub, despite his ill health, stood beaming. He offered us all a warm handshake and gestured towards the chairs around the kitchen table.

Mrs. Holub had graciously prepared a delicious Czech luncheon. First we had coffee and pastries.
Jonathunder,  29 November 2010, Home made poppy seed
 kolaches on a plate, Wikimedia.
My childhood memory of “kolache”, pastry filled with prune/apple/poppy seed, was reawakened – there were several on the dessert plate! Then we were presented with ham and cheese sandwiches, and each time one of our plates was empty, another sandwich appeared!
Makovec, 26 December 2012,
Cuisine of the Czech Republic, Wikimedia.
We spent the next few hours looking at photos from Mr. Holub’s life, and we saw his birth certificate. Marie translated as Mr. Holub told us the details of his birth. His mother, Antonie Holubuva, lived in Naceradec when she was pregnant with him. She did not marry his father but married another man from the town of Louny and moved there with him. Mr. Holub was actually born in Louny. Because he grew up in Louny, Mr. Holub unfortunately never met any of the Naceradec Holubs. 

Mr. Holub came to live in Naceradec in 1977 when a relative left him this house and he has been here ever since. He said that Holubs have always lived in this house. It will take some more research to find how we are related.

We noticed that Mr. Holub was looking tired so reluctantly we said our goodbyes and headed back to our hotel in Prague.

As I planned this post, I wondered what other companies might offer heritage tours in other European countries besides the Czech Republic. I did a quick search on google and found a few entries for heritage guides, mainly for non-English speaking countries. Please note that I have no experience with any company other than P.A.T.H. Finders InternationalFamilyTree Tours is the company of an American and a German and although the company“specializes in heritage tours to German-speaking countries, they are able to design and assist in trips to other European nations." (from FamilyTreeTours website.) Ancestral Attic offers heritage tours in Poland and other Eastern European countries while Polish Origins has services for Poland and the Ukraine.


Hiring Ms. Marie Zahn, of P.A.T.H. Finders International, turned out to be the best decision I made in planning this trip back to my Czech homeland. If you are planning a trip to Europe to learn more about your ancestors, I recommend that you consider hiring a guide to make your heritage tour the best it can be.

Categories: genealogy professional

Dress Up Your Family Tree with History

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Most family historians have a companion interest in world history.

Ktrinko, world map made with natural earth data,
 eckert 4 projection, central meridian 10 ° east, Wikimedia.
 And our interest starts with ourselves. We are intrigued by the outside events that have shaped our own lives. A natural extension of our desire to know what historical events have impacted our lives is to also know what happenings affected the lives of our ancestors. Creating family trees with dates and locations for our forebears is necessary as a first step in organizing our family history. But if we  stop there, we will have only a list of facts. In order to understand our ancestors’ lives, we need to find out what was happening around them – locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. We want to uncover what was influencing their daily lives: their decisions to move, to leave the farm, to go to another state or country.

In my post of Sept 16, 2012, I touched upon the need to put flesh on the bones of our ancestors by finding out how they lived and what the world was like during their lifetimes. Let’s see what professionals in the field have to say on this subject.

Anchor.svg, Open Clip Art Library, Wikimedia.
The genealogist Kimberly Powell is the author of The Everything Family Tree Bookand a writer for about.com. One of the topics Ms. Powell covers in both her book and her on-line pieces is the need to anchor our ancestors in time. In her book, Ms. Powell states:

One of the first, most important steps in family history research is to gain an understanding of the history of the location and time period in which your ancestors lived.1 (p. 175) 

Where can we go to gain this understanding? Be sure to check sources such as archives, libraries, historical societies, and local genealogical societies. Many of these institutions have excellent web sites with on-line catalogs, so that you can find out what materials are available.  Also search books.google.com and scholar.google.com in addition to regular google.com as you hunt for information about the times in which your ancestors lived. Search for experts in the time period that you are interested in. Read their books.
Eugenio Hansen, OFS, September 1, 2013, 
Library science symbol, Wikimedia.
And very often, if you contact them, they will give you suggestions and lead you to additional sources. Now let us look at some on-line sources that can help us find the historical context of our ancestors’ lives.

An about.com piece (no author name given), Historical Research – Researching the DailyLives of Your Ancestors, provides many suggestions and on-line links where you can find information on disasters, epidemics, clothing styles, and much more.


lmproulx, 31 August 2011,
 Utilisé pour le site du Crieur-public.org, Wikimedia.
One type of historical web search site is based on what happened in the world on any given month and day, such as the Scopes Systems site.  Another type, including the dMarie site, let’s you enter day, month and year and then gives you a lengthy report on historical happenings. I have listed just two sites, but you can find many more on Google.

A genealogy blog by FamilyTree.com spotlights some of the kinds of historical events that can influence our ancestors’ lives, such as wars, inventions, legislation, and mineral discoveries. 

Epidemics, another type of historical event, can have devastating effects on people’s lives. I was familiar with the Black Death in Europe from 1348 to 1350, the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 
1918, St. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps on duty Oct. 1918 Influenza epidemic,
 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 
and the polio epidemics in America and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s , and I know that these events likely touched the lives of many of our ancestors. But there are many more plagues that have happened throughout the world over time that can be investigated. For a list see the website “List of Epidemics”.

A plague that struck America several times, the worst episode being in 1878, was only vaguely familiar to me. Molly Caldwell Crosby, in her book 
Cover scan used by permission of author
reveals the horrific history of Yellow Fever which struck America so often that it earned the name The American Plague, also the title of the book. I want to use this epidemic as an example of how an event like this can change people’s lives.

My great grandfather, Johannes (John) Ulrich Kreis, was living with his family in New Orleans in 1878,
Kruseman & Tjeenk, 1877, Canal Street,
New Orleans, in the 1870s, Wikimedia.
 a fact that is corroborated by his filing of an application for naturalization on Oct 10, 1878. To see this document, please check my post of July 23, 2012. This was John’s second time in New Orleans as he had landed there in 1866 when he emigrated from Switzerland. Between 1866 and 1878 John had been first farming in LaSalle County, IL and then living in St. Louis, MO. I can time his arrival in New Orleans by the birth of his second son, George Kreis, in June of 1876. Because of Crosby’s research on the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1878, I now assume must have been a contributing factor to John Kreis’ leaving New Orleans once again. 
New Orleans, 1905: Screened horse-drawn ambulance
 during outbreak of Yellow Fever, the last to strike the city, Wikimedia.
The fever touched many countries in the Americas as noted by Ms. Crosby:

The 1878 epidemic had stretched from Brazil to Ohio….the final death toll in the Mississippi Valley would prove to be 20,000 lives and the financial loss close to $200 million.” (p. 74)

The horror of the fever caused mass exodus from places where it struck, such as Memphis, Tennessee. Again, Ms. Crosby describes the grim scene that met the refugees as they tried to flee:

Nearby farms locked their gates and doors, with shotguns ready. Public roads were wrecked and bridges burned to prevent travel. Many cities and towns refused admittance in fear of the dreaded fever.” (p. 47)

I don’t know exactly when John Kreis and his family left New Orleans; I only know that he showed up in the 1880 Ottawa, LaSalle, Illinois US Census.

So far, we have discussed why it is important to learn about the historical events that affected the lives of our ancestors. But how can we record what we find so that we might better be able to analyze, understand, and explain our findings?

Once you have gathered details about what was going on in the world of your ancestors, you need to be able to organize this information. In the words of Kimberly Powell:

This is where timelines: chronological listings of historical events – can offer an interesting perspective to your genealogy research. They can help to take you beyond names, dates and locations to the ‘big picture’ – events, situations and surroundings which probably had some sort of impact on your ancestors.(Timelines & Your Ancestors)

Ms. Powell gives a helpful suggestion on how to begin thinking about a timeline:

To create your own ancestral timeline, begin with a simple timeline of the major events in your ancestor’s life. Then use history books and pieces from historical … timelines to add in local and world events that took place during the same time period.” (Timelines & Your Ancestors)

Lynn Palermo, The Armchair Genealogist, presents an interesting framework based on categories for setting up a basic timeline in Word or Excel in Four Steps to a Family Timeline

One of my favorite articles about timelines is one written by Diane L. Richard for archives.com, Timelines as Genealogical Research Tools. I like how Ms. Richard uses Excel to build a tabular timeline model and how she integrates personal and historical events in an ancestor’s life.

After reading Ms. Richard’s article, I was inspired to follow her model and try my hand at a timeline for John Ulrich Kreis:



I first filled in the personal details, with dates, of John Kreis’ life: birth, leaving Switzerland to go to America, landing in America, working as a farm laborer, getting married and having children, moving from Illinois to Missouri to Louisiana and back to Illinois. Then I began researching to find historical events that may have shaped some of John’s decisions. These I highlighted in green.

I saw several things as I created the timeline that I had not seen before. First, I realized that John had landed in New Orleans when he emigrated so he was familiar with the city and that was one reason he chose to return ten years later. When I explored land records and legislation in the mid-1800s and learned more about the Homestead Acts, I realized how that affected John. On the FamilySearch.org wiki, Illinois Land and Property, I read that:

Illinois was a “federal-land” state, where unclaimed land was surveyed, then granted or sold by the government through federal and state land offices.

John worked as a laborer on a farm in LaSalle County, Illinois when he first arrived in America. But by the early 1870s he had married, had children and moved first to St. Louis and then to New Orleans. All of these places are close to that great water highway, the Mississippi River. 
Lee Russell, 1937, Detail of an abandoned farmhouse.
 Miller Township, LaSalle County, Illinois, 

The Second Industrial Revolution explains the movement from farm to city that John and many other Americans followed in the late 1800s through the twentieth century.

 Finally, I came upon Molly Caldwell Crosby’s book on Yellow Fever quite by accident. I was reading another book she had written and saw a reference to The American Plague on the book jacket. This book proved to hold the explanation of John’s move from New Orleans. And it gives me chills to think that he and his family lived through the great 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic that killed so many.

In conclusion, genealogy is so much more than lists of names and dates. When you add historical background to your ancestral stories, you learn so much more about the lives of your forebears. Once you have researched and gathered your historical events, you can organize them with a timeline, and you never know what will jump out at you.

Notes & Bibliography:
  1. Kimberly Powell, The Everything Family Tree Book. Avon, Massachusetts: Adams Media, 2006.
  2. Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague. New York: The Berkeley Publishing Group, 2006.
  3. New York. Kimberly Powell, Timelines and Your Ancestors. Online <http://genealogy.about.com/od/timelines/a/timeline.htm> Material downloaded November 2013.
  4. Cafferty, Pastora San Juan, Barry R. Chiswick and Andrew M. Greeley. The Dilemma of American Immigration: Beyond the Golden Door. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1983. Material downloaded November 2013.
  5. Washington. National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, About the Homestead Act. Online < http://www.nps.gov/home/historyculture/abouthomesteadactlaw.htm>. Material downloaded November 2013.
  6. Florida. Wikimedia Foundation. Conclusion of the American War, Online < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conclusion_of_the_American_Civil_War>. Material downloaded November 2013.
  7. Florida. Wikimedia Foundation. Second Industrial Revolution, Online  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution>. Material downloaded November 2013.
  8. Utah. FamilySearch.org. Online <http://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Illinois_Land_and_Property> Material downloaded November 2013.
Categories: document types, genealogy education

Uncover Adoption Secrets with Genealogy Research Methods

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Could genealogy help adult adoptees search for their birth parents? Genealogists who usually begin their search with grandparents or great grandparents and adult adoptees who usually don’t have knowledge of their birth parents, generally employ the same set of strategies to uncover their heritage.
Bing.com stock image

How many adoptees are there in the US? According to the website, 
 “In the last decade (since the year 2000), the U.S. Census has attempted to collect national demographics on the adoption community. The data have helped the government estimate that there are over 7 million adult adoptees in America and 1.5 child adoptees.” 

Of the approximately 7 million adult adoptees alive today in America, many are searching for their birth parents:

“Between two and four percent of all adoptees searched in the year 1990.” (American Adoption Congress, 1996)  

But there is another interesting statistic:
Bing.com stock images

“The psychological literature has established that the desire of 60 to 90 percent of adoptees wanting to obtain identifying information regarding their biological parents is a normative aspect of being adopted.” (American AdoptionCongress, 1996) 

If 60 to 90 percent have the desire to learn about their birth roots, why are only 2 to 4 percent actively searching? What holds adoptees back from searching for their birth parents? Many people may consider a search for many years without taking a step because of many obstacles, such as fear of failure, not knowing where to start, or any number of other reasons. But once a person decides to start a search, some help from genealogical research methods might come in handy.

Richard Hill, an adult adoptee who didn’t find out that he was adopted until he graduated from high school, shared his story of how he conducted his successful search for his birth parents in a book, Finding Family.
Used by permission of author
His experience can be enjoyed on one level as a riveting detective story with ups and downs, twists and turns, lucky breaks and disappointing dead ends. 

On another level, Finding Family is a road map of how to use many different kinds of sources that genealogists regularly employ to find ancestors. Richard started with the step that many genealogist gurus suggest that you begin with – interviewing family members and family friends. Ann Fleming Carter  explains more about how to approach the person you wish to interview, how to build rapport, and what questions to ask in Chapter 1 “Where Do I Start?” of her book The Organized Family Historian

While Richard digested and analyzed the information he collected from his interviews, he also began checking vital records, an often difficult and frustrating experience for adoptees. A search for vital records brings a researcher into contact with the keepers of such records, and these are often courts and health departments (Fleming provides a website, http://www.vitalrec.com/ in her book, which lists where to find vital records by state.) Richard wrote to the Ingram County, Michigan Probate Court to
Photograph by Tim Hollosy,Ingham County Courthouse in
 Mason, Michigan, USA. December, 2006,Wikimedia.
request his non-identifying information. In Michigan, the probate court in each county holds the sealed adoption records for that county. This initiated a long relationship with the Probate Court that you will see described in the book.

Bing.com stock images
He also wrote to the state health department to see if there might be some kind of birth record on file. As his search progressed and he found out more details, Richard was to repeat this request several times with different results! While many genealogists find challenges in searching for birth records from more than 75 years ago, adoptees can have trouble getting their own birth record!
And it’s not that the courthouse burned or that birth records weren’t required by the state at the time they are searching.

After finding out where his mother went to high school from one of her friends whom Richard had tracked down, he consulted old high school yearbooks for possible photos of his mother.
Bing.com stock images
When he found out some places where she had worked, he searched for former co-workers to interview and newspaper articles about the target businesses. He employed a tactic that was new to me; he wrote to the Social Security Administration
US Social Security Blding: AgnosticPreachersKid,15 September 2008,
 Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, 330 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, D.C. A.K.A. the Social Security Administration Building, Wikimedia.
to request an earnings report for his mother for his target year and received a list of places where she had worked during a critical year of his search!

Richard talked about his search and mentioned some of the problems that plague many genealogists – the difficulty of staying motivated, the way day-to-day life gets in the way, and how some person will come along or some event will happen that gets you right back in the game! A critical step in Richard’s search was making contact with affinity groups in the area he was researching.
Bing.com stock image
It was through these groups that he found experts in this field. Just as genealogists sometimes find that networking with like-minded people or working with a professional can move their search forward, so did Richard.

First, someone recommended the Adoption Identity Movement(AIM) where adoptees who were searching could get together and share stories, strategies, and contacts. A person he met in an AIM meeting led him to Adoptees Search for Knowledge (ASK), a search group in Lansing, MI where Richard was born. It was at an ASK meeting that Richard found a person who would be key in helping him reach his goal.

Another record source, very familiar to genealogists, that Richard used was the newspaper. But he went beyond searching for obituaries in the library. He put an ad in some small, local newspapers
Bing.com stock image
that served communities near where his birth mother had lived and worked. Since Richard had found out, first in a general way from his father and then the specific details from his other family member and his mother’s friends, that his birth mother had died in an accident, he used this information to create the newspaper ad. And he received responses!

As a retired scientist, Richard knew the value of keeping copious notes of his search process.
Bing.com stock image
This helped him immensely when life put his search on the back burner several times over the decades of his journey to identify his birth parents:

“…I kept careful notes of my research, phone calls and meetings, plus copies of all correspondence.” (p. 70)

Each time Richard re-started his search after a long hiatus, he would review his notes, which brought him up-to-date. Also, when he uncovered people with new information, he could use his notes to see how these new pieces would fit with his existing knowledge.

Although Richard demonstrated persistence, patience and putting-in-the time in his search, he might have never discovered the identity of his father without the help of DNA testing.
Bing.com stock image
Richard’s story clearly demonstrates how DNA testing works hand-in-glove with traditional research methods to help untangle ancestry questions. That said, Richard’s experience also tells us that we can’t rely on DNA testing alone. It was through a combination of traditional research, the yDNA test and the autosomal DNA test that Richard successfully identified his father.

Adult adoptees searching for their birth parents use many of the same strategies that genealogists do in their search for ancestors. In fact, this type of search could be a gateway for adoptees to turn thinking about searching to taking the first steps.
Bing.com stock image
 Both adoptees and non-adoptees begin exploring family history because they want to know the people who came before them. Whether you are searching for parents or ancestors further back, you will be using many of the same research methods to find official records of many kinds, living people who might be able to provide information, books, and other types of source material. Kimberly Powell  in her online article, “Adoption Search: How to Find Your Birth Family”, presents a good introduction to searching.

Bibliography

  1. Richard Hill, Finding Family (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Privately printed, 2012).
  2. Ann Carter Fleming, The Organized Family Historian(Nashville, Tennessee: Rutledge Hill Press, 2004). 

Has a Record You Need Been Digitized?

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Collections Access | Balboa Park.bing.com
The digitization of print materials from archives, libraries, and many genealogical societies is an on-going phenomenon and a wonderful gift to genealogists. More and more records are becoming available online everyday. This being said, we must remember that even today with so many digitization projects springing up all over, the majority of records are not online. We still need to be thorough and diligent in our hunt for documents that exist only on paper or microfilm/fiche
File:2004 microfilm reader 1117365851.jpg -
Wikimedia Commons, bing.com
 in some small courthouse, church or local library. Still, it is always beneficial to keep up with what organizations have put some of their records online.

Before we talk about new ventures in digitizing records and books, we need to begin with the two mega providers of online genealogy information, FamilySearch.org (free) and Ancestry.com (subscription.)
These two organizations have been offering census records, vital records, passenger lists and many other types of documents online to eager genealogists since the 1990s.

In her book, The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy, Kimberly Powell discusses many governmental agencies and companies who offer online records, including the following:
 extension.oregonstate.edu.bureau of land management.bing.com

1.  US Bureau of Land Management has over 2 million federal land records for public-land states from 1820-1908 at www.glorecords.blm.gov (p. 120)
Ellis Island in 1905.jpg - Wikipedia, 
the free encyclopedia.bing.com

2. Ellis Island has passenger records for immigrants who came to Ellis Island from 1892 to 1924 at www.ellislandrecords.org (p. 160)

(note: Since The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy 2nd edition was published in 2011, newer digital projects aren’t covered, but the book gives an excellent overview to records one can find online.)

For more information on digitized records in America, the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) Virtual Library web page is a great place to visit. You will find links to online collections including American Presidential Inaugural addresses from Columbia University, Foreign Relations of the US from the University of Wisconsin and Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869 from Brigham Young University.
National Archives And Records
 Administration Royalty Free Stock Photo.bing.com


The public’s amazing embrace of the internet has shown archives and libraries the need to provide online access to their records. But the budgets of many of these institutions are not able to cover the costs associated with moving into the digital arena on their own.

Digitizing records isn’t cheap. In an online article, APPENDIX VI: Comparative Costs for BookTreatments, from the Council on Library and Information Resources, we read:

“The average cost for digitizing a book page, including scanning, metadata creation, automated generation of OCR and minimally-encoded text, and associated activities, including identifying and preparing materials, quality control, and project management, is $5.32. For a brief, 300-page book, this works out to $1,600.00.”

Because of the high costs of digitization, some institutions are joining together in this effort to make records available for all online. As Kimberly Powell states in her online genealogy book:

“Collaborative databases, in which several libraries or societies pool their records and resources, are also becoming common online.” p. 127
Hathitrustlogo.png.bing.com


An example of this type of partnership is Hathitrust Digital Library. In her about.com article, “HathiTrustDigital Library - A Researcher's Guide,”
Kimberly Powell describes this Digital Library as:

“…a growing partnership of over seventy major research institutions and libraries, offers online access to over 10.7 million digitized books, about 30% of which are in the public domain.”

Be sure to check out Ms. Powell’s Guide to HathiTrust to familiarize yourself with what the site has available and to learn how to navigate the site.
Digital Public Library of America
 | starMedia.bing.com

Another partnership for record digitization is the DigitalPublic Library of America (DPLA.)  In the institution’s website, it says that DPLA

“brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.” 

I tried a search on DPLA’s site. In the search box, I put “Irish in Chicago,” and a screen opened which listed several responses to my query. The first item in the list was: Biographical history of the American Irish in Chicago  by Charles Ffrench. I clicked on “View Object.” The screen that came up was a surprise – it was the HathiTrust site with bibliographic information on the book and a “Viewability” section with a button, “Full View,” that brings up the complete contents.  

We mentioned FamilySearch earlier in this post as a pioneer in the digitization of documents. The organization has launched a new project, a commitment to the genealogy community to digitize all of its own holdings, and it has teamed up with several public libraries to include their family history materials in the project as well. With this new project the organization is digitizing books that could previously only be accessed at its
LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City,
lonetester.com, bing.com
 Library in Salt Lake City. This is a monumental effort and will take some time, but FamilySearch periodically announces its progress in its blog

Thanks to the digitization of many records, books, periodicals and journals, researchers now have access to so much more information right in their own homes. Be sure to check institutions in your target localities to see if they have made any of their material available online or if they have become partners in a consortium of institutions dedicated to digitizing their holdings.

Finally, we end with the question that we started with: Has a record you need been digitized?

To find the answer, start with the name of the target ancestor and check FamilySearch.org and/or Ancestry.com. Use the name search function in either program to see what records, if any, are available for that name. Next, go to the state where the particular record you are looking for may have been created. Check to see where different records (vital, military, land, court) are kept in the area in question. Then go to the record holder and see if it is a court, church, university, archive, or library. Finally, check the website of that entity to see if it is part of a collaboration to digitize records. You just might get lucky.

Endnotes:

  1. HathiTrust Digital Library - A Researcher's Guide, Kimberly Powell, online  <http://genealogy.about.com/od/history_research/a/hathitrust.htm>, downloaded January 2, 2014.
  2.  APPENDIX VI: Comparative Costs for Book Treatments, Council on Library Information Resoures, online, <http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub103/appendix6.html>, downloaded January 2, 2014.
  3. What is the DPLA? Digital Public Library of America, online, <http://dp.la/info/about/faq>, downloaded January 2, 2014.
  4.  Kimberly Powell, The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy(Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2011).
Categories: document types, genealogy education

E-Reading for Genealogy

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This is a companion piece to my post on Digitizing Records where I will discuss e-readers,
Fotografía de Mariana Eguaras
 rodeada de elementos
 que representan 
la edición impresa y edición digital…,21
 August 2013, Wikimedia.
their effect on the digitization of print materials, and more places to search for digitized copies of genealogical records, journals and books.

When did e-readers first become available? According to a web piece by PC Magazine:
http://findlogo.net,bing.com

“Starting in the late 1990s, e-book readers began to appear; however, it took a decade to gain real traction due to the many different e-book formats on the market.”

The popularity of e-readers has opened a new market for digitized materials. Although many people prefer to read their e-material on the larger screens of computers and tablets, others use e-readers or even mobile phones. This is a boon to genealogists: as the market grows so the availability of family history information in electronic format increases. 

George McKinney wrote an article about e-books, “Free ebooks for Genealogy Research,” which appeared in the  New England Historic Genealogy Society’s (NEHGS) genealogy blog, "The Daily Genealogist," on June 29, 2012. McKinney talked about the availability of free e-books and which types might be of interest to genealogists:

“A number of websites offer free eBooks — generally out-of-copyright books or works made available by their authors. Categories of particular interest to the family historian are family genealogies, compendiums of genealogical facts (such as military records), directories, and local histories.”

Many of these books, if not in e-format, would be out of reach for most genealogists. Often times, these books are part of special collections that aren’t available through interlibrary loan. The only way you can see such books is to go to the institution that owns them.

George McKinney lists some websites to search for free or low-cost e-books. He mentions books.google.com, a site that is familiar to many readers. Google includes books in different formats on this site. Some are still in copyright and available in print only or in both print and electronic versions that you can purchase from on-line retailers. In some cases, Google will offer a preview of the book; in other cases no preview is available.

To the Homeless of the Chicago Fire,
Chicago History Museum, City of Chicago, Wikimedia.
On the opening page of books.google.com, you will see a search box. I searched for “Chicago history” and several books came up, including History of Chicago Volume 3by Alfred Theodore Andreas, in a free e-book format. It was here that I first heard of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society. On October 13,1871, the general relief society turned over the charge of assisting victims of the Great Chicago Fire

Chicago in ruins after the The Great Chicago Fire of 1871,
T
he New York Times photo archive, Wikimedia.
to The Chicago Relief and Aid Society. The statistics below give just a partial picture of the great work this Society accomplished:


“The total number of families aided by the Chicago Relief and Aid Society from October 18, 1871, to May 1, 1873 was thirty-nine thousand two hundred and forty-two….”
(p. 604)

The nationalities that made up this number were: “Irish, 11,623; German, 14,816; American, 4,823; English, 1,406; Scandinavian, 3,624; French, 382; Canadian, 323, Scotch, 526; Italian, 207; Welsh, 35; Polish, 143; Swiss, 55; Holland, 60; Bohemian, 565; Negro, 600; Belgian, 54.” (p. 604) 

This is the kind of information that is often very difficult to find but offers greater understanding to periods of history such as the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

http://archive.org/images/
glogo.png,Wikimedia
.
Another website McKinney lists is the Internet Archive, a non-profit that works with libraries to offer a rich collection of books. To learn more about the Internet Archive’s digital book collections, click "Text" on the menu bar at the top of the first screen. Georgia is participating in the Internet Archive’s Open Library which gives you access to thousands of e-free books.

http://bcpls.org, bing.com
In my post on January 16, 2014, I mentioned the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA)  page on digitized collections. At the top of the main page under “Contents,” click  “E-Book Collections (Full-text).”  Under this category, scroll down to: “Online Texts Collection” and click. You will be re-directed to the Internet PublicLibrary, hosted by DrexelUniversity, where you will be immersed in the world of e-books.

iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology,
  
Thesab, 14 February 2008, Wikimedia.
On the main Internet Public Library page, I put “Kentucky History” in the search box. Up came several listings, including “Kentuckiana Digital Library” with images, historic newspapers, oral histories, and maps about historic Kentucky. In just a few minutes of searching this site, I found a 1909 map of Livermore, KY where my great, great grandfather, Franklin Allis, worked as a tailor in 1870.
McLean County Public Library, located at 116 E. Second Street in
 LivermoreKentuckyUnited States, Nyttend, 2013, Wikimedia.

In conclusion, genealogists have an ever increasing number of on-line resources to check to see if records, journals, or books pertinent to their research are available in e-format. Universities, public and private libraries, archives and other institutions are teaming up to provide electronic access to their collections. And you have many different ways to view electronic material: computer, tablet, mobile phone and e-reader.

Categories: genealogy tools

Getting Paid for Praising the Doctor – Medical Testimonials, a unique genealogical record group

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Genealogists are familiar with many types of records, including vital (birth, marriage, death), church, court, and land documents. But the medical testimonial is a new one for me. Here is an example:

Patent Medicine "Elixir of Life" ad, c. 1901,
  
Infrogmation 15:49, 9 May 2008, Wikimedia.

The Wikipedia definition of a “medical testimonial” is:

  “…a testimonial or show consists of a person's written or spoken statement extolling the virtue of a product. The term "testimonial" most commonly applies to the sales-pitches attributed to ordinary citizens….” 1

TheFreedictionary.com adds to the above definition that these 
testimonials

“…consist… of individual personal accounts of healing without statistics or controlled scientific experiments.” 2

All records have a purpose. Let’s see what the impetus was for medical testimonials that became wildly popular in late eighteenth and nineteenth century America when the advantages of modern medicine were lacking. 
Broussais instructs a nurse
 to carry on bleeding a
 blood-besmeared patient.
 Wellcome Library no. 16372i, Wkimedia.

So many ailments and diseases that in the past could make your life very uncomfortable or might even kill you, nowadays are controlled by early detection and/or effective medical interventions. But our ancestors, who lived in America up until the early twentieth century, did not have access to the medical knowledge and treatment available today.



Medical knowledge and care was not very developed in America in the 1800s. The average person had a healthy suspicion of the chances for getting better under a doctor’s care because so many did not. People often treated themselves with the herbs and later patent medicines that became necessities for nearly every home partly due to the rise and spread of advertising and medical testimonials in newspapers from the mid-19thcentury.
Kilmer's Swamp Root (a patent medicine),
 Edmonds Historical Museum, 
Edmonds, Washington,
 Joe Mabel, 2009-04-30, Wikimedia.


What was medical education like in America in the 1800s? I consulted the online article, Gale Encyclopedia of US History: Medical Education.   From this site, I learned that medical schools were sparse in 19th century America. They were simply businesses, and those who ran them were in it for the student fees. Courses were short, and there were no labs or opportunities to work with patients.

Why was it important for patent medicine hawkers to have ads and testimonials? Patent medicines, like any product, need recognition by the public for sales to occur.
Dr. Miles' Anti-Pain Pills, Edmonds
 Historical Museum,
 Edmonds, Washington,
 Joe Mabel, 30 April 2009, Wikimedia.
 Although several brands of patent medicines had been available in England and America since the 1600s, it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that this industry could say its products were found in almost every American home. And this happened for three reasons (rise in literacy rates, spread of newspapers and with them newspaper advertising) which Peggy M. Baker, Director & Librarian, Pilgrim Society & Pilgrim Hall Museum, explains in her article, “PATENT MEDICINE: Cures & Quacks”:

 “The expansion of public elementary schools meant that everyone could read newspaper ads that promised (unproved) cures and provided (unreliable) testimonials. The craving for news from the front during the Civil War meant that more Americans read more newspapers, giving patent medicine manufacturers access to more customers. 

Oregon Paper Mill, “…piles of pulp… made from wood and
 which…will be made into great rolls of paper.” 
OSU Special Collections & Archives, 10 July 2009, Wikimedia.  

The discovery of cheap wood pulp paper and improvements in the printing process meant that advertising volume could grow by leaps and bounds. Newspapers became filled with ads promising quick, easy, inexpensive and sure cures for diseases both dreadful and mundane.” 

But what does all this have to do with genealogy? Medical testimonials are actually a unique genealogical record group, one that I never came across before finding one through GenealogyBank.com by one of my ancestors.
Logo used by permission
 of GenealogyBank
Many of you are familiar with GenealogyBank and already have used its huge newspaper database. For those who haven’t yet mined this vast resource, this is how a Wikipedia entry describes the company:

“GenealogyBank.com is a commercial genealogy website housing a database that contains over one billion digitized records from U.S. newspapers and historical documents for researching family history online.” 3

I was doing a search on my cohort families in GenealogyBank. In my years of searching databases, I have learned a few techniques to make the search more focused, such as using quotation marks around the target name or phrase. 

When you log in to GenealogyBank, you see a simple search screen. But I wanted to limit my search to Illinois newspapers, so I scrolled down to “Historical Newspapers” and clicked on “Newspaper Archives.” The screen that appeared had a list of states in which to search and I checked “Illinois.” But you can “drill down” even further. When you double click on “Illinois,” you will see a listing of cities/towns. I clicked on “Chicago.” (note: Many times you will not want to limit a search, especially at the beginning. Putting too many limits may result in your missing an important article.)

Next, I filled in the search box fields:

Ancestor's Last Name:           “Cosgrove”
First Name:                           “Matthew”
Include Keywords:                 “Chicago”
Exclude Keywords
 Date Range:                     1850-1880
 Date

I clicked on “Begin Search” and the initial results screen appeared:

Date: Sunday, June 24, 1888
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Paper: Daily Inter Ocean
Article type: Ad/Classified

When I clicked on “Ad/Classified,” the second results screen appeared. At the top of the page, GenealogyBank gives you source information, including the type of newspaper article, the date, the name of the newspaper, the volume, issue, section and page. For my Cosgrove search this is what came up:

Advertisement Date: Sunday, June 24, 1888  Paper: Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL)  Volume: XVII  Issue: 96  Section: Part 3  Page: 20  

Below this citation is the actual article. And what a surprise it was!! GenealogyBank highlights your search terms in yellow, so I scrolled down the page, looking for “Matthew Cosgrove.” This jumped out at me:

“Miss Katie Frances Cosgrove is the 13-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Cosgrove, whose residence is at No. 303 South Desplaines street, this city.”

What a treasure trove in the first sentence –  names and addresses! And the details fit my research into the Cosgrove family in Chicago city directories and federal census documents.

As I scrolled down, I came to a line drawing of Katie – perhaps the only existing depiction of her.

In the text, we read that according to her mother, Mrs. Cosgrove,“Ever since Katie was 6 or 7 years old she has been troubled with catarrh…and though we tried many things, nothing seemed to do her any good.”

Next is the point of the testimonial, for this is where the reason for this whole story in the advertisement comes out:

Again in the words of Mrs. Cosgrove, “We heard of some of the remarkable cures of chronic catarrh by Dr. J.G. Carroll, now at No. 96 State Street. Several months ago I took Katie to the doctor’s office for the first time….She took the doctor’s treatment at once and one month afterward she was very much better. She has continued to improve right along ever since, and now feels and looks better than she had for years.”

And the testimony does not stop with Mrs. Cosgrove. Katie herself is also called upon to praise Dr. Carroll:

“The doctor’s treatment cleared my head at once, and made it feel as if nothing had ever stopped it up.”

After discovering this document on GenealogyBank, I wondered how the Cosgrove family came to be featured in a newspaper. They were an ordinary family with no renown or fame. That’s when I began researching medical testimonials and found how prevalent this type of advertising was at this time. But how were these “testifiers” located? How were they persuaded to testify?

As early as 1849, the American Medical Association (AMA) was warning the public of the dangers of “quack remedies and nostrums.”  In 1911, the AMA published several articles investigating the fraudulent use of medical testimonials under the title Nostrums and quackery. It appears that enterprising entrepreneurs realized the value of the personal touch in building trust of would be customers of patent medicines or doctors who provided quick cures. Often inventors of the products would pursue advertising themselves but as the field grew, they would seek partners.

According to one of the articles in the set mentioned above, a whole new job was created by the industry called “medical testimonial gatherers,” and men were solicited through newspapers to fill the jobs as reported in the American Medical Association articles mentioned above. These gatherers would offer small remuneration or even photos to perspective testifiers.
Still from the American silent film Traveling Salesman (1921), 
from page 60 of the July 1921 Photoplay magazine, Wikimedia.

The American public remained avid users of patent medicines and quack cures pedaled by “doctors” through advertising and were unaware of the actual ingredients that were in these products into the early twentieth century. As explained in a Wikipedia web page on patent medicines, it wasn’t until the First Food and Drug Act of 1906 that the industry faced its first regulation: 

“This statute did not ban the alcohol, narcotics, and stimulants in the medicines; it required them to be labeled as such, and curbed some of the more misleading, overstated, or fraudulent claims that appeared on the labels.”4
Harvey Washington Wiley,
  "Father of the Pure Food and Drugs Act,
” Ca. 1900, DCPL Commons, Wikimedia.

But it would be another 32 years, until 1938, when the statute would be amended to ban patent medicines.

To read more about the history of testimonials in American advertising, you might consult the book TestimonialAdvertising in the American Marketplace: Emulation, Identity  by Marina Moskowitz and Marlis Schweitzer, a resource suggested to me by a reference librarian at the Newberry Library.

Footnotes
  1. Testimonial, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, online < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimonial>, downloaded March 2014.
  2. Detoxification, TheFreeDictionary, online <http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Detoxification>, downloaded March 2014.
  3. Genealogybank.com, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, online < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenealogyBank.com>, downloaded March 2014.
  4. Patent medicine, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, online <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_medicine>, downloaded March 2014.
Categories: research terms

Writing an Outstanding Family Story

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Many family historians begin their search for ancestors in the same way. We start with names and dates of birth and death, relationship to us, and finally countries of origin. But most of us are not satisfied to stop with just the facts. A common trait of genealogists is the hunger for knowledge. We want to know what kind of lives our ancestors had in their countries of birth. Why did some decide to emigrate and others didn’t? What were their lives like in their new countries?

Royall Tyler Collection's original manuscript by John Adams (1735–1826), Wikimedia.

For some of us, these questions can be answered by family stories, diaries and journals, letters, bibles, and published histories.

Letter to Abigail Adams, wife of former President John Adams,
 written by Jefferson at Monticello...15 May 1817.
The Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1, General Correspondence,
The Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., Wikimedia

 But for many, our forebears were struggling to survive and may not have been able to read or write. Their individual stories have been lost to the progression of generations who followed them. However, for some families a combination of an auspicious historical time period, a wealth of letter-writing members, and some living relations with excellent memories come together, just waiting for a modern-day scribe to weave a history.

David Laskin is a best-selling author who turned his talents to writing the history of his Hakohen family line in his book, TheFamily: Three Journeys Into The Heartof The Twentieth Century.
Used by permission of publisher
Laskin explains that this surname has three different spellings depending upon the country that some family members were living in. In Russia, where the family story first starts, the name was “Kaganovich.” In America, where one branch of the family immigrated, the name is “Cohen.” In Israel, where another branch chose to live, the name in Hebrew is “Hakohen.”1

Laskin begins his chronicle with Shimon Dov Hakohen and his wife Beyle Shapiro who were born in the mid-1800s in the Russian Pale of Settlement.

"Map of Western Russia Showing the Jewish Pale of Settlement,” 1905, Herman Rosenthal;
J.G. Lipman; Vasili Rosenthal; L. Wygodsky; M. Mysh; Abraham Galante (1905)
 "Russia" in 
The Jewish Encyclopedia: Vol. 10, Philipson–Samoscz,
 New York, N.Y.: 
Funk & Wagnalls, pp. 531, Wikimedia.
By 1900, six children, ranging in age from 17 to 38 were born, and several had children of their own. The family members lived in two small towns between Vilna  and Minsk. Most of Laskin’s story is about the lives of the children of Shimon and Beyle whose lives coincided with the twentieth century.

Like many family chroniclers, Laskin didn’t become interested in the story of his family as a young man. But when he did, he was very fortunate that several members of the family were still living who had knowledge of the past, from hearing first-hand accounts from relatives now passed away, and who were willing to share what they knew. Another very lucky break was the fact that much correspondence among family members, going back to the early 1900s, survived.

The first part of Laskin’s book tells about life for Shimon and Beyle Hakohen, their children and their grandchildren in the Pale. We learn of the conditions of daily life in a small village in the early years of the 1900s with Jewish and Christian neighbors living along side each other. We read about everyday family life, marriages, births, work and economic conditions.

Laskin also tells us of the pogroms that came with regularity and how these devastating periods of slaughter of Jews out of ethnic hatred impacted the younger generation of Hakohens. This history of institutionalized persecution along with bleak economic prospects propeled two branches of third-generation Russian Hakohens out of the Pale forever, illustrating the “push factor” in emigration.
We know the reasons that pushed the young Hakohens to leave the Pale, but what were the “pull factors” or the motives behind where they chose to emigrate? Laskin gives an inspiring picture of Sonia and Chaim Kaganovich, grandchildren of Shimon Dov Hakohen and first cousins, who longed to be part of establishing a Jewish homeland.

Pioneers in Kibbutz Ein Harod , Settlements in Israel,
 between 1920 and 1925,

In Chapters 11 and 12, we read of their separate journeys to Palestine, their individual beginnings in the land and their coming together in marriage. What a powerful window of history Laskin opens for us as we glimpse the struggles of Jews and Arabs to live in the same land.
British Mandate for Palestine, Seblini, 29 January 2012, Wikimedia.
 We watch the pioneering Jews as they tackle often harsh climate conditions to turn barren land into thriving farms. This is a genealogist’s dream: to see into their emigrant ancestors’ daily lives in their new countries.

So far Laskin has introduced us to two branches of the Kaganovich family: one that stayed in the Pale and one that made a foothold in Palestine. But there is a third branch. Itel Kaganovich, the oldest granddaughter, who was born in 1886, had a talent for sewing and for fighting injustice. In Chapter 3, Laskin describes Itel’s journey from seamstress to revolutionary. The younger generation of Jews in the Pale were organizing against the system that condoned the cycle of mayhem against their people. Itel became part of the movement to such a degree that her life was in danger. The man she loved had left for America to escape the death sentence of having to serve in the Tsar’s army as a Jew. After her family was warned that she would be jailed, Itel sailed for America where she would be known as “Ida” and would become a phenomenal success.

"The Steerage" 1907 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz,
public domain, Wikimedia.

Laskin allows us to see the day-by-day struggle of Ida from a near penniless young seamstress
“…a sweatshop inspection in Chicago, Illinois”,
1903, Chicago Historical Society, Wikimedia.

 looking for work on the Lower East Side of New York to the owner of Maidenform Bra Company. So many genealogists have stories of family members who came to America with nothing but hopes and worked hard so that their children could have life a little easier. But very few actually strike it rich and end up owning a world famous company. Laskin shows us just how Ida put together her creative talent, a risk-taking nature, hard work, and a head for business. We get to go on Ida’s unforgettable journey along with her.

As Laskin tells the story of his family, he gives us his theory on the types of immigrants:

“Some immigrants forever grieve for their “real’ homes, the predawn smell of baking bread, the glaze of rain on cobblestone, the echo of bells in the alley. Others step off the boat, fill their lungs with the raw unfamiliar air, and get to work. They never look back because they never have a moment to spare or an urge to regret.”2 

David Laskin’s book is an example of the best kind of family history. Readers not only get the personal history of the family, but these individual stories are woven into local, regional and world history. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Laskin taught a class in “How to write your Family Story” at a professional genealogy conference? While we wait for that to happen, pick up his book and read it for the exciting story that it is, but also study it as an example of excellent genealogy writing.

Notes

1David Laskin, The Family: Three Journeys into the Heart of the Twentieth Century (New York, New York: Viking, Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013), p. 1

2 Ibid., p. 55

Categories: research terms

Conversing with Your Ancestors

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A wonderful tool for genealogists is the mailing list. In a post from September 24, 2011, I wrote about how I used one of these lists to ask a question. You can read even more about this tool and how to use it in Kimberly Powell’s e-article she wrote for about.com  called “How to Use Genealogy Mailing Lists toFurther Your Research.”

Help by Kosta Kostov,public domain.bing.com

Genealogy mailing lists are a great source of information. Not only can you ask a question to the readers of the list, but you can see other people’s queries. Sometimes list members simply post items of interest.


In one of my favorite genealogy mailing lists, the  COOK-CO-IL list, I recently saw a message (Vol. 9 Issue 58) by Laura Aanenson in which she muses about questions she wishes she could ask her ancestors. Laura provides a link to her blog where you can read these questions. 

Just looking down the list of her questions, you get a good idea of how to start a genealogical search: look for vital records! But there are other questions in Laura’s list that most family historians soon learn aren’t easy to find the answers to. Information on the details of daily living, family traditions, and stories passed down: these can’t be found in the census or birth, marriage, and death records. We have to dig deeper.
 
Where, When, Who, What, Why, How?
 Office for Emergency Management.
 War Production Board, 
ca. 1942 - ca. 1943, Wikimedia.
Laura ended her mailing list message with an invitation to list readers to think of questions they would love to ask their ancestors. I would dearly love to have asked my great grandmother, Mary Carney/Kearney Kries Lauer, who died in 1955 when I was ten, a few things:
Taken by Art Spears, ca. 1955 of
Mary Carney Kries Lauer

  1. How did your parents spell their last name – Carney or Kearney?
  2. Where in Ireland were your parents born?
  3. Did your mother come over from Ireland on her own or with her family? When/where did she arrive in America?
  4. Were you really orphaned as the family story says? Were you put in a Catholic orphanage?
  5. Was Patrick William Kearney, who was born in 1877 and died just two years later, your brother?

Of course I would have a whole lot more things to ask, but the answers to these five questions would really help clear up some of my brick walls.

Brick wall and window by George Hodan,
 Publicdomainpictures.net, bing.com.
My friend and mentor, Kate from Chicago, also answered Laura’s challenge and posted her own set of ancestral questions on the Cook list. Again, Kate’s questions reflect what we yearn to know about our ancestors:

"I always want to know the human side of things. I want to see their eyes ... touch their hands ....
1. What do you remember about growing up? School? Housing? Chores? Celebrations? Tragedies?
2. What did he/she look like? Were they quiet/entertaining? Kind? Gruff?
3. What kind of clothes did you wear? Where did you get them?
4. What did you eat? What were family meals like?
5. Were you close to other family members? Neighbors? Involved in the parish?
6. What kind of work did they do? Describe it.
Kate in Chicago"

To really learn about the details of the lives of those who lived before us, we must dig deeper than the usual birth, marriage, death, and census records. We want to search for stories and histories, letters, diaries, journals, and newspapers. Even if our people did not leave their own personal writings, others who lived near them may have done so. Finding relevant sources  gives you the closest experience possible to being able to ask your ancestors about their lives.

Finally, Laura and Kate’s lists of ancestor questions can serve another function. Even if you can’t ask your questions of deceased ancestors, you can use these lists (and more that you create) to help frame interviews with living relatives. Take these to family reunions. Happy asking!

Miners and their families gather … at the Tennessee Consolidated 
Coal Company first annual picnic…, Environmental
 Protection Agency, 08/1974, Wikimedia.

Categories: genealogy tools, document types

The Rise of the Irish in Chicago

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I have long lamented the fact that so little is written about the Irish in Chicago in the mid- nineteenth century. I have wondered what life was like in Chicago for my great, great grandparents, John Carney/Kearney and Mary Duffy in the 1870s and 1880s. But as so often happens in life, when you put something out there, suddenly help appears! I found a reference to Ellen Skerrett in a Chicago Tribune newspaper article by Ken O’Brien. He described Ellen as “a walking, talking book of Chicago history.”  When O’Brien further stated that Ellen had spent years researching the Chicago Irish, I was hooked! I had to find out more.  

As I read O’Brien’s article, I saw that while working on her Master’s degree at the University of Chicago in 1974, Ellen began studying the part that neighborhood Catholic parishes played in the lives of the immigrant Irish in Chicago in the nineteenth century. From that time on, she has been researching, writing and collaborating with other experts on the Irish American experience in Chicago to produce numerous books. In this post, I will discuss two of her contributions to the field:

“Nineteenth Century Chicago Irish: A Social and Political Portrait” (Charles Fanning, Ellen Skerrett, John Corrigan).  Loyola University Center for Urban Policy, 1980 [title abbreviation: NCCI]

Used by permission of Ellen Skerrett

Ellen, Skerrett, Editor, At the Crossroads:  Old Saint Patrick’s and the Chicago Irish. Loyola Press, 1997 [title abbreviation: ATC]

Used by permission of Ellen Skerrett
From these two works, I learned much about the attitude of US-born people in Chicago to the immigrant Irish, the poverty that plagued the new arrivals, the role the parish church played in bringing the newcomers into mainstream American life, and how the Irish used the Anglo-Saxon government structure to their advantage. The Irish faced the disadvantages of arriving in this urban setting with few skills other than subsistence farming and of following a religion that raised the suspicions of the native Protestant Chicagoans. Yet, as Ellen discusses in her ATC essay "Creating Sacred Space in an Early Chicago Neighborhood", the Catholic Church provided the Irish with a community that held them together, ministered to their needs and educated their children, thus helping the second generation move toward the middle class:

"...Irish Catholics in Chicago used the process of church-building to create a place for themselves -- and leave their imprint on the landscape." p 24 ATC

St. Patrick's Church, Adams & Desplaines Streets, Chicago
 (Cook County, Illinois, from the 
Historic American
 Buildings Survey
 (HABS),Wikimedia.
"For immigrants and their children, churches such as Saint Patrick's and Holy Name represented a crucial beginning in creating community, identity, and a sense of belonging in their new urban neighborhoods." p. 30 ATC 

"...creating sacred space in the city built community and laid the foundation for other important initiatives, especially parochial schools and social services." p. 34 ATC

The reaction of US-born Americans to the stream of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century is a familiar one in American history and is still around today in the immigration debate.  Whether newcomers are welcomed or fiercely rejected by those already here depends on several factors. One is the economy. If it is booming and jobs are plentiful, then new workers are accepted. But when jobs are scarce, new arrivals are viewed as a threat. A second factor, discussed by Eileen Durkin, one of the essayists in ATC, in her piece "Saint Patrick's Day at Saint Patrick's Church", is the number of incoming persons:

“By 1843, they (the Irish immigrants) accounted for only 773 of Chicago’s 7,580  residents (about 10%) ….” p. 5 ATC 

These numbers didn’t raise much worry among the native born population.  But in 1845, the Great Famine struck Ireland, and it continued to devastate the land until 1850. Trying to escape starvation, the Irish came to America in huge numbers, and many settled in Chicago as Ms. Durkin writes:

“After the Famine, almost one in five (about 20%) Chicagoans were Irish-born.”  p. 7 ATC

On the Library of Congress website, I found an advertisement for a "short-lived nativist newspaper" -- American Citizen -- that was published in Boston in 1852. It shows the venom of the nativist position:

A paper entitled the American patriot, Boston : Published by
 J.E. Farwell & Co., 1852, LC-DIG-ppmsca-07575, 
Library of Congress website http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661538/
As illustrated above, another factor affecting the reception given to immigrants is the religion of the new arrivals. The large increase in mostly poor, low-skilled Irish Catholic immigrants caused fear and anger in the city. No longer were these Catholic newcomers unnoticed. An editorial in the Chicago Tribune in 1855, quoted by Lawrence J. McCaffrey in his essay "Preserving the Union, Shaping a New Image: Chicago's Irish Catholics and the Civil War", captured the sentiments of many “nativists” in Chicago:

“Who does not know that the most depraved, debased, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community are Irish Catholics?” p. 53 ATC

But McCaffrey goes on to say that the Irish showed patriotism and bravery in the Civil War:
Col. Jas. A. Mulligan: Of the Illinois "Irish Brigade", 
New York: Currier & Ives, between 1860 and 1870,
 LC-DIG-ppmsca-08408
 (digital file from original print),
 Library of Congress website.

 “…the Chicago Times acknowledged the bravery and patriotism of Irish immigrants and noted that thousands of Irish Catholics had already rushed to the rescue of their adopted country, leaving ‘peaceful avocations’; to bring ‘terror and dismay’ to the Confederate foe.” p. 64 ATC

Poverty, its causes and effects can be very public: disease-ravaged slums teeming with families in overcrowded conditions with poor sanitation, abandoned children in the poor house, increasing numbers of the destitute, the hopelessness of lack of opportunity, domestic violence and drunkenness were not easy to overlook.

In the eyes of many of the Anglo-Saxon Protestants of Chicago, the poverty of the Irish and their foreign religion were a double threat to the public order. The fear that somehow the Pope might try to influence America’s government was still present when the Irish-American (4thgeneration Irish) John F. Kennedy  ran for President in 1960.

While local newspapers and some people running for office on an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic platform decried the Irish, the Catholic Church in Chicago set about helping them. As Suellen Hoy describes in her essay "Walking Nuns: Chicago's Irish Sisters of Mercy", in 1846, the Sisters of Mercy arrived in Chicago and began their life-saving ministry, including building Mercy Hospital:

Mercy Hospital, Chicago Daily News, Inc., 
photographer, 1909, DN-0007384,
Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

By 1849, “the Sisters of Mercy were already operating three schools, teaching Sunday School at Saint Patrick’s, running an employment bureau for Irish working women, volunteering at a free dispensary opened by Rush Medical College, and holding night classes for illiterate adults.”  Then “…when a cholera epidemic struck during the summer of 1849…a large number of Irish died….they [the Sisters] began nursing cholera victims.” p. 41 ATC


Sisters of Mercy, afunkydamsel, Taken on
 April 10, 2011, Flickr, Creative Commons.

The Irish turned to their parish churches for more than spiritual guidance, education for their children, and medical help. The parish became the foundation, the springboard for the Irish to infiltrate Chicago politics. It was in the parish that Irish politicians began building their power base, to take advantage of the Irishman’s desire to become American. Citizenship was an important step towards reaching the goal. And with citizenship came the right to vote. The influx of Irish voters guaranteed a majority voting the Irish ticket in Ward elections. And so control was gradually wrested away from the old Anglo-Saxon power elite. (pgs. 2-3 NCCI)  

But getting people to vote and getting into office was just the first part of the Irish-American politicos’strategy. The new Ward aldermen knew their way around the Anglo-Saxon system of government from all the years they and/or their parents had spent living in Ireland and dealing with British colonialism, a knowledge that the other immigrant groups to America lacked. (p. 2, NCCI) Using the boss system or machine politics, (and some would say abusing their political power), the aldermen provided relief to their communities:

“…the poor obtained food, coal, and jobs; Christmas turkeys and Easter hams found their way to empty tables; and the financial burden associated with baptisms, weddings, and wakes was lightened by contributions from the ward boss or his precinct captain.” (p. 14, NCCI)

As you can see, these two histories  ̶  one edited and one co-written by Ellen Skerrett  ̶  give us a clear picture of the life of the Irish in nineteenth century Chicago: their struggle to overcome prejudice, poverty, lack of a voice in the new land, and the role the Catholic Church played in both ameliorating the burdens of the first generation and moving the second generation into the American mainstream. But there is much more to discover in the two books.

Finley Peter Dunne, "Mr. Dooley", Artist: Ward, 
Leslie Matthew, aka SPY, Lithograph July 27, 1905,
 CCNY Art Collection, Flickr, public domain.
Another of the writers, Charles Fanning, presents the life story and career of Finley Peter Dunne, the creator of the Mr. Dooley columns in Chicago newspapers, in his essay "Mr. Dooley Reconsidered, Community Memory, Journalism and the Oral Tradition":


“Between 1893 and 1900, some three hundred Dooley pieces appeared ….Taken together, they form a coherent body of work, in which a vivid, detailed world comes into existence—a self-contained immigrant/ethnic culture with its own customs, ceremonies, ‘sacred sites,’ social pecking order, heroes, villains, and victims.” p. 72 ATC

As you can see, if you want a glimpse into what life was like for the Irish of Chicago in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, you will want to read Ellen Skerrett’s books. Since they are both out of print, you will need to use interlibrary loan, (ILL) or see if you can locate one on ebay.com, as I did.

Categories: genealogy tools

Escape to Kentucky in the 1940s

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If you aren’t yet familiar with the novel, A Far Piece to Canaan, by Sam Halpern, you’re in for an unforgettable reading experience.

Used by permission of
Harper Collins and author
 This book, although a novel, reads like a memoir. The first-person narrative keeps you riveted to the page.

You can read Canaanon many levels. First, there is the pure joy of being immersed in rural Kentucky of the 1940s. For anyone with an interest in family history, this is a visit to a by-gone time and place that you won’t want to miss.

When you read Canaan, you get a glimpse of daily life seventy years ago in a small farming community where everyone (except the few landlords) is trying to eke out a living by sharecropping. Although extreme poverty hangs over the community, this seems to help bring people together. We watch neighbors come together at revival meetings, during plantings and harvests when someone is injured or falls sick, and when their stock
Sheep grazing on farm of Russell Spears near Lexington, Kentucky, 
[1940 Sept.?], LC-USF33-031128-M1, 
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 
Washington, DC 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
 is threatened by an unknown peril.

The main character is Samuel Zelinsky, who at the outset is the twelve-year old son of a Jewish couple, Morris and Liz Zelinsky. Morris is a sharecropper, and the novel begins when the family moves to an area “fifteen miles south of Lexington, Kentucky” to begin three years of cropping on Mr. Berman’s farm. You can read Canaan as a “coming of age” story. Halpern weaves an interlocking tale of a group of young boys who have fun doing things that kids today often miss out on as they build friendships. But the group also finds out that life can put you into situations where you are torn between loyalty and doing what’s right.

Halpern appeals to all of our senses as he paints a picture of Kentucky:

“March and early April crept by in their wet, cool, blustery, miserable way, and real spring come on with its bee-buzzing sounds and warm-wind feeling. 

ForestWander Nature Photography, Wikimedia.
The brown hills turned dark green and the apple trees busted out in pink-white. The creek in the hollow below the tobacco barn
Field of Burley tobacco on farm of Russell Spears, 
drying and curing barn
 in the background, vicinity of Lexington, Ky., 
 photographer, 1940 Sept.,  
LC-DIG-fsac-1a34368, Library of Congress
 Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540
 settled back inside its banks and it was a great feeling to belly down beside it and listen to its sounds and let the sun beat down on my back and smell the grass and warm, black, soft, moist ground.” p. 21

Canaan is also a testament to the American Dream of owning your own piece of land. Genealogists who study early America from the mid-1600s through the early 1900s are familiar with the hunger for land that resulted in people spreading across this continent. I believe this “land rush” lasted longer and had more effect on the making of America than almost any other phenomenon.

By the time Samuel Zelinsky’s family came to Kentucky, the time of land patents, homestead acts, land rushes and military bounty land warrants was long gone. You had to have resources to buy land in the 1940s and after the Great Depression of the past decade, many people had very few. 

Canaan gives us a chance to see the scourges of this poverty up-front as the families in this story are all barely making it from season to season. They often see their profits eaten up by what the landlord claims and by what bad weather does to their crops. But what keeps them going is the hope that sometime in the future, with lots of hard work and luck, they might be able to save some dollars for a down payment on their own few acres.

Willie Nall, 11 years old; Raymond Jones, 10 years old; Denver Jones, 
5 years old; plowing on farm, …Elizabethtown vicinity,
 Kentucky; Hine, Lewis Wickes, 1874-1940, photographer; 
1916 May 5, LC-DIG-nclc-00399, Library of Congress Prints
 and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540 USA

For those genealogists who wonder, and I think that includes all of us, how childhood circumstances affected our ancestors in their adult lives, Canaan lets us look over Samuel Zelinsky’s shoulder as he interacts with his peers on neighboring farms. We learn about the values that Samuel internalizes from his day-to-day socialization, some from his parents but mostly from the boys who become his friends. And Canaan’s author gives us the opportunity to see how this early part of Samuel’s life plays a part in his efforts in later life to fit in in college and the workplace.

The book also touches on the themes of immigration and religious persecution. The Zelinsky family is Jewish, and Morris was sent to America from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s to escape pogroms. But he found that even in America, the land of immigrants from so many cultures and religions, anti-semitism was present. When his mother worries about Samuel’s friends, Morris assures her that the boys are good for Samuel:

“…there’s nothing wrong with those boys. They’re good kids and they treat him like one of their own. They don’t hold it against him that he’s a Jew. They don’t look up to him or down at him, just across, and that’s what I want for Samuel.” p. 34

As you watch the adventures that Samuel and his friends have and how they treat each other, you can judge whether or not Morris was right.

You can read Canaanon many different levels: a sociological study of mid-twentieth century rural America, a psychological profile of a man whose relationship challenges in adulthood have their roots in his childhood, a rip-roaring saga of the everyday doings of young boys in the days when after the work was done, you could get lost all day in the woods and never see an adult.

document types

Academic Journals: A Powerhouse of Research

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Most genealogy researchers are very familiar with the journals of genealogy societies: local, regional and national. An example of a local society journal is the ChicagoGenealogist, a publication of the Chicago Genealogical Society. The Western New York Genealogical SocietyJournal, published by said society , covers eight counties. A national organization, such as the NationalGenealogical Society, will have a national journal -- the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

Many genealogical journals, including the ones above, are classified as academic or scholarly journals. When a writer submits an article to an academic journal, he or she can expect to have the piece peer-reviewed. Because of the rigorous standards that writers in academic journals must adhere to, the quality of the research is very high.

Hartwell Hall, east side, DanielPenfield,
 31 May 2010, Wikimedia.

Peer-reviewed journals follow some established patterns.The Department of Sociology at the College of Brockport posted an article, Reading Journal Articles, on the college website, which outlines the framework that makes up a report of research in an academic journal. The parts of this framework look very similar to the parts of a good research plan; the basic elements of research are all here:

First, the scholarly article begins with an Abstract or summary of the research question: What is the reason for this study? What are the topics/questions being investigated?

Second, comes the Introduction:“What is already known about this topic and what is left to discover?” 

Third, is the Literature Review: “The review of literature is meant to discuss previous work on the topic, point out what questions remain, and relate the research presented in the rest of the article to the existing literature.” 

The fourth part of a journal article is the Methods and Data: What did the author find and how did he/she find it? 

The fifth section is Analysis and Results: What analytic techniques does the author use to tease out information from the data? How does the author interpret the findings?  

The final step in the reporting on research is the Discussion and Conclusion:  How do the findings connect with other data? What other questions can be asked based on the new information? Has this research added any new knowledge to this topic that would be valuable to others?

Many genealogical societies publish scholarly journals that contain information very helpful to family researchers. But academic journals in a variety of disciplines often contain articles of great interest to genealogists.

in the stacks, Anna Creech, April 14, 2005, 
Creative Commons, flickr.com

Where might one look to find these publications? Scholarly journals have long resided in college and other libraries. But in this age of the internet, digital copies are now available for many journals.

Used by permission JSTOR
According to Wikipedia, in 1995 Princeton University led an effort to digitize ten journals at seven libraries in order to save storage space. The project was called JSTOR, “pronounced JAY-stor; short for Journal Storage.” Today JSTOR offers “more than 1900 journal titles” from over 900 publishers. 

To get an idea of the breadth of the journal offerings at JSTOR:
Go to the webpage and follow these steps:

In the upper right of the screen (next to JSTOR logo), click “About.”
On the menu bar at the top of the screen, hold the mouse on “For Publishers” to access a drop-down menu.
Click on “JSTOR Publishers & Content Providers.”

This gives you an A-Z list of the more than 900 content providers whose journals are in the database. You can also find journals arranged by content area: Browse by Subject.

I did a quick search and found these intriguing organizations sure to get a genealogist’s interest up:

Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society
Economic History Society
Georgia Historical Society
Presbyterian Historical Society

University of Arizona Vertical Logo,
 https://brand.arizona.edu/guide/identity,
19 September 2014, Wikimedia.
Now that we know about JSTOR and its treasures, how can we access the journals? For faculty, staff and students of one of the 8,400 institutions that belong to JSTOR world-wide (including many colleges and universities, museums and public libraries), unlimited access is free. If you are an alumna or alumnus of one of these participating universities, you may also have free access. I was greatly pleased to see my alma mater, the University of Arizona, on the list!

How about for un-affiliated individuals? JSTOR has two ways you can gain access: JPASS (costs and has some limits) and Register and Read  (free but has limits.) JSTOR is also offering free access (some limits) to journals “published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere” through a program called Early Journal Content

Well, now that we know how to access journals at JSTOR and what kinds of journals we can expect to find, let’s look at the results of a search. One of my family lines is Irish, and they lived in Chicago from the 1850s. I want to learn as much about the lives of these people in the mid to late nineteenth century as I can. In JSTOR, I did a search on “Irish Chicago” and got over 2500 hits.

 But on page 5, I found this listing:


It is important to remember that although this article was not written for genealogists, it has great significance for anyone interested in American history:  life in large cities in the nineteenth century with an emphasis on the lives of immigrants. 

The ghetto, Chicago, Ill., Bird's-eye view of street scene, c1920, 
LC-USZ62-80739, Library of Congress Prints and
 Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
Dr. Galenson conducted this study to shed more light on a question that has challenged experts in academia, government, and non-profits: does growing up in poverty in urban ghettos decrease children’s chances of becoming employable, responsible, engaged citizens? As he states in the introduction to the study:

“In recent years social scientists have become increasingly interested in the question of how members of ethnic and racial minorities are injured economically by living in segregated neighborhoods. A central concern has been that the poverty of these neighborhoods may be self-perpetuating.”  p. 261.

As Dr. Galenson noted, this concern with the adverse effects of poverty on immigrant children is not new:

“It was often expressed in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the problem of immigrant children who failed to attend school.” p. 261-262.

The purpose of this study was to “investigate the concern of (George Emerson, prominent Boston educator) and others in the nineteenth century that the children of immigrants who lived in ethnic ghettos were less likely to attend school than their peers who lived elsewhere.” p. 262.

1860 Census Questionnaire,
1860 Image Gallery,
US Census Bureau website.

Of great interest to genealogical researchers is the source Dr. Galenson used for his study: the 1860 Federal Census for Boston, MA and Chicago, IL. He looked at each of the wards in both Boston and Chicago and compared them by wealth and ethnicity – with a focus on Irish heads of household.

Many of us have perused census documents, but it is unlikely that we have done anything like what Dr. Galenson did with the data.  Among the information the 1860 Census asked for were the ages of the children living in the household and if they had attended school at any time during the last year, what ethnicity the people in the household were and if the family income was over or under $1,000 for the period.

Correlating this data for the different wards in Boston and Chicago allowed Dr. Galenson to see the effects of the wealth of a household, and if the household were Irish, on the chances of the children attending school. And what he discovered was startling:

“…in Boston the probability of school attendance was positively related to a ward’s wealth and negatively related to its proportion of Irish residents, but in Chicago the reverse was true.”  p. 270-271.

In other words, if you were a poor, Irish male child in Chicago in 1860, you had a better chance of attending school than a child of similar wealth and ethnicity in Boston.

The rest of Galenson’s study attempted to explain why this difference existed. He found that there was no Catholic School System in Boston, so the public schools in Boston were pretty much the only game in town – “…more than 85 percent of all children who attended school in Boston in 1855 and 1860 went to public schools.”  p. 271 In other words, the public schools had a monopoly on the market. Unless you were wealthy, your children had only one choice – the public school.

In Chicago, on the other hand, the public schools had competition from the Catholic Church. In fact, in 1860 nearly 36% of Chicago children attended private school (mainly Catholic.)  p. 275

Why would it make such a difference on school attendance if a child had the choice to attend a public or a Catholic school? Galenson found the answer in a condition that differed in each city. Boston had a public system that went back to 1635 while Chicago’s “…basis for a city school system was first established by an act of the Illinois legislature in 1837….”p. 283. Along with the much longer history of its public education system, Boston had more nativist sentiment among the administrators who ran the schools and the teachers who interacted with the students.
American citizens! We appeal to you in all calmness. Is it not time to pause? . . . 
A paper entitled the American patriot, Boston : Published by
 J.E. Farwell & Co., 1852, LC-DIG-ppmsca-07575,
 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
 Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
Chicago was different:

“In contrast to Boston, Chicago’s early public school system may have also had a different attitude toward immigrants. Chicago’s population was very heterogeneous from its earliest days, as the foreign-born made up 30 percent of its population in 1843 and more than 50 percent in 1850.”  p. 284. 

So what conclusion did Dr. Galenson make as to why Irish boys in 1860 Chicago attended school in greater numbers than their cohorts in Boston?

Irish children in 1860 Chicago had the choice of attending a Catholic School where their ethnicity, social class and religion were respected. On the other hand,  Irish school-age boys in 1860 Boston had only one choice of school -- the public school, where they encountered discrimination due to their poverty, their Irishness, and their Catholicism.   

I learned an incredible amount of history from this academic study – history, economic, sociology, education, immigration – all covered in this article whose author was comparing school attendance of Irish immigrant sons in 1860 Boston and Chicago. And only in JSTOR did I find this resource.

Categories: genealogy tools

You Are There: Chicago 1837-1920

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Yesterday's Main Street, Kathy,
January 2, 2025, Creative Commons,
 Flickr.com.
When I was a young child living in Chicago in the early 1950s, my parents brought me to the Museum of Science and Industry. I remember several visits, and each time I would gaze fixedly at one exhibit in particular: “Yesterday’s Main Street,”a representation of a cobblestoned Chicago street in 1910, with storefronts lining both sides.

Yesterday's Main Street, Dainaar,
April 2, 2010, Creative Commons,
Flickr.com.
 For some reason, I never got the chance to walk down the street and peer into the windows as I longed to do. Perhaps this was the beginning of my yearning to know what Chicago was like in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when my ancestors lived there.

When I began investigating my family background and found that the Irish Carney/Kearney family line lived in Chicago from 1860 on, I was even more passionate about learning about life in early Chicago. Following the Irish, my German, Greek and Czech ancestors came to make their home in this young city. I wanted to walk the streets my people walked, see the sights they saw every day, hear the sounds that might have soothed or tormented them, and even smell the scents that surrounded them.

Fortunately for me, I came across the book Challenging Chicago: Coping With Everyday Life, 1837-1920  by Perry Duis.

Used by permission of publisher, University
of Illinois Press

The author goes way beyond the surface of sights and sounds. He plunges the reader into the gritty but also glorious world that was Chicago in this time period.  From this book, I learned the risks and the obstacles that challenged my people, but I also learned about the opportunities.

Dr. Duis is a master at painting a picture with words of what it was like to live in Chicago in those early years. Although this is a scholarly work covering the history, social mores, technological advances, and much more of this period and place, it is as readable and engrossing as a historical novel. However be advised, I may be prejudiced as I love nineteenth century Chicago!

In the introduction, Duis tells his readers the purpose of this book: to explain the challenges of living in a new, fast growing city and how its denizens dealt with them:

“The millions of all social classes who flocked to American cities…needed to resort to survival strategies. Urban life was a new experience for most of them. Raised on farms and in small towns, both here and abroad, they were often unprepared for what lay ahead. Many found that cities were far more congested, crowded, dangerous, unpleasant, immoral, and unhealthy than they had anticipated.” p. xii Duis

First, Dr. Duis tells us what forces helped create Chicago and other cities. By the mid 1800s, the industrial revolution  was taking hold in the United States. Farm workers living in poverty in rural America and in Europe began seeking employment in the new factories that were springing up in cities like New York and Chicago and were hungry for workers. To give an idea of the astonishing rate of population growth in Chicago, Duis writes:

“A populace of 4,170 in 1837 became 29,963 in 1850 and 109,260 in 1860, and it was on its way to three times that figure by the time of the Great Fire in 1871.” p. 7 Duis

Here is a photograph of State Street c1893 which shows the congested conditions of Chicago living:

Traffic on State Street, Chicago, U.S.A., Washington, D.C. : 
J.F. Jarvis, publisher, c1893, LC-USZ62-101801, 
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
With such rapid growth, there wasn’t much time to pay attention to the environment – the land the people lived on and traversed. People, including the city fathers, were focused on business. But nature was not to be ignored.

From the time before the first Europeans came to the site of Chicago in the late 1600s, the area was plagued by mud much of the year. In their book Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis, Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade explain the cause of that mud:

(It)  “…was the result of ancient geologic forces. More than four hundred million years before, the site lay beneath a tropical sea ….Before the waters receded there was deposited on the sea bottom the material (limestone) that constitutes the bedrock of Chicago….Above the limestone, glaciers left layers of impermeable clay that prevented the draining off of surface waters and created a high water table.” p. 3 Duis

  # 69 State Street, South from Lake,
 Views of Chicago, Carbutt, Photographer,
Chicago History Museum, used by license.

It was this high water table that caused the omnipresent mud which challenged Chicagoans when they were attempting to get from place to place on foot. The mud also caused problems for workers as they labored to keep streets open when they sunk into the mud.  p. 5 Duis
But the mud was not the only environmental problem facing Chicagoans. The city leaders thought the cost of pipes and sewers too costly for the new city, so sanitation became a problem. Large numbers of new immigrants living in overcrowded tenements with no waste removal systems led, among other problems, to very dirty streets:

In 1837, the city declared that “No dung, dead animal or putrid meats and fish or decayed vegetables (were) to be deposited in any street, avenue, lane or public square.” p. 5 Duis

Just walking in the city was a nightmare:

“The lack of sidewalks forced pedestrians to walk on the sides of the road, where debris, garbage, stray animals, mud, standing water, and dust impeded daily travel.” p. 5 Duis

Ore docks, blast furnaces & steel mills, South Chicago, Ill.,
International Harvester Co., Chicago, Ill.,
Geo. R. Lawrence Co. , copyright claimant,
 c1907, C-USZ62-41402,  Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
So thanks to Dr. Duis, I have a good picture of what it was like for my ancestors to try to get to work each day through the mud and trash. I know also where they likely found employment: the new iron and steel mills, the stockyards and meat packing plants, the railroads, and garment making shops. But how did people find these and other jobs?

Birds-eye view of Union Stock yards, Chicago, Ill., U.S.A., 
Meadville, Pa.: Keystone View Company, c1897, 
LC-USZ62-45849, Library of Congress 
Prints and Photographs Division 
Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
Chapter 9, “Chicago is Work,” talks about the different ways jobs were advertised: employment agencies, saloon message boards, hiring halls, and word of mouth. In addition to a way of making a living, a Chicagoan had to have a place to go before and after work. Finding housing was yet another challenge.

A basic facet of life is shelter, and I have long wondered the kind of housing my Chicago ancestors had. Different pieces of evidence (including the sad finding that an infant of the Carney/Kearney family was buried in the pauper’s area of Calvary Cemetery, the fact that my people likely left Ireland in the famine years, and the family story that my great grandmother was in an orphanage) attest to the probability that the Carney/Kearney and Duffy families were poor. Perhaps part of the reason I have trouble locating them in the city directories and federal census records is because of their poverty. Duis tells us that many Chicago families moved every May 1st, but poor families moved even more often, sometimes to avoid back rent they couldn’t afford to pay or in the hope of securing cleaner, less crowded lodgings:

“For the very poor, eviction or the search for more sanitary and safe tenements often led to the transfer of their meager possessions every few months. Their stay in one place was often so brief that they used neighborhood saloons as permanent mailing addresses.” p. 85 Duis

Too bad the saloons didn’t keep ledgers filled with addresses of the neighborhood denizens!

Another challenge for Chicago’s workers was finding food. Due to crowds, increasing commuting distance from work, and unreliable public transportation, working people couldn’t get home for lunch.  Saloon owners saw a way to capitalize on their roles as post box and job message board. Why not serve lunch to bring in customers to eat and, of course, drink? Initially, saloons charged for these noon meals, but when a politician/saloon owner started handing out free oysters (p. 157- 158 Duis), the concept if free food to lure customers spread across the city. Thus, was born, as Dr. Duis tells us, a new concept – the free lunch.

Image from page 208 of “Blasts” from “The Ram's Horn” (1902), 
Chicago, The Ram's Horn Co., Internet Archive 
Book Images, Flickr.com.
But that wasn’t the only thing Chicago gave America in the area of eating. When I was a little girl, my mother took me downtown to a cafeteria. I was mesmerized by all the food choices! This experience inspired the essay below from me in the third grade:

Written by Pat Spears, 1953
 school assignment, John M. Palmer
Elementary School, Chicago, IL
But I had no idea then that my city invented this restaurant phenomenon. In order to reduce the cost of lunch for working women, the Ogontz Club came up with the idea to do away with wait staff and instead, let patrons choose their food from large tables and carry their plates back to the seating area. p. 159

Thus was born our modern day cafeteria. A fellow blogger, Ms. Jan Whitaker, wrote a wonderful poem, “The Cafeteria,” which perfectly captures my fascination with this form of dining.

To conclude, we have taken just a quick visit to the wonderful world of nineteenth century Chicago, courtesy of Perry Duis. But there is more to explore in his historical tour guide, including how early Chicagoans sought to escape the problems of life and spend some moments enjoying what the city had to offer, covered in Part Four: Spare Moments.

One last note, in a press release of the book by the University of Illinois Press, James L. Swanson from a Chicago Tribune review was quoted: “…the illustrations and endnotes are worth the price of the book.” And the notes are indeed a treasure.

categories: genealogy tools
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