Census entries that have "DOOM" written all over them, and some good reading

Joseph M. Burdock [Burdick], 1870 U.S. census, Chicago, Cook Co., Ill., Ward 14, p. 582, dwelling 1455, family 1657: FIRE INS. AGENT.

Robert G. Turk, 1920 U.S. census, Binghamton, Broome Co., N.Y., Ward 3, Enum. Dist. 18, sheet 8B, dwelling 167, family 230: FOREMAN CITY STABLES.

What's your most doomed occupational find?

In other reading . . .

. . . the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society's blog takes a look at haunting forms of decease in old New York.

. . . those who appreciate the Napoleonic Era nautical-historical novels of Patrick O'Brian may want to check out a New-York-based novel set half a century earlier. One reviewer called Francis Spufford's Golden Hill "the best eighteenth-century novel since the eighteenth century."

. . . if you'd like to have a long leisurely dinner with a historian who knows all about what went on in the US between 1815 (end of the War of 1812) and 1848 (end of the Mexican War), you're out of luck. But you can read the book What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe.

Five generations of New York women

Ye fair that cast on this an eye
By me a pattern take and
Spend your time industriously
And such a sampler make
Polly Holmes her work done
In the year 1824

Polly Homes did not live to see 25, but she is the 5G grandmother of our granddaughter. The sampler she stitched 193 years ago survives, a little faded in parts. I tell the stories of her five generations of non-living female descendants in the July 2017 New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. Cuddle up with a copy and see what you think.

Samplers were a part of schooling at that time, and to some extent an insurance policy: wives marked their linens, and many a widow or grass widow plied the needle for a living. Books and surveys have been published based on samplers, some of which are beautiful and some of which document family trees. For more, check the informative and illustrated books by Betty Ring, Susan P. Schoelwer, and others. For now, I'm just happy to have these Holmes-Denison-Crandall-Burdick-Bassett female lines documented: just as much a family as those who share the same surname every generation. And thanks to NYGBR retiring editor Karen Jones for  being willing to publish a "cross-grained" lineage.

 

Fourth and (sort of) last installment of "A Missing Heir" on the Bassett family in NYGBR

My mother-in-law's paternal Bassett line has now got its due in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. The Record does problems, which is how this four-part series started off, with the puzzle of how apparent oldest daughter Elizabeth could be omitted from the list of legal heirs when her father died.

The Record also does documentation of families, which in the case of Lewis Bassett (1776-1871) and Dorcas Hoxie (1782-1832) amounted to twelve children and 67 grandchildren, plus assorted spouses. Each of the 79 has their own sentence or paragraphs in the genealogical summary, which is why the article had to appear in four installments. The nine children who had descendants were:

* Elizabeth (Bassett ) Porter (1798-1855) with 13 children,
* Peleg Hoxie Bassett (1800-1891) with 9,
* William Riley Bassett (1802-1889) with 10,
* Lucy (Bassett) Hoffman (1805-1882) with 10,
* Harriet (Bassett) Burdick (1807-1874) with 6,
* Nathan Lee Bassett (1808-1833) with 5,
* Samuel Clark Bassett (1811-1878) with 7,
* Sarah Emiline (Bassett) Utter (1817-1898) with 5, and
* Hannah (Bassett) Crandall (1822-1899) with 2.

As with many 19th-century families, the older children were far more prolific than the younger. Five of the nine stayed in New York; Elizabeth, Lucy, and Harriet died in Illinois, Nathan in Wisconsin.

Grandchildren or their spouses worked as farmer, miner, local official, attorney/soldier, clerk, box manufacturer, hoe manufacturer, dry goods merchant, machinist, blacksmith, teacher, lumber agent, insurance salesman, college professor, engineer, carpenter, tailor, cowboy, and auto mechanic. Many served in the Civil War, arguably the defining event for this generation.

Three women among the grandchildren lived on their own without marrying. One was a milliner, one ran a boardinghouse, and one may have become a Catholic nun -- if true, a most unusual career path from a long-time Baptist family.

The grandchildren's generation lasted 136 years, from the birth of Harry B. Porter, Elizabeth's child, in 1815 when James Madison was President, to the death of William Henry Bassett, Samuel's child, in 1951, when Harry Truman was President.

Most of the grandchildren's stories could occupy more than a paragraph or two. So if 45 pages and 583 reference notes sounds like a lot, these folks could easily fill a book, and maybe someday they will. (And strictly speaking we're not quite done, as the Porter family into which Elizabeth married has its documentation still to come.)

“A Missing Heir: Reconnecting Elizabeth (Bassett) Porter to Her Parents, Lewis and Dorcas (Hoxie) Bassett,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record in four parts:

145 (July 2014): 165-84,
145 (October 2014): 281-91,
146 (April 2015): 117-23,
146 (July 2015): 198-208.

April 2015 New York Genealogical and Biographical Record!

Some Empire State reasons why I don't blog here as often as in the past . . .


If you have New York interests, don't hesitate -- go out and buy the NYGBS's new research guide and gazetteer! I reviewed it in the April NYGBR.


Also in the April issue is the third installment of "A Missing Heir" involving the intertwined families of Lewis and Dorcas (Hoxie) Bassett and  John S. and Zerviah (Hawkins?) Porter. This installment follows descendants of

* Lucy (Bassett) Hoffman and husband Matthew, whose trails lead to Genesee County, New York;, Lake County, Illinois; Chicago; and St. Louis;

* Harriet (Bassett) Burdick and husband Rodman, who also went to Lake County and Chicago; and

* Nathan Lee Bassett and wife Adelia S. (Reed) Bassett, whose trails lead to Jefferson County, New York; Walworth County, Wisconsin; Freeborn County, Minnesota; Larimer County, Colorado; and Chippewa County, Wisconsin.

More descendants to come.


Meanwhile I have had the privilege of joining NYGBR's editorial board as well.

Crossing the Continent with Common Names and Living to Tell the Story

As we genealogists soon learn, an amazing number of people have common names. I ran into a few of them seven years ago while working on my first BCG portfolio: Who were the parents of Ina Smith who married Frank Burdick in Kansas City in 1885?

He was the third generation on my kinship determination project, so I didn't have to deal with this side issue right then. But I was intrigued.

It turned out that Ina's parents were John and Elizabeth Smith. They appeared to have come from Indiana, but which ones were they, and where in Indiana -- and was Elizabeth's maiden name Smith too?

I made several runs at this problem over the years, going from thinking it was hopeless to thinking it was too easy. Now I'm on even keel, and the finished article is in the newly posted March issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, so readers can see how I solved it. This version is a little sharper than the original submission, thanks to peer review and good editors.

Of course, it's not likely that either of these two Smith families is one of yours. But you may have a similar sort of problem with different people. Hope it helps!

 NGSQ is a benefit of membership in the National Genealogical Society. Members can read the latest issue (and many old ones) as soon as it is posted.



"Crossing the Continent with Common Names: Indiana Natives John and Elizabeth (Smith) Smith," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 103 (March 2015): 29-35.

Sociology as context for genealogy

Two 20th-century guys I wish had had longer lives are George Orwell and C. Wright Mills. Mills's 1951 book White Collar is a minute examination of what became of the 19th-century society we often encounter in genealogy. The subjects of my first kinship determination project were three generations of Burdicks: Rodman (1799-1878, carpenter and farmer), son Joseph (1826-1897, farmer, insurance agent, laundry proprietor, clerk, and more), and grandson Frank (1855-1920, printer, express company agent, carpenter for a railroad company). They were all middle class in their times, but during their century-and-a quarter, the meaning of "middle class" changed.

Mills has interesting things to say about this, and while he's no Orwell he does so in language more readable than that of many sociologists:

The most important single fact about the society of small entrepreneurs was that a substantial proportion of the people owned the property with which they worked. . . . perhaps four-fifths of the free people who worked owned property. {7}

What happened to the world of the small entrepreneur is best seen by looking at what happened to its heroes: the independent farmers and the small businessmen. These men, the leading actors of the middle-class economy of the nineteenth century, are no longer at the center of the American scene; they are merely two layers between other more powerful or more populous strata. . . . Democratic property, which the owner himself works, has given way to class property, which others are hired to work and manage . . . .  Work is now a set of skills sold to another, rather than something mixed with his own property. {13, 14} . . . Over the last hundred years, the United States has been transformed from a nation of small capitalists into a nation of hired employees. {34}

Harold Henderson, "Sociology as context for genealogy," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 July 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Is an Obituary an Original Source? Does It Matter?

Above is the obituary for my wife's maternal grandfather's second cousin's wife Ina (Smith) Burdick, 1862-1932. Some members of the ProGen Study Group have been debating whether an obituary is an original source. As all genealogists and historians should know but some still don't, sources may be original or derivative; the information they contain may be primary or secondary; and the evidence drawn from that information may be direct or indirect depending on the question we're asking at the moment.

Those of us who have left behind the "rip and run" school of genealogy want to analyze this evidence well, and these terms help us think clearly. But in my opinion the thinking is what matters, not which basket we decide to put it in. "Original" is no kind of baptism that absolves a record from all sin and error!

In Evidence Explained, Elizabeth Shown Mills defines an original source as "material in its first oral or recorded form" (p. 24). By that definition, this newspaper item probably doesn't qualify. Ina's surname has been butchered, one suspects by a sleep-deprived funeral director or journalist taking hasty notes over the telephone. His or her notes in turn were set in type, and somewhere along the way Ina acquired in death a surname she never had in life. Note that the presence of error itself does not make the source derivative -- many original sources contain errors. But this particular error looks like an error in hearing, because even very bad handwriting doesn't make a V look like a B. In all likelihood, there was at least one earlier written form of this information from which the published obituary was set.

But we are most unlikely to be able to find the reporter's notes for an 80-year-old six-line obituary, so what was published may be as close to the original as we can get. (Any surviving records from J. P. Finley & Son's funeral home would be worth seeking out, though.) Another consideration: when we think of derivative sources, we usually think of, say, a published index of obituaries published in the Oregonian in 1932, or perhaps an on-line database created by re-keying the print index. Those derivatives would be at least one or two steps further removed from its first written form, and hence more prone to error. So some sources are more derivative than others. (And, as Tom Jones has been known to explain, a source that is derivative to any degree can be considered a red flag telling us to look for what it's a derivative of.)

So much for theory. What we really want to know is, IS IT TRUE? That question, alas, cannot be answered by staring fixedly at the obituary, nor by analyzing to death its exact degree of derivativeness. It can only be answered by correlating its information with information from other sources. The point of wondering whether it's original or derivative is not to provide a label ("APPROVED" or "TOXIC"). The point is to consider how that record was created and how it stacks up to Elizabeth's ten categories of textual criticism (pp. 32-38), so that we can weigh it properly in the balance along with any other obituaries, Ina's death certificate, Aleen's birth record, family letters, census returns, etc.

In plain language, we need to know where that information has been and what wringers it has gone through. Once we have that understanding, the choice of label becomes academic, because we're ready to weigh this source against the others. (Sound weird to learn the terminology and then rarely use it? Welcome to the spiral staircase of genealogy learning!) Confirmation, or proof, is never done solo, and never just by applying a label. It's always a group affair.


ADDED Saturday afternoon 4 August 2012: For more depth on this whole topic, plunge into Evidence Explained Quick Lesson #10.


"Ina Veurdick," [Burdick], obituary, Morning Oregonian (Portland), Wed. 13 July 1932, p. 7, col. 7.

Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2007), 24, 32-38.

Harold Henderson, "Is an Obituary an Original Source? Does It Matter?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Local News from the Past

Like many libraries, Fremont Public Library in north suburban Mundelein (Lake County), Illinois, has a symbiotic relationship with the county genealogical society. The Lake County Genealogical Society's Research Facility (AKA the genealogy room) is on its second floor, and Fremont's web site lists and distinguishes three different Lake County genealogy web sites.

For the past ten years (apparently), Fremont has done something else so simple and so valuable that I can't believe it's the only one. Under the heading, "Local News from the Past," they've posted the "local" items from the weekly Lake County Independent from a century earlier -- 1 Jan 1897 through 23 Aug 1907, and I hope they haven't given it up now!

This listing was an enormous help in sorting and following my Burdick, Knigge, Aynsley families in the area -- like watching a movie unfold, sometimes plotless and sometimes with a plot you know the end of, as relatives gather around a sickbed.

Quite a few basic genealogy sources are like this. Preparing them week after week won't get you published or win any ingenuity rewards in the prestigious journals, but without them it would be just that much more difficult to have the resources to be ingenious with.