Never ignore childless siblings!

One of my immigrant ancestors had six children between 1795 and 1815, one of whom apparently died young. Two of the six were daughters who married but had no children. Their husbands both left wills.

One husband's will left everything to his wife if she survived him. If she did not, he divided his estate in half -- one half to be divided among his surviving siblings, and the other half to be divided among his wife's siblings . . . He named them all, including the one we thought had died as a baby, with her married name. Both had common names, there was no other way to find her.

When I started reading his will, I thought, well, this is pretty far out on a limb. But in genealogy, "out on a limb" is a wise place to be.

Methodology Monday: Genealogy in bulk? Twelve suggestions

When I have a choice, I prefer to work on one genealogy problem at a time. But there are other times -- such as when the task becomes identifying and documenting all descendants and spouses in three of four generations.

And in order to meet standards, we have to find the people first. Most of the following items work better when working on people who lived on both sides of the Dark Age in the US (that is, before and after 1850). Deep in the Dark Age or well up into the 20th century would be another post, actually several different posts depending on the location.

* When possible, do the work in a good library or archive where it's easy to switch from on line to on paper. Some on-line materials are hard to navigate, and some on-line providers omit crucial material like prefaces and introductions where authors and compilers tell something (intentionally or otherwise) about how they did their work. For me that place is in  Fort Wayne. More info here.  One practical reason to make it the HQ-away-from-home for this work is that it has the world's best collection of genealogical periodicals, indexed on PERSI. Get the basic info from Find My Past and then get the relevant call numbers from the online catalog.

* If this is a perennial project, check the old folders, binders, emails, and notes created long ago and scattered on various web sites or cloud locations for clues that may mean more now than they did at the time.

* Use property and probate records if they are within reasonable driving distance, or if they have been digitized. (Not using property records could land you in trouble. Using probate records will not be the death of you.)

* Don't start by searching broadly. Approximate a birth/marriage/death date and place and look for candidate parents/spouses/children then and there. Check metasites for digital newspaper availability.

* If you have a region or state, search broadly within those confines, for instance New England. Peruse Michael Hait's inevitably incomplete Online State Resources for Genealogy 3.0.

* Ancestry and FamilySearch have some of the same data, but their indexes are not interchangeable. Search both. If you have candidate parents, search Family Search's main site using only their names in the parent boxes.

* Google Books and Internet Archive often harbor old periodicals as well as old genealogy books. A lot of microfilms have been digitized and uploaded to Internet Archive as well.

* Less famous venues can be useful when searching broadly, such as the GLO site for federal-land states. While we're waiting for the master newspaper site to emerge, give a try to the larger collections of on-line city directories on Fold3 and Ancestry as well as local providers. For tips see this metadirectory. (But as you close in on the person, the ability to survey every year of a given city's directory becomes crucial.)

* Find A Grave is the best, but it is not the only cemetery site. Also, it contains random unsourced assertions about unpictured grave markers. Which brings me to . . .

* Don't be a source snob. Put on your hazmat suit and acid-resistant gloves, or whatever you think you need, and dive into genealogical dumpsters. Source-free clues appearing there may be verifiable elsewhere -- or at least may lead back to a contemporary document of some kind.

* Use ArchiveGrid within reason, especially if your target people had literate and gossipy neighbors, or belonged to record-creating institutions or societies.

* Don't forget to write it up! Local, state, or national, genealogy editors everywhere are waiting for you.

Enjoy the bulk-genealogy chase. In my experience, it is likely to provide both surprises and -- a bouquet of interesting problems, each of which will require up-close and personal work to solve.




Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/elisfanclub/6208669725 per Creative Commons


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday: Genealogy in bulk? Twelve suggestions," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 June 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Daily work for boys in southeast Ohio around 1820

One way to break a Dark Age deadlock is to find a literate and gossipy neighbor who wrote things down. Even better is to find one who had his or her reminiscences published. Best of all if it's someone that you're actually related to.

When you find such a treasure, don't stop at extracting the genealogical gold (like an overseas grandfather's date of death). In fact, if you have any people anywhere in eastern or southeastern Ohio in the early 1800s, you will enjoy William Cooper Howells's Recollections of Life in Ohio from 1813 to 1840. His son was the well-known literary man William Dean Howells (1837-1920), and Howells families (with a terrifyingly small set of given names) are tangled throughout the Midwest and right back to eighteenth-century Wales. The senior Howells's lucid and astringent recollections also provide a model of style and tone for those of us likely to fall into sentimentalism or other kinds of editorializing.

As young boys, William Cooper Howells and his brother Tom plowed difficult ground with a difficult horse and not much harness:

When the corn was small [Paddy the horse] would get out of the rows and trample the corn, and when it had grown to some size he would stop to eat it in spite of all the efforts we could make with loud hallooing on my part and vigorous thrashing on Tom's part. . . . We had no buckles to the harness, and with our little hands we could not tie a knot that would stand. It was the same when we hauled wood, which we mostly did by the process called "snaking." We would tie a chain around the end of a log, and thereby drag it on the ground. If the log was small, or there was snow, we got along pretty well; but if the load was heavy, we usually had a scene of balking and harness breaking trying to my patience and unpleasant to Tom if he rode. Paddy was a safe horse -- that is, he was small, and it did not hurt any one to fall from him, and if he didn't stay in his tracks he was always to be found where there was something to eat.

In the spring of 1821 his (unnamed) uncle Howells decided to move 80 miles to an unsettled area of Coshocton County, where he could only afford to lease land. With young William's help, they took along cattle, sheep, and pigs as well as household goods and tools.

The loading up of the wagons occupied nearly the whole day of starting, and it was late in the afternoon when we mustered the cattle, sheep and pigs in the rear of the wagons. . . . To start off with such a mixed drove of animals was no trifling affair, for, though they would drive pretty well after getting used to the road and a day or two's experience, their obstinacy and contrariety at first was without parallel, and a boy to each animal was little enough. First, a pig would dart back and run like a deer till he was headed and turned, by which time the others would meet him and all have to be driven up; while in the meantime a cow or two would be sailing down a by-lane with elevated head and tail, and a breathless boy circling through a field or the woods to intercept her career . . . . We worked along till night, when we put up, about seven miles from the starting point.

Plenty more where that came from . . .





William Cooper Howells, Recollections of Life in Ohio from 1813 to 1840 (Cincinnati: The Robert Clarke Company, 1895), 82-83, 87; digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/recollectionsofl011646mbp : viewed October 2013).



Harold Henderson, "Daily work for boys in southeast Ohio around 1820," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Shedding light on the Dark Age of American genealogy

One of the commonest problems that people bring to consultants or to professionals is how to identify people, especially parents, once they get back before 1850.

The period from the late 1700s (upheavals preceding and including the American Revolution) to 1850 (first US census that aimed to name every person) could be called the "Dark Ages" in US genealogy. Many of the records we rely on for research after 1850 didn't exist then, or existed only in bare-bones form.

To put it another way, before 1850 is where we see the final breakdown of the dubious idea that genealogy is just a matter of "looking up" your ancestors in the records. Those accustomed to doing that kind of genealogy may find the pre-1850 research environment bewildering.

Of course it's not barren, just different. But we do need to know where to look, and what to look for. The first step is to change our attitude:

• look for clues (indirect evidence), not only direct statements;
• search as much by area or associates as by name;
• pay more attention to the historical context (emphasized in the course I took at the Genealogical Research Insitute of Pittsburgh on the Northern part of this topic), especially since the past gets weirder the further back we go; and
• don't yield quickly to the temptation of trying to "connect" with a likely-looking individual in 1760.

The second step is to consider some of the solid sources that are available:

•  land records (federal, state, local), including tax records;
•  probate records;
•  military records;
•  any post-1850 records that cast light backwards into the Dark Age (such as a late-life marriage application, or an obituary that tells more than the death certificate, or a grandchild's mug book entry);
•  unsourced books and online trees (with appropriate caution);
•  newspapers (advertisements much more than obituaries) and early ephemera (called "imprints");
•  court records; and
•  manuscript collections, including business records. (In western New York, as Josh Taylor will explain if you give him an opening, the early land records often are business records.)

Good luck!




Photo credit: J. C. Loudon, (1826) An encyclopædia of agriculture (London: 1826, 2nd edition 1831), figure 512, "Trenching"; digital image, Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/marceldouwedekker/7468901744 : viewed 11 August 2013), Maarcel Douwe Dekker's photostream, per Creative Commons.

  
Harold Henderson, "Shedding light on the Dark Age of American genealogy," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 August 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Getting out of the Dark Ages

Michael John Neill, writing in Ancestry Weekly Journal, uses Kentucky as an example to give a concise reminder of basic research procedures for dealing with research targets in the "Dark Ages" before the 1850 census.