Never ignore childless siblings, part 2

My wife's grandfather had two older sisters, Bonnie and Nellie, who never married and had no descendants. Both had professional careers in the first half of the 20th century, but we never learned much about them, partly because they had decamped to California by the mid-1920s. I've been working on their mother's family for publication(s) and found that I pretty much had to reconstruct their professional lives by wide searching and judicious use of on-line newspapers and directories. It made me feel that perhaps they had not been taken seriously enough by other family members.

In the course of this searching I came upon a contribution Bonnie made in 1927 to a folk music collection, and that ended up on a folk-music site, Bluegrass Messengers. It was the lyrics to a folk song that their grandfather William was said to have brought with him from England to Wisconsin in the late 1840s, and that his son Sam, their father, now a Wisconsin blacksmith, sang for them. (If you know any ballad tunes at all, you will see how the rhythm fits; I haven't got hold of an audio version yet.)

My hair, what there is of it, stood right up on end. Of all the things I might have expected, a chance to eavesdrop on Sam and Harriet and their three children by the fireside, most likely in the 1880s when the children were growing up, was the last thing on my mind. What a gift, one their grand-nephew-in-law only opened by accident 90 years later.

It's a cliche because it's true. You really never know what you will find. By the same token, we never know how some small act of preservation now may reverberate in future generations.

Methodology Friday from immigrant origins to economic causes

In the current (September) National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Allen R. Peterson pieces together a Sandham family that showed up in Derbyshire out of the blue in 1806. Where did they come from?

The IGI -- used as an index to the underlying records -- suggests a hypothesis. The family may have come from 56 miles away in Lancashire. Comparisons of names and birth and death information from the two places confirm that the parents and 4-5 children are the same in both places at different times.

Why did they move? By digging through records ot taxes, inheritance, and warnings-out involving both ancestors and in-laws, Peterson goes beyond "pure" genealogy, making the case that the parents were probably leaving a marginal agricultural existence and seeking steadier factory work in Derbyshire. Those without English ancestry can learn something here about taking the next step of restoring more than just dates and places in the past.




Allen R. Peterson, "The Origin of Peter and Jane Sandham of Thornsett, Derbyshire," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (September 2014): 189-200.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Friday from immigrant origins to economic causes," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday with three generations in three pages

Not all articles in top genealogy periodicals have to be long or involve a convoluted tangle of indirect evidence. If you're having a short-attention-span day, Arlene V. Jennings's recent inquiry into the mother of Jane (Fife) Smart (b. 1769) is quick and to the point in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

Sometimes good methodology is just about knowing where to look. In this case two parallel record sets give varying results: no name for Jane's mother in one, and two different surnames for her in the other. Probate files for her father and husbands provide the "glue" to piece together vital records, identifying Jane as a daughter of her mother's middle (second) marriage, and reaching back to Jane's mother's mother's surname in the early 1700s.



Arlene V. Jennings, "Jane Fife's Mother, Elizabeth (Sowersby) Stather Fife Hought," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (June 2014): 93-95.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with three generations in three pages," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 August 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Books: everyday life in three centuries

One of the pleasures of a national institute or conference is the chance to browse and buy good books. I bought the following four from Maia's Books at GRIP last week. I ended up choosing mostly books that told stories -- but that did so in a knowledgeable historical context, not just for quaintness' sake. We'll see. Hopefully this will not be the last you hear of them!

Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As Various as Their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Most of my mother-in-law's ancestors and a fraction of my mother's and father-in-law's ancestors were around for this.

Harvey Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Parents, grandparents, and most great-grandparents were active in these years. Growing up in the 1950s was not entirely different, in that much of the built environment was still there from the 1920s, but I could easily assume similarities that were not there.

Joan M. Jensen, Calling This Place Home: Women on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1850-1925 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006). In-laws were in Wisconsin early, whether from England, New England, New York, or Pennsylvania.

David T. Hawkings, Pauper Ancestors: A Guide to the Records Created by the Poor Laws in England and Wales (Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2011). In 1819, my two-year-old great-great-grandfather's impoverished family was removed from the parish of Long Bennington in Lincolnshire to the parish of Teigh in Rutlandshire.




Harold Henderson, "Books: everyday life in three centuries," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 July  2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

NGSQ touches on Michigan

The cover of the December issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly portrays Ann (Pratt) Snowden who emigrated from England in 1833 and settled with her family in Kent County, Michigan, in 1842. She figures in Ronald A. Hill's article involving conflicting evidence, a seaman who went by various names, and the ambiguous use of "brother" and "sister" in correspondence: "Siblings, Religious Brotherhoods, or Neither: Oliver, Pratt, and Fowler or Foley Families of Whitehaven, England."

It should go without saying that this article and the three accompanying it -- Elizabeth Shown Mills on documenting a slave's birth, parentage and origins; George R. Ryskamp on Basque genealogy; and Arliss Shaffer Monk on "Five Edmund Jeningses of Virginia and Maryland" -- are the haute cuisine of the genealogy world. You can't read them without learning something, and you can't read them fast.