Methodology Monday in NGSQ: Tracking Tatums

Pamela Strother Downs serves up a Southern-style methodology treat in the current issue of the NGS Quarterly. Carefully proceeding from a man who died in Louisiana back to Alabama and Georgia, she extends a Tatum line two generations downstream from where they were accounted for in John Frederick Dorman's Adventurers of Purse and Person.

As often in the Q, the map and the table accompanying the article are not just ornamental, and they repay careful study.

The map:  Census records list two landless people in Montgomery County, Alabama, in 1830 as being 28 pages apart. Downs located landowner neighbors and mapped their locations. Without locating just where the landless pair lived in 1830, the map shows that they had to live nearby because their landed neighbors did. This was a key piece of evidence in completing the lineage, and it's a key technique to use and reuse in Dark Age US research, wherever your people may be.

The table paired two timelines of same-name Tatum men to show that an earlier DAR application confused one with the other.

Tatum researchers will appreciate the two extra generations; we all can appreciate seeing good technique in action.





Pamela Strother Downs, "Ancestry of Henry Tatum of Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana: Migration and Mistaken Identity," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (December 2013): 273-90.



Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday: Tracking Tatums," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 March 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

A 1948 snapshot of the Gulf Coast shoreline

Visiting a used-book store in Freeport, Maine, I purchased an intriguing mid-20th-century source for a dollar -- a detailed mile-by-mile survey of the Gulf Coast for navigators: United States Coast Pilot: Gulf Coast, Key West to Rio Grande (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1949), third edition. So far I have not seen it on line. According to the 2 April 1949 preface, the book "includes the results of a special field examination made in 1948." Among these results:

"Salerno [Florida], a small town at the head of Manatee Pocket, has a vegetable-packing plant, an asphalt plant, a shark factory, and is headquarters for a fishing fleet. . . . Gasoline, Diesel oil, fresh water, ice, and facilities for overnight dockage or seasonal storage are available at the yard. Groceries are obtainable at nearby stores." {214}

"For a distance of 40 miles eastward of the entrance [to Mobile Bay], the shore, although low, is wooded and unbroken. . . . . Approaching Mobile, two tall buildings near the water front are first seen. The easterly building has a pointed finial. The westerly building was under construction in May 1948 and will be the higher of the two." {272}

"The wreck of the S. S. Leo Huff is in 39 feet of water 6.0 miles 161 [degrees] from the whistle buoy marking the entrance to Calcasieu Pass Channel [Louisiana]. The mast shows above the water. A lighted buoy marks the wreck." {362}

"Gulf [Texas] is a small town 35 miles northeastward of Pass Cavallo. The sulphur mines north of the town were not in operation in 1948. The twin stacks and buildings at the mines are prominent from offshore." {405}

For landlubbers like me, it's as if someone had carefully noted every few miles of any given highway for hundreds of miles, as of 65 years ago. I'll add this to my informal list of people who are deeply interested in very specific and very small places, along with genealogists, cartographers, and weather forecasters in tornado season.

The book is not completely indexed (the wrecks are not included, for instance). But since its value is mostly in the description of local town and bay features I'll probably add this to my free lookups in due time.




Harold Henderson, "A 1948 snapshot of the Gulf Coast shoreline," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

Methodology Monday in 18th-century Louisiana

The discussion group of the Great Lakes APG chapter recently took up an article by Elizabeth Shown Mills published in the July/October 1997 Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Issue of The American Genealogist: "Deliberate Fraud and Mangled Evidence: The Search for the Fictional Family of Anne Marie Philippe of Natchitoches, Louisiana." (If you haven't heard Mills speak and are a Midwesterner, don't even try to pronounce that place name.)

The article is worth digging out of your nearest good genealogy library even if you don't have research targets in the 1700s in that territory, because it's at least a three-in-one. (Copies are still available for $20 from the TAG website.)

For one thing, it shows show even the best genealogical research has a kind of spiral character, in which you examine a set of records, then another, and then later return to the first set knowing enough more to see the same records with new eyes. For another, it ties the genealogical puzzle into the story of a chilling fragment of German history. (No spoilers here!) For a third, it chronicles a bit of the author's own journey from neophyte to sadder but wiser.

And finally, read it for the inspiration. At one stage in the research, essential information from parish registers was finally being made available -- but only in a compilation of poorly indexed abstracts, the originals remaining unavailable. Mills writes,

At this point persistent researchers part company from the fainthearted. Solving this research problem required a word-for-word, page-by-page reading of the entire volume -- indeed more than one such reading, to absorb all clues amid a myriad of name variations and phonetic spellings. {358}

Will you recognize that point when you come to it?