Methodology Monday in three dimensions

My friend and colleague Cathi Desmarais has produced an excellent metaphor for the dilemma every genealogist faces when we size up the evidence we have collected during our thorough  (but only reasonably exhaustive) search: we're trying to turn a complex three-dimensional knot into a smooth untangled piece of string that is easy to follow in two dimensions.

Those who deal regularly with actual knots and tangles of string might say that there's no substitute for just sitting there and working on it until done -- which is true although not very helpful. In genealogy we do have some of the steps broken down into

• analyzing individual pieces of evidence, 
• correlating (comparing and contrasting) different pieces of evidence, 
• resolving any conflicts that appear, and 
• writing up the result in a form that is clear and convincing (or to put it another way, in a form that does not require the reader to take your results on faith).

But the problem can still exist when one gets down to the writing part. And once again, there is no substitute to just sticking with it. As my grandfather-in-law (by consensus the most distinguished of any of my or my wife's ancestors) reportedly used to say, "The most important application in writing is the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."

It helps if we have been writing all along -- in the research log to remind us of what we were thinking, as well as any any work-in-progress inspirations that cropped up along the way. It also helps if we had a clear research question to begin with, but sometimes the question changes along the way. And a late-arriving piece of evidence can shift the nature of the presentation even when the question stays the same.

It helps not to have to reinvent the wheel. The more our minds are furnished with the ways that other genealogists have tackled similar problems -- in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, and other publications with similarly high standards -- the more different approaches we can try to see if they fit. (For instance, I love to use timelines, but they are not always the most efficient way to deal with a string of property deeds.)

One way to furnish the mind is to read and study a new article from the above publications every week or two. Another way would be to attend the course that Kimberly Powell and I will be co-coordinating at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy next January, "From Confusion to Conclusion: Writing Proof Arguments." And I'm sure you can think of others!




Photo credit: "Knot," Quinn Dombrowski's photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/4780103370 : viewed 15 March 2014), per Creative Commons

Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday in three dimensions," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 March 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday: The questions we ask in genealogy

Most genealogical questions, according to Thomas W. Jones in Mastering Genealogical Proof, ask about relationship (R), identity (I), or activity (A). Of course we can think of much more tangled ones, but usually they are "supporting questions" enabling us to better answer one of the basic ones. (p.8)

After a Facebook discussion the other day, I wondered how this idea checked out at the top end of the field in 2013. Classifying articles this way turned out to be more difficult and more subjective than I expected, and I never found anything that quite fit "activity." Activity-type questions may end up in DAR applications more often than in published articles.

The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (NEHGR) and American Ancestors Journal: R 14, I 3, A 0, others 2.

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (NYGBR): R 10, I 1, A 0, and others 3.

The National Genealogical Society Quarterly (NGSQ): R 11, I 3, A 0, others 2.

The Genealogist (TG): R 6, I 1, A 0, others 0.

Totals: R 41, I 8, A 0, others 7. Roughly three-quarters ask about relationships. The "others" are generally individual life stories, or ask what would usually be supporting questions, such as, "Where was he buried?"

How does this play out in less formal publications like NGS Magazine, American Ancestors (NEHGS), and some state magazines? What questions do their articles answer? Your turn!



Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday: The questions we ask," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 March 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

January in Salt Lake: new workshop, new practicum case, new talk

Genealogists don't hibernate during the winter -- we go to Salt Lake City for the APG Professional Management Conference, immediately followed by the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy!

Here's where to find me speaking in Salt Lake City in January 2014:

• Friday afternoon January 10, as part of the Association of Professional Genealogists' Professional Management Conference, a workshop: "The Story of the Story of Jethro: The Making of an NGSQ Article." Registration for the PMC is cheaper if you sign up before January 6, if you are an APG member, and if you are a full-time undergraduate. (Check out our great lineup even if this workshop is not for you.)

A finished article in a top-tier genealogy publication normally shows some ways of cracking a tough research problem. But it necessarily omits much of the research, writing, editing, and agonizing that went into its creation. Workshop attendees will review and discuss the logic, structure, writing, omitted research, and more of a recent article in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. Not all professionals will write for NGSQ or similar publications, but the writing and thought habits needed for such articles make other genealogical writing and editing easier.

• Tuesday-Wednesday, January 14 and 15, as part of the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy's Advanced Evidence Practicum, a western Pennsylvania problem from the 1800s: analyze and correlate evidence to prove or disprove a family story and determine parentage. Don't be spooked: The early-bird discount for SLIG registration ends October 31! 

•  Tuesday evening, January 14, a talk open to the public as well as SLIG enrollees (for a fee): "Reading Genealogy: Why Not Follow the Best?" An introduction to and sampling of the five top genealogy publications: NEHGR, NYGBR, NGSQ, TAG, and The Genealogist. They're all hard-core, and they're all different.

I hope to see you there -- especially for the last one, where I'm scheduled against Judy Russell and Kimberly Powell!



Harold Henderson, "January in Salt Lake: new workshop, new practicum case, new talk," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, no. 1267, posted 27 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Recycle your writing!

One way to increase your writing output without adding a large amount of work time is to recast the underlying material into a different form. It occurred to me that -- in addition to news about the community (who got credentialed, which genealogy business has bought another), there are basically three kinds of genealogy writing:

(1) technical -- proving identities, relationships, and lineages. Usually this kind stands alone only when it's an especially difficult problem, or in a client report. But it is the foundation for everything else. Examples are in every issue of NGSQ, NYGBR, NEHGR, TAG, and The Genealogist. Each one may contain fragments of stories (#2 below), but they are only present insofar as they provide evidence to construct the proof.

(2) stories -- telling the life stories of ancestors and lineages. This is the stuff all genealogists and many non-genealogists crave, often even when the stories are terrible and sad. Without #1, the stories may get distorted or attached to the wrong people, but this is the payoff.

(3) instructional -- explaining how to accomplish #1 and #2. This is the meat of most popular genealogy magazines (the ones whose titles always start with a number), professional publications (like the APG Quarterly), many blogs (such as Kimberly Powell's at About.com, or Archives.com's expert series), and much of the traffic on genealogy mailing lists and social media discussions. Technology tips fit here too. (Theoretical articles, of which genealogy has few so far, are at the high end of this range.)

Of course all of these are far more valuable when they cite their sources.

Here's the point. Each family or part of a family provides material for all three kinds of writing. Years ago I found my Gedney ancestors on a New Orleans ship list from the 1840s, where their surname had been written "Kidney." That was a humble kind of technical finding (#1), and of course could play a part in an instructional article or talk (#3). But there are hints of stories there as well (#2): my recently wed great-great grandparents, William Flint and Mary Gedney, were on that cramped boat for two months with their extended family, and it seemed likely that her father bankrolled the emigration. Then again, I could tell those stories better if I did just a little more research . . .





Harold Henderson, “From England to St. Clair Via New Orleans: William and Mary Gedney Flint,” St. Clair County (Illinois) Genealogical Society Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2003):141-44.



Harold Henderson, "Recycle your writing!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

"I" and "we" in genealogy writing

This year's Ohio Genealogical Society conference in Cincinnati sparked some good discussions, including one that came out of Ohio Genealogy News editor Sunny McClellan Morton's Friday morning talk. Like many of us, she's trying to encourage new writers to take up the pen or word processor as the case may be.

I admit to being a bit surprised that there was anything to discuss. There are many kinds of good genealogical writing, and the first person can be effectively wielded in most of them.

. . . Except at the top of the pyramid. In the five most scholarly magazines -- NEHGR, NGSQ, NYGBR, TAG, and The Genealogist -- the first person singular or plural is out of bounds, I think reasonably so. The focus there should be on the methods, the records, and the people being researched -- not on the researcher's false trails and travails. Having journals like this is one of many factors that will make genealogy more respectable as an intellectual endeavor and not just a harmless obsession of geezers. Also, once you get the hang of it, leaving yourself out of the picture actually makes it easier to tell one story, without having to shift back and forth from the story of the past to the story of your attempt to reclaim the past. Scholarly accounts deliberately suppress process details because the logic of proof is often very different from the travelogue of discovery.

But this is not the only way to tell these stories, and it is not always even the best way. For one thing, up-and-coming researchers have a natural hunger for accounts of how it went. A research find can look very different in the heat of battle (or more likely in the courthouse basement) than it does in a polished article. And nothing prevents such accounts from being well-written and well-documented.

So, pretty much everywhere else -- in commercial popular magazines, in trade publications (APG Quarterly), and in quality mid-level publications (such as NGS Magazine, Ohio Genealogy News, and many state publications) -- I would expect good editors to be open to the possibility of using first person to tell a solid genealogical story. (I blogged about a couple here; Sunny has been publishing research travelogues under the heading "Genealogy Journeys" in OGN.)

Many people may find it more natural to write in the first person at first, and I'm in favor of any approach that will get more of us writing (as opposed to dying with file cabinets full of uncommunicated discoveries). But writing WELL in the first person is much harder than it looks, for at least three reasons:

(1) All storytelling and all writing is about selection, and when you write about your own experience you have to do all the selection. You know too much. (In an interview-based article, for instance, both the interviewee and the interviewer filter the direct experience, so that the result of the interview has already been winnowed down considerably from the raw experience, making it easier to craft a readable narrative out of it.) It can be hard to see the forest because you know so much about each individual tree -- but if you tell all, the reader will quit rather than figure it out.

(2) First person can tempt us into careless writing. As beginners we often rely too much on adjectives and adverbs, and on general ones at that. First-person may make it harder to realize that we are emoting vaguely, rather than painting a clear picture.

(3) First person poses a special technical problem in genealogy. We then have at least two separate narratives going: our own research chronology, AND the life we are researching. It takes considerable skill and experience to keep both stories on track, separate, and memorable.

These caveats aside, I think first person opens realms of possibility. Some of the most memorable genealogy or family history books I have ever read use it: Leonard Todd's Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave; Martha Hodes's The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century; and (in a somewhat different and slightly less documented vein) Ian Frazier's Family. I found them impossible to put down, and well worth rereading and learning from. It's true, these are world-class writers. Few if any of us can use the first-person tool as well as they do, but that is no reason to banish it altogether from our toolbox.




Harold Henderson, "'I' and 'we' in genealogy writing," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

William Berry and His Progeny: Property + Probate = Results

William Berry was born in Rhode Island in 1753, was bound out at a young age, served in the Revolutionary War from New York, was captured on his fourth hitch, and survived 3 1/2 years' captivity on Prisoner Island in the St. Lawrence River. His 17 October 1839 will in Allegany County, New York, named seven children (two already deceased) and a few grandchildren.

William bequeathed mostly land, and specified how his children should dispose of each parcel. In part because of that provision, children and grandchildren made numerous deeds following his death. By correlating these with probate and other records I was able to identify more than 30 grandchildren, born between 1802 and 1833. Those so far identified and traced lived in New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Nebraska.

The two-part article appears in American Ancestors Journal 2011 and 2012, an annual supplement to the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. NEHGS members can read the articles and documentation on line.

Surnames in the children's generation: Berry, Palmer, Greenfield, Hungerford, Potter, Parks.

Additional surnames in the grandchildren's generation: Sheldon, Hornecker, Clark, McNaught, Goodrich, Green, Daboll, Saunders, Sprague, Hackett, Humphrey, Coleman, Bliss, Walrath, Weaver, Burdick, Wheeler, Swartwout, Morgan, Lauther, Sumner, Trask, Mead, Bliven, and Monroe.

William was my late mother-in-law's great-grandmother's great-grandfather. Several mysteries remain, and I hope to have a continuation article written next year on just one of William's grandchildren, a Civil War veteran with more than two dozen grandchildren himself.




Harold Henderson, “William Berry (1753-1839) and His Children and Grandchildren in Massachusetts and New York,” in 2 parts, American Ancestors Journal, third and fourth annual supplements to The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 165 (October 2011): 368-78 and 166 (October 2012):365-74.



Harold Henderson, "William Berry and His Progeny: Property + Probate = Results," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 December 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Weekend Wonderings: What Genealogy Periodicals Do You Actually Read?

I do suspect that the famous top five genealogy journals are more revered than read, but would be happy to hear otherwise. FYI they are National Genealogical Society Quarterly (NGSQ), New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (NYGBR), New England Historical and Genealogical Register (NEHGR), The American Genealogist (TAG), and The Genealogist.

For more popular fare, I tend to prefer NGS Magazine and NEHGS's American Ancestors to the commercial publications. With state and local publications, I tend to be inconsistent because (from my point of view) most of them are. This is not a slam on them, it's a slam on us because we don't write enough.

What do you look forward to reading and why? (Especially things I haven't even mentioned!)


Harold Henderson, "Weekend Wonderings: What Genealogy Periodicals Do You Actually Read?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Newspapers tie Midwesterners back to New England, and a double dose of Henry

Newspapers tie Midwesterners back to New England in two articles in the spring edition of the New England Historic Genealogical Society's popular magazine, American Ancestors.

Patricia Dingwall Thompson unearths a hostage-taking episode near Detroit in the War of 1812. "Living in Montana, I connected with a man in Missouri who owns a handwritten family account of events that occurred in Michigan. I then found historical corroboration from a man in Florida, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, and a database supplied by NEHGS in Boston."

Patricia Bravender describes how she used family reunion notices in newspapers to untangle some of her Hines ancestors, many of whom ended up in Lorain County, Ohio.

Readers also get a double dose of New England Historical and Genealogical Register editor Henry B. Hoff:

* a nice appreciation of the New York State censuses of 1855 and 1865, and

* a methodological smorgasbord (mostly from the Register's table) of "When Do You Think It's Proved?" (In my perfect world that show would replace WDYTYA.)

Hoff sees some gray areas in the landscape of proof: "Since every genealogist is different and every genealogical situation is different, there are still many instances when genealogists disagree on whether to categorize an identification or a connection as definite -- or with a modifying word such as probably, likely, perhaps, or possibly."


All in American Ancestors, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 2012):
Patricia Dingwall Thompson, "From Family Myth to Historical Account: The McMillan Incident in 1814 Detroit," pp. 25-27.
Patricia Bravender, "Establishing Kinship with Family Reunion Announcements," pp. 38-41.
Henry B. Hoff, "Weighing the Evidence," pp. 33-34, 41. 
Henry B. Hoff, "Appreciating the New York State Census," pp. 54-55.



Harold Henderson, "Newspapers tie Midwesterners back to New England, and a double dose of Henry," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Figgie of Cleveland

In the April issue of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Helen Schatvet Ullmann describes Patricia Law Hatcher's The Ancestry of Harry E. Figgie, Jr., of Cleveland, Ohio, as "a good model for presenting research on a diverse ancestry," in this case Swiss and English.