Books vs. Articles

Slowly I am learning that writing a family history book is not anything like writing an extra-long article. A book is more like infinity  -- walking in a flat desert with no landmarks. The horizon stays in the same place no matter how long you walk.

On the positive side, once done, books are much roomier than articles. I can find out how relatives interacted -- how California cousins took in a Wisconsin relative whose doctor said she would die if she had to go through another winter; how my wife's 20something grandfather, on his way from Wisconsin to graduate school at Yale, stopped by to see an aunt in eastern Kansas (a sizeable detour); and some less reputable exploits. I can also find out how they didn't interact, as when a Civil War veteran died claiming he had no relatives, when he had at least two. (I count him and many like him as casualties of the war even though they lived for decades after.)

And a book has room for diversions and distractions, even though it cannot be as consistently entertaining as  Sharon Hoyt on the many marriages of Ida May Chamberlain (National Genealogical Society Quarterly 106 [September 2018]: 217-38), or John Coletta on anything.

Easy online availability of deeds, probates, and newspapers makes it easier than ever to enrich the story -- and lengthen it (1216 footnotes but who's counting?). Even so, because so few write biographical or autobiographical sketches there are still many gaps. And when the task is to render the formatting consistent over many dozens of pages, it also helps to have the smooth drone of a Cubs game in your ear.

Fannie Fern Crandall and Her Three-Timing Darling "Husband"

My mother-in-law's grandmother's sister Fannie Fern Crandall was not someone we heard much about, and we never thought to ask. The newly arrived (on line) March 2018 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly includes the results of my research that makes her almost as well-documented as her sister, who married a Seventh-Day Baptist minister. (It's available free to NGS members.)

Fannie's father Charles Welcome Crandall suffered an injury early in his Civil War service and later drew a pension. He was caught claiming more disability than he really had, and in his struggle to regain the pension he met up with a charismatic attorney in Chicago -- Frank Ira Darling -- where they were neighbors.

It turns out that Frank's work as an attorney brought him together with many a Civil War veteran, and many a daughter. He had six children with three of his clients' daughters, including the one to whom he was legally married.

Frank died unexpectedly in his 40s, and the story of two of the three came out in a blaze of sensational publicity in January 1898. Fannie was the third and she kept quiet, but evidence starting with Charles's pension file leaves no doubt that Frank was the father of her child, a daughter who grew up and married and left no descendants. (Those who follow NGSQ may recall the tale told by co-editor Thomas W. Jones about George Wellington Edison, an even more swashbuckling and disreputable character in Illinois, in 2012.)

What we will probably never know -- unless old correspondence surfaces -- is what Fannie knew and when she knew it, and what she thought about it all. After a few years in the early 1900s when she went by the surname "Brown" for no known reason, she used the Darling surname throughout the rest of her life. She earned a living and brought up her daughter by clerking and stenography in Washington, D.C., including in the patent office. In later years she had an artistic career in southern California, but she also had to have been a resilient and determined person.

A week to remember

Genealogy institutes are a hybrid between national conferences (lasting a few days with something new every hour or two and attendance in the thousands) and regular college courses (lasting a semester or so). At institutes (attendance in the dozens or hundreds), several courses are offered but genealogists spend five days in just one of their choice. Compared to conferences, there's more time to focus, and more opportunities to find like-minded friends, but not as many topics covered. I've been a fan ever since I first discovered them in 2009 in Salt Lake City and Birmingham.

At the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP) last week, Kimberly Powell and I taught the third iteration of the course "From Confusion to Conclusion" on writing proof arguments -- with great help from William Litchman, Karen Stanbary, and Melissa Johnson, plus a cameo appearance by retiring New York Genealogical and Biographical Record editor Karen Jones.

 Our students were outstandingly inquisitive. Two of them -- Pam Anderson and Shannon Green -- will soon have articles published in the June National Genealogical Society Quarterly, and so were obliged to host the traditional GRIP Thursday night party. (This is Pittsburgh -- we don't do banquets.)

It's a small and intense world but big news still percolates in: this was the week FamilySearch announced the end of microfilm loans. Meanwhile GRIP keeps rolling along, with three separate week-long sessions and several new courses on tap for 2018, including various levels of DNA studies.

Genealogical summaries and family chronicles

These days I mainly work on putting together 3- and 4-generation "downstream" accounts of my wife's and my less-documented ancestors (what are called "genealogical summaries" in the journals, and often closely resemble the "kinship determination projects" required by BCG). These give me much better family perspectives on the whole family than just researching upstream for direct ancestors does.

They also sometimes produce problem articles too. Just now there was a young woman who married into my father-in-law's father's mother's Mozley family. Nobody has parents for her, and it now appears that she at least has siblings and was not born in North Dakota but likely came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire around 1903.

Article about problems (as in NGSQ) are tough to write -- the writer has to show how logic is applied to bring conclusion out of confusion. But I'm finding these family chronicles are not as simple as they look. They pose their own writing problems.

The good news is that often it's possible to drill right down to day-by-day or month-by-month accounts of fortunes and misfortunes, thanks especially to the increasing numbers of digitized newspapers and land and probate records. The interesting news is that a pile of facts, no matter how high, does not a story make.

Often I will go back to the work-in-progress and find that I never wrote a topic sentence (usually because I was  just listing what happened without trying to pull it together or make sense of it somehow), and the story and maybe even the most fanatical reader gets lost. The paradox here is to find ways to be both thorough and concise.

Don't get me wrong -- a pile of facts is a lot better than nothing. But the more we (or our editors!) can see and communicate the stories in their lives, the more likely they are to be read and remembered.

Good times at the 2017 NGS conference

* Being present Friday when my friend and colleague Karen Stanbary was presented the award for outstanding article published in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly in 2016: "Rafael Arriaga, a Mexican Father in Michigan: Autosomal DNA Helps Identify Paternity." Even readers not fluent in DNA will be able to glimpse the power in this technique.

* Hearing LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson's eloquent and nuanced talk at the BCG luncheon Thursday, "Condemnation of Memory: Recalling that African American Genealogy Is American Genealogy" -- which introduced me to some new tools as well.

* Hearing presentations by David Ouimette on Thursday ("Silent Border Crossings: Tracing the Elusive Immigrant Who Left Only Breadcrumbs for Clues") and Thomas W. Jones on Friday ("Converting a Bunch of Information into a Credible Conclusion"). Assemblage is a key intermediate stage between gathering evidence and writing it up. Sometimes we can do it in our heads, but in the more difficult cases we need to lay it all out in plain sight.

* Talking with genealogists, both vintage and new. It seems that is now the main thing I do at national conferences.

* Spending several days within a few blocks of the North Carolina State Archives . . . without ever actually getting there!

* Appreciating the ongoing work to establish good standards for the use of DNA in genealogy.

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Looking back on 2015 writing and prospects for 2016

Last year, with the help of kind editors and colleagues, I published a dozen genealogy articles (four in peer-reviewed journals) and six book reviews. The full list is at Midwest Roots.

I experimented with "double-decker" publishing, following a problem-solving article about an eastern Indiana Smith family in NGS Quarterly with the full genealogical summary of the family in later issues of Indiana Genealogist. (BTW, one needs a long running start to do this. I have been puzzling over this family for six years!) And I experimented with a "review essay" which appeared in the December NGSQ.

And I've had fun with a series of short methodology articles on indirect evidence, negative evidence, and historical context in the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly.

Early 2015 saw the long-awaited publication of La Porte County, Indiana, Early Probate Records, 1833-1850 with Genealogical Publishing Co., a joint production with Dorothy Germain Palmer and Mary Leahy Wenzel -- one of the few such books containing a nearly-every-name index of the probate materials, so that early La Porte researchers can track non-decedents in these records. Proceeds go to our genealogical society, of which Dorothy is president.

I also changed professional focus from client research to client editing. The plan is to spend more time on writing (and more on specific problems and families), and less time on committee work, speaking, and (sigh) blogging. I hope 2016 -- or the 11 1/2 months of it that remain -- will be good for y'all, with publications and credentials galore.

Reading Two Top Genealogy Books Together

The best two books for serious genealogists are Thomas W. Jones's Mastering Genealogical Proof  and Robert Charles Anderson's Elements of Genealogical Analysis.

But they are different enough in their emphases and terminology that reading both may induce vertigo. My review essay in the December 2015 National Genealogical Society Quarterly may help. (Jones co-edits the Quarterly but was not involved in the editing of this piece.) It is free on line to NGS members and available at good genealogy libraries.

And if the review essay doesn't float your boat, enjoy the substantial articles by Laurel T. Baty (AL, GA, NC), Ronald A. Hill (Cornwall), and annual writing contest winner William A. Cox (VA, PA).

And if these don't float your boat either, well . . . back in the 1700s Samuel Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." I would venture an update: "If you're tired of NGSQ, you're tired of genealogy."



“Review Essay: How to Solve Genealogy Problems, and How to Know When They Have Been Solved: A Guide to Elements of Genealogical Analysis and Mastering Genealogical Proof,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 103 (December 2015): 304-308

Genealogy experiments with indirect evidence

That's the title of my article just published in the September issue of On Board, the newsletter of the Board for Certification of Genealogists. It's about how indirect evidence worked in my earlier article about the family of Indiana natives John H. and his wife Elizabeth (Smith) Smith, who ended up in Bonner Springs, Kansas.

On Board appears three times a year and anyone with $15 to spare can subscribe here. Or you can read selected article from past issues for free on the BCG's website here. The NGS Quarterly is a benefit of membership in the National Genealogical Society.




“Genealogy Experiments: Indirect Evidence Up Close,” On Board vol. 21, issue 3 (September 2015): 21-22.

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

Methodology Monday backtracking Jacob Wynkoop (NGSQ)

Jacob Wynkoop died in Morgan County, Ohio, in 1842, placing his entire life in what I call the "Dark Ages" of US genealogy, before the first every-name census was taken in 1850. In the June 2014 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Stephen B. Hatton traces the Wynkoop family back by studying their associates (and in one case the associates' associates), the Sears, Power, McNabb, Brabham, and Combs families.

These five families lived near one another, intermarried, went to court, sometimes bought land -- and, most importantly, produced more records than the Wynkoops did! Clues from both Ohio and Virginia show that they all went back to Loudoun County, Virginia.

The importance of this sizeable pile of evidence becomes even clearer near the end of the article, when the author reveals a much smaller pile of direct evidence about Jacob's family, and shows how the pieces fit together. See the article itself for details (the quarterly is a benefit of membership in the National Genealogical Society and is available in good genealogy library collections).

Many of us would have put the direct evidence up front, but I think Hatton is on to something in this case by playing his strongest cards -- indirect evidence from friends, associates, and neighbors -- first. Check it out and see what you think!



Stephen B. Hatton, "Using Networks to Backtrack the Migration and Identify the Parents of Jacob Wynkoop of Morgan County, Ohio," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (June 2014): 111-27.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday backtracking Jacob Wynkoop (NGSQ)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday and Labor Day with Philippina Kicherer

Genealogy is about remembrance, not just descendants. Or as Tom Jones puts it in Mastering Genealogical Proof, genealogical questions are usually about a relationship, identity, or activity (pp. 7-8).

Judy Kellar Fox's article leading off the June 2014 National Genealogical Society Quarterly is an example of an activity question, but not one like whether someone served in the Revolution. Her subject, Philippina Magdalena (Kaiser) Kicherer, emigrated and married late, helped raise stepchildren, ran a Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, farmhouse, and died in 1909.

How and why did she come there?

Without the aid of family letters or reminiscences, Fox spotted the name of a man who was Philippina's associate, not her husband's, and the name of a particular part of Germany rarely included in US census designations -- and worked out Philippina's otherwise forgotten story. Sometimes the supposedly dry bones of technical genealogy are the only way to learn those stories.





Judy Kellar Fox, "Why and How Did Philippina Kicherer Immigrate to Jefferson County, Pennsylvania?," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (June 2014): 85-92.

Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday and Labor Day with Philippina Kicherer," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday with Elizabeth Shown Mills, the FAN club, and DNA

No, I will not retrace all the steps of Elizabeth Shown Mills's argument in the June National Genealogical Society Quarterly, "Testing the FAN Principle against DNA: Zilphy (Watts) Price Cooksey Cooksey of Georgia and Mississippi." But the article is significant in more ways than size (23 pages):

* It builds on previously published hard-won research. Two of the five generations discussed here were documented in previous articles. Most of us begin with some woolly family lore and work from there. That is the first step, and Mills does discuss family lore here. But building on prior research is what scholarly disciplines do. And it will become increasingly prevalent in genealogy as DNA evidence becomes ubiquitous.

* As the title says, it uses both documentary and DNA evidence. At least six previous NGSQ articles using both kinds of evidence were published in:

June 2012 (Warren Pratt, "Finding the Father of Henry Pratt of Southeastern Kentucky," vol. 100:85-104), 

June 2011 (Judy Kellar Fox, "Documents and DNA Identify a Little-Known Lee Family in Virginia, vol. 99:85-96),

September 2009 (Daniela Moneta, "Virginia Pughs and North Carolina Wests: A Genetic Link from Slavery in Kentucky," vol. 97:179-94),

March 2008 (Daniela Moneta, "Identifying the Children of David Pugh and Nancy Minton of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee," vol. 96:13-22), and

December 2005, a themed issue on genealogy and genetics (Anita A. Lustenberger, "David Meriwether: Descendant of Nicholas Meriweather? A DNA Study," 93:269-282; Donn Devine, "Sorting Relationships among Families with the Same Surname: An Irish-American DNA Study," 93:283-293 with a brief September 2007 update 95:196). 

These earlier articles used Y-DNA (male line). As far as I know, Mills breaks new NGSQ ground here by using evidence from both mitochondrial (female-line) DNA and autosomal DNA (the 22 chromosome pairs that recombine with each generation).

* Mills builds an intricate documentary case with indirect evidence that Zilphy was actually "Lucy" (the name "copied from an old family record") daughter of Judith and Rev. John Watts, and that Zilphy's daughter Nancy was the mother of Elmira Parks -- based on approximate dates, multiple associations, multiple name duplications, and an analysis of handwritten L and Z in this time period. If you want the details, join the National Genealogical Society or visit a good genealogy library.

* Mills does not ask or answer the question, "Would these relationships be proved if we did not have the DNA evidence?" She assembles the documentary evidence, then the DNA evidence, which confirms it. THE DNA EVIDENCE COULDN'T EVEN HAVE BEEN COLLECTED WITHOUT DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE SUGGESTING WHO TO TEST. The question of how DNA evidence functions within the Genealogical Proof Standard is for another day. Enough examples of this quality may render the question academic. The specific uses of DNA evidence in these articles is already under discussion among genetic and documentary genealogists.

 Although much genetic genealogy is necessarily shrouded in confidential situations, there are plenty of good publishable cases that have yet to be written up. Seven articles in nine years isn't enough! The more high-quality peer-reviewed articles we have, the easier it will be for us to learn more about how these two streams of evidence can converge. We need more people crossing the documentary-DNA line from both sides.



Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Testing the FAN Principle against DNA: Zilphy (Watts) Price Cooksey Cooksey of Georgia and Mississippi," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (June 2014): 129-152.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with Elizabeth Shown Mills, the FAN club, and DNA," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 August 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday with William Gray and an earthquake (NGSQ)

What's worse than a burned county? Would you believe an earthquake county? In the September 2013 National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Melinda Daffin Henningfield expertly traces a common-name ancestor, William Gray, who was briefly a judge in New Madrid County, Missouri Territory, just after the gigantic earthquakes of 1811-1812, during which the Mississippi River briefly ran backwards.

Those who have common-name brick walls, missing records, and tantalizing potential records scattered across several states can pick up ideas from Henningfield's account, even if their problem family has another name. They will also appreciate the variety of records she brings to the table.

Readers of Thomas W. Jones's Mastering Genealogical Proof will find here an example of one of the less common ways to structure a proof argument: the "building blocks" approach (p. 89). The author moves from one cluster of evidence to the next, but the clusters are organized more by relevance to the case than by chronology or other logic. Gray was in middle age at New Madrid; gradually his later Kentucky and earlier Virginia residences come to light, as do the family Bible. Census evidence, church records, handwriting samples, and onomastics (naming patterns) come late in the story. No piece of evidence names William's father, but the combined weight of the evidence from seven counties and four states is as hard to resist as -- an earthquake.





Melinda Daffin Henningfield, "A Family for William Gray of New Madrid County, Territory of Missouri," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (September 2013): 207-28.

Photo credit: Richard Miller Devens, Our First Century (Springfield MA: C. A. Nichols, 1881), 220; digital image, Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=XJU_AAAAYAAJ : viewed 21 April 2014). Also,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811%E2%80%9312_New_Madrid_earthquakes

Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with William Gray and an earthquake (NGSQ)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 April 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday with many Robert Walkers (NGSQ)

So you have a flash-in-the-pan ancestor with first and last names common as dirt who left no clues whatsoever after 1830, let alone 1850? Check out how Pamela Stone Eagleson dealt with Robert Walker of North Carolina and Indiana in the September 2013 National Genealogical Society Quarterly. Her article may help even if your difficult person is John Smith.

Robert did future researchers one favor by marrying Charlotte Pirtle (NOT Jane Smith!) in Rockingham County, North Carolina; moving with her to Orange County, Indiana; and leaving two children before he disappeared down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers looking for work in 1829. Their marriage date helped establish his age. One Rockingham County Walker family lived near her father. That Walker's estate got tied up in a year-long lawsuit over land he had sold but for which he had not executed a deed. Too boring to follow up on? Think again. The papers included a neighbor's deposition naming all the heirs, including Robert.

But was Robert the heir really the same guy as Charlotte's husband? In addition to parental proximity, the evidence making this "likely" includes timelines, analysis of deeds, a Y-DNA comparison, and naming patterns. The clues add up and no contradictory evidence appeared. Every case is different but the tools -- and the persistence -- can be applied anywhere.



Pamela Stone Eagleson, "Parents for Robert Walker of Rockingham County, North Carolina, and Orange County, Indiana," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (September 2013): 189-99.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with many Robert Walkers (NGSQ)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 April 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

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.]

Is there a finite amount of genealogical evidence?

Tony Proctor has a thoughtful post over at Parallax View, discussing the concept of "proof" and how it differs in science and in genealogy. I encourage you to read the whole thing as he has a lot to say. Since thoughtful theoretical discussions are scarce in genealogy, I thought I'd add three thoughts.

(1) I'm surprised that neither the post nor the comments allude to the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) or the recent book that explains it most thoroughly, Thomas W. Jones's Mastering Genealogical Proof.

FYI if you're new: the GPS is the only widely accepted standard of proof in genealogy, and it states that no conclusion is proved without five things: thorough research, good citations, analysis and correlation of evidence, resolving any contradictions, and a written account. The best genealogists then working put this GPS together at the end of the 20th century under the auspices of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists (BCG_, as an improvement for our purposes on the "preponderance of the evidence" standard borrowed from the law.

(2) Tony writes,

"Science is about the here-and-now whereas genealogy is about the been-and-gone. What this means is that genealogy only has a finite set of evidence available, and although more of that set may be discovered over time, no evidence outside of that set will ever be found. It also means that evidence cannot be created on demand in order to solve a particular problem, or to support/refute a given proposition. On the other hand, in science — technology permitting — an experiment can be conceived purposely to test a given theory, or to separate two competing theories. . . . Whereas science can usually conduct a specific experiment to disprove some of the candidate theories, and so support the remainder, genealogy can only search for more items of evidence that already exist. If they don’t exist somewhere now then they never will in the future either."

Some sciences, such as paleontology, are about the been-and-gone. I suppose that in the abstract both genealogy and paleontology only have "a finite set of evidence available," but in practice nobody knows all of it or even where it is. Both paleontologists and genealogists find new evidence all the time.

It's true that paleontologists and genealogists cannot conduct laboratory experiments on the past. But they do have the ability to make predictions based on what they know, and then see whether further research supports those predictions. These predictions and tests are quite similar to an experiment. If I find that a man's wife is named in a deed where he sells property, I can predict that there is likely to be some additional evidence of the marriage that I have not yet seen (whether a formal record of the event or an appearance in an obituary), and go look for it.

But I have a quarrel with the whole idea of a "finite" amount of evidence anyway. Evidence is information that can be used to answer a specific question. (That is the agreed genealogical definition.) Sometimes ingenious genealogists find evidence where others might not have perceived any at all.

In a recent NGSQ article by Judy G. Russell, she used records of people working on roads to ascertain when someone died (who had never worked on the roads). Many genealogists would not have thought of using that information as evidence to answer the question "When did Mrs. X die?"

I'm inclined to think that even if the amount of genealogical information is finite, the amount of evidence is not, because it depends on human ingenuity in the use of the information -- much as scientists use ingenuity to design experiments. (Improved indexes can also make information much more available to be used as evidence, as in this example from a few days ago.)

(3) IMO, it's useful to figure out just what constitutes "proof" or "evidence" in different disciplines. I don't think it's useful to fuss about whether one discipline can use the word in a different sense than another discipline, because that's just not going to change. It's not that hard to understand that new evidence can supersede a past proof in genealogy as in science, and that that kind of thing does not happen in mathematics.


(Happy New Year! By Blogger's count, this is MWM blog post #1300.)



Judy G. Russell, “'Don't Stop There!,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 99(1):37, March 2011.

Harold Henderson, "Is there a finite amount of genealogical evidence?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 January 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.]

Interestingly false information -- a research travelogue

A certain kind of information can come in handy when genealogy gets complicated. It might be primary, secondary, or undeterminable; for this purpose it doesn't much matter. Whichever way, the information is false on its face, but when viewed in context with other information it points to a truth.

In 1916, Levinna (Reynolds) Holmes swore that she had been born in Ripley County, Ohio, 3 May 1831. (Oh yes, this is a Dark Age problem.)

She was wrong. There is no such county. There is, however, a Ripley County in Indiana. It's not far from the river and state called Ohio, and just north of Jefferson County, Indiana, where Levinna was living in 1850.

I had found her father William there in 1850 (when he was employed as a blacksmith), and in Brown County, Ohio, in 1830. But the 1840 census just did not give enough information to sort through the multiple William Reynolds in two or three states.

Now her false information prompted me to look for William in Ripley County, Indiana. Bonanza! I found two of him! Wait, that's not so good. The two Williams were both in their 30s, had apparent wives of the same age, had two apparent sons, and one apparent daughter of the right age to be Levinna. How to tell them apart?

Every entry in the 1840 census stretches across two wide pages. We rarely look at the second page. (We can't even download it from Ancestry.com because it's not indexed). Among other things it gives the number of people in each household who were involved in what were seen as the seven principal economic activities: mining; agriculture; commerce; manufacturers and trades; navigation of the ocean; navigation of canals, lakes, and rivers; and learned professions and engineers.

On one William's page, every household had someone in agriculture, nothing more.

On the second William's page, a small portion of which is shown above, every household but one was the same. The one exception was the sixth line down. William's five-person household was reported to contain one person in "manufacturers and trades." Sounds like a blacksmith to me!

Obviously the work is not done. But pending further confirmation, this and other information makes me pretty sure he's my man. And I wouldn't have made it this far if his daughter had just said "Ohio."

A similar piece of interestingly false information played a role in my June NGSQ article, "Jethro Potter's Secret" (p.111).

In both cases, what makes the misinformation useful is knowing enough about the people and localities involved to recognize two things:

(a) the information is false as stated, but

(b) when its errors are unwound it can be useful anyhow.

As a rule, the more we know, the more we can find out. This is just one more reason that it's worthwhile to look back over information collected over a period of years to find some hitherto unrecognizable diamonds in the rough.

Has IFI helped you in a genealogical quest? Have you published the results yet?






Harold Henderson, "Jethro Potter's Secret: Confusion to Conclusion in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (June 2013):103-112. 
 

1840 US Census, Ripley County, Indiana, Otter Creek, p. 121, line 6, Wm. Reynolds; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : viewed 28 September 2013), citing NARA microfilm publication M704, roll 92. The other William Reynolds is at p. 85, line 20.

Harold Henderson, "Interestingly false information -- a research travelogue," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

My upcoming workshops in January 2014

Both in Salt Lake City:

• Friday January 10, as part of the Association of Professional Genealogists' Professional Management Conference, "The Story of the Story of Jethro: The Making of an NGSQ Article":

  Workshop Summary: 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 it other genealogical writing and editing easier.

• One day during the week of January 13-17, as part of the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy's Advanced Evidence Practicum, a western Pennsylvania problem from the 1800s: finding parents by analyzing and correlating evidence to prove or disprove a family story.

Harold Henderson, "My upcoming workshops in January 2014," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 September 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.]