Methodology Sunday with NGSQ: A Boren Family in Pittsburgh

Samuel W. Boren's 1898 Pittsburgh death certificate said that he was 69 and that his parents were both named Boren. Ten years later his grandson wrote down a more informative, brief, and entirely unsourced profile of Samuel's birth family. In the June issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, I treated it as a hypothesis and managed to confirm it, relying on indirect evidence and evidence from better-documented siblings.

Key records were censuses, city directories, Methodist newspapers and records, tax lists, property records, and vital records (in a state other than Pennsylvania). Key tools included establishing a migration chronology (mostly in and around Pittsburgh), creating tables to condense and correlate multiple pieces of evidence, and establishing connections between Samuel, each of his two brothers, and their sisters.

Of course, the conclusion that Samuel's parents were John Boren and Elizabeth Moore just sets up two more tricky parentage problems in early 19th-century "Dark Age" western Pennsylvania genealogy.

Like many articles, this one has had multiple incarnations. It is the more finished version of a case presented to half of the January 2014 Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy Advanced Evidence Practicum. And it will be one of several proof arguments to be dissected in the January 2015 SLIG course "From Confusion to Conclusion." Samuel was or is my great-great-great grandfather-in-law.



Harold Henderson, "Testing Family Lore to Determine the Parentage of Samuel W. Boren of Pittsburgh," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (June 2014): 97-110.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Sunday with NGSQ: A Boren Family in Pittsburgh," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 July 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Back Door to Chicago

Most genealogy societies have been around long enough that they have a significant amount of history, including a written trail of published research results, queries, and transcriptions. Many local periodicals are not indexed. Many are indexed by surname only (making researchers of names like Smith or Jones apoplectic). Many are indexed one issue, or one year, at a time. And then you have to find those indexes.

Fortunately there is a trend to digitize these potential clue factories. Thanks to the Newberry Library and the Chicago Genealogical Society, the Chicago Genealogist now has volumes 1 through 39 (1969-2007) on line and searchable.

Anyone who might have Chicago people should check it out (and then you'll be happier, but as far behind on your day as I am!). But if you're looking for my piece on a Civil War letter from Samuel Lowe, son of Cook County's first sheriff, it's still too recent, but you can read it here.

And speaking of urban research, the front door is open in Pittsburgh, where Historic Pittsburgh has an impressive run of early directories. They are not fully covered in my usual go-to reference, United States On Line Historical Directories.



Harold Henderson, "The Back Door to Chicago," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodists in Meadville

Those who have research targets who were Methodists in western Pennsylvania need to know about the denominational archives at Allegheny College's Pelletier Library in Meadville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania. It would be a good destination anyway, but given the absence of early vital records from Pennsylvania it's a great one.

First of all, it's an archive, so don't try just dropping in. Use the contact information. Volunteer archivist William L. Waybright is very knowledgeable and helpful, but he can't be there all the time. It's by appointment only.

Second, don't expect the archives to be able to tell you whether your ancestor was a Methodist (or an allied denomination, such as Evangelical United Brethren).

Third, check the ancestor's own church first. As in most denominations, records reside at the local level. If a local church ceases to exist, its records may find their way to a denominational archive.

Fourth, be prepared to use a particular variant of cluster genealogy: what ministers were your research targets associated with? The archives will normally have much better records for those who carried the church's message than anyone else.

Fifth, don't be overly focused on western Pennsylvania. The archives has records and published reminiscences that cover adjoining conferences as well.

Sixth, when visiting, don't expect lots of space to spread out. We had the good fortune to meet other researchers who knew the area and resources better than we did, and we met them over what would be a normal-sized kitchen table.

Seventh, be alert to finding aids that area Methodist historians have prepared over the years. Pittsburgh-area Methodists published a weekly newspaper for about a century beginning in 1834, usually under the title of Pittsburgh Christian Advocate. Abstracts and indexes to its marriage and death notices have been published from through 1870. The newspaper itself has been microfilmed, but Meadville holds the films only up to 1890.

Finally, in the likely event that your Methodists went past Pittsburgh into the Midwest and West, additional regional resources do exist. The Chicago Genealogical Society's new blog recently posted on their instructional visit to Garrett Evangelical United Library in Evanston.


Harold Henderson, "Methodists in Meadville," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Reviewing Research from 2002

In 2002 my wife and I made a memorable joint research trip to Pittsburgh in quest of certain of her paternal grandmother's Boren ancestors. We got acquainted with the Historic Pittsburgh web site, the Carnegie library, the Beaver County Genealogy and History Center, and a motel lobby full of bikers. I wrote up a 40-page booklet about the project (minus the bikers) for family members.

How does it look now? Well, the citations are nonstandard, but at least they're there, as are images of original records. I used a variety of records but didn't always suck all the juice out of them. (And this is a problem that requires that.) Judging from what I found in my old files, I also spent a lot of time printing out census images and retrieving unsourced trees from the web. (They may yet come in handy.) So there's some work to re-do, not too much to undo, and a lot more sources to seek out.

The main problem I see now in that booklet is its logic. I wasn't sure where to start. My wife's great-grandfather's grandfather is the last well-documented ancestor, so (as I know now) that would have been the best place to start work. But there is a fairly plausible candidate for HIS grandfather who made a detailed deposition for a Revolutionary War pension in 1839. It was just too tempting, so I tried to work from both ends. Go thou and do not do likewise!

We still don't know if he's for real (he never got the pension, as his service records were not found), and in the meanwhile I have learned that it's not good practice to skip over that intervening generation. Also in the meanwhile more compiled abstracts have been published, more original records are on line, and I have gotten acquainted with a number of knowledgeable genealogists in the left-hand end of the state. Pittsburgh is in our sights once again.


Harold Henderson, "Reviewing Research from 2002," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Yorkshire to New York to Michigan in Letters

Ronald Hill draws on an amazing collection of letters and other saved family documents in following James Snowden (1805-1869) across the Atlantic to New York and the Erie Canal in 1833 and on to Kent County, Michigan, in 1843, all in the lead article of the current New York Genealogical and Biographical Record.

Publishing annotated letters is a sub-genre of genealogy writing that doesn't seem to get much attention, but it presents an ongoing tension between the imperatives of understanding and readability. The author needs to explain to today's readers the many items, now mysterious, that were familiar to the original correspondents. Full explanation of everything would clog up the story; none at all would leave the letters barely comprehensible. Hill follows a middle path.

There is no outstanding genealogical problem here, just a great deal of life as lived 175 years ago, give or take. A cousin and friends left New York for Pittsburgh in 1837; one friend had a certificate that no bank would cash due to the ongoing financial panic. There is much description of masonry jobs or the lack thereof; a page-long account of the death of James's wife's sister; a family tiff over money; and a lament that needs no explanation at all: in 1842 James wrote to his wife of a rental property, "It would all moast be as well to set it on fier when we have got the things out as to pretend to rent it."

Eventually James gave up stonecutting and became a farmer in Michigan, accumulating a compact 280 acres in Alpine Township, Kent County. Family papers include four years of Snowden's farm accounts  -- showing, as Hill explains, that Snowden was able to do much better as a farmer. Another installment is promised.


Ronald Hill, "James Snowden, Stonecutter on the Erie Canal: Part 1 -- The Snowden Letters," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 143, no. 2 (July 2012): 165-85.


Harold Henderson, "Yorkshire to New York to Michigan in Letters," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Get a GRIP and Go Read Another Blog!

 I have been well educated and nurtured and networked at the Salt Lake Institute and at Samford Library's IGHR, but there's a special place in my heart for the new kid on the block . . . because it's closer to home -- all but Midwestern. The Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh opened its first session this week, and here are the three bloggers I know about who are chronicling a sliver of their experiences. Give links in the comments if you know of more!

Shelley Bishop at "A Sense of Family"

Cathi Desmarais, CG(sm) at "No Stone Unturned"

Chris Staats at "Staats Place"

Between them, they should help explain why institutes may sometimes be a better fit for your genealogical learning style than conferences, especially when you need in-depth education.



Harold Henderson, "Get a GRIP and Go Read Another Blog!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Find your Midwesterners in Pittsburgh

Thanks to ResearchBuzz for pointing out a very interesting subset of genealogically valuable material within the historical gold mine that is Historic Pittsburgh: 125 city directories 1815-1945.

As city directory digitizations go, this is a wonderfully well designed site. Let me count the ways:

* it includes actual images of directory pages, as opposed to error-prone transcriptions.

* it offers a long run of consecutive years, which is required for good research, given that directories often missed people in any given year.

* it keeps pages in their actual sequence, rather than mechanically rearranging them in numerical "order," or even conflating different directories of the same year, as Footnote sometimes unfortunately does.

* it allows searches of ancillary matter such as addresses -- making it possible to find extra residents at a given address, even if the city was too large to have had a criss-cross directory organized by address. So this new format is far more than a mere convenience and travel-saver; it is a powerful research tool.

Right now I'm recalling the long afternoons I spent cranking microfilm following my wife's Boren ancestors in the Pittsburgh directories. They were hard-working but not well off, and they moved every year. Happy New Year, and use this fine resource in good health!

Online Directories at EveNDon

Thanks to a poster on rootsweb's Cook County, Illinois, mailing list, I have learned that the free and ad-free site EveNDon has images (not transcripts!) of city and county directories well beyond their Pittsburgh home base. (Also some other materials I haven't had time to check out.) They accept donations for this great service and offer fee-based lookups and copying services if you have needs in western Pennsylvania.

In our area they have the following directories on line:

ILLINOIS: statewide, Cass County, Christian County, Coles County, Shelbyville, Springfield, and Chicago (12 directories 1844-1900)

INDIANA: Fort Wayne (4 directories 1860-1917), Indianapolis (9 directories 1858-1896), Jay County

MICHIGAN: Detroit, Saginaw

OHIO: statewide, Cincinnati (29 directories 1819-1875), Cleveland

WISCONSIN: Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Wood County

FYI if your Midwestern roots stretch back to Pittsburgh, they also have 41 Pittsburgh directories 1761-1951.

As a directory aficionado, I would add that if you're in pursuit of everything about a research target, you may need to resort to travel, hired research, or pay sites (such as Footnote.com) that can offer every-year coverage. Working people's residences and relationships and business ties change very often, and you could easily miss an all-important clue by skipping even one year of the relevant time period in a directory. This also applies to non-appearances; people randomly disappear and reappear sometimes.

Invitation to some inquests

Thanks to my Pittsburgh friend (and 5th cousin once removed) Jan for pointing out a post by Lisa Alzo at The Accidental Genealogist. (It's blog "for genealogists who like to write, and writers who happen to be genealogists!" -- how did I miss that one?) Lisa writes about The University of Pittsburgh Archive Services Center's Coroner Case File Project, preserving and making available Allegheny County coroner's inquest files from 1887 to 1973.

She's hoping that one o f these files will shed light on a probable murder among her relatives, but from some of the comments in the accompanying wiki I wouldn't count on it. One browser of the files reports, "I think that some of my case files [more than 100 years ago] that were ruled suicides were actually misdiagnosed or just plain wrong. In one file a man was found in the Allegheny River, his feet bound and stab wounds in his chest. The coroner ruled it a suicide..." Moral: always evaluate official sources with a wary eye.

These files are an unusual source for unusual circumstances (or, perhaps, for historical background). Similar files covering shorter time spans are also available through the Illinois State Archives' regional depositories for the Illinois counties of Cook, DeWitt, Macoupin, Vermilion, and Wayne.

Genealogizing outside the lines...

The wonderful Genblogfinder tempts me to stretch my definition of the Midwest:

On our far right-hand side, Pittsburgh will be hosting the August 1-3 meeting of the FEEFHS, the Federation of East European Family History Societies. The conference blog lists speakers and topics including "Austria-Hungary" (in two parts, naturally), "Recruiting Rules of the Austrian Army," "Russian Empire Research," and "Polish Archives: Behind the Scenes in Gdansk & Poznan." Conference blogs don't tend to be cutting-edge, but it does give me a warm fuzzy feeling that people are working these resources.

On our left-hand side, the Davenport (Iowa) Public Library's Richardson-Sloane Special Collections Center, AKA "Quad City Memory," is blogging at "Primary Selections from Special Collections." Recent posts include generous excerpts from Capt. Chester Barney's unique and wry recollections of the Civil War, and a cliffhanger about Davenport barber, foot doctor, and ex-slave General Houston.