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.

Randolph County (Indiana) Relatives: Ina (Smith) Burdick

In the March National Genealogical Society Quarterly I traced a Smith family from central Iowa in 1870 back to eastern Indiana in 1850. It turned out that the parents of Ina (Smith) Burdick (1862-1932) were John Smith of Wayne County and Elizabeth (Smith) Smith of Randolph County, who were near neighbors.

(Ina married in Kansas City, Missouri, my wife's maternal grandfather's second cousin, Frank Burdick. He was one of the focus persons in the first portfolio I submitted to BCG for certification. So for those who are working on their own portfolios, remember that you may be able to reuse this material later on!)

Ina's relatives on both sides were crucial to identifying her parents and making a convincing case for their relationship, but it's in the nature of proof arguments that they only get mentioned, not described. The new (June) Indiana Genealogist fills in the picture by telling some of the stories of Ina's mother's extended Randolph County family, starting with Temple (1806-1885) and Priscilla (Crossley) Smith (1808-1890), who came up from Adair County, Kentucky, in the early days. Next issue will describe John's somewhat smaller family.

Together their descendants married into more than forty families:
Adams, Addington, Bias, Brake, Burdick, Chapman, Cox, Elliott, Engle (twice), Escher, Fetters, Getter, Hathaway, Hiatt, Hicks, Hildreth, Hill, Jennings, Johnson, Kinert, King, Kolp, Martin, Mason, McCurdy, Miller, Mundhenk, Newman, Pearson, Phillips, Piper, Ramsey, Ranson, Schwepe, Smith (again!), Summers, Swangle, Weaver, West, and Woodcock.

Members of the Indiana Genealogical Society can read it on line.



“Randolph County Relatives: Ina (Smith) Burdick’s Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins, Part One,” Indiana Genealogist 26(2) (June 2015): 5-29.

“Crossing the Continent with Common Names: Indiana Natives John and Elizabeth (Smith) Smith,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 105 (March 2015): 29-35.

Crossing the Continent with Common Names and Living to Tell the Story

As we genealogists soon learn, an amazing number of people have common names. I ran into a few of them seven years ago while working on my first BCG portfolio: Who were the parents of Ina Smith who married Frank Burdick in Kansas City in 1885?

He was the third generation on my kinship determination project, so I didn't have to deal with this side issue right then. But I was intrigued.

It turned out that Ina's parents were John and Elizabeth Smith. They appeared to have come from Indiana, but which ones were they, and where in Indiana -- and was Elizabeth's maiden name Smith too?

I made several runs at this problem over the years, going from thinking it was hopeless to thinking it was too easy. Now I'm on even keel, and the finished article is in the newly posted March issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, so readers can see how I solved it. This version is a little sharper than the original submission, thanks to peer review and good editors.

Of course, it's not likely that either of these two Smith families is one of yours. But you may have a similar sort of problem with different people. Hope it helps!

 NGSQ is a benefit of membership in the National Genealogical Society. Members can read the latest issue (and many old ones) as soon as it is posted.



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

Methodology Thursday: working with derivative sources

We can't say it often enough: if we have only an index entry or an abstract of a record, we need to find the original record, because the index or abstract may contain mistakes and it is likely to have left out some pieces of information that were in the original. Genealogists who take the easy way out and rely on indexes or abstracts are not only failing to meet standards but also may be creating their own brick walls.

The other day I was busy wallowing in derivative sources and realized that there are more dimensions to this question. I was trying to identify a J. W. Smith family living in Joplin Township, Jasper County, Missouri, in 1880, and had little luck backtracking them in previous censuses. Eventually I came across Ancestry.com's database, "Jasper County, Missouri Deaths 1878-1905." 

My search for "J. W. Smith" (exact, in this database produced a remarkable result: 

Name:	Mrs. J. W. @ Smith
Age or Birthdate:	abt 78
Death Date:	14 Jun 1908

I was pleased to see that this person was about the age I was hoping to find. As a result, I didn't spot the oddity about this entry right away, but you probably did! When I did notice it, I looked to Ancestry's explanation of the source for this database. Ancestry says it came from two compilations by Kenneth E. Weant of newspaper death notices in the county, one volume 1878-1899, and another 1899-1905.

Obviously this information did not come from where Ancestry said it did. (I will say right now that I have long criticized Ancestry's shoddy quality control and will continue to do so, even though in some cases poorly cited and  poorly organized online data are better than nothing. But this post is not about Ancestry's lack of commitment to genealogical excellence, except as to the additional research skills it requires of us.)

Fortunately I was working at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, and I was quickly able to locate the volumes Ancestry had drawn on. In addition to the two the on-line giant named, there is a third: Kenneth E. Weant, Jasper County, Missouri, 6957 Deaths Reported in & Chronological Index to Selected Articles from The Joplin Daily News Herald 1 January 1906 to 31 December 1910 (N.p.: privately printed, 2002). Mrs. J. W. Smith appears on pages 100 and 294 of this book.

One mystery down. But you may well wonder why Mrs. J. W. Smith, with such meager information, appears twice in the book. The answer is that not all derivative sources are created equal. When Ancestry turned the book into an on-line database, it chose to omit a good deal of information that Mr. Weant had collected.

Mr. Weant also tells us that either Mrs. J. W. Smith or (more likely) her husband was a military veteran. (That's what the @ sign signified, as explained in the book but not in the online database.) In addition, Mr. Weant gives the date of newspaper publication and list of the specific newspaper microfilms he consulted and where to order them from. He also includes for most people a de facto partial abstract of relationships mentioned in the obituary: Mrs. J. W. Smith was named as the mother of Mrs. J. W. Cole and sister of Mrs. Mary Keane. 

For my purposes that day, this was enough to tell me that Mrs. J. W. @ Smith was not likely of interest to my research. But if I were to seek out the original record(s) here, in particular the published obituary, it would be a lot easier to do by going back systematically from Ancestry's data entry to its (unmentioned) source, because that source (Mr. Weant's third volume) is one step closer to the original and contains a lot more information than Ancestry troubled itself to reproduce -- just as the original obituary may contain its quota of useful information that Mr. Weant left out. 



Harold Henderson, "Methodology Thursday: working with derivative sources," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]


 

Sleuthing for Smiths in Alabama and Mississippi

This blog doesn't normally reach so far south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but blog rules were made to be broken. And what better time than to take note of Laurel Baty's methodological tour de force that leads off the current (June) National Genealogical Society Quarterly (online issues free to NGS members)?

Given a Smith family, she deals smoothly with an array of erroneous records, not to mention the ones that aren't there at all: "Three generations of Martha's family left no estate records. Her parents' marriage record is missing, her father owned no land, and he appears in a single census, which supplies no ages and birthplaces."

She maps and lists land, court, and church records to help identify a father who appears in none of them. The footnotes are revealing: the four words "He witnessed no deeds" are backed up by an every-page search of 23 years of Wilcox County, Alabama, deed books. This article will benefit any researcher, in the South or elsewhere, who's troubled by common-name ancestor issues.




Laurel T. Baty, "Parentage of Martha Smith of Alabama and Mississippi: Overcoming Inconsistent, Incorrect, and Missing Records," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (June 2013): 85-102.



Harold Henderson, "Sleuthing for Smiths in Alabama and Mississippi," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 August 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Sergeant John Smith in The Genealogist

We all get to cheer whenever another John Smith is pulled out of the swamp of ancestral ambiguity -- and that's what Gail Blankenau does in the lead article of the Spring 2012 issue of The Genealogist, a twice-yearly magazine published by the American Society of Genealogists.

This Revolutionary veteran left no birth, death, pension, land, probate, or cemetery records -- but he did leave four notebooks of a journal of his four years at the war. (In addition to hard fighting, as first sergeant he was involved in training the Rhode Island regiment of black soldiers.) Historical information is brought in to good effect, as are eight children and 37 grandchildren.

Two Smith sons settled in Washington County, Ohio; a grandson continued on to Alabama, where a great-grandson ended up fighting against the country his great-grandfather had helped establish.


Gail Blankenau, "Sergeant John Smith of Rhode Island, With Descendants Early in Washington County, Ohio," The Genealogist 26, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 3-23.


Harold Henderson, “Sergeant John Smith in The Genealogist,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post.]

Winter 08-09 Chicago Genealogist

From the current issue of Chicago Genealogist:

"Illinois Staats Zeitung Translations," translated from the German by Virginia Dick and submitted by Gail Santroch. First of a series, obituaries and news items 1861 through March 1872.

"Of Wealth and War: Samuel Lowe Writes Home," by Harold Henderson. Identifying the people Samuel asks after in an 1863 letter to my step-great-grandmother reveals something about Chicago society of the time as well as the ongoing war.

"Anna L. Smith: Chicago Suffragette," by Craig L. Pfannkuche with Nancy Merriman. Anna (1872?-1949) worked her way up in the feminist movement and the Democratic Party and by the 1930s had switched to Republicanism. "Anna's contributions to political freedom of action for women in Chicago have been overlooked by historians of women's progressivism in Chicago."

December's OGSQ

In the December 2008 Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly:

"The Family of William H. Fyffe of Champaign County," by Martha Orsborn Gerdeman*

"Society of Civil War Families of Ohio Roster 2008"

"Ohio Genealogical Society 2008 Writing Competition" [closing 28 February 2009]

"Nathan L. Glover, Akron's Premier Music Educator," by Rena Glover Goss

"1903 Deaths in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Burials Outside of Hamilton County," comp. Kenny R. Burck and Doris Thomson

"Rose's Research," by Mary Alice Austermiller Betley

"The Smiths of Champaign County, Ohio, with connections to Epps, Hall, Stoddard" by Nancy Wright Brennan, CG*

"Decennial Tax Valuation, Cincinnati Real Estate 1892," comp. Jean Overmeier Nathan

"Hulda Emilie (King) Richholt Harris Otterbach," by Joanne Richholt Allison

*Footnoted.