Cynthia Inez Thrall Klein from Illinois to Texas

The Utah Genealogical Association quarterly Crossroads has just published my account of my grandfather's second cousin Cynthia Inez (Thrall) Klein. The story spans three states so it is a good fit for Crossroads, which is aiming for a more national audience and recently began paying for articles. (Those with multi-state articles take note!) I like the layout and the professionalism of the staff.

The magazine is a benefit of UGA membership; since they also offer a member discount for their week-long Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy in January, it's an investment worth considering.

A few other branches of this mostly New-England-to-the-Midwest Thrall family went to Texas. Someday I hope to get to them. For that matter, I know there is more information on Cynthia and her family in Wharton County, Texas, where they settled.

For those interested in procedure, this article is based on roughly the last third of my Kinship Determination Project submitted to BCG last year. Don't forget to publish those puppies once the judges have had their say!




Harold Henderson, "Cynthia Inez Thrall Klein (1867-1932): An Enterprising Illinois Woman in Texas, with Allied Families Reavis and Whyde," Crossroads 8, no. 2 (Spring 2013), 6-17.



Harold Henderson, "Cynthia Inez Thrall Klein from Illinois to Texas," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

Caroline (Thrall) Cooper 1804-1826

In the fall of 2011 I made what seemed like an epic journey to Mt. Carmel, Wabash County, Illinois, to walk and read the Sand Hill #2 cemetery where some of my maternal grandfather's relatives are buried. (This is the cemetery where I was accosted by a policeman, but that is another story.)

Among other things I found the graves of Caroline (Thrall) Cooper (1804-1826) and her brother Aaron (1807-1847), two of my great-great grandfather's siblings. Caroline's stone is well preserved although flat on the ground. According to it, she died just short of age 22. According to other accounts, she and husband Samuel C. Cooper left Ohio in 1824 or 1825 and went down the Ohio and up the Wabash to frontier Illinois, where her husband was involved in a foundry. There she died in childbirth, leaving four children including the baby, all of whom went on to have long interesting lives and many descendants. (Samuel became a Methodist circuit rider in Indiana and had a second family.) I took a picture of the stone.

Because she was a woman and died young, Caroline left few records and has always been a mystery. We can try to guess a few things about her from her children William, Sarah Ann, Samuel, and Stephen. It hadn't occurred to me to do any guessing based on this stone. Last week I was reviewing it for a talk and reread the inscription:

My flesh shall slumber in the ground
Till the last joyfull trump shall sound
Then burst the bands with sweet surprise
And in my saviours image rise

Now I have a high opinion of these relatives, but I didn't think her widower wrote this. Sure enough, it is from Isaac Watts and if you google the first line in quotes, the top hit should be its page at hymnary.org, where there's a short biographical sketch of Watts and two page scans of what appear to be two different tunes, or at least two different arrangements, for this hymn. It does not seem to have appeared in hymnals after 1850.

All these tunes have names, which is so cute. One is called "Felicity." The other, which rather made my hair stand on end, is called "Illinois."

Can you see a drafty cabin in the woods? A wet, clammy day in late fall? A dozen or so people inside singing this in parts, as best they can without accompaniment? Would Samuel have put it on her gravestone if it hadn't been one of her favorites?

Harold Henderson, "Caroline (Thrall ) Cooper 1804-1826," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 December 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Comparisons: One Way to Add Flesh to the Bones

What does it really mean to "put your ancestors in historical context"? Especially when you have no letters or first-person accounts of them at all?

One approach for 19th-century folks involves that most commonplace of genealogy sources, the census. Use it differently. Compare your people with the neighbors (cross-sectional analysis) and compare them with themselves over time (longitudinal analysis). Sure, we'd all love to have a diary or a set of revealing letters. But lacking that, go for the numbers.

In 1850, 1860, and 1870 census enumerators were supposed to write down the value of any real estate owned (plus figures for personal property in 1860 and 1870). In those years, my great-great grandfather's widowed sister-in-law, Cynthia Balentine Thrall, lived in Wabash County, Illinois. Her husband Aaron had died before 1850, so the family was already a bit shadowy. The census population schedules reported that her real estate was worth $2,000 in 1850 and $10,000 in 1860. The 1855 state census showed her livestock worth  $450, and the 1865 state census showed her farm produce all together was worth $2350.

Of course you can convert these numbers into 2012 dollars, but that process is fraught with measurement problems and uncertainty. The census process itself is fraught with uncertainty (we don't know who provided the numbers, and from other research it's not at all clear to me that she owned five times as much in 1860 as in 1850), so I'm not crazy about a longitudinal comparison here either. Tax records would be a good corrective but this is a burned and tornadoed county.

My preferred way to make some human sense of these figures is to set them against those of her near neighbors in each census year: the adjacent five pages on both sides in 1850 and 1860, and the adjacent one page on both sides in 1855 and 1865 (which had only one line per household). These relative cross-sectional rankings were a bit more consistent than the raw numbers:

In 1850 five of her 70 near census neighbors had more real estate than her $2000, placing her (conservatively) in the top 10 percent.

In 1855, thirteen of her 86 near census neighbors had more livestock than her $450, placing her in the two 20 percent.

In 1860, only one of her 82 near census neighbors had property worth more than $10,000, placing her in the top 3 percent.

In 1865, five of her 117 near census neighbors had farm products worth more than her $2350, placing her in the top 6 percent.

These figures should not be taken as precise. I rounded the percentages up to give a more moderate result and to allow for poor-quality information and the randomness of which neighbors were visited. But it's clear that her family was better off than most of their neighbors -- maybe in the top 6-10 percent if we discard the outliers.

There are at least two ways to take this further: the agricultural schedules and overall county averages (perhaps a fairer comparison than immediate neighbors). As luck would have it, in 1860 she did appear in the agriculture schedule, and that was the year for which a diligent census-bureau employee compiled elaborate county-level statistics, obviously by hand (the book was several years in the making). So I was able to learn that the agriculture schedule had a much lower value for her farm in 1860 than the population schedule had.

The agriculture schedule shows that she had 120 acres of improved land; the median sized farm in the county (probably including unimproved land) was a little over 50 acres. In the preceding year her farm had produced 2000 bushels of Indian corn, more than triple the county average (mean). The household's production of butter and hay and buckwheat was also well above average. In terms of basic farm power, Cynthia had five horses (county average 3.5) and $200 worth of farm implements and machinery (county average $101). Some of these numbers can be qualified because she had significantly more land than average to work with. On yield-per-acre basis, for instance, her corn production was likely not so far above the average as the raw number of bushels would suggest.

These figures are reflected elsewhere in their lives. Her son and daughter who lived to have offspring both married into families who were better-off than the Wabash County average (although I haven't finished quantifying that casual observation yet!).

For this particular process, it helps if your folks didn't move around too much, and it helps to be comfortable with numbers and the difference between mean and median when working with "averages." This is just one approach among many possibilities.



Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864), pp. 34-37, line 93 (Wabash County totals), and p. 197, line 93. Also available on GoogleBooks.

1860 US Census, Wabash County, Illinois, agriculture schedule, no subdivision named, p. 25, line 26, Cynthia Thrall;
NARA microfilm publication T1133, “Illinois Nonpopulation Census 1850-1880,” “1860 Agr.: Vermillion [sic] pt.)-
Woodford.”

1850 US Census, Wabash County, Illinois, population schedule, no subdivision named, pp. 404-9 (stamped), pp. 805-15
(penned), families 185-254; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 30 October 2011), citing
NARA microfilm publication M432, roll 130.

1855 Illinois State Census, Wabash County, pp. 15-17, “Township 1”; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.
ancestry.com : accessed 3 November 2011), citing Record Series 103.008, roll 2196; Illinois State Archives, Springfield.

1860 US Census, Wabash County, Illinois, population schedule, Bonpas Precinct, pp. 143-53, families 1015-96; digital
images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 30 October 2011), citing NARA microfilm publication M653,
roll 234.

1865 Illinois State Census, Wabash County, pp. 11-13; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www. ancestry.com :
accessed 3 November 2011), citing microfilm of Record Series 103.010, roll 2185, Illinois State Archives, Springfield.



Harold Henderson, "Comparisons: One Way to Add Flesh to the Bones," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Revolutionary patriot Stephen Simmons in The Genealogist

Of the five most highly regarded US genealogy journals, The Genealogist publishes by far the longest articles. In the Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 issues, Dan W. Olds chronicled the parents and descendants of Stephen Simmons, who served in the Revolution from Connecticut and died near the banks of the Wabash in southeastern Illinois in 1835. The article occupies 57 pages (some books are shorter), and even so it followed the descendants of only three of the five children of Stephen Simmons and Mabel Hunt who lived to maturity.

The family moved west from Windham County, Connecticut, to Greene (then Albany) County, New York, before 1790; on to Scioto County, Ohio, about 1807; and to Wabash (then Edwards) County, Illinois, before 1820. The stories about Stephen, from a variety of sources, suggest a versatile and interesting person to know -- unless perhaps you were a sheriff delivering a court summons. One reported that Simmons "ansearede it by riding out of hearing."

The article rests in part on several wonderful sources -- Simmons's own declaration for a Revolutionary War pension in September 1832, a transcript of the family Bible record, and a collection of family letters from the Gunn family (into which one daughter married) 1808-1862. Most lines are carried to Stephen and Mabel's grandchildren, and two families of great-grandchildren are given as well.

The logistical challenges of managing such an extensive project have to be imagined, as it's so smoothly done. My only disappointment was that the article often cites marriages to index entries rather than to the original records -- an odd choice given that Illinois marriages are readily obtained through the relevant county or the Regional Archives Depository system. Citing derivative sources when originals are available does not seem in keeping with the publishing society's stated goal "to advance genealogical research standards," but perhaps there's more going on here than I know about.


Dan W. Olds, "Stephen Simmons (1765-1835), from Connecticut to Illinois: A Revolutionary Soldier and his Family," The Genealogist 25, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 169-199, and 26, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 133-160.


Harold Henderson, "Revolutionary patriot Stephen Simmons in The Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]