A Day in the Life: Probate

You are six hours away from home. The probate clerk has unlocked the records room, containing probate information back to the beginning of the county, and left you to it.

The will books are there, but books of probate court proceedings from early days are hard to find. Where are the probate packets (AKA "loose papers")? In one corner, a likely-looking group of metal shelves contain boxes of  . . . original marriage returns, handwritten on scraps of paper, bundled up in groups for each year -- 1843, 1844, 1845. A treasure for another day.

You look for an overall index. You find volume 2 -- which begins in the 1850s. You find Volume 1, a different-shaped book with a slightly different label in another part of the shelving. The desired decedent, from the 1840s, is there. And her case has a number.

The probate packets are on the other side of the room in ranks of big metal file drawers. The packets are in strict numerical order, but the order is NOT chronological. Worse, the number you found in the index book applies to someone else's probate altogether.

You paw carefully through a drawer that contains three rows of tight-packed trifolds in their narrow heavy paper or light cardboard holders, all from the 1840s. The decedent you're looking for isn't there. But as you scan the jacket labels one by one, you notice that everybody in the drawer has a surname beginning with B, and every packet is dated in the 1840s. Since few people die in alphabetical order, a light dawns. You remember a classroom and a distinguished teacher admonishing students to think about how and why a given record was created. Now you need to think about how the record was treated after creation!

These 1840s probate packets were not fitted up with fine jackets back in the near-frontier days when the cases were heard in court. They were probably tied up in string and left in drawer, as the marriage returns remain to this day. At some point, perhaps in the comparatively affluent early 1900s, the probates got special treatment. The county clerk must have bought several gross of jackets, and someone went to work sorting, labeling, and numbering all the old probate packets so that they could be preserved and relocated at need.

How did the clerk organize the packets? Alphabetizing them all may have seemed like a herculean task, and it would mix probates from very different eras. But putting them in exact chronological order would have been difficult and largely irrelevant, since some probates that began in 1840 ended then, and others dragged on for years. Evidently a compromise was reached: sort them all by decade, then alphabetize each decade by the surname of the deceased, and number them in that sequence. Anyway, that's how it looks to you now, and your job is not to conjure up a history of one county's probate office but to find that one packet!

The theory was close enough to help. You quickly put your hand on the right packet -- with dozens of pages inside, each breathing a bit of life from the 1840s. Time to sit down and scrutinize every scrap, all the time wondering if someone else would have figured out this organizing scheme sooner, and how your experience might benefit the next comer.




Harold Henderson, "A Day in the Life: Probate," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History for Non-Readers

Colorado State University Pueblo historian Jonathan Rees writes over at The Historical Society:

 . . . humanities professors faced with non-reading students have to teach their recalcitrant readers the kinds of reading skills that they’ve never learned.

. . . In their classic How to Read a Book Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren speak of Elementary Reading, Inspectional Reading, and Analytical Reading.  To get students to that third level, you have to read with them.  Open the book during class.  Make them read aloud to the class.  Discuss the implications of those ideas.

Rees is also the author of the recently published Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life, covering the US 1877-1929 (and available as an e-book). His list of "case studies" makes me suspect that even those of us who think we know some history may benefit from reading it . . . out loud or otherwise. (If it's as good as it could be, I might agitate for a prequel covering 1845-1877.)



Jonathan Rees, "Bend, Don't Break," The Historical Society, posted 26 November 2012 (http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2012/11/bend-dont-break.html : accessed 26 November 2012).


Jonathan Rees, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2012).


Harold Henderson, "History for Non-Readers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Interruptions

Being able to focus on just one thing for half a day is an unusual luxury in my world, but it's often the most fun and most efficient way to work. Our work rarely lends itself to that arrangement -- and I'm talking just within the framework of genealogy itself, not even taking into account extraneous events like illnesses, car breakdowns, oven fires, kids' and parents' urgencies, and vacations. Any given project often has to be set aside because the next step involves a trip or waiting for someone else to make the trip, or because a closer deadline takes precedence.

I get so used to being interrupted that I find myself interrupting myself (to check email or Facebook or FamilySearch for new databases, if nothing else). This is rarely a good thing. How do you do interruption management?



Harold Henderson, "Interruptions," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Teaching What You Just Learned

James Lang, a professor of English at Assumption College, has an interesting review-and-commentary article dealing in part with Therese Huston's Teaching What You Don't Know.

Having read the article and not the book, I suspect they are mistitled, and that the correct title would be something like "Teaching What You Recently Learned." The core argument seems to be that novices (recent learners) remember better what it's like not to be learning a subject than do long-time experts. Lang quotes Huston: "A content novice is also more likely than a content expert to relate difficult concepts to everyday, common knowledge—to something the student already knows—simply because the instructor doesn't have a vault of specialized knowledge on the topic from which to draw."

There is surely some truth to this, but I can think of plenty of counterexamples in genealogy world. And surely one job of a good teacher is to retain that precious memory of their former ignorance and how they climbed out of it. Your experience?


[P.S. Yes, Huston's book was published almost four years ago. On this post-Thanksgiving week, I also thank the publishers and editors with the good sense to know that books published more than six months ago are still worth writing and talking about.]



James Lang, "Teaching What You Don't Know," Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 October 2012 (http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-What-You-Dont-Know/135180/ : accessed 22 November 2012).

Therese Huston, Teaching What You Don't Know (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Harold Henderson, "Teaching What You Just Learned," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Always Room for More Black Sheep

The current New York Review of Books includes a nice review of what sounds like a good readable background book if your research takes you repeatedly back into the Gilded Age (say 1870-1900). It's called A Disposition to Be Rich, and follows the life of the author's great-grandfather Ferdinand Ward (1851-1925), who was the Bernie Madoff of his day and then some.

Ward grew up in Geneseo, New York, county seat of Livingston County, and it is suggested that his career of compulsive fraud may have been a reaction against the omnipresent piety of the Ward family household and the Burned-Over District in general. The side issue that interests me is that such towns often emphasize local history in their school curricula, but one Geneseo native I know never heard of the man. (It's not as though the town is deluged in celebrity.)

So the genealogical moral may be that, wherever we're working, we may well have plenty of local "black sheep" to rediscover. Then again, if they have been discovered (and are of an "acceptable" type?), they may be fantastically overexposed, like Belle Gunness of La Porte, Indiana.



Geoffrey C. Ward, A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States (New York: Knopf, 2012).


 Christopher Benfey, "A Magnificant and Audacious Swindle," New York Review of Books, vol. 59, no. 19 (6 December 2012):58, 60.


Harold Henderson, "Always Room for More Black Sheep," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Misteaks

We all make mistakes . . . constantly. In my own lives, I have:

* constructed skylights that leaked persistently,

* nailed up clapboards on a chicken house backwards, so that they conducted water into the wall instead of away from it,

* publicly expressed bewilderment as to why anyone would cite the 1880 census any differently from the 1850, and

* submitted a writing contest entry about a three-generation family, in which I cited no probates or property records.

The question is not whether we're going to make mistakes. That's a given. But we have a choice of what we do afterwards.

Option 1: We can hug our mistakes to ourselves, and lash out at anyone who points out, even in a very general way, that they are mistakes.

Option 2: We can resolve to do better (or in my case, to take up something other than carpentry!) and learn from the correction.

The other day a fellow genealogist wrote an exasperated post complaining about "drive-by genealogists" and how much unsubstantiated genealogical information is posted on line. Without naming names or web sites, she outlined some of the basic standards of evaluating evidence. She did note that "a researcher might find a document that says a couple married on a specific date. That researcher may tell others that this 'proves' the marriage. In fact, it isn't proof, but it is evidence of the marriage and needs a bit more work."

A number of other genealogists responded by choosing Option 2 and complaining about her complaint! Some called it elitist. Some said they had no time for source citations. One commenter sarcastically expressed surprise that a document didn't prove a marriage. (It doesn't. One document by itself doesn't prove anything, because any document can be wrong. Proof comes from multiple sources that corroborate each other. Check it out here for starters.)

There are no carpentry police, at least not out in the country. There are no genealogy police, and there never will be (although the original poster did kind of wish for some).

But there are plenty of people who can tell good from bad. It would not be elitist for others to snicker at my misbuilt chicken house, because it really did not protect the structure from the elements. Similarly, it is not elitist to point out that our family and other readers won't believe our family tree when it lacks a sound foundation. Of course there are better and worse ways to make this point. Good teachers and responsible genealogists will find ways to do it in a kind and encouraging manner. But whether stated well or badly, it remains a fact.

Cut-and-paste genealogists are free to spread unsubstantiated, dubious, false, or absurd information -- and will remain free to do so. We can build however we want. But what we can't do is build poorly, glory in it, and expect respect from those who know better.



Sharon Tate Moody, "Drive-by genealogists should learn a few rules," Tampa Bay Online, posted 18 November 2012 (http://www2.tbo.com/lifestyles/life/2012/nov/18/banewso8-drive-by-genealogists-should-learn-a-few-ar-567094/  : accessed 23 November 2012).
 

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


Photo credit: garryknight's photostream at Flickr.com (http://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/3813921093/ : accessed 23 November 2012), per Creative Commons.

Unfortunate Titles and the Value of Browsing

Strolling along an aisle of physical books in an actual library is a really retro thing to do. But given the imperfections of book production and storage, it's also a useful activity. I once discovered a whole set of marriage abstracts because I came across a book with an unpromisingly general title on the spine: "Marriages 1834-1855."

Because I came across it in the right part of the library, where my target location was, I pulled it out, and discovered what it was, and later found additional books in the series. These were obituaries and marriage notices in a place and time where newspapers were terse and vital records non-existent, abstracted from a denominational newspaper that shut down eighty years ago.

"You never know until you look." And you haven't looked until you've tried both the retro and the up-to-date forms of looking. 


Harold Henderson, "Unfortunate Titles and the Value of Browsing," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]