Branching Out

Until now, all of my research has been conducted from my home computer. It is incredible how far I have gotten with online resources, but I have been at an impasse for some time now. Time to branch out! (pun intended)

So, I signed up for some genealogy classes at the public library. The library's collection includes many great resources for ancestry research. They are currently offering classes and tours of their genealogy collection and have experts on hand to guide individuals in their research.  They have programs that I have never even heard of, such as Heritage Quest and WestLawNext. Now that I am retired, I can take full advantage of such resources.

Tonight is "Moonlight Madness," an after hours workshop from 7 - 11 p.m.  Today I will compile and organize my research since someone else may be looking at it and judging me!

More DNA testing

Through a video course on ancestry, I learned that one should get a DNA test on the oldest member of the family line.  Makes sense - the closer you are to an ancestor, the more concentration of their DNA you have.

So I ordered another test, and got mom to spit in the test tube (took her 20 minutes to work up 1/4 tsp of spit!).  The test has been sent off, and I am waiting for the results with great anticipation. I hope this will help solve some of the mysteries of her family's past.

Verifying Facts and Saving Documents

It came to my attention recently that all the research that I have done on Ancestry would disappear forever if (heaven forbid!) the website ever went down. On Ancestry, when I "save" a document to my family tree, it is merely linking the document to a person on my tree.  It does not save anything to my computer. I broke down and purchased Family Tree Maker, which syncs to Ancestry and supposedly saves everything to my computer, but I don't trust it completely.  I decided to systematically save every piece of evidence one by one from Ancestry to my personal computer. After two years or more of research, this is a massive undertaking!  The result, however is totally worth it.  I now have a folder of primary documents that are labelled in detail and easily organized. 

I started with my own profile and downloaded every supporting document. Each document is labelled:  YEAR_LastName_DocumentName_PlaceName.  For example, one might be called: 1859_Allen_USCensus_HancockIL.  At the same time, I create a fresh research log on paper for each person, giving the date, event, document, and conclusions. I am currently on my 3X great grandparents. 

This process is much more organized, and makes it easier to spot discrepancies and inconsistencies in my research.  I am not making any forward progress on building our family tree, but I am certainly shoring up the foundation.

Getting in deep

I broke down finally and bought the Family Tree Maker software.  I have wondered why people would need software when Ancestry does it all for you.  Yesterday I asked another serious genealogy researcher that question.  Her reasoning was... it puts your family records in your own hands in case the website goes down or they start charging exorbitant fees.  It makes it possible to continue working on the family tree even when internet is not available.  It keeps your information private until you are ready to post it on Ancestry, thus allowing you to do all the necessary verification first. I hadn't thought of any of that but it made sense.

The Family Tree Maker software downloaded all of my records from Ancestry, and automatically syncs with my online records. It gives a more comprehensive display of the information on one screen.  It can print out a large number of different reports which may come in handy.  Ancestry prints reports but is more limited.

I've found that the more ways you can look at your information, the easier it is to spot inconsistencies and inaccuracies.  Right away, I was able to see that one of my links was incorrect because I could see the birth and death dates for two generations on the same page. I have had trouble seeing the media and documents that are posted on Ancestry - that might be a major limitation, but I am still working through it.

Research Strategies

So far, all of the research I've done has been by computer, except for family documents shared with me by relatives.  I recognize and appreciate the fact that much of the information I've discovered on Ancestry is there only because someone did a lot of the original legwork in the pre-computer days. 


Here are the resources that have helped me the most in my research:


Findagrave - this website is just amazing.  People from all over the world visit cemeteries and contribute photographs of tombstones, transcribing the information on them.  Some entries are created by family members or descendants, with detailed biographical information.  Others are created by people who have no relationship with the people in the graves, but who wish to add to the body of knowledge.  If a relative of that person wishes to add information, the creator of that entry can transfer it to the relative. A network is created where people can request a photo of a grave in a certain locale, and someone in that locale will provide it.  I cannot express how valuable this website has been to me. 


Google Maps - whenever I have clues to a location, I look it up on a map and explore the area.  Exploring the streets, viewing buildings, and looking at the relationships between places, I have gained insight into my ancestors' lives that at times has broken through a wall in my research.  This strategy has made my research immensely more real and tangible, and has greatly affected my understanding of the way of life of my forebears.  I can go to street view and visit the actual places where my ancestors built their lives.  I can take a snapshot of a building and include it in my documentation.  If I find a plat of a town from colonial times, I can compare it to the current landscape and pinpoint the location of property owned.  Street names have provided clues to my family's stories.  The number of instances where this resource has helped me are countless. 


Ancestry - this goes without saying.  This database grows continually as members add documents and information.  I have learned which sources to ignore - Ancestry trees, Family data, Millenium files - all of these are rife with errors due to amateurs' enthusiasm and lack of discipline!  Their information is valuable only to pick up possible names to verify.  With experience, I have learned which researchers are the most careful and accurate.  I have actually contacted a few of these folks to find out more information.  On Ancestry, there are indexes listing the names but not the actual information included in a variety of resources.  There are also sources such as DAR applications, Census documents, and Veteran's pension applications which contain reliable information.   


Google books - many original transcripts of old books can be found here.  A Google search using a person's name will turn up many of these sources.  I can scroll through a major portion of a book to learn about my ancestors' part in history. 


Postcards and letters - family memorabilia or online - these provide major clues to family relationships, important places, and life events.  There are photos of buildings from as long ago as the mid-1800's.


Journals, stories, personal accounts - these can be original documents or online resources.  Carefully chosen search terms yield a surprising number of sources, such as newspapers and local histories, that might mention your ancestor's name.  Searching multiple ways with different combinations of search terms will affect the results.  These are fairly reliable, especially if they are firsthand accounts, though not necessarily.  I discovered that my great grandmother was a storyteller, and her stories were often passed down by word of mouth and often distorted. 


I have taken the step of expanding my search to International databases.  The next step will be to join subscription websites such as newspapers.com.  Right now I am working on verifying the information I have already added to my tree before adding anything new.

Taking it to the next level

I've reached the point where I am ready to expand my research into new methods and sources.  There are still many options I have not explored online.  I aim to exhaust every source online before resorting to visiting actual places in person.   This is probably the beginning of my investment of financial resources into the project, and also where my research will become quite a bit more tedious.

Today I began watching a video series on Ancestry.com's youtube channel about Genealogical Proof Standards.  So much yet to learn!  I ordered a book published by the Board of Certification of Genealogists. I may look into getting certified as a genealogist myself.  I started a research log.  I looked into the Family Tree Maker software - not sure if I need that yet.  I submitted a post for review on the Ancestry Facebook page.  I had already submitted questions to Genealogy Roadshow and to ask@ancestry.com.  To date, my only expense has been the annual membership in Ancestry and the book I just ordered today.  It will cost more to join the International version of Ancestry, and even more to subscribe to valuable resources, such as Newspaper.com.  I feel like I need to confirm and validate every single name I have already added to my tree before I can add anybody else or spend any more money.

There are many reasons for genealogy research:  publishing, curiosity, legacy... my sole reason for doing this is for my children and their children.  Knowing one's family history is an important part of one's identity.

Research Gets Harder

At first this ancestry project took off like a rocket.  Though I was only able to work on it in my spare time, the pace of progress fueled my motivation.  Every day I would discover some new link to the past.  Progress got a tremendous boost when I was able to connect online with new-found cousins who were also researching our family history.

After months of research, the project moved forward only in fits and starts.  New discoveries happened just often enough to keep me motivated.  Sometimes a closer look proved my former findings to be questionable as I checked my facts more carefully.  Progress sometimes took a few steps backwards.

It is now well into Year Two of this ancestry project.  It is becoming tedious work.  A new bit of information is a rare treasure.   Every now and then, I choose an ancestor and do an exhaustive search online.  At least once a month, I look for inspiration for a blog entry.  My main focus now is to try to make sense of all the accumulated information.

The next steps are to add more of my family's "hard copy" information and do more research outside of the online environment.  I will look for family documents, analyze them, and scan them into the records.  I will interview the few remaining folks in the generation before me to flesh out the facts with stories.  I will study historical records and read accounts of the places and events that personally affected my ancestors' lives.  Now is where the real detective work begins.

The goal of this project is to provide as complete a genealogy as possible for my children.  I want them to have all of the family stories, pictures, and documents within my reach, to be able to put names and faces to our family's history.

Legacy

I have undertaken this ancestry research as my legacy to my children, my nephews and niece, and to all of their children.  I believe that our life on earth is fleeting and our physical being is not our eternal reality.  However, our sense of self on earth is partly derived from our place in history.  Seeing ourselves on a timeline of people who have come and gone gives us a more authentic perspective.

There is so much family history that died with my grandparents and with the scattering of family records among their descendants.  I am grateful for my youthful urgency in interviewing my great grandmother Zaun before she died.  I was not yet even a teenager, but sat down at the bedside of my Nanny and wrote down all of the names and dates that she could remember about her family.  There were tears in her eyes as she struggled to remember some of the details about her brothers and sisters.  From her memories, I painstakingly created a poster of our family tree (with fountain pen and ink cartridge) that I still have.  This poster was the starting point for my Ancestry research decades later.

I hope that it will be meaningful to my children someday.  I have put all of the photos and documents in my possession on each of the profiles so that it is easy to tell who was related to whom and how we all fit together as a family.  I love my family and especially my children so much - I am so proud to be connected with them in this interesting family!

Teresa Marie Allen, part 1

When I first began dabbling in ancestry research a year and half ago, progress happened so fast it was mind-blowing.  On Ancestry.com, it took no time at all to follow some family lines all the way back to medieval times in Europe (Europe has much better historical and genealogical records).  I happily paid the annual fee to join Ancestry.com so I could continue the excitement.  Then it began to be tedious as each branch of the family reached the end and the facts were more and more difficult to find.  Still, random discoveries have kept the fire burning.

Since I do not subscribe the International version of Ancestry, our tree mostly begins with the original immigrants to America.  But overall, it is an impressive assemblage of ancestors!   There are some famous and admirable folks in our family lineage, such as Roger Williams (founder of Providence RI) and Joost Van Den Vondel (the Shakespeare of the Netherlands).  Governors, religious leaders, pioneers, colonists, soldiers of the Revolution... I can't even begin to wrap my mind around it all.

I have learned to be discriminating about sources.  Sloppy research can become a contagion on Ancestry.com as researchers build on inaccurate facts from other family trees.  For instance, when double-checking the facts, I couldn't actually prove a Mayflower connection with reliable sources though there was some anecdotal evidence; therefore, I reluctantly disconnected that link from the tree.  Working on the research only occasionally and for short periods of time, I have spent most of the time over the last few months looking over my sources, fleshing out facts, and adding media.

Start with the biggest question
Last night, I decided to pick a random ancestor to investigate.  My maternal grandmother's lineage has been the most confounding mystery in our family tree, so I chose to look again at my long lost great-grandmother Eva L. Allen, who was born in Illinois.  I had previously been unable to find anything about her after 1900.  I was mainly concerned with finding proof that my grandmother "Teresa" was the same person as "Ethelyn" who was documented as the only child of Augustus and Eva Allen.  I did a search for "Eva L. Allen" on findagrave.com, and was surprised when a 2010 entry took me to Oklahoma.  It turns out that around 1998, an inmate at a low level security prison in Oklahoma had cleared out an old, overgrown cemetery at nearby Old Fort Supply and uncovered hundreds of grave markers no larger than bricks.

Cemetery at Old Fort Supply
http://yireng.blogspot.com/2013/06/another-old-cemetery.html

This photo was taken after 1908 in the early days of the mental hospital. It shows the north line of barracks used as wards. Some of the trees on either side of the road are still there. The tree-lined road or path led from the Superintendent's home, the former Commanding Officer Quarters to the hospital administration offices.
(Fort Supply Historic Site Facebook page).

The graves were of patients who had died at the mental hospital at Fort Supply.  One of them was Eva L. Allen, 1867-1911.  A mental hospital...!  Sure enough, Eva L. Allen is listed on the 1910 census as a patient at the hospital.  My heart raced as I checked facts against each other to be sure it was the right person.  I already knew that, according to the 1920 census, my grandmother had lived in a boarding house in Oklahoma City which is not far from where her mother had died. There were just too many coincidences to dismiss the information.  Sadly, Teresa never knew what became of her mother.  Raised by nuns at a Catholic boarding school in Texas, she remembered a visit from her father, Augustus, but she never knew what happened to him either.  Teresa attended a nursing school in Paris, Texas - I tried to identify the school and came up with St. Joseph Hospital, which was run by nuns.  No proof... yet.  Mom and I conjecture that she changed her name while she was at this school, from Ethelyn to Teresa Marie (perhaps named for a favorite nun?) UPDATE:  see later post with more information about Teresa! 

Update, January 2, 2015:
Further research has brought up more questions about Augustus D. Allen.  I have created a timeline of confirmed events.

Year - Source - Subject - related persons:
1860 Census, Warsaw, Ill.  Augustus, age 1.  (Robert, b. Va.; Elizabeth, b. Ohio)
1870 Census, Hancock, Ill.  Augustus, age 11. (Elizabeth, widowed)
         Census, Littleton, Ill.  (Schuyler County) Eva L. Bosworth, age 3. (OM, Eliza)
1880 Census, Littleton, Ill.  Eva L. Bosworth, age 13. (MO, b. Ohio; Eliza, b. Kentucky)
1883 Marriage record, Littleton, Ill.  Augustus m. Eva on Nov. 25. (Robert, Elizabeth, Orlando, Eliza)
1890 .... (Census destroyed by fire).
1900 Census, Wichita, Kansas.  Augustus, real estate agent (Eva, Eliza, Ethelyn, b. abt 1893)
1904 City Directory, Wichita.  Eva L. Allen, widow of A.D.
1910 Census, Woodward, Oklahoma.  Eva, widow, age 43.
1920 Census, Oklahoma City.  Teresa, age 26.  (fellow boarder, Maude Marshall)
1930 Census, Waukegan, Ill.  Horace, Teresa, H.C. Jr.

This is where it gets tricky... there is documentation of "Augustus D. Allen" residing in Sedgwick, Kansas after Eva was supposedly widowed.  Like my ancestor, this Augustus was also born in Hancock, Ill. and moved to Wichita in 1900.  He was also a real estate agent.  In 1905, the year after Eva was listed as a widow, this Augustus married "Miss Emma Schindler" and became a well known business tycoon in the Wichita area, opening his own Realty Co. on Douglas Avenue in Wichita. (Coincidentally my grandmother grew up thinking her father's middle name was Douglas).  A brief biography by O.H. Bentley does not mention either Eva or Ethelyn/Teresa.  His year of birth is given as 1865, six years later than my ancestor. Also my ancestor was not known to have a love of horses, and he was not orphaned at a very young age (though his father died when he was a small boy; his mother died in the 1890s). This Augustus must have died sometime between 1911 and 1925* because Emma is listed as a widow in the Wichita directory in 1925.  To complicate matters further, there is an Augustus D. Allen listed in Dallas, Tx, in 1915, spouse Emma S.; occupation, grocer. (Dallas is close to where my grandmother was living in an orphanage).

In 1905, Sedgwick County had a population of about 45,000.  What are the chances that there were two Augustus D. Allens, both real estate agents, born in Hancock, Ill., and moving to Wichita the same year?  Did my ancestor die before 1904, or did he live to 1917?  Did he die, or did he abandon his family to start a new life?  If he lived, why the discrepancy in birth year?   Did Eva claim to be a widow rather than bear the shame of divorce?  Was Eva mentally ill, or was she a victim of circumstance?  And the biggest question of all.... Are Ethelyn and Teresa the same person, or am I completely on the wrong track with her parentage?

Augustus D. with Eva
and seven year old Ethelyn