Never perfect, but good enough

Such a long time since I’ve added a post! Bear with me -- there is much to report. Besides working on a narrative about my Cain ancestors, I’ve spent a week in Salt Lake City, done some traveling, and dealt with various at-home projects that just don’t seem to end. In other words, life intervened.

The Cain story is ready for the printer, if I don’t find one more minute piece of information to add, or notice another comma out of place. What do they say? “Perfection is the enemy of good.” Just as no family history is ever complete, this small sliver of mine is only tentatively “done”  (and I can never claim perfection). But at this point I really need to say “enough” because there are other lines I’d really like to return to!

What have I learned from doing this? For one thing, trying to write something down as a story instead of just a string of charts and notes really makes me look much more carefully at what I’ve gathered. New information comes online every day, and some of my earliest research was done well before the existence of FindaGrave, Ancestry, or that online treasure, FamilySearch. New sources for obituaries, in particular, have provided a wealth of fascinating data. And I learned a particular lesson: if, for whatever reason, you cannot find an obit for a particular individual, try to find one for a spouse, child, or sibling.

Another lesson: when one puts something iike this together, patterns emerge that may have been hidden before. Looking at a person singly, or just with his/her immediate family, is what I often do when entering new data. But writing about that same person as part of an extended group makes certain information stand out. Sisters who married men sharing occupation, siblings who left home and ended up in the same place elsewhere, relatives who died within days or weeks of one another -- that sort of thing invites further examination.

It’s been a rewarding effort, and one I hope to reprise with other ancestral lines in due time.

Why I love Laura

When I read to my young children many years ago, our favorite books included the “Little House” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, for its gently fictionalized depiction of the author’s pioneer life. On a cross-country road trip we even visited DeSmet, South Dakota, where there is a Laura Ingalls Wilder museum. 


This was long before genealogy grabbed me by the throat, mind you.

As you may recall, Laura’s family, Pa and Ma, Carrie, Mary, and Laura herself, lived in Wisconsin, Kansas and Minnesota in the post-Civil War period. Their tales of log-cabin living, threats from wild creatures, and plagues of grasshoppers, were counterbalanced by accounts of Pa’s fiddling and singing, the girls’ playthings, and the descriptions of the endless prairies, ice-bound lakes and dark woods where they made their home at various times.

To me it was simply a delightful set of stories from a far-off time and place, with no particular relation to my own experience. So when “Pioneer Girl: the Annotated Autobiography, Laura Ingalls Wilder” came out recently, it caught my interest just for that reason.

However, it turns out the scholarly notes that accompany the text are enough to make the genealogist’s heart sing.  Not only do the editors pay homage to census and vital records for research, but the work also includes period photos, maps and references to such sources at the Bureau of Land Management, and it is rich with historical details about the realities of living on the land in that time and those places.

But there is a more personal reason I find the book of particular interest. From 1877-1879, Laura’s family lived in southwestern Minnesota’s Redwood County. And I have a letter from my grandmother’s sister, written in 1885, when she was in adjoining Murray County. Lizzie Records and her husband Josiah moved there from Indiana in the 1860s, so would have been in the region at the same time as the Ingalls family. Now, to me, that is an interesting coincidence! And it tells me what living conditions might have been like for my own kin. 

Lizzie was writing to my grandmother, who had evidently asked for some family information. She said: “Well, for a history of my life in the last twenty years, we came to this far off western country twenty two years ago, the same fall your Ma died. … It seems but a day since I left my motherland and yet it seems like ages to think of the changes that has taken place.” They had five children, more or less contemporaries of the Ingalls offspring.

That letter is a treasure to me, and its significance is enlarged now by the knowledge that she and her family lived so near Laura and her family, and probably shared similar experiences.

Who ARE they?

Annabelle Cain

Genealogy is all about tracking down relatives, living and dead, though mostly dead. We all know that. But then there are the ones who perch out on the edges of our family tree --  clinging there by reason of a previous marriage, informal adoption, or some other situation. And while they may not be the main focus of our research, they ARE there … sometimes just pleading for recognition.  

A couple of my puzzles were not really on the margins, but did remain elusive for a long time. Franklin Lee Parkison, my grandmother’s cousin, was one of what I call the 
“lost boys,” single, with no fixed address. His widowed mother remarried and it appears they barely kept in touch.  I finally found him through a death certificate which had mispelled his surname.


Another was Albert Kelsey Thompson, also a cousin, also single and also on the move. I THINK I’ve found him, in the potter’s field section of a Sacramento, California, cemetery.


Then there are the youngsters taken in by families, for whatever reason. Often they are given their adopting/fostering family’s surname and their own biological past is virtually erased. While I am not so concerned about delving into that past, I am quite interested in learning what became of them in later life.

Recently I rediscovered a girl named Jessie in our Indiana Cain clan, one of at least three children who had been adopted, informally or otherwise, by Sarah Cain and her husband, Orlando Hamilton. Although obviously quite young in an 1886 family photo, she was identified as the wife of another adoptee in the same family.  Though my proof is not rock-solid, I now feel sure she not only  grew up in the same household as this fellow adoptee, but later did become his second wife. Of course I’ll keep checking for any new evidence that might prove (or disprove) the matter.

But now I’m turning my attention to another young woman, Annabelle, who was found in the 1900 census for Middlesex County, New Jersey, as part of the Albert Cain family. That record states she was an adopted daughter, born January 1886 in England. After that -- nothing.  Family members I queried long ago (all gone now) remember nothing more of her, but I can’t let it go.  Is she the Annabel, also spelled “Anna B.” who is shown as the wife of Jack/John Coffey in subsequent NJ census records? The birth year is close, the birthplace is England, the year of immigration close enough.  This Annabelle is buried in Groveville Cemetery, according to FindaGrave, with a stone that simply shows her years of birth and death.  Without a more specific date I cannot get a death certificate, and searches for obituaries have so far come up empty. No NJ marriage records online -- as far as I can tell, and no children’s birth records which might show the mother’s pre-marriage name.

Well, it is a work in progress. 

Who are you looking for these days?

Five Generations, Sixty-Five Years, Twenty-Six Hundred Miles

Browsing through old family pictures  -- and discovering ones that haven’t been scanned yet --  I came up with some pretty interesting juxtapositions.

To the left, below, are Dr. Cornelius Cain, my great-grandfather, Rev. John Wesley Cain, his son, and Howard Hamilton Cain, his grandson (and my father). This was taken in Clarksburg, Indiana, in about 1899.

 The next shot is of of Howard holding his son, Thomas Hayden Cain, in 1943, in Riverside, California.

The color photo, taken about 1966, shows Thomas again, and Jonathan Minton, my son, in San Mateo County, California. Not satisfied with just a beard, or a mustache, like his two forebears, Tom is sporting both.

The Census Taker is Your Friend

Plowing through various census records to help me locate ever more relatives, I am reminded once again of how useful they can be.

But reading the column designations at the top of the page, even on a large computer screen, can be difficult, and it is easy to forget that certain questions were asked at different times.

The 1850 census stands out, of course, because it was the first one to list the name of every person in the household. It gives age, sex, color, birthplace, occupation, and more.  It does NOT, however, show relationships, so we cannot simply assume the oldest male and female were husband and wife.

In fact it was not until the 1880 census that relationships were listed, so always look there for confirmation. This census also showed, for the first time, the birthplaces of everyone’s parents (as reported by someone in the household).

As a beginner, I didn’t pay much attention to the other questions that were asked at various times. But when I got stuck trying to find descendants of a particular cousin, I realized the 1900 and 1910 census listed how many children the married females had, and how many were still living at the time.  

Both these years had other nuggets of information as well. In 1900, the exact month and year of birth was asked for each person. If married, the number of years married was listed. In 1910 and again in 1930 and 1930, the males were asked whether they were veterans. Also in 1930, age at first marriage is recorded, rather than number of years married. Be sure to get that right!

Immigration year and naturalization are noted from 1900 to 1930.

Everyone was pretty excited when the 1940 census came out, and it does have a lot of information, such as each individual’s residence in 1935.  But, with the exception of the two persons singled out on each page to provide more detail, birthplaces of parents are omitted.

And don’t give up on the pre-1850 censuses just because they offer so much less information.  Heads of household are listed by name, with age ranges and gender given for others.  From the broadest categories in 1790 (two ages ranges for males, none for females), to the decade-specific ranges for both sexes in 1840, there are clues to be derived. Also, in 1840, there is a separate listing for Revolutionary War pensioners.

The subject of census records for genealogists could fill a book, and in fact it has. The one I use is The Census Book : a Genealogist’s Guide to Federal Census Facts, Schedules and Indexes, written by William Dollarhide. Published by Heritage Quest in 1999, It does not, of course, have a rundown on the 1940 census, which was just released for public use in 2012,  but there are plenty of online sources for that data.

For a complete rundown on the contents of each census year’s questionnaire, go to familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Main-Page and enter “US census” in the search box.  Look on Cyndi’s List (www.cyndislist.com) for downloadable forms.

A whole lot of clues here, but we have to remember, the veracity of the answers depends on both the skill (and penmanship!) of the census taker and the knowledge/truthfulness of the informant (marked with an x in 1940, but not indicated in earlier records).

Hidden Names

Don’t you wish our ancestors made more generous use of their middle names? I have at least three men whose full given names elude me, though there is plenty of room for speculation.  Deeds, probate papers, marriage records (these are before birth records and no baptismal records have come to light) -- all carry very specific, but unrevealing, middle initials. And these names might lead to more family history, if I knew them.

Here is one:

John M. Cain (pictured at right), was born in Kent County, Delaware in 1810, the son of John Cain and Elizabeth Morgan. So what are the odds that his middle name is Morgan? He is not their first son (that was Cornelius, my gr-grandfather), so naming patterns don’t seem to be in play.  However, this is the only of John and Elizabeth’s seven sons to even have a recorded middle initial.

Another later example: Daniel M. Howard, my grandmother’s half-brother. who died in the Civil War. His father was likely named for a circuit-riding Methodist preacher by the name of Samuel Parker. Daniel’s younger brother was Jasper Newton Howard -- there were many Jasper Newtons born around the same time, possibly named for a pair of then-popular Revolutionary War heroes. So, in this family at least, so-called naming patterns are completely out the window.

The third puzzler is Thomas E. Sherwood (b ca 1795, KY), my great-great grandfather. His daughter, Nancy Jane Sherwood, named her first two children William Enoch (b 1850) and John Edwin (b1853).  The family, so far as I have been able learn about it, had no males with names which had “E” initials. The boys’ father, David Hammond, did have a half-brother named Edwin. Does that leave Enoch as Thomas’s middle name?

So, tantalizing clues, but no definite answers. So far.

The risks, the frustrations, the fun ...

When I sit down to do some serious research, whether trying to fill in gaps, add new family members, or expand a particular record with new information, something invariably pops up which has a pull I cannot resist.

 “Look for connection. Allie Lee Gabbert, Buchanan Co (MO), 1882-1942, m. Wm A Ebling. Sister: Nannie Gabbert m. Fr Dennis, dau Engene psychic.” This was a recent  culprit, a note in my own handwriting, with absolutely no indication as to its source.

By now I don’t even remember where I found the scrap of paper, let alone when or where the information was jotted down. But once it resurfaced I couldn’t let it go. The Gabberts are a particular interest because my great grandmother’s sister was Mary Ann Sherwood, born about 1829 in Bartholomew County, Indiana. She married Ransom Gabbert in February, 1850,  and they were in Buchanan County, Missouri by the time that year’s census taker came around. They had at least three children, William Edwin, James George, and Mary Frances (Mollie), and it has been a project of mine to try to follow the descendants down to the present day. 

Allie Lee Ebling was was buried in Amstrong Cemetery, Rushville, Buchanan County, along with her spouse, William A. Ebling. A photo of their gravestone is shown on the invaluable Find a Grave website. (Thank you, Tom DeBerry) Allie Lee’s birth name, Gabbert, and William’s full middle name, Anderson, have been added, presumably by Mr. DeBerry, along with the names of William’s parents.

But I still have no idea where I got the information that she had a sister Nannie, or a niece named Eugene, who was a psychic, no less!

This was a pursuit I could not resist. There are ten Gabberts listed in Armstrong Cemetery, some of whom I know to be Ransom’s relatives. And there are 43 Gabberts, all told, named in Buchanan County cemeteries. (Sadly, most of the listings do not indicate placement within plots, which would be a useful clue to relationships.)

So, I have found evidence of this Allie Lee, but not her supposed sister Nannie, mother of a psychic. And I have no idea of their parents’ names.

My concern is with their possible connection to Ransom, so I needed to look for their parents’ names. But I was so intrigued by the psychic that instead I looked for evidence that Nannie’s daughter was really named “Eugene,” and was said, by someone, somewhere, to dabble in the supernatural.

Nannie’s marriage to an E.F., or Frank, Dennis had been indicated in two census records, and the second one, in 1910, did show a daughter, Eugene, age 5.

Searching the web for the name “Eugene Dennis”  brings up endless stories about a prominent member of the American Communist party, a man by the same name.  Excluding “Communist” in my search query, however, yielded several references to the young woman in question, who apparently made quite a name for herself in the 1920s. Stories appeared in newspapers as far afield as Spokane, Washington, about her uncanny abilities, and several ads proclaimed her vaudeville appearances. The last record I could find was her presence in her brother’s household, with their mother (yes, Nannie) in the 1930 census for Los Angeles.  She was 25, single, born in Kansas, and her occupation was listed as “physic” (sic) in the “theater industry.” 

California death records show Nannie Dennis died in 1942 in Los Angeles, that her father’s surname was Gabbert, and that her mother’s birth name was “Bilderbock.”

On a hunch I went back to FamilySearch and came up with a marriage record which showed that Thomas Gabbert and Angeline Bilderback married in 1856, in Buchanan County, Missouri. Bingo!

The 1870 census shows the Buchanan County family of Thomas and Angeline Gabbert with Nancy, age 3 mo (born after date census was supposed to represent, but listed anyway, with a September birthdate). Also listed were Alexander, age 12, and Mary, age 7.

Ten years later there is Nancy B, age 11 with her family, which now includes a younger child, Edward, all still in the same place.

These records are still too early for Allie Lee who was reportedly born in 1882, but they pretty well establish that this is the Nancy/Nannie Gabbert of my ephemeral note.

So, is her father related to Mary Ann Sherwood’s husband, Ransom Gabbert? And if so, how? Stay tuned.

Some thoughts while away

Ruth, Florence, Gertrude Cain, Claude Murvin,
Tommy Cain, Mary Jean Koos

It’s been a long time since I sat down to look at my genealogy projects, and I miss the fun, the satisfaction, and even the occasional frustration of it all.

Two trips -- one for fun, one less so -- and planning for some household  remodelling have kept me away from this most engrossing pursuit for far too long. But thoughts do keep occurring, and one of these days I’ll be able to plunge in again. Perhaps, in the meantime, I need to follow the suggestions we’ve all read, about taking small steps when there’s no time to settle down with the Big Ones.

One modest task comes to mind immediately (because the evidence is sitting right in front of me): sorting the most recent family Christmas letters and photos, making sure they are dated with the year and the images are properly identified. 

The group on the right include three of my aunts, an uncle, my little brother (now in his 70s) and a cousin. Who besides me would know all their names?

Another is the perennial need to straighten up the work area. Folders pulled out and never put away, half-finished lists, books than need to go back on the shelf.  I am an inveterate list-maker and inventory-taker, but later, looking at the incomplete results, I am often puzzled at what prompted their creation. Then there are the newly-purchased books, the journal articles, and the many printed-out references that need to find a home -- preferably someplace where I can find them again. 

That brings up another question. How do you file items of general interest -- about places, events, living conditions -- in short, matters that are not about your family members but most likely had an impact on their lives? I have a file cabinet full of carefully labelled folders for the states and regions where my ancestors lived, with emphasis on their home counties, local topography, etc. But I almost never consult it! There needs to be a better way, and if you have any suggestions, I’d be delighted to hear them.

Quantity or quality?

Great grandpa?

Do you feel envious, or skeptical, when you read about someone who has zillions of relatives in his family tree? Or who claims to trace her illustrious forebears back to Charlemagne? (Funny, no one ever brags about being descended from Attila the Hun.) Are these people simply collecting names, harvesting them from other trees just because there might be a tenuous link?  Online family trees are great enablers in this respect, as there is endless space for adding names, and, sadly, very little on the need for valid sources.

While I’m chasing faint connections in an attempt to identify some first-name-only references in an old letter, these questions do come to mind.  I am looking at a family related only by marriage -- my great-grandmother’s in-laws from her first brief union.  This spouse was David Hammond, son of Nathaniel Hammond and the second of his three wives, Hannah Van Meter. All told, Nathaniel fathered 17 children we know of, and of course most of them married and reproduced abundantly. From various clues in the letter, written to my grandmother by her aunt, I am guessing the people she named are part of this enormous Hammond clan, most of whom lived their lives in 19th century Indiana.

 The researching involved is sort of like trying to solve a tantalizing puzzle with many equally tempting off-shoots, which means I can easily lose sight of my goal -- simply identifying the names in the letter. 

I am reminded of Stephen Leacock’s words: "Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.” But I do try to keep to the point. It is a fascinating family, but only one individual is connected to my line in any way.  The letter’s references are my excuse for digging further, but how does one decide where to draw the line?  

What are you views?

Big time in Salt Lake City

Just back from my periodic foray to the Family History Library, for a week of immersion in genealogical research, and a chance to reunite with a group of fellow conspirators from the Midwest.  The weather was cool but mostly dry (as a Californian, I earned a few laughs for wearing a jacket outside when the temperature was in the low 60s).

It is always a treat to be there and learn what changes are taking place in and around town.  The local rapid transit system goes right to the airport terminal now, for one thing. The Salt Lake Plaza Hotel has remodelled most of their rooms, for another (and my closet was cleverly concealed behind a huge mirror -- took me a while to find it). In the library itself, there is at least one photocopier right out on the third floor (US/Canadian books), as well as the film-to-print-or-flashdrive equipment on the second floor. (I haven’t investigated the lower floors where my Minnesotan friends hang out, looking for their Swedish, German, and Norwegian lines.)

We hiked over to the LDS office building most days for hearty but very inexpensive lunches, and were in time to see the holiday decorations being put up in Temple Square. Hearing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir practice on Thursday night was a pleasure, as always.

My big find was on Ancestry.com (their “institutional” version is free to use at the Library). Browsing for Lewis Hartwell Thompson, whom I know had come west by 1860, I found him in a database of “California Pioneers,” with place and date of his birth, and the names of his parents. A real piece of luck! The list had been compiled by the California State Library (applause), originally from Hubert Howe Bancroft’s seven-volume History of California. Of course, if I had thought of it at the time, I could have followed up by looking at the books themselves, since the Family History Library has a set in print and on film.

Another rather intriguing clue I picked up was the discovery that my great-grandmother, Nancy Jane Sherwood, had signed her name “Nancy Sexton” in some probate documents after the death of her first husband, David Hammond. I was looking for some clue as to when she might have married my great-grandfather, whose surname was Howard. I had always thought he was her second husband, but it seems there was another brief union first.  Unfortunately this all took place in Jasper County, Indiana, before the time of their 1864 courthouse fire.  So, no marriage records are available, and I will have some digging to do in order to learn about this Mr. Sexton.

There were a couple of other pieces of information which came to light in my searches, but as we all know, the longer you work on this, the fewer the discoveries. At first it is like skimming the cream off the top. Later is it more like sifting through already-mined sources to find a tiny nugget or even a bit of gold dust.

Nonetheless, I had a really satisfactory visit, and now there are some real clues to stalk.

The joy of sleuthing

“Perhaps the most satisfying task is to assemble in chronologic order all those bits and pieces of information from all those varied sources and watch a life appear before our eyes...”

This anonymous quote from an old genealogy newsletter really resonated with me. It is a satisfying task (and can be nearly endless if you let it).  We never can really know all there is to know about another person, especially one who is long gone, but, oh, the fascination in seeing a personality develop from a complete blank to a recognizable image. It may stay somewhat faded and fuzzy around the edges, but does gradually come to life, like a photograph in a darkroom bath.

Another source of satisfaction comes in working on a specific puzzle. Sometimes, when the very “dailyness” of daily life just gets to be too much, it’s a pleasure just to sit down and tackle something completely different, like the question of whether Uncle Wally really had six wives, or who that mysterious person was in Grandma’s household, circa 1880.

And it’s so much easier to find answers now! You must have seen those endless ads for cable TV, with kids harking back to the “old days” when you couldn’t record four programs at once while watching something else. (My question is -- who on God’s green earth thinks there are that many programs worth watching, much less recording? But I digress.) We researchers of a certain age could do them one better, reminiscing about our “old days” in genealogy, when there was no internet, doing research in books often meant waiting weeks to get them from distant libraries, and one had to be a detective to even discover where specific public documents or books were likely to be found.

My earliest experience in trying to learn something about an 18th century ancestor came when I received, on inter-library loan, a book from San Francisco’s Sutro Library: The Calendar of Kent County, Delaware, Probate Records, 1680-1800, compiled by Leon de Valinger Jr. How thrilling to find an abstract of Thomas Cain’s will, made 20 October, 1799! Being such a newbie, I didn’t feel compelled to look for the original document until years later, but the book’s entry did give me some very helpful information, and confirmed much of what my grandfather had written down about what was his great-grandfather’s family. 

It was a thick old volume, so fragile I couldn’t take it home, but had to use it in the library.  Now, paperback reprints are available, and the work has been digitized so it is fully searchable online. Not only that, but an index to the original probate files can be examined at the Delaware Public Archives website, as an aid to obtaining copies of the original documents.

Carping about the so-called tribulations of early television-viewing  makes me snicker, but when I recall what it was like to do family history research just a few years ago, I am truly grateful for modern technology.

Copy once, look twice -- or something like that

I have written before about the importance of looking hard at even the most tentative clues in genealogy -- census records that don’t seem worth examining because the dates, birthplaces, or even surnames seem too far removed; references in letters that don’t look pertinent, and on and on. Well, here is another example, from my own research:

I’ve always copied down a lot of items just because they seemed, at the time, to have some connection to my surnames, however slight.  But all too often the notes get consigned to a folder where they lie, forgotten.  In this case, while trying once more to find out what happened to my great-aunt’s son, Franklin Lee Parkison, I was going back through a collection of those set-aside notes. What caught my eye was a pencilled notation I must have made in the days before computers, from the WPA’s “Index to Death Records for Jasper County (Indiana), 1882-1920.” It read: ParkiNson, Frank S., white, male, single, age 56, died 19 July 1919,  Rensselaer, Indiana.  Well, to start with, the surname has an “n” (but Parkison is often misspelled that way), and the middle initial is wrong.  Then, my faulty math led me to dismiss the possibility that this might by my guy. Let’s see, 56 from 1919 means a birth year of 1863. Oh oh. That actually matched what I did know about Frank’s birthdate, as did the likely place of death. (I knew from a letter by his mother that he had been in that area three years earlier.)

As anyone else who searched in Jasper County knows, there hasn’t been much available at the Family History Library (though they seem to have acquired more public records recently). So my searches there have not been fruitful. In a flash of inspiration (why did it take me so long?), I decided to go directly to the source for this WPA index. It was a simple matter to contact the Public Health Department in Rensselaer and learn the procedure for obtaining the death record for this so-called Parkinson individual.

When it arrived, lo and behold, the names of his parents matched, confirming that their “Frank S. Parkinson” was really MY Frank L. Parkison! (Unfortunately the document was a transcription, not a photocopy of the original, so I couldn’t tell how the errors happened.)

This solved, for me, what had been a very long-standing search for the date and place of Frank’s death. (There was another Frank Parkison in the area at the time, which confused matters somewhat.) Now, with a confirmed date of death in hand, I have queried the local library to see of there was a death notice or obituary which give more information.

How many other notes to I have lying around, just waiting for a fresh look and possibly a new interpretation?  What about you?

****

On another note:

I recenly mentioned a newspaper article about the smart phone app that Icelanders have, which can confirm the relationship between two possible “kissing cousins,” a necessity in this enclosed and isolated society, where nearly everyone is related to everyone else.  As it happens, I was travelling in Iceland last month (really!), and was able to ask our tour guide about it. She confirmed the program's existence as well as its usefulness "for the young people, of course."  Nice to get it from the source!

Put it in writing ...

Time for another blog entry and I am in the midst of trying to write up some family history, hoping to have something to pass along to interested parties in the next few months.

This continues to be remarkably rewarding exercise, and one that has transformed itself from simply one of captioning my precious documents and photographs to giving a reasonably detailed account of the family’s growth, movement and change over the years.

Jasper Newton Howard
1851-1936

It has spurred me to read more background material on the regions where family members lived, examine the possible reasons for their moves, and study the social conditions of the period(s).  I have sent for magazine articles from PERSI, strived to find copies of original documents where I had only secondary references, and worked to obtain complete records where I had just a single item (such as a will, instead of an entire probate packet).

It has also encouraged me to explore the less-used features of my word-processing and genealogy  programs in order to develop an appealing physical layout, with charts, maps and photographs.  

AND it has pushed me to sharpen my writing skills so that the narrative doesn’t sink into a series of mind-numbing “begats.”

All this so the years of effort I have joyfully expended won’t be utterly lost on future generations. Wouldn’t we all like to think that after we’re gone our research would still count for something?  If you are considering this kind of project (and I truly hope you are) there are plenty of books and articles to help you on your way. To get started, try Cyndi’s List, a genealogical treasure trove.  Her topic “Writing your family’s history: general resources” can get you started.  Enjoy your adventure!

In case you are unfamiliar with PERSI, it is an index to genealogical periodical articles maintained by the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  The PERiodical Source Index is available online at home if your public library subscribes to Heritage Quest, or if you are a subscriber to Ancestry.  FamilySearch.org has a good description of its offerings.

Whither and yon

I moan a lot about getting sidetracked when doing research -- straying from the ancestral line and wandering off into unmapped territory. At the same time I know it is important to learn as much as possible about the relatives and in-laws who inevitably beckon.  Aunts, uncles, cousins all have something to contribute, and studying them may lead to new information about our own forebears. so where is the line between going off on possibly fruitless tangents, and doing worthwhile exploration?  

The other day I was bemused by my own reaction to discovering (get this): the middle name of my grandfather’s second wife’s first husband. Well, middle names can be important identifiers, and while I know where Frank Martin Curry is buried, I wanted to confirm that the body of his remarried widow, Frankie Mae Hildebrand, was interred next to him instead of beside her second spouse, my grandfather.  (In another case, I have a relative who is neatly interred between his first and second wives. You probably do, too.)

In rereading a letter from my grandfather, with news of Frankie’s death, I learned that her daughter by that first marriage had died some 30 years earlier. That bit of information certainly narrows down my search for her!  So looking for a seemingly trivial bit of information turned up something else at least as significant.

In other news, I have still been trying to tie up some loose ends re the sons of a Howard cousin, Elvira Thompson.  Her mother was born in Indiana, as were most of the other Howards of that generation, so I had been intrigued to learn that Elvira came west, married and eventually two of her sons were born right here in Northern California (Petaluma, Sonoma County,  and San Rafael, in neighboring Marin County).

A vague reference to one son’s Navy service led me to write for his military records. With general dates (and a check for $60), I was able to obtain a thick packet of material for Rowland Maynard Thompson. When I read them, my mental picture of Rowland was completely turned around by the physical description they contained! 

In 1902 this young man was said to be 5’ 6” tall, with blue eyes, brown hair, and a “ruddy” complexion; he reportedly weighed 122 lb. But most intriguing was the entry for his physical characteristics: “ink marks right front arm.”  A similar record when he re-enlisted four years later had more: “ 7” birds left arm and shoulder; coat of arms, dagger, “NSGW” right front arm; snake, left leg; fly right leg; bird top both feet … scar forehead.” In the interim he had gained not only a lot more “ink marks” but ten pounds in weight.  In other words: short, stocky, scarred, and well-tattooed.  Not as I had imagined him at all.

Interestingly, Rowland’s precise year of birth is still in some question. The 1880 census shows him as three years old, and in 1900 he is reported as having been born in June 1877.  But his death certificate gives the birth year as 1884 (the informant was not a relative), and when he enlisted he gave 1879 as his year of birth. 

One more item in these papers helped me locate his parents -- in 1902 he stated that his father was living in Corning, California. Since they were in San Francisco in 1900, I had wondered whether they left for Corning before or after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire.  Now I know.

On putting our family histories into words ...

How is it that writing seems so easy until we sit down to attempt it? This is not a novel, or an acdemic dissertation; it is about leaving something behind to show for all our efforts -- an attempt to put a family’s history into coherent, reasonably accurate form, without leaving  potential readers confused or bored. 

Ah, the readers -- who are they to be? In my case, I hope it is simply some of the younger generation of people related to our family lines --  i. e., my children, their cousins, and future generations of same. 

Is the writing to be an adjunct to a collection of documents and photographs? A series of captions with spare descriptions to hold them all together?  Or is it a stand-alone story with citations or incidental references to the documentation?  Or … something in between?

This issue is the one that gave me pause -- I began by planning simply to create some family-tree-type charts and add extensive captions for the volumes of material I had collected.  In other words, it would be a kind of justification for all the years I had put into this work. 

Gradually, however, I came around to the notion that, for me, writing a narrative would be a better way to go; I could then include the documents as supporting material.  

Then there is the matter of structure. Should one start from the present and work back in time, as we are advised to do our research?  And, if so, what line or lines do we choose to follow? Or should one start back with an earliest-so-far-discovered ancestor and come forward? In either case, the problem arises about how to manage the collateral lines that develop, so that the project doesn’t turn into a frustrating maze.

Once those matters are decided, at least provisionally (an outline is essential), how does one present the facts? Will the writing be a description of “how I did it,” or  a straighforward depiction of the people and events? Or something else entirely?

And of course, how much information should be included? I had a single family line in mind, starting way back when and coming forward, and of course I wanted to make it as complete as possible, but that could fill volumes. The most satisfactory way to deal with that, it appears, is to break the work into sections, each based on a time period, or location, or major event.

No one structure/format/style fits every case, but these are questions every genealogist/author needs to consider.

More about this later.

In the meantime, I commend to everyone the wonderful blog, The Legal Genealogist.

Please take a look. The author was in the thick of the East Coast storm and her reactions are eloquent in their simplicity (posts of Nov. 2 and 3, 2012).

To tell the truth

If you want to bring to light the gaps and flaws in your genealogical research, there’s a straightforward solution -- try writing it down as a story.  Not a chart. Not a “report.” A story. 

Four Cain brothers, ca 1899: Cornelius, John (standing),
 Jonathan, Eli

And as you go along, make sure to confirm every statement of fact. Great-aunt Josie was born in Oklahoma.  Who says?  Cousin Bunkie was a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia. When? What proof do you have?

I’m rediscovering the value of this process as I try to knit together the people and facts that make up one of my family lines. It isn’t quick-and-easy, but every step along the way gives me a sense of achievement.

I chose to start with my earliest-discovered Cain ancestor, Thomas, who died in 1795 in Maryland or Delaware (not that far back, compared to some). As I work forward in time emphasis is on the direct ancestor in each generation, though I’m trying to give equal time to the wives, and am not overlooking the siblings and their families. To help make sense of the inevitable flood of names and dates, I am devising simple charts to accompany the text, and footnotes will refer to the documentation, much of which accompany the narratives. 

Since I started doing genealogy many years ago, and have learned a lot since gathering those earliest pieces of information, it has been a journey of rediscovery. For instance, I never used to give much thought to the occupations listed in every census since 1850 (most of the men were farmers, but not all). In more recent censuses I didn’t always know enough to try to work out the home addresses, or make note of any property valuations that were given. There is so much more that census records can tell us than just name, age, and place of birth.

And when I went back to unearth a paragraph in a county history about my great-grandfather, with an eye to finding a better copy, I read it more carefully.  Dr. Cornelius Cain was married in Brookville, Indiana, but he began his medical practice in the nearby town of Laurel, the article said.  This, I knew from another document, was where his father-in-law was a Justice of the Peace, and, later, postmaster. 

I began to sort through the photographs and documents that will illustrate this narrative, and found that I still need copies of some original materials.  Work at a project like this long enough and you begin to understand the importance of looking at the real thing -- not just a name in an index, a will abstract, or some other researcher’s notes. 

Those early research deficiencies need to be remedied, and in the process of doing that, I am making new discoveries and connections that had not occurred to me before. The point of writing the narrative is, in part, to make my research results more palatable to non-genealogists, but as I dig into it I am finding it is also a great way to tie up many loose ends, uncover and correct long-standing errors and omissions, and make new connections.  So satisfying!

Middling mysteries

Don’t you love it when you discover a middle name?  It can be a clue to an earlier relative, a mother’s birth name, or a naming tradition that’s been handed down through generations.

Then again, it may just be … a name.  But finding it is a small triumph, because it makes the individual’s story more complete.

Mary Howard Cain

My father’s middle name was Hamilton, and of course I knew that from early days. I even knew that it was the surname of his aunt’s husband.  But I didn’t realize the import given this family until I saw the impressive stone at the Kingston Cemetery in Decatur County, Indiana. It is labelled “Hamilton-Cain” -- not Cain-Hamilton, even though many more Cains than Hamiltons are buried there.  

I’ve mentioned my hunt for Elvira Amanda Kelsey, a relative in my Howard line, from which derives my own middle name.  Elvira came west from Indiana with her widowed mother in the 1860s, married in Oregon, and had three sons:  Albert, Parker and Rowland.  It was easy to guess Albert’s middle name, Kelsey, from the initial K, but I nailed it down when I found Albert Kelsey Thompson listed in the Great California Voters’ Registers of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Thank goodness he was conscientious enough to register!  His brother Parker married well -- to a state senator’s daughter -- and his obituary carried his impressive-sounding full name: Parker Howard Thompson. (His mother’s father was Samuel Parker Howard.)  As for the youngest, Rowland, it took a while for me to find his middle name -- he was simply designated as Rowland M. Thompson in census and Social Security records, and even on his death certificate.  But his World War I draft registration card showed him as Rowland Maynard Thompson.  I don’t know of any specific reason for that name -- yet.  But I’m still working on his father’s line, and perhaps the Maynard name will crop up there somewhere.

A middle name I’m still looking for is that of Daniel M. Howard.  He was my grandmother’s half-brother, who died at the age of 18 in the Civil War.  He served in Company G, Ninth Indiana Infantry (Union Army), and was “slightly” wounded at the Battle of Shiloh.  He “died of fever” while hospitalized, according to his military service records.  But NOWHERE does his middle name appear.

John M. Cain is another puzzle.  His mother was Elizabeth Morgan (my great-great-grandmother, who lived to be 96), so it is a strong possibility his name is Morgan.  But I am not going to assume anything!  And since John died in 1828 it is quite possible I will never know for sure.

There could be a whole subset of genealogy about middle names, don’t you think?  

A post script: Given names don’t always follow family tradition, as I’ve learned to my rue.  After years of trying to find the source of the above-mentioned Samuel Parker Howard’s name, I learned that a charismatic Methodist circuit-riding preacher was in in the region around the time this ancestor was born, in Kentucky. His name: Samuel Parker.

Elmer Ellsworth Cain posed another puzzle, until I discovered the story of the Civil War officer who had led colorful military drills in various venues around the country.  He put on quite a show with his Zouave-like troupe, and went on to achieve the dubious fame of becoming one of the first Union casualties of the war.  His name was Elmer Ellsworth, and not only was my relative named for him, but he named his twin sons Elmer and Ellsworth.

So much for “family” names.