Is the computer on or is it just me?

Whew, who knew a break from technology would be that long. I sure didn’t! Yesterday I ended my unexpected hiatus by booting up my desktop and opening every genealogy program I own. I guess I had decided enough was enough and it was time to do something tech related again.

My focus yesterday was the Love family. (Of course I chose them, I always start with them after a hiatus.) One of the first things I did was break out my printout of all Love surname marriages for Beith parish. I made the list months ago using credits from Scotlands People. Since I knew I was going to be dealing with a lot of Loves eventually, I spent the credits at the time and figured it couldn’t hurt.

Once I had the list out, I made lists of my ancestors siblings. Using the list I was able to list possible spouses. I say possible because I wasn’t prepared to make any commitments to a spouse until I was sure of them. So armed with my new lists of possible spouses for the siblings, I bit the bullet and got myself some more credits. However, I like to make my credits go as far as I can. Knowing what I know about the Love migration pattern, I went ahead and just did a general LOVE search for deaths in the Statutory Registers. Note: The Statutory Registers began in 1855, before that they used OPR (old parochial registers), however Scotlands People warns that the OPR’s were infrequently used, so aren’t as accurate. I decided to use the Statutory records because I had already found Robert and Elizabeth Love’s deaths in them, so I thought their five siblings might be as well.

6 pages or 6 credits is worth it for me, because that’s 150 LOVE deaths between 1855 and 1930 in Beith parish. Since the age is also listed, I can narrow down quickly if any of these are my ancestors or their siblings.

I quickly was able to find an Andrew Love that fit the parameters for the brother of my 5th Great Grandfather. The record confirms that this Andrew was the son of James Love and Janet Fleming. It also shows that he was also a Grocer (which definitely runs in the family) and the widower of Margaret Jack. Now that I have a spouse name, I can look on my marriage list and find out when they were married. If I wanted to spend another credit, which of course I did, I could do a search for their children’s names. I held off on looking at the actual records of their children’s births for now. They aren’t in my direct line, so I can hold off on verifying them for a little while longer. I did add the marriage and children into my database with placeholder source citations so that I would know I need to still look at the originals.

I’m making some definite progress on the children of James and Janet. I still have more death records to check to see if I can narrow down the other three children. Then it’s onto the Wills & Testaments database on SP for more records if I can find them. Not to mention the census records, I’ve barely touched the Scotland census yet, since I’m trying to get lists of spouses and children to differentiate between all the same names.

That was actually a pretty productive day for being a day back after an extended break. The only thing left is to transfer my hand written notes into Microsoft OneNote and to finish making the printout for Beith death records. Oh and of course I have to update the database on my website. Sheesh, that stuff sure piles up quick doesn’t it!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – What’s Your Ancestral Name Number?

Today has been a very strange day. Now I am wide awake at 11pm and don’t know what to do with myself other then continue on the Cleanup Project. I decided to take some time out for some fun. Saturday Night Genealogy Fun to be exact!

Here are the “rules” as Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings laid them out:

  1. Determine how complete your genealogy research is.  For background, read Crista Cowan’s post Family History All Done? What’s Your Number?  For comparison purposes, keep the list to 10 generations with you as the first person.
  2. Create a table similar to Crista’s second table, and fill it in however you can (you could create an Ahnentafel (Ancestor Name) list and count the number in each generation, or use some other method).  Tell us how you calculated the numbers.
  3. Show us your table, and calculate your “Ancestral Name Number” – what is your percentage of known names to possible names (1,023 for 10 generations).
  4. For extra credit (or more SNGF), do more generations and add them to your chart.
  5. Post your table, and your “Ancestral Name Number,” on your own blog, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status or Google+ Stream post.
My Ancestor Number Table
My Ancestor Number Table

To get my numbers, I created an Ahnentafel Report in FTM2012 and I counted the ancestors with known surnames. This means I didn’t give myself credit for the females who I don’t know surnames for. I was doing good until I got to my sixth generation back. Then by the time we get to the eighth generation the bottom has completely dropped out of my results.

The biggest reason for the drop off is all 10 of my known paternal 3rd great grandparents (generation 6) are immigrant ancestors. For this reason I’ve run into some challenges on finding some of their parents.

My Extra Credit
My Extra Credit

For the extra credit, I decided to see how far back I go and it isn’t much farther and the numbers just get lower! For this report, I also used my Original family file for this report. So these numbers might eventually go down even more or possibly go up!

All in all it was nice to see where I stand. It makes me motivated to get those blanks in the sixth generation filled in.

What I’ve Been Working On

I’ve been a little silent on the blog writing and reading front. Summer is in full swing so I bet everyone knows what that means! Yard work! Fun stuff there. I haven’t been doing as much as the rest of my family, but we’re working on our yard and I’ve spent a week dogsitting. Not to mention this heatwave! So one of the things I’ve been doing in the evenings is adding things to a private family tree on Ancestry.com. I’ve gone back and forth for ages on this subject, and I finally decided to have a private family tree there.

The advantages are that I will have a sharable tree to invite new connections to. I will also be able to show my source photos. A lot of my pictures are already on Ancestry from people who have visited the website in the past and saved the images. One of the reasons I’m doing this is I would like a way to share some of the source images without having to send huge emails with many attachments. For copyright reasons, there are some sources that I haven’t posted images for on the website. I would never intentionally violate a copyright agreement, so I think a private tree to share certain things would be better.

click for full size
click for full size

I started a new blank, unlinked tree because I wanted to have complete control over the file. If I had synced my FTM file with Ancestry.com, then my source citations would have been a little weird. For example, it would have shown everything on the Ancestry tree, however, the census images and death records wouldn’t be linkable to the databases on Ancestry. I could have added the records through Ancestry.com, but then those sources would have downloaded themselves to my desktop family file. That would be a no no for me. So I decided the simplest route would be to do this. It’s a lot of leg work sure, but I’m really only working on it in the evenings when I feel like I can’t work on my family file for stress reasons.

Of course, there might be some way to do what I want, without the syncing issues, but I think I’d choose to do it this way in the end anyway. I just like having complete control over these things.

Later this week, I’m going out of state for a quick trip. I’m hoping that before I leave, I get an entry written up and posted about the TNG software. I get a lot of questions about it, and I’m hoping to answer some of those this week.

A Tale of Many Sisters: Finding Emma Carter’s Mother

Most of the times, my genealogy days turn into a long day of entering information into my family tree program of choice. I love the record keeping part of genealogy. The one part I didn’t realize I enjoyed so much is the mystery-solving aspect. Every so often, I can’t be satisfied with just entering names and dates and making lists of places to search newspapers for. Every once and awhile, there are members of my family that just jump out and say investigate me more!

Emma Carter was one of these people. Emma first showed up in the 1870 Census, living with Rachel Miller-Carter and her family. Emma was listed as being 8 years old. That presented a problem to me. Rachel’s husband, Levi Carter passed away in March of 1860. So was Emma an illegitimate child of Rachel’s? Rachel was listed as being 52 years old in 1870, so I was a little doubtful of that. I next started wondering about Rachel’s daughters. She had four daughters and three that were living with her in 1870: Betsy, Sina, Eliza. I eliminated Hannah, the married daughter because I had her tracked through my life. She is my 3rd Great Grandmother. If she was Hannah’s daughter, I would have either known about it already, or I wasn’t going to find out by my usual means. So I decided to eliminate her for now, but not permanently.

I jumped ahead to the 1880 Census, the first one to show relationships, to see what that would bring me in the way of information.

1880 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T9, roll 0996. Brown County, Ohio. Lewis township, Higginsport precinct, ED 198, p. 342-C (stamped), dwelling 215, family 233, Rachel Carter; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com).

Luckily for me Emma was still living with her in the same household in the 1880 US Census. So now I know that Rachel is in fact Emma’s grandmother. From this information, I still don’t know who Emma’s mother is. The next step was to follow the daughters and Emma to see where they end up. Luckily for me some Brown County records are online at FamilySearch. I was a little worried about the 20 year gap between the 1880 and 1900 censuses. So I decided to try and see if there was a marriage record for any of Rachel’s daughters first. There was not. Then on a whim, I searched for a marriage record for Emma Carter.

Probate Court, Brown County, Ohio, 1879-1881, vol. 11, p. 551, no. 13812, for Chas W Hurdle-Emma Carter; FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org).

I was in luck to have found a marriage record for 1881! Now I had a place to search for Emma in 1900, but I couldn’t be sure this was my Emma without further evidence.

1900 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T623, roll 1247. Clermont County, Ohio. Franklin township, ED 028, sheet 01-B, dwelling 11, family 12, Emma Hurdle; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com).

There are a few problems with this record, like Sina being listed as male (she wasn’t), and that she was widowed. I still haven’t found a marriage record for Sina, so I can’t confirm or deny that fact. What’s interesting is she is listed as a servant in the household instead of as a relation. So by this record, I’m still not sure who Emma Carter’s mother is, but I am positive the above marriage record fits with my Emma Carter. So I will follow Emma’s family into the next census to see what that brings.

1910 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 1160. Clermont County, Ohio. Franklin township, ED 029, sheet 02-A, dwelling 33, family 33, Hamer Hurdle; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com).

The 1910 Census answers all the questions that I first had and gives me two more. The question I had answered is the identity of Emma Carter’s mother. That I know is Sina Carter. However I now have two questions: Where is Emma Carter if Sina has 2 living children in 1910? Who is the second child, Lewis maybe?

Weird Glitch in FTM2012?

click for full size

I noticed something weird in the Places tab in Family Tree Maker the other day. It seems that Brooklyn has malfunctioned. I thought at first it was because I added the street addresses to the description field for many of the census and residence facts in my file. However, it didn’t do the same thing for Caldwell, New Jersey. To test, I moved the street address to the beginning of the places field, but that didn’t solve the problem either.

I tried to merge all the different Brooklyn entries using the Merge Two Places option. That did nothing. The places won’t merge.

Is this a leftover side effect from my corrupted file? The problem does not appear on my Original file, so I can’t imagine what I did to make it happen. I’ll let you know if I figure out how to fix it!

P.S. I’m still working on the next part of my Redesigning my Chaos series. I’m having a hard time pinning down a banner I like. It’s coming along though and I’m really anxious to get new design around here.

Who I’ve Found in the 1940 Census

I’ve been indexing and searching the 1940 index since Monday. I’m sure plenty of you have too. For me, I wasn’t in a huge rush to see the images because obviously it’s another 10 years before another census is released. However, I was still excited to see the images! So I tried first thing and of course, there was an overload. As a website designer I’m very familiar with website overloads and slowed servers. So I was a bit disappointed in that, but decided to just try again on Tuesday.

The images are going up in many different places, the official 1940 US Census site, Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and My Heritage. There are probably more, but those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. For me, I’ve been mostly using the My Heritage site. It works best for my needs and it’s been super fast. Even in full screen view. So because of that I’ve been able to find all my grandparents and Great Grandparents in the 1940 Census already. Which is what I was hoping to find most. I’ve got some more generations in certain (more rural) parts of the country, but for now I’m just going to share my Grandparents and Great-Grandparents.

 

William L Moore, Llewellyn T Moore, William T Moore ((1940 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T627, roll 2340. Essex County, New Jersey. West Caldwell township, ED 373, sheet 02-A, family 38, William L Moore; digital image, My Heritage (http://www.myheritage.com).))

Database Links: William L Moore, Llewellyn Thorward-Moore

Clifford Herbert Redford

database link: Clifford Herbert Redford

Jane Parkin-Redford, Florence Redford ((1940 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T627, roll 2341. Essex County, New Jersey. West Orange township, ED 393, sheet 01-A, family 9, Clifford Redford; digital image, My Heritage (http://www.myheritage.com).))

database link: Jane Parkin-Redford, Florence Redford

My grandma actually was picked for the additional questions. Nothing new learned, but it feels like a win for some reason! She’s not the only one who got picked. I have a few more.

William H Mays, Iva Belle Moyer-Mays, Stanley Mays, Ralph Mays ((1940 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T627, roll 3041. Clermont County, Ohio. Monroe township, ED 015, sheet 17-B, family 367, William H Mays; digital image, My Heritage (http://www.myheritage.com).))

database link: William H Mays, Iva Belle Moyer-Mays, Stanley Mays

Interesting enough, the mysterious Ralph Mays was picked for the additional questions. Ralph has always been a special family member. I’ll have to write a post about that sometime.

Marshall Howard Taylor, Lula Applegate-Taylor, Emogene Taylor and siblings ((1940 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T627, roll 3041. Clermont County, Ohio. Washington township, ED 029, sheet 05-A, family 84, M H Taylor; digital image, My Heritage (http://www.myheritage.com).))

database link: none, they haven’t been added to the website database yet

This is the most interesting because I wasn’t looking for my Grandma Emogene and her parents here. I had actually looked for them in Bracken and Pendleton Counties in Kentucky first, but didn’t find them where I thought they were (or the usual folks to be honest). So I was looking for Moyers in the Washington township area of Clermont County, Ohio. To my surprise, BAM, there was the Taylors, in the midst of where I usually find Moyers. I knew the family must have eventually moved to Ohio, otherwise how would Grandma Emogene have met Grandpa Stanley? However, I didn’t know she was as young as she was when they moved. It really puts things into a new light. So now I have new questions about them:

  1. Why did they move between 1935 and 1940?
  2. Where did the other Taylors disappear to in 1940? I didn’t see them either.
Now, I haven’t delved back into the Taylors yet since my cleanup project, so I’ll have to see if there’s a mass exodus of the family, or if it was just a family losing a lot of it’s numbers and not having as many children as they used to.

So there you go! That’s all my Grandparents and Great-Grandparents.

My 1940 Census Cheat Sheet

Here’s a cheat sheet for anyone who is interested but doesn’t have my family tree memorized. (I don’t know why you would but I wanted to say that. ha) The checks stand for those that I’ve found and the red circles with the line through them are for people who were deceased before the census was taken. I don’t have exact death dates for a lot of my mother’s Mays side, but their birth dates were in the early 1800’s so it’s a common sense judgement call on my part.

I want to thank the US Census Bureau, The National Archives, FamilySearch, and My Heritage for all the hours of entertainment and research they’ve given me this week! I was on a bit of a vacation so it was destiny I guess that everything worked out where I could devote so much time to indexing and researching!

Double Wedding

I know I’ve suspected it before on my Taylor lines, but I’ve never actually found the records to prove a double wedding until now. Only this isn’t my Taylor line, but my Moyer/Evans line.

click for larger size

On October 17, 1901, brothers James Franklin Evans and William P Evans (they aren’t added to the website yet, still gathering their details), married twin sisters Nora and Cora Fiscus in Clermont County, Ohio. ((Probate Court, Clermont County, Ohio, “Marriages, 1801-1910”, 1899-1903, vol 26, p. 350, no 700, J F Evans-Nora A Fiscus;  Family History Library, 35 NW Temple Street Salt Lake City, Utah 84150.)) ((Probate Court, Clermont County, Ohio, “Marriages, 1801-1910”, 1899-1903, vol 26, p. 351, no 701, W P Evans-Cora A Fiscus;  Family History Library, 35 NW Temple Street Salt Lake City, Utah 84150.))

Fun fact: James was also a twin, but his twin sister Angeline did not partake in the double wedding, she married Robert Dunbar the previous year. ((Probate Court, Clermont County, Ohio, “Marriages, 1801-1910”, 1899-1903, vol 26, p. 161, no 18904, Robert C Dunbar-Angie Evans;  Family History Library, 35 NW Temple Street Salt Lake City, Utah 84150.))

Time to revisit Naming Patterns

I’ve recently gone hog wild on the Scotlands People website. I must admit, this time I didn’t even use the FamilySeach indexes to help me along. Probably not a smart move on my part, but oh well now!

All that matters is that I have many names to analyze for the Love family.

To start off, I’ll be using the naming pattern that I wrote about here and Irish ones found here to “guess” what the key names will be to go back one generation from my current Love family generation wall, Andrew Love.

WHAT I CAN “GUESS” ABOUT ANDREW USING SCOTTISH PATTERNS AND ANDREW’S CHILDRENS’ NAMES.

  • Andrew’s father is possibly named Robert.
  • Andrew’s mother is possibly named Jean.
  • Andrew’s fraternal grandfather is possibly named Andrew.
  • Andrew’s maternal grandfather is possibly named William.

WHAT I CAN “GUESS” ABOUT ANDREW USING IRISH PATTERNS AND ANDREW’S CHILDRENS’ NAMES.

  • Andrew’s father is possibly named Robert.
  • Andrew’s mother is possibly named Jean.
  • Andrew’s third son was possibly named after Andrew.
  • Andrew’s third daughter was possibly named after her mother, Agnes.
  • Andrew’s oldest brother is possibly named Thomas.
  • Andrew’s second oldest brother is possibly named William.

WHAT I FIGURED OUT ABOUT ANDREW’S PARENTS AND SIBLINGS FROM THE ACTUAL RECORDS.

  • Andrew’s father is named Robert (Scottish – 1/4, Irish – 1/6)
  • Andrew’s mother is named Jean (Scottish – 2/4, Irish – 2/6)
  • Andrew’s fraternal grandfather is named James (Scottish – 2/4)
  • I don’t have Andrew’s maternal grandfather yet (Scottish – 2/4)
  • Andrew’s third son is named Andrew (Irish 3/6)
  • Andrew’s third daughter is named Agnes, like her mother (Irish 4/6)
  • Andrew’s oldest brother is not named Thomas, but he did have a brother named Thomas. (Irish 4/6)
  • Again Andrew’s second oldest brother is not named William, but he did have a brother named William. (Irish 4/6)

IN CONCLUSION

  • Naming patterns aren’t an exact science.
  • Just because the Loves stuck to more of the Irish patterns doesn’t mean they’re Irish. It also doesn’t mean that they aren’t Irish. It just means that they used family names.
  • Naming patterns are fun to use, but usually I only find that the parents part of them fit into my families.

Aren’t naming patterns a great way to make you look more at your family? I’m very excited to have found all 9 of Andrew’s siblings (I think that’s all!) and even his parents and grand parents. I’m once again blocked. I haven’t completely filled in Robert Love’s parents and siblings. I don’t even know if I have them all. What I do know is that in Beith parish, there is a farm/village called Hoodsyard and it’s because of Hoodsyard that I was able to distinguish my Loves from all the other Loves. Now to figure out where the other ones fit into the family!

A Source Lesson Learned

Brown County, Ohio Marriage Records, vol 1, 1857-1860
Brown County, Ohio Marriage Records, vol 1, 1857-1860

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned during my cleanup is to always track down what the original source was. For me, I like to know what website I got each record from, but that’s not the most important part of the citation. When you’re citing your sources, it’s most important that if something crazy happens, you could actually track down that original source again if the need arose.

For example, say one day (a horrible day) FamilySearch lost all their servers and records. (I did say a horrible day.) In light of this unfortunate (and completely fictional) incident, I decide I’m going to Brown County, Ohio to research the Carter family because that’s where I am in my cleanup. Well, I knew I last left off with Daniel Moyer and his wife Hannah Carter. However, I want to look at their marriage record for more clues, or even the same time period of marriages to track down their siblings. Well, you can’t always do that from what you get from the FamilySearch indexes. They don’t always leave reference numbers.

This is where my lesson comes in. I’ve started going to the very first images in a group of images and the picture above is what I find. This gives me the exact direct source information for the marriage record of Daniel and Hannah. With this information, I would know exactly where I’m going at the Brown County Courthouse in order to find this record in it’s original form.

Probate Court, Brown County, Ohio, "Marriage Records, 1818-1939", 1857-1860, vol. 1, p. 147, no. 7723, for Daniel Moyer-Hannah Carter;
Probate Court, Brown County, Ohio, "Marriage Records, 1818-1939", 1857-1860, vol. 1, p. 147, no. 7723, for Daniel Moyer-Hannah Carter;

Not that there was much information on the original record, but you never know!

County Records on Family Search

It’s finally happened. I’m finally out of the Kentucky section of the family file cleanup. Not that I don’t love the Kentucky section. It just has a way of going on and on without end. I did make some decisions to not follow some leads on the siblings of my ancestors. I’ll get back around to them. I just needed to take a break. I’m now onto the Clermont County, Ohio section of my family tree. The main surname there is the Moyer surname. I’m in much more comfortable territory on this section because I’m very familiar with Clermont County and two of my Aunts still live there. It’s so easy to call Aunt Molly and ask her any questions about the area or even some of the family history.

The one thing I find difficult in my long distance research is trying to see the records myself. I love nothing more then to scan down the pages of a birth or marriage register. I find it a lot of fun. The only problem is I don’t have any of those records for my family in the immediate area. Even worse, the Family History Center by me is within a half hour drive, and I still haven’t been able to find the time when it’s open twice a week. So I make to do lists, and hope that one day I’ll be able to visit these repositories in an area my family once lived.

Back when I first found FamilySearch.org, they didn’t even have an Ohio Birth Index. Now they have a huge one. As I switched over to my Moyer ancestors, I went back to Family Search to see if there had been any new entries I could add to my family tree. Boy did I get a pleasant surprise!

The very first record for “Ina Bell Moyer” is from the old index. The bottom record was a big surprise for me! I know I had seen some marriage register images had been added, but I had no idea there were birth registers! I think that there were Clermont County registers was a surprise too. I don’t know why, I guess I’m just used to not having anything come up online that I was expecting more of the same!

Now all I have to do is find Great Grandma Iva‘s siblings!