Journey Through the Generations
Jacksonport, Arkansas school 1940 – Gladys Denson Mays, teacher
How to engage children in genealogy and family history
Journey Through the Generations
Jacksonport, Arkansas school 1940 – Gladys Denson Mays, teacher
Mother’s Day is tomorrow, and it is a day our thoughts center around our mothers, all of the things we can be thankful for, and how to honor them. In this article, I do not want to thank my mother even though I do for everything she taught me.
I want to take this time to thank my children for making me a mother. I don’t mean in the biological sense, because their father helped with that. I want to thank them for what has happened since they made their first appearance known to me with a tiny butterfly kicks.
Since I became a mother, I have learned many things. How to be patient, how to be loving even when a child is saying, “I hate you!” How to embrace that same child when they say “I love you!” How to clean up messes that are not your own and go on to teach that child how to clean up after themselves; how to help them take responsibility for their own actions; how to potty train; how to be a teacher on a daily basis; how to embrace the simple things; the moments of quiet, the moments of laughter, the moments of tears; how to continue even when you are going it alone; how to be strong when you have no strength left; how to find a way when there is no way; how to embrace faith and rely on that faith to care for a child when they are beyond hope; how to love and be loved; how to find joy in a child’s embrace or a sloppy kiss; how to find joy in small hugs and first steps, first words, first signs of growing up; how to share sadness in first disappointments, first cruelty, first broken heart; and how to go on after burying one long before his time.
All of these things have helped me to become the woman I am today. Most of all, I want to thank my children for the beautiful, wonderful, smart, talented grandchildren they have given me, and the precious moments I have spent with them.
I love you so very much! Thank you for making me a mother.
Thank you, Trisha, for sharing this!
Journey Through the Generations
I have always loved looking through old photos. My Granny had a little shelf in the living room where she kept yearbooks from her high school WF Branch High. I have fond memories of sitting in front of that shelf flipping through the pages to find her and my parent’s photos for hours and hours when I was a kid.
So when I heard that Ancestry had a new collection of digitized yearbooks, I was super excited. This collection includes yearbooks from middle school, junior high, high school, and colleges throughout the United States. The first name I searched for was myself. Well I didn’t find me, but I was able to find my brother, my dad, my uncle, my husband, and my mother in law. And that was just in the 15 free minutes I had to search. So I will spending Labor Day weekend searching through…
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Sometimes a story that needs to be told could be right outside your door. Perhaps you just failed to comprehend, or it just grew too familiar and as a result, gave it no real thought. This post is a small footnote in the telling of this much larger story, and I hope a means for some to help find their family’s story. This story was found in my wife’s backyard in her childhood home
This is a picture of my brother-in-law playing Frisbee with his young nephew (out of picture) in my wife’s family backyard. The two trees with the overgrown bushes between them are the Treadwell family graves. In the upper right hand part of the picture you can see part of Lake Champlain. That is Treadwell Bay. My wife and I use to walk through her grandfather’s pastures to swim and picnic there when we were dating.
Moore…
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This was the first time for me to present at RootsTech as well as visit Salt Lake City and I must state that both were very enjoyable! With so much to see and do at the conference, it was a wonderful smorgasbord of events for everyone.
The Expo Hall was filled with vendors and products that filled my head with ideas and my bag with items to use in my research. My husband and I also enjoyed getting our picture made with the tree man from RootsFinder.
What I especially enjoyed was presenting with Valerie Elkins and Rachel Trotter, two professionals who know the ins and outs of getting families involved in genealogical research. I learned so much from just listening to their presentations.
Not a bad group for 8:00 on a Saturday morning! When it came time for my presentation, I was so glad I had taken the advice of my professional speaker and presenter son, Michael Villareal, who recommended that I practice, practice, practice. Good advice! I felt totally at ease even with this huge group.
After the presentation, I was able to share a bit of information about my books . . .
and give my good friend, Cindy Medina, a big hug!
Thank you, Heidi Ertel, Tara Bergeson, and all the staff who helped organize and make RootsTech 2019 such a wonderful experience!
Written by Lela Nargi
Originally published on Mental Floss:
Genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies in the United States and a billion-dollar industry, but few people know what actually goes into tracking down ancestors—let alone putting information about them into any kind of context. Mental Floss talked to three professional genealogists to learn more about their increasingly in-demand profession, and discovered why they love weird last names, why they’re indebted to the Mormons and the Quakers, and how television is making their job more difficult.
There’s only one accredited four-year genealogy degree program in the U.S.—bachelors at Brigham Young University in Utah. Those who can’t make it to Utah can enroll in certificate programs, such as the one offered at Boston University, where Melinde Byrne teaches. “A lot of people sign up [at certificate programs] thinking it’ll be simple,” she says. Unfortunately, lots of people then fail when they discover how much work the program really is. Learning how to use databases, evaluate evidence, document research, locate and search public records, and define genealogical terms is essential knowledge for genealogists-in-training. Other course offerings may teach about ethics in DNA testing, how to read historical documents in multiple languages, and the best methods for writing historical narratives.
But those who don’t want to commit to a whole certificate can take advantage of other, less formal options, such as classes in conjunction with library science programs, lectures offered by historical and other societies, and week-long intensives at institutes around the country.
Unlike, say, doctors or lawyers, genealogists don’t need a specific qualification to practice. But they’re still guided by professional standards—including the five Genealogical Proof Standards developed by the Board for Certification of Genealogists, a non-profit in D.C. The five standards are considered best practices for coming “as close as possible to what actually happened in history,” and include 1) “reasonably exhaustive research,” 2) “complete and accurate source citations,” 3) “thorough analysis and correlation,” 4) “resolution of conflicting evidence,” and 5) a “soundly written conclusion based on the strongest evidence.”
Professional researchers may have differing opinions about what constitutes “reasonably exhaustive” research, but most agree that it means visiting archives and making sure to cover all the bases—for example, looking at not just a death certificate to confirm a name and age, but census, birth, and burial records as well, to build a fuller picture and to corroborate it. “If you don’t do all the steps in the genealogical proof standard, then the conclusions aren’t convincing,” Byrne says.
Byrne, for example, looked into her family’s history and discovered that “my own father and mother would never have met if my great grandmother in Alsace-Lorraine hadn’t had a goiter.” This medical condition led her to circumvent Ellis Island’s rigorous physical exam in favor of entering the country via Boston, setting a whole new family history—and her parents’ eventual meeting—in motion.
Genealogists will often continue to use their research tools on their own families later in their careers, too. Lee Arnold, who oversees the collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), has used them to research his family’s past. “One of my ancestors fought with the South Carolina militia during the Revolutionary War,” he says, and service records indicated that he’d “lost his horse.” To Arnold, who grew up on a horse farm, “That meant, I fell off my horse and he beat me back to the barn.” He later learned that the phrase actually meant that a person’s horse had been shot out from under him. These are the kinds of details that get people hooked on genealogy, according to the experts—“how their lives compare to mine, how … the things they did and didn’t do helped to form me,” Byrne says.
Genealogists are often hired by families who are curious about their past or hoping to join lineage societies such as the Colonial Dames; by specific libraries or archives; or by companies such as ancestry.com, who have genealogists on staff. Fees generally vary by experience and project, although they tend to start around $20/hour (for simple record searches) and go over $100/hour, with a mid-range of around $55 per hour.
Arnold says there are three levels of genealogical research he’ll personally take on: research limited to HSP’s holdings; research that takes him anywhere in the Philadelphia area; and “our Cadillac version, where we’ll get nana to talk to us about her life in the shtetl.”
Be careful what you wish for when you decide to go deep: “I always tell prospective clients, ‘This can be life-changing,'” Byrne says. “‘You may find half-siblings and other relatives you never imagined existed.’”
HSP’s director of research services, David Haugaard, says that clients can be stunned to learn about family members who were deliberately kept hidden. “Within so many families there are people who are written off … somebody might have [had] a mentally ill sibling who was kept secret. It’s less common today than it was, so when people are doing genealogy, it’s not uncommon to learn about people in fairly recent history [who were ignored]. You start to learn that the family was more complex than realized.”
Genealogists use plenty of sources you might not suspect would be helpful. Family bibles, in particular, can offer a wealth of relevant tidbits, since they were once often used to record births, deaths, and marriages. Scrapbooks, tax and church records, land deeds, and the 1870 Census (the first to list African Americans after emancipation) can also be goldmines. So can letters, whether provided by the family or found in manuscript collections, which might casually mention a family member’s birthday or offer snippets about day-to-day existence. “You can gather lots of information from them in a real-life kind of way,” Byrne says.
Genealogists know it’s key to consult paper sources—and to give a critical eye to the “facts” they offer. Arnold recalls a colleague becoming confused when an ancestry site listed her grandfather as white and from North Carolina when she knew he was black and from Louisiana. “I was able to go into the original documents and see that they had been transcribed wrong,” Arnold says—a common occurrence for sites outsourcing work to other countries. (Another common transcription error: mistaking a florid handwritten 17th century S for an F.)
That doesn’t mean paper sources are error-free, of course. Sometimes mistakes were made in the original documents themselves: Census workers may have misspelled names or miscounted children; priests may have mismarked birth dates on baptismal certificates. Pros know how to cross-reference all that, too … with more documents!
“I often tell people we’re like private investigators looking for dead people—we know your ancestors have to be there; you didn’t just hatch from an egg,” Arnold says. “The problem is, it’s so labor-intensive for a common name; you could spend hours looking at the wrong Smith. It’s better if you have an obscure last name.” Names like Brown, White, Jones, and Johnson are especially tough—although matters can be made easier if family members had a distinctive first name (“Napoleon Jones” will be easier than “John Jones,” for example).
Forensic genealogists—like Byrne—apply genealogical tools and principles to cases with legal ramifications. In the process, they often solve mysteries. Byrne might track down a next of kin for someone seeking the heir to a family fortune, or to repatriate the remains of a soldier killed in action. One of Byrne’s colleagues helped a woman prove that the man who kidnapped her as a girl was not her father—and was, in fact, a grisly serial killer. Another forensic genealogist discredited a woman who claimed she was raised by wolves and that she killed Nazis while hiding out in the woods. Sometimes, Byrne says, the tip-off comes just from talking to relatives; in the wolf case, for example, “Her first cousin was still living and he basically said, ‘Misha always had such an incredible imagination.’”
The man thought to be the Golden State Killer and East Area Rapist was also caught using forensic genealogy strategies. Police compared DNA found at the killer’s crime scenes with DNA test results from an unidentified genealogy site and found a match with a user of the site. The user wasn’t the killer himself, but by going through their family tree for the potential suspect who matched clues in the case, police found their man. “The techniques used to find the Golden State Killer combined solid police work with genetic genealogists’ principles,” Byrne says. “This is done routinely to reunite children and birth families, to identify the remains of KIA or MIA soldiers, and increasingly to identify John Does, Jane Does, and Baby Does.”
A good number of online records exist thanks to the efforts of Mormons. For years, they’ve been sending missionaries to HSP and other archives to scan hundreds of thousands of family histories, usually in exchange for a royalty and free access to the scans for the society’s patrons. What’s their interest? Posthumous baptisms for the family members who weren’t Mormon—so they can stay together in heaven. Genealogists agree the scans are a tremendous asset to researchers, with a caveat: Not even close to everything is scanned, and mistakes are also common. “You still need to use as many different paper sources as you can,” Haugaard advises.
Some things would make genealogical research a snap—for example, if your ancestors were Quakers. According to Haugaard, that’s because the Quakers were always issuing certificates; when someone moved, say, to use as an introduction at the Quaker Meeting in a new town, and also when they were kicked out of the community. “Lots of [mid-18th century] Quakers got in trouble for fighting, or drinking, or marrying out of unity, then were disowned,” Haugaard says. What that means is, “Basically, they kept great records.”
Grudgingly, Arnold admits that TV shows like Finding Your Roots and Genealogy Roadshow have “introduced people to genealogy and made it really hot—I mean, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an ancestry.com commercial.” But the shows have also given people unreasonable expectations about what genealogy can and cannot do. Byrne says, “People don’t understand that [the history] is not all laid out in front of you” as it typically is on TV. Arnold says he fields requests from patrons who ask him to “‘Tell me about my ancestors, just like that guy on TV did.’ They think it’s easy and quick.” In fact, what Arnold calls those “ta-da” moments offered by hosts like Henry Louis Gates Jr. are actually made possible by professional genealogists hired to painstakingly research ancestry over the course of days, weeks, months.
Ancestors with less money—who maybe didn’t own property or pay taxes—can be less likely to leave a paper trail. But employment agency, almshouse, prison, and orphanage records can get the research ball rolling, as can advertisements offering rewards for runaway indentured servants. Haugaard explains that charity society records also frequently provide details: Society workers would visit families and “make records indicating the woman of the household’s name, how many people were in the household, what religion they were, and what charity they received, like coal or groceries.”
Three groups of people looking for their roots make Arnold steel himself for some rigorous research. If the case involves African Americans, Native Americans, or Jews, “I know this is going to be a tough one,” he says. That’s because their records are often scant or nonexistent. Slaves often weren’t allowed to marry (or their marriages were never recorded); Native Americans didn’t traditionally write their histories down; and Jews fleeing Europe during World War II often had all family records destroyed as synagogues and villages were torched. Sometimes, their papers were falsified in order for people to survive.
These factors make picking up someone’s trail difficult, if not impossible. “I had one woman come in to a talk I was giving and say, ‘How do I start? All my ancestors were killed in the Holocaust,’” Arnold remembers. “And I said, ‘Alright, then your ancestry starts with you. Document your life for your [descendants].”
According to Arnold, DNA test results can be sketchy. His own experience with DNA tests from seven companies yielded seven different results, some of them “bizarre”: “One said my family was from Tuscany, but I’m paler than a Presbyterian. Another said I was 5 percent African American. Another said I was Swedish—and that probably means that they found a gene from some randy Viking pillaging the Scots Irish 1000 years ago.”
Part of the problem is that DNA test kits are dependent on data from other people who have taken the tests, which means they are more accurate for some well-represented groups than others. (For example, an American with Irish background taking the test may get a more reliable result than someone whose ancestors were of Middle Eastern descent, since people from the Middle East tend to be less represented in the database.) Also, different companies are working with different data sets, and using different algorithms—which can produce different results.
Haugaard also says that DNA testing may tell you some things you don’t want to know. He recounts a story about a man who connected deeply with his Irish heritage, yet DNA testing undertaken by his family showed he was Jewish, switched at birth with an Irish-American baby. “He passed away before he could learn that,” Haugaard says.