An Old Favorite; A Penny for Your Thoughts

I grabbed one of my old favorites the other day and sat down to refresh myself on some good, solid genealogical principles and techniques. It’s an old school book, and it was written as a guide to beginning and intermediate genealogists on how to handle both basic and challenging research issues.  By old school, I mean the old way. Yes, your suspicions are correct: I’m talking about before the Internet became our family history superhighway.

Did that send shivers down your spine? I remember the days I spent rolling through unindexed microfilm looking for census records, and I’m much happier searching Heritage Quest, Family Search, and Ancestry.com for the same records from the comfort of my home.

The issue is that modern genealogy how to books spend time talking about Internet issues and techniques, which are important but constantly changing, and are not totally focused on the best ways to pursue solutions to tricky problems.

 I also have to raise that ultimate bubble-popper: not everything we read on the Internet is true.

So if you have found some really cool connections on the Internet that you want to check out and verify, this book can help you do that. It’s about field work and where to go look for information when there aren’t detailed census records or lists of births and deaths.  It takes a realistic look at truth and proof and what you can expect to find. It provides great guidelines for organization that can be applied to computer files as well as paper files, and yes, you should have both. It has extensive checklists of items you might wish to ask your older relatives when you talk to them about family history.

The book? Ancestry’s Guide to Research; Case Studies in American Genealogy, by Johni Cenry and Arlene Eakle.

This is a 1986 book—the Ancestry publishing company is now Ancestry.com.

The authors originally wrote this book as a companion guide to their famous The Source. Since some readers were having difficulty applying the information from The Source, the authors built a road map of how and when to use the material, and in the process created a valuable reference for the rest of us, regardless of owning The Source.

Modern readers will be able to creatively pursue Internet, email, and cell phone alternatives to some of the techniques covered in the Guide, and thus bring together lessons of the past with tools from the future.

I continue to use this book, and I’ve never regretted paying $20.00 for it.  This book can take your genealogical skills to the next level—it’s still helping me. 

I thought I’d better see if it was still available before I started singing its praises, and there are a variety of copies on sale at Amazon. Some of the used ones are going for a penny. Grab one and have fun with it!

Findagrave.com: from Good to Great to Incredible!

As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to spend some time discussing findagrave.com today.  This is a free site, first created to post celebrity and famous people’s grave sites, and now an extremely helpful site for genealogy.

I first started posting grave site photos, portraits, and memorials for my ancestors over ten years ago. Here’s an example with my Great Grandfather: David Davison.

I was motivated by the desire to share freely the information I had found or that others had shared with me. For years I’ve used it as my virtual cemetery where I could pay my respects any time of the year. Once you’ve registered, you can create online virtual cemeteries where you can organize graves into groups.

This was fine and very handy.  Then they built in links, which allowed us to attach children to parents and husbands to wives. Even better!

Then it happened.  I kept finding relatives appearing around the country. Some were done by fellow hobbyists, but it was obvious some cemeteries were posting all of their records, even linking to them on their websites. The number of entries on findagrave.com seems to have doubled every few months!  It is unbelievable how many individual entries are now on the site.

It lead to one of those times when I spent a fruitless hour looking at microfilm at a LDS Family History Center, only to have a quick peek at findagrave.com during a five minute break and discovering three more generations of my direct maternal line (mother’s mother’s mother, etc.).

I was having a look at Thomas Dickinson’s entry, thoroughly appreciating his tale of bad luck and very interesting life (you must read that!), when I then went down and clicked on his wife Maria Lowe’s link. I kept clicking on the mother’s links, ultimately ending up at Susanna Stull Swearingen, my 6^th great grandmother. From here I did an online search for Charles Swearingen and Susanna Stull, and it led me to two genealogies, one about Gerrit Sweringen from the Netherlands and the other the excellent The Stulls of “Millsborough,” by Chris H. Bailey. Both of these are available online for free, but Bailey’s book was so outstanding I ordered one.

Can you trust what you find in published genealogies? Sometimes.  I like to go with trust, then verify. So I believed for about an hour the story from the Gerrit Sweringen book about Marmaduke Swearingen being the legendary Blue Jacket who led the tribes against General Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1812.  Then I read Chris Bailey’s The Stulls documentation of the DNA reports debunking the myths—the DNA of Swearingen and Blue Jacket descendants show no relation. That’s how you can spot good genealogists: they go after the truth and let you know when they aren’t sure about something!

In my next post, I’d like to introduce you to an old school book which is now incredibly inexpensive and has an excellent chapter on truth called “How the Rules Apply to Genealogy,” Ancestry's Guide to Research: Case Studies in American Genealogy
, by Johni Cerny and Arlene Eakle.

Things I learned from Family Finder DNA test

Well, so far this week no one has called me Prince.  I guess I'll have to actually prove a royal connection before I can expect royal treatment.

But I'm still excited and having a lot of fun with my Family Finder DNA results.  The ethnic breakdown has been very interesting and worth the cost of the test by itself.

Another result of the test, and the main reason I chose FamilyTreeDNA for my testing, is that they connect you with people who show traces of being related to you. Ideally you can find someone with the same family names and make contact with them.  So far I've had zero replies. But many of these people, and there are over 800 matches for me, have posted ged.coms (a basic genealogy file of your tree) that allow access to other members.  As a result, I've gone ancestor hunting in other people's trees and have found known relatives!  Even better, I've found relatives I was 90% certain of, but not 100%, and this gives me confidence that my research and family notes were accurate.

So Grandma Davison, your notes about the Staffords and Dickinsons were spot on! So Carroll Andrew Edson, you were right when you said my 2nd Great Grandmother Lura Edson was part of your Edson Genealogy! And wouldn't you know that Lura's ancestor was my 9th Great Grandmother Frances Deighton?  And Frances, she's so famous you can Google her!  She's what they call a gateway ancestor, who leads us back to all sorts of famous people, like signers of the Magna Charta, Kings of England, and Kings of France.

So I think I'll give the royalty stuff another week and see if I get called any interesting names.

Bottom line, the DNA tests are fun and worth it.

Next week, let's talk about findagrave.com and the importance of persistence in genealogy!

The Family Finder Results are In!

Received my FamilyTreeDNA Family Finder results! It provides an ethnic background working off all my ancestors in the last four generations, and it provides contact information for people who have connections to me who want to be contacted. Some of those connections have posted their genealogy, and I've been able to find common ancestors.

I was not surprised to learn I'm 97 percent European: the breakdown surprised me! I'm 54% British Isles and 43% Scandinavian! Vikings, good grief. Didn't see that one coming.

And the other overall 3%? Middle Eastern, specifically Asia Minor, the area including Turkey. So, and this is Not Good Genealogical Practice (NGGP) , I'm claiming descent from the princes of Troy and demanding to be referred to as "Prince" or "Your Majesty" around the house. I'll let you know how that works out!