GenealogyAtHeart – Page 45 – GenealogyAtHeart.com

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund

Last week I received an email via Ancestry.com from the Research Manager with the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF). The group will be having a candlelight vigil in Washington, DC in May 2017 and reached out to me as I have in my Main Tree an individual that was selected to be honored.

We are not closely related to the fallen officer; Robert Flenner was my husband’s 4th cousin, 3 times removed through marriage to the grand daughter of a Harbaugh. Since I have updated all the Harbaugh/Herbach family in the U.S., Robert appears in my tree.

I had never heard of the organization and did a little research. The NLEOMF was founded in 1984 for the purpose of honoring and remembering law enforcement officers who have been killed in the line of duty. I’m not sure how they select the officers to be honored; Robert Flenner died in 1908.

After receiving the email and checking out the group I went to my tree to remind myself who Robert Flenner was. I have a large tree and I didn’t recall him. The citations I had were the 1870, 1880 and 1900 US Federal census, a death certificate that didn’t mention he was a fallen officer (cause of death-cancer of intestines; occupation of deceased-house duties), Pennsylvania Probate, Find-A-Grave memorial and a Social Security record for one of his children. I did find it interesting that the death certificate noted he was buried in Harbaugh Church Cemetery. I had visited there on my July research trip looking for the grave of one of my husband’s several times great grandmother. I must have walked past Robert’s resting place as I was all over that small cemetery on my unsuccessful hunt. Passed him without giving him a thought! None of my found records provided me the event that occurred to warrant being honored. I looked for an obituary and found the following provided by KimTisha on Find-A-Grave:

Robert Flenner

Ironically, the same day I was contacted by NLEOMF I received a copy of my paternal great grandparents’ divorce records. I had always suspected the root cause of the divorce was alcoholism because I had found a newspaper article written shortly before the divorce mentioning that great grandpa had been fined for providing alcohol to a known alcoholic. I was also very aware that NO FAMILY member on that line drank. So I was not surprised when the divorce documents mentioned that my great grandfather had had a drinking problem for 25 years. I was stunned, however, by the long term physical abuse my great grandmother had been subjected to when great grandpa was inebriated. He was definitely a mean drunk! The records mention the severity of the abuse and it made me sick.

Reading the obituary for Robert Flenner and knowing the arrest he made had prevented another woman from receiving further abuse I was determined to find a closer relative who could represent him at the DC event.

The problem was, I had been unsuccessful in finding any close family members for my husband’s line when I visited the area three months ago. What to do?!

The internet is a wonderful way to connect so I thought I’d try to locate family by following the bread crumb trail of known records. I updated Robert’s line and discovered one of his two children had married and had children. I emailed every Find-A-Grave memorial creator through Robert’s great grandchild. Most didn’t respond but several wrote back that they knew of closer descendants and would forward the information to them. I’m hoping that someone is able to attend the Candlelight Vigil in which he will be honored.

Save Those Emails!

At the recent genealogical seminar I attended I met up with a colleague I had not seen since the National Genealogical Society conference in May. We were catching up and he mentioned he was still trying to recover about 13,000 emails that had been lost. That’s a lot of emails! Here’s how it happened:

In our area Verizon used to be one of our internet service providers. In April, Frontier purchased Verizon’s customers. The transition was not seamless; there was much service disruption but it appeared that most of the problems had been corrected. Then, with no warning, my colleague woke up one morning a few weeks ago and discovered that he couldn’t access his Verizon email account. He contacted Frontier who told him they had nothing to do with it and he needed to call Verizon. Verizon told him he was no longer a customer so he no longer had access to his emails.

It’s always difficult changing addresses, whether it’s in the real world or virtually, but it is even more difficult when one is caught unexpectedly. He had received no warning that the account would be terminated. His contract with Verizon was for 2 years and everyone in our area had been informed that Frontier would honor and continue the Verizon contracts through their expiration. I don’t even know how breaching the contract can be legal since he’s still under contract but that’s a whole different issue!

The colleague quickly made a gmail account and then began the arduous task of updating his email address all over the internet. Been there, done that, not fun!

Although hubby and I had a Verizon email account we rarely used it and I don’t think I’ve checked it in the last few years. In fact, I had forwarded the account to our gmail account at least five years ago. I completely missed that the account disappeared.

The wasted time in having to update to the new account, though, wasn’t the most upsetting situation. The loss of all the saved emails was the most devastating. I can only imagine!

Back in the day, like most Americans, we had an AOL account. We continued to use the account well into the 2000’s even though our children loved to poke fun at us old fogies still sticking with AOL. I pointed out I was being a loyal customer. So much for loyalty! About 2010 our account got hacked. We changed passwords. It was hacked again. AOL sent us a rather IMHO nasty email that warned us that our account would be cancelled if we continued to share our passwords with others. Huh?! We hadn’t done that. I was over them so I created a gmail account. Hubby wanted to continue with AOL so he once again changed the password. I spent a weekend updating the new account info to our many online accounts. Over the next few weeks I went through the saved emails and purged. Many, though, were of genealogical significance – notification of a cousin’s marriage, the death of an aunt, graduation dates and connections with long lost relatives who had found postings I had placed on bulletin boards. I forwarded those emails to gmail and placed them in a folder titled Genealogy. A few weeks after I completed the transfers, the account was again hacked. We received the same letter and this time, hubby was through with them. That account is still open and maybe once a year I go on it to see if any long lost relative has rediscovered my original tree on Rootsweb’s World Connect or one of those old bulletin board posts that I can no longer update to provide a newer email address. It hasn’t happened yet but who knows? Mostly I find a thousand junk emails that I delete en mass.

I now save emails that are of value to my computer and to a cloud. This way, if I have to abandon gmail for another email account I haven’t lost anything important. For emails that were of special importance, such as a photo or record attachment, I also attach to my tree, copy and paste the email contents into the citation. I feel very fortunate that my transition was on my own terms. Heed the warning!

Genealogy At Heart Website Update

I’ve been writing a lot about technology lately. I do love it but it certainly is a pain when it glitches! Last year I created a free website using Sidengo called www.GenealogyAtHeart.com. I linked my blog posts to it and featured genealogical special offers, photos of recent research trips I’d taken and information for clients who were interested in contacting me. In July, I received an email from Sidengo that in less than 3 weeks my account was going to be closed unless I moved to a paid option. I was leaving town for a two week research trip the next day, had a client deadline I had to finish before I left and was returning to my teaching job three days after the research trip ended so I felt rushed into making a decision. Hubby thought I should just pay up to make my life easier but I didn’t want to do that as I thought it was poor customer service to pressure folks into paying. During my evenings while I was on my research trip I searched for alternatives. I settled on another company but wasn’t really happy with it – I was only able to get one page so the website was a long scroll AND I couldn’t link to my blog posts so I had to list them which was cumbersome for readers.

In September, the Association of Professional Genealogists had a webinar about WordPress. I had explored them in July but didn’t find the site intuitive enough for me to figure out how to quickly put together my webpages. After watching the webinar I thought I’d give it another try and in just a few hours I had my webpages almost back to where it was from the beginning. It’s officially live so I’ll continue to post my blogs on blogspot and then archive at genealogyatheart.com. So, if you want to find an older post and you remember the month – you can look on blogger. If you can’t remember when it was published but are looking for the topic – visit genealogyatheart.com where I’ve tagged and archived by area.

Tips for Attending a Family History Day and What I Learned from Attendees

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 9 Oct 2016.

October is Family History Month and if you’re a newbie planning on attending a local event to get some genealogical assistance, I’ve got some recommendations to make your experience a happy one:

Bring what you know written down. Even better – bring how you know what you know! (Was it your parents who told you or did you find a record? It’s important to record where you got the information as you build your tree because trust me, before you know it you’ll have a lot of info and won’t remember where you got most of it!)
Have a specific question you’d like answered in mind. Specific is not, “I want to know everything about my mom’s family.” Specific is, “I’d like to find out when my great grandmother Elizabeth Smithson died.”
You probably have a lot of questions but rank them in order of your interest; it’s only fair as other people have questions, too, and are patiently waiting!
Prepare yourself for not immediately finding an answer – very little is online so it might take a phone call, email, letter or a visit to discover the answer you seek. You might not ever find what your looking for, either. Today an attendee demanded of one of my colleagues that he find an obituary from 1877 in a rural area of Pennsylvania. Checked the largest town newspapers online but couldn’t find one. He had checked several databases (Chronicling America, Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank, Ancestry) so I recommended calling the local history center and asking what papers were in existence then. The woman was not happy and demanded that someone find the obituary immediately. We couldn’t give her what she wanted so she left in a huff.
Remember to thank the researcher – they are volunteering their time and could be doing their own research instead of helping you with yours.

We had a nice turn out today at our county day and I met some incredibly wonderful folks with some very good questions and a few brick walls we were able to start tearing down. My three most memorable of the day involved:

A woman in her 70’s who’s parents in their 90’s were still alive and all of them decided it was time to write the family history. They were having trouble starting because they wanted “to do it right.” HINT: There is no one way to do genealogy and that’s one of the major pluses for me! I showed several formats – Case Studies, Proof Arguments, Kinship Determinations, and several lineage forms. If you’re putting off writing because you don’t know where to begin just begin with whoever your favorite individual is. You can ascend or descend from there. I understand that footnotes/endnotes are a pain but citations are critical. How is anyone going to know where you found that document unless you write it down?! The lady today didn’t like the look of footnotes; I explained why they are often used over endnotes – people tend to not think the citation is important so they save paper by not copying them. I recommended that she use page numbers that say 1 of X so if someone does make a copy in the future they’d know they might be missing the endnotes. I think the family just needed reassurance that their work was not going to be up for a Pulitzer Prize. It’s okay if you aren’t an author; it’s not ok to let all that research go to waste by not communicating in the best way you are able to for the next generation.
A lovely lady who wanted to know why her step-grandmother who she had never met was mean. What I loved about this woman was her matter of factness; she wasn’t emotional about the situation. Instead, she just wanted an explanation for why the older lady had been reportedly so miserable. I thought this was extremely interesting as most people don’t even fully research their blood relatives and here was someone who wanted to know about a step relative. I was able to find the woman’s death date in California and showed her the familysearch.org wiki so she can get further information about the many places out west the woman had lived. I also recommended she check out GoogleBooks and Hathi Trust for more information about events that were occurring at the time the grandma was residing in an area – like the dust bowl, for instance. I think that would have made me miserable! We were unable to find a marriage record or a death date for her grandfather but we did narrow down some cemeteries that she can contact to see if he is buried there. (Not on Find-a-grave, Billion Graves, etc.)
A woman who brought in the earliest photoshopped photo I’ve ever seen! Seriously, don’t know who or when it was done but some family member took a photo taken circa 1872 of a couple seated holding a baby and cut a photo of another baby out and pasted it over the woman’s lap. It was done fairly well, too. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen! The family was afraid to remove the glued on kid, understandably, so I recommended taking it to a professional photographic restorer. For someone who just deleted all of her photos from her phone in error, I’m clearly the wrong person for the job! But the photoshopping brings up lots of interesting questions – why did someone do this? What’s underneath? Who did that? Who’s the baby? I have a tentative hypothesis that the family will have to pursue but my theory is this: Eleven months after the immigrant couple wed in Newark, New Jersey a male unnamed baby was born. The baby died 2 weeks later; he had been named Henry in the death records. The couple had another baby the following year. I suspect they had the first picture taken holding the dead baby as they looked miserable. Not having the money to sit for another photograph they had a picture of their second child taken and then wishing they had taken a photo when she was younger, cut it out and placed it over the original photo. The couple had 5 children, one every year, and then the father died. The mother died 2 years after him. The youngest two children were raised in an orphanage. Using GenWeb I was able to find where the orphanage records are housed. There was a memorial on find-a-grave for the couple but not for the baby. I recommended calling the cemetery to see if he was buried in plot 1 as the father was buried in plot 2 and the mom in plot 3. Hmm…who else could have been in plot 1 but the baby with no stone because they couldn’t afford one? Only way to find the answer is to make a call!

Happy Hunting!

Less Than 6 Degrees of Separation

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 2 Oct 2016.

Yesterday I attended the Florida Genealogical Society’s sponsored seminar given by Judy Russell, CG. Judy is always such a dynamic presenter!

Typically, when I attend a seminar, I somehow find a relation to another attendee and yesterday was no exception. Judy had mentioned HIPPA and there was a question from an audience member regarding the number of years that records are held privately. I added that I had done some client work and discovered that I could obtain medically related records from a state facility and the court records regarding the medical issue were housed in the Florida State Library. This was for an individual that had died in 1973, just 43 years ago. The records I had received, though, were from a period over 50 years ago but the individual had continued to reside in the facility more recently than 50 years ago.

Shortly after there was a break and a woman sitting directly behind me introduced herself. Her father had been the psychologist at the facility from which I had obtained the records during the time the individual I was researching was living there. The attendee had just visited her father two weeks ago and had taken a trip to that area two weeks ago; she remarked that it looked the same.

It then hit me that I had once had a professor who also had been employed at the facility I asked her if her father had ever become a professor at a local college in the 1970’s as my instructor had been the psychologist at the same facility in the 1940’s and 1950’s. It appears that the seminar attendee’s father replaced the professor as her father had joined the facility in 1959 after an interim staff member was let go. So, I had connected with two of three psychologists that could have treated the client’s relative.

I live over 200 miles from the medical facility. The professor had lived in my county but the individual I was researching, the woman I met yesterday and her father never lived here. The father of the attendee lives over 300 miles away from me. Yet our paths all crossed. Definitely is a small world!

Saving Photos

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 5 Oct 2016.

I’ve been on a technology kick lately and here’s why – I did something incredibly dumb and I don’t want you to do it!

We have a nice older digital camera that we rarely use. I rely on my phone for pictures of events and when I research as I prefer the document to be digitally available instead of having to lug the book to the copy machine, pay, and come home with yet another piece of paper that I have to then scan to save.

Yes, the camera phone has made my life better but I had taken so many pictures in the past two years that it stopped uploading about 45 photos ago. Now I knew this because I kept getting a warning that I was out of space but it was one of those things I put off correcting. I decided I wasn’t going to buy more space because I really needed to get into the habit of cleaning out the photos shortly after I’d taken them.

We were going to have an event at my primary job that involved taking lots and lots of photos over a short period of time. Charged the camera and put in a new SD card but I wanted a backup in case the old camera failed. I started going through the phone photos and hitting delete one by one. I guess I got a little over enthusiastic (actually, I got distracted by a phone call on the land line) and must have hit something wrong as I deleted everything at once. Oops!

I know what I lost and most are thankfully, somewhere else. I lost a picture of my son petting an armadillo he had rescued out of our hot tub last summer. The armadillo was making eye contact with him and looked like he was eternally grateful for being saved. I texted the pic to my daughter who promptly replied son better wash his hands as to not get a disease. So I have that picture in my texts.

I lost a picture of a peregrine falcon that landed on my fence during the hurricane but that’s okay, too, as he now lives in my hood so if I want, I can retake his photo.

What I’m upset about is birthday photos of my husband for the last two years. I don’t post to Facebook and I wouldn’t have texted them because everyone who cared was here. I know I was the only one taking photos so they’re gone for good. Hubby could care less but I’m kicking myself for being a goof.

Hard way to learn my lesson but I think I won’t be repeating this mistake.

Mexican War Soldiers – A Project You Can Help With

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 29 Sep 2016.

Looking for a way to give back to the genealogical community? An awesome preservation indexing project has begun that may be of interest to you.

The U.S. National Park Service’s Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park partnered last month with the Federation of Genealogical Societies for the purpose of developing a database of individuals who served in the U.S.-Mexican War. The project will be ongoing – after the estimated 130,000 soldiers are entered to a searchable database, military unit information and related documents will be scanned and added.

You can help – just email Patricia Rand at projects@fgs.org.

The Adoption Trend

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 25 Sep 2016

In the past six months I’ve been approached by two clients who had adoption inquiries. I used to be contacted by folks who were adopted and were searching for their birth parents but lately, I’ve noticed a different trend.

The first individual discovered she was adopted while she was at college. Her assigned roommate swore she knew someone back home that looked identical to her. This was before Facebook and email so seeing a picture or contacting the “twin” had to wait. In the spring of her freshman year the client visited the roommate’s home and upon entering, roommate’s family remarked about the resemblance. Unfortunately, the client wasn’t able to meet this “twin” because the “twin” was out of town as it was her spring break, too. Everywhere the client went that week she encountered people who called her by the “twin’s” name. Finally, someone showed her a picture and indeed, there was a striking resemblance. A few weeks after the client returned to college she was contacted by the “twin’s” father. He had heard of the client’s visit and wondered if perhaps, they were related. The client called her parents who fessed up – she had been adopted and they knew who her parents were. Yes, the “twin’s” father was her father, too. When this client called me I thought she was interested in tracing her birth parents’ lines but she wasn’t. Her adopted parents were an older couple who had recently died and she wanted to know about their families. She felt that they had given her their family’s customs and norms and she was more a part of their lineage than her birth parents. Shortly after working for this client an episode of Genealogy Roadshow aired and an adopted woman was to trying to verify a family story told to by her adopted parents. As part of their family, she felt the story was a part of her history, too.

Last month,I was contacted by another individual who asked me to complete lineage paperwork for her sister. I thought this was going to be fairly quick as the client’s mother had been a part of the organization. When I mentioned I would need the birth certificate the client let me know that her “sister” had been adopted. The organization that the ladies were interested in joining does not accept applications unless bloodline is proved. After explaining that I thought there might be a way around this dilemma. Often children are adopted by other family members and if that was the case, proving kinship might still be viable. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the situation. The woman, who is in her 50’s, had discovered who her birth parents were and confirmed it through dna testing a few years ago. I offered to research the birth parents but client and her sister weren’t interested. They had been raised as siblings and if they couldn’t join as siblings they weren’t interested.

As our society evolves so does the concept of family. My opinion is we are all related anyway. If the inquiry is to learn more about customs and norms than I understand why there is an interest. If the concern is medical, however, it may or may not be valid. We’re all aware that lifestyle effects health but so does our genetic makeup. My prediction is that genealogy software is going to catch up to enable a connection between two sets of parents.

Citation Dilemma – Attributing Parent Marriage Info on a Child’s Ancestry Page

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 22 Sep 2016.

About a month ago I was contacted by an Ancestry user who inquired the following: “How could George Mitchell Long marry Sarah Ford in 1807 in Tennessee when he wasn’t born until 1849?”

Excellent question! I went to my tree and checked the birth and death dates for the couple and their child and didn’t see that I had an error so I suspected my tree was confused with another; that was my reply.

Yesterday, I received a more detailed response which brings up an excellent point. Under sources, I had saved for George Mitchell Long (Jr.) his parents’ marriage record. It does not show under Facts, of course, since the marriage took place before George Jr. was born. The record does not show Jr. or Sr. either since the Sr. hadn’t yet had a son so there was no Jr. at the time of the marriage.

Why did I have the parents info on the son’s page? I put the record there so when I write kinship determinations I can pull everything from one page. I can understand how this would confuse someone looking at my tree and assuming I had the wrong information for that person’s page, though.

I do this a lot, too! I’m thinking about how the Social Security info provides kinship and I save to both the parents and their child. That is clearer since it shows the relationship that a parents marriage alone does not do.

I don’t know if there’s a better work around – if you know of one please let me know! I’ve requested that Ancestry add a feature like the shoebox to the Facts page so extraneous information could be saved and retrieved easily but I’m not holding my breath on that.

Originally, I put info that I just described under the Notes feature but I had to move it out because I was working on some lines with other family members and they couldn’t see the Notes section – it’s only visible to the owner. For awhile, I then added it as a Comment but I wasn’t scrolling down and was missing my own comments. I see that now a click on comments on the toolbar brings the comments to the right side for viewing so maybe I should go back to using that.

I’d appreciate your thoughts and suggestion…

A New Way to Identify Name Variations

Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 18 Sep 2016.

I was reading the article Guild of One-Name Studies Is Now Available at FamilySearch.org in The Genealogy News recently and thought I’d check out the database on Familysearch. On a few lines, I trace everyone who has that name in the US in an attempt to make a connection across the pond. Stop and read the article and then come back to my blog.

If you followed the articles link to Familysearch, (added here in case you didn’t), and you enter a surname in the search field, you probably were disappointed. I know I was! I first added HARBAUGH and got links to everything but Guild Of One-Name Studies. I know family historians, some quite renown, have traced the name back to a HARBO who was a court scribe in the 1200’s in Denmark. I expected to find that and more but all I got were records of Harbaughs.

I then typed in LEININGER and got lots of IGI records but nothing for the Guild of One-Name Studies.

Then it hit me! On the left hand side, I should have scrolled down and filtered out everything but Guild of One-Name Studies.

I still got nothing for Harbaugh and Leininger but when I entered KOS I got Cass and Coss,

Next I tried KABLE and that’s when it occurred to me – duh – this could be an innovative way to come up with surname variations! My Kables were listed as Cable, Cabel, Kabel, Cobbold and Cabot. I would have never come up with Cobbold and Cabot.

Next I tried DUER and got Dewhurst. Now that was very interesting to me as I’ve been heavy into deeds and wills of my John Duer in Trumbull/Mahoning Counties, Ohio who died in 1831 after his son, Thomas, and I keep seeing Dewhurst in the records. I pronounce Dewhurst as doo’ herst but I guess it could be pronounced doo’ ers. Hmm.

We’ve all seen creatively spelled names, likely recorded from pronunciations, in records but I’ve never been really good at coming up with more than obvious variations. I’m adding this tool to my genealogy tool box!