Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Unfinished Genealogy Projects

I'm pretty sure tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun topic from Randy Seaver is going to include everyone.  And if it doesn't, that person (could there be more than one?) is amazing and very, very special.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

1.  What started but unfinished projects do you have?  Define one or more of them and how far along you are in the project(s).

2.  Share one or more of your unfinished projects in your own blog post or in a comment on this blog post, or write a Substack post, Facebook Note, or post in some other social media system.  Please leave a comment with a link on this post so others can find it.

Oh, I have so many, and it's hard to keep track of them all.  But some of the most important are:

• Enter all the information I gathered from research I did before my computer crashed, with citations.  I had a great research streak for a while, and I was finding lots and lots of information.  I probably had entered only about 20% of what I had found.  Oh, but this requires that I . . .

• Get my computer all fixed up, including connecting the storage disk I have already purchased and transferring all my retrieved files.  Part of the benefit of getting the computer fixed and transferring the retrieved files is that most of the research I haven't entered is among the retrieved files.  Oh, and the updated family tree program files are there also.  I think I have everything I need, it's just getting it done.  Since that's the time-consuming part, I'm only about 10% done?

• Properly file all those documents, both physical and electronic.  I have to regain access to the electronic files before I can file them properly, of course.  I haven't started this at all.

• Get my online back-ups started again.  I am woefully behind (about four or five years' worth).  Also not started at all.

• Like Randy, I need to regularize my locations in my family tree program.  Tedious but necessary.  I probably have done about 5–10% of them.  Maybe it isn't that bad.  Maybe about 20%.

• Restart sending updated copies of family information to every relative with whom I am in contact, for every family line each person is a descendant of.  This will be easier than when I used to do it, because previously I printed out everything on paper and mailed it to everyone.  That equaled about 50 to 75 big manila envelopes going out for Chanukah and Christmas every year.  This time around, I intend to send everyone electronic files, unless specifically requested otherwise.  I haven't started this at all.

Okay, that's enough to make me feel overwhelmed, so I better stop while I'm behind.

I Found Out Where We Had Our Vacation!

It's amazing what you can learn once you find the right people to ask.

Back on November 8, I posted a series of photographs from a vacation my family took, probably around April 1970, when most of the photos were dated.  Some photos were at picnic tables, some by a tent, some by a lake, and some of different family members standing in front of rock formations.

I still remember that we visited Lake Mead when I was young, so that was my guess for the lake in the photos.  But I had no idea where the rock formations could be.  I threw the question out to anyone looking at the blog post.

No one posted any comments on the blog, but I did get several comments on my Facebook page.  One in particular, from my cousin's wife, suggested that the rocks might be at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area in Nevada.  So I looked it up online, found an e-mail address for questions, and sent a link to my blog post, asking if anyone there could tell me if the photos were taken at Red Rock.

The person who first received my message said he would forward it to people at Red Rock to look at.  It took a couple of weeks, but a very nice person from Red Rock responded and said the photos didn't look like Red Rock, but maybe they were at Valley of Fire State Park, also in Nevada.  He sent me the URL for Valley of Fire's site.

So I visited the Valley of Fire site, found an e-mail address there to send questions to, and went through the same routine.  This person thought the photos did look like Valley of Fire, and he said he would forward them to staff at the park to see if they could find the locations.

This time I waited much longer.  I realized after three months that I had never heard anything back, so I sent a follow-up message.  My contact said he would poke the staff at Valley of Fire.

Three days later, a message came from a new person, someone at Valley of Fire.  She said yes indeed, those photos sure did look like they were at her park, and she was going to ask some staff members to try to find the locations.

And two days after that, woo hoo!  Not only did they find all three locations, they took photos of them while holding up printouts of my photos from 1970!  Look what they sent me:

First we have the photo of the Toyota station wagon, and then just the rock formation.

Here's the photo of my father, and next the same rock formation without the photo.

Last but not least, the photo of the three of us kids being held up in front of the same rocks, and the rocks by themselves.

And now I know that all of these photos were taken in the Seven Sisters picnic area at Valley of Fire State Park.  Since there were photos of us sitting at a picnic table, I'm guessing that table was not far from the rock formations.  I hope that the picnic tables from 1970 have been replaced by now, although I'm amazed that the rocks look almost exactly the same as they did 55 years ago.  I know geologic time is slow, but I would have expected more erosion.

It's almost exactly 55 years ago, in fact.  I realized that we probably took this vacation during Easter break (yes, back then, before political correctness, it was Easter break, not spring break as it's now called), because my parents weren't really big on having us miss school unnecessarily.  Looking at the calendar for 1970, Easter fell on March 29 that year.  If I remember correctly (it has been a while, after all), Easter break was the week before Easter, so we would have been there during the week leading up to March 29.  And that was just last Saturday.  If Easter break came after Easter itself, then it's 55 years ago this week.

I'm so stoked that I was able to identify the locations for these photos, and also figured out when!  Next up, I think I'll see if the people at Lake Mead National Recreation Area can tell me where at the lake those photos were taken (the person who sent me the URL for Valley of Fire also sent me the one for Lake Mead).  I'm feeling lucky.

And I did receive permission to post these photos on my blog (because of course I asked; I didn't take the photos, so I don't own the copyright).  I'm still waiting on an answer from the park interpreter on whether she wants name credit for the photos.

Addendum, April 1, 2025:  The park interpreter has decided she wants to stay anonymous.  But I gave her a big thank you for helping me solve my mystery!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Survey of Genealogy Activities

This week's challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun sounds similar to the one Randy Seaver posted on May 21 of this year, but this time he has given specific questions and made the exercise less open-ended, which actually makes it easier in a lot of ways.  But it's a lot longer!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible music, please!):

1)  Answer these questions in my survey about your genealogy resources and usage:

a)  Which genealogy software programs for your computer do you use (e.g., Family Tree Maker, Reunion, GRAMPS, etc.)?

b)  Which online family trees have information submitted by you, in either a separate online tree (e.g., Ancestry Member Tree) or a universal (collaborative) online tree (e.g., WikiTree)?

c)  For which subscription genealogy record providers (e.g., Ancestry) do you have a subscription?

d)  Which FREE genealogy record providers (e.g., FamilySearch) do you use regularly?

e)  How much time do you spend each week doing actual genealogy research online?  [Note:  not reading, or social networking, but actual searching in a record provider.]  Estimate an average number of hours per week.

f)  How much time do you spend each week doing actual genealogy research in a repository (e.g., library, archive, courthouse, etc.)?  Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.

g)  How much time do you spend each week adding information to your genealogy software program (either on your computer or online)?  Estimate an average number of hours per week over, say, a one-month period.

h)  How much time do you spend each month at a genealogical society meeting, program, or event (not a seminar or conference)?  Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.

i)  How much time do you spend each month on genealogy education (e.g., reading books and periodicals, attending seminars, conferences, workshops, Webinars, etc.)?   Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.

j)  How much time do you spend each week reading, writing, and commenting on genealogy blogs, Web sites, and social media?   Estimate an average number of hours per week over, say, a one-month period.

2)    Answer the questions in a blog post of your own (and please drop a link as a comment in this post), in a comment to this post, or in a Google+ or Facebook post.

Here's my breakdown:

(a) The only genealogy software program I use regularly for my own family tree information is Family Tree Maker, v. 16.  I also have:

• Reunion 9
• Mac Family Tree
• Legacy Family Tree
• PAF
• Personal Ancestry Writer
• Roots Magic
• and I think one or two more

I keep the other programs handy to be able to open other people's files if necessary.

(b) I have submitted no information to any online family tree anywhere.  I have a page with the names I am researching on my own Web site.  I have also discovered that a distant relative of my brother-in-law has entered my mother's information on Geni.com.

(c) I have a paid subscription to FindMyPast.com, because it's the only way I have found to have access to the British newspaper collection.  I still think the interface sucks.

(d) My definition of a free genealogy record provider includes those databases I can use for free at my local Family History Center (technically, FamilySearch Library), in Oakland, California.  These are the sites I use regularly.

• FamilySearch.org
• JewishGen.org
• SephardicGen.org
• Chronicling America
• FultonHistory.com (another site with great material but an awful interface)
• FindAGrave
• USGenWeb
• FreeBMD
• RootsWeb
• Google
• Wikipedia
• Ancestry.com
• Fold3.com
• Newspaper Archive
• 19th Century British Newspapers
• ProQuest Obituaries
• GenealogyBank
• Newspapers.com
• VitalSearch

(e) Online genealogy research each week averages about 15 hours.

(f) Repository research each averages about 3 hours.

(g) I don't spend a lot of time adding information to my own family tree program.  It's probably only about 2–3 hours each week.

(h) Genealogy society meetings and events run about 15 hours every month.

(i) Genealogy education takes about 15 hours of my times every month, once I take into account conferences and seminars.

(j) Reading, writing, and commenting on genealogy blogs, sites, and social media runs about 20 hours each week.

Yikes!  My weekly total is about 70 hours each week that are devoted to genealogy.   That sounds about right, but I hadn't realized it was so high.  This year is probably running a little higher than average due to the number of conferences and seminars on my schedule (SLIG, San Francisco History Days, Sacramento African American Family History Seminar, CSGA [twice!], Jamboree, Ancestry Day, Civil War Teachers Institute, IAJGS, IBGS, and the Contra Costa County Genealogical Society's John Colletta seminar).  And this total didn't even include volunteer work!

Trusting Obituaries

Today I have a guest blogger:  my friend Carol Townsend.  Her mother recently passed away, and after writing her mother's obituary, she was struck by the nature of obituaries and how they fit into genealogy research.

===

Frances Lathrop Gundrum

One of the cornerstones of genealogical research is the newspaper obituary.  There is so much information packed into a small space, and they often contain names of relatives that appear nowhere else in other documentation—aunts, uncles, cousins—who are listed in the "survived by" or "preceded in death by" sections.  Obituaries can be one of the best ways to break through a brick wall in your research and give you a new avenue of research.

One caveat:  You can't always trust them.

Having just written my mother's obituary, I know how easy it is to get facts wrong or include information that we who wrote it understand, but which might seem misleading.  But once an obituary goes into print, many people take it as gospel truth.

Case in point:  My brother married a woman with three very young children but never legally adopted them.  They all call my brother "Dad" (their biological father is referred to by his first name, if at all), and my parents were Grandpa and Grandma.  They are listed, rightfully so, as my mother's grandchildren.  Each of those grandchildren has the name of a significant other included:  Marie (Kurt) Edwards, Katie (Bob Deelstra) Kortlever, and Jared (Katrina Eisma) Kortlever.  Looking at those names, it seems obvious that Kurt and Marie are married, but you don't know if Bob and Katie are married and if Katie just kept her maiden name.  The same can be said for Jared and Katrina.  More research is required.

(For the curious:  Kurt and Marie are married and have each brought children into the marriage; Bob and Katie are engaged, have one child together, and share custody of an older daughter with Bob's ex-wife; and Jared and Katrina are living together with no current plans to make anything official.)

Another example:  I have a cousin who is rather a vagabond and a drifter.  All we could really say in the obituary was that he was somewhere in Hawaii.  We're not sure which island he's on, or if he's still there.  We're pretty sure it's accurate, but we don't actually know.  That's what it says in the obituary.  It may or may not be true, but it's in print.

One thing to remember when doing research is that most often, at least in this day and age, obituaries are written by funeral directors from information given to them by grieving families.  The families do their best, I'm sure, to give accurate information.  But it is a time of stress, and one does not always think clearly at such times.  I was fortunate that I had a few days to fact-check; I had originally gotten a couple of dates wrong, but I was able to find the information in my home files and correct the obit before it went to print.

Now that I've written an obituary myself, I will look at them with a more careful eye as I do any research.  Obituaries can be wonderful goldmines of new facts, but you can't be sure that everything in them is accurate.  Take the information down, certainly, but verify each fact with at least one other documentary source.  That's good research practice in any case.

Carol is a former teacher and ASL interpreter who is transitioning to becoming a professional writer.  Her mother's memorial page is hosted by the Miller Funeral Home.

IIJG Call for Research Proposals

From Emanuel Elyasaf, Executive Director, International Institute of Jewish Genealogy:

The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) has issued its annual Call for Research Proposals for original research in the field of Jewish genealogy, to be carried out in the academic year of 2013-2014.  Successful applicants will be awarded grants of up to $10,000.

Proposals are requested by May 31, 2013.  Those meeting strict standards of academic excellence will be judged by the extent to which they broaden the horizons of Jewish genealogical research and/or create innovative tools or technologies to assist Jewish genealogists and family historians in their work.

The CFRP and Instructions to Applicants can be found on the Institute's Web site under Research/Research Grants.  These instructions should be followed carefully, as only applications in the correct form will be considered.

Successful applicants will be announced on September 1, 2011.

What Passes for Scholarship

<rant mode on>

Tonight I went to a presentation at a local historical society.  I will not grace the speaker by publishing her name, as I was, shall we say . . . disappointed in the information presented.  If you really want to know, you can probably Google and find it.

The speaker began the talk as a theatrical presentation, having the attendees clap while she sang.  This is a common tactic used to have an audience become emotionally invested in what is about to happen.  It creates an atmosphere more conducive to believing what the speaker will say.

And then it got worse.  And I'm going to quote directly from the presenter.

The speaker said she had read the many words her subject had written and then "strung them together" for her presentations.

The subject of the speaker's "research" is documented as having told several different versions of many events in her life.  The speaker defended the way her subject changed her stories as "spin doctoring" of "her own conflicting accounts."  But the speaker has been able to determine the true facts from all these versions.

The subject told several different stories about when and where she was born.  Our erstwhile "researcher" decided that seven testimonials of people who knew her some 35 or so years later, in an entirely different state, proved one of the stories was the true one.

As the presenter began talking about her subject's life, she warned us right up front that she wouldn't "bore [us] with great details" about how she had proved a lot of her information.

The presenter talked about how the research subject was supposed to have been born in slavery in Georgia, then somehow (before the Civil War) beame indentured in Nantucket for nine years.  How did that happen?  Well, it's a "long, involved story" and she "[wouldn't] go into it now."

We were shown four lines of an 1850 census page that was supposed to prove that the subject was married to a particular man -- except that the subject wasn't one of the people on the four lines.

Now, as almost anyone who knows me will attest, I have a very low tolerance for BS.  At the end of a work day, that tolerance is even lower.  So at this point I was having trouble keeping quiet.  I decided to go out to the lobby and look at the book that the speaker had available for sale (self-published, of course).

Well, that was a mistake.

The text of the book has no references.  No footnotes.  No endnotes.  No citations.  Nothing to indicate where the information came from to document any of the assertions in the book.

The book does have a reference list.  It is constructed as a list of sources that were "consulted."  Seven of the sources were the speaker's own works.  About twenty of the sources were interviews with octogenarians.  While these types of interviews are wonderful to use as leads for real research, they are not usually accepted as stand-alone evidence by themselves.  Other sources listed were incredibly generic, such as "city directories", "census", "archival documents."

While I was looking through the book, the speaker was talking about how her subject had often said that she had worked with and learned from a very famous person.  So how did the speaker "prove" that this was true?  She interviewed the subject's granddaughter, who said it was true.  Oh, so it must be, right?

The speaker is said to have a Ph.D.  This is not the quality of research I am accustomed to seeing from someone who has earned a Ph.D.

<rant mode off>

Genealogists often have a bad reputation for shoddy or questionable research.  If you present, or even do, historical research of any kind, including genealogical research, please take the time to use established best practices in your work.  Document your facts.  Use citations.  Resolve conflicting stories with facts.  Make sure that anyone who reads your work knows where your information came from.  If you have theories or beliefs that you are not able to prove, label them as such.  And as my friend Carol said, don't forget that the devil is in the details and people will be looking for that devil.

"You Don't Need to Know What You're Looking For ..."

You know the ads.  An actor talks about researching family history, following leaves, and an amazing revelation, then says, "You don't need to know what you're looking for.  You just need to start looking."

Well, if you don't know what you're looking for, how will you know it when you find it?  How will you know that the person you're linking to is actually your ancestor?

Those ads remind me of Alice in Wonderland and the Cheshire Cat:  “One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don't know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter.”

If you don't know where you want to go--don't know what you're looking for--then it doesn't matter which person you link to.  Anyone will do.  But if you want to find your family, you need to have a plan.  You need to know what, and who, you're looking for.

Talk to your family.  Call your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, your parents' best friends.  Look on the backs of old photos, because information may be written on the back.  Look in the family Bible for names.  Once you know who you're looking for, it can actually be easier to find them, because you know where they probably will be and who will be with them.

Do the research to find your family members.  Take the time to document and prove each connection in your family tree.  Don't just blindly follow a twitching leaf that someone else has posted and take that person at his word.  You might end up climbing someone else's family tree instead.