Photos!

I recently moved from Connecticut back to Washington, and I’m extremely happy to be home. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot of genealogy I could get done during the move, although we did visit a few cemeteries along the way and I did get the chance to talk to family members about our family. As soon as I got my computer up and running, though, I had something specific I had to get done as a favor to my husband’s dear old friend and school teacher from when he was young, Grandma Carol.

Carol has an amazing family  history. She pulled out scrapbooks and photographs to show me, and I was in awe. She even said she had a sword that belonged to an ancestor that was his during the War of 1812. If only all of us could have such wonderfully amazing heirlooms! She has an ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence, an ancestor who was on the New York senate, and other amazing people. All that said, a lot of the work was done by her grandmother, which is a luxury, considering I have very little to go by myself for my own family, and she’s old enough to be my own grandmother.

All of that awesomeness aside, Carol does have one problem: there’s a line that her immediately family hadn’t traced. Her paternal grandmother’s name was Josie Alexander, and she had very little information on her family. She told she wasn’t even sure what Josie’s mother’s maiden name had been, though she thought it may have been Shannahan. Turns out she was right! Luckily, in 1925, Josie was living in Iowa, and the 1925 Iowa State Census had her mother’s maiden name listed. I love that census for that reason, it’s helped me out with a lot of problems, and I hope Carol is happy to know her hunch was right.

After tapping into other trees and using those as a guide to find the right censuses and other records, I put together what I felt was the most solid information I could get without purchasing records or microfilm and printed it all out. I organized it the best I could and stuffed it all into a manila envelope to send out to her. Carol doesn’t have the ability to go and research on her own these days, on the computer or otherwise, and so I’m trying to do my best to find her the information she wants. And if she wants me to continue on and order things for her and get copies and what-not, then I shall, for the sake of her family history. Carol and I have connected fairly well through all this, and I greatly appreciate having a friend who is as interested in genealogy as I am.

There are a lot of  ways to contribute to the always-growing mass of genealogical information on the internet, be it cemetery transcription, keying records, obituaries, photographs, and whatever else. I have done all of those things mentioned and a few more in small quantities, but for some reason my favorite thing, the thing that makes me the most proud (and for no reason I can really explain) is when I get an automated email from Ancestry.com thanking me for editing transcription errors, especially on census indexes.

So many times have I searched and searched through pages upon pages of the census only to find that yes, my family was indeed in the census and just indexed incorrectly. I’ve seen the name Pease written out in numerous ways, my favorite odd-ball being Race, and all just because the indexer had a hard time decoding the census taker’s handwriting. I’m certainly not criticizing the indexers in any way, I myself have incorrectly read censuses only to read the index and have an “ooohhhh…” moment. It’s not always easy to key records and even the most crisp and clear images can still have horrible penmanship scribbled all over the page, not to mention just honest errors in the images themselves. And so, it is other people who have fixed errors than led to my ease of finding other relatives that makes me look back and think to myself, gee, I’m really glad I noticed that random mistake on this random person on this census (usually someone who was a neighbor to a relative) and fixed it, because now maybe someone who has been looking for them can find them. It’s worth every millisecond it takes to edit the names if even just one person finds one record because of me. And it’s that feeling that makes me want to continue helping where I can.

As every other genblog I read has been stating, Archives.com is adding the U.S. Federal Census to their collection. Now, I don’t subscribe to Archives.com, although I’m sure there’s a lot of really helpful documents available, but I can’t afford anything more than Ancestry right now as it is, so I have no general review. However, the biggest part of this isn’t this new availability (since I already have access to a searchable census directory not only from the free FamilySearch but also Ancestry), but the fact that Archives also pledged at LEAST 5 million dollars to FamilySearch to digitize millions of documents to be made available. This is fantastic news, considering there is a huge amount of records that the LDS church has so wonderfully collected and while a lot of things are already available, I can imagine how difficult it must be to pay for the resources to digitize all these records. So kudos to Archives for this pledge and partnership, I am very excited to see what helpful pieces of history we may be able to recover for the Bindner and/or Pease lines.

Read more about it at Archives.com

I think the biggest thing I tend to forget when it comes to genealogy is that my life is just as important as those of the ancestors I’m researching. It may seem obvious, but I really had to sit and think about the fact that I need to write down things about myself. But what?

What are somethings that I’d like to know about my ancestors, was really the first question, but the answer wasn’t helpful, because the answer is, well, everything. Had ever ancestor written an autobiography, I’d probably own and read them all. Not helpful. So, my next question was what do I feel my kids and other descendants will care to know, and that answer was also not helpful: I don’t know. What is important in my life? I could think of some obvious ones but not everything. So when I found Arcalife.com I was overjoyed. This website is essentially what I was looking for to help guide me to preserving my own story, and in addition it has a feature to connect to other family members to build upon a general family story. Now if only I could get all my family members to take the time out of their day to answer at least one question… but, that right there, is something I  can do myself. I could easily copy down the questions I think are important and ask anyone willing to do an interview.

The site has a lot of other helpful features and is absolutely worth the time to go check it out. Aside from the wide array of questions to be answered and the family connectivity, the other feature I like the most is that it will compile all the information you feed to it into a biography with a story-like format. As silly as it may sound, I hate having to take a pile of information and format it in a way that other people will understand, since raw data tends not to be the way most of us like our information presented. Not to mention that a story format is much more pleasing to others who aren’t researchers that way they can still get the information without looking at a list; makes it more interesting to the average person.

Give Arcalife.com a shot. Not only will you fall in love with answering all the questions and delving back into your own past, but if you can manage to get other family members to connect with you, it’ll be worth its virtual weight in gold.

As much I feel guilty about using a premade theme, I haven’t the time to make one of my own just yet. Now, I could have waited until after the move and after we unpack and everything, but the temptation was just too great. Not to mention, on top of that, there will be genealogy trips during our drive over from Connecticut to Washington, and, as I’ll be bringing my laptop with me while we’re on this trip, I thought it might be nice to keep the page up to speed, even if no one is reading quite yet. I think everyone can agree, however, that writing something while it is fresh in your mind is the best way to keep things accurate and make sure you get everything out that you want.

I’m still in the process of planning out our journey, and I must admit that there are a lot of things I’m NOT looking forward to (in addition to the super awesome things that I AM looking forward to…), such as the long periods of time in the car. The biggest thing is probably the our pets will be with us, and that limits a lot of things, such as hotels and how long we can be away from the car and out doing things, since we can’t leave them in the car, summer heat and all. Planning all of this is going to be a little tricky, and I have a feeling that the majority of the genealogy trips will be limited to copying my relative’s photo albums at the local Kinkos and snapping photos of the local cemeteries. I wish we had a motor home or that we didn’t have the kids and pets with us, would make it easier. But, since genealogy isn’t the actual point of this trip and is just an awesome bonus, I’ll have to deal with it and just make the best of it.

All that said, I’m going to go do a little research in my own notes and make up a bit of a map, so to speak, of where families in our tree lived, married, and died, so I can better decide which cemeteries and things to visit.