Has a Record You Need Been Digitized?

Collections Access | Balboa Park.bing.com

The digitization of print materials from archives, libraries, and many genealogical societies is an on-going phenomenon and a wonderful gift to genealogists. More and more records are becoming available online everyday. This being said, we must remember that even today with so many digitization projects springing up all over, the majority of records are not online. We still need to be thorough and diligent in our hunt for documents that exist only on paper or microfilm/fiche

File:2004 microfilm reader 1117365851.jpg -
Wikimedia Commons, bing.com

 in some small courthouse, church or local library. Still, it is always beneficial to keep up with what organizations have put some of their records online.

Before we talk about new ventures in digitizing records and books, we need to begin with the two mega providers of online genealogy information, FamilySearch.org (free) and Ancestry.com (subscription.)

These two organizations have been offering census records, vital records, passenger lists and many other types of documents online to eager genealogists since the 1990s.

In her book, The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy, Kimberly Powell discusses many governmental agencies and companies who offer online records, including the following:

 extension.oregonstate.edu.bureau of land management.bing.com

1.  US Bureau of Land Management has over 2 million federal land records for public-land states from 1820-1908 at www.glorecords.blm.gov (p. 120)

Ellis Island in 1905.jpg - Wikipedia, 
the free encyclopedia.bing.com

2. Ellis Island has passenger records for immigrants who came to Ellis Island from 1892 to 1924 at www.ellislandrecords.org (p. 160)

(note: Since The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy 2^nd edition was published in 2011, newer digital projects aren’t covered, but the book gives an excellent overview to records one can find online.)

For more information on digitized records in America, the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) Virtual Library web page is a great place to visit. You will find links to online collections including American Presidential Inaugural addresses from Columbia University, Foreign Relations of the US from the University of Wisconsin and Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869 from Brigham Young University.

National Archives And Records
 Administration Royalty Free Stock Photo.bing.com

The public’s amazing embrace of the internet has shown archives and libraries the need to provide online access to their records. But the budgets of many of these institutions are not able to cover the costs associated with moving into the digital arena on their own.

Digitizing records isn’t cheap. In an online article, APPENDIX VI: Comparative Costs for BookTreatments, from the Council on Library and Information Resources, we read:

“The average cost for digitizing a book page, including scanning, metadata creation, automated generation of OCR and minimally-encoded text, and associated activities, including identifying and preparing materials, quality control, and project management, is $5.32. For a brief, 300-page book, this works out to $1,600.00.”

Because of the high costs of digitization, some institutions are joining together in this effort to make records available for all online. As Kimberly Powell states in her online genealogy book:

“Collaborative databases, in which several libraries or societies pool their records and resources, are also becoming common online.” p. 127

Hathitrustlogo.png.bing.com

An example of this type of partnership is Hathitrust Digital Library. In her about.com article, “HathiTrustDigital Library - A Researcher's Guide,”
Kimberly Powell describes this Digital Library as:

“…a growing partnership of over seventy major research institutions and libraries, offers online access to over 10.7 million digitized books, about 30% of which are in the public domain.”

Be sure to check out Ms. Powell’s Guide to HathiTrust to familiarize yourself with what the site has available and to learn how to navigate the site.

Digital Public Library of America

 | starMedia.bing.com

Another partnership for record digitization is the DigitalPublic Library of America (DPLA.)  In the institution’s website, it says that DPLA

“brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.” 

I tried a search on DPLA’s site. In the search box, I put “Irish in Chicago,” and a screen opened which listed several responses to my query. The first item in the list was: Biographical history of the American Irish in Chicago  by Charles Ffrench. I clicked on “View Object.” The screen that came up was a surprise – it was the HathiTrust site with bibliographic information on the book and a “Viewability” section with a button, “Full View,” that brings up the complete contents.  

We mentioned FamilySearch earlier in this post as a pioneer in the digitization of documents. The organization has launched a new project, a commitment to the genealogy community to digitize all of its own holdings, and it has teamed up with several public libraries to include their family history materials in the project as well. With this new project the organization is digitizing books that could previously only be accessed at its

LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City,
lonetester.com, bing.com

 Library in Salt Lake City. This is a monumental effort and will take some time, but FamilySearch periodically announces its progress in its blog. 

Thanks to the digitization of many records, books, periodicals and journals, researchers now have access to so much more information right in their own homes. Be sure to check institutions in your target localities to see if they have made any of their material available online or if they have become partners in a consortium of institutions dedicated to digitizing their holdings.

Finally, we end with the question that we started with: Has a record you need been digitized?

To find the answer, start with the name of the target ancestor and check FamilySearch.org and/or Ancestry.com. Use the name search function in either program to see what records, if any, are available for that name. Next, go to the state where the particular record you are looking for may have been created. Check to see where different records (vital, military, land, court) are kept in the area in question. Then go to the record holder and see if it is a court, church, university, archive, or library. Finally, check the website of that entity to see if it is part of a collaboration to digitize records. You just might get lucky.

Endnotes:

1. HathiTrust Digital Library - A Researcher's Guide, Kimberly Powell, online  <http://genealogy.about.com/od/history_research/a/hathitrust.htm>, downloaded January 2, 2014.
2.  APPENDIX VI: Comparative Costs for Book Treatments, Council on Library Information Resoures, online, <http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub103/appendix6.html>, downloaded January 2, 2014.
3. What is the DPLA? Digital Public Library of America, online, <http://dp.la/info/about/faq>, downloaded January 2, 2014.
4.  Kimberly Powell, The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2011).

Categories: document types, genealogy education

Dress Up Your Family Tree with History

Most family historians have a companion interest in world history.

Ktrinko, world map made with natural earth data,
 eckert 4 projection, central meridian 10 ° east, Wikimedia.

 And our interest starts with ourselves. We are intrigued by the outside events that have shaped our own lives. A natural extension of our desire to know what historical events have impacted our lives is to also know what happenings affected the lives of our ancestors. Creating family trees with dates and locations for our forebears is necessary as a first step in organizing our family history. But if we  stop there, we will have only a list of facts. In order to understand our ancestors’ lives, we need to find out what was happening around them – locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. We want to uncover what was influencing their daily lives: their decisions to move, to leave the farm, to go to another state or country.

In my post of Sept 16, 2012, I touched upon the need to put flesh on the bones of our ancestors by finding out how they lived and what the world was like during their lifetimes. Let’s see what professionals in the field have to say on this subject.

Anchor.svg, Open Clip Art Library, Wikimedia.

The genealogist Kimberly Powell is the author of The Everything Family Tree Book and a writer for about.com. One of the topics Ms. Powell covers in both her book and her on-line pieces is the need to anchor our ancestors in time. In her book, Ms. Powell states:

“One of the first, most important steps in family history research is to gain an understanding of the history of the location and time period in which your ancestors lived.”¹ (p. 175) 

Where can we go to gain this understanding? Be sure to check sources such as archives, libraries, historical societies, and local genealogical societies. Many of these institutions have excellent web sites with on-line catalogs, so that you can find out what materials are available.  Also search books.google.com and scholar.google.com in addition to regular google.com as you hunt for information about the times in which your ancestors lived. Search for experts in the time period that you are interested in. Read their books.

Eugenio Hansen, OFS, September 1, 2013, 
Library science symbol, Wikimedia.

And very often, if you contact them, they will give you suggestions and lead you to additional sources. Now let us look at some on-line sources that can help us find the historical context of our ancestors’ lives.

An about.com piece (no author name given), Historical Research – Researching the DailyLives of Your Ancestors, provides many suggestions and on-line links where you can find information on disasters, epidemics, clothing styles, and much more.

lmproulx, 31 August 2011,

 Utilisé pour le site du Crieur-public.org, Wikimedia.

One type of historical web search site is based on what happened in the world on any given month and day, such as the Scopes Systems site.  Another type, including the dMarie site, let’s you enter day, month and year and then gives you a lengthy report on historical happenings. I have listed just two sites, but you can find many more on Google.

A genealogy blog by FamilyTree.com spotlights some of the kinds of historical events that can influence our ancestors’ lives, such as wars, inventions, legislation, and mineral discoveries. 

Epidemics, another type of historical event, can have devastating effects on people’s lives. I was familiar with the Black Death in Europe from 1348 to 1350, the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 

1918, St. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps on duty Oct. 1918 Influenza epidemic,

 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 

20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print.

and the polio epidemics in America and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s , and I know that these events likely touched the lives of many of our ancestors. But there are many more plagues that have happened throughout the world over time that can be investigated. For a list see the website “List of Epidemics”.

A plague that struck America several times, the worst episode being in 1878, was only vaguely familiar to me. Molly Caldwell Crosby, in her book 

Cover scan used by permission of author

reveals the horrific history of Yellow Fever which struck America so often that it earned the name The American Plague, also the title of the book. I want to use this epidemic as an example of how an event like this can change people’s lives.

My great grandfather, Johannes (John) Ulrich Kreis, was living with his family in New Orleans in 1878,

Kruseman & Tjeenk, 1877, Canal Street,

New Orleans, in the 1870s, Wikimedia.

 a fact that is corroborated by his filing of an application for naturalization on Oct 10, 1878. To see this document, please check my post of July 23, 2012. This was John’s second time in New Orleans as he had landed there in 1866 when he emigrated from Switzerland. Between 1866 and 1878 John had been first farming in LaSalle County, IL and then living in St. Louis, MO. I can time his arrival in New Orleans by the birth of his second son, George Kreis, in June of 1876. Because of Crosby’s research on the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1878, I now assume must have been a contributing factor to John Kreis’ leaving New Orleans once again. 

New Orleans, 1905: Screened horse-drawn ambulance

 during outbreak of Yellow Fever, the last to strike the city, Wikimedia.

The fever touched many countries in the Americas as noted by Ms. Crosby:

“The 1878 epidemic had stretched from Brazil to Ohio….the final death toll in the Mississippi Valley would prove to be 20,000 lives and the financial loss close to $200 million.” (p. 74)

The horror of the fever caused mass exodus from places where it struck, such as Memphis, Tennessee. Again, Ms. Crosby describes the grim scene that met the refugees as they tried to flee:

“Nearby farms locked their gates and doors, with shotguns ready. Public roads were wrecked and bridges burned to prevent travel. Many cities and towns refused admittance in fear of the dreaded fever.” (p. 47)

I don’t know exactly when John Kreis and his family left New Orleans; I only know that he showed up in the 1880 Ottawa, LaSalle, Illinois US Census.

So far, we have discussed why it is important to learn about the historical events that affected the lives of our ancestors. But how can we record what we find so that we might better be able to analyze, understand, and explain our findings?

Once you have gathered details about what was going on in the world of your ancestors, you need to be able to organize this information. In the words of Kimberly Powell:

“This is where timelines: chronological listings of historical events – can offer an interesting perspective to your genealogy research. They can help to take you beyond names, dates and locations to the ‘big picture’ – events, situations and surroundings which probably had some sort of impact on your ancestors.” (Timelines & Your Ancestors)

Ms. Powell gives a helpful suggestion on how to begin thinking about a timeline:

“To create your own ancestral timeline, begin with a simple timeline of the major events in your ancestor’s life. Then use history books and pieces from historical … timelines to add in local and world events that took place during the same time period.” (Timelines & Your Ancestors)

Lynn Palermo, The Armchair Genealogist, presents an interesting framework based on categories for setting up a basic timeline in Word or Excel in Four Steps to a Family Timeline. 

One of my favorite articles about timelines is one written by Diane L. Richard for archives.com, Timelines as Genealogical Research Tools. I like how Ms. Richard uses Excel to build a tabular timeline model and how she integrates personal and historical events in an ancestor’s life.

After reading Ms. Richard’s article, I was inspired to follow her model and try my hand at a timeline for John Ulrich Kreis:

I first filled in the personal details, with dates, of John Kreis’ life: birth, leaving Switzerland to go to America, landing in America, working as a farm laborer, getting married and having children, moving from Illinois to Missouri to Louisiana and back to Illinois. Then I began researching to find historical events that may have shaped some of John’s decisions. These I highlighted in green.

I saw several things as I created the timeline that I had not seen before. First, I realized that John had landed in New Orleans when he emigrated so he was familiar with the city and that was one reason he chose to return ten years later. When I explored land records and legislation in the mid-1800s and learned more about the Homestead Acts, I realized how that affected John. On the FamilySearch.org wiki, Illinois Land and Property, I read that:

“Illinois was a “federal-land” state, where unclaimed land was surveyed, then granted or sold by the government through federal and state land offices.”

John worked as a laborer on a farm in LaSalle County, Illinois when he first arrived in America. But by the early 1870s he had married, had children and moved first to St. Louis and then to New Orleans. All of these places are close to that great water highway, the Mississippi River. 

Lee Russell, 1937, Detail of an abandoned farmhouse.
 Miller Township, LaSalle County, Illinois, 

The Second Industrial Revolution explains the movement from farm to city that John and many other Americans followed in the late 1800s through the twentieth century.

 Finally, I came upon Molly Caldwell Crosby’s book on Yellow Fever quite by accident. I was reading another book she had written and saw a reference to The American Plague on the book jacket. This book proved to hold the explanation of John’s move from New Orleans. And it gives me chills to think that he and his family lived through the great 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic that killed so many.

In conclusion, genealogy is so much more than lists of names and dates. When you add historical background to your ancestral stories, you learn so much more about the lives of your forebears. Once you have researched and gathered your historical events, you can organize them with a timeline, and you never know what will jump out at you.

Notes & Bibliography:

1. Kimberly Powell, The Everything Family Tree Book. Avon, Massachusetts: Adams Media, 2006.
2. Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague. New York: The Berkeley Publishing Group, 2006.
3. New York. Kimberly Powell, Timelines and Your Ancestors. Online <http://genealogy.about.com/od/timelines/a/timeline.htm> Material downloaded November 2013.
4. Cafferty, Pastora San Juan, Barry R. Chiswick and Andrew M. Greeley. The Dilemma of American Immigration: Beyond the Golden Door. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1983. Material downloaded November 2013.
5. Washington. National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, About the Homestead Act. Online < http://www.nps.gov/home/historyculture/abouthomesteadactlaw.htm>. Material downloaded November 2013.
6. Florida. Wikimedia Foundation. Conclusion of the American War, Online < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conclusion_of_the_American_Civil_War>. Material downloaded November 2013.
7. Florida. Wikimedia Foundation. Second Industrial Revolution, Online  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution>. Material downloaded November 2013.
8. Utah. FamilySearch.org. Online <http://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Illinois_Land_and_Property> Material downloaded November 2013.

Categories: document types, genealogy education

Swiss Research Resources Part II – Where Oh Where is my Ancestor’s Record?

Public domain, commons, wikimedia

In my blog posting of June 9, 2012, I wrote about my first steps in finding information on my Swiss German great great grandfather, Johannes (John) Ulrich Kreis who was born in Switzerland. I followed the advice of many genealogists to exhaust all US records before I attempted to “cross the Atlantic.”  I ended the post with the announcement that I had contacted the State Archives of the Canton of Thurgau to request information.

Permission to copy granted under Free Software Foundation
wikipedia.org

While I waited for a response from the State Archives, I checked the web for more information on how to do research in Switzerland. I found a very helpful website of the Swiss Society of Genealogical Studies. The section with information for those who wish research their Swiss ancestors starts with this caveat: Doing research in Switzerland differs from researching in other countries. There are several reasons for this. Genealogical records can be stored differently depending upon when and where the record was created and whether the record was religious or civil.

City Hall, Basel, Switzerland, wikimedia.org

A date to remember is that before 1876 all birth, marriage and death records were recorded by priests/ministers. No civil record collection was in place.  So records created before 1876 were in churches but have been sent to the State Archives of each canton. The archivesonline project  gives a list of state archives for many of the cantons.

Records created after 1876 fall into the challenging category. There is no one way of organizing these records; instead each canton handles their records in their own way. Some records are in the State Archives and some are in the civil registry offices. A listing of the civil registry offices 

can be found online.

Another challenge facing researchers as they hunt for records is the Swiss idea of citizenship. The main form of citizenship in Switzerland is local. Local citizenship is where a person’s forebears were born, and that can be back to the 17^th century. It is in the local area where the records for your family will be found, no matter if later generations moved to another canton. In other words, your ancestor may have been born in one place, but his/her family records may be in another.

The third challenge to finding records are the data privacy laws (this is a rough English translation) in Switzerland. Records in the civil registry offices fall under these privacy laws. Anyone wishing to use these records must first apply for permission from the civil registry office in the target canton. The researcher must be able to demonstrate a direct relationship to the ancestor in the records.

In addition to understanding  that finding  records is challenging, it is important to realize that archival staff does not do research for you. And because the older records are in German, French, Italian or Latin and can be very difficult to read because of old handwriting styles, it is almost a given that you need to hire a professional researcher.

I received a response from the State Archives of Thurgau. Basically the information I received is what I covered above. The State Archives also included a list of some Swiss professional researchers with their contact information. And this is what really helped me. I wrote to one of the researchers who lives in Thurgau, my target canton. I was very fortunate to have found her as she had worked at the State Archives of Thurgau.

For additional help in locating professional assistance nationally or internationally, Lisa Alzo, in her webinar “Back to Your Roots:Planning a Successful Heritage Research Trip” suggests checking ethnic genealogical society sites to find researchers, country guides or translators.

In my post of November 5, 2011, I gave some suggestions on how to work with a research professional. When you work with a professional outside the US, additional factors must be considered. A potential challenge is language. Does the person offering services that could help you speak English? Unless you speak the language from the target country, you may need to hire only English speakers or use a translator. When I hired the Swiss researcher, I found that although she wrote in English and could speak English, she preferred using German to explain complex points. This worked for me as my husband is a German speaker. In addition to the suggestions that Lisa Alzo gave in her webinar, another place to find German translators is the Germanic Genealogy Society.

Logo of Western Union, wikimedia

Another factor to pay attention to in hiring people from other countries is   method of payment. You can send a wire transfer through Western Union or through your bank. Be careful to investigate either option carefully before going forward.

To summarize, the goal of this post was to provide some basic information about how and where to find birth, marriage and death records in Switzerland. Privacy laws have been enacted in Switzerland that affect the ability of the researcher to look at records created since 1900. The handwriting and language of early Swiss records present challenges to the English speaking researcher and finding a local person with experience in dealing with these documents is recommended. But if you keep these points in mind, the possibility of finding wonderful information about your Swiss ancestors makes the search most worthwhile even if there are some hurdles to overcome.

Categories: genealogy education, genealogy professional

A Research Assistant at Your Side: The FamilySearch Research Wiki

How would you like to have a robot with a genealogical brain at your side and by your computer when you start researching a geographic area that is new to you? The folks at FamilySearch have made quite a lot of progress towards such a scenario.

How do you usually conduct your internet searches as you hunt for people/records in particular geographic areas? I usually start with google , FamilySearch main page, books.google, and FamilySearch catalog in about that order. But this is not really a strategy; it’s more of a “shot in the dark” approach where I throw out my question and hope I find an answer somewhere. There is another way that will give us more structure to our searches and that may well produce some surprisingly fruitful results.

So what is this “other way”? It’s no big secret. It’s been here for sometime – the Research Wiki by FamilySearch. The purpose of this Wiki is to provide some structure to geographic searches. But recently it has been revised and improved.  I used the Research Wiki a couple of times in the past year but then, out of habit, I slipped back into my scatter-shot way of searching the web.

But fortunately, Lisa Alzo, a renowned genealogy researcher, in her Legacy webinar “Best Internet Sources for East European Genealogy” ,  reminded her audience about the Wiki and demonstrated how helpful it is. 

For more background on this Wiki, check out the posting on Legacy  by Marian Pierre-Louise, another well-known genealogist and one of my favorite webinar presenters.

I decided to return to the Research Wiki to help me as I searched Patrick County, VA for signs of the Shelton family, a cohort or FAN (see paragraph 5) of my Johnson line.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Go to FamilySearch.org on the internet.
2. At the top of the page, click on “Learn.”
3. Under the large map, you will see “Research Wiki” on the left.  Click on this.
4. In the search box, type the place you are researching.  In this case, I typed “Patrick County, VA.”
5. A results page will come up next. I clicked on the second result “Patrick County, Virginia Genealogy.”

Clicking on this page brought up a page with many topics. The first topic on the page was: Main article: PatrickCounty, Virginia which gave a general introduction to the history of the county and resources available to help you in your research.

When I returned to the main page, I saw that the next topic was Patrick County, Virginia  Genealogy Message Boards. I clicked on Patrick County, Virginia Genealogy by Genforum just to be sure I had put a message there. And there it was at the top of the list, dated 11/07/12. But unfortunately, there were no responses yet.

I went back again to the main page and looked at the third topic, Patrick County, Virginia Genealogy Books and Articles. As I looked down the list, this caught my eye:

[Shelton] Shelton, David. Autobiographical Sketches of the Life and Adventures of David Shelton. 1890s.FHL Book 921.73 A1 no. 615 Book Storage 0238073.

And here is where the amazing find happened!! I clicked on the selection and up came a page from the FamilySearch Catalog which showed that the document was on microfilm. So I thought I would need to order the film and wait for several weeks. But to my surprise, the folks at FamilySearch have indeed been busy digitizing records as I have been hearing in the genealogy community. Under Notes, this link was posted: To view a digital version of this item click here. With one simple click, a screen appeared showing a handwritten journal by David Shelton! I have never seen a piece of personal, family correspondence from the nineteenth century before. Here is an excerpt:

So the next time you are researching an ancestor in a geographic area that is new to you, be sure to start with the Family Search Research Wiki. Not only will you find a thorough introduction to many records and where they are located for your target area but you never know what hidden treasures are waiting for you.


Categories: genealogy education, genealogy tools, research terms

Using a Digital Camera to Copy Documents

On September 19, 2012, Legacy Family Tree offered one of its series of webinars. The subject of this webinar was how to use a digital camera to make very good copies of documents, presented by Mary E.V. Hill.  You can purchase a CD of this webinar at Legacy Family Tree.

But why would you use a camera when portable scanners, even hand-held ones, are now available? In many archives and libraries, scanners are not allowed. On the other hand, digital cameras, if you turn off the flash, are accepted by most research institutions as safe to us on fragile documents. And in some instances, such as when you need to copy many documents on a microfilm reader, using a camera can make the job go fast.

Ms. Hill begins her presentation with a description of the basic features you need in a digital camera if you want to make excellent image copies. Perhaps the most important feature you need is a function wheel which allows you to turn off automatic mode and to make changes to the auto settings.  Leaving your camera on automatic setting does not result in good quality document copies. Later in the webinar Ms. Hill explains that genealogists need be concerned with just a few settings, thereby reducing performance anxiety in some of us less technical people.

Ms. Hill states that there are only four basic functions that you will need to control (using function wheel) in order to make great copies, and she shows you how to set each one (great visuals):

1.    Flash on/off
2.    Macro or Tulip (close-up)
3.    Film speed -- International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
4.    White balance (to get the best possible color)

After the function wheel, there is another feature Ms. Hill recommends if you are in the camera purchase mode. And that is a flip-out LCD preview screen. This allows you to easily shoot from the different angles. 

Finally, Ms. Hill suggests several accessories to make your digital camera document photographing go very smoothly. First, a copy stand can give you stability and hands-free, close-up, stable picture-taking. Second, a camera clamp (such as the Sunpak ClampPod Pro) allows you to a fix your camera on to a microfilm reader in order to photograph the projected  image. Ms. Hill goes through this process in the webinar, showing you where to clamp the camera for the best shots. A third recommended accessory is the tripod. Ms. Hill suggests that you consider selecting a tripod with a reversible center pole which allows you get closer to an image in certain situations while keeping everything in focus.

While researching about taking digital document photos, I found a site by Adam Costanzo. Mr. Costanzo delves deeper into some of the ways you can improve your digital photos of documents. I find reading about the same subject by several authors helps my learning. 

After listening to Ms. Hill’s webinar, I felt energized and ready to outfit myself to take some digital document photos at the Family History Center near me. This presentation took me from knowing nothing about this subject to feeling confident in my ability to take on this project.

Categories: genealogy education, genealogy tools

Chicago Trip Preparation Part III – Organizing my Itinerary and Reviewing my Research

It is six weeks before my research trip to Chicago – time to assemble my trip binder. I have been collecting notes (operating times, addresses, ckecklists, maps) on various research sites that I plan to visit and putting them into a manila folder. My next step is to organize the notes by day of visit.

First I get a 3-ring binder and some dividers. Then I take my trip calendar, see my post from June 24, 2012, where I have made a rough outline of my destinations by day of the week. I make a divider for each day and place them in the binder. Now I’m ready to tackle my bulging folder. I separate the notes and rearrange them according to the sites I will be visiting. Then I punch holes in the sheets and place them in the binder. It’s a quick way to bring order to my chaos.

While I am in this trip preparation mode, I decide to take a look at a webinar by Marian Pierre-Louis, “Ten Brick Wall Tips for Beginners” that I bought on a CD from Legacy Family Tree.com. One of my main goals for this trip is to try to gain more information on one of my brick walls. I haven’t been able to find much information on my great grandmother’s parents – John Kearney and Mary Duffy Kearney. Maybe some of Ms. Pierre-Louis’ tips could help me.

In fact, the webinar is full of helpful ideas. And it was the very first tip that helped me push my research forward, and put me in a better position to learn more from my trip to Chicago. Ms. Pierre-Louis cautioned her audience to review their research. She said that she knows people will say “Oh, I do that.” But she encouraged everyone to regularly review all their findings on their brick wall challenge.
 I believe the key here is “regularly.” As we find new information, it is important to re-look at our accumulated notes. Sometimes the new facts may give us a different perspective or idea. And, Ms. Pierre-Louis says this review can help us reorganize our information that may provide us a new research route. Well, I was inspired!

I started reviewing my documents on the Kearney/Carney family. A challenge I had been working on was to find where this family lived in Chicago. I knew that their daughter, Mary Carney/Kearney Kries Lauer, lived in West/North Chicago after her marriage in 1895. But before that date, I had no idea where she had lived with her parents. I have been unable to find a birth record for Mary where I might find a residence for her parents listed.

I looked again at the baptismal record for Patrick William Kearney – the infant son of John Kearney and Mary Duffy Kearney who was born 8 Dec 1877 and died in 1879. We know that documents can have many clues besides the obvious. I saw the sponsors’ names on the baptismal record – James Devine and Julia Cosgrove. I had noticed these names before. In fact, I had done a long search on the Cosgrove family, trying to link the Kearneys and the Cosgroves. But something new struck me. What were their addresses? If they were friends of the Kearney family, they must have lived close by.

On Patrick William Kearney’s death record, his parents’ residence is given as “Halsted at Hastings,” a South Chicago address. This is a big clue, but I wanted more evidence. If James Devine and Julia Cosgrove also lived in South Chicago, I could be pretty sure that I had placed my great, great grandparents in 1875. This is where the online Chicago City Directories might offer me some answers.

An important thing to remember when using the directories to search for addresses is that in 1909 the streets in Chicago were renumbered. If you want to plot pre-1909 addresses on maps.google.com or mapquest.com, you have to use a conversion tool to update the old addresses. 

In the 1875 directory, I found James Devine living at 80 (549 – post 1909) Barber St, also a South Chicago address near Halsted at Hastings.  Julia Cosgrove lived with her husband, Matthew, at 308 (703 – post 1909) S. Desplaines, also a South Chicago address but at some distance from the Kearney home.

Now that I had two addresses suggesting the South Chicago status of John Kearney and Mary Duffy Kearney, I wondered if there were any other friends of the family that might give me more confirmation. I remembered researching Catherine Sweeney Brookins Dinan, a friend of Mary Duffy Kearney and later a friend of her daughter, Mary Kearney Kries Lauer. Catherine had been a baptismal sponsor of Mary Kearney Kries Lauer’s first child, Henrietta Kries. I searched the 1875 City Directory for George Brookins, the first husband of Catherine, and saw that the couple also lived in South Chicago at 716 W. 18th St., near the Kearney/Duffy home.

By this point, I had strong evidence that John Kearney and Mary Duffy were South Chicagoans. This knowledge would save me time in my research in Chicago. And I would never have come to this conclusion if I hadn’t followed Marian Pierre-Louis’ Brick Wall Tip # 1 – look over your accumulated research on your brick wall(s) regularly and you will increase your chances of solving the case(s).

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