Conversing with Your Ancestors

A wonderful tool for genealogists is the mailing list. In a post from September 24, 2011, I wrote about how I used one of these lists to ask a question. You can read even more about this tool and how to use it in Kimberly Powell’s e-article she wrote for about.com  called “How to Use Genealogy Mailing Lists toFurther Your Research.”

Help by Kosta Kostov, public domain.bing.com

Genealogy mailing lists are a great source of information. Not only can you ask a question to the readers of the list, but you can see other people’s queries. Sometimes list members simply post items of interest.

Personal Person Group Monitor World Globe Earth, pixabay.com

In one of my favorite genealogy mailing lists, the  COOK-CO-IL list, I recently saw a message (Vol. 9 Issue 58) by Laura Aanenson in which she muses about questions she wishes she could ask her ancestors. Laura provides a link to her blog where you can read these questions. 

Just looking down the list of her questions, you get a good idea of how to start a genealogical search: look for vital records! But there are other questions in Laura’s list that most family historians soon learn aren’t easy to find the answers to. Information on the details of daily living, family traditions, and stories passed down: these can’t be found in the census or birth, marriage, and death records. We have to dig deeper.

 

Where, When, Who, What, Why, How?

 Office for Emergency Management.

 War Production Board, 

ca. 1942 - ca. 1943, Wikimedia.

Laura ended her mailing list message with an invitation to list readers to think of questions they would love to ask their ancestors. I would dearly love to have asked my great grandmother, Mary Carney/Kearney Kries Lauer, who died in 1955 when I was ten, a few things:

Taken by Art Spears, ca. 1955 of
Mary Carney Kries Lauer

1. How did your parents spell their last name – Carney or Kearney?
2. Where in Ireland were your parents born?
3. Did your mother come over from Ireland on her own or with her family? When/where did she arrive in America?
4. Were you really orphaned as the family story says? Were you put in a Catholic orphanage?
5. Was Patrick William Kearney, who was born in 1877 and died just two years later, your brother?

Of course I would have a whole lot more things to ask, but the answers to these five questions would really help clear up some of my brick walls.

Brick wall and window by George Hodan,

 Publicdomainpictures.net, bing.com.

My friend and mentor, Kate from Chicago, also answered Laura’s challenge and posted her own set of ancestral questions on the Cook list. Again, Kate’s questions reflect what we yearn to know about our ancestors:

"I always want to know the human side of things. I want to see their eyes ... touch their hands ....

1. What do you remember about growing up? School? Housing? Chores? Celebrations? Tragedies?

2. What did he/she look like? Were they quiet/entertaining? Kind? Gruff?

3. What kind of clothes did you wear? Where did you get them?

4. What did you eat? What were family meals like?

5. Were you close to other family members? Neighbors? Involved in the parish?

6. What kind of work did they do? Describe it.

Kate in Chicago"

To really learn about the details of the lives of those who lived before us, we must dig deeper than the usual birth, marriage, death, and census records. We want to search for stories and histories, letters, diaries, journals, and newspapers. Even if our people did not leave their own personal writings, others who lived near them may have done so. Finding relevant sources  gives you the closest experience possible to being able to ask your ancestors about their lives.

Finally, Laura and Kate’s lists of ancestor questions can serve another function. Even if you can’t ask your questions of deceased ancestors, you can use these lists (and more that you create) to help frame interviews with living relatives. Take these to family reunions. Happy asking!

Miners and their families gather … at the Tennessee Consolidated 

Coal Company first annual picnic…, Environmental

 Protection Agency, 08/1974, Wikimedia.

Categories: genealogy tools, document types

Message Boards v. Mailing Lists

On my last post, Sept 19, I talked about my experience with GenForum, a message board provided by genealogy.com. But until this week, I didn’t know that there was a difference between a message board and a mailing list.

And as happens often in genealogy, you learn something new when you have a question that you need answered and you ask for help. That’s where Kate Herron, my friend/mentor from Chicago, IL, and the mailing list come in.

The question that I needed answered came from a marriage license for my maternal great grandparents, Peter Fleseras and Louise Miller. I found the document at FamilySearch.org.

 The document says the marriage was performed by the rector of St. Andrews in Chicago, IL in 1901. But I couldn’t read the name of the rector. Hard- to-read handwriting is one of the things that plague genealogists.

I know that Peter Fleseras was Greek and that Louis Miller’s father (Frederick Miller) was German and her mother (Catherine Norton) was Irish, from County Mayo. Which church would they probably have attended? Greek Orthodox? Catholic? Protestant?

I googled for St. Andrew in Chicago, IL and found both a Greek Orthodox and a Catholic.The Greek Orthodox St.Andrew opened in 1926 – after the 1901 marriage. The Catholic St. Andrew opened in 1895 – well in time for the 1901 event.

I tried some analysis on my own. Catholics don’t usually write “clergyman” on a document. They put “priest”. And “rector” didn’t seem to be the usual Catholic choice of words either.

I was stumped so I e-mailed Kate for help. Kate suggested that I post a message on the Cook County Mailing List, gave me the following web address, said to be sure I linked to my marriage document, and told me to be careful to use digest mode: http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/usa/IL/cook.html

Well, this gave me plenty of challenges. I didn’t know that rootsweb.com had a mailing list function although I had been using their WorldConnect section for years (see future post). Second, I didn’t know what “digest mode” meant. And third, I didn’t know how to “link” inside a mailing list post.

Here’s where I can offer a piece of advice: never abuse your community of friends and mentors by asking pesky questions that you can find the answers for yourself. Save them for the BIG questions. So I started educating myself about message boards and mailing lists.

I went to the wikipedia site on internet forums to find out exactly what these two forms of communication are and how they differ. To paraphrase wikipedia, a message board, or web forum, is an internet discussion site where people have conversations that take the form of back and forth message postings.

A mailing list (in the link scroll down to "Comparison with other Web applications")  is also an internet discussion site with posted messages. It differs from a message board mainly in how messages are retrieved. On a mailing list, new messages come directly to your e-mail inbox; whereas on a message board, you have to log-on to the site to see messages. Some message boards, like GenForum, will send you an e-mail notification that there are messages waiting for you at the forum site.

stock image from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

My next self-education step was to find out what was “digest mode”. I returned to rootsweb.com and went to the Help section.The difference this time comes in the way you receive messages from the list. In “mail mode”, you receive each single message at the time it is sent to the list. That could be a lot of messages in your inbox. In “digest mode” you receive a group of messages once a day or so. This latter way cuts way down on traffic to your inbox.

Armed with this information, I was ready to go. I subscribed to Cook-CO-IL-L by following the instructions at that site.  I received a message response from the administrator of the list that  included an address of the list that I should send my messages to.

I posted my message on Cook-CO-IL-L on Tuesday, Sept 20, 2011 and in two days received several answers. I hit the jackpot with the message suggesting that I check out the 1900 Lakeside Chicago City Directory at ChicagoAncestor.org.

stock image from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

Now this is a funny thing about genealogy researching. Many times we know about a particular resource and may have even used it several times before. But then we may file it away in our minds and not think of it. This is what happened in this case. Well, I wasted no time going to the ChicagoAncestors site and in the front section of the directory, I struck gold. On p. 18 there was a list of churches in 1900 Chicago. Can you imagine how I felt when I saw:

St. Andrew’s Church – Washington boul(evard) Cor(ner) S. Robey. Rector, Rev. W.C. DeWitt.

This was it! As I looked back at the nearly indecipherable signature of the clergyman on the license, everything just fell into place.

You can be sure that I will make more use of the mailing list feature of rootsweb.com in the future.  And by the way, rootsweb.com also has a message board feature.

Categories: genealogy community, genealogy tool