Going through the expenses listed in your relative’s probate may give insight into their life and may also suggest additional places to look for information. This list of 1924 expenses for the late Heipke Dirks of Coatsburg, Illinois, mentions a newspaper subscription, a “church subscription,” a publishing company, the “Good Shepherd Home,” and the pastor who gave her funeral. Searching for more information on these people and organizations may prove fruitful. GoogleBooks (books.google.com) and other sites of digitized print materials may provide some additional information on some of the items or people mentioned, particularly if county or local histories are included. Local newspapers would also be a good place to look for more information as well. Heipke’s subscription to the Ostfriesische Nachrichten also suggests that her obituary may […]
I needed to add a little bit more to my provenance and identification of this thank you note I found in my parents’ collection of congratulatory cards received at their wedding–particularly information on the lady who wrote the card. At the very least, her complete name and year of death and birth should have been included–Effie (Tripp) Trautvetter Wetzel [1885-1968]. That should be sufficient. The formatting of the text is not something one should be overly concerned about. Focus should be on content. This thank you note and the wedding card included along with it only have my parents’ names written on it. If it was mailed in another envelope that has not been retained. Spend some time putting documentation on items you scan or photograph. You will […]
I’ve been working on the husband of my aunt as he moved across three states and went through four marriages in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I have been fortunate to find many records. What I have not done is to track my reasoning of why I think I have the same person in different locations. That needs to be done as I research. I am saving the documents I find in a separate folder on my digital media. I need to create a text file tracking what I have found, what my process was, and how I know I have the same person. This needs to be done as I research. It will save time later and decrease the chance I merge different people together […]
My aunt and her husband married in Hancock County, Illinois, in the early 1880s and by the mid-1880s they settled in the same Nebraska county where her brother and his family settled at about the same time. My aunt and her husband remained in that Nebraska county until their death. Virtually all of their children lived and died in that same Nebraska county. Except for their first daughter who was born in Nebraska. For some reason she returned to Hancock County, Illinois, where she married in 1910 and where she spent virtually the remainder of her life. I’m not certain precisely what caused her to move back, it’s possible she went to visit relatives who remained in the area and met her future husband there and stayed. Even […]
The wedding card to my parents is signed “your cousin.” The writer was my dad’s cousin, but not his first, second, or third cousin. She was his first cousin twice removed–meaning that she was his grandfather’s first cousin. Well actually she was his grandfather’s half-first cousin making her my Dad’s half-first cousin twice removed. Someone who says they are a cousin may be biologically related, but do not assume that they are first cousins. It is also possible that someone calls someone cousin when they is no biological relationship.
Reading the entire newspaper article in which your relative’s name appears should be done because at the very least it provides context. Sometimes it provides much more. Sophia Dirks was easy to find in this March 1896 entry in the Camp Point [Illinois] Journal because her name was spelled correctly and the legible print made it easy to read. The article documented her employment at the Adams County Poor Farm as a “matron assistant.” There was another name in the article as well: John Diesback. In April of 1896, Sophia Dirks and John Diesbach–actually John Driesbach–were married in Coatsburg, Adams, Illinois, where Sophia was from. I had wondered how Sophia and John met. This newspaper article referencing their employment at the local poor farm explained how they met. […]
I’ve been going through and scanning my grandparents’ slides and identifying the individuals in them. This needs to be done carefully and not hastily. I saw a picture of my Mom talking to a cousin of my grandmother and made the identification after his name popped into my head. It turned out that the name was wrong. I was right about the family the guy was from but it was not the person I originally thought it was–it was his brother. Comparing it to another picture I have of this man–around the same time fortunately–confirmed who it was. Slightly longer reflection caused me to remember that my grandparents saw the “correct name” cousin more than the cousin whose name initially came to mind. Take a minute before you […]
I purchased a scanner for the slides and negatives I have in my collection of family history materials. There needs to be some thought before I just start running materials through the scanner. I don’t want to capture just what is on the slides. There’s more that I need–information on the boxes some of the slides are in and information written on the slide itself. I need to tie that information to the slides that were in a specific box. The box in the image contained slides of photos taken when my grandparents and I went to Nebraska in 1990. None of the slides in that box have anything written on them but I need to track which images came from the box with the “1990 Nebraska Us […]
Are you aware of the local geography where your ancestor lived? Having access to maps is a great help, but having a certain amount of information “in your head” can save time. For your city ancestors do you know the “name of the neighborhood” (if there was one)? Do you know names of nearby neighborhoods and towns? How close did your family live to the line that divided one city from another? For rural ancestors the same thing applies? What were the names of adjacent townships? How close were they to the county line? Did they live in a part of the county that had a nickname (perhaps based upon where most residents were originally from)? Failing to know some local geography may cause you to look in […]
The grandson left Christmas goodies for Santa on an old cookstove that originally belonged to his great-great-grandparents. The picture actually taken included the entire stove and the entire grandson and was appropriately labeled and identified. Everyone was named in the caption. The words “Mom,” “Dad,” “Grandma,” etc. were not used. Names were used along with years of birth and death where appropriate, for example: Ida (Trautvetter) Neill [1910-1994] Keith Neill [1941-2022] What little I know about the cookstove’s origins–that it belonged to my grandparents, that my Mom had it cleaned up and painted in the early 2000s, and that my parents had it in their home until they passed–was included. No pronouns were used in the description as sometimes “he,” “she,” “they,” etc. do not always clearly indicate […]
Sometimes we need a different perspective. I’m not certain the rotating paper to landscape will solve all my problems, but I’m willing to try. There are times when I’m taking notes (or transcribing a document by hand) and I would like more room on a line. So after seeing a friend purchase some of these, I decided to try them for myself. I’m not certain I needed the different colors, but on a whim I ordered them. Actually the different colors might be helpful when taking notes on a research trip as I could use different colors for different families, types of records, or whatever. Color could be a sorting mechanism. A 90 degree rotation isn’t going to solve all my problems, but the paper is a good […]
The local newspaper gossip column from the 1920s stated that Mr. and Mrs. Dale Loren attended the funeral of “a cousin last Friday” in a town approximately thirty miles away. The cousin is not named. My first task will be to try and determine who the cousin was. The best place to start would be with local newspapers in the town where the cousin’s funeral was held. Since I have the date of the newspaper in which the funeral attendance was mentioned and that the funeral was held “last Friday,” I have an idea of when to look in the papers of that town thirty miles away. That will make it easier to potentially determine the funeral Mrs .and Mrs. Dale Loren attended. The Lorens may be mentioned […]
Reminder as we have mentioned this before: chronologies and chronological order can be helpful in sorting out your ancestor and her records. Put the dates of events in your ancestor’s life in chronological order. This can be a good way to very quickly get a broad overview of what you know about the ancestor and see potential gaps in time where no records have been located. The scaffold of a chronology can be a starting point to writing an ancestral biography. You may even want to include more than just one ancestor in a chronology–perhaps an entire family or a few key relatives. Putting documents from a military pension, court case, probate file, etc. in chronological order can also help you to see the flow of process and […]
There are quite a few things to think about before posting that genealogy query mentioned in an old post on our Rootdig blog. Feel free to add comments or additional ideas there.
When explaining something to someone or creating a post, make certain that you include all relevant detail. In an old tip regarding the “parents’ home,” it wasn’t mentioned that the father had died nearly ten years before the daughter married and that the mother had moved over 100 miles away shortly after his death. The parental home the daughter lived in was one where her mother had lived, but the father never had. But be careful when deciding what is relevant and what is not. The weather on the day your ancestor was supposed to get married could impact the marriage and may be relevant. The fact there was a wine stain on the altar carpet and your father noticed it during the ceremony probably isn’t.
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