Picturing Maggie

American History, Family Stories, , , , ,
Margaret (Ricketts) (Wright) (Willin) Witzke (ca. 1882-1948)

This past couple of weeks a lot of the old ghosts have decided to haunt me. Just when I think I’ve got them all figured out (especially a significant one like that of my paternal great-great-grandfather John Henry O. Record), a surprise comes along to teach me that I still have much to learn. Now, I’ve studied John Henry’s ancestry until I’m blue in the face. I’ve looked at journals and notes handed down from his daughter Grace[1] to her daughter Barbara.[2] I’ve studied Civil War era pension files and been privy to deathbed letters from his mother Susanna[3] to his brother George.[4] But a few weeks ago, something very rare and unexpected showed upending most of what I thought possible to know or discover about my Record family. I happened to stumble upon Maggie. Continue reading Picturing Maggie →

An update on Elliott Roosevelt

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Elliott Roosevelt with his daughter Eleanor in 1889. Courtesy of Wikipedia

Soon after my recent post on the fictional middle name of Theodore Roosevelt’s brother Elliott was published, I was pleasantly surprised to see his fake middle name starting to go away, and I learned of a few other places where that the error had been repeated, most of which were also being corrected.

Elliott’s findagrave entry was fixed right away and now notes “He had no middle name, so any requests to add such will be declined.” One Wikipedia editor attempted to correct the error, although there was some initial pushback, citing that the middle name was included in the Encyclopedia of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, which I had not noted in my previous post. Continue reading An update on Elliott Roosevelt →

ICYMI: The Great Migration: Top-down, bottom-up

Family Stories, ICYMI, Research Methods,

In case you were wondering, American Ancestors’ Great Migration Study Project continues to add new research to uncover the details of immigrants who came to New England between 1636 and 1638. NEHGS will publish a first volume by Ian Watson in early 2023 that will contain letters A-Be for these years, and research will continue for the foreseeable future to cover those who arrived through the year 1640.

[Editor’s note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 21 April 2014.]

The activities of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629-30 were uniformly organized from the top down. The Company either purchased or hired the vessels to carry the passengers and provisions. The passengers themselves, and especially the critically important professionals such as ministers and soldiers, were recruited by the Company leaders.

Yet this phase of the migration was brief, as most of the merchants involved found the enterprises for which all this activity was expended to be losing propositions and allowed their New England plantations to disperse, some almost immediately and most by the middle of the next decade. The influence of those leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company who remained behind in England quickly faded away, and by 1632 the top-down direction of the migration process was essentially at an end. Continue reading ICYMI: The Great Migration: Top-down, bottom-up →

Clandestine marriages

American History, Genealogical Writing, , , ,
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Recently I was researching marriage records in Vermont and was reminded of the existence of Gretna Green towns in Colonial New England in the mid-eighteenthcentury. It turned out some English customs were just too convenient to leave behind, and British colonial towns like Chester, Vermont continued to mirror the infamous Gretna Green found just over the southern border of Scotland. We have likely encountered more references to the notorious town and hasty marriages in historical romance novels than we have in our own genealogical research. Still, it made me wonder about the origins of the scandalous towns and the non-traditional marriage custom the new inhabitants continued to practice after arriving in the New England colonies. Continue reading Clandestine marriages →

Ghosted

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It sat there like the apparition of a chad from some long-ago election. I stared at the blank lines somehow expecting immediate changes to the record of his life, changes I’d reckoned should be there. There were none. What the heck? Couldn’t they see that all the information they had about Frank was wrong?[1]

I had reached out to them the moment I first saw mention of Cousin Frank: Hey, Frank didn’t die in ‘29. He’d lived, disappearing into a simple and solitary life. Further, he’d somehow put into motion posthumous wishes to be buried under the name of Tom nearly fifty years later. Yep, old Frank; he’d simply ghosted them all. Then at this, at my notion to reach out and tell the family about Frank, his descendants simply did the same thing. They ghosted me.[2] Continue reading Ghosted →

Presidents in the 1950 census

American History, Family Stories, Research Methods, Technology, , , , , ,

Okay, so despite my earlier claims, I did end up looking at the 1950 census on day one. Of my twelve living ancestors, I found seven immediately upon searching, and another two after browsing their specific town of residence; I was unsuccessful in locating the remaining three (one couple, one widow) after browsing their towns, both of which had several addresses listed “not at home.” All in all, I spent about twenty minutes looking for ancestors. Overall, I am impressed with the advances of OCR technology giving genealogists a much better start this time around than ten years earlier. Continue reading Presidents in the 1950 census →

OCRing the 1950 census

Collections, Genealogical Writing, Research Methods, Technology, , ,

The greatest achievement of the release of the 1950 Census is not the records themselves, but the technology used to index the records. On April 1, 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration released the census on a dedicated website using a unique optical character recognition (OCR) software designed to translate the handwritten names into text that can be searched online. This made 6.4 million digitized pages of the 1950 Census immediately available. Think about that – immediately available…?! It seemed too good to be true. Continue reading OCRing the 1950 census →

Grafted in

American History, Family Stories, Genealogical Writing, , , ,
Folger Johnson, Jr. and Sr. Courtesy of Brian W. Johnson

I suspect that many cities have a Facebook page called “You know you grew up in _____, when …” I am one of nearly thirty thousand who belong to the one for Portland, Oregon, and not long ago, someone posted an article there about how recent remodeling has made the back of Benson High School visible for the first time in almost seventy-five years. That was an interesting factoid just because it’s a beautiful old building, but especially so since my brother and stepfather graduated from the school. Near the end of the article, it mentioned the officially-designated architect for the school, but then also noted that contemporary newspapers credited a young architect named Folger Johnson as a chief designer for the project. Continue reading Grafted in →

Old Style

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Forty years ago, my grandfather’s first cousin “Burgess” Morse took pride in pointing out the gravestones of our ancestors, Simeon Morse and his wife Sylvia Fish, and the nearby grave of Levi Fish (1754–1837). Findagrave.com photo #118544184, at left, is much clearer than the one of Levi’s stone I took at that time (and shown below). When I asked Burgess if he thought Levi Fish was Sylvia’s father, he quipped, “Who else would he be?”

Old Style, the designation applied to dates before the calendar change in 1752, may also represent the way we conducted research before the advent of the internet, digitization of records, and DNA evidence. In the absence of definitive evidence, building circumstantial cases for identifying an ancestor evolved slowly. Take, for example, this story of a once-assumed but-now-proven great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Levi Fish. Continue reading Old Style →

The 1950 census: just the beginning

American History, Genealogical Writing, Research Methods, Technology, , ,

My colleague Chris Child wrote a controversial post last month about the merits of the 1950 Census. The title of the post was triggering, but I must admit that I agree with his overall argument. According to Chris, “…the census has spoiled us. Because it is often so quick to search, we might overlook other valuable resources because of how long looking through those records might take us. This is not meant to diminish the importance of the census, only to partially explain why it is used more than other records.” Continue reading The 1950 census: just the beginning →