How Do You Find All That?!

I post all of my Ancestor Bio posts to Facebook for family and friends to see, and today, after posting Andrew’s story, I had a couple friends ask, “How do you find this stuff?!” I tried to answer on Facebook but apparently it’s currently not letting me comment on my own or anyone else’s posts for some unknown reason. But it is letting me post from outside sites to Facebook, so I thought I’d do a post answering the question. Tomorrow I’ll go back to my compulsive quest to catch up on the 52 Ancestors challenge (I’ve four more posts planned – not written yet --this week and then I should be caught up and go back to one a week, so I can sleep, too – coming up are posts on GGG-grandfather Francis “Franz Joseph” Henn and GGG-grandmother Katharina Phillipine Blank, #24 & #25; GG-grandfather John “Josephat” Henn #26; GG-grand aunt Rosa “Generosa” Henn #27; and, #28, a transcription of a newspaper article describing the inquest into the death of Rosa’s son, Henry Strauss, jr (the latter is not my normal style of post but I found it fascinating and hope you will too. In fact, each of these people had fascinating bits in their stories, just wait and see!)

This post is not my normal sort of post either because I still consider myself a beginner doing basic research, solely online, on a few sites, so far. I know there is more on other sites online, and far more to find offline, but what I am doing now is a first pass through both sides of my family. At the end of this year (I think) I’ll be going back through, slower, looking for the harder to find things. Anyway, while I consider myself a beginner, I realize I have friends who are just starting that might find what I do in my searches helpful in developing their own search style.

I discovered in thinking about writing this post that I have already developed basic search patterns that I apply to each person, with varying levels of success.  So I’m going to talk about this in steps. (Problem: I don’t know how to do screen shots, so I can’t show you exactly).

To begin with, I’m lucky enough to have some family research / written memories passed down to me on both sides of the family. More on Dad’s side than Mom’s but both tending to the “born, married, begat, and died" dates and names. My interest is in filling in the between spaces so I do more societal background research for my bio posts than you may be interested in. In any case, even though I have helpful family documents like this, I consider them clues, not gospel. I’m sure they did the best they could in their research/ interviewing (in terms of interviewing, probably better than me as I don’t do enough, because I’m shy and busy.) But I don’t know them & thus don’t know what they did for research, as most did not attach source documents or cites, and I don’t know how they think. I know me. I know that I have had over 20 years’ experience in assessing credibility of evidence as an Administrative Law Judge, and I’m fixated on being able to document a fact. True, I work in a small, extremely niche area of the law and I haven’t done a lot of historical research since college but the principles of analysis carry over, I think, as well as the application of logic and common sense.  (Some things that drive me nuts from other Ancestry trees: even if the offered person has the right name, if they don’t have the right kids (or parents if you know them), it’s probably not the right person. If the kid is born when the putative mother is 8 years old --or before the alleged mother is born–they aren’t related; if someone is born in Illinois/Indiana Territory in the early 1800s one month after the mother documented as being in Maryland, the baby is not that mother's child as no one could get from Maryland to Illinois/Indiana Territory in a month in the early 1800s – think horses or walking – let alone an 8 month pregnant woman!)

I. My first step always starts with Ancestry.com. My working tree is there, I have the International Membership, which is quite helpful now that I’m starting to have ancestors on the other side of the pond, as some records from other countries show up in my shaking leaf hints. I have to be careful in looking at the hints because not all of them apply to my family. This is where my non-straight line approach helps. I don’t just look up straight line ancestors but all their siblings and their kids too (I usually stop two generations down on this sweep through) as that provides me with more facts to double-check against others, as how I think my Oswego Andrew Henn is right because of the newspaper notice about his sister Rosa’s death. If I were doing straight-line I wouldn’t know about Rosa (who has a tragically fascinating life story, btw; coming soon.) I also note neighbor’s names in censuses as I’ve noticed that people seemed to move west in groups of people they know and the same names showing up as before might confirm that I’ve found the right William Erwin or Elizabeth Bixler Wolfington Moore.  

II. My second step is also Ancestry.com but I click the link to “search records” just above the “overview tab” and go see what else I might find. You can alter the search parameters, look in all the searchable records at once or one at a time [there are records that are only browsable not searchable, that I’d have to look at page by page, but I’m saving them for a different pass.]  I look past the point where Ancestry says the records are no longer likely to be my ancestor for a few pages. Sometimes I find stuff that way: directories, yearbooks, land records, etc.

III. My third step is Familysearch.org’s record search. I don’t have a tree up there yet, but with a free membership I can search all the records I want. Mostly there though I look for death certificates and marriage records as they often have them when Ancestry doesn’t; or when Ancestry might have given me the information off a document but not let me see the original, FamilySearch often has the original. ALWAYS LOOK AT THE ORIGINAL of any document when you can, it has so much more information than is in the index! (And sometimes the transcriber transcribes something incorrectly in the index version.) If I find them, I download them and take notes (lawyer here – we take notes on everything).

IV. If Ancestry has shown me a draft registration, or my ancestor is alive during a war, I check Fold3.com (subscription site), which has historical military records. Lots of them. Not all of them, but more are added weekly so check back. I found a boatload of information from Mariah Bailey’s application for a Mother’s pension against her son John’s death in the Civil War. Again, you’ll have to sort through and make judgment calls as to which records belong to your family. But you can set the search parameters to help limit what you find.

If you already know your ancestor was in the Civil War, look for him in the National Park Service’sSoldier’s and Sailor’s database to find out what he did in the War, plug in his name & perhaps other details, then sort out who is yours, then click on the battle unit to get to a description of what he went through. I've found (through Google) that some states have good archives of military info (e.g., Indiana, Missouri & Illinois are good, Pennsylvania is difficult to navigate) that extend beyond the Civil War. This cheat sheet helps you figure out what war your ancestor may have fought in: 

V. Next I go to Google Play,Books, and search for old e-books on the places my Ancestor has lived. A lot of counties did histories around 1880 – 1905, some with biographical sketches of the first settlers and/or prominent people. Most are free and most are searchable within the e-book: plug in the relevant surname and see what pops up. Sometimes it’s a lot (Judge Erwin), sometimes it’s just a list of who enlisted in what (Andrew Henn) & sometimes I get nothing – except interesting background information about the area he lived.

VI. My sixth step is to look for local historical newspaper articles about my ancestor. Small town newspapers used to do stories or one line squibs on everything: who visited who, 50^th anniversary parties, reunions, obituaries, hospital entrance and release, legal notices, plus regular news. This step requires patience as the search capabilities on each site are based on scanning and sometimes on old newspapers it scans wrong, or you ancestor decided to go by their middle name for a while [names used to be very interchangeable, I’ve found]. But when you find something it’s a delight. The main pay sites I’ve used are NewspaperArchive,com, Newspapers.com, and http://www.genealogybank.com/;the free sites have been the Library of Congress and, for New York, only, the Fulton Post Card site.  and when I don’t know where to look, The Ancestor Hunt site has an excellent section on where to find archived newspapers in any state. Newspaper mentions can really humanize and bring a person to life as they did for Myrtle Bailey and for Mabel Erwin Snyder.

VII. My seventh step is to Google the person’s name and lifespan, and perhaps a key factor about him . Somebody else might have done research you want to see. If you’re using the info for your own tree/personal use, you can just use it probably under fair use, just keep the cite so you can find it again – there is apparently a “proper” way to cite for genealogical purposes: I don’t know it -- I’ve got the book but haven’t read it yet so i'm not using it yet -- I will go back through and correct cites after I have time to read the book. Right now I figure it works if I cite enough detail that I can find it again. If you’d like to use part of what is written on the site or a photo in a blog or book, email the person or entity and ask permission first or if you think you’ll be using their phrasing or the picture. While FACTS can’t be copyrighted, how one writes about them can be, unless it’s old enough to be off copyright.  I’ve links on copyright issues for family historians in my Resources page, others can explain that a whole lot better than I can. It is not my area, so nothing I write here should be construed as legal advice.

VIII. My eighth step is to google background things for general info & understanding. Curiosity is one of the best traits a family historian can have. For the post on Clarence Snyder I googled "Plumbrook munitions" and "teachers in the Great Depression" among others. For the post on Andrew Henn I googled: “Germans in Syracuse NY Oswego” – there’s bunch of info on that; “German emigration passenger list” – there’s a website, plus Ancestry has some; “Ship Radius 1850s”, “Ship Schiller 1850’s” – that was a bust but it’s worked before; “Baden emigration 1800s” – there turns out to be a lot on that, a good bit in German (I used Google Translate), including lists of people who left Baden with details as to the port used & whether they were steerage or not; I googled “emigration 1850s Bremen”  and “emigration 1850s Le Havre” – fascinating stuff; “Coopers 1850s” “Baden History” – got a birth record index that had a bit more info than Ancestry’s – in German, thank you Google Translate; “1800s Germany why do children’s birth registration change religion in the same family” – that one will be used in a later post; and probably other things I’ve forgotten now. I do list sources at the bottom of my ancestor bio posts. I tend to use Google a lot in prepping for a blog post, and I Google anything I can think of that I’m curious about, even though sometimes 2-3 hours of research results in one sentence by the time I write it up. But each search gives me more knowledge with which to find out more, and it carries over from ancestor to ancestor. The irony of any information search is that you must know something to find out more. It helps you form the questions to ask.

And last, if I’m blogging the person, I look for images, pictures, You Tube videos, etc., to illustrate and explain the story. Reading a big block of text without pictures is intimidating to a lot of people in our video age and people won’t read or finish it no matter how interesting it is. I LOVE having pictures of the person, but I don’t have many (actually I don’t have any more further up the tree on Dad’s side of the family than I’ve already put up – if you have some and are willing to share with me I’ll be forever grateful!). Sometimes I use images of documents, full or cropped. Sometimes images of old ads (pre-1923 is off copyright in the USA - other rules apply in other countries) that I've found through a Google search. I've bookmarked websites that connect me to photos/art which are under the creative commons license (which allows me to use it under certain conditions and with proper credit) or in the public domain. I love Photopin.com, Pixabay.com, Creative Commons Search, and Wikimedia Commons. There are other sites too. I’m concerned about making copyright violations because even though this isn’t my area and I know virtually nothing beyond what I’ve read on the Legal Genealogist’s blog (excellent blog, btw) and/or linked to in my Resources page, I’m afraid I’d be held to a higher standard because of the J.D., and I can’t afford a screw up in that area. So I try to be careful..

I hope this helps someone. If you’ve got questions, leave a comment, or email me at the address on the Contact Me page; I’ll try to answer. If I know you on Facebook, well, it’s got to let me comment again someday!

Moving on to Dad's Side of the Family

Now I’m going to flip to my father’s side of the family for awhile. The surnames that I know of so far are Henn, Wilcox, O'Brian, McClean, McGregor, Currier, Sharp, Bennett, Grigor/Gregor, McFarlane. (It would appear that I have far more Scottish roots than I was aware of. I thought I was mostly of German extraction until I started all this, lol.)  As in Mom's side, I will not be naming anyone who is alive, or posting recognizable pictures of anyone who is alive, absent explicit permission (baby pictures may show up).

I believe I got the family history gene from this side of the family because there are several family trees in existence for several branches of the family on this side. They will be a great help in my attempts to “fill in the dash” on my ancestors lives and tell their stories, even though mostly (not entirely) they simply map out connections and give birth-marriage-death dates without a much citation. 

I remember Dad talking about what all Grandpa did in his family research, so I believe the research was done and was solid, but the citations were not put on the trees and so I don’t have them, and I’ll be attempting to verify the information by finding a source to support it, while researching for information to "fill in the dashes" in their lives between the dates. Additionally, I am blessed with a copy of Great-Aunt Lucille Henn Robson’s book, "Members of the Flock", in which she rounds up memories of her parents and grandparents, and those of her husband, and of the town she & they all grew up in. It is a delight! And I will use it as a source for stories herein as I figure that the next generation (my nieces and nephew) may not have read it.

I only have a very few pictures for this side of the family (perhaps even fewer than I originally had for Mom’s side, before Mom’s cousin found the blog and scanned hers and made copies and sent me pictures!).  So I will be illustrating the stories with other sorts of pictures as I have all along when portrait photos were in short supply. Hopefully, they will be interesting too. 

I know more photos of the families exist because in some of the family trees Dad has loaned me there are photocopies of old photos. But they appear to have been done in 1972, or before, when photocopiers weren't as good quality as we have today, and some are appear to be photocopies of photocopies. I tried to scan some into my computer to use but it didn't work at all well.  If anyone wants to send scan and send me family photos by email or disk, or make scanned copies of photos to send me (but I know photo paper is expensive), I’d be happy to receive and use them. If you are willing to risk them to the U.S. Mail, you can send them to me and I’ll scan them and then mail them back to you. See the “Contact Me” page for my email address, and I’ll be happy to send you a mailing address if you need it. (You can send me family stories too if you want to. )

My first post on this side will be on Owen James Henn, my great grandfather, and it will either go up later tonight or tomorrow evening , depending on when it gets finished.

Thoughts, Contemplations, and Musings

A round up of thoughts on disparate details.

Vernon Erwin.

I’ve received an email from someone who reads the blog, suggesting that Vernon Erwin may have had unrecognized  PTSD based on his time in the Spanish-American war, which could explain some of his actions and inability to settle down to married life and several children. I think that’s a real possibility and I’ll be editing the post to reflect that possibility.

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My maternal grandparents, Clarence and Mabel Erwin Snyder

I’ve noticed that a lot of the blogs which are doing the 52 Ancestors Challenge start with the writer’s grandparents and moving up. On the other hand, so far I’ve spoken of everyone but my grandparents. In some ways it’s more difficult to research people who are closer on the tree to me. It’s more difficult to source my information, unless they make the newspaper, as the last census that has been released is the 1940 census. True, I have memories of them, but I was a child and therefore I’m uncertain as to whether my memories are of true events or whether my young mind misinterpreted what was happening . I’ve asked family members for memories but due to the difficulties mentioned above, and the fact that I’m still rather inexperienced in genealogical research, I find it difficult to corroborate many of the memories with sourced facts. (I’m an Administrative Law Judge – what can I say? We like cites.) I was going to skip writing about them for this reason, among others, but that didn’t feel right. So I will write about them now and just do the best I can with what I have and verify later when it becomes possible. At least by doing them last before I start writing about the other side of my family, you are familiar with the families that formed them and that may give a bit more insight into them than starting with them would have. My grandmother, Mabel Erwin Snyder, will be post #19 for the 52 Ancestrors posts, and my grandfather, Clarence Snyder, will be #20. The next post after that will be from my father’s side of the family (I’ve no idea who yet.)

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I’m moving.

I have started researching my Father’s side of the family as I worked ahead and the last several posts on the Snyder/Erwin side have been prepared in advance. That said, it’s possible, maybe even probable, that I will fall behind in my posts in the early part of summer as I’m moving July 1 to a nicer but smaller apartment and must first reduce the stuff I own, then pack the rest of it for the movers, and then unpack it after the move – while working full time. This will not leave a lot of time for research and writing up bio-sketch posts, and definitely not one a week – each one of these things takes about 8 hours to write, not including the major research. I hope to catch up and still end up posting about my preliminary research on 52 different ancestors by the end of the year.

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Vertical Pedigree of Clarence Weldon Snyder

I previously did a chart of the direct line members of my Mom’s maternal side of the family  

I could find, so I want to do a chart of those direct line members of Mom’s paternal line I've found before I move on. And here it is:

Click to make bigger

Why All The Footnotes?

I am aware that some of my readers are wondering, “Why all the footnotes?” in some of my posts. No, it’s not because I’m a lawyer and used to putting cites after everything. Or, not entirely.  I use them for three reasons.

The first has been drummed into me from all the reading I’ve done on genealogy, “Always cite your sources!”  The purpose of citation is to make sure you can find the source of each of your facts again; it also helps you (or someone else) judge the quality of your evidence and thus its credibility, and, if necessary, allows the research to be duplicated.  There is a specific approved format for genealogical research. I don’t know it yet. I just try to make sure that someone else can find it based on what I put in the citation. (I’ve ordered a book on how to do it the right way.)

The second reason is that I’m trying to avoid committing a copyright violation.  Bearing in mind that I am not a copyright lawyer, I’ll try to explain this. [Requisite legal disclaimer: I *am* a lawyer, but not *your* lawyer. This shouldn't be considered legal advice and does not form a lawyer-client relationship. If you want a real legal opinion, retain and speak to a lawyer who regularly works with copyright issues.]

The Copyright Act grants five rights to a copyright owner: the right to reproduce the copyrighted work; the right to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted work; the right to distribute copies of the work to the public; the right to perform the work publicly; and the right to display the copyrighted work publicly. It essentially prevents the unauthorized copying of a work of creative authorship.  There are some limitations on this right, and I’m only going to address those that come up in genealogical research and blogging about it, briefly. [If you’re interested in a more in depth discussion, see:  Copyright Fundamentals for Genealogy by Mike Goad and Copyright and the Old Family Photo by Judy G. Russell]  All that’s protected under copyright is the author’s original creative expression.  Facts and ideas can’t be copyrighted; but how one arranges those facts, and chooses to express the facts or ideas is, as long as there is some level of creativity involved. Another limitation is the concept of “fair use”, which has been developed through years and years of case law but has now been codified in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is to be considered fair: (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work. It’s not always easy to determine whether something will be considered fair use or not, there are rooms full of long decisions parsing this out. There is no magic number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission, and acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission if such permission is required.  The safest course is to get permission before using the material (an emailed request to the copyright holder can save a lot of angst and stress).

Copyright can expire; when it does the item is then considered to be ‘in the public domain’ and anyone can use it. The duration of copyright protection depends on when the item was created, because the law has changed several times. Happily, for genealogical research, if it was created before 1923, there is no copyright on it anymore, so long as it was published (newspapers, magazine, yearbooks, books, etc.).  If it wasn’t published, it might still be protected by copyright.  The latter arises mostly with old photos, and the problem there is the copyright goes to the photographer and not to the owner of the photo unless it was assigned to the owner at some point.  And then there are about five discrete blocks of time with differing expiration times and conditions in the years since 1923. There’s a nice explanatory chart of those different effects, here.

So what is the punishment for violating copyright, you wonder? The copyright holder generally has to assert the copyright first and if you don’t take it down, then punishment can apply if your calculation as to “fair use” or “in the public domain” was off.  The punishment can range from fines ($200 to $150,000) and court costs to jail time.  

    

So the reason there were so many cites in the post on Myrtle Bailey was that the source of much of my information was newspaper articles (creative work subject to copyright) published since 1923 and through 1976. Now looking at the laws in effect then, I think most of it was in the public domain and I probably didn’t have to be that obsessive, but I hadn’t really looked it up until I wrote this post. I read a digest of  the copyright law over before starting blogging, but I didn’t refresh my memory before that post. Some of the newspaper articles were written late enough to be still covered, and, while I think my use ought to be considered fair use, I would have cited to the paper anyway.  In the future my posts will probably look a bit less like a treatise.

 Basically, in my blog, I’m going to try to avoid using copyrighted material, but if I do use it, I will cite to the original piece and author if I know it and hope that it falls under the fair use exception. If someone with claim to the copyright protests, I’ll remove whatever I’ve quoted, or the picture I’ve posted. Pictures of family posted in a family history blog that is not written for any sort of profit probably fall under fair use; I’ll still attribute the photographer if I can figure out who it is, to be safe. As I write more about people who lived before 1923, I’ll be less obsessive on the blog, but citations as to evidence will remain important to me in my research.

….Oh, right, the third reason I use cites is that I’m a lawyer and used to putting cites after everything! ;)

[There are no cites in this article because its a mix of facts and my own creative arrangement to those facts. I hold the copyright to this article (for my life plus 70 years!) which is why I have a "Copyright Information' paragraph on the Home page of the blog.]