I got my RootsMagic 4 Book in the mail about a week ago (you can still get it for $10). It is a very easy read especially if you already know what you're doing in RM4. Unfortunately, I am coming to the realization that I need to clean up my database. This will consist of a few steps:
1. Properly cite my sources. Rather than start merging and changing existing sources I am going to do it all over. Mainly because I want to use the handy multi-person source options. But also because many of my sources are either missing or not formatted correctly. I also want to classify these sources properly. This will be extremely time consuming but it must be done and I believe it will help me become much stronger when it comes to proof standards.
2. Organize my media files. I have a system, but I don't think it is a good one. I have saved a few posted with great recommendations and will start migrating my files to a new structure as I rebuild my database.
3. Focus on direct ancestors. My database was created from merging several trees and so I have people in it that are extremely distant relatives. I don't think they will make the cut in my new database as I will focus mainly on direct ancestors and their families.
4. Organize peripheral information. By this I mean I need to catalog and store documents, pictures and other memorabilia. I also want to properly archive correspondence that contains information I need to enter in the database and have been putting off for a while.
How does this sound? Any suggestions?
I have been trying to write more, but it seems time is the most scarce and valuable commodity right now. So here are a few short notes (that hopefully I will turn into full posts in the near future):
1) Fulton County Court Records: My first trip in search of some real records was extremely fruitful. I found wills of my wife's grandfather, Lawrence William Brannon, and grand-aunt, Leila Elizabeth Brannon Pendergrass, as well as lots of supporting documents including a copy of a death certificate and names of several descendants. And this is just from looking into two estate records. There were several others that have been archived that I would need to order. And I haven't even touched the marriage records yet.
2) Fundraiser: My daughter's school held it's annual fundraiser, with my wife being one of the co-chairs for the second year in a row. It was a huge success and a lot of fun. Since the theme was the 'Tree of Life' I was able to get some very generous donations from a couple of 'Family Tree' companies. I will definitely write more about this.
3) Cousins, cousins, everywhere: People are popping up everywhere and joining our huge Geni tree. Distant Auth and Brannon family members have made contact and started updating their side of the family. One Brannon that went to school with Cynthia turned out to be a 5th cousin. While at school they were sure they were not related but I was quickly able to prove otherwise.
4) Newspaper clippings: I was able to find an obituary for my wife's grandmother, Emily Anne Brannon, from 2002 as well as an article detailing her wedding in 1931 to Lawrence J. Brannon. The wedding has a lot of details about guests and is full of useful information.
5) The Battle Book: While looking through HeritageQuest Online through my Cobb County Library subscription I ran across a 780-page book detailing the Battle family history. It was printed in 1930 and has hundreds of pages of information about the family. Here's a quick nugget:
It reads:
6. Jesse Battle — b. Hertford Co., N. C., July 8, 1738; d. Hancock Co., Ga., Aug. 25, 1805 (See will, Chap. V); reared by grandfather, William Battle, in Nansemond Co., Va.; Revolutionary soldier (See Chap. XII); removed 1777 to Swift Creek, Edgecombe Co., N. C., and thence, Feb. 20, 1787, to Greene (now Hancock) Co., Ga.; Baptist; m. Nansemond Co., Va., 1756, Susanna Faucette (b. France, Oct. 7, 17381; d. Hancock C0., Ga., May 8, 1819, a French Huguenot who escaped from France hidden in bales of silk). Children:
Jesse Battle and Susanna Faucette were my wife's 6th-great-grandparents. I love the part about the escape "from France hidden in bales of silk." With this book I have now been able to trace one of my daughter's lines back 13 generations, to her 10th-great-grandparents. Pretty incredible.
I really hope to post about all these topics in more detail. This is truly fascinating stuff!
I asked for your help but nobody commented. So I had to come up with my own checklist. Here is what I am going to do when researching online:
1) First thing I need to do is figure out all the spelling variations. And the best method I came up with is to go to MyHeritage and use the MegaDex search tool that lists out all the possible spelling options for last names. Here's an easy one:
Here's a more detailed one:
I am obviously not going through all these alternate spellings, but at least I know where to look if I hit a dead end.
2) Paid Subscriptions. These are sites I have annual subscriptions and I will check them first for premium content. Obviously there are a lot of things I can look for in each one that don't overlap:
- MyHeritage.com - They really have an outstanding research engine that goes through almost 1400 sites simultaneously. It's not always accurate but it will take you in directions you don't always expect.
- JewishGen.org - A lot of this content is now available on Ancestry.com but I still like the simplicity of the site.
- FamilyHistory.org - I can still find some amazing nuggets here. I've been using the pilot site with great results lately and I can't wait for them to start digitizing everything.
- General Google search - I'm still waiting for my "Google Your Family Tree" - Where is it?!?
- Books.google.com
- Any other Google tools i will about from the book. Where is it?!?
- City/State specific sites
- Geni.com Trees
- MyHeritage.com Trees
- WorldVitalRecords.com (?)
- GenealogyBank.com (?)
- RootsWeb
- One World Tree
I am embarrassed to say that I made one of the dumbest mistakes in my research so far. I guess I can blame my inexperience but that's really no excuse. What did I do? I didn't try enough spelling variations for Selena Bishop. I have seen her named spelled Selena, Selina, Celina, Alina and Salena. But only when I looked at the photo I took of the 1932 Atlanta City Directory did I decide to actually run some searches on Salena Brannon (her married name). And guess what I found? Her death certificate. Doh! So I ordered the death certificate through VitalChek and it should be here soon. I really hope it has her parents' names on it. That would crack open my biggest brick wall to date.
I really need to devise a research checklist and get organized. Does anyone have a good list? I know everyone has different tactics but I would love to hear some suggestions.
And now for a feel good story for the holiday season. Has anyone heard of Cliff Young? Well if you have or haven't, go read about this amazing athlete, who at the age of 61 ran his first ultra-marathon (543.7-mile (875-kilometer) endurance race from Sydney to Melbourne) and won! Here's the full story.
This one goes out to both my family reading the blog as well as seasoned genea-bloggers. What should I do about sensitive material that I uncover in my research? I will list a few scenarios (some real and some not) and hope to see what you think I should do:
1) Children out of wedlock / Marriage while pregnant.
2) Previously unknown spouses.
3) Canceled engagements.
4) Missing people.
If it were up to me I would write about everything I find. But I am aware of the fact that some people are more private than me and would not want sensitive subject out on display for the whole world (and future descendants) to see. I see several possibilities:
1) Living vs. Deceased.
2) Direct Ancestors vs. Indirect Relatives.
3) Contacted Relatives vs. Unknown Relatives.
For now I will sit on most of my information until I can figure this out. But I think everyone would agree that deceased direct ancestors are fine, right?
How do you treat touchy subjects?
A couple of weeks ago I stepped out of my internet genealogy bubble and went to the library. I went to my local South Cobb Regional Library which is one of 17 libraries in Cobb County. And I got myself a brand new, shiny library card! Then I went over to the reference desk and asked where their genealogy section was and got a blank stare from the nice lady across the desk. Apparently they don't have a section like that, all they have is computer access. And at that location they didn't even have AncestryPlus. I did learn that I could access all the online resources from home, if I needed to, using my library number and a password.
I remembered that the Central Library has a big genealogy collection in the Georgia Room, so I headed that way. I walked right in, checked in with the front desk and got some instructions and a map. Yes, a map. The room is pretty big (12,000 books), so they give everyone a map to help them figure out where they want to go.
Since nobody was in the room I asked for some help anyway. I was led to the South Carolina section and shown the Spartanburg County books. I found a book entitled:
Spartanburg County Marriages, 1785-1911: Implied in Spartanburg County South Carolina Probate Records
By Barbara R. Langdon
Published by Langdon & Langdon Genealogical Research, 1992
ISBN 0938741071, 9780938741077
317 pages
I did not know this at the time, but South Carolina doesn't have marriage records prior to these dates and the way Langdon got this information is from going through loose probate records and trying to figure out who's who.
And there I found that Margaret Wolf married a Bishop man around 1870, which matched the information about my elusive Margaret. But this will have to wait for another post.
A couple of weeks later I went to the Georgia Room again, this time looking for actual Cobb County burial information since I found Margaret's obituary, but couldn't find what I wanted. So I headed over to the Fulton County Central Library and found Atlanta City Directories dating back to pre-1900. Of course, I forgot to bring my digital camera, which I took out of my bag to take Halloween pictures with, so I had to hand-write everything.
And there was a lot to write. I tracked Bishop's, Brannon's, McElrath's, Tuggle's and Wiley's through about two decades of life in Atlanta. But again, that's the topic for another post.
I have to say, the library is a terrific source of information. I just wish I knew a little more about how it's organized and how to find things faster. But I guess that's something you learn from experience.
And never leave home without your digital camera!
Who do you add to your family tree?
This question has been on my mind for a few weeks now. I guess it started when I was able to merge our family's Geni tree with several distant relatives (third cousins and beyond). My immediate reaction was that anyone I can add will be added. But then when I started doing just that I ran into many new branches of people who were only related to me through marriage or multiple marriages. So here's who I've decided to add to my research:
1) All direct descendants of my daughter's direct ancestors.
2) Spouses of 1.
3) Parents and siblings of 2.
Does this make any sense? Does it make any sense for me to expand my tree further than that? From all the Geni tree merges I now have people who are my "first cousin thrice removed's wife's nephew." I don't even know what that means!
On Geni, I set my family to the highest level:
My Family consists of my 5th cousins and closer plus their current partners
and My Wife's 5th cousins and closer plus their current partners
and our inlaws out to first cousins.
Too much? I'd love to know what others are doing.
It's been a while since my last post, but boy have I been busy. I have been diving into some Polish geography and finding a lot of links to long lost relatives. I have found a lot of these people on Geni.com and it is proving to be a truly valuable resource.
As I have written here before about my grandfather's Dombek family, there are few leads to follow. But then I started to investigate his mother's side of the tree. Bella (Beile) Kreplak was born about 1884 in Poland (according to a page of testimony, she was born in Warsaw). So far I have not found any Kreplak's in Warsaw. So I started looking in other places. I found Bejla Kreplak, born in 1885 in the Kosow Lacki PSA BMD 1863-1904 in the Siedlce Gubernia / Warszawa Province database on JewishGen. You'll see why this is interesting in just a bit.
From speaking with my mother and grandmother, but also from personal acquaintance, I know we have Kreplak relatives in Paris. They are the children and grandchildren of Herschel Kreplak who is (supposed to be) my grandfather's first cousin. I need to verify who his parents were to confirm this, but I would say this is pretty certain. There is also another family in Paris that are descendants of a female Kreplak and they were also considered first cousins. Then there is a Ritz family in Israel.
Today I found out that Chaya Rydz (nee Kreplak) was the mother of Yehuda Rydz of Herzelia, Israel, and perished in Ciechanowiec, Bialystok, Poland, along with Yehuda's wife, Faiga Rydz (nee Plisky). All this is based on the Ciechanowiec Yizkor Book. You can read a chapter written by Yehuda here. So I have some research to do there, but I am pretty certain I can link them all back to the same family as well. I think Yehuda Rydz is the Idel Ritz in my tree?
There are two other Kreplak trees I am working on. They all lead back to families in Kosow Lacki, Poland. I found records of Kreplak families there and I need to see if I can find them at an LDS center and actually see who the parents were. I think I'm on the right track.
And then there are a few Dombek families that track back to Ostrow Mazowiecka.
One of the interesting things I found out is that all these villages are within a 20 mile radius. Check out this map:
By the way, I created this map by looking up the town Sterdyn on this site: http://mapy.eholiday.pl/. I guess you can also go through Google maps but this site actually does have a type-ahead feature that helps you if you have no idea how to spell in Polish, which I don't. Then I used a FireFox plug-in called FireShot that let's you grab either your current browser view or the entire page and add highlights and comments. There's a free version and it is extremely useful.
Last tech-tip for today. If you wind up in a foreign language site, like the one above, right click somewhere on the page and select the bottom option "Page Info". Then choose the "Translate to English" option at the bottom. It runs the entire page through Google Translate and does a pretty good job. This only works in FireFox (because you really should not use Internet Explorer), but doesn't work on Google's new Chrome browser. I'm certain it will be added very soon.
My maternal grandfather was Michael (Misha) Dombek (Domb is an oak tree in Polish). As far as I know, he is the only surviving Jewish Dombek from his family to have made it through the holocaust (There are other Dombek families, but so far I have not been able to find any that are Jewish). When WW2 started he left Warsaw and his disapproving family behind and fled to Russia, where he later met my grandmother. When he returned after the war, there was nobody left alive.
I will have many more posts about my grandfather, as he was one of my role models growing up and one of my favorite people in this world. But for the sake of this post I will focus on one single story. It's a sad story about the complete annihilation of his family in the holocaust and how a misunderstanding and a case of mistaken identity changed the future for many people.
Misha lived with his family in Warsaw in a big apartment at 16 Woloska Street. He was one of 9 children in the family and was about 19 years old when the war started. he felt that things were not going to end well and decided to leave. He tried to convince his father and the rest of the family to leave with him, but they wouldn't listen to his warnings. And so he set out on his own to the Russian border.
He moved around a lot in Russia during the war, joined and left the Red Army (twice) and eventually met my grandmother in Central Asia (near Tashkent, Uzbekistan). After they married in 1945, he made an unsuccessful attempt to find his family in Warsaw. A couple of years later they moved back to Poland, in 1947. At this point, he tried to go back to his family's apartment. Surprisingly, the building was still standing and the old Polish woman who worked there recognized him. She told him that one of his sisters, Tema, had come back after the war and sold the family apartment. Apparently Tema and another sister had survived, according to the old woman, and had moved to Israel.
Misha was encouraged by this new development and had tried to contact his sisters in Israel for several years without success. Eventually Misha and his new family (wife and two children) immigrated to Israel around 1957. One of the reasons was the chance that his sisters could be contacted somehow. At that time there was a radio show on Friday afternoons that tried to reconnect lost family members. Misha was reluctant, but his wife Riva decided to put his name on the show and they were soon contacted by Mrs. Rivka Geiger (Kramarz).
Rivka and her sister, Tema Fruchter (Kramarz), were the only two known survivors. When they finally met, Rivka took Misha to see her sister and that's when things got a little strange. Apparently Tema and her husband were acting in a weird way, avoiding eye-contact and being very distant. After the visit with his two cousins, Misha figured out what must have happened. It seemed that Tema came back to the family apartment in Warsaw, pretended to be Misha's sister (also called Tema) and sold it. Misha later confronted her with this conclusion and she admitted to it and apologized. Her reasoning was that since it seemed like everyone had perished in the holocaust, there was no reason to just let the apartment go to waste. It took some time but eventually all was forgiven.
So the case of the cousin who "stole" the apartment had led to several life changing events. Had she not sold the apartment, Misha would have had no idea that they were alive and living in Israel. Without the (false) hope of seeing his sisters he would not have moved his family to Israel. My parents would have never met and I would not be here to tell the story. I am constantly amazed at how little incidents in our past make a huge impact on our future (or present).
Rivka Geiger has been one of my biggest sources of information about my grandfather's family. She filled out dozens of 'Pages of Testimony' for Yad Vashem about her relatives who had perished in the holocaust. From reading these handwritten documents I have been able to piece together a family tree dating back to the mid 1850's in Poland. Below is a tree of descendants of my 2nd great grandparents:
I marked the only survivors in red, all who perished in black and myself in blue (bottom left). It is astounding how entire families were massacred and wiped from existence. This is just an example of only one branch in the tree. I have similar diagrams for the Kreplak family (my great-grandmother's side, of which a couple of second cousins were later located in Paris) and the Smorgonski family (my paternal grandmother, who were murdered in Dolhinov, Poland). And these were only the adults. Many of these families had children that aren't listed in the 'Pages of Testimony'. All gone.
I will slowly continue to add details and proper citations from this resource. I am currently at around 100 people combining both sides of my Polish ancestry. My next big leap would be to try to find out if there were any family members higher up in the tree that left Europe before the war or survived the holocaust in some other way. The problem there is that both my great grandfather and his father were only sons in families with many sisters. Another problem is getting through to the correct information for 19th century Polish Jews. This is one of the top goals of my research.
I think I've mentioned this resource in the past, but I have been searching through it the past few days and came up with some terrific nuggets. Here is the description from the Carnegie-Mellon University Libraries page:
The Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project is composed of The Jewish Criterion (1895-1962), The American Jewish Outlook (1934-1962), and The Jewish Chronicle (1962-Present). This project serves as both an online reference source and as a digitized historical documentation of the Jewish community of Pittsburgh and its outlying areas.
The search functionality is terrific. I plugged in a few names and came up with a lot of accurate hits. The only drawback is that when the actual page comes up (scanned both as a small and large image) it doesn't highlight your search results in any way. So you have to read the entire page to look for the phrase you searched for.
I am constantly amazed at the level of detail in these old newspapers. The first thing that struck me was the donation listings. There are a lot of people donating all sums of money and everyone is listed. Even a 50 cent donation.
The second thing I noticed is the 'In Memoriam' sections. Families kept posting these for decades after loved ones had passed away. There are a lot of other family events such as births, marriages, engagements and obituaries. It has proven to be a very valuable and accurate resource for me.
Here are some of the funny snippets I have found these past few days. I guess that almost 100 years ago, other than word of mouth, this was one of the better forms of communication. I can't imagine some of these things showing up in local papers today.
On July 27th, 1923:
Miss Mabel Hytowitz, of Beeler
Street, is spending a few weeks in
Atlantic City.
On May 6th 1923:
On Sunday, May Sixth, Miss Es-
ther Weisberg, of Black Street, en-
tertained the members of the Sigma
Delta Phi Sorority with a card par-
ty. Prizes were awarded the Misses
Minnie Cooper, Mabel Hytowitz, Ruth
Schmidt and Selma Goldstein. After
a dainty luncheon had been served,
Miss Rhoda Selznick entertained with
several ukelele numbers, after which
the Misses Ruth Spector and Sara
Sbarsky, accompanied by Miss Ma-
thilda Miller, entertained with dance
and song numbers.
One of the things I noticed is that at the end of a lot of the clippings they add 'no cards':
On January 10th, 1922:
Weiner—Hytowitz
Miss Hazel Weiner, daughter of
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Weiner, of At-
lantic Avenue, has chosen Tuesday,
January tenth, as the date for her
marriage to Mr. Benjamin Hytowitz,
of this city, which will be solemnized
in the Rittenhouse. A dinner for the
immediate families will supplement
the ceremony, and will be followed by
a reception. No cards.
Does anyone know what that means?
My wife's 2nd-great-grandfather, Milton B. Tuggle, volunteered to join Company C ("Dawson Grays") of the 3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry regiment, Confederate States of America, Army of North Virginia, commanded by Capt. R. L. McWhorter, in 1861, when he was only 16 years old. It took them a year to figure out he was a minor before discharging him.
Two years later Milton re-enlisted to the same unit and served until Lee surrendered at Appomatox on the 9th of April, 1865. He stated in his application for a pension in 1900 that he was with his command when the war ended and had his gun too.
I found this information in the notes of one of the GEDCOM files I downloaded from One World Tree, so this could all be fiction. But if someone went to all the trouble of writing this elaborate note (and there is a lot more to it, including information about his employers, address in 1900, etc.) I would assume that a lot of it is true. I will obviously mark it as a 'questionable' source and try to dig deeper and uncover the actual facts. I was going to contact the GEDCOM file owner, but alas, he/she is listed as unknown, so that's a dead end for me.
I did start to look into who Capt. R. L. McWhorter was and came across this information:
Robert Ligon McWhorter was born June 19, 1819 in Bowling Green, Oglethorpe County, Georgia, the third son of Hugh McWhorter and Helena Ligon.
He attend Mercer University and was married to Nancy Winifred Janes, who was the daughter of Absolom Janes and Cordelia Callaway. Winifred lived only four years following their marriage and died, leaving one son, Robert Ligon McWhorter, Jr.
In 1849 Robert Ligon was married to Nancy Pope Thurmond. Their five children were: James Vason, John Alexander, Hamilton, Julia Pope, and Jessie Boyd McWhorter.
McWhorter enlisted in Company C ("Dawson Grays") of the 3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry regiment as Captain on April 24, 1861. He was elected Major and Assistant Quartermaster of Wright's Brigade on April 28, 1862. He surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.
Robert Ligon served in both houses of the State Legislature and as Speaker of the House during the Reconstruction period.
Contributed by Thomas Baumgartner (descendant of the McWhorters of Greene County, Georgia), "3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Veterans - Robert L. McWhorter", http://www.3gvi.org/ga3vetrmcwhorter.html, August 2008.
How can you pass up on these kinds of great stories?
Miriam Robbins Midkiff commented on my previous post, about the validity of online family trees, by saying:
Amir, there is a well-known quote in the genealogical world: "Genealogy without sources is mythology."
Even if you have researched all your information carefully and have the documents to "prove" it, if you don't list your sources with your information when you publish it or post it online, it must still be considered mythology.
Good sources allow another family historian to retrace your steps through the same documents.
Thomas MacEntee responded to my question on the Genea-Blogger Group discussion thread along the same lines:
Amir, for me, none of the Ancestry tree data - be it One World Tree or others - is reliable unless there are source citations. I am a stickler for that.
Sometimes I will use the data in my database but place a citation of UNSOURCED with it so that I know I have work to do down the road.
And Bob Franks concurs as well:
I concur with Thomas about this. I treat unsourced data as research hints only until source material can be obtained to verify the data. I've also seen a lot of online trees where the source is listed as other online unsourced trees. It seems these spread like wildfire.
I have to agree with all of them. For one thing, they've been doing this for a while and I bet they know what they are talking about. But also, as I started drowning in a sea of ahnentafels, I was able to find some GEDCOM files that contained actual source references. Not a lot, but I guess that's better than claiming your ancestors are the Kings of Asgard.
I have decided to add this kind of information and tag the source as 'questionable'. This will help others who might come across this information in the future as well as allow me to return to these parts of the tree and continue a more thorough research at a later time. I find it kind of ironic that while researching the past you leave behind clues for people who might come across this research in the future. Kind of cool.
I found a great little Civil War story to tell, but I will just post it separately later. Thanks for the help and comments. Keep 'em coming!
How much faith can I put in One World Tree sources?
I ask this because tonight I found out that my wife's family tree dates all the way back to the BC-to-AD switch and beyond. I went back to the yellow legal pad her father scribbled some information on and found her great-grandmother was a Tuggle. When I started doing some research on that family I quickly found myself going down a long winding path back to London, then Denmark and eventually Ancient Troy and Jesus era Jerusalem. I found all kinds of "Princess of the Vandals" and Olaf "The Mighty" along the way as well.
The thing that initially struck me as odd was that the further I went, the more trees were linked to these names. At certain points I had over 300 trees linking to the same data. I understand that the further up the tree I go the more people are likely to converge and cite the same sources. But this is ridiculous.
How do you use this resource? Is it worthwhile? Should I flag it as 'questionable'?
I am quickly understanding that proper source citations are extremely important. Not only to allow you to backtrack and find the source of the information you are using, but also to allow fellow researchers to connect the dots when they run into something you claim is true.
When I started out building our family tree, I mostly used oral interviews and some research that my mother-in-law did for my wife a few years ago. But then I started adding information from other sources, especially online. Pretty quickly I was making a big mess of it. I needed a better system.
One of the things I noticed on Ancestry.com is that it allows you to attach a record to your online tree. What that does is put all the proper sources and citations with that record and makes it very easy to tag a whole family. For example, if you have one family member that you find in the census you can add that record to this person as well as to his entire family (depending on the census year, some older census records will only attach to a single person).
But I don't use my online tree as my primary database. It just doesn't have the breadth of features I get with RootsMagic. And worse of all, I can't just merge new information from one to the other easily. So I decided to just use the online tree for source gathering. Here's the process:
1) I create a new tree on Ancestry.com named after the home person.
2) I start researching online and adding sources and citations.
3) I expand the tree and use the 'hints' that the site uses to try to link to other records.
4) I add whole families, making sure to keep adding all sources.
5) Once I reach a point where I feel I have enough to transfer offline I export a GEDCOM from the online tree.
6) I load this GEDCOM into a new database in RootsMagic.
7) I arrange this new database, getting rid of all the duplicates.
8) I merge this database into my master file.
9) I make sure all the sources and citations are in the right places.
10) I delete the old online tree and upload the new organized one back in it's place.
Seems like a lot of work, but using this method I added over 200 people to the Brannon side of the family in my main tree, all with the proper sources and citations.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Are there easier methods to add so much source information?
7/29/08 - Current family members: 1118 in 330 families.
I am drowning under the amount of information and keep finding more and more methods to find additional sources. I'm not even sure how I got there, but I found a video of Miriam Robbins Midkiff talking about using Google Books in her research.
So I open up the site and plug in the first name I can think of, Conrad Auth. Conrad was my wife's 2nd-great-grandfather, was born in 1832 in Germany. He married Elizabeth Bannantine, born in 1839 in England, and lived with his large family in Pittsburgh, PA. I have very little information on Conrad and his family outside of what I could find in census data and a GEDCOM file I received from another Auth. The 1880 US Census lists his occupation as Glassblower.
I got 20 results for my search of "Conrad Auth". The first book in the list was:
Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh
By Ileen A. DeVault
Published by Cornell University Press, 1995
ISBN 0801483077, 9780801483073
194 pages
I clicked on the link and found the following section in the book (I used OCR to get it in text instead of the screenshot I took, but many books actually have a plain-text version as well):
Charles Auth entered the Commercial Department in 1900. His father, Conrad, was a Pennsylvania-born glassblower of mixed German and English heritage and national treasurer of the Glass Bottle Blowers’ Association (GBBA). Glassblowers like Auth made up almost 3 percent of the skilled workers represented in the Commercial Department. Conrad Auth, his English-born wife, five sons, and one daughter lived in a house with a fully paid mortgage near the glasshouses on Pittsburgh’s South Side. Charles was the youngest son. His two oldest brothers held manual jobs; one was a glassblower like his father, and the other was an unspecified "steelworker." During the year ending with the federal census taking of June 1900, Conrad Auth and his glassblowing son had both been unemployed for twelve full months. Even as treasurer of his national union, Auth, Sr., did not receive a salary, although he did sometimes receive per diem payment and costs for time spent on union business. Auth`s steelworker son had been unemployed for seven months of 1900. Faced with this dramatic experience of the precariousness of the skilled trades, the Auth family switched to a new plan for their three younger sons. When fifteen-year-old Charles entered the high school's program, his other two brothers worked as clerks, one for a plumbing business and the other as a grocery clerk. Unlike their older brothers, neither of these young men employed in white-collar jobs had any periods of unemployment in 1900. Since the family had paid off the mortgage on their home, their economic situation had not always been so bleak as it was in 1900. Nonetheless, the pattern of employment in the family demonstrates a change in strategy for the sons' futures over the course of the 1890s.
WOW! Look at all this information! I love it! This kind of data breathes real life into our ancestors. It takes them from a bunch of census data and source citations to an actual family, living in times of hardship and persevering. I would have had to dig deep to find out that Conrad was the national treasurer of the GBBA. And this was just the first link!
I kept going through the list and found out that he testified in the tariff hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, First Session, Fifty-third Congress, in 1893. There was a lot more information but I was already completely overwhelmed. I tried a few others and kept finding more and more.
So obviously this is a huge resource that I will use in the future. One of the things that's kind of annoying is that not all the books have full view. Some only have snippets and point you to where you can buy the book. But even these snippets can be extremely valuable.
Some of you veteran genealogists are probably snickering at my ridiculous newbie discovery. But since I have no formal genealogical training and I haven't even read an "Idiot's Guide To Genealogy" book, this is still a big deal to me.
Any more 'WOW' tips out there? I sure hope so!
I am going to recap what I have done so far in the past few weeks since I have embarked on this journey.
First, I read through my sister's roots project and got all fired up. Some of the pages in the project were printouts from Beit Hatfutzot, which is also known as the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. They had basic information about my paternal grandparents' villages in Poland. The two villages are Radzilow and Dolhinov (wow, I just found this site when doing a Google search. There is so much information I have to go through and I have already seen several familiar names!).
From there I jumped over to the Yad Vashem site which is The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. It is the largest and most impressive holocaust museum in the world and is located in Jerusalem. I remember going there when I was younger to do a research project about the Treblinka Concentration Camp. It was a project I did for school and the reason I chose that specific camp was the fact that it only had one purpose - kill as many people as fast as possible. We'll get back to this in a minute..jpg)
I sat at the computer with my mom and we started searching through The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names and all of a sudden we both started getting chills. There, in front of our very eyes, were hand written documents (called pages of testimony) filled out by my grandfather's first cousin, Rivka Geiger. To the right you can see the page she filled out about my great-grandfather, Hanoch Meir (Heynoch) Dombek. Rivka and her sister Tamara (Tema) Fruchter were the only close family survivors that my grandfather was able to find in Israel after the war. That's a story I will have to tell in full in a later post.
Anyway, by using the easy functionality of the site I was able to find 58 pages that were filled by Rivka. We were just skimming through them, trying to figure out the names and dates. Most of the testimony is in Yiddish and hard to read, but we slowly figured out who was who. Last night I finally sat down and went through them all and I now have a chart of three generations of the Dombek family that perished in the Shoah (holocaust). I will have a full post about that soon as well. I promise.
I started a quick family tree with some free online software through a link I found on the Beit Hatfutzot site. I won't actually link it here because it has all the details of living relatives. If you want to see it please let me know. I will also figure out a way to post this tree somewhere else.
I spent a few hours with my parents, trying to map out as many relatives as we could think of. The next day my mother and I went to visit my grandmother and I grilled her for over two hours, trying to get as many details as I could.
On my return to the US, I told my wife about my new hobby and asked to see what her mother had put together a few years ago. That pretty much got me started with a big chunk of information on her side. I also found a few people through JewishGen's Family Finder (JGFF) and the Family Tree of the Jewish People (FTJP) who were nice enough to share some of their research and give me some tips moving forward. I joined Ancestry.com and found a distant relative of my wife's who has over 23K people in his tree. With his help and direction I decided to purchase the RootsMagic Genealogy Software tool. Through Ancestry.com I was able to piece together a lot of information from US Census data from 1840-1930 about the Auth, Wiley and Hytowitz families.
Well, this is becoming quite a long recap of the first few weeks and I already have several posts I promised to write. One of the things I will try to list at the bottom of each post is how many people I currently have in my family project.
7/29/08 - Current family members: 825 in 259 families.
