​I was looking at DNA matches on Ancestry.   A good match, 65 cM, came up.  But when I looked at the details on my list of matches, it said “Tree Unavailable.”

​When I clicked on the match name, I got to this next screen.  You can see at the bottom where it says “The connected family tree is private” and it gives me a button to click to contact the match.

​But up at the top, where my red arrow is pointing, I can once again click on the name to get the Member Profile for Match.  Once I scrolled all the way down on that screen, below “Recently Added Content” I can see that Match does indeed have an Ancestry Public Member Tree.

​Sometimes you have to dig to find the trees, but if Ancestry “shuts the door” with a “Tree Unavailable” message, be sure to walk around the whole “house” and peek in all the windows to see if you can’t find a tree hidden on the Member Profile page.

Sometime in the 1970s my dad’s first cousin Thelma Wooster Van Alstyne typed up some genealogy information on her great-grandparents, immigrants from Germany.  Her two reports provided information on my great-great grandparents, two immigrants couples, Charles Kircher and his wife Augusta Frühauf who met and married in Germany before emigrating, and Johannes Springer of “Kappeln” in Bavaria and his wife Louisa Caroline Hartman of Hanover, Germany, who came to America separately and were likely introduced to each other by common friends in Syracuse, New York.    Thelma’s charts gave the birth, marriage and death dates for these couples and all their descendants she knew about at the time she prepared the charts.  In addition to the charts she wrote up a dozen or two paragraphs of “Notes” on each couple.  There is not one source cited on any of the notes or descendancy pages. 

Thelma must have had some documents.  There are photocopies of some records from Germany for the Kirchers, including an 1849 passport from the Royal Prussian States and a couple of documents reporting on baptisms which were likely provided by the couple to the pastor who married them.  Thelma had the documents transcribed and translated.  With some of the other documents I only have copies of the translations, and no idea where the original documents are.  God bless Thelma for doing as much as she did.  Without it, much of the history would have been lost.

I’ve tried to go back and prove what Thelma had in the trees and notes.  Most of it was accurate, at least to a degree.  I have not found a Kappeln in Bavaria, but there is Kapellen, and using microfilm and digitized records from the Family History Library I found Johannes Sprenger’s baptism record.  In fact, for three of those four immigrant great-great grandparents, I found original baptism records, and in several cases I’ve been able to work back another generation or two (or more!) on German soil.

But one of them had me stumped.  Louisa Caroline Hartman of Hanover.  Hanover is the name of a city, as well as a former kingdom, in what is now Germany.   It is neither a small nor a very specific place. 

Here’s all the information about Louisa I had from Thelma’s “Notes on the Springer Family”:[1]
      Johannes Springer had four brothers and sisters.
    The Hartmans in Germany had money.  Louisa’s parents didn’t want her to come to America, so she probably didn’t get any of the family’s money.
     The Springer’s in Liverpool[2] were poor.  Grandma (Frances) and Aunt Amelia used to pick up sticks for fuel near the salt mine.
    Relatives in Liverpool and Syracuse: Hartmans (Nellie, Fred, Nick, Amelia Hartman Klassi), Getmens, Bauers (Mrs. Bauer was a Hartman).

The descendency chart started with:
        LOUISA CAROLINE HARTMAN               M. 1st              JOHANNES SPRINGER
   B. June 3, 1836 (Hanover, Germany)                             B. 1835 (Kappeln, State of Bavaria)
   D. May 1, 1905 (Buried in Union Hill)                            D. Oct. 3, 187- (Age 42) Liverpool, NY[3]
 
Hanover...  Ugh.  But the notes listed some Hartman cousins in Liverpool and Syracuse.  Nellie, Fred, Nick and Amelia Hartman Klassi.  I like that Klassi name – unusual enough to hopefully be easy to find.  Sure enough, found an obituary, “Mrs. Frank Klassi Dies at Daughter’s Home.”  The article title is wrong, but the text is just what I was looking for:
 
         At the residence of her daughter, Mrs Frank Klassi at No. 16- [?] Strong avenue yesterday occurred the death of Mrs. Abbie Frech Hartman, aged 73 years.  Surviving her are three daughters, Mrs John L. Bauer, Mrs. Frank Klassi and Miss Nellie Hartman of this city and a son, Fred G. Hartman of Newark, N. J.  Funeral services will be held privately at 2:30 o’clock tomorrow afternoon and burial will be at Woodlawn Cemetery.[4]
 
As I searched more for this family I discovered through census records and obituaries the patriarch was Frederick August Hartman.  (I think Thelma might have been slightly off listing Nick as a Hartman. He appears to be a cousin on the other, Springer, side.  Nick Springer and Sarah Gettman were children of Johannes Springer’s brother Nicholas who lived next door to Louisa and Johannes in Liverpool.) 

The pieces began to fit together.  Louisa Hartman Springer’s daughter, Franklin Abelone was baptized on 14 June 1857 in Liverpool.  Her godparents were Frederick Hartman and Abelone Hartman.   Cousins. Godfather. Yes, Frederick Hartman was beginning to look a lot like he must be Louisa’s brother.

I ordered both Frederick and Louisa’s death certificates.  Not cheap to get New York vital records, but surely one of them would tell me the parents’ names and the birthplace in Hanover… And the records came!  Louisa was born in… Germany.  Her father was Anthony Hartman, born in… Germany.  Her mother was Mollie Hartman, born in… Germany.  Louisa was 68 years [months and days not givene] at her death on 1 May 1905.[5]  Not exactly the specific details I hoped for. 

What about Fred?  Fred’k A. Hartmann, died 19 May 1902 at age 79 years, 3 months and 25 days.  He was born in… Germany.  He’d been in the US 55 years.  His father was Anton and his mother was Amelia, both from… well, you know… Germany.[6]  But at least there was some math I could do.  I calculated a birthdate of 24 January 1823.  If, of course, the unnamed informant on the death certificate knew what they were talking about. 

The details on the two certificates meshed well enough.  Anton and Anthony seemed a solid fit.  Mollie is not a far stretch as a nickname for Amelia.  Both Frederick and Louisa named daughters Amelia. 

And there things sat for a year and a half.  I tried to work on the problem off and on.  My attempts to find a marriage record in Liverpool for Johannes and Louisa met with stonewalling from the likely church where the baptisms of their children and probably their marriage occurred.   I reached out to distant cousins, looking for a family bible which might say something.  No bible, but my “new” cousin Amy had a fabulous photo album from Louisa’s daughter, Amelia.  The album contained several Hartman pictures, including one of Abelone Frech Hartman with all her children, and one of Frederick and Abbie together.

But I’m afraid with the scant clues I had:  - aprobable birthdate for Fred, first names for parents but no maiden name for Mama, a Kingdom comprising about 14,600 square miles[7] (roughly twice the size of New Jersey)[8], -   and little in the way of online records, I just didn’t have the stamina to tackle that problem.  So many ancestors, so little time…

In January I took a class at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG)[9] from Warren Bittner, Baerbel Johnson and Daniel Jones on reading Gothic Script and Fraktur.  It was a delightful experience, one of the most fun weeks of learning I have ever had.  Five days of “code breaking” flew by, not one moment feeling like work.  But now I have the confidence to take on those “chicken scratch” records which used to scare me to death. 

A couple of weeks after SLIG I had to go back to Salt Lake City for some meetings, and I built in some time for more research at the Family History Library.  I was getting a bit of help from Daniel on a few bits I couldn’t read in a couple of records.  Herr Bitter was there as well and I couldn’t resist sharing how excited I was about my new-found skills.  I sat next to him later in the day and he worked at one computer and I at another, but every once in a while he offered a little advice on this or that.    I saw him at the library several more times in the next few days.  (I do hope I wasn't too much of a pest.)

My Hartmann problem in the back of my mind, I thought I’d see if Warren had any ideas.  I guess I was right about the size of the problem.  When he asked who I was looking for and I said “Frederick Hartman in Hannover,” his response was a brief two words.  “I’m sorry.” 

But a little later he wanted to see what I had on him and I showed him the 1855 New York census for Frederick in Syracuse.  It showed he’d been in Syracuse 5 years.  He was married and living with his in-laws who reported being in Syracuse 3 years, so it pointed pretty strongly to an immigration year within a couple of years of 1850.   Warren said, “Why don’t you look for a passenger list for Frederick.  You might find a few, you might find a lot.  But it’s worth a shot.” 

Yeah, right, I thought.  My experience with passenger lists has rarely been fruitful.  I don’t know the name of the ship my guy came on, I don’t know when, I don’t know if the list for the ship he did come on survived, I don’t know if it was microfilmed… or indexed… or digitized.  Was it legible enough that the indexer could come up with a reasonable approximation of the name?   If it made it through all those hoops would it say anything more than “Frederick Hartman, age 25, laborer from Germany?”

Below is my “typical” passenger list.  The columns are: Number on the manifest, Name, Age, Gender, Occupation, The country to which they severally belong, and The country in which they intend to become inhabitants.[10]
​

The name, age and gender columns at least have a bit of variety.  The other three are laborer, Germany and U.S. of America.  Even a 2-month-old baby on the next pages was a “laborer.”
​
So, no… I didn’t jump right on Warren’s suggestion.  But after a few more days of research, I’d exhausted the questions on the other “findable” lines and so I thought I’d at least give it a shot.  I searched in Ancestry’s New York Passenger Lists database for a Frederick Hartman arriving in 1850 +/- two years.  I got only 20 hits, so not too many to go through.  Some I could immediately throw out based on the passenger’s age.  Only one had a birth year of 1823, so I checked that one first.  The Columbus arrived 6 April 1850 from Bremen.  What I saw on that list had me drooling.

The column headings might be a bit hard to read due to the ink splotches, but they are: Name, Last Dwelling Place, Occupation, Age, Destination, [no heading, but the entries show number of boxes of possessions] and Sex.[11]
​

Look at those letters![12]  Thank you D. Meyer, Master of Columbus.  You are my hero!  Your second grade teacher who taught you that beautiful penmanship is my hero, too!

So what do we have here?  Frederick Hartmann, from Makensen,[13] a farmer, age 27, uncertain about his destination, one box, male.  Next line, Caroline Hartmann, [ditto, also from Makensen], 22, destination Pitsville [?], 1 box, female.  Could this be Louisa Caroline?  She’s a little old from what I know about Louisa, but if she subtracted a little in her later years (many women did) and added a few on this manifest (maybe she worried about appearing too young to support herself, so she tried to be a little older) she might be within range to be Louisa.  But I’m pretty sure Frederick and, Caroline aren’t a married couple because they’re not going to the same destination.  And look at 8, 9 and 11 lines below Caroline – Wilhelm Benzinger, Matthias Zimmermann and August Zimmermann – all three of them are going to Syracuse, where Frederick wound up.

Imagine if you will, a ship full of people, lining up to give super scribe, D. Meyer, their particulars.  Frederick really can’t decide where he’s going but there’s a trio just a bit behind him in line, all of them talking up the many opportunities of Salt City and Frederick is convinced.  Do I know this is really what happened?  Nope.  But hey, it makes sense, right?

I really like this passenger list.  I could find it.  It is legible.  It has really specific information like Makensen and Syracuse.  I sooooo want this list to be mine! 

Allow me a little digression…  When I was a kid, I chewed a lot of Bazooka bubblegum, the pink stuff with the comics inside the wrappers.  Often hard as a rock, but enough spit and you could get a pretty good chew.  I cannot tell you much about the comics.  But one, for some obscure reason, has stuck with me the last 50 years.  Bazooka Joe is on his knees beneath a street lamp, clearly looking for something.  His friend offers to help.  Next frame his friend asks if this is where Joe lost his thingamabob.  “No,” says Joe.  “I lost it over there.”  “Then why are we looking here?”  “The light’s better over here.” 

I feel that way a lot in genealogy.  Some record isn’t from where my ancestor was from, and it’s probably not them, but the “light” is better on the record.  It’s legible.  It’s got places - “Makensen!” and “Syracuse!”  That is some great light!  It just HAS to be my people.  Please, please, please, genealogy gods, can this be my people?  Pretty pretty please.  The light is so good on this one.

Well, I have absolutely no idea if the Hartmanns on the Columbus are my people.  But Warren has given me the name of Detlef, a researcher in Hannover, who used to work at the Landeskirchliches Archiv Hannover.  I’ve already emailed Detlef about a baptism record on a family in Einbeck, maybe he could look for a Mackensen record, too.   So I gave Detlef those details, and crossed my fingers.

Three days ago I heard back from Detlef.  The microfiche from Mackensen was horrid, difficult to read and not worth taking a picture of.  But it was legible enough at least to find some relevant entries.  He found two baptisms on that crummy microfiche.  Two children of Heinrich Anton Hartmann, a Schumacher [shoemaker], and his wife Johanne Amalie, born Schollens.  Friedrich August Hartman, born in Mackensen 24 January 1823.  And Johanne Dorothee Caroline Hartmann, born in Mackensen 14 March 1828.[14]  Frederick’s was exact date calculated from his death certificate.  That informant did know what they were talking about!

Caroline’s baptism name doesn’t include the name Louisa.  The birthdate is consistent with the Columbus passenger Caroline Hartmann, but the birthdate does not match Thelma’s details on Louisa Caroline.  I think this might be another sister.  My experience with my German families indicates children are often christened with three or even four names.  The “first” name is often the name of a godparent, but the child may be called by one of the other names.  When you’re doling the names out three-to-a-kid you run through them pretty quickly, so often the “extra” names are used for multiple children.  So Louisa Caroline’s baptism record is still waiting for me to lay eyes on it, but I’m pretty darn sure I’ll find it in the parish registers of Mackensen.  Can’t wait!

Research takeaways

• Follow the FAN club – friends and family, associates and neighbors.  I don’t think I ever would have found much on Louisa if I weren’t researching her brother as well.
• Those “possible” associates on the passenger list, Wilhelm Benzinger and Matthias and August Zimmermann gave me a tie to Syracuse.  They weren’t right next to the Hartmanns but they were close.  Look at the nearby names on all your documents and all potential documents.
• Trust your gut.  Your ancestors want to be found.  When you find a record that’s got a lot of “light” on it, maybe they’re shining a light on it for you.
• When you get a chance to sit next to Warren Bittner at the Family History Library, grab it!  And when he gives you advice that really seems like it can’t possibly work… a lousy passenger list, for goodness sake… run with it.  You just might find your ancestors in Mackensen, too!

I recently found a book which included some great information about my 4th great-grandfather and his brother who were book printers in Eimbeck and Goslar in Germany (Hannover and Hildesheim).  I’d like to thank fellow genealogist Jim Beidler for pointing me to the book.

The book, however, hid its secrets from me behind a couple of walls – a foreign language and a foreign font.  You mean a book written in 1840 by a German man about printers in Germany is written German, not English?!!! Um, yes.  And not only German, but it’s printed in a Fraktur font, not the standard Roman font I learned to read in my California kindergarten.  That give this wonderful resource two strikes against it.

Oh, but I’m not going to let that stop me!  Fortunately, last month I took a week-long course at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG) where I learned how to decipher that funny foreign font.  It’s still work to decipher, but I’m finding I’m much quicker at the process. 

My translation procedure consisted of Step 1, Transliterating - typing the Fraktur characters on the pages of the book into a Word document, and then, Step 2, Translating - using Google Translate to convert the words into English.  Thanks to my class, I getting pretty speedy at the transliterating part. I know E is an E and G is a G.  But still, typing the text into Word is a rather tedious process. 

As I was doing it, my mind kept thinking, “If a Google search can find the book, when I enter search terms like ‘Kircher’ and ‘Goslar’ into the search engine, surely Google is itself “reading” and transliterating that text.  Where the heck is Google hiding the transliterated words?!  If I could only find those, that would save all the work in Step 1.”  And where do I go to get answers to my questions?  Google of course!

Do you know where to find those Google transliterations?  Let me show you.  Here’s a screenshot from the book I found on GoogleBooks.

​

​See that little pair of scissors in the tool bar?  If I click on that, I can highlight the entire page of the book.  You use it sort of like you’d use your snipping tool to capture the page..  

​Once I’ve “clipped” what I want, I can do things with the clip.  See where it says translate?  Click on that.  Up pops the GoogleTranslate window with the TEXT from that “picture” I just grabbed all copied into the left-hand pane, and my translation into the right-hand pane!

Newspapers are possibly my favorite records.  I can find many details of my ancestors’ lives.  I recommend searching by name, of course.  But have you thought about other ways to search?  My new favorite way seems to be searching by location.

I have relatives who moved from one small town in one state to another small town in another state.  When I learned this, questions arose.  Why?  And more specifically, why that town?  More questions – Did they ever go back home to visit or live?  Did anyone from the home town visit them in the new place? 

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll find an article where the names were butchered, either by an author or typesetter spelling mistake, or an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) translation mistake.

I recently searched in an Osage County, Kansas newspaper for “Webster, New York,” the hometown of several family members.  And I found a perfectly readable (to the naked eye) article with perfect spellings of my relative’s name.  It had never come up on a search by name.
 
Here’s the article:

It’s pretty easy to read the article.  You can read the names, right? A. E. Billings.  Anna Kircher.

But here is what the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software “read.”
 
“ Marmkd. At the Baptist church, in Webster, N. Y,, June 11th. by the Rev. E. F. Waine, Mr. A. E. Bili.ings, of Burlingame, Kansa, to Miss Axxa Kirches, of Webster, New York. We heartily wish our iViend Asa and his fair young bride long life and a world of happiness, contentment and prosperty.”
 
I’ve shown in red the OCR mistakes, and in green the one word misspelled in the newspaper, (not an OCR mistake).  The surnames of both bride and groom were misread by OCR.  I never would have found this record, never would have known about this marriage, if I had not searched by place.
 
Next time you search in online newspapers, try searching by place.  Who knows what you’ll dig up.

I was recently looking at an agricultural census schedule.  For those not familiar with the Agricultural “Ag” censuses, they were taken in 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880.  If your ancestor listed “Farmer” as his occupation, you definitely want to look for the “matching” agricultural census which will tell you about livestock he owned, acres planted, how many bushels of this or pounds of that he grew and more.  It is a great snapshot into your ancestor’s life as a farmer.  Take the opportunity to compare your ancestor to his neighbors – calculate things like yield per acre, etc. to see how productive he might have been in relation to his fellow farmers.  And look at him over time – if you can find him in 1860 and 1870, does he have more land?  Does he have more cows?  Did he drop that unproductive rye crop and plant more acres in wheat? 
​
Ancestry has filmed these agricultural censuses as well as some other “non-population” schedules. 
 
The way the 1850 schedules are arranged, the farmers’ names are written down the left side of the page and boxes were filled in for each column as they applied.  There are 19 columns on the front side of the page.  After the enumerator asked Farmer John all the details on the front side, he’d flip the page over and ask another 27 columns (up to column 46).  Lots and lots of data!
 
The schedules were microfilmed and the images are available on Ancestry.  But there is a little bit of a problem.  Ancestry has arranged them by State, then county, then township, in alphabetical order of town.  Easy, right?  Well… if your ancestor is has is name on the last page of the town, you can’t “flip the page” to get to the
 back side of Farmer John’s page.  How are you going to know how many pounds of maple sugar or bushels of peas he produced????
 
I was looking at Franklin Township, Delaware County, New York.  “My” guy, “Enas B. Tisher” is on line 1 of image 10.  As you can see, that is image 10 of 10.  Where’s the back side of his page?!!  I can’t type 11 in the box at the bottom- that won’t work.  

​If I click on the filmstrip icon next to the 10 I see the start of another township, Hamden, which apparently has 5 images. Maybe that will be it…
 

​But nooooooo.  Look in the upper right hand corner of Enas Tisher’s page.  In (sloppy) black marker it says 313.  Hamden’s first page has the number 259.  So… somebody somewhere had a stack of these agricultural enumerations and started numbering the pages in numerical order (I mean really, how else would you number pages?!)  But Ancestry, thought these should really be in alphabetical order, by town name.

​So how did I finally find Mr. Tisher’s back page?  I looked at the filmstrip, scrolled forward or backward to the first image for every town, and when I finally got to the town of Masonville, I could see, right there in that same old black marker, “315.”  The numbers on the left side of the page?  Yep, that’s exactly the data I was seeking for my old buddy Enas.  3 Bushels of peas, and 400 lbs of maple sugar (I think…)
 
Don’t take my word for it, compare the data numbers on the left side of the image with those on Enas Tisher’s page on image 10 in Fisher.  The same.  But the numbers on image 1 of Masonville, “black marker” page 315, were written in someone else’s handwriting.
 
Lesson learned, those “flip side” of the pages are somewhere.  You just need to be a little creative to find them.

​
Oh, the many problems with Optical Character Recognition (OCR).  Documents may use a plain font.  But in specialty publications, yearbooks, for example, the typeface might be a bit fancier.  This leads to problems in text recognition.  The scanning, digitizing or interpreting software may preclude finding what you’re looking for.
 
I had a few details on a woman my friend JoAnne was researching.  I found her on a FamilySearch family tree and discovered in the notes on the subject that she was a 1906 graduate of Smith College.  I searched for the subject, Harriet Leitch in Ancestry’s “U.S. School Yearbooks, 1900-1990 Database.”   I couldn’t find her on a name search, but I was able to find the 1906 Smith yearbook.   A page-by-page search yielded Harriet’s picture right where it should have been, with the other L names.  I suspected the fancy font might have been a problem when I saw it.
 
Afterwards, I did a search on Ancestry by location, using the college’s name as a keyword, specifying only the year, but no student’s name.  It took a few pages to get to the Ls but along the way I saw many butchered names and words – try a few of these on for size:

        Jsentor Bvamattcs   - yep, that’s Senior Dramatics
        Jswbstttute Sasfeetball Eeam – that’s Substitute Basketball Team

Those two were set in a Gothic font.  But even with a hopefully clearer font, what appears to me to be Cambria, there are many errors, particularly regarding the letter H.

       Iiavex Hol'sii – that, my friends, is Haven House, one of the dormitories. 

​My new friend Harriet Elizabeth Leitch?  She did OK until they got to the back end of her name.  She became “Harriet Elizabeth Leitcii”.  Her next-door-neighbor on the page, Helen Mae Larmouth, had a similar problem – “Helen Mae Larmoutii”.  It seems a small capital H is definitely a problem for the eyes of Ancestry’s computers.
 
When you’re searching specialty publications such as yearbooks, be willing to expand your search.  Maybe search by first name only, last name only, use a lot of wildcards, or just resort to a page-by-page search.  It’d be a shame to let a little OCR hiccup stand between you and a picture of your ancestor.
 
​
1 “U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-1990,” Ancestry (https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1265 : accessed 13 August 2018) > Massachusetts > Northampton > Smith College > 1906, image 34, Harriet Elizabeth Leitch.

​How thorough is your research?  When Ancestry gives you an index record with at least six solid pieces of information –full name (including middle name), birth date and place, death date and parents’ names (first name, middle initial and last name) – how often do you think, “That’s good enough”?  Especially when the alternative is to spend $21 on… what?  I mean… there’s all the information I really need, right?
 
I had this experience recently with a record that came up for a guy I’m researching.  Ancestry pointed me to an entry in the “U.S. Social Security Application and Claims Index, 1936-2007.”   I already knew everything the (no-image) record was telling me.  And one more detail, seemed to be telling me a piece of information I really wanted would NOT be on the record.
 
One of the fields on the record Ancestry shows is “Relationship of Signature,” and the Index record says “Not signed, SSA prepared.”  Well, shoot… so I’m not going to get the signature I need to compare with other documents, I already know all the other stuff, so really, WHY DO I NEED TO SPEND $21?!!!!
 
The very specific answer for me, is because I am seriously considering becoming a Certified Genealogist® and my application needs to document reasonably exhaustive research.  An index record ain’t gonna cut it.  So I bit the bullet and ordered the record.
 
In my mind, I ordered the record ONLY so the citations in my certification portfolio would be up to snuff and demonstrate the scope of my research.  Because without that signature for comparison, the record wasn’t going to be helpful.
 
It finally arrived Saturday and there was much more than that index led me to believe was there:

• Parents names?  Full name, including full middle name – not merely the initial shown on the index

 

• Additional info? The date of the application and his address.  That told me where he lived on 3 January 1937

 

• More additional info? The name and address of his employer when he signed the application. (This provided an entire evening’s entertainment as I read about all the scandals involving the 1930s-era gambling ships anchored exactly 3.17 miles off the coast of Los Angeles in international waters. Quite a crowd of degenerate gamblers my guy was involved with…)

 

• And yet more?  HIS SIGNATURE WAS ON THE RECORD!!!  I have no idea why the index said “Not signed, SSA prepared.”

 
When you think that index is “good enough”, think again.  Order that record.  You’ll be glad you did.
 
 
I wish I could tell more stories about this guy.  I apologize for my dearth of blog posts recently. Much of my research and writing time lately has involved material for my certification portfolio and I need to keep kinda mum about my work until I submit the portfolio. I promise to try to find lessons like this one that I can write about and share them with you.
 

For more about becoming a Certified Genealogist® see https://bcgcertification.org/
​

I had a problem recently trying to find where some of my ancestor’s property was in McLean County, Illinois.  I have some 1850s and 1860s deeds describing his property as being in sections 32 and 33 of Township 26 Range 5.  I wanted to see where that was on a map.  Unfortunately when I look at McLean County information now, all the townships seem to have names, not numbers and I can’t tell where Township 26 lies in the county and in relation to other properties my ancestor owned.
 
I went to the BLM website (https://glorecords.blm.gov/) and entered the information for my property.  Unfortunately, for some reason I can’t quite figure out, when I clicked on the “Map” box to see the property, I got a message “Due to data limitations, we could not map the township of this land description. No township is available.”  Well, that’s not very helpful!

​In this area, townships were generally six miles by six miles, a square divided into a 6 x 6 grid of smaller squares.  Each of these smaller squares is a section.  The section numbering begins at the upper right corner of the township and looks like this:

​I already knew that part.  What I couldn’t figure out was where a particular numbered township was located within McLean County.
 
But by googling “how to find section township range” I found Earthpoint - http://www.earthpoint.us/  There I can put in the Principal Meridian, township, range and section, and Earthpoint gives me GPS coordinates for the center of the section as well as its four corners.  I know that my ancestor’s properties were in the NE corner of Section 32 and the NW corner of section 33, adjacent sections.   According to Earthpoint, my ancestor’s common corner is at 40.6836582, -88.6598660.  

​Now I can copy and paste those GPS coordinates into MapQuest.  I’ve always used MapQuest with a street address to find the property, but it’s nice to know MQ can locate based on GPS coordinates as well.   When I drop those coordinates into MapQuest I get a map:

​I have drawn a box around the 36 sections of what was once Township 26.  I can see it lies in the northeast corner of McLean County and is bordered on two sides by Livingston County.
 
Zooming in I can see the road names 

​I can look at a satellite view on MapQuest or drop the same GPS coordinates into GoogleEarth to see a bird’s eye view of what the property looks like now.  That creek running through his property on the map shows up as a green swath against the brown field.

​Looking on Wikipedia for McLean County, IL, I finally know that Township 26 is now called Yates Township:

It took a few steps to get there, but know I know just where my ancestor’s property was.  I’ll do the same thing to track his path of property ownership across the area from Tazewell to McLean and then on into Champaign counties.   I’m looking forward to visit the area in the Fall.

If you run into a problem with the mapping feature on the BLM website, I hope you find this post helpful.

I’m reading a book on Irish genealogy research – always trying to expand my knowledge.  The author uses examples from some now-famous Boston Irish families, the Kennedys and their in-laws, the Fitzgeralds. 
 
She demonstrates tracing a family back through census records.  Through clues in the census, such as age at marriage or the approximate birth year of the oldest child, researchers can move on to marriage records which may identify the parents of the couple, channeling their line back through the generations.
 
The book’s author starts with John F. Kennedy, living with his parents Joseph and Rose on the 1940 census, working back to find Joe and Rose’s marriage record, then Rose’s parents’ marriage and further back to the 1857 marriage of Rose’s paternal grandparents, Thomas Fitzgerald and Rose Cox.  The author goes on to point out that the marriage informant was the Rev. Geo. F. Haskins of Boston.
 
Determining the officiant on a marriage record is always a good practice for a genealogist.  He may be more easily found in a city directory, which would provide a clue as to his denomination and the parish he served in.  With that kind of information, genealogists can gather information on the neighborhood, the mix of people and occupations who spent time living where their ancestors lived.  All these small details combine to create a richer picture of our ancestors’ lives.
 
When I read the name of the priest who joined Thomas Fitzgerald and Rose Cox in holy matrimony, I knew I’d seen it before… on the marriage record of my own great-great-grandparents. In 1850 in that mid-19th century Boston neighborhood, Rev. Geo. F. Haskins also celebrated the marriage of John Fields and Mary Devlin.[1] 
 
Fun to think that my ancestors and President Kennedy’s ancestors might have worshipped together at St. John’s Catholic Church in Boston 150 years ago.  Pay attention to every name.  You might just turn up a link to Camelot!.


[1] Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 for John Fields, John Fields and Mary Devlin, 14 April 1850 (ancestry.com : accessed 4 Feb 2018)

Dear Mary,
My Ancestry DNA match just won’t respond!  It is so infuriating.  Why does someone do a DNA test if they don’t want to connect with cousins?  And my match is sooooo good.  I can just tell this will be the link that’s going to solve my family mystery.  Help.
 --- Signed,
Frustrated in DNAland
 
Dear Frustrated in DNAland,
I feel your pain.  But I have at least one potential solution.  Remember the saying, “If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and it waddles like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”  Well, sometimes I find those Ancestry DNA “handles,” the cute user names people use for their Ancestry account look an awful lot like part of an email address.  Try googling that handle and see if you don’t come up with an “@msn.com” to follow.
 
This fictional interchange between Dear Mary and Frustrated in DNAland is exactly how I solved a recent DNA quandary.  I manage a kit on Ancestry for AA.    AA’s father was an out-of-wedlock birth from a known mother and an unknown father. On GEDMatch, AA had a great match of 440 cM with BB, which is right in the ballpark to be a half first cousin.   Given geography and timeframe, it was immediately apparent that AA and BB likely share a grandfather.  When I contacted BB, however, his father was born in a home for unwed mothers in Omaha and adopted as an infant in 1908.  There is no information on BB’s grandparents, other than the strong possibility that they lived not too far from Omaha in 1907-08.
 
On Ancestry I came up with CC, a good, solid match of 168 cM for AA.    But CC had no tree, hadn’t logged into Ancestry since 2015 and wouldn’t respond to my Ancestry message.   When I looked at the CC’s Ancestry handle, however, it really looked like an email, so I  just Googled it.  Bingo.  I found an email address.  I still didn’t get any response, but the email led me to an identity and some locations and with a few more Google searches I had CC’s mom’s obituary, including her parent’s names.  And I was off and running on building the tree that ultimately gave me AA’s grandfather’s name.  Now, I don’t really care whether CC ever responds; I’ve gotten what I needed.
 
Like that duck, if it looks and sounds and waddles like an email address, google it.  You might just find it is an email, and be able to identify the party behind it.