Follow-up Friday 17 Feb 2012

Here's a list of goals I set two weeks ago in my Motivation Monday post of February 6, 2012:

1.     Process the Thomas Hume papers I photographed from UNC’s Southern Historical Collection.

2.     Process the O’Neal family papers I received from my new O’Neal cousin (determined by DNA test)

3.     Enter information on the William Godwin family of Escambia County, Alabama (whose descendant was determined to be a match to our line of Godwins from NC)

4.     Process the Barton family Find-A-Grave photos from Center Point Cemetery in Howard County, Arkansas that a volunteer uploaded for me

And here is my progress so far:

1.     No progress

2.     No progress

3.     I believe I have all of the information on William’s descendants entered into my RootsMagic database. We got sidetracked by trying to find information about a John Godwin from North Carolina who was found on a Revolutionary War Roll. Evidently he fought with a bunch of people who moved with William Godwin from North Carolina to Georgia and then eventually they all settled in Escambia County, Alabama together. It also seems that Zilla Godwin who married Jesse Baggett (one of the men who was on the Revolutionary War Roll and who moved to GA and then to AL with the others) might have been the same woman who was the daughter of Richard Godwin and Zillah Thomas who moved from Sampson County, North Carolina to Hancock County, Georgia about the same time my Nathan Godwin moved to Indiana. We have always believed this Richard was related to our line of Godwins, but  have been unable to determine how.

4.    Several Find A Grave memorials had already been created for my Barton ancestors in Center Point Cemetery in Howard County, Arkansas back in 2008 by FAG volunteers. I requested that photos be taken of the headstones and was notified this week that my request had been fulfilled and the photos uploaded by a volunteer. I compared the information in the memorial biography to what was on the headstones from the photographs that the FAG volunteer took. However, the resolution on many of the photos rendered them unreadable, even if I downloaded them and tried to zoom. So I emailed the volunteer and asked her to email me copies of the originals. I thought that the ones that were uploaded to FAG somehow lost resolution when they were uploaded. Unfortunately the ones she emailed me were just too low quality of resolution that I could not zoom to read them. They were 50-150kb in size. Maybe if she had set her camera to a little higher setting I would have been able to zoom in better? Oh well. Also, I’ve been struggling with creating a citation for my FAG entries in my RootsMagic database and although I finally settled upon some standard text, there was only one field in my RootsMagic source template that I could squeeze all of this text into. So I created a custom source template in my RM software in which I could enter the deceased person's name, memorial number, memorial creator's name and date, etc as separate fields. This made me much less stressful about creating my FAG source citations!

5.     My Mother’s Family  Finder DNA results came back, so of course I got distracted with those. She had 214 matches! Which for Family Finder is a LOT! Of those 214 matches about 90 of them were matches she and I had in common. She has a lot of 3^rd cousins as well and suprisingly, I have already received emails from 2 of her matches requesting information! (usually you have to beg and plead with people to get them to respond to YOUR emails). Unfortunately I have not been able to find a connection to them yet.

6.     Learned more about my JONES family. My 2^nd great-grandmother was Emily Jones and she married John Riley Lasiter. Jones was a possible common surname with one of my Mother’s DNA matches, so I did some research to see if I could find more information about Emily Jones. I found Emily and John Lasiter living in Madison Co., AR on the 1870 census report and then I found the family of Thomas and Saphronia Jones also living in Madison Co., AR in 1870. Going back to 1860, I found Thomas and Saphronia Jones with a daughter Emily C Jones who matched up to my Emily Lasiter. Based on the places of birth listed for the children of Thomas and Saphronia Jones on the 1860 census, I was able to determine that the family moved from TN to AR about 1851 and that Thomas and Saphronia Jones were probably married between 1840 and 1847 when Sally Ann Jones, the first child listed on the 1860 census, was born. I did a search on Ancestry.com in the Tennessee Marriage records for Thomas J Jones and found it right away: Thomas J Jones to Safrona Phelps, 18 Dec 1844, Davidson Co., TN. I followed it up with an 1850 Davidson Co., TN census record for Thos J Jones, 30 years old, Sophrona Jones, 26 years old, Sarah Jones, 4 years old, and Tennessee Jones, 1 year old. I have now taken my tree back another generation and learned of a new family name and location from which to start searching in!

Follow-up Friday – Jan 20, 2012

I definitely got sidetracked this week and my surname research took an entirely different turn, but for the better! Even though I have committed myself to setting and following certain goals for the new year, I encountered one of the many quagmires involved with genealogy research and we are only in our 3rd week of the year. I set a few goals for particular surnames that I wanted to research, either because I wanted to learn more about them or because they had presented a brick wall. But I also committed to finding connections to the 178 autosomal DNA matches I have acquired in the 6 months since taking the Family Finder test.

I know I haven't written much about the test and all that is involved in working with my matches (that is also on my goals list - to write more about my experience). But anyone who has taken the test knows that 1) your tree has to be pretty well built up 2) that includes your collateral lines and 3) you will inevitably spend more time exchanging more family and historical data once a match is determined which means building up your tree some more, entering more sources, transcribing more records, etc. but the bottom line is that you will get sidetracked into looking at several different surnames at a time, especially if you have any of those annoying common surnames that you will inevitably have in common with 75% of your matches like Jones, Smith, and Johnson!

So long story short, even though last week I was researching my Ward and Joy, Peters, and Dunlap families and still had a bunch of Ward and Joy information to input into my database, this week I was researching my HARDIN and TINSLEY families!

It started off with one little email to a match who had a few surnames in common with me. I'm not even sure why I picked him. I guess I was bored last weekend and just randomly emailed him. (Now you see why I don't write too many posts about this - wouldn't want the method to my madness getting out). Anyways, he sent me his ahnentafel and told me that we connected through my 6th great-grandmother, Clara Hardin who was born 1793 in Kentucky. She married John Carman LaRue in Maury County, Tennessee in 1811. Clara Hardin's great-grandfather, Mark Hardin, born sometime in the late 1600s, was my match's 7th great-grandfather and my 9th great-grandfather, making my match and I 8th cousins, twice removed!

So I spent the first half of the week (Monday was a holiday for me for MLK's Birthday and then I was out sick one day) looking on the internet at all the conflicting information about where and when said Mark Hardin was born and who his possible parents were. I reviewed sources and analysis and research reports. And then I found out that my cousin Kay Haden (you might remember her because she was featured on the FGS blog as the first registrant for the FGS conference in Birmingham!) is also descended from Mark Hardin! She had done a lot of research on him when she lived in AL years earlier and sent me some stuff to look over.

Then my match and I used this not-always-so-handy-tool called the "In common with" filter on our ftDNA homepage to see who else we both matched to and it came up with two names. I emailed them thinking they might be descendants of Mark Hardin as well. One of them wrote me back and although she did not have and Hardins in her ancestry that she knew of, we did find not one, but TWO connections via the TINSLEY and HILL lines!!! How cool is that???

I never really did much research on my Tinsley line because frankly, there was already tons of information out there on the internet and there looked to be two or three very capable researchers who had posted their research on the internet already, so I figured they had it covered and I could use their research as a guide when the (free) time came. But we know it's never that easy, so of course I had to perform my own research. Including starting an annotated bibliography of the secondary sources on the Tinsley family that came into Virginia in the 1600s which included my ancestor, Thomas Tinsley.

It didn't take long to find the connection to her Tinsley line, even though it was several generations back. It turned out we were 9th cousins 1x removed! She had sent me the name of her Ancestry.com online family tree and I was able to find the link to it by running a google search on it. Her tree was very easy to navigate in the pedigree view and by going through each of her lines I found a 2nd connection to Robert Hill (1678-1766) and Tabitha Brown Green (1690-1765)! My lines goes through their daughter Ann Hill who married John Steed and my match's line goes through their daughter Tabitha Hill who married David Chapman.

I have to admit, I'm getting pretty good at finding connections using genealogical tools like Ancestry.com's online family trees! It does take patience though. Oh and with this connect, we were 8th cousins 2x removed.

So as you can see, I'm a pretty well-rounded genealogist. Or you might say I get bored easily. But I don't think this is a bad thing. Last year I was more focused on one of two things and this year I plan to make more connections and get back to building my tree up some more.

So not bad for a first 3 weeks. Last week I added some new information and worked on breaking down a couple of brick walls. This week I opened two new can of worms and got my brain's juices flowing and started pushing myself to think about how to deal with what I find on the internet, how to resolve conflicts, how to cite my sources, how to deal with not being able to make the report I want to make with my gen software (that's never ending right?), how to find books, and how to start thinking about the historical context of the area that my ancestors lived in. Oh yeah and how cool DNA is! And did you notice that my test seems to be really sensitive? They guarantee to only go back to 5th cousins, but most of my matches have been 8th cousins. I think that's pretty cool!

Follow-up Friday - Jan 13, 2012

Today is Friday the 13th and there was a Full Moon this week, so it's been a pretty weird week so far. I haven't had much luck posting comments to other people's blogs, nor have I even been able to reply to people's posts on my own blog! So blogger is acting up this week as well. And I saw there is a new feature of blogger - you can now indent your comments and reply to other people's comments individually! This makes for a more personal feel to the interaction between me and my readers. I've used this a lot in my WordPress blogs and I'm happy to see it finally being implemented in our blogger platforms. So even through all of this funk, and starting back to school this week, I managed to get some of my genealogy goals accomplished! whoo hoo! I know you're probably bored with reading all this, but it finally dawned on me that I needed to get my research interests and surnames out there. And if that means that a brief mention of a line I am working on gets the attention of another blogger, genealogist, or cousin who contacts me and we make a connection, then I'm all for the boring or ho hum. So bear with me please :-)


I posted some of my goals for the week last Monday in Genealogy Research Progress for Monday, January 9, 2012 and I copied them below as well and reported on my progress:

1. Enter the information I received on my collateral SABIN and SMITH lines from folks that contacted me via my blog and Find-A-Grave memorials. This is a tangible and do-able task and counts towards my 2012 goal of building upon my collateral lines. - Done.  I entered the 15 children of George SABIN into my genealogy database. George SABIN was married to Margaret GODWIN, the daughter of Etheldred GODWIN who is believed to be the brother of my presumed ancestor, Nathan GODWIN. My cousin just received 150 pages of George SABIN's Civil War pension file too, so I've been reading all the fun stuff she's been sending me about that as well; I have not heard back from my SMITH cousin, so unfortunately I have no new information there. I sent him some photos of his great-grandmother and requested a scanned copy of a family photo from him. I also shared with him the origin of his Grandfather's name, Avery LaRue SMITH. He was named after his Mother's Grandmother, Phoeba Ann LARUE! I hope to hear from him again, as it is always disappointing when you get that very exciting first email, you write them back and then you never hear from them again. 
2. Start reviewing the information on my WARD family that the FAG researcher sent to me and ask her about her collateral JOY line, also counting towards my goal of building upon my collateral lines. In addition, I should take advantage of asking her any questions I might have since she is currently available. - In progress. I created my source citation for the Ward and Related Families book by Martha Ward Presson, but I am hesitant to copy any information from it into my genealogy database because she did not provide many sources for her facts. I usually like to start with looking at what was written about my own family, the more recent part, to see how the author treated that information. In my case, my 3rd great-grandmother, Martha Ward Putman was mentioned, along with her 4 or 5 children - on one page only 4 children are mentioned - Vanona V., LaRosa M., Pearl, and Willie O; On another page, there were 5 children mentioned - Varona, Annie, Pearl, Laura (married to Mr. Lasiter) and Willie O. So already there are errors. In fact there were actually 6 children born to this couple. I would not trust this book and unfortunately the author passed away last year. 
3. Continue writing more blog posts - including a post about the deeds I have found on my DUNLAP family and how I am trying to learn about the family from the transfer of land. I am at a standstill with the DUNLAPS right now, so there is no hurry to break down this "brick wall." I also need to get to the North Carolina State Archives to do more research. - We had planned to go to the Archives this Saturday, however, the Archives will be closed because Monday is Martin Luther King's Birthday and for us in North Carolina, that is a State Holiday (I will be off of work). I still have not written my post on using Deeds to research my DUNLAP family, but I did manage to write my post on Metes and Bounds. That helped me to understand how a 375-Acre land grant was divied up and sold off 50 years later. 

As usual I did manage to get distracted by a couple of other things, but I did get one thing closed and checked off my list as well: 

1. I finished corresponding with the descendant of the James and Martha PETERS family of Anderson Co., TN and determined that their Martha PETERS was not the same Martha PETERS that I found on the Oregon Co., MO census report in 1880 (her descendants say she remarried to a WILLIAMS). This Martha on the 1880 census is still a good candidate to be the mother of my 2nd great-grandfather, William PETERS though. 
2. I was looking for an obituary for a friend's grandmother (which I was unable to find) and stumbled upon back issues of The Arkansas Historical Quarterly. I did a quick search for a few of my AR surnames and found a photograph of Ruby BARTON, the sister of my 2nd great-grandmother, Jessie BARTON! The article was a story written by a retired Oklahoma school teacher who graduated from three-year high school at Center Point (Howard County), AR in 1910.  What a cool find!

photo credit: Cheo! via photopin cc

Follow-up Friday - Nov 3 2011

Last weekend I had a pretty good genealogy day over the weekend because I finally got my new desk set up. I heard that many of my genealogy pals got some good genealogy time put in over the weekend as well. I don't know if it's because the weather is getting cooler and we are staying inside more or if it's just because things are starting to slow down or what. But I definitely have a happy face on, despite the trials and tribulations I've been experiencing at work.

So in my genealogy news, I've been working on finding the parents of William Peters who was born in 1874 in Thomasville, Missouri. One of my DNA Family Finder matches believes the Peters line is our connection, however I don't have a leg to stand on because I can't get past William Peters. I did find a Martha Peters on the 1880 Oregon County, Missouri Census Report who could have been his mother as she had a young William living with her that fit my William. But then I got distracted by trying to trace this Martha to a James Peters family out of Anderson County, Tennessee. Turns out this family moved to Missouri and James disappeared leaving Martha to fend for herself and their 2 (or 3) children. Descendants of this family are not receptive to the idea of them having a son named William though, nor to the idea that Martha was living in Oregon County, Missouri in 1880! Another find I had is a newspaper article in which a John Peters was shot and beaten to death on his employer's farm by a gang of brothers in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I had heard my William was beaten to death but his death certificate said he died of a heart attack in Pocahontas, Arkansas. I wonder if maybe this John was William's father (or close relative) and he was the one the family remembers who was beaten to death. Only problem was that the 1880 Council Bluffs census says John Peters was single (William was born in 1874), he was living in Iowa and not in Missouri or Illinois where William was rumored to have been born, and John was from Denmark. Surely I would have heard something about Denmark in the family! Well the nice thing is that I've been able to comb through a bunch of newspapers that my University subscribes to.Click on this post to view newspaper article for the death of John Peters of Council Bluffs Iowa.

In addition to working on my Peters line, I have done some research on my Dunlap family in Stokes County, North Carolina.  Jesse Dunlap left North Carolina about 1820 and moved to Tennessee and then moved to Texas and then finally settled in Arkansas about 1840. His two sons, Jesse Dunlap, Jr and Lorenzo Dow Dunlap were killed in the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857 in Southern Utah. You might have heard about it. Click the above link for more information. Anyways, I started off my search in the totally wrong direction and it took a nice genealogist named Rex Bertram to set me straight. He sent me back to the North Carolina original records. So I have been combing through the Stokes County, North Carolina deeds (they are online – whoo hoo!), using the NorthCarolina State Archives online catalog called MARS to find land grants and wills, and compiling census records in order to piece together the history of the Dunlap family prior to their removal from North Carolina. This was also prompted by a Family Finder DNA match.

Lastly, I finished transcribing the estate files of John F. Dry of Perry County, Illinois. I happened upon these scans as I was making a list of files that I needed to scan during the next Scanfest. If you don’t know what this is, it happens the last Sunday of the month and it’s a time when genealogists all over the world get together in a chat room and chat while they scan their photos and documents. I usually do a pretty good job of keeping up with my scanning, but I always have a lot to catch up with after a trip to the library. These estate files were scanned once but at a very low resolution. I must have had a problem with the scanner. So they have not been transcribed. I did manage to rescan this set of estate files, so I was able to transcribe them. And then, my biggest feat of the week is that after reading Michael Hait’s blog post on Do you understand source citations? I decided to try my hand at writing an “official” citation to the estate file I was sent copies of and transcribed as mentioned above. It is probably missing several pieces because I was not the actual person who went to the courthouse and made the copies. In fact, I probably would have copied where the book sat on the shelf!

Anyways, here’s the citation I came up with (complete with footnote note):

John F. Dry Estate File No. 128, dated 1847; Perry County, Illinois Probate Records, Box 307; Perry County Courthouse, Pickneyville, Illinois. This estate file was copied by Stella Runyon, sarjas@hughes.net, Illinois, USA, in February of 2007 and sent to me by snailmail. Note that Stella told me this was file no. 158, however according to the Perry County Probate Index that is online at sarjas.com, and accessed 03 November 2011, (this is Stella’s homepage), it is file no. 128. I have change it to File No. 128 because I believe this index was compiled since 2007.

Check out Michael’s post if this citation doesn’t make sense to you!

Follow-up Friday Post – July 7, 2011

Death Certificates:

                In last week’s Follow-up Friday post, I mentioned that I ordered 5 death certificates from the State of Arkansas Department of Health Vital Records Section in Little Rock.  I received the first 2 of those death certificates in the mail this week. I scanned, transcribed them, and entered them into my notes and as new sources in my RootsMagic database.

                I received the death certificate of my 2^nd great-grandfather, William Edward Peters from Pocahontas, AR. He died in 1948. Unfortunately it did not list his parents’ names, however it did list his date of birth as March 10, 1874 and place of birth has Thomasville, Missouri. This information correlated with his obituary; however, most of his census records said he was born in Illinois. Click here to view his death certificate. 

                Follow up: I feel more comfortable going back and combing the census files again for Peters families in Thomasville (also Moore Township), Oregon County, Missouri now.

                I also received the death certificate of my 2^nd great-grandfather, James Franklin Lasiter from Fort Smith, AR. He died in 1968 at the age of 92. I found a photo in my grandmother’s collection of him and someone called “John Riley Lasiter,” presumably his father. The death certificate stated his father’s name was John R. Lasiter and his mother’s name was Emily Jones. His mother’s name was new information to me.

                Follow up: I can now start looking for records for Emily Jones Lasiter and John Riley Lasiter including census records, death records, and marriage records.

Richard Smith’s Confederate Service Records:

                As I also mentioned in last week’s Follow-up Friday post, I located the Confederate service records of my ancestor, Richard Smith.  I posted the muster roll cards to my Smith and Fox family Blog here. And I set some new goals and things to follow up on for next time, including to continue looking for his original enlistment muster roll and to see if I can find the Confederate records of Richard’s brothers John and Claiborn Smith who supposedly joined at the same time as Richard.

Fox Family:

                One of my Family Finder matches indicated that we might have a connection via the Fox family in Indiana. My Fox family is concentrated in Arkansas and Oklahoma, however, for some reason, my 3^rd Great-Grandfather, John A. Fox, moved to Indianapolis after his wife, Sophronia Maynard died in 1917. I guess his son Dillard Fox lived up there, so he went up there to be with him. Anyways, he was only there for 3 years before he died in Indianapolis. My grandfather had given me a copy of John’s death certificate, which is how we were able to locate him in Indiana.

So I went into my RootsMagic database and “touched” it up a bit by adding my sources and updating my notes in both John and his son Fred Fox’s files. Fred Fox was my 2^nd great-grandfather. I did things a little bit differently this time: I added the notes about each source to the individual notes section for each fact. Normally I just add everything to the main notes section under the name fact. I then added my commentary on the source.

I also updated my sources to Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained standards. Boy was that complicated! I encountered several problems with doing this, one of which was that Rootsmagic has several template options to choose from which may or may not follow EE.

As it turned out, my match mentioned Parke, Vigo, and Putnam counties, Indiana and I immediately knew right off the bat that it was NOT the Fox family that we connected on. This location would be my Godwin family that moved from North Carolina to Putnam County, Indiana in 1828. This is the first connection I’ve made with someone on my Mother’s side of the family!

Follow up: I am still waiting to hear back from him to see if he recognized any of the surname I sent to him.

Update ** October 5th, 2011 ** I have heard back from this Family Finder match and he said that he did not recognize any of the Godwin collateral line surnames that I sent to him from Parke, Vigo, Putnam and Clay Counties, Indiana, so we are back to square one! 

Follow up Friday Post – July 1, 2011

Death Certificates:

This week I sent off for five death certificates – my 2^nd great-grandfathers, James Franklin Lasiter and William Edward Peters, my great-grandparents, Reba Fox Smith and Claude Rual Smith, Jr, and Melvina West Fox, my 2^nd great-grandmother.

I was prompted to order the death certificate of William Peters because he was the connection I had to the first person I matched to and talked to via my ftDNA Family Finder DNA results!! I was somewhat embarrassed that I couldn’t provide more information on my Peters line to my match who believed we were close cousins through our Peters line.  And even more embarrassed when I realized I had never ordered William’s death certificate which can oftentimes provide you with the names of your ancestor’s parents. There has been a lot of discrepancy about William Peter’s place of birth as well, so even if his death certificate does not provide me with his parents’ names, I am hoping to get a place of birth at least.

James Franklin Lasiter is one of those so-called “elusive” ancestors. You know, one of those that you know existed but you just can’t seem to find him on those certain records you expect to find him on. I have a photo of him and someone I believe to be his father, John Riley Lasiter, according to the information written on the photo, and I would like to see if the names of the parents are listed on his death certificate and if so, if they match up with what the photograph says.

Back in 2009 I wrote a post challenging myself to see if had copies of the obituaries and death certificates of all 8 of my great-grandparents. Since Claude and Reba Smith were the last of them to pass away, I just never thought to obtain them. And actually I figured my Grandfather had copies of their death certificates already. Since I’m already sending off requests for these other death certificates, I might as well toss two more into the mix…

I was prompted to order the death certificate of my 2^nd great-grandmother Melvina Fox from my Family Finder test as well. I matched to a close cousin on my West and Criscillus lines. Melvina Fox was the daughter of Calvin West and Elizabeth Jane Roberts. My match is a descendant of Calvin’s sister, Serepta West. We compared family trees and they were identical. We compared brick walls and they were identical. I did learn that our West family descends from one Robert West b. 1612 in England thanks to her cousin who submitted to a Y-DNA test.

Richard Smith’s Confederate Service Records:

                I finally located my ancestor, Richard Smith’s Confederate Service Records on Footnote.com. I have a copy of his pension records and notes from my Grandfather that mentioned Richard’s Confederate service prior to his service in the Union Army. I had trouble locating his records at first because all I knew was that it was Clarkson’s Battalion, Ark and Mo., however when I looked up the records in Footnote, the collection titles went by State first and then by Regiment number. Not having a regiment number threw me off. I finally found one collection title called “Confederate Soldiers – CSA” and that was the correct one. My persistence paid off.

                Of course my grandfather’s notes also said that Richard Smith’s Confederate Enlistment papers listed his parents as David and Sarah Smith. I can’t find a copy of his enlistment papers in any of my files. Does anyone know how to order Civil War enlistment files? And is it common for them to list the soldiers’ parents’ names?