The Problem with Public Family Trees

Let us discuss Public Family Trees at Ancestry.com.

I have photos of my husband's great grandmother.  She died in 1961.  She shows up in 28 public trees on Ancestry.com.  I would love to share the photos I have of her with other people on Ancestry, but when I pull up those trees, they are either owned by people who have one source for her and haven't logged in for a year or more, or they are people who logged in yesterday and she is so far removed from them, there is no terminology to describe the relationship.

There is a publicly posted photo identified as her mother.  It looks like it was posted in some kind of newsletter or something, then photocopied and posted to Ancestry.  I have messaged the owner of the photo and asked for details of the source of the photo.  I received no response.  I am particularly interested because I have another unidentified photo that I believe could be her, but I would like to see if I could come up with a better quality photo before I jump to that conclusion.  No response.

I have a first cousin in my own family who I have offered to collaborate with.  I messaged her and offered to send her information, which I did.  I got no response and when I emailed and asked if she received it, I got no response.

I have a very large drawing of my husband's great-great-grandfather, who died in the Civil War.  I would be happy to share this with anyone who wanted it.  Same story as his great grandmother from his paternal side.  Nobody close enough to message.

It is all fine and dandy to spout off about how if you post a public tree on Ancestry that you will undoubtedly have distant cousins knocking on your door to get to you, but that has not been my experience so far.  Even with the people I have reached out to, I have gotten no response.  So frustrating.

Autograph Hound

Family Search has loads of good stuff, but sometimes you have to dig for it.  Recently, I was digging into the New York State probate records (a mere 14 million pages).  I spent a week clicking through the 1582 images in box 49 of the Cayuga County estate files.  Tonight, I hit pay dirt on image number 1035:

Citation: "New York, Probate Records, 1629-1971," images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1951-35055-27409-83?cc=1920234&wc=MQFP-XM7:213305601,215960602 : accessed 27 May 2014), Cayuga > Estate papers 1799-1905 box 49 > image 1035 of 1582.

At the bottom is the signature of my third great grandfather and above it is the "X" of my fourth great-grandmother.  This is a document from the probate file of his brother and her son, Robert Stivers, who died a prisoner of war at Andersonville Prison in Georgia at age 23, during the Civil War.  They signed this page 148 years ago.  Family Search microfilmed these records when I was only 5.  I found it today.

The other side.

My father-in-law passed away this morning from a long illness. It is sad, but at the same time, we are happy to see an end to his decline in health.

A funny genealogy thing happened to me, though.  My sister-in-law was filling out the paperwork for the death certificate and asked me where his parents were born.  I just sat there for a moment and thought about how someday that information will be a tiny crumb for someone other genealogist to follow.  I was glad I knew the answers!

Number 49 - Barry Bostwick

Yes, this Barry Bostwick:

Ahh, Rocky Horror Picture Show...I won't tell how many times I have seen this movie.

A couple of weekends ago, Mocavo.com had a free weekend of access.  I didn't have a lot of time to play with it, but I plugged in a few of my more bashful ancestors to see what it might come up with.  I plugged in my 4th great grandfather, Jacob Quackenbush (1769-1818) and one of the suggestions was "The Ancestry of John Howard Camp"  Now, this page is enormous, and hasn't been updated in at least three years, but there was an interesting tidbit on it:

Jacob Quackenbush, Jr. and Ann are my 4th great grandparents!  I am descended from Isaac's brother Abram, but that's my guy.  I did a bit of creeping around at Ancestry.com and found enough public trees to get me from Barry back to Susan Quackenbush, who is in my tree already.  

I don't really care all that much about connecting to famous people, but it is very funny that if I should be related to a famous person, it would be someone like this.  By my calculations, this makes us third cousins, once removed, actually pretty close, for random people.

What I do find interesting is the fact that there are parents and grandparents listed for Jacob Jr.  He is a dead end on my tree and I'd love to find more information on him.  Here is a new name to try and find and connect to.

Number 50 - GG Uncle George W. Quackenbush

My next installment of "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" is GG Uncle George Willis Quackenbush. George was the elder brother of my great-grandfather, and he was quite the entrepreneur.  According to "Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens of Chenango County, N.Y." he was born February 24, 1876.   Much about the rest of the article is definitely fictitious, so I take that date with a grain of salt.  I think it is much more likely that he was born in 1878, but that would have made him pretty young for the biographical publication in 1898, so my guess is he fudged his age a bit and while he was at it, the rest of the article as well.

His upbringing was certainly tumultuous, at the age of six, his father was arrested for shooting his mother (a story for another week) and by the 1892 New York State Census, his parents no longer lived together.

At some point between 1892 and 1897, he left Cayuga County, New York and moved to Oxford, New York.  A distance of about 80 miles.  Why did he pick there?  There is no family connection that I am aware of in this part of the state.  Maybe he wanted it that way.  He is listed in "Oxford Historical Souvenir" of November 1897, as proprietor of the bakery and a member of the fire department.  The entire department is pictured, George is number 43, alphabetically:

George's younger sister, Grace is working at the bakery at this time as well.

George's bakery business is growing.  By 1908, it has become a bakery and a bookstore:

I believe the other two in the photo are my great-grandparents, Ella (Baird) and Alfred Quackenbush.

In 1909, scandal erupts around George.  A young female employee of the bakery attempts suicide by drinking carbolic acid!

This was taken from a half-page spread on the story in the Syracuse Herald, eighty miles away!  Newspaper accounts differ to the relationship between George and Julia, some say they were engaged, some say they were not.  I couldn't find any resolution to the story, although Ancestry.com has an undocumented member tree that shows Julia married to a different person a year later.

Despite this setback, the bakery must be doing well, by the 1910 census, George is shown owning his own, unmortgaged home.  My great grandparents are not shown in Oxford in 1910, but they must have returned soon, there is another photo in front of the bakery and bookstore:

My grandmother's curly handwriting on the back says this is 1911 and she is three years old.  George is certainly dressed like a businessman in this photo.

At some point around this time, George takes up photography!  He takes many landscape and building photos in the Oxford area and has them made into postcards.  They are easily found on Ebay.  He also takes photos of the family!

This is my grandmother, date unknown, but George's mark is clearly visible in the bottom corner.  I do not know if all the photos I have were taken by George, or if his brother took up photography as well.  Many of them do not have George's mark like this.  An aside: my mother told me that when my great-grandfather died (1961), there were hundreds of glass plate negatives in his apartment, and a great deal of them were ladies "en deshabille" and my mother was instructed to break them and throw them away.  Argh!

George decided to expand his business holdings and either bought or opened a Nash dealership by 1918. (Amazing coincidence, since my husband's grandfather also owned a Nash dealership.)  Here is an ad from the Syracuse New York Daily Journal:

George's garage is listed in the right-hand column at the bottom.

Something happened between 1920 and 1925.  On the 1925 New York State Census, George has sold his home and moved into a rented place and has a new job, simply listed as "garage" with no mention of car dealer.  My great-grandparents have moved back to Cayuga county at that point.  In 1930 he is listed as a mechanic in "own garage", and in 1940 he is listed as proprietor of the garage.  

George died, unmarried, as far as I know.  He is listed as buried in the Weedsport (New York) Rural Cemetery.  This list says "his wife" is near him, but I can find no record of a wife.  His sister and brother are both buried there as well. 

51 Ancestors in 51 Weeks?

I wanted to do the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge, but I didn't find out until the week one entries were already posted, so I offer 51 ancestors instead...

Since I am already a week behind, I will have to chose an easy one for this week, right?  Is it cheating to use someone from my husband's family?  I offer, Robert Henry Bledsoe, to you.

By the time I met "Mr. B" as he was known, he was already 90 years old and was having a lot of trouble remembering things.  What I know of his life comes from his descendants.  He was born in 1901 in Louisiana and worked as a depot agent for the Rock Island Railroad.  He married Alma Lois Avinger around 1921 and they had three daughters together.  I also know that at some point in the 1950s, he moved to Shreveport Louisiana and started a Nash dealership:

That's Mr. B on the left.  The gentleman on the right was a local radio personality at the time.  All that's left of the dealership is a clock that hung in it, a promotional item from Quaker State Motor Oil, which still runs great and hangs in our kitchen. Mr. B retired to Breckenridge, Texas with Alma and stayed there until he died in 1995.  They are both buried in Breckenridge Cemetery.

An Amazing Software Find

Today, I went to a class at my local Family History Center. I don't usually go in for such things, but the topic was great free software programs for image manipulation and I couldn't resist.

If you care to scroll back through my piteously few postings, you'll see that there is an issue with the scans from the State Archives of Belgium.  That is, you have to save them as screen shots and paste them back together in an image manipulation program.

Until today.  Go and download Microsoft ICE.

I went to the archives and found the birth record for my Great-Grandfather, Honoré DeClerck.  I had to scroll down to capture the entire image, it took two shots:

The first thing you have to do is to take them into an image manipulation program and crop off the borders, so all you have left is document...

Now, you open up Microsoft ICE and drag these two images into it.

It works really fast with only two to merge.  The class instructor merged 31 photographs into a huge panorama and it took just a minute or so.

Now, this is a little picture of this, and this was only two pictures, but it has seamlessly merged these two together to make one intact picture.  You can crop from this program to get rid of the jagged edges and save in a variety of formats.

Wow!  I am so excited about this now!!  I have been avoiding these records because of this.

H/T to instructor Mike Maddox, who turned us on to this great tool!

Almost serendipity

My Ancestry.com account is going to expire in three days.  I am not going to renew it.  Last time I renewed, I paid $135 after tax and this time, it's going to be nearer to $185.  I'm going to go it alone for a while.

So, today, I was looking at my hints for any last minute additions before I was stuck with Ancestry Library Edition....

I happened to look at a hint for my 3rd Great-Grandfather, Henry Seamens (1839-1904 Cayuga County, NY).  The only hint was a family tree hint.  Normally I don't look at those unless they are more closely related, but this time, I did click through and they had Henry's residence as Bristol, Massachusetts, 1687-1933.  This was an obvious error, but I thought I'd click through and see what record provided this anomaly...this was it:

Henry's daughter, Dora is my GG Grandmother.  This book traces back the family to 1687.  Not indexed by Ancestry.com, so it never showed up as a hint.

This book was listed as privately printed in 1933 in Syracuse, New York.  I was pretty bummed that I wouldn't get a chance to look at the whole thing in three days.  On a whim, I plugged in the author's name into Worldcat.org:

The supremely awesome Clayton Library for Genealogical Research here in Houston, amazingly, has a copy of this book.  Heh.  Pretty close to serendipity for me!  

Willard was displeased

This is Willard, born on 11 Nov 1918.

In celebration of the day on which he was born, Armistice Day, he was given the middle name Peace.

I have no idea why he was given the first name Willard. 

All of Willard's grandparents were born in the Netherlands and came to America. His father's family came in 1887 and his mother's in 1890.  His parents were born in the United States.

According to this article on Dutch naming traditions, sons were usually named after their grandfathers.  The first son gets the name of the father's father and the second son gets the name of the mother's father.  Both of Willard's grandfathers were named Jacob.  Both of the fathers of Willard's grandfathers were named Jacob. Willard's own father was named Jacob.

I did not find out until Willard had passed away, but he was quite displeased that he didn't get named Jacob. 

Sadness

There are a few items that I would be devastated to lose in a fire.  This is one of them:

Genealogie Vinjé Frans of Noors?

Back in 1997, my grandfather received a letter from a researcher in the Netherlands tracing our family tree.  He had determined that one of his ancestor's brothers had emigrated to the United States and he decided to track all his descendants down.  This was the results of his work. 

I can honestly say that without this book, I probably would have never gotten anywhere researching in the Netherlands despite their fantastic online records.  You see, my maiden name was spelled Van Gee.  I knew it was Dutch.  What I didn't know was it was spelled completely wrong.  My third great-grandfather who emigrated to the United States in 1890, Jacobus Johannis' last name was spelled Vinjé.

The Vinjé family arrived 29 Sep 1890 on the S.S. Spaarndam

On the census records, it is spelled Van Gee, and Vangee and Vingee.  Even on his headstone, it's spelled Vinja! I doubt that I could've figured it out myself.  It doesn't sound Dutch to me and maybe it didn't to the other people of Wayne County, New York, where there are lots of Dutch names, and that's how it evolved to Van Gee.  Thanks to the author of this book, my third cousin, twice removed, Jo Vinjé, I can now look up lots of records in the Netherlands without frustration.  He compiled this book, which my father was kind to secure a copy of for me.  My father traveled to the Netherlands several years ago and got to meet Jo in person.

It was with extreme sadness that I discovered a few days ago, that he had passed away.  He had been on my mind lately, I was wondering if he had ever decided if Vinjé was a French of Norwegian name.  I even emailed him at the address in the book and didn't get a response.  This prompted me to do some online searching and found a death notice online for him.  He passed away on 10 Apr 2013.

The State Archives of Belgium Primer

My online journey started at Familysearch.org.  I was looking the Belgian documents.  Having just recently discovered that there is a wiki for every collection, I looked at the one for the "Belgium, Civil Registration, 1795-1910".  Included in the information on this collection

The images for the Belgium Civil Registration, 1795-1910 have been temporarily removed from the FamilySearch website to assist with the development plans of the Belgian National Archives Website. The digitization of images by the State Archives of Belgium is ongoing; however some of the provincial registers are available for viewing online at the State Archives of Belgium. 

That last part is indeed a link.  I followed it.  Caveat:  it will be difficult to proceed without either the Chrome browser installed or fluency in Dutch or French, depending on the origin of your ancestors.  (Mine were Dutch-speaking.)  Chrome will ask you if you want to translate any pages it recognizes are from a different language.

Once you get to the archives and have Chrome translate from Dutch, you will find this section in the middle of the page:

If you have any familiarity with the Dutch civil registers, you will recognize the layout of the Belgian archives.  I was interested in the civil registers, so I clicked on the last link in red on this section.

The next page will take you to a place to select the region your ancestors lived in.  I knew mine were from Oost-Vlanderen (East Flanders), but I didn't know which district (arr. is the abbreviation for arrondissement, or district) the town Maldegem belonged to.  A quick Google search led me to Ghent.

So I clicked on the Ghent district and was presented with a long line of towns in the district to choose from.  Luckily, I knew my great-grandparents had emigrated from Maldegem, so I clicked on that...

Here were my choices.  These words are easy to learn, geboorteakte means "birth certificate"  (think about boor, like "born" in the middle of it), overlijdensakte means "death certificate" (I think "over" like they are "over you in heaven"), and the third is huwelijksakte which means "marriage certificate", no easy mnemonic here, it's just the one left over, lol.

When you click the arrows to the left of the three categories, you will find this:

Now, I started with the births.  I had two last names to work with and I opened up the birth indexes.  (tienjarige tafel means ten-year table, or index, I found what I was looking for in the indexes, so I didn't need to go into those).

Maldegem gave me two choices of indexes, 1871-1900 and 1901-1910.  I accessed both, but started with the earlier first.  

Now, this part is important.  You will have to register with a name and password to continue from here.  If you are using the Chrome browser, it will ask you to translate every page unless you told it to automatically translate and down on the left hand side, there is a link to register.  You will be taken to a page to enter a name, an ID, an email address and a password.  You cannot continue without this.  They will send you a verification email, click the link and you are in.

Here is the difference:

This is not logged in

This is logged in.

There is a second tab next to the blue box once you are logged in, and this is the tab where the actual scans of the documents are located.  When you click on that link, this is what you get:

I am using screen capture to make this tutorial, so I can't capture the entire page, but there are seven rows of thumbnails and navigation at the bottom of the page to get to each of the nine pages that makes up the 171 scans for this index.

One of the surnames I was looking for is De Clerck, so I picked a page to start my navigation at, by clicking on one of the thumbnail images, it happened to be number 10.  These indexes are alphabetical.

Similar to Family Search scans, this opens up in your window.  Unfortunately, unlike Family Search, there are some vital buttons missing.  There is absolutely no way to save or print the entire page or any portion of it.  Also, the percentages of magnification are set rigidly and you cannot go above 100%.

The De Clerck's begin on page 11, but the first one I was looking for was on page 12, so we will skip to there:

In this image, the ancestor I am looking for, Honore is listed as number 182 in 1878.  You will need both pieces of this information to find his birth certificate.  

The number 182 represents that he was the 182nd birth certificate of 1878.  In the next section of books, the actual certificates are filed numerically by this number.

Click on the x at the top left of the scan screen (you can see it in the image above this one) and it will take you back here:

Click on the left tab "Archive Description" to get back to the list of books.

This time we want just "geboorteakten" and not the index.

  

This was a long line of books, which I cropped down, since I knew we were looking for the book for 1878. Clicking on that book brings you to here, which should look familiar:

See your tab on the right with the digitized records?  If you are not logged in, you will not see this.  From here, you will see your screen with the thumbnails of the images, similar to the one above.  You can pick a thumbnail to start navigating.  For the sake of brevity, I found the 182nd certificate of the 1878 on page 47 of these scans. (Remember, this book has three years of certificates in it.)

In this book, there are four scans per page. Later books have six per page.  My great-grandfather is the bottom right on the page.  Once again, there is no way to print or save this image.  If you make it smaller to get in one screen shot, it is almost impossible to read.

At this point, your options are to save multiple scans of the document and stitch them together with an image manipulation program, or to extract the information without saving.  Chrome will not translate the text from an image file, but all of these documents are in the same format unless there are extraordinary circumstances.  

In this case, Honore was born on the 26th of September to Charles Louis De Clerck and Barbara Geyssens.  The first name listed in the document is an official of the town and then there are usually two sponsors, in this case, I think maybe only one, Pieter De Clerck.  If you can decipher the handwriting, you can open a window of Google Translate and type in what you see and it will attempt to translate the document from Dutch for you.  Since the format is identical, it doesn't take too many and you see the pattern.

When I began my search of this archives, I opened the each of the two indexes and made and Excel file of all the births for the two surnames I was looking for.  Then I opened up each book and recorded the data, including the scan number and book title of each record.  I originally started by trying to save each scan, but this quickly became difficult because of the time needed to stitch the screen shots together to try and get an entire document.

At the end of each year in the birth certificate books, there is an index for all the names of the year, sorted alphabetically, so if you misrecord a birth sequence order number from the index, and know the name you are looking for, you might be able to find it from this additional index.  This index also includes death dates, if they are known, but this is far from complete.

I was able to find three sets of 3rd great-grandparents in these records, even with the limited time frame available online.  Family Search has a large quantity of these records available on microfilm, there are 21 films available for the town I am searching in alone.  Some of these records have come online there recently as well: https://familysearch.org/search/collection/list#page=1&countryId=1927071

I hope you find this helpful.  I am by no means an expert at this, your mileage may vary.  Good luck searching!

The start - this time.

This is not my first blogging rodeo.

I had knitting blog for a long time.  I enjoyed it and kept it up until our lives had some upheaval back in 2006.  It petered out and was deleted by the hosting company.  I stopped knitting about the same time, so it seemed like a natural conclusion.

I started this one for a couple of reasons. First, I jumped into Google+ yesterday again, hoping to cultivate some more genealogy knowledge.  I've been a Facebook user for awhile, but I don't have any genealogy contacts there at all, other than a New York Genealogy page I follow and contribute to.  Google+ seems more conducive to what I am looking for.  Sadly, I have not yet found a New York Genealogy community.

Second, I started this blog because I have been doing some research I think is very exciting and I wanted a forum to share my methods.  I could post my experience directly to Google+, but I have a tendency to be verbose so this way it makes things a little easier for people to ignore me.

Background:

I was born in Rochester, New York.  My father's maternal grandparents were immigrants from Belgium (Maldegem, Oost-Vlanderen) and his paternal great-grandparents (both sets) were Dutch immigrants (Zeeland, specifically Zeeuwsvlaanderen).  My mother's family has been in the same two counties (Wayne and Cayuga) for generations.  I have not yet found her immigrant ancestors.

My earliest genealogical memory is a family tree I had to prepare for 6th grade history class:

I was a little unclear on maiden names.

I wasn't close to any of my grandparents.  We moved to Texas when I was nine and we had very little contact with them.  Nevertheless, I have dabbled on and off with genealogy since that first chart.  I did have the opportunity to visit with my maternal grandmother in 1996 and got some fantastic photographs and information at that time.  I also got to visit with my paternal grandfather a couple of times before he passed away in 2011 and got some photos and information from him.  I am very lucky in that regard.

My daughter had a family tree project in the 4th grade at her school.  If you have read this far, you probably know it was really my project:

We made an A+

Since that time, the leaves on my side of the tree (right) look my fluffier, although I still haven't found any Revolutionary War ancestors, they must be there.

Here we go!  Next stop: Belgian archives.