Month: May 2010

Madness Monday: Back Away…

Posted on by Kathleen

Sometimes, you just need to back away from your family file. Well I do at least. I found myself this week re-thinking EVERYTHING that involved my research and my blog. I’ve already done the irreversible step of clearing out my Mom’s side of the tree on my website. Which I’ll never regret, because keeping it around was just wrong when I wasn’t sure of the validity of it all.

I’ve read enough on blogs in the last month or so to make me sweat about all things I think I know. It’s been a crazy, educational couple of months. In the end, I deleted everything but my Original Family File and then I made a copy of my Random Number RootsMagic file and plopped it into Family Tree Maker. No more files for me. These three are it. The Original file is now relegated to back up status, even though I back up the other two regularly.

So here I sit, with a clean start on both my website and my family file. Technically I’m not starting completely over though. I still have all those names in my file to contend with. I just won’t add them to the website unless I have them thoroughly and well sourced. Which brings me to my next decision.

I went through all the trouble of having to clean out my website database. This is so my Ref ID #’s on the website and in FTM/RootsMagic will be the same. I couldn’t change an already existing ID # in the website, which I understand completely. So I’m starting over with that in every since of the word. The decision I made though, is I’m going to go ahead and add my Random Relative Project relatives as I finish them. If I don’t feel comfortable adding them to the site yet on what I have, I won’t. Since I know so much more about things on the TNG software though, it doesn’t make sense to save them for later when it’s just as easy to add them now, and then link them in when I get there. It doesn’t harm anything really.

So that’s where I’m at. By the way, I put eighty million categories on this post because they all fit, and I’m obsessed with categories. Maybe I just need to put up a Kathleen is Category Crazy category for days like today… or maybe I just need to leave it as Family File Hijinks and Madness Monday. Here I go again. 🙂

Madness Monday is a daily blogging theme I got from GeneaBloggers. To participate in Madness Monday simply create a post with the main focus being an ancestor who may have suffered from some form of mental illness or an ancestor who drives you “mad” because you have trouble locating them or locating more information about them.

Update on Photo Rehab

Posted on by Kathleen

In this post, I showed you a quick peek at the start of my photo retouching project. It’s one of the only photos we have of my mother’s father. He died when my mother was pregnant with my older brother. So not many of his grandchildren ever really “met” him. A few were babies, I think. They might have all been in the womb still. I’d have to check my records, and I don’t have time for that right now. :p

L) Before | R) After

This is where my project stands right now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to save much more, but it’s certainly been worth the effort!

Another Mays Family Drama

Posted on by Kathleen

I’ve posted twice already (01, 02) about trying to figure out about William and Anna Mays’ children. I’d link you to the main site, but I cleared it out so I could sync the ID numbers with my “Random Relative Project“. The last I researched this family, I was trying to figure out where some of the children came from and where the others went. I’m pretty sure the last I looked Anna Z Mays was up in the air because I couldn’t figure out who she married, and then I found someone matching her age, but with her younger sister’s  name (Ellen). So I was thoroughly confused.

Today, I was trying to log in one of my Random Relatives in the 1880 census and low and behold, I was back to Anna Mays’ household in 1880. They were living almost next door to my Random Relative. So I decided to let myself get distracted and I was finally going to track down those grandchildren living with Anna.

The first one, James, was fairly easy because I noticed that I had Rebecca listed as having a son. I have him listed as James H Mays, born Oct 1864. I have his death certificate so his birthdate and parents are correct. Well, as correct as they’ll ever get. So he fits. Easy as pie.

The next grandchild, Willis, aged 2 was a little bit trickier. My mistake was assuming that because because they are listed with the Mays surname that they were children of one of Anna’s sons. For some reason I forgot that the Mays girls had quite a few illegitimate children. My next step was going to the Kentucky Birth Records, 1852-1910. It was spacey record keeping and the records are even spacier, but it was worth a shot.

You may not be able to see it because of the size but that shows Willis Maise born 22 Aug 1878. Parents are Jacson Conn and Anna Z Maise. Maise/Maize is a very common spelling for the Mays family of  Kentucky in the old records. If this was just an index I probably wouldn’t even have looked through this as I’m becoming very careful about my sources (My momma would be proud! I should tell her ^.^) This has images to back things up though, so I can confirm details instead of relying on a transcriber who sometimes gets things wrong. I know how tough that job is so you won’t see me complaining!

Wow, okay, that wasn’t so bad either. Though the Conn last name brought me up short because Anna’s little sister Ellen married Hansford Conn in 1878. That doesn’t surprise me though because the Mays clan married like that a lot. Several siblings ended up marrying siblings. If that makes sense.

My next step was trying to find a Jackson Conn in Elliott County in the 1870 and 1880 census. Just to see if there was one close. Another tip I had was that the father’s birthplace was given as Virginia.

There was exactly one Jackson Conn living anywhere in Elliott County in 1870… and he was married. Yikes. Let’s look at 1880.

Still married in 1880, but looks like a different wife. I’m starting to think there’s a scandal here. Of course it’s nothing I can prove and who says the name was written correctly. So we’ll have to see where that takes us, but I at least feel safe in listing Willis as the son of Anna Z Mays. Now I just have to figure out the other two grand children. I’m going to “assume” for now (because I’m not researching them today), that at least the 8 month baby girl’s mother is another of the girls who is living with their mother. We just have to figure out which one. I’ll have to see if that year’s birth pages made it online.

Free Resources pay off!

Posted on by Kathleen

I’ll be the first person in line to admit I don’t ever want to give up my Ancestry.com membership. It’s so convenient for searching. I know the downfalls and dangers but I just don’t care. It’s like my fluffy pajamas, they’re my security blankets.

I think sometimes it’s easy to forget all those other great resources out there in the shadow of Ancestry though. Just waiting to be found and utilized sometimes. I’m definitely making a trip to the National Archives this summer, I’m pretty sure the local historical and genealogy societies do day trip shuttles. Why shouldn’t I take advantage! I’m also thinking about volunteering at the local historical society. I used to know some people there and I think I could be some help. Especially if there are forms to fill out, I love forms.

Yesterday I posted about my chagrin at being denied access to NewspaperArchive.com from my home. I’m so spoiled you see, that I felt slighted. Well, I felt slighted for about 30 seconds when I decided I was going to play with that Heritage Quest thingy. Just for fun.

heritagequest-01

Unlike other things I won’t name, this one allowed me to enter my library card number and away I went.

heritagequest-02

Where to start? Where to start? I decided to start with something I already knew, just to see how easy it would be to search things. I’ve been having a little trouble with Census searching on Ancestry the last few days, so I decided to see what it was like here.

heritagequest-03

So I picked someone from my family file that I hadn’t really researched a lot, but that I knew the basics about. Sort of. I also wanted an easy to interpret last name. After all my frustrations and weirdness of the last few days I didn’t want to mess with spelling things too.

heritagequest-04

Oh look, we have three matches! My guy is on the bottom of course, but don’t be fooled all those yahoos are in my tree.

heritagequest-05

For some reason, I thought this would just be an index. Imagine my pleasant surprise when it also showed the actual image! They don’t have all the censuses online, but boy do they have a lot and this is all FREE to me through my library card. You can bet I’m going to be utilizing this a lot more now that I’m aware it’s there.

heritagequest-06

Just wait until I show you what I found on John K Taylor’s father and my 5th Great Grandfather Bartholomew Taylor.

Well I had plans

Posted on by Kathleen

I started to get a tech geek itch. It was bad, it’s always pretty bad, but it was really bad today. It’s been awhile since I had something new to play with. So I barely restrained myself from installing a Wiki onto the site and playing around with the code. Just barely did I escape the future headache that would have become.

I escaped it by telling myself I’d break out the handy dandy library card and do some searching online at newspaperarchive.com. I got pretty excited too. There’s this entry I want to write, but I want to find the newspaper article first to back me up. It’s one of those things I haven’t been able to find in all these years. I really need a Jersey genealogy trip.

So I found my wallet with my library card…

and I went to my library’s website and clicked on the Online Databases link.

Only to be shut out in the cold, without a coat. Turns out they’ve changed it since I last utilized this feature and now it’s an in-library feature only. Well darn. I need a car… I need a drivers license too. That would help. I should have named this site how to do genealogy while being a virtual shut in. haha. Anywho, Darn. It’ll just have to wait for another day and I won’t bore you with my whining any longer. In the mean time, I’ll try and figure out my jumble of family files and what I’m going to do about them. To be honest I think I’m going to scrap them all except my Original file. Then I’ll make a clean one in RootsMagic as I obtain records and fix the Original file as I go. That seems most logical to me, right?

Okie dokie. That leaves me with a plan, but not much of one. Too bad I’m a little sick and too warm to wear my fluffy pajamas, I could have really used them today! You know what this blog needs, it needs me to break out some of those Grandma Recipes. I should do that this weekend! Nothing like some Grandma cooking.