Family File Hijinks – Page 5 – Moore-Mays Genealogy

Finding hints on a record

Posted on 26-Sep-2012 by Kathleen

Yesterday I wrote about my first productive day back from an unexpected break from technology. As with all research, one thing can always lead to many more avenues of information. Yesterday was no different for me. I talked about my marriage possibility list and how I was going to use the list to see if I could find out the spouses of my 5th great grandfather‘s siblings. Often when I’m coming back from a break, and I’m looking for something specific, I re-examine the records I’ve already found. So yesterday, I decided to go back through the death records I had for all of the children of James Love and Janet Fleming.

On the death record of Margaret Love, the informant is listed as Andrew Ritchie, nephew. I’ll take that clue! When I looked at my information for Margaret’s sisters (since the nephew did not share the Love surname), I saw that her oldest sister Elizabeth married James Wylie and died 2 years later with that surname. That means she was out as Andrew’s mother. The second eldest sister, Janet, was unaccounted for, which left her as an option. The youngest sister, Jean, was also unaccounted for at that time. That left me with two sisters and one nephew. That seems to be my story a lot! Trying to find out which sister a niece/nephew belongs with.

So I went to my trusty “possible spouses” list, and you can even see in my photo from yesterday who the obvious answer was:

With that hint, I verified that Jean Love and James Ritchie had a son named, Andrew.

My next step (for now) was to search out a death record for Jean Ritchie. I wanted to verify that her maiden name was Love and that her parents were James Love and Janet Fleming. They were.

So with that, I’ve tracked another sibling of my 5th great grandfather, and I’ve added another will to my to do list. Those are 5 and 10 credits a piece sometimes, so they come when I’m really blocked or feeling like I want to spend some money. What a rebel I am!

James Love and Janet Fleming's family — James Love and Janet Fleming’s family

All that yesterday on top of surgery on my great grandmother Llewellyn’s sewing machine (according to Grandpa Moore it was hers)! Today I think I’ll stick to some office work for the rest of the day and make sure all my logs and lists are up to date. I also have to add James and Janet’s family to my database on the website so that when I talk about them, you can find out who I’m talking about.

P.S. Just because I was away, doesn’t mean I didn’t notice that nifty new feature on FTM2012!

You have no idea how much easier it will be to update my website manually when I’m researching now!

Hopefully, I’ll be able to work on the next RMC update tomorrow and Friday! I’m really ready for the redesign to be moving forward again!

Note: As part of the redesign I’ll be making a disclaimer page. Until I get all that sorted out, just to be clear, I have no affiliation with anyone for any perks. I just really love the tools that I use and I like to get excited about new finds. I do not currently make any money for this website, so please don’t sue me for any reason. I’m really wanting to save up for an iPhone 5 come December. ^.^ <– That’s my giggly face.

Is the computer on or is it just me?

Posted on 25-Sep-2012 by Kathleen

Whew, who knew a break from technology would be that long. I sure didn’t! Yesterday I ended my unexpected hiatus by booting up my desktop and opening every genealogy program I own. I guess I had decided enough was enough and it was time to do something tech related again.

My focus yesterday was the Love family. (Of course I chose them, I always start with them after a hiatus.) One of the first things I did was break out my printout of all Love surname marriages for Beith parish. I made the list months ago using credits from Scotlands People. Since I knew I was going to be dealing with a lot of Loves eventually, I spent the credits at the time and figured it couldn’t hurt.

Once I had the list out, I made lists of my ancestors siblings. Using the list I was able to list possible spouses. I say possible because I wasn’t prepared to make any commitments to a spouse until I was sure of them. So armed with my new lists of possible spouses for the siblings, I bit the bullet and got myself some more credits. However, I like to make my credits go as far as I can. Knowing what I know about the Love migration pattern, I went ahead and just did a general LOVE search for deaths in the Statutory Registers. Note: The Statutory Registers began in 1855, before that they used OPR (old parochial registers), however Scotlands People warns that the OPR’s were infrequently used, so aren’t as accurate. I decided to use the Statutory records because I had already found Robert and Elizabeth Love’s deaths in them, so I thought their five siblings might be as well.

6 pages or 6 credits is worth it for me, because that’s 150 LOVE deaths between 1855 and 1930 in Beith parish. Since the age is also listed, I can narrow down quickly if any of these are my ancestors or their siblings.

I quickly was able to find an Andrew Love that fit the parameters for the brother of my 5th Great Grandfather. The record confirms that this Andrew was the son of James Love and Janet Fleming. It also shows that he was also a Grocer (which definitely runs in the family) and the widower of Margaret Jack. Now that I have a spouse name, I can look on my marriage list and find out when they were married. If I wanted to spend another credit, which of course I did, I could do a search for their children’s names. I held off on looking at the actual records of their children’s births for now. They aren’t in my direct line, so I can hold off on verifying them for a little while longer. I did add the marriage and children into my database with placeholder source citations so that I would know I need to still look at the originals.

I’m making some definite progress on the children of James and Janet. I still have more death records to check to see if I can narrow down the other three children. Then it’s onto the Wills & Testaments database on SP for more records if I can find them. Not to mention the census records, I’ve barely touched the Scotland census yet, since I’m trying to get lists of spouses and children to differentiate between all the same names.

That was actually a pretty productive day for being a day back after an extended break. The only thing left is to transfer my hand written notes into Microsoft OneNote and to finish making the printout for Beith death records. Oh and of course I have to update the database on my website. Sheesh, that stuff sure piles up quick doesn’t it!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – What’s Your Ancestral Name Number?

Posted on 18-Aug-2012 by Kathleen

Today has been a very strange day. Now I am wide awake at 11pm and don’t know what to do with myself other then continue on the Cleanup Project. I decided to take some time out for some fun. Saturday Night Genealogy Fun to be exact!

Here are the “rules” as Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings laid them out:

Determine how complete your genealogy research is. For background, read Crista Cowan’s post Family History All Done? What’s Your Number? For comparison purposes, keep the list to 10 generations with you as the first person.
Create a table similar to Crista’s second table, and fill it in however you can (you could create an Ahnentafel (Ancestor Name) list and count the number in each generation, or use some other method). Tell us how you calculated the numbers.
Show us your table, and calculate your “Ancestral Name Number” – what is your percentage of known names to possible names (1,023 for 10 generations).
For extra credit (or more SNGF), do more generations and add them to your chart.
Post your table, and your “Ancestral Name Number,” on your own blog, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status or Google+ Stream post.

To get my numbers, I created an Ahnentafel Report in FTM2012 and I counted the ancestors with known surnames. This means I didn’t give myself credit for the females who I don’t know surnames for. I was doing good until I got to my sixth generation back. Then by the time we get to the eighth generation the bottom has completely dropped out of my results.

The biggest reason for the drop off is all 10 of my known paternal 3rd great grandparents (generation 6) are immigrant ancestors. For this reason I’ve run into some challenges on finding some of their parents.

For the extra credit, I decided to see how far back I go and it isn’t much farther and the numbers just get lower! For this report, I also used my Original family file for this report. So these numbers might eventually go down even more or possibly go up!

All in all it was nice to see where I stand. It makes me motivated to get those blanks in the sixth generation filled in.

What I’ve Been Working On

Posted on 02-Jul-2012 by Kathleen

I’ve been a little silent on the blog writing and reading front. Summer is in full swing so I bet everyone knows what that means! Yard work! Fun stuff there. I haven’t been doing as much as the rest of my family, but we’re working on our yard and I’ve spent a week dogsitting. Not to mention this heatwave! So one of the things I’ve been doing in the evenings is adding things to a private family tree on Ancestry.com. I’ve gone back and forth for ages on this subject, and I finally decided to have a private family tree there.

The advantages are that I will have a sharable tree to invite new connections to. I will also be able to show my source photos. A lot of my pictures are already on Ancestry from people who have visited the website in the past and saved the images. One of the reasons I’m doing this is I would like a way to share some of the source images without having to send huge emails with many attachments. For copyright reasons, there are some sources that I haven’t posted images for on the website. I would never intentionally violate a copyright agreement, so I think a private tree to share certain things would be better.

I started a new blank, unlinked tree because I wanted to have complete control over the file. If I had synced my FTM file with Ancestry.com, then my source citations would have been a little weird. For example, it would have shown everything on the Ancestry tree, however, the census images and death records wouldn’t be linkable to the databases on Ancestry. I could have added the records through Ancestry.com, but then those sources would have downloaded themselves to my desktop family file. That would be a no no for me. So I decided the simplest route would be to do this. It’s a lot of leg work sure, but I’m really only working on it in the evenings when I feel like I can’t work on my family file for stress reasons.

Of course, there might be some way to do what I want, without the syncing issues, but I think I’d choose to do it this way in the end anyway. I just like having complete control over these things.

Later this week, I’m going out of state for a quick trip. I’m hoping that before I leave, I get an entry written up and posted about the TNG software. I get a lot of questions about it, and I’m hoping to answer some of those this week.

A Tale of Many Sisters: Finding Emma Carter’s Mother

Posted on 11-Jun-2012 by Kathleen

Most of the times, my genealogy days turn into a long day of entering information into my family tree program of choice. I love the record keeping part of genealogy. The one part I didn’t realize I enjoyed so much is the mystery-solving aspect. Every so often, I can’t be satisfied with just entering names and dates and making lists of places to search newspapers for. Every once and awhile, there are members of my family that just jump out and say investigate me more!

Emma Carter was one of these people. Emma first showed up in the 1870 Census, living with Rachel Miller-Carter and her family. Emma was listed as being 8 years old. That presented a problem to me. Rachel’s husband, Levi Carter passed away in March of 1860. So was Emma an illegitimate child of Rachel’s? Rachel was listed as being 52 years old in 1870, so I was a little doubtful of that. I next started wondering about Rachel’s daughters. She had four daughters and three that were living with her in 1870: Betsy, Sina, Eliza. I eliminated Hannah, the married daughter because I had her tracked through my life. She is my 3rd Great Grandmother. If she was Hannah’s daughter, I would have either known about it already, or I wasn’t going to find out by my usual means. So I decided to eliminate her for now, but not permanently.

I jumped ahead to the 1880 Census, the first one to show relationships, to see what that would bring me in the way of information.

emmacarter-01 — 1880 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T9, roll 0996. Brown County, Ohio. Lewis township, Higginsport precinct, ED 198, p. 342-C (stamped), dwelling 215, family 233, Rachel Carter; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com).

Luckily for me Emma was still living with her in the same household in the 1880 US Census. So now I know that Rachel is in fact Emma’s grandmother. From this information, I still don’t know who Emma’s mother is. The next step was to follow the daughters and Emma to see where they end up. Luckily for me some Brown County records are online at FamilySearch. I was a little worried about the 20 year gap between the 1880 and 1900 censuses. So I decided to try and see if there was a marriage record for any of Rachel’s daughters first. There was not. Then on a whim, I searched for a marriage record for Emma Carter.

emmacarter-02 — Probate Court, Brown County, Ohio, 1879-1881, vol. 11, p. 551, no. 13812, for Chas W Hurdle-Emma Carter; FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org).

I was in luck to have found a marriage record for 1881! Now I had a place to search for Emma in 1900, but I couldn’t be sure this was my Emma without further evidence.

emmacarter-03 — 1900 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T623, roll 1247. Clermont County, Ohio. Franklin township, ED 028, sheet 01-B, dwelling 11, family 12, Emma Hurdle; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com).

There are a few problems with this record, like Sina being listed as male (she wasn’t), and that she was widowed. I still haven’t found a marriage record for Sina, so I can’t confirm or deny that fact. What’s interesting is she is listed as a servant in the household instead of as a relation. So by this record, I’m still not sure who Emma Carter’s mother is, but I am positive the above marriage record fits with my Emma Carter. So I will follow Emma’s family into the next census to see what that brings.

emmacarter-04 — 1910 U.S. census, population schedule, NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 1160. Clermont County, Ohio. Franklin township, ED 029, sheet 02-A, dwelling 33, family 33, Hamer Hurdle; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com).

The 1910 Census answers all the questions that I first had and gives me two more. The question I had answered is the identity of Emma Carter’s mother. That I know is Sina Carter. However I now have two questions: Where is Emma Carter if Sina has 2 living children in 1910? Who is the second child, Lewis maybe?