violetismycolor

A little genealogy rant...

I work almost daily on genealogy tasks. I (as I may have said) research both my family and my husband's. My primary platform is Ancestry, but I try to transfer all the information to FamilySearch, which is the collaborative family tree/genealogy website, run by the Church of the Latter Day Saints. 

I'm so passionate about genealogy that I put some pretty coin into using services like Ancestry, Findmypast, Newspapers.com, and Wiewaswie. I have the resources to do that and I like to share by putting useful information up on FamilySearch, where anyone can have an account for FREE. 

But because FamilySearch is a collaborative website, anyone can change the things that are put up there. I try to write a Life Sketch for each person I research, using historical documents as the basis. I transcribe carefully, all the information out of those records, onto the Life Sketch. I assume, wrongly apparently, that with that Life Sketch front and center, anyone who wants to change something vital, will read that first and see that the facts there are documented. Maybe they have the wrong person...an ancestor with the same name and similar dates, but not the right person they are searching for. No.

Lucky for me, FamilySearch lets you opt to 'watch' any person listed and see what changes are made to anyone you are watching. They send a weekly email listing changes to everyone on your watch list. 

Recently, I had an ancestor of my husband's that I had researched very thoroughly and I had documented my research there. Last week, someone changed his parents, gave him a child, born in a different country and ten years before he and his wife married, and merged him with another person...all without thinking how this could possibly be right and wiping out all my data, including the Life Sketch. I try to write very kind notes to folks like this but this one made me very angry. I have to admit that I wrote a note saying he had wiped out many hours of work, not only by me but by others who had contributed to this person and all of his descendants. Then I changed everything back. Thank goodness, there is a restore function.

I have not heard back.

FamilySearch can be a fun and interesting place to do genealogy. It can also be infuriating. How many times have I slapped my forehead in disbelief when someone assigns parents to someone when their marriage (or birth or death) record is attached, which clearly states the parents' names...and they are not the ones you think they are, dude!

I do transfer the Life Sketch information for anyone I have in my tree to my Ancestry page, so I will have it for the long run. But for others that share these genealogies, I want to make their life easier and not make us all hunt for the information we need. If it is out there and I have found it, I want to share it. I hope others feel the same and want to share information, too. 

Just please, think twice before you change the work of hardworking home genealogists like me. I always double check that I have facts or documents before changing someone's work, and I hope you do, too.

Obsessiveness

As I have said in an earlier post, I am a bit of an obsessive personality. This actually helps me to get things done, IF, in fact, I am obsessive about the particular task. I can say that this applies (currently) to genealogy and knitting. Apparently, I am not an obsessive about blogging. I have been a terrible blogger. 

My other issue is that I am a bit...scattered. Maybe a bit ADD. My attention is easily pulled away. Say I am investigating the Vermilyea family (my husband's side). Someone sends me an email via FamilySearch.org and I jump into action to investigate whatever ancestor that person asks me about and, voila, I am on to checking into the van Eeden's or whoever. Focus, Diane, focus!

I will try to change that, a bit. 

So, what is new with me? It's a gray July morning in Portland. I am at my usual coffee shop, spending a hour doing some genealogy. The place is full of people trying to grab some great coffee and maybe a delicious pastry or two. There are never enough seats and it is a little loud, but that doesn't seem to bother me. I block out all the noise around me.

I am trying to focus a little bit more on my genealogy tasks. I am working up my family tree and adding a Life Story for each of my direct (and sometimes indirect) ancestors up my family line. Well, and up John's family line, too. I attach these on FamilySearch, the collaborative family tree that is sponsored by the Mormon Church. It is a free website and a good way to try to find distant cousins who may be working on the same people I am. I also attach those Life Stories to these same ancestors on my Ancestry.com site. That way if someone on FamilySearch deletes the story, I still have it. Oh, yeah, people do delete things...like attached records...without a lot of thought.

Next up is my (obsessive) knitting. I am working on a cardigan that is a variation of the Sock Arms Sweater...same pattern, I am just making it into a cardigan instead of a pullover. I am using a wonderful gold merino by Swans Island Yarns. It is a fingering weight sweater (read: the yarn is very thin and you need a lot of stitches to knit my size). It will be wonderfully drapey and light for the fall and spring. I intend to make a DK or Worsted weight gold sweater for cold winter days.

The garden is amazing this summer. I put this down to the fact that my son-in-law-to-be, Zerek, spread two yards of compost over it for me this past spring...and the fact that we had a rainy spring and early summer that gave it lots of good water.  The weeds cannot do much to get up beyond the mulch and the spectacular growth of the perennials. I am doing far less weeding than I did last summer. 

The thing that is the most abundant this year are the blueberries. They have produced more than they ever have...and they KEEP producing. We can't keep up with them, to the delight of Bonnie and Ross, who are happily accepting "gifts" of blueberries whenever they come by.

We are having lunch with Dominic from Switzerland, who was an exchange student the same year as our own Katharina. He is visiting with his girlfriend. I am going to make a charcuterie board spread with good bread, spreadable cheeses, nuts, salami, olives, etc. with cherries and blueberries on the side. It's not too hard to do and it's delicious. We are planning to eat outside but I am not sure the weather is going to allow it...how is that possible in July?

Last year, the summer here was unusually hot (lots of temps in the 90's and 100's) and/or too smoky from the wildfires in both southern Oregon and British Columbia to spend time outside. This summer has decided to be cool and overcast more than warm and sunny. I have decided not to complain (too much) about this summer's weather because last summer was unbearable.

Anyway, that's a brief look at what's on with me lately. I will try to be better about blogging.

 

Family History Organization

I have been working on family history (or genealogy) for the past few years. I have become quite good at being able to find records and am piecing together the lives of many of my (and my husband's) ancestors.  This is all good.  My big problem is Organization. 

I have been collecting records and "trying" to put them in their proper places, so that I can find them again. However, some of the time I am working on my desktop and some of the time on my laptop. Only at my desktop do I have a big, secondary hard drive where I have a file for each generation and each family in that generation. When I am working on my laptop, usually at night, while watching TV, I do download the files and label them appropriately. But I don't often find the time to MOVE them from my laptop to their proper filing folder on my desktop. I would much rather be hunting down new material.

The other thing that I am trying to do is to write a story about each family group. I collect the birth, marriage, and death files. I find newspaper articles and census records,  property records and wills. I look at my ancestor's siblings and their families and I try to get a sense about what these family groups were going through while they lived. This is much harder than it sounds. But it IS my ultimate goal, to leave a record of these families that my husband and I come from and to tell their stories for future generations. But there are SO MANY OF THEM!

For any interested party, the filing system that I use is this. I create a file for each direct ancestral couple. I use the first 4 letters of their last names in this system, in order to keep the file names an appropriate size. My husband and I are Gen 1, our parents are Gen 2, etc. So a file for our grandparents would look like this:

03_SMIT John_JONE Mary

That would be the file that would start with their marriage and go on with each child having their own sub-folder in their birth order: 1_Thomas, 2_Joan, 3_Clara  etc. In those files I would put all their BMD records and information on their children, censuses they are in, etc. When my own direct ancestor marries, they get thier own couple file. This works pretty well for me. My ancestors had lots and lots of kids. My husband's family, less so.

Each record gets labeled like this:  SMITH JOHN 1896 BIRTH   or   SMITH JOHN JONES MARY 1913 MARRIAGE

Doing this also makes it easy to find a record, as I can spot the year I am looking for, and what person or persons are involved in the record.

Okay, enough explaining. Time to do some record sorting....

 

 

It's in the eyes....

I am always interested in seeing traits repeated in families.  In this case, I am referring to physical traits.  I came across these pictures the other day and, BAM!  It smacked me right in the face.  My husband, JOHN CALHOUN, has the same eyes as his great-aunt, KATHLEEN CALHOUN.  John was about 39 years old when this photo was taken, but I am not sure exactly how old Kathleen was.  But those eyes...they are the same.  

Family history is so interesting, and I will tell Kathleen's story in this blog...wait, wait, I will get to it and it is worth the wait.

 I am not sure I see those same eyes in any of my kids, but I will look for them in photos from now on.  In the meantime, John was born in 1944 and Kathleen was born in 1886.  Fifty-eight years may separate their births, but those genes are strong.  I am not sure if they came down the Calhoun or Parke side, but again, I will keep looking at the old photos I have to see if I can trace them.  

This is a fun new avenue of research for me to go down.   Yippee!

On to family research

I have decided to change this blog into a family history and genealogy blog.  I hope to track my progress through the wacky, maze-y world that is all-things-genealogy.  I have found how much I LOVE doing research...I actually think I already knew that; why else would I have been such a history bug?  

I have a lot of history of my own side of the family, the Smoorenburgs, so I have been digging into my husband's side, the Calhouns.  This has proved fascinating.  I hope to tell the stories here in the blog.  Hopefully, other genealogy freaks like me, who may be researching some of the same folks that I am, can join in.  We can help each other.  

So, here we go!