Privacy in Texas

Several discussions on legal and ethical issues lately. As a newcomer to the genealogical community, I don't know how common this is. I have come upon another one that's troubling me.

Last night, doing some research on a surname in Texas I came across the Ancestry databases of their birth, death and marriage indexes. Several states have their death indexes online. This can be useful. Missouri even has their death certificates online - up until 1956. But they stop with certificates less than 50 years. They have no index for recent deaths either. The St. Louis Public Library has an index for Post Disptach obituaries that isn't complete, but when it is, will be up-to-present. This doesn't trouble me much, since all the people in the index are deceased.

But indexes of births and marriages for people who are still living? The Texas birth index at Ancestry is for 1903-1997. The marriage index is for 1814-1909 and 1966-2002. If I had been born in Texas, I'd be on it, as would my parents, and grandparents. The birth index gives names of both parents, with maiden name for the mother. Combined with the marriage index, this provides an easy reference to track the generations. There is a large gap in the marriage index, but still, while the census stops at 1930, if the family remains in Texas, you can pretty much keep on going until the current generation of parents. And then at several phonebook websites (Or on Google if you figure out the city they live in) you can probably find the phone number of the living generations. And give them a call and say, Hi, I'm a cousin.

It certainly might not be advisable to start out the conversation that way. And you might do better trying to find their address and writing a "blind inquiry" letter to them. (Uncle Hiram has some good advice on that.) It's way too easy to hang up a phone. But Texas certainly makes it easy. I'm not sure how many other states do this. Randy at GeneaMusings back in February suggested California was the only other one. Chicago (Cook County) recently announced it is putting a lot of their vitals online - with an estimated date of arrival in January, but I don't know if this will include recent vitals.

He also asks for input on the privacy issue. I didn't see his post back then (see first paragraph) but I'm giving it now, I guess. I don't like it.

Well, that is, looking at it from the perspective of somebody tracking me down - online - within a couple hours of fairly easy research - if I don't want to be tracked down that easily. I don't have to worry about that, I don't live in Texas.

But I do have some Texas relatives. I now know their names. I won't mention the surname. And while I'm not about to pick up the phone, I think I'd be silly not to write a couple letters. Gives them the option of not replying. I might even play 'dumb' and say that I think 'we may' be related. Don't want to scare them by telling them that I *know* we are. Of course, I'd be surprised if this hasn't been discussed in Texas newspapers, and they know full well how easy it is. So they might see right through my facade.

Genealogy Challenges and Puzzles

I've been having fun with Genealogue's challenges, but I often see them after the answers are revealed in the comments, or while I am at work without much time to solve them. I did submit one to him, and it was fun to see people solve it.

A local puzzler named Nobody published a puzzle late last night early this morning, and today it has a genealogy-related slant. I found it not too challenging, but still somewhat fun, since it involved some well-known names, and thought others might like to try their hand.

Nobody's site used to be much more active than it is now, but it's good to see they're not completely gone.

In the attic

I was over at my parents' house today going through some old boxes in the attic. Discovered photo albums both of my grandmothers put together when they were young. 1920s and 1930s. Both contain high school graduation photos. And I think my favorite pictures are those of my grandfathers young and hamming it up for the camera. Though there are also some pictures of great-grandparents and great-great grandparents in the collections.

(I'm going to have to reread the posts on The Practical Archivist on rescuing glued photos, and find myself a microspatula.)

The most surprising find though wasn't a photograph. It was my maternal grandfather's resume. He updated it after he retired, in 1968, and saved it. Who does that? (My grandfather, I guess. He's the same grandfather who gave me his Hungarian birth certificate to put into a grade school report.) So I have a one page summary of his career that I couldn't have found anywhere else. I knew the highlights: brief stint as a lawyer, most of his career as a Postal Inspector, a few years in the army, but now my knowledge is more complete. He also had kept in a folder a lot of business correspondence.

Friday Five

It's Friday, so five more names from various census.
It should be obvious what is on my mind this morning.

1900 – Cub Beers – Manhattan, NY – 22
1910 – Cardinal Butter – New Orleans, LA – 12
1920 – Astro Archie – Limestone, TX – 17
1930 – Met Pitt – Marshall, KY – 15
1880 – Pirate King – Richmond, MO - 45

Genealogy Jenny

Not too many people know what a Jenny is. A Jenny is a form of poetry I created last year. (Link is to my other blog). Like haiku, the word is both singular and plural.

It's a real simple form to learn. There is a specified number of lines, with a specified number of syllables for each line. Jenny have 7 lines, and a total of 38 syllables. The first line has 8 syllables. The second line has 6 syllables. The third line has 7 syllables. Can you guess the rest? Does this help: 8-6-7...

Here's an example:

Honor thy Great Grandmother and Great Grandfather

We all have eight great grandparents.
Half of us don’t know them.
I treasure all my surnames:
Newmark and Cruvant,
Feinstein, Blatt,

Deutsch, Lichtman, Van Every, Denyer.

That of course was more factual than poetic. The following is slightly better:

Advice Not Taken

In the hot summer heat I found
myself reading gravestones
looking for my ancestors.
All of the websites
said: Autumn.

I could not wait that long to find them.

© John Newmark

Genealogy Haiku/Senryu

I find it a lot easier to think in syllables of 5-7-5. Maybe I'm part Japanese; from a past life?

Erosion

A British study
reveals half can't name one great
grandparent. Lost roots.

---

Epitaphs

I can't walk past graves
without stopping to read them.
Dead men do tell tales.

© John Newmark

Genealogy Limericks

Randy at Genea-Musings put out a request for some Genealogy Limericks

Since I consider myself something of a poet, and since my great Grandfather Barney claimed to be Irish even though the wasn't, I had to see what I could come up with...

I will note that I tried to stick to a 3-3-2-2-3 pattern with regard to metrical feet, though I know there are a few rough spots. I was more flexible with rhyme.

There once was a guy from Missouri
Knew nought ‘bout his granddad named Morrie
He searched at Ancestry;
Got help at the library
Now he knows where his granddad is buried.

There once was a lady named Maude
Who loved to explore a graveyard
With blue jeans and bug spray
She would spend the whole day
Rubbing graves and chatting with G-d.

I intentionally avoided the word 'genealogist'. I didn't see an easy way to fit that into the metrical scheme without totally ignoring it. Then it came to me...

Way back when ol' Beowulf was young
A kid searched for his dad and his mom
"Genealogist" they
might now call him today
But back then he was known as young Tom

© John Newmark

Labor Day

Since it's Labor Day in the United States, and I believe in Canada too, as opposed to all the other countries that still observe it on its original May day, I've been thinking about the work my ancestors did.

In the early 1900s they were tailors, launderers, undertakers, salesmen. The next generation had several lawyers and doctors. Most people see that as a jump, because we focus on the money, and the years of required education. But every one of my ancestors in the first list were self-employed businessmen, dealing with clients in much the same fashion.

I've found an online interview of a distant relative who left the city and started a medical practice in a small rural town in the 1930s because they had no other doctor. For years he charged his patients $1, and never sent out bills, because he knew they would pay if they could. Something which he, and his children, and his children's children should rightly be proud of.

In the interview he states one of his reasons for becoming a doctor was because his mother didn't want him to become a tailor like everyone else in the family. I cringe at the joke, even though it receives the expected laughter from the interviewer. Mostly because I know the interviewee's father, and his father's father were tailors, and I know his mother's father was a bootmaker.

It's not exactly what he said that bothers me, but how he said it. The parents of all his cousins probably had similar (mostly fulfilled) desires for their children. I like to think, though, that instead of looking down on the profession, they saw the hard work that went into it, and the years of poverty, and wanted an easier life for their children. That's probably how he looked at it too, and I'm just reading too much into a one-liner in an interview.

I was certainly thrilled to find a recording of his voice. The interview is about 30 minutes long.

St. Louis Genealogy Search

I read Genealogue's recent post with interest. His "New Genealogy Message Searcher" is certainly useful. And it occurred to me that Google's Coop service could be utilized to group any number of databases together. I know I use a handful of databases locally that would be great to be able to search all together.

Even though all the sites I added had to be such that all the information was on real pages that a searchbot could crawl and index, I still came up with several. Including the St. Louis Genealogical Society, St. Clair County (IL) Genealogical Society, St. Louis Public Library resources (including a great indexing of obituaries), St. Louis specific message boards at Ancestry, Rootsweb and Genforum, and an AccessGenealogy website.

If you have any ancestors who stopped in St. Louis, you might find it useful. The St. Louis Genealogy Search. And after you're done there, don't forget to drop by the office of the Secretary of State, they have some great databases that can't be added to this.

Setting these searches is extremely easy, and there's a link on the search-page that will lead you through the process. Since the search is through Google's cached pages, it doesn't increase the load on the pages that are actually searched. It only, theoretically, increases the load on Google. They can handle it. (If they couldn't, they wouldn't have set this service up.)

Peeps goes to the library

A humorous introduction to genealogy video from Birmingham Alabama found on YouTube:

MacFamilyTree

Deciding to purchase some genealogy software to be organized, and owning a Mac, in early July I walked into a local Mac Store and purchased MacFamilyTree. The only significant complaints I had seen online were some oddities in the GUI. Functionally it was rated highly.

[I know that the leading software packages are Legacy and Family Tree Maker, but both of these appear to be PC only, and while I could buy software that would allow me to run PC programs on my Mac, that would be an additional cost, and would in my opinion be wasteful if all I wanted it for was one software program.]

So far I have had few issues. Of course, I have nothing to compare it to. They've just announced an upcoming major overhaul, though, and the 'cutoff' for a free update when the release comes is an August 14th purchase. Grumble grumble. I do understand, though, the cutoff has to be somewhere.

Ancestry backs down

Ancestry has removed their collection of web caches. The announcement is carefully written in neutral language as one would expect from a corporate PR office, but they explain their initial intent ("an effort to preserve history – if a Web page featuring important family history information were taken down in the future, a cached version would still be available"), acknowledge they have heard the concerns raised (not listing those concerns, but PR rarely focuses on the negative unless they feel they have to), and announce they are removing the information 'for the time being.'

The announcement is pretty fresh, and already a few bloggers have picked up on those words. They're the most colloquial-sounding words in the release, but taking them at their word in the rest of the text, they still would like to provide the information, but they want to review the concerns that have been addressed by the community and come up with a way to do it that will be less objectionable. Which is commendable.

I'm a newcomer to this community, but considering the time frame this has all occurred in, their response is impressive. Companies are best judged not by the mistakes they make, because mistakes will be made, but in how they respond to criticism of those mistakes.

Caching, Ancestry, Archive, and Google

I have a personal blog where I talk about everything that comes to my mind. This is what it looks like now.

This is what it looked like in March 2005, July 2004, December 2003, and a full five years ago in August of 2002. All the links are courtesy of the WayBack Machine. Archive.org has been archiving the internet for several years now. Here's what another website I maintain looked like in October of 2000

There has been some talk about Ancestry’s caching of genealogical websites – such as USGenNet and genealogy blogs. Such as at Genea-Musings, About.com’s Guide to Genealogy , and Genealogue.

When I blog I know what I blog may appear elsewhere. I consider myself a poet, and have included some poetry in some of my blog posts. I’ve had some of this poetry appear on other sites without credit. (In these instances I emailed the owners and asked them to include a byline…which they did.) I’ve also had poetry I’ve written appear on websites, credited, but without people asking, which legally they are required to do…but I’m not wealthy enough to take them to court, and I don’t really mind, usually. I now have a Creative Commons copyright notice on the blog which allows people to distribute the content as long as they don’t make any money off of it, and as long as they give me credit. I don't have that notice on this blog. It's probably not going to appear here.

Of course, USGenNet doesn’t have a Creative Commons copyright notice on their site. And if you search for their archives at archive.org you will be able to access their archived homepage, but when you try to follow a link, you will receive the error msg: "We're sorry, access to [url] has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt." Basically, robots.txt files are files webmasters put on their sites to tell searchbots that they shouldn’t archive their pages. I could put these on my site, but I don’t. USGenNet does. Understandably, too. Bots are still physically able to ignore the requests and archive the pages…- it's just respectable archival search engines (such as Google and Archive.org) don’t ignore the requests. Partially probably due to fear of legal retribution. Ancestry, apparently (key word - I'm still stating an opinion here) is ignoring these electronic requests. Note: I've been assured they didn't ignore robots.txt files.

As others have stated, I state as well, what this means legally is beyond me. I’m not a lawyer. I took a media law course in college over ten years ago, and have some clues, and this looks suspicious, but I am certainly not an expert. It should be interesting to watch if Ancestry does insist what they appear to be doing is legitimate, as there are a whole bunch of companies – completely outside of the genealogy industry – who might justifiably be worried about the results of a court case in Ancestry's favor. If a court decides Ancestry can cache pages on sites with robots.txt files specifically requesting pages not be cached … will Google and Archive.org decide to still be nice? I suspect every newspaper in the country has a stake in the answer to that question.

And while it certainly feels more reprehensible for Ancestry to charge for viewing their cached files, I suspect that newspapers or any other website which wishes to protect their content hope that's not the deciding factor, as archival websites making their content available for free likely isn't an acceptable solution from their perspective.

Music and Genealogy

Warning: all four videos below, together, will absorb 20 minutes of your time. But they won't be wasted.

YouTube video of Ray Stevens song describing a classic genealogical nightmare...complete with an alternate surname spelling in the credits at the end. (sigh. note to YouTubers...please, if you're going to violate copyright, at least spell the musician's name correctly.) For those interested in the animation, it was created using Sims software.



If Ray Stevens' humor isn't your cup of tea, but you prefer Julie Andrews and Gene Kelly...here they explain why genealogy can be fun

Part I



Part II



And finally, more recently, another song on Family Trees from the group, Venice

How much do I trust the research of others

This is a question I am facing. For example: My family can trace their roots back to a person named Ebenezer Denyer in Texas. We know he was a Confederate Soldier as we have a letter from his granddaughter, to the government asking for confirmation from their records, and their positive response.

According to a record at Family Search, Ebenezer's parents are William Denyer and Elizabeth Sliver. Which is as far as FamilySearch goes. However on Rootsweb there's a long descendency from Henry Rosenberger of Franconia. A Mennonite born in Germany around 1685. One line of the descendency ends at William and Elizabeth. Apparently all the information in this descendency comes from a book published in 1906 by an AJ Fretz. But I don't know AJ Fretz. I don't have the book. How much do I trust it?

I don't know the individual who entered the data at FamilySearch either so I don't know that Ebenezer's parents are William and Elizabeth. However, the county in Texas where Ebenezer got married does have the certificate, which might possibly contain some confirmation on that score; We'll see.

But it doesn't really answer my question. I downloaded the gedcom, and the Register, and told my mother she probably has a Mennonite minister as a direct ancestor. But I felt the need to insert the 'probably.'

French twist on surnames

A recently married woman in Quebec wants to change her surname to her new husband's name. However, she isn't allowed to by Quebec law.

In provinces where common law prevails, a woman can simply begin using her husband's surname after marriage. Armed with a copy of their provincially issued marriage certificate, a woman can easily acquire new identification for other documents such as a driver's licence.

But in Quebec, since a 1981 reform of the civil law, women are not permitted to adopt their husband's name at marriage, not even if they apply for an official name change.

link

The rationale given is 'gender equality.'

Procedures for any formal name change are very strict in Quebec, and the decision is up [to] the director of civil status. It requires a serious reason, such as difficulty of use due to spelling or pronunciation, or bearing a name that is mocked or that has been made infamous.

Reading this I think to myself, "this certainly makes things easier for genealogists," but then I find a letter to the editor a few days later. Apparently hyphenated surnames for children are a common solution, resulting in the following:

Their children will have to take her surname, his surname, or both. When their child marries the offspring of another couple married in Quebec, let's say a Sophie Gray-Bertrand, their grandchildren could be called Parent-Lamirande, Gray-Bertrand, Parent-Gray, Lamirande-Bertrand or any combination of these composed names - but only keeping two surnames.

When Caroline and Karl's grandchildren have children, the family surnames get further diluted, especially if these grandchildren also marry someone with a composed name, as they can only keep two surnames.

Imagine the convoluted family histories if all of their descendants opt for different combinations of these composed names.

Oy! Let's see. The sixteen surnames of my great-great-grandparents, assuming no name changes would be allowed: Newmark, Sundberg, Blatt, Wyman, Cruvant, Mojsabovski, Dudelsack, Perlik, Deutsch, Weiss, Lichtman, Adler, Van Every, Stuart, Heartley, Denyer. Which two would I choose? I wonder which two my siblings would choose. My cousins would have different choices.

Actually, we'd only have four surnames to choose from, depending upon what surnames our parents had chosen, and their parents. But everyone in my generation could have a different last name.

Family Myths: More on the Dudelsacks

The upcoming Carnival topic is: Confirm or Debunk: Family Myths, Legends, and Lore. For this topic I'm returning to my funny family surname which I discussed a few Carnivals ago. Dudelsack.

Myth:

Selig Dudelsack had several siblings. One brother, named Yidel, and one sister, named Toba, immigrated to the US, as did Selig. All three changed their surname at Ellis Island to something different. Selig chose Feinstein, Yidel chose Odelson, and Toba chose Oberman (or maybe married an Oberman…)

This myth comes from Selig’s youngest daughter, who was born in the US. I think she told the stories in the 1970s. None of her parents or siblings born in Poland/Russia were still alive.

Facts:

First, it wasn’t at Ellis Island. At least not Selig, and most likely not Yidel and Toba. It was Castle Garden. But that is a common mistake made with ancestors who immigrated pre-Ellis Island.

Second, the pervasive myth of name-changing at Ellis Island or Castle Garden is as unlikely with them as it was with anyone else. The myth is based on the idea that when an immigration official asked the immigrant their name, they either didn’t know what the question was, or decided to give them a different answer. This assumes that there were no translators available, and/or the only information the immigrant needed to provide to enter the US was a verbal declaration of who they were. It’s amazing that this myth is so ingrained in our collective minds that we don’t think about it rationally. I know I didn’t until recently. Of course they had translators. Of course they required documentation. Any name changes most likely occurred before or after, not during. Sure: changes in spelling are possible. But not entirely new names.

A)

A ship manifest for a Selig Dudersack has been located for 1890 which is the year that appears on the census reports for their immigration. No ship manifest for a Selig Feinstein has been found. But the argument that “I have never seen a black swan, so black swans don’t exist” is so common a logical fallacy it is taught in introductory logic courses and has its own name: The Black Swan Fallacy. One must be careful not to fall for it. There are black swans. (They're native to Australia.)

Selig Dudersack, for all appearances, traveled alone. But it's not unusual for a family member, especially the head of the family, to make the voyage first, and in 1891 there is a ship manifest that contains all the given names for mother, wife, and children. Can you guess the surname? Correct: Feinstein. The ages for the children are correct. The age for the wife is pretty close. The age for the mother is way off, by decades. Clerical error? No Selig though. It’s certainly still possible that one of two things happened. 1) After Selig immigrated, he changed his name to Feinstein, and sent communication overseas to his family who he knew would want to know. So they changed their names before immigration. 2) They made the decision to change their name before Selig left, but not in time for him to change his documents, so he traveled under Dudelsack, but the rest of the family had time to change their documents.
The only evidence that may exist for this is birth records and marriage records in Poland/Russia. Unfortunately, we don’t know what town they lived in. Selig’s wife, Anna, had a brother named Jacob. Jacob’s naturalization petition gave a town in Russia named Szdobirtzen. The certificate says Szdobeitzen, Poland. Either way, no one can find this town on a map. He immigrated several years after Anna and Selig so the town he came from, while likely the town Anna came from, isn’t necessarily. If we could find it though, it would be a starting place.

B)

Selig’s youngest daughter said that Yidel “Odelson” never had any descendants. So no one looked. I found a Judal Dudelsuck at Castle Garden, though. The Y/J spelling variance is common as there is no letter ‘J’ in Hebrew. Joseph is pronounced Yosef. Jacob is pronounced Yakob (or Yakov). I found a Julius and Jennie Odelsohn in St. Louis. Lots of Hebrew names were Americanized, and Julius isn’t too much of a stretch for Judal. What’s really interesting is that in 1910, Julius and Jennie are living next door to Selig’s oldest son, Harry. Julius and Jennie’s oldest child, Pearl, is married and living next door to a Aron and Tillie Oberman. (Remember Toba?) Relatives living next door to each other was common. Of course, non-relatives living next door to each other was even more common.

Pearl and Morris Feldman had six children. Julius and Jennie’s son Louis had a daughter named Bernice. That’s as far as I’ve gotten, though I have only been researching this thread since July. I’d like to find some descendants and see if they have family stories that match ours.

Update: August 30: I have found Tillie Oberman's death certificate. Not only do the given names for both parents on her death certificate match the parents of Selig, the informant gives her father's surname as "Duderzock." Not only is this what I am going to consider proof of all my assumptions, but a completely new spelling! (I guess someone could argue I don't have proof that Julius is Yidel. But I'd say the odds are high.)

Friday not-so-random Five

Haven't done this for a few weeks, but here's a list of five names from various census - all found at ancestry.com, and all on a particular theme which is likely obvious:

Phantom Williams – Rowan NC – 1920 – 13 years old
Hair Martel – Quebec – 1911 – 9 years old
Oklahoma Redwine – Bear Creek AR - 1910 – 21 years old
Fiddler Franklin - Cherokee, SC – 1900 – 1 year old
Singing in Water – Fremont WY – 1900 – no age given

How many of our ancestors are men?

NYTimes piece asks the question: What percentage of your ancestors are male?

Their answer isn't 50%. The article talks about how men die without reproducing significantly more than women, meaning we're descended from more women than men. And it goes into familiar areas on how men and women act differently based on biological needs. Some people believe this. Some people believe this is junk. Others, like me, don't really care.

I'm not sure I completely understand the math. I have one mother, and one father. Two grandmothers, and two grandfathers, etc. (Sure, there are ancestors with multiple spouses, but I'm only descended from one of them.) Less men may reproduce than women, but that just means men have to end up with more spouses than women. And even without the help of polygamous societies, I think there's evidence that that is true. Liz Taylor tried to even out the statistics, but she was unsuccessful. But each specific individual should have an equal number of male and female direct ancestors. And if we're talking collateral ancestors, it doesn't matter when they die.

Further, I can tell you that, while overall they may be right about today's society being descended from more women, in *my* family, there are more males. At least in recent generations. To the point that when my parents had their first child, and were told it was a girl, my father told the doctor, 'check again!' My father was one of three sons. My grandfather was one of three sons. In my generation there are 2 women and 6 men descended from my grandfather. My grandfather's brother also had two sons. So you're going to have a difficult time convincing me more of my ancestors are female.

update The NYTimes blogger updated and explained how one individual can have a different number of men/women in their ancestry. Incest. I'm sure if one goes back far enough in any line it's findable. The explanation he links to in the comments is better. If you go back enough generations you're likely to find duplicated individuals. Not due to incest, or at least not what society considers incest, since we're likely talking 3rd, 4th, or 25th cousins.

FamilyTreeConnection

I found an interesting genealogy website: familytreeconnection.com - Like many sites, it's free to search, but to actually view any of the records requires a subscription -- and they only offer it at an annual price. Inexpensive for an annual price - $29.95.

However, while there are lots of great small databases, and some people might find several documents, a search on my surnames yielded one record, for my great grandfather, who appears in a 1928 list of masons. I knew he was a mason. He states this in a 1926 bio for the Who's Who in North St. Louis. I was a little curious what other information appeared on the record, but not $30 curious, though.

However, it did spur me to do something I had thought about before, but hadn't yet done. I went to the Missouri Grand Lodge website, and on their 'contact' page, there's a form, which contains 'I have a genealogy related question' as an option. I sent a request for any information they had on my great grandfather.

They sent me his 'initiation' date, the date he 'passed'. and the date he was 'raised.' I don't know what these terms really mean, but that's ok. So I now know he was a member from 1919-1956. They also told me he was never an officer, though if he had been, I suspect they would have told me the dates there too.

From a simple google search, I learned that Cardinals ballplayer Rogers Hornsby was also a member of the same lodge at the same time. (At least he was playing baseball in St. Louis from 1915-1926 and 1933-1937, so I assume his membership in the lodge overlapped my great-grandfather's.)

Update: This page has more information on what to expect to find from Masonic genealogical queries. Apparently individual local lodges may have slightly more information than the regional Grand Lodges, but still not a lot of biographical information is retained.

I sent my query to the grand lodge since their website contact page had a specific option for genealogical queries; that looked promising. And their response was fairly quick. (3 business days I believe.) But still, even if I were able to get a copy of my great-grandfather's petition to join, the only pertinent information it's likely to contain is birth date and address at the time of petition, and I know both pieces of information.