Who Do You Think You Are (US)

According to Reuters

If exploring the lives of celebrities seems a little tired, NBC has a solution: Find their relatives.

The network is developing an American version of the hit British series "Who Do You Think You Are," where stars are shown the oft-surprising details of their ancestors' lives.

In the UK version, the series uncovered backstories included tales of bigamy, wartime heroism and, in one case, attempted murder. Celebrity participants often are brought to tears as they learn about their relatives' hardships.

Randy presents a few ideas for celebrities, and asks "Who would you suggest? Who do you want to know the ancestry of?"

While it appears the UK version has focused on celeb's ancestral hardships, my personal choice would be Patrick Swayze. He's going through some personal hardships right now, and it would be great to uncover some information about his deep ancestry for him.

OK, who am I kidding? Depending upon how far back they go, his ancestors are mine. This is a selfish desire. And in that v(e/a)in, I'd like them to focus on proving or disproving the ancestry that OneWorldTree provides:

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400)
Thomas Chaucer (1367-1434)
Alice Chaucer (1385-1475)
Joan De La Pole (1436-)
Mary Stoner (1461-)
William Barantyn (1481-1550)
Margaret Barentyn (1500-1547)
Margaret Harcourt (1554-) *
Richard Of Astley Chamberlayne (1555-1601) *
Robert Chamberlain (1590-1639)
Joanna Chamberlain (1620-1711)
Mary Betts (1654-1734)
Judge Samuel Swayze (1689-1759)
Samuel Swayze Jr. (1712-1784)
Samuel Swayze (1737-1800)
James Swayze (1774-1840)
Alexander P Swayze (1808-1849)
James Wesley Swayze (1840-1893)
Jesse E Swayze (1890-1925)
Jesse Wayne Swayze (1925-1982)
Patrick Wayne Swayze (1952-)

* (obviously if these entries are accurate, the dates of birth/death are off a bit)

Joanna Chamberlain is the earliest ancestor the researchers at Sweezey.net have accepted, but their descent from Joanna matches OneWorldTree's. I should be happy with tracing a line back to 1620, but the potentiality the earlier ancestors present is too juicy. So, if the researchers NBC hires could carry it any further back, I would be *most* appreciative. It should be noted that Joan De La Pole is the daughter of William De La Pole, the first Duke of Suffolk, who gets mentioned in Shakespeare's Henry VI Parts I and II. That could make it even more 'compelling'.

Another fun guest might be Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame. Assuming not all celebrities are of the Hollywood type. Despite his surname he is not a known kin, though one never knows what one will find out in the future, so any research done for him might benefit me at some point.

Other than these two selfish interests, my only hope is that they find some interesting stories to encourage more people to research their history.

"When a society or a civilization perishes, one condition can always be found. They forgot where they came from." - Carl Sandburg

"If you can't get rid of the family skeleton, you might as well make it dance." - George Bernard Shaw

American Bottom

The RiverWeb:American Bottom Landing Site contains a large digital archive of artifacts related to the American Bottom region, defined as the area south of the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois rivers. This includes portions of St. Clair, Randolph, Madison, and Monroe Counties in Illinois. Most of the information on the site appears to be centered on the Cahokia Mounds, and East St. Louis.

I discovered the site looking for East St. Louis City Directories. They have several completely scanned, downloadable as PDFs, but also searchable online, with the usual OCR limitations. 1893, 1900, 1905-1908, 1912. The 1908, and perhaps some of the other directories, are bi-directional, in that they also organize the directory by street address, letting you learn who the neighbors were, or what store a family lived above.

The best way to search is to search the entire site, since there are other historical documents such as Bits and Pieces of East St. Louis History 1890-Present (c.2004) and the East St. Louis Blue Book for 1936.

I downloaded all the City Directories from 1905 on since several of my Cruvant kin are in those directories.

Impatience Redux

Two months ago, exactly, I was blogging about my impatience

I was concerned because it was January 7th, 2008, and the Missouri Death Certificate index still only went up through 1956. Not that any relatives died in 1957, mind you. It was all philosophical impatience. I realized however they weren't finished scanning through 1956, so I figured that was the hold up. The silly volunteer-scanners wanted to finish that first.

It's complete now. 1910-1957, indexed and scanned in.

One thing I really like about Missouri's death certificate index is their 'advanced search' options. You can input a string and indicate that the name begins, ends, or contains that string. That's very useful when dealing with surnames of variant spellings. For example, one of my surnames is "Cruvant" which can also be Kruvant, Cruvand, or Kruvand. So I just enter: ruvan and check 'contains'. All the results are displayed. I wish other online databases had this option.

I have found something new to be impatient about, and I might be impatient about it for awhile. An upcoming project for the Missouri Digital Archives appears to be their Penitentiary Records (1836-1939). It's so early in the project, all they have is the description. At least they're looking for more stuff to do.

Carnival of Genealogy

The 43rd Carnival of Genealogy has been posted, with lots of input on the technology we are using for our research - hardware, software and websites.

In honor of National Women's History Month, the 44th edition will focus on:

A Tribute to Women. Write a tribute to a woman on your family tree, a friend, a neighbor, or a historical female figure who has done something to impact your life. Or instead of writing, consider sharing a photo biography of one woman's life. Or create a scrapbook page dedicated to a woman you'd like to honor. For extra credit, sum up her life in a six-word biography

More Information

Something to add to my resume

This weekend I received an envelope of childhood mementos from my parents. Included was the contract to the left, which no one ever told me about. However, even without knowledge, I believe I have held up my duties as defined by the contract, and it does say lifetime, so it should still be good. Now I just have to apply for the backpay that is clearly owed to me.

Jackson County Marriages

Jackson County Missouri Marriage Index/Certificates

Jackson County is home to Kansas City, MO. This marriage index is completely up-to-date. (I have found marriages dated March 1, 2008 in it). You can also download a PDF or Tiff - your choice - of even the most recent certificates. (I downloaded one from May of 2006)

Logic Problem

A genealogist is researching two non-intersecting family trees. Members of one family always tell the truth, and members of the other family always lie. The genealogist comes to a brick wall. Standing at this wall is a member of each family, but the genealogist can't tell which family each belongs to. What question should she ask to break through the wall?

Sigh…to belong to families of all truth-tellers, or all liars. That would make research so much easier.

Deciphering an Occupation

Can anybody read the occupation on the left? It's obviously the newspaper industry, and some sort of agent. It references Samuel (aka Stanford) Ophan Van Every, a brother of my grandmother. Unless I am confusing two individuals with similar names, and it doesn't appear that I am, he was a conductor (railway) in 1910, and an optometrist from about 1922-1933, so he had a diverse career.

Route Agent as Karen suggests in the comments seems like an obvious choice now. I was trying to come up with something that began with a C or a P for some reason.

Squirrel Genealogy

On some days, I feel like a squirrel!

The Privilege of Ladies

Because leap years are seen as unusual events that disturb the otherwise orderly progression of days/months/years, certain beliefs have been attached to them. (One constant in the realm of folklore and superstition is that out-of-the-ordinary events are deemed to have out-of-the-ordinary consequences or properties.) Leap years, according to folk tradition, were the only times when women could propose marriage to men, with this belief often termed "The Ladies' Privilege." Yet even within this hypothesis there was disagreement as to how far it went -- a great many of those who encountered this custom did not see it as applicable throughout the length of a leap year, but only to the extra day itself; that is, only to February 29.

Another school of thought held that a man so entreated either had to accept the proposal or pay the refused woman a substantial forfeit for turning her down, such as a silk gown or £100…

I have two sets of grandparents who were married during a leap year -- though neither on LeapDay. The same leap year even - 1936. 18 leap years ago. My maternal grandparents managed it by the skin of their teeth on December 31. It's not clear who proposed to whom, or whether Leap Year figured into their plans at all.

Coincidentally, both marriages were conducted by a Justice of the Peace, with only the required witnesses. While all four participants lived in St. Louis, MO at the time, both marriages occurred in Illinois. No family members were in attendance at either one; primarily because family hadn't been informed. Both sets of my grandparents were married on a spur of the moment. A leap of love.

Wordless Wednesday: Proper Treatment of Source Material

Artist: Emile Bayard;
Illustration for novel, Ninety-Three, by Victor Hugo

Wordless Wednesday

Tuesday Tech †ip

þßƵë¿

I was planning on starting this series next week, but a quick post idea occurred to me.

Many genea-bloggers have ancestors from foreign countries which often use foreign characters in their character sets. You may know how to draw those characters in your own handwritten notes, and may even be able to get your word processor to reproduce them. However, you may not know how to blog them.

Here's a cheat-sheet.

In the first column you will see what the character looks like. The last column is a description of the character. The middle three columns provide three different codes you can use: "Friendly", Numerical, and Hex. Not every character has a 'friendly' code, which are easier to remember, but they all have the other two. [Note: link above updated from original link to a source with a more complete list]

For example

á is a "lowercase a acute". It is reproduced by typing: á (where that first character is an ampersand.) or á or á

My First ScanFest

Participated in my first ScanFest today. It was productive, and fun. I scanned 46 photos in total. The conversation among the scanners varied from lingerie to applying for SAR/DAR membership. Reminded me of my college days chatting on Relay. Things are a little different twenty years later, but not much.

Here's one photo I scanned. It's a personalized autographed photo of Chevy Chase. The picture is from his 1985 movie, Spies Like Us. The photo was obtained for me by a cousin in 1986 while I was in the hospital.

This is one of only two autographed photos I scanned today. I have a large collection of those, but most of them don't have special meaning beyond being autographed photos of mostly actors. The other I scanned was a photograph of US Representative William L Clay, for whom I interned during the Summer of 1990. He gave each of his interns an autographed photo at the end of the internship.

Unlike Chevy, he wasn't wearing a hat in his photo.




Here's another photo I scanned in - of myself. An uncle of mine was married in New Orleans, and a trip was made to a local store for everyone to buy a Mardi Gras mask - even though it wasn't Mardi Gras at the time. The photo on the left is clipped from a larger group photo, since I don't like posting photographs of living people without their permission. (Famous actors are an exception.) I wasn't surprised by it, but I could easily identify everyone in the entire family group shot - even though I couldn't see anyone's face. Clothes and body shape are sufficient if you know people well enough. But I also know that's one photo that has to be labeled, or it will be completely useless to future generations.

Technology

As a long time fan of SF/Fantasy novels and movies, I have learned from experience that genre movies don't win Best Picture, Best Actor, or Best Director awards. Fans must settle for Best Special F/X, Best Makeup, or possibly Best Soundtrack. There are the exceptions (2001: A Space Odyssey; Lord of the Rings) but the exceptions are rare.

Tonight is The Academy's night, and so it somehow seems appropriate that the theme for the 43rd Carnival of Genealogy is on technology, since the last Carnival focused on our Best of Awards. (It also seems just like yesterday that the 42nd Carnival concluded, but February is a short month.)

What technology do you most rely on for your genealogy and family history research?

Select one piece of hardware (besides your computer)

This isn’t difficult. Besides my computer, the piece of hardware I currently use the most is a microfilm reader. There are a lot of records that haven’t been scanned in, haven’t been indexed. They know me by now when I enter the Special Collections department.

One web site/blog (besides your own) that is indispensable to you.

Ancestry.

If I had to recommend one database subscription site to someone, this would be it. Others have been useful, but it’s hard for me to imagine where I would be without Ancestry – from what I have learned through their databases and forums.

One piece of software (besides your internet browser)

This is where I am most likely to deviate from a lot of answers.

MediaWiki.

I have set up two family wikis – both password protected – one for my mother’s family, and another for my father’s.

Here’s a view of the the homepage of my mother’s, as well as one entry on the site.



The images should look familiar to anyone who has experience with Wikipedia or any of its cousins. It uses the exact same software. The original theory behind installing the software was to facilitate other family members helping me in recording the information.

Theory and practice aren’t always the same. I think only one edit has been made so far by anyone except me. However, even when a cousin sends me an email with text for me to put onto a page, that’s helpful. And it’s easier for me to update a wiki than it is to update other types of family websites.

I've uploaded images of almost every document I have found. Most of the more recent entries have several photographs on them.

One might argue this hasn’t helped my ‘research’. However, I think one genealogy-obsessed cousin was impressed enough by it, and pleased with the password-protection, to send me her entire register. (And I have respected her wishes and not blogged any information for which I am indebted to her.)

I’ve been meaning to do a series of posts on my knowledge of and ideas for websites, including a few more snapshots of our wikis. Hopefully I will get a round tuit soon.

Another President!

Too many of these posts and people will be paraphrasing line 230 from Act III Scene II of Hamlet.

However, while this isn't the reason I am researching my family history, I believe I have found support for at least one more, and I'm close to another of the 'famous people' Ancestry's One World Tree claims my grandmother, Myrtle Van Every, was related to. I've had fun laughing at some of the impossible family trees the OneWorldTree software draws, but the lousiest ball player will occasionally hit the ball.

(And researching both hits and misses can result in extending lines further back)

Alas, the hits are not necessarily the hits I'd have chosen.

According to this Genforum post, the book "Ancestors of American Presidents" claims the Eddye family is related to three Presidents: Ford, Benjamin Harrison, and Fillmore. I already knew about Harrison since the Van Every's intersect slightly more recently than the Eddyes. There are a couple unproven generations on my grandmothers side still for Fillmore. But if the book is accurate, Ford was 'definitely' my mother's 8th cousin. (I bet she wishes she knew this when he was alive.)

The book was researched by Gary Boyd Roberts, who seems to have some credentials. Senior Research Scholar for the New England Historic Genealogical Society sounds impressive. Since he seems to be known as a scholar, I expect the book to cite sources. It's out of print, though. I can buy it at Amazon for $300. Or I can browse through it at either the St. Louis County or St. Louis City library next time I go there. I think I'll do that. It's supposed to contain the ancestries of all the Presidents (Since it was published in 1995, it might include Clinton, I'm not sure.)

Find a library near you that has it

Ancestry Facts

Several of the charts and tables that can be found in the Name in History books that Ancestry publishes can be found on Ancestry for free. Even for many surnames that aren't popular enough to have books. (Link to extensive review of the contents of one such book.)

On the main index page of their Learning Center, if you scroll down you will see "Facts About Your Surname", and an input box to enter your surname.

You don't need to have a paid Ancestry account - though if you do, there are links to the databases for the actual records, which of course the books don't have.

ScanFest - Feb 2008

AnceStories has announced the upcoming ScanFest. This will be the first one I participate in. If I do my time zone math correctly, it will be from 1 pm to 4 pm Central Daylight Time.

I have reread Sally Jacobs' "8 Blunders People Make" and cleared some albums of photographs I wish to scan. There are probably more than I can scan in 3 hours, but whatever I accomplish will be more than I would have probably done anyway.

I don't believe it's too late to sign up now, and you don't have to be a blogger to do so - Miriam includes instructions in her post.

The answer is 42

The 42nd Carnival of Genealogy has been posted. 23 Geneabloggers have chosen their five best posts from 2007, creating a Best of the Best carnival. Since I started blogging midway through the year, and there are several bloggers in the group I have only been reading recently, a lot of it is new to me. Which is good.

The theme for the 43rd Carnival has also been announced:

Technology. What technology do you most rely on for your genealogy and family history research? Select one piece of hardware (besides your computer), one piece of software (besides your internet browser), and one web site/blog (besides your own) that are indispensable to you...The deadline for submissions is March 1st.

Read the post for full instructions.

Houston, We May Have A Problem...

The 24/7 Family History Circle posted, as it usually does, What's New at Ancestry

On the list was: Missouri Birth Records, 1805-1980 (Updated)

1980?!

I quickly went and typed in my own surname.
The results turned up 1 person born in 1889, and 3 appearances of another born in 1909.

I knew about the latter, as I discovered her on the Missouri State Archives awhile back. She's a daughter of Sol Newmark and Sarah Nathan (the couple married in the Great Synagogue of London in 1901.) She didn't live long enough to appear on the 1910 census. The 1889 individual wasn't in the State of Missouri database, though I don't know why not. I was aware of Newmarks in St. Louis prior to our family, and they either died or moved before we showed up. I haven't yet figured out whether or not they were related.

However, no other Newmarks appared in the results, and this was supposed to be 1805-1980. That suggested some serious gaps. My great grandfather, Barney, his brother Sol, and other brothers Max and Israel, all reproduced some more, and there were many grandkids. And great grandkids, too.

Since Ancestry allows you to search on just one field, and allows a +-20 year search, I made that the field, and discovered there was a grand total of 4 records between 1940 and 1980. (One of which was a birth certificate from California!)

A little more research revealed there was 1 entry for 1934, another for 1933, and 5 for 1932. I think more than 7 people were born in Missouri from 1932-1934.

In 1931 there's a sudden explosion of results: 50.
In 1930: 509
1929: 1609
1928: 3536

I'm not quite sure what's going on, as in 1912, the year my grandfather Melvin Newmark was born, there is only one entry. Not him.

I suspect some counties in Missouri may have released some more recent records. The big question in my mind, since there is a significant, if not completely sufficient, privacy window between 1934 and now, is those four *certificates* from 1951, 1966, 1973 and 1980.

I sent Juliana at Ancestry an email notifying her of this issue.

Please, no more, we're done!

The compilers of Confucius' descendants have been working for ten years, and have finally decided they're finished.

"We have received more than 1.3 million new entries and already stopped soliciting new ones."

The database is closed, for now, and since this is only the fifth time they have ever updated the list, if you didn't get on it, maybe your great great grandchildren will.