Friday's Faces From the Past - Keeping Clues in Place

I thought I’d take a moment to quickly discuss the challenges of old photo albums. I’m not talking about those horrible ‘magnetic’ albums with the sticky pages and plastic that holds the photos in place, but those albums with black or dark brown ‘construction paper’ pages. They may be 100 years old, or older, and the photos in them may look fine but the acid in the pages are slowly degrading the images and the paper they are on.

As an Archivist, I’ve de-mounted my fair share of photographs and other items from albums and scrapbooks. It’s a tedious process but one that, in the long run, will preserve the materials longer. The key is in ensuring that the order in which the items were placed in the album is maintained. It is essential that this be done to maintain the context in which the photographs were added by whoever created the album.

Obviously if the images are identified you're well ahead of the game. Simply transferring the information to the back of the photo, using a photo pencil of course, is fine. But if there is no identification it becomes even more critical to keep the images in the order they were in the album. As we all know, it’s rare that someone puts random pictures into an album. While you might not know who are in the images, those 2^nd and 3^rd cousins that are out there may know, or you may realize through clues in the images themselves who is whom. It’s also possible there’s another album somewhere that may have images that are identified which will provide identification for your images.

So before you remove the images from the pages, scan or take a digital image of the entire page. Then as you carefully remove the images from the album use a numbering system to identify their location from the album. As you place the images in acid-free folders or in acid-free photo boxes, carefully note on the back with a photo pencil the location from the album.

I have a 3^rd cousin who removed unidentified images, many tin types, from a number of albums and when she presented them to me to scan, she had no idea who the people in the images are or which images had originally been together. I also found several photos my Mom had in her collection which are unidentified. There’s nothing more frustrating for a genealogist than to have these much older photos and simply have no clue who they are!

Thankful Thursday - Why Are YOU A Family Historian/Genealogist?

I thought this was worth revisiting. Much has changed since this was written. There is still healing to do, but we function as the team we are and we've learned to accept what we cannot change or control. The time we spend together has increased significantly, taking away time that I had been researching and writing. I'm going to try to create a better balance, a more even flow, and hope that readers will come back (the significant drop in views has been noted) with the re-focused slant to archives and genealogy with a less 'personal' touch.  

29 April 2012 - Why Would You Want to be A Genealogist

When I started this blog, I honestly didn't think anyone would be interested in knowing about my journey. I've been very pleasantly surprised about the support it's received. So many people have taken the time not only to read what's in this space but also to comment about it as well. For that, I am incredibly grateful. What's more, I've discovered not only am I sharing my journey, I'm uncovering myself in the process. 

As those of you who regularly read this blog know, I am sans family. Well, not completely without family, but I don't have children. It wasn't a choice but a medical condition that prevents me from having kids; my husband is not comfortable with adoption. When I first found out I shouldn't have children, I was devastated, but never shared that with anyone. It wasn't 'me' to share my feelings (hard to believe, right?!). Years past, and like any loss, the pain eased a bit. But I find that not having the opportunity to have children, as I so deeply want, has had other unexpected and sometimes unwanted consequences. 

My husband comes from a large family. He has four siblings and as of today, we have seven living nephews and nieces (one is deceased) ranging in age from 34 to 4 and seven grand- nephews and nieces. When I first met my husband, everyone was very close and we spent the vast majority of our free time with them. We were present at the births of three of our nieces and nephews, a privilege I never thought I'd have. We cared for our 'middle' nieces and nephew like they were our own, because in many ways, they were the closest thing we'd ever get to knowing what it feels like to have our own family. 

But, as with so many families, there was a disagreement. There was a member of the family who, quite frankly, didn't want to BE a part of the family. That person considered their family to just be a spouse and children. Didn't want the 'intrusion' of the rest of the family. So, this person systematically took down an entire family. It's incredible to look back on the series of events and realize that's what was happening. When it was all said and done, last summer, my husband's family fell apart to the point siblings pointed fingers at each other and said they were no longer siblings. How very, very sad. 

Over the last seven years or so, we stopped going to his family functions because they were just too awkward; frankly we'd stopped receiving invitations to things. My husband was always a bit philosophical about these kinds of things. I have to claim my feminine qualities for taking it much more personally; for admitting that my heart broke a little more each day we were pushed farther and farther out of the family. 

At the same time last summer my husband's family was splitting apart, my parents fulfilled their dream of moving to Arizona. While they've settled in and seem happy, my Mom has had a number of medical challenges, including two stays in the hospital. I don't have the financial resources to go back and forth to Arizona, so I haven't seen them in almost a year. Just last week Mom had to go back to the emergency room; my first thought was I just wanted to be there to hold her hand. I struggle with feeling guilty that I'm not there to take care of them at a time in their lives when they really need me. Except they chose to be in Arizona and are happier there than they were when they lived here.

I made a profound realization this week. The timing of my decision to restart my genealogical journey came squarely at a time when I felt abandoned by my family. I threw myself into my genealogical research and I decided to start this blog. I recognized, as an Archivist, that there simply is not enough education out there for family historians and Genealogists about how to properly care for and manage their own collections and I want to fill that void with the knowledge I've acquired. I brought people into my circle and I tried to get on a solid path to creating an archival and genealogical services business. Having worked in the financial industry, I recognized that keeping your business and personal lives separate is a key to success. But in the Genealogical world, those lines aren't so clear cut.

The other aspect of my realization is that, feeling abandoned by my family, I tried to create a family rather than a business. I so desperately want to be a part of a family that I subconsciously created one where one didn't exist. I put expectations on people that were incredibly unfair, and in so doing, harmed potentially beneficial relationships. Only time will tell if this tactical stumble will hurt me in the future with my business; I hope that my passion for the stories our ancestors have to tell and the desire to preserve the physical remnants of those stories will be what people remember. I am a skilled technician and an exemplary researcher; I have a significant drive to share that with others. 

I felt the need to share this story here because someday I hope that someone researching their family will have a greater understanding of why I'm so passionate about being a Genealogist. (As I say to myself) It's a family, dummy. 

Why did YOU become a family historian or Genealogist? I'd love to collect your stories too...

Wisdom Wednesday - Oral History Lessons

Oral histories. I doubt there are many family historians or genealogists out there who don’t wish they had an oral history in their arsenal of evidence. But oral histories, along with family records like bibles and compiled genealogies, can be very tricky. Not only can there be material errors, but the point in your research when you receive this information can be an important aspect of how it is analyzed.

Case in point: I have a family document that provides details of my Richards, Penn, and Sargent lines. It is one of the first documents I received from Thomas (Tom) Wersel back in 1996 when I first started doing my family research. As a new family historian, keeping in mind it was a time when the Internet and sites like GenWeb and Cyndi’s List were in their infancy, I ran with that document believing that all of it had to be true.

Fast forward about 5 years, and I’d become aware of the fact that it wasn’t the number of names in my database that was important but the quality of the information I was gathering. I ‘started over’ with a new database; not by choice but rather by a catastrophic failure of a computer hard drive and the poorly stored back up disks that failed to work. Lesson learned the hard way. I’d been provided family group sheets by a Professional Genealogist who shared my line and helped me uncover some rather serious inaccuracies in our Penn line (an entirely missed generation). I realized that this ‘hobby’ was one that required more work and knowledge than I had so I set the work aside and focused on other life projects.

I went to college, starting at 40, and learned about research methodology. Critical thinking. Resource analysis. I worked with an art collection creating detailed condition reports and on the papers of a professor at the University I attended, organizing and arranging them so that they could be used by other researchers. I was hired by a local company, as an Archivist, to work in a variety of repositories. And every time I looked at the collections I was working with I thought, ‘Wow, some family historian would kill to have this information.’

So, three years ago (how time flies) I dusted off my family history materials, fired up my laptop and stepped into a whole new world. A world in which documents, from repositories unavailable just 5 or 6 years ago, were available online and for free. A world in which individuals were able to put family trees on websites, along with documents and photographs, to be shared by other researchers. I found myself stumbling over people I’d contacted 10 years ago who were still at it, working a bit here and a bit there to fill in their family histories. And I came across a confounding number of places where work that I’d done long ago and far away had been copied and pasted into other trees, errors and all.

I wanted 'better'. I wanted better interaction between myself and the information I was gathering, better interaction between myself and other people with the same ancestors and to be able to find better ways to do my research. I spent 18 months in the Pro Gen Study Group (15) and learned more than I knew I needed to know. I went to conferences where I sat in rooms listening to people talk about methodology, resources, and the reasons there is a better way to perform genealogical research. I spent time with other family historians and genealogists learning that the shades of these labels are many and incredibly varied. And, I learned that there are detriments to what we ‘know’ to be true in our family histories.

Getting back to that family document, I now see it for what it is: a clue. Actually, tons of clues. Evidence to be analyzed along with all the other evidence I’ve obtained about the same individuals. (Here I’ll shamelessly plug Evidentia, a piece of software I fell in love with last year that captures this evidence to more efficiently analyze it. You can check it out here.) Most importantly, I learned that we don’t know what we don’t know and that adding *one* other document to the mix can completely change how we analyze what we thought to be true, or not true.

In going through my cousin’s family materials I found original letters that corroborated much of what was in my family document. It is, in fact, mostly accurate. So, I went from believing it, to not believing it, to being able to build a case around each piece of information being either accurate or not accurate. 

Yesterday I received a message from someone I’d connected with a year ago on Ancestry. She uploaded a document that discusses the Richards and Penn part of my family history that was also described in my family document. The document she uploaded is an oral history transcript taken from a woman in 1929. As I was reading this document I found myself thinking, ‘Oh, that’s not right.’ Except, how do I know that? I don’t know who the person was who provided this oral history. I don’t know how reliable she was as a source.

She discusses her great grandparents, the two Richards brothers who’d married two Penn sisters. She mentions an “Aunt Jennie”, the same name mentioned in my document. She says that these Richards men are German and possibly Jewish. Huh? Well, that can’t be. 

Except it could be because while my DNA doesn’t show any possible Jewish connection, my mother’s 23andMe profile indicates she has 0.1% Ashkenazi DNA. I initially thought this might be an error, and I guess it still could be, but now I have oral evidence that corroborates a possible Jewish connection. What’s important here is that, without the DNA, I might discount this piece of oral evidence. But I DO have the DNA, so anything is possible.

The oral history transcript is fairly long; eleven pages. Most of it doesn’t apply to my direct family, but I have to take it page by page to analyze each piece of evidence to see how it correlates to the evidence I currently have. Then, I’ll have to see how this ‘new’ information affects what I knew and what potential new areas of research I’ll need to be looking to in order to fully analyze what’s there.

What I do know is that this oral history partially supports the evidence in my family document in confirming that two Richards brothers married two Penn sisters. Is everything in this oral history accurate? There’s really no way to be certain. However, it contains a plethora of clues that can be used to locate other evidence. 

This still doesn’t provide what I need the most: corroborating evidence that John Richards and Mary Penn had a son, Randolph Richards. THAT piece of evidence may or may not exist; I’ll keep looking and hope that some other descendant has evidence that they’ll share. Have you found oral histories or family documents to be as confounding as they are helpful?