52 Ancestors Challenge Week 6

     For several years fellow blogger Amy Johnson Crow has been running a genealogy challenge that has seen increased popularity in the last couple years. Over on WikiTree, they have decided to pick up this challenge and issue a weekly open-ended prompt on the message boards. Each prompt is designed for members to discuss and respond with an ancestor or story that fits with that week’s prompt. In addition to answering over on WikiTree's G2G forum, I'll also be answering here in a more complete form.
     "Surprise" is the topic for the sixth week of this challenge. I was a little late for this challenge but was happy to get back into the swing of things.
     One of the bigger surprises for me when I was a novice genealogist was the lack of records from the early 19th century in much of North America. I had imagined that the large religious drive that prompted much of the early settlement would translate into well-kept records.
     In addition to the religious undertone of early American life, I would have assumed that time would also help establishe decent records. With the colonization of the American continent beginning in the 17th century, I would have assumed better records would be available for residents nearly two centuries later. While there are intermittent church and town records during this time, they are hardly consistent and vary widely on what and who was recorded.
     I feel that I can often find better records from the same time in Europe, and better records begin appearing again around 1870 to 1880 in the United States. This has created kind of a donut hole in records where I can find information about a grandparent and grandchild, but little information on the middle generation parent. I feel like this is the culprit for many of my brick walls.
     A smaller surprise that I have encountered is the amount of high inter-marrying in early American towns and villages. I’ve experienced two or three families marrying at various points in time. Most of the time I am sure they knew of the closeness of the families, but other times, I’m not so sure. While this doesn’t have a huge impact on my research, it does create some very complicated – and difficult to trace – family lines, often with naming conventions that even further confuse.
- Patricia
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52 Ancestors Challenge Week 5

     For several years fellow blogger Amy Johnson Crow has been running a genealogy challenge that has seen increased popularity in the last couple years. Over on WikiTree, they have decided to pick up this challenge and issue a weekly open-ended prompt on the message boards. Each prompt is designed for members to discuss and respond with an ancestor or story that fits with that week’s prompt. In addition to answering over on WikiTree's G2G forum, I'll also be answering here in a more complete form.
     This weeks' theme is "At the Library".
     This one was a more difficult topic to tackle because I could not recall a good relative for the subject. My initial train of thought went towards ancestors who may have been librarians or architects that may have built a library. Perhaps a person who attended a dedication ceremony or a prolific library volunteer.
     After a day of waffling back and forth on the topic, I settled with Marcius Denison Raymond, the author of “Gray Genealogy,” the 1887 genealogical record of the Gray family in early America. This book, which I’ve written about way back when, was one of the first jumping off points I had in genealogy. It was really like opening the door to Narnia for my research potential.
     In contrast to many other anthologies that you find in the genealogical world, Raymond’s book does not carry a numbering system that you frequently find in other works. While this may seem complicated, Raymond is incredibly articulate on who these individuals are and from whom they are descended. He has included copies of historic family letters as well as contemporary letters from his correspondence compiling the book.
     Beyond this work, Raymond was the author of several other genealogical books, papers, and lectures both on the Gray family as well as his Raymond line.
     Despite this seemingly full-time work load, Raymond was employed as the editor and publisher of two newspapers in upstate New York.
     More information about Marcius D Raymond can be found on his Wikipedia or over on his WikiTree.
- Patricia
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52 Ancestors Challenge Week 4

     For several years fellow blogger Amy Johnson Crow has been running a genealogy challenge that has seen increased popularity in the last couple years. Over on WikiTree, they have decided to pick up this challenge and issue a weekly open-ended prompt on the message boards. Each prompt is designed for members to discuss and respond with an ancestor or story that fits with that week’s prompt. In addition to answering over on WikiTree's G2G forum, I'll also be answering here in a more complete form.
     This weeks’ theme is "I'd like to meet".
     My beautiful grandmother, Harper Edwards, is the person I would most like to meet out of my ancestors.

     While she died several decades before I was born, Harper was probably the earliest figure who sparked my interest in my family’s history. Known in our family simply as “Ma Gray,” when my father passed away, I realized I’d never learned what her true name was and there was almost no one available I could ask about these things.
     After my father’s death, I began searching for who exactly this mystery woman was that my father spoke of so highly.
     Born in northeast Texas in 1894, Harper was the 8th of 11 children. Her family moved from the Clarksville area to McCulloch County, Texas where she married my grandfather, Washington Gray. Together they would have ten children over the next 24 years.
     For most of her life, Harper was a dutiful wife and mother. After her husband’s untimely death in 1939, Harper was left to raise their younger children as a single mother. She entered the workforce and eventually moved to El Paso around 1955 where she worked as a nurse’s aide until her death in 1963.
- Patricia
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52 Ancestors Challenge Week 3

     For several years fellow blogger Amy Johnson Crow has been running a genealogy challenge that has seen increased popularity in the last couple years. Over on WikiTree, they have decided to pick up this challenge and issue a weekly open-ended prompt on the message boards. Each prompt is designed for members to discuss and respond with an ancestor or story that fits with that week’s prompt. In addition to answering over on WikiTree's G2G forum, I'll also be answering here in a more complete form.
     This is the third week of the challenge, but the first week that I am joining in on the action. I am excited to see where exactly this challenge will end up taking me in my tree and research.

     This weeks’ theme is "Unusual Name".

     Names tend to go in and out of fashion, albeit slower than clothing or other trends. Looking back through my tree there are some unusual names such as Earskin, Methodite, and Vitallis. However, the name that I chose for this week’s challenge was Blackleach Burrit.

     Our relation is null, however, his daughter Diantha married my first cousin five times removed in May of 1793 if that is any consolation.



     I chose Blackleach Burrit out of all the other names I had to choose from because I feel his name is Puritanical in nature, fitting in with his overall personality and character.

     After graduating from Yale College in 1765, he studied in Connecticut for three years to become a preacher under Rev. Jebidiah Mills before being licensed for the Congregational Church in February of 1768. His growing family soon moved to New York in the early 1770s and he became notable for his extemporaneous preaching during the Great Awakening.

     In addition to being an evangelical preacher, Blackleach Burrit was also an early American Revolutionary. By 1779, Blackleach’s work had brought him back to the Congregational Church in Greenwich, Connecticut. From this pulpit, he would take the cause of American support. Angering the British with his political stance, this would lead to his arrest in June of 1779 and subsequent imprisonment of more than a year at the Sugar House Prisons of New York City.

     By October of 1780, Blackleach is recorded as preaching once more in New York. The next decade sees the family continue to move around New York and Connecticut following the work of Blackleach. Blackleach’s wife dies in 1786 and he remarries in about 1790. His last appointment was to the Congregational Society of Winhall, Vermont beginning in January of 1793. During the early autumn of 1794, he passed away.

     Blackleach was prolific in both preaching and family, the father of 14 children total – 12 with his first wife, Martha Welles, and two with his second wife, Deborah Wells.

- Patricia
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Why Organizing by Person or Family Name is a Bad Idea


     The most common question I see in various genealogy groups is an iteration of:

"How should I organize my files?"

Invariably, I will see someone mention they organize either by person or by family name. These methods will either use a folder for Smith Family with all Smith family documents located inside, or they might organize by person with individual folders for John Smith, Sally Smith, Susie Smith, Juan Smith, and so on with each person’s information found inside.

My biggest issue with both systems is marriages.
  • What about when Sally Smith marries Don Hardy?
  • Is she moved from the Smith folder to the Hardy folder?
  • Where would the census for her be located?

Using a system that organizes by name, I would go to a person's folder to look for their information. But once they marry, where is the document? With the wife or husband? Now we face the question of duplicating information so we can find it for both the wife and husband. Things just get complicated this way. We do not want to take this route.

Another issue I have with these systems is the size and scalability of this format. This might work if you have just a few hundred people who share a dozen or so surnames. However, moving beyond this size, a person begins to get overwhelmed by this system.

Currently, my database holds 2,058 individuals with 462 surnames. If I were to follow the above formats, I would end up with thousands and thousands of folders to search through for the correct record I need.

Database management is tricky and there are as many schools of thought as there are people using computers. In the end, using what works for your needs is best, but also keeping in mind where the research is taking you and future needs is key for long-term success.

- Patricia
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Why I Cancelled my Ancestry.com Account for Good

     After over a decade using Ancestry.com, I finally decided to break off my relationship. There are many reasons that I finally gave up in favor of utilizing other resources, and none were really the be-all-end-all.

1. I research sporadically.
     There might be a few months time where I am not able to sit and research actively on the site. With a child, husband, pets, etc. I just do not always have the time to regularly research. Because of this, I cannot see paying a monthly subscription (as of this writing it was $40 for six months or $20 for one month) that may or may not get used. Especially when that $20 could be quarters for the laundromat.

2. Once you have paid for access to a document, you do not retain access to it once membership lapses.
     How awesome is it to have access to your great grandparent’s birth certificates or death certificates? Then once six months is up, you no longer have access to these files on their website unless your membership becomes active. This was probably the biggest issue for my situation. I have a few thousand people in my tree and with some of the individuals, I have really struggled with finding their associated records. Having them suddenly yanked from me once my paid membership is up was unexpected. It left me in no better of a position with my research than before I had paid for a membership as I did not download all the documents the first time I had access to them. I know better now!
     This being said, you can certainly download them to your own computer to have a personal copy. However, if you then try to only use your personal media rather than Ancestry’s media to circumvent this issue, it will always give you “hints” for life events for which you already have the media. See below for my hangup with their "hint" system.

3. Duplicated efforts.
     Site wide, you will run into the same person in multiple family trees. Users will often share their trees with you, allowing you to see what their research looks like. Often times, the information is not substantiated with any sort of documentation or has been copied from other trees that were in turn copied from another tree.

4. Privacy
     After finding a long-lost branch of the family on the Ancestry.com message boards, I passed on information about living individuals, with their permission, via email correspondence under the assumption that it was private and would be beneficial in getting two close relatives in touch with one another. I was shocked and saddened when this person breached my trust by posting the information to public forums, including the town I was currently living in and my child’s name and age. While using another website will not protect me from this type of issue, using a website the automatically hides living individuals does cut down on this significantly.

5. Hints
     Ancestry is known for their shaking leaf signal on individual profiles to indicate that a 'hint' has been found for you by their system. These could be anything from actual census or school records, which are incredibly helpful, to a photocopy of a receipt that another user uploaded and tagged incorrectly, which is not helpful at all. Also not helpful are the proliferation of separate trees within Ancestry. Because everyone keeps their own tree, so much inaccurate information is collected for these shared ancestors. With Ancestry pushing these often times inaccurate trees as 'hints' to others, many users think this information is verified by Ancestry -- which is not the case at all.

     As I said earlier, there are many reasons I gave up my paid subscription to Ancestry. This is not to say that I do not still use their resources. From my local library card, I am able to access Ancestry Library which does circumvent some of the above-mentioned problems.
     My biggest hang-up with Ancestry revolves around the fact that much of the material they offer via paid subscription can be found elsewhere.
     Ancestry was a great start for me, but with the increasing availability of resources, it is rapidly becoming an outdated method for conducting basic genealogical research.
     What are your thoughts on paid services? Where do they fit into your research?

- Patricia
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A Big Help

     About two years ago I was looking for information on Russell Gray and Joyce Ferguson (these are the parents of George Washington Gray, GW Gray being the father of Washington Gray), and came across their name mentioned on page 115 of Gray Genealogy: Being a Genealogical Record and History of the Descendants of John Gray, of Beverly, Mass., and also Including Sketches of Other Gray Families.

     That is a ridiculously long title, but the book has been priceless in helping me with this genealogy. I have since ordered myself a copy of the book from Amazon for around $23 or so, but a full transcription of the book is available here. It's a little overwhelming to scroll through it all, so using Ctrl+F to search is the easiest way to find what you're looking for.

     The reference that I found was this:
RusseL F. Gray, son of Daniel H. and Phebe Godfrey
Gray, b. 1824, in Berlin; removed with his father's
family to Texas; mar. Mrs. Ferguson, 1848; she died
and he mar. again; residence, Llano, Llano Co.,
Texas; children:
Delilah Gray, b. Jan., 1849.
Robert Gray, b. Feb., 1850.
Washington Gray, b. 1 85 1 .
Wilburn Gray, b. March, 1852.
Lizzie Gray, b. 1855.

     This might be a little ambiguous on it's own, however I have a copy of George Washington Gray's death certificate that lists his father as Russell Gray and his mother as Ferguson. GW Gray's birth date is also noted as 1851 on his death certificate.

     From this positive connection I've been slowly going back trying to find the paper trails for the nine generations that have been chronicled in the book. The author, a noted genealogist, makes plenty of notes about where he found his information and hopefully retracing some of his steps will not be difficult.
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