QuiltnCowgirl

WOW! Are you for hire??? I just dream of doing my family's genealogy. I messed around some last year on Ancestry.com but never got any further.

crafty_linda_b

We have a family tree on Ancestry.com. My DH has his family on his Dad's side back to 1720!! He is like you and insists that all info is documented! We have seen distant relatives that "guess" about info and ad it in their family trees. Even his own neice had her GrGrandpa's name wrong..she said "well that's what Mom told me..and she was older than you are!!" Her Mom was my DH's older sister. We tried to explain to her that we are searching records and documenting all our entries..OH well maybe some day she will get a clue..it is really interesting to find all the info...my family on the other hand is not been easy to document. We paid for footnotes & mylife and there is alot of extra info in those sites. We have also had distant relatives contact us. DH had a 2nd cousin contact him and she sent us lots of old family photos and even sent him a little flannel gown & bonnet that her Gr-Aunt had make that was worn by his Dad & his sister who was her grandmother..we treasure that item! She also sent a little shot glass that has his grandfather's name engraved on it and dated 1911. Her Mother said DH's Dad had bought it for DH's grand father at a county fair. If you aren't into doing research I suggest you start!! It is just facinating...

Ramona Byrd

A couple of my first cousins went through our shared Grandma to join the DAR. The massive amounts of paper they sent me to get me to join was amazing. (No, none of my kids were interested, so I didn't. As of yet.) But copies of old documents are interesting. One GGGrandfather paid ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS to marry his wife, and he was obviously illiterate, since he signed the license with an X, which was of course witnessed. But that amount of money at that date and time? Strange.

Another letter from my Grandma's Grandfather, who joined the military in the Civil War and was frozen in in NC in 1862 or so, with 2 buddies. Had a Colored slave woman who did housework, said she asked them to pay her half in front of her owner, who took most if not all her money, the rest under the table. She gave it to her brothers who were going to Canada, all 3 men agreed. Said she was a good woman.

Interesting how history comes alive when you find out about them as people. My hard scrabble GFather is just a bare memory to me and a picture of a man with a black hat and pipe. Turns out he had brothers who were elected officials and business owners, real high toned folks but GFather was just a farmer. Don't know anything of his childhood.

And my his wife, my Grandma who raised me, I've just started wondering about some of her pictures. At the age of about 7, she was pictured in her home, a high middle class place, with her beautifully dressed mother and brother, and then wound up as a feed sack dressed hard scrabble farm wife!! What happened? I'll never know now, since her and my Mom's generation are all gone.

More power to you for doing such work for history. Good thing you are labeling everything.

One of DH's family did years of such work, had a big sack beside his easy chair that he was collecting stuff in, including pictures of old graveyards that he'd stomped through buck brush and poison oak to take pictures of. Come one night when one of his sons was late for a date but Mom ordered him to take out the garbage first. Well, you know what happened and that took the heart out of him, never did get all his work repeated.

gaigai

That is exactly how incorrect information is passed along. GOOD FOR YOU for not taking the easy way out!! (Big pats on the back and kudos!!) And don't give up on the hard ones. I was stumped on my dad's line for more than 20 years, until one day EUREKA!!! It can happen. In my case, I had the naturalization index (emigrated from Montreal) that listed my gr-gr-grandfather and his wife and children. His name was Edouard/Edward, and he had a son named Edward. He was listed in the index as Edward Sr. I couldn't find his father's name. Well, I never bothered to get the actual record because it wasn't going to give me any more information than the index. When I finally got around to having a local researcher get me the document, he pointed out that the index was incorrect, that the original document stated Edward's name as Edouard JR!!! So there went the brick wall tumbling down. It was kind of a Duh/Gibbs slap moment. Don't give up.

Ramona Byrd

Even his own niece had her GrGrandpa's name wrong..she said "well that's what Mom told me..and she was older than you are!!" Her Mom was my DH's older sister. We tried to explain to her that we are searching records and documenting all our entries..
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We have to remember that some of the census takers were themselves not too well educated, some might have been hard of hearing, and some might have had others transcribing their writing and gave it an entirely different spelling.

You're right, it must be documented over and over, from many different sources, then you can almost be sure it is accurate. But even in my own Father's family we have family suggestions that our name, BYRD, was spelled BIRD and an argument between two brothers in the early 1800s made one of them change the spelling of his name. Might have happened, might not have. I don't know at this time.

AND, pictures of my Grandmother's sisters surprised me no end. Their maiden name was Shaver, (I think) but when the sisters signed the backs of their pictures, there were THREE different spellings of it..Shaver, Shaffer, Shafer. And these were adults!!

Caroline S

I do the very same thing. It is easier for me to go to a well labeled binder then a file cabinet. But I do still have two lateral files of accumulated papers and stuff that have not been moved to binders.

Ramona Byrd

My whole family and I have wondered for years about where our father is buried. He walked out in 1952, never seen again except once by one of his brothers who didn't know he was missing.

Still wondering. Now and then I go to cemetary records in either California's high country (hints he landed there) or in Colorado where is only sister lived, and her actions, discovered after her death, made us think she knew where he was, near Golden, CO.

Mom, a sister and a brother all went to their graves, still wondering. Daddy Dearest, Leslie George Byrd, or, as we think, George Leslie Byrd, he said once he didn't like the way it sounded at first so changed it!! That's the way it is on my birth certificate...which is another thing. I had a lot of trouble finding it when needed for pass port, the clerk who found it in WV sent a chatty letter saying that for home births, this doctor did not register his births. That once or so a year his nurse removed them all and did the registering herself! So he could possibly have lost one or more. And he most likely was not alone in his
carelessness, which more than likely made a lot of problems for some of the babies he or his kind birthed, later in life.

gaigai

Remember Census records are not considered PRIMARY documentation, only secondary. As for name spelling, also realize that before the 20th century there really was no standardized spelling. It was not uncommon for a name to be spelled three different ways in the same document, or for family members to adopt different spellings of the same name. Thus, for someone to say "Our name is supposed to be spelled this way, but grandpa changed it" is probably incorrect. It is just that grandpa spelled it the way he thought it should be, and someone else spelled it the way THEY thought it should be, or the way they heard it. Spelling depended a very lot on the writer's education, and ethnic background, as well as how the name might have been pronounced by the people who were saying the name to him. Take the name "Desgranges" for instance. It is a French name, and the French pronounciation would be "Deh GROUNDJE". Imagine my surprise when my grandfather said "No, it's pronounced "DECK Rowch". Then it hit me: These people were from Alsace, where both French and German are spoken, but most people had a German, rather than a French accent. Now say the name as if it had a German pronounciation and it makes perfect sense. So, if you were looking for Desgranges in a census, you would also have to look for Deckrouch and other variations. Shaver, Shaffer, and Shafer would all have been pronounced the same way, so it didn't really matter how it was spelled in the absence of any standardization.

gaigai

If the family was Catholic, or perhaps from Quebec, this was not uncommon. In Catholicism, infants are baptized soon after birth. Because of infant mortality, it used to be that babies were baptized as soon as a priest could get to the house. And it was the rule that the first name HAD to be a saint's name. My grandfather, for instance, was baptized George Virgil, because Virgil wasn't a saint's name. But everywhere else for the rest of his life, including the CIVIL registration of his name, he was Virgil George.

In Quebec, it was very common for all the boys to have the same first name, and all the girls to have the same first name in baptismal records. So in one family the baptismal records may show the children as (for instance) John Robert, John Charles, John Sebastian, and the girls are Marie Anne, Marie Matilda, Marie Elizabeth, etc. In the family, the John and Marie are dropped, and used only as a middle name.