Many more to find....

So Newspapers.com is doing a free access weekend this week for Fathers' Day.  My gift year that I received for being an admin on Wikipedia expired in January, so I took advantage of the free access and did a few more searches.  I found some really good information on some of my cousin lines.  One that I want to highlight is the story of Eureka (McClure) Keyt.  In 1959, her family threw a large birthday party to celebrate her 99th birthday.

 

 

Eureka was my 2nd great grandaunt.  Out of all the party guests listed, I had only Grace Beach (my great grandmother and Eureka's niece) in my database already.  So now the task is to find how all the other 40 or so names mentioned relate to Eureka, and therefore how they relate to me.

Looking at a land patent

I’m doing a little researching around today to try to fill in some of the holes in my database from the 19th and early 20th centuries.  One of the resources that I purchased at the FGS conference recently was Family Maps of Montgomery County, Indiana.  I bought the book with the intention of looking up some of the original documents that were referenced within it.  Today, I finally looked up the records listed there in my direct line.

Surname Saturday: Curtis

So we get to look at another of the more common surnames in my research.  Although it is not among the top 100 surnames in the United States today (according to the Wikipedia article linked in a previous post), it is one that is still pretty easy to recognize and even at the closest relation, was among the earlier settlers of New England.  The youngest in this line in my research was my sixth great grandmother, Jemima Curtis.

One of many who served

Today is November 11, Veterans' Day in the United States.  Although I only got as far as a recruiter's office before deciding that I was too afraid to serve after all, there were quite a few other family members who did serve honorably.  One of them was my grandfather, Floyd Beach.  Here he is in his Navy uniform sitting outside an unidentified building near the start of his military career.

Surname Saturday: Beach

Okay, time to alternate back to one of the lines on my side of the family.  This week, we will look at one of the most heavily researched lines in my family.  It connects back to some of the earliest settlers of Massachusetts Colony and continues all the way to close family members who are still living today.  There are quite a few researchers looking into this line from the early-1800s back to the 1600s, possibly due to the line's connection to Sir Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill), so this will be a fairly long post with nine generations listed, but there seems to be one universal stumbling block when we go back far enough.

Surname Saturday: Allen

So today I'm going to start an overview of each of the surnames that I'm researching, looking at each surname one at a time.  I'll start with the names in my own lines first, going in alphabetical order.  That means that today we'll look at how the Allen surname connects into my research.

Not so Wordless Wednesday - who are these people?

The wordless part of this Wordless Wednesday post is that most of the people in this photograph aren't talking to me.  I know who a few of these people were (read more to see them), but who were the rest?

Black Sheep Sunday - fynes in New Haven colony

Yes, it's been a while since I last posted here, but now that a number of large commitments are passed, I have some more time to devote to my genealogical research.  I've been spending some of that time going through old photocopies and correspondence rereading them and re-entering information into my database.  While working through these documents, I found a few notes that fit perfectly into a Black Sheep Sunday post.

Probably not a royal connection, but Prime Minister...

When I started doing genealogy research, I got a postcard from one of my relatives suggesting that there might be a connection to Mary, Queen of Scots.  For the entire time that I had known of this family legend, I thought it was a bit too unlikely to possibly be true.  After all, I had only this one postcard to go on for this story, and I haven't seen anything in the rest of my research that might suggest a connection.  So I haven't really tried to prove this connection with very much vigor at all.  The closest that I've seen was in the 1925 history of Alexander Meharry's descendants, where it mentions that the Meharry line emigrated from Scotland to America as a way to flee religious persecution during her reign.  It may not be as glamorous a connection as a blood relationship, but this is one explanation that I can believe.

However, in looking around on a different topic this week, I found many resources that show a probable blood connection to another very well known British leader.  He wasn't an ancestor, but turns out to be a cousin.  Sir Winston Churchill (b. 30 November 1874; d. 24 January 1965), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 1940s and 1950s, was descended from Mehitabel Beach (b. 1749; d. 1807), who connects into my Beach line through her great, great grandfather, John Beach (b. 1621; d. 6 November 1677).  John was the first of the Beach line to live in North America, and making the leap back to the British Isles has proven very difficult for a number of researchers.  I'm still digesting the assertions and trying to fit various people into my lines.  So now I have another avenue to research in proving my distant Beach relations.

Finding the stones

As I was working through reviewing some of my genealogy records over the weekend, I thought I'd take a quick look at a site that I had been to long ago to see if there was any new information that might be of interest.  There was, and plenty of it.

The site in question is Find A Grave.  Basically, it's a database of gravesites and cemeteries showing memorial pages for more than 35 million grave records (that number is according to the bullet points on the site's front page).  Most of the people that I was looking for weren't particularly famous outside of the family, but I had a few successes this week.

Since I'd been looking at my Beach family line with the census records described earlier, I figured that would be a good place to start.  I opened the site's search form and put "Beach" for the surname, then filled in the fields for the "Cemetery in" dropdown lists as "United States" then "Indiana" and "Montgomery County."  Most of the records that came up in the search were direct relatives while a couple of them weren't yet listed in my own database.  Also, many of the records had photographs of the tombstones and their inscriptions.  I had most of the information that was mentioned on these pages already in my database, but a few of them did help fill in some years and dates that I was missing.  The grave marker photos also helped to add some color to my database, my favorite so far being the memorial stone for Nathan Beach and Mary Meharry, my 3rd great grandparents.

There is of course one strong caveat to the information on Find A Grave.  The website is not run by any governmental or civic authority.  It is run by individuals and allows contributions from the public to add content to the information displayed there.  Also, as much as we would like them to be, gravestones can have errors on them too.  Therefore, this website is definitely not a primary resource.  So, while I will take down information that I find there, I'll still keep looking for more resources to back up the data and further prove what I have in my own database.

He was a census enumerator

If you've listened to Genealogy Gems Podcast episode number 70, you've heard a little about my successes with searching in the 1930 US census this month.  The images of the census enumeration pages were made available for free for this month only at Footnote.com, so I figured I had nothing to lose except the time I used in searching for them.  I was looking at the page listing my great great grandfather, Jonathan Rice when I made this discovery.  By 1930, Jonathan was 73 years old and living alone in Linden, Indiana.  When I went to build the citation information to include in my database, the enumerator's signature (pictured) caught my eye.  A quick search of my database showed Everett Josiah Beach was my great granduncle.  Everett's brother Emerson married Jonathan's daughter Grace Rice to connect the two families on 17 Nov 1904.  So, knowing that Everett was in one of the families that I was researching, and knowing that he was an enumerator for the 1930 census, he must have been enumerated himself, right?  Almost -- I fell victim to one of my biggest frustrations with research done by computer.

My first search for him by name turned up no hits.  I set this task aside for a moment while I continued searching for other family members, but then thought of another way to search.  I tried expanding my search of the census index by removing the first name field from my search criteria, but adding "Indiana" to the state field in my search.  This gave me a list of 515 names on 183 census images to examine.  While I could look at each of these in turn, I didn't relish the thought of scrutinizing that many pages to find this one relative.  The next search criterion is the one that got me there.  I added "Montgomery" in the county field, which narrowed the search to 14 names on 2 census images.  The first image showed Emerson's household, while the second showed the household of "Eanstt J. Beach."  I thought that spelling was a little odd, and looking at the image, it was actually Everett's household, and he signed the sheet as enumerator as I had guessed he would.  The problem was that whoever read the page to create the index that Footnote was using misinterpreted Everett's handwriting and typed Eanstt instead.

The thing is, if I hadn't expanded and then narrowed my search on a different set of criteria, I wouldn't have found the indexing error.  That's what I dislike most about computerized indexes; they are exact to a fault in that if it's misspelled in the index, you've got to know the exact misspelling to find it.  Yes, I sent a note to the staff at Footnote to let them know of the error, and they did send me a note thanking me for the correction and soon had the entry updated to reflect Everett's name correctly.