An Irish blessing

Boy, there are a lot of Irish blessings out there, aren't there? It seems the Irish are always wishing good things on others. I am half Irish by way of my paternal grandfather and maternal grandfather - my great-grandfather, Timothy Ambrose Cronin, born in County Cork, Ireland in 1879 is my most recent Irish ancestor. Because he told my grandmother and my grandmother told me that he saw a leprechaun as a young lad in Ireland, I defended leprechauns as being real, not imaginary like unicorns or fairies (ok, the Irish would argue that fairies are also real, I suppose), in front of my whole class as a young girl. And I was a shy kid, but I did not want my teacher and classmates passing around wrong information.

I am not embarrassed by that moment at all. I taught my 3 year old daughter about leprechauns this week. My grandmother, who passed away almost two years ago at the age of 99, insisted until the end that leprechauns were being mischievous in her home. I believe her.

Though I often identify most with my German side, I sometimes feel very Irish. I look Irish. I inherited a bit of the Irish superstitious nature. I enjoy laughter and storytelling late into the night over a couple of pints. My daughter and son are only a quarter Irish but I hope they'll be proud of their heritage as well - I think my great-grandfather and grandmother would be happy to know that my daughter spent today wishing everyone a "Happy Patrick's Day" and looking for leprechauns. And with that, I leave you with one of many, many Irish blessings wishing you only good things in life, because even if you're not Irish by ancestry, today everybody is Irish in spirit!

A glimpse into a life lived: Obituary for Joseph J. Raynor

Obituaries are one of my favorite genealogy resources. A well-written obituary can tell you not only when and where your ancestor died (obviously), it can shed light on a spouse's maiden name, a daughter's married name, where a person was born, their parents' names, when they immigrated, what they did for a living, where they are buried, the names of all their children, the names of their grandchildren. They can clue you into someone's remarriage, what they died of, their standing in their community, if they belonged to any social, political or business organizations. A well-written obituary can tell a story, giving you a glimpse into the life your ancestor lived. Below is an obituary from The Nassau Daily Review-Star that I recently found for my great-great grandfather, Joseph J. Raynor. He died January 6, 1944 in the same house in which he was born. He spent his life working as an oyster planter and oysterman, a trade he learned from his father at a young age. It was a trade that was the heart and soul of the 19th century Long Island waterfront community in which he grew up. The obit mentions two of his grandsons who are serving in the military, as World War II is currently raging - Monroe Raynor, who was in the Army and stationed in Lousiana, who would end up serving in Europe, and Clifford Raynor, who was in the Navy and stationed in Rhode Island, who would end up serving in the Pacific Theater. Clifford was my grandfather. Anyway, if you've already looked for obits and haven't found them, look again! That's how I found this one - you might learn something new, you might not. You might end up with a smile on your face, picturing your great-great grandfather as a little boy, running after his father along the water's edge, sitting on a boat with him, living life.

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Joseph J. Raynor obituary from January 6, 1944.

PS Just an interesting, weird note. I have two great-great grandfathers who both died on January 6, 1944 - same day, same year. Weird, right? I used to think it might be a typo, a transcription mistake, but it's not. Not a good day for my family!

Ancestry.com, why has thou forsaken me?

Sorry...the title of this post is a little dramatic, I know. I just needed to rant a little bit. I love Ancestry.com. I think it is an invaluable resource to genealogical research, providing access to millions of records, right at your fingertips, that would've been difficult to impossible to access 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 years ago...even six months ago. Ancestry helped mainstream genealogy research. I won't get into how Ancestry's opening genealogy to the general population has also muddled true, accurate research...this post is about how Ancestry.com makes it difficult to foster that interest in genealogy.

Confused yet? I was recently working with a client, and part of what I was hired to do was create an online family tree for this person on Ancestry.com. Now, as recently as a couple of years ago, this was super easy to do, even if you didn't have an Ancestry subscription. While a paid subscription is required to access 95 percent of Ancestry's website, features like its message boards and online family trees (and now AncestryDNA) were always free, and easy to use. It behooved Ancestry to make these features free and easy - if a non-subscriber created a family tree on Ancestry.com for free, and saw all the hints they got, and were able to see other users researching the same people and were able to connect with these people, it got them EXCITED about doing MORE research, serious research...research they would need an Ancestry subscription for. Well, no more. First, the landing page to Ancestry as someone without a subscription is the subscription sign-up page, instead of the homepage. I couldn't even find how to make my client a registered guest (the free version to use Ancestry). I had to google "Ancestry registered guest" which brought me to one of the FAQ pages...frustrating beyond belief. THEN, when I went to start their tree, I input one person, input his wife...and then couldn't input the father. Or the mother. And couldn't click on the person I originally input. When I refreshed the page, all my info was lost. So I input it again. Same deal. Tried something else to get to the individual's page to add some more details, and lost all my info again. 30 minutes later and my client's online tree consisted of ZERO information. I finally had to start his tree on one of my family tree programs on my computer, save it as a GEDCOM file, and then upload that GEDCOM to Ancestry. That FINALLY worked. Created and saved the tree, and 125 individuals later, found out that my client couldn't view any other trees without an invitation from the tree's owner (even PUBLIC trees - so much for being public) and without a subscription, couldn't contact a tree's owner, and therefore couldn't ask for an invitation to view his or her tree. So much for being able to connect with cousins and share information. My client was frustrated, not excited, about his family tree, and to be honest, so was I. A huge part of genealogy for me is the sharing of information, the building of a tree, the merging of trees, with the help of others.

Anyway, this incident has really made me rethink whether or not I'll continue to offer this service. In the future, I might recommend people create online family trees on a completely free website like FamilySeach - I'm not sure the community is as huge as on Ancestry, so there might not be as many other trees to look at and connect with, but at least it'll be easy to share your tree with friends and family, and to build your tree in the first place.

Here endeth the rant. It's Friday, everybody - take it easy and enjoy your weekend!

DNA connection: Peter Lafrentz

Using DNA to make family connections is really trendy in genealogy right now, and rightly so. Even though it's still somewhat in its infancy and many people (myself included) don't really understand how it works or what it really means, it does provide concrete connections to individuals who are related to us, possibly way way back on the ole' family tree and helps us to establish some kind of genealogical road map when the paper trail ends. A lot of my DNA connections (I took the autosomal test through AncestryDNA, though I also uploaded my results to FamilyTreeDNA) confirmed my descent from Jacob Raynor and Rebecca Raynor, which is both exciting and disappointing - exciting because it's always nice to confirm or reaffirm what we know or what we think we know, but disappointing because for me, that connection was never in doubt. I KNOW I am their descendant. The Raynors are no mystery to me - they are my most researched branch. I made a connection on my Berg branch, which was nice, but boring, because the person who I connected with genetically and I had already been in contact years ago and made the paper connection very easily. Another hit I had was on my Reinhardt line, which was a pleasant surprise. Though they've become well known to me and I knew OF the person I connected with, I don't know a whole lot about them or my cousins on that line. While I didn't much doubt that line, it was a nice confirmation of research I had done on my own, and that wasn't handed down to me by my grandmother.

I have had some really pleasant surprises, though, some who connected genetically to me and some who connected genetically to my dad (since my dad and I connect genetically, anyone who connects to him genetically is also a relative of mine, even though we might not have been a genetic match - god, genetics is confusing!). Today I want to mention one of my dad's connections, which is his seventh-great grandfather, Peter Lafrentz of Stinstedt, in Cuxhaven, Lower Saxony, Germany. I discovered Peter through my own original research with the help of a distant cousin who provided me with transcribed pages of a German church book and family book, which are transcriptions themselves of original church or family records - they don't go into much detail about each person but they trace many families back generations, all the way through the late 1500s sometimes, with parents, dates of birth, marriage and death, as well as places for each - it's all very well organized and another reason I really connect to my German side - if you have German roots, try to find one of these books for your family! They are invaluable! Anyway, to have Peter turn up as a DNA connection was a HUGE confirmation that the paper trail I had followed, even though it was a secondary source trail, was correct. I don't know anything about Peter. I know that the town he came from is on the north coast of German, about 40 km northeast of Bremerhaven, a huge immigration port. Peter was born there about 1703 when it was a part of the Duchy of Bremen, though it was also ruled by the Swedish and the Danish (it's located not far from the border of Denmark and is in a part of Germany that saw a lot of Scandinavian occupation) before falling under the rule of the Hanoverian Crown. So it was a time and place of transition of authority. It was also a place of transition of religion from Roman Catholicism to Lutheranism back to Catholicism then back again. Seeing this physical connection to such a distant ancestor (I have many distant ancestors on my American lines from this time period but for some reason, because Peter lived in Germany, it feels further back!) makes me want to know more about him - what did he do for a living? What was his life like? What was his world like? On that line, my family didn't immigrate until five generations later, when Meta Tiedemann Ricklefs came to New York from Mittelstenahe (the next town over to Stinstedt) in the 1880s.

What interesting discoveries or connections have you made through DNA genealogy?

Dead end or end of the road?

I had an inquiry this week from a potential client, asking for help with a brick wall they had encountered. They had traced their family back to Germany in the early 1500s and wanted help getting past this dead end.

I know some of you are green with jealousy right now that this person had managed to trace at least one family line back 600 years...I know I am!

We all encounter brick walls in our research, that one person (or two or three) we just can't get back, no matter how much research we do, no matter how many records we use. For some of us, that dead end is our great-grandfather and the late 19th century, a rather recent sudden halt in our family line. For others, it's a line we've traced all the way back to late 16th century Germany. I have experience with both. The question becomes, the further back we encounter these brick walls, is this a dead end or is it the end of the road? The end of the road means, there is no more paper trail. Sometimes, like when we do Irish genealogy or Eastern European genealogy, it's because those records were destroyed and no longer exist. Sometimes, like when we do Central American research, it's because official record keeping was sporadic and the record might never have existed in the first place. Sometimes it's just the end of the road for our online research and we have to take it to real world repositories - but sometimes those repositories might be so remote and so local (a small village church or cemetery on the other side of the world, just to use an extreme example) that we might never be able to access it or even discover it in the first place, so that for all intents and purposes, it is the end of the road. And sometimes, when we trace our family lines far enough back, the paper trail just ends. Unless you're descended from royalty, regular people weren't important enough to keep records on. And even if you ARE descended from royalty, written records disintegrate with age, and far enough back, written records just weren't kept. As much as I wish it weren't true, we cannot trace our family trees back forever - we'll never find that original ancestor. We'll never discover everybody. At some point, all our lines will end abruptly, and that will be it - there will be nothing more to discover.

Does this mean that if you hit a brick wall you should give up? Just shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, that must be it"? Of course not. A dedicated genealogist always does a reasonably exhaustive search...the keyword being "reasonably." When you reach an end of the road, move on to another line - we all, if we're lucky, have many, many lines to explore and expand. And when you reach the end of all roads, fill in those gaps between the dates - make those ancestors come alive with the details you find!

Happy 8th anniversary to me!

Eight years ago today, I started this blog as Threading Needles in a Haystack on Blogger. I can't believe my baby is eight years old today! Eight years later, my family history research is still going strong - for myself, for my husband's family, and now also for clients - even if my blogging has become sporadic at best...life gets in the way! But my love of genealogy has not waned - every new discovery I make, every new person and family I get to research, is still as exciting and interesting and educational and just plain FUN as the day I started, and I hope that's what this blog still conveys to this day. And just in case you forgot or you're a newcomer to this blog, this is where it all started... :)

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Becoming Nancy Drew

This blog is about genealogy, in case that isn't obvious. But I'll get to that soon enough.

When I was younger, I discovered my mother's complete collection of Nancy Drew books and being an avid reader, I devoured them. A detective who was a high school girl? How cool was that? I was quickly hooked on mysteries and soon decided I wanted to be a detective.

When I was a little older than that, my family went out to eat at a seafood restaurant in Freeport, the small village on the South Shore of Long Island where I lived. When I opened the menu, I saw the first page was the story about the founding of Freeport by a man named Edward Raynor. It immediately caught my attention and kept my interest because my mother's maiden name was Raynor. Coincidence? Could this Edward be a distant relative? How might they possibly be related? What would Nancy Drew do to solve this mystery?

As it turns out, this first case of mine would have made a very boring book, as the Raynor family, one of the first English families to settle Long Island, had already been extensively researched and my maternal grandmother, the keeper of our family tree, had given my mother all the information in a handy-dandy binder. Edward was an nth-grandfather. Mystery solved.

But my interest was piqued. And over the years, it only grew. And I soon realized that my Nancy Drew days, pathetic as they had been, were not over. What about my dad's family? Where had they come from? What was their story? And my mother's mother? Her dad was born in Ireland and claimed to have seen a leprechaun (a story that even today my superstitious Irish side is reluctant to entirely dismiss), but that's all I knew about her family. And what of these women who had married into the Raynor family - the Seamans, the Pearsalls, the Smiths - all early important Long Island families in their own right...what were their stories? The mystery was far from over. There was still a lot of work for Nancy Drew to do.

For me, doing genealogy is doing detective work. It's starting with names and places and photos and stories and looking for the facts to not only back them up but to connect the pieces of the puzzle. Geneology is like having a haystack full of needles, and not only looking for the individual needles, but also the threads to tie them together.

Since those beginnings, my family tree has grown many more branches, and I have become its keeper. But with each needle discovered, there's another one to look for. The mystery only continues to grow.

I'm not an actual detective. I'm just a lowly newspaper reporter. But turns out I get to be Nancy Drew after all.

http://www.threadingneedlesinahaystack.blogspot.com/2008/01/becoming-nancy-drew.html

The stories in between...

All too often when we do family history research, we end up being simply collectors of names and dates...I am also guilty of this. I think this is often because unless our ancestor was someone of prominence, all we often have are names and dates - birth, marriage and death if we're lucky. We can imagine the person our ancestor was when we have the stories in between - for instance, my great-great grandfather, Rudolph Stutzmann, was a prominent member of the Queens and Brooklyn German-American community, a businessman and a bank founder and president, so I have passport applications and passenger list manifests that help me imagine the traveling he did, and newspaper articles on his business dealings, philanthropic activity and involvement in fraternal organizations and singing societies that actually spell out for me actual moments in the life he lived. I have newspaper articles on family members' birthday parties, wedding receptions, injuries, illnesses and in the case of the infamous Ricklefs brothers, their prolific criminal activity. It's easy for me to picture who these people were, to make and feel that connection to them - but what about everyone else? Everyone on our trees lived a life - they cried, they worked, they felt pain, they loved. They were people in a place in a time.

Even if we don't know the details of the stories in between a person's birth and death, we can imagine them, and we should. Genealogy is so important in learning not only our own personal histories but HISTORY, and our families' place in it. If we try to picture our ancestor in a certain time and place, it can also provide possible answers to our questions, even if we don't have the documentaton - why did this person die so young? Was there a sickness in the locality? Were they poor and maybe underfed and underclothed? Could they have died in childbirth? Why did this person move around so much? What was their profession? What was the economic climate of the time and place they were living in? When they finally settled down, was it because there was a need in that place for the service they were providing? A person living in 1880s New York will not have had the same life experiences as someone living in 1880s California, and a person living in 1880s California will not have had the same life experiences as someone living in 1940s California.

I remember when my mom went back to college when I was a teenager, she was given an assignment for one of her classes - she was given a name of a fictional person, a date of birth, a date of death, and a locality. This is often all we have to go on in genealogy - her assignment? Write that person's life story. What that story was was totally up to her, but in order to create it, she had to do some research - based on that person's name and location, what might their original nationality have been? Based on that, why might they have ended up in the location they did? Based on where they lived, what might they have done for a living? What was going on in the world that might have contributed to this invididual's life? What might have been their family make up? Did they marry? Did they have kids? How many? I remember thinking this was such an interesting assignment - it was basically entirely up to you to figure out who this person might have been, but you had clues to guide you in who this person PROBABLY could've been. That's what we can do when we research our family trees - we might not have hard documentation to PROVE who these people were, but we can put our ancestors into the context of the larger world to figure out who they MIGHT have been. Because everybody is more than just a name, a place and a date. We are also the stories in between, and just as I try to remember theirs, I hope someone will try to remember mine.

Remarkable records and meaningful stories - working with genealogy clients

In response to my last blog post when I asked what you would like to hear more about, Cousin April of Digging Up the Dirt on My Dead People asked me on my Facebook page what work I'd done for clients that meant the most to them or to me, and whether or not I found any remarkable records. 

That's a hard but interesting question, and I thank April for asking it, as it's led me to look over a lot of my closed cases, reminding me of just how much work I've done and how interesting (most of it) has been. Some clients want to prove their connection to a famous person in history. Some are trying to find what international roots they might have. Some are trying to prove Native American ancestry. Some are name and date collectors. Others, due to divorce or death of a parent, know little to nothing about an entire side of their family and are trying to make a connection.

Recently, I've done a lot of work for clients with Eastern European Jewish ancestry. Talk about interesting but impossible! Name spellings become beyond creative - if you find the family under one surname spelling in a census, don't expect it to be the same or even similar in another record. And then once you've traced the family sufficiently in the U.S., making the leap across the ocean to their roots in Eastern Europe or Russia can be impossible because more than likely, the name you've traced in the U.S. is an American one, and the one they came here with is an Eastern European/Jewish one - if you're lucky, they simply Anglicized their original name and there will be similarities. But as often as this happens, it's equally possible that their original name is completely different. And then to top it off, much as African-American ancestry research almost always has the dead end of the mid-1800s that you will never get past, due to the institution of slavery and the fact that there are little to no records on slaves, many people of European and Russian Jewish descent will never be able to get beyond the early 1900s, as those records were destroyed during World War II. In this research area, I had one client who was trying to find his ancestor's original name. I was having no luck. I found his wife's naturalization record, which held a wealth of info, including HER original name, her village and country of origin and the date and ship of immigration, which led me to finding her on a ship passenger list manifest, which listed her father's name. We had that line back to the late 1800s - amazing. But her husband remained a mystery. I found in her naturalization record HIS naturalization info, but his records were not available online - we were going to have to enter the real world! His documents were not in the National Archives, they were not in the New York City Municipal Archives, they were at a New York City court house, in their archives staffed by a single person. I spoke to this man on the phone and he told me his office hours, that there was no charge to make copies of the naturalization record - IF IT WAS THERE - but you had to bring your own camera to take photos, and to be sure to not visit around 1 pm because that's when he took his lunch break. I passed this info along to my client with the caveat that there was a chance the record wasn't there and even if it was, there was no certainty that it would be as detailed as the wife's record had been - maybe the original name wouldn't be there, but maybe his date of immigration would be and we could pick up the search from there. I only do online research currently for my clients, so he asked his sister to go and find the record. I didn't hear from him for a few months but he finally wrote to me to let me know that his ancestor's naturalization record WAS there and more importantly, so was his ancestor's original name, information he and his family had been searching for, tirelessly and fruitlessly, for years and years. I was beyond thrilled that he had written me to share the success of the search and his discovery, and so happy and proud that I had helped make that discovery possible for him.

There are several lessons in this story - if you can't find the answer to your genealogy question, look at records other than the obvious (there are other records out there besides the census!); if you can't find it online, go out in the REAL WORLD - visit an actual records repository; and if you can't find it on your own, ASK FOR HELP! :)

That's only one example of many cases I've worked where I've been honored and so happy and proud to help people break through longstanding brickwalls... turns out that helping others with their family history research can be incredibly fulfilling!

It's also an example of the difficult, frustrating and incredibly interesting and fun records I get to use when I work with clients that I don't get to use on my boring, well-established Western European family tree. I've had the chance to research families of so many exciting and diverse backgrounds - Native American, African-American, Eastern European, Swedish, Mexican, just to name a few - I've even gotten to research Icelandic and Finnish families! In short (too late for that), I'm not only having a lot of fun, but I'm learning so much. It's been such a wonderful experience so far.

Happy New Year!

Well, today is the start of a new year - can you believe 2015 has come and gone? It's been awhile since I last wrote. Unfortunately, even as I resolve to keep current on this blog, life always finds a way to get in the way! I am currently not working, which would make you think I would have more time to devote to this, but the reason I'm not working is I gave birth to the newest leaf on our family tree, my son Julian James, in the beginning of December. We are beyond thrilled at our new family addition - like my daughter, who is now a feisty, precocious, exhausting 2 1/2 year old, Julian looks like he'll inherit my coloring - somehow my fair, Northern European genes kick the butt of my husband's dark and supposedly dominant Latino genes - but his features are all his dad's side of the family. Julian is a new name on the family tree - if you know me, you know I am a deep believer in tradition and paying homage to family, but I let my husband pick the baby's name this go-around (with my approval, of course lol). The family tradition concession is my son's middle name, James, which is my father's middle name and a longstanding family name on my dad's side of the family.

I actually have been very busy with genealogy research, some of my own, moreso on my husband's side, trying to make connections to other researchers and their trees, anything to add generations and information because while it's not MY tree, it's the family history of both my children, and it's important for me to know as much as possible about both sides of their family. That's what my grandmother did - she actually had very little research on her side of the family (and sadly, despite my best efforts, that's still the case) but she devoted years of research to her husband's side of the family.

I've also been busy doing genealogy research for clients, which, while not my own family history, has become extremely rewarding. As much as the thrill of genealogy for me is discovering a little bit more about who my family is, I am a Nancy Drew at heart, and the detective work of putting together the pieces of a puzzle, whether it's my puzzle or somebody else's, is just so much fun for me - and the satisfaction of finding the answer, where someone never knew the answer before? Where the research was hard and roundabout and labor intensive? Where you're able to hand answers to someone, even a complete stranger, who was searching for those answers for so many years? There are literally no words.

And the doing research for others fills a genealogy void when I'm not having much luck on my own tree. It's fun. It's been keeping me busy. Too busy to blog? Apparently. I'd like to say I resolve to blog more this year, but with a newborn and a toddler in the house, it might be awhile again before I get this way. But I can ask you this - is there a specific genealogy topic you'd like to read about? Something you've been having trouble with? A particular website or database you'd like to know more about? Do you have any questions for me about a particular problem or ancestor I've had to tackle? Let me know in the comments and I'll do my best to make time to blog about it - if and when the kiddos ever nap! :)

In the meantime, I'll make a couple of genealogy resolutions anyway:

• to try to blog more, despite the odds not being in my favor
• to try to do a better job of documenting the sources of my information
• to try to not be just a collector of names and dates - to remember that these people WERE people, who lived lives in between their births and deaths, and to try to record more about what those lives entailed
• to continue my pursuit of the origins of Jacob Raynor - Cousin April, you know what I'm talking about!

That's all for now! PS, new episodes of Finding Your Roots resume on PBS starting January 5th - check it out to get your genealogy fix!

God bless the FamilySearch volunteers...

If you live anywhere on the U.S. East Coast, it's probably a very rainy, windy day - perfect for staying inside and doing some genealogy research. Today I just want to give a shout out to all the people who volunteer their time transcribing and indexing family history records for the LDS's FamilySearch website...if you've never used it, check it out. And if you have the time, do as I say, not as I do, and volunteer to help them getting all their invaluable worldwide genealogy records accessible online! Today I went on the website to continue looking into my husband's family tree - his family is from Honduras and those records are in Spanish, which thankfully I read, and many are unindexed - that is, they WERE unindexed. I have spent months scrolling through probably thousands of images of handwritten Spanish hoping to untangle and add to his tree, only to discover today that many of those records are now available by simply typing the desired name into the search engine. Technology is amazing. And I am frustrated. And exhausted. But that is the life of a genealogist. My grandmother had to do this research without any internet - she probably thought I was spoiled just having online images available to me, even if I had to search page by page without an index. And I have been spoiled. And my children and grandchildren will be even more spoiled as more and more genealogy resources become more widely accessible, just as it should be. It makes me a little sad though too, I'll admit - as much as it's an amazing help to be able to just plug a name into a search engine, half of the fun and satisfaction of family history research is doing the detective work yourself. But I want to go on record now that I am going to be that grandmother who tells stories of "how I did genealogy back in the day..." I can't wait. :)

Happy Friday everyone - stay warm and dry!!

I LOVE probate records for genealogy research and here is an example why...

Ancestry.com has recently added a database for U.S. probate records - wills, letters of administration, inventories of goods, and all the proceedings before and after. So I've been going through and adding these records to people in my trees - so far, no new, groundbreaking information had been coming to light, but the insight into life - and death - from the 1800s & 1900s can be interesting - children inheriting farmland and farm animals such as cows and pigs, an entire estate including housing and properties being valued only in the low $1000s, etc. My something-great grandmother Rebecca Raynor had her bank account included in one of her records, including day-to-day transactions for rent, necessities, loans, etc. Probate records can be a snapshot into what daily life was like. You might find out that your great-grandmother actually remarried (I had one listed by her first married name and second married name, which is how I found that out) and that's why she seemed to suddenly disappear from public records. But for newbies dealing with these records,  if you're lucky, these records spell out crystal clear relationships between individuals - so-and-so's next of kin include 3 sons and 2 daughters, wives of so-and-so and so-and-so, and ten grandchildren, with all names, including married names, listed as well as where they lived. Oh, those records are the best! God bless the people who left super-detailed wills for posterity!

Anyway, I'm still in the middle of adding these records but had to take a quick break to say that sometimes these records will reveal BOMBSHELLS. Oh boy. I was researching my 3rd great grandfather Edward Haase and found some probate records that were for the right name, right year of death (1919) but with a provision at the beginning of the will for a son named Edward George Haase. As far as I had known, there was only my second great grandfather, Gustave, and a brother Edward F. who had died very young. So, yay, interesting, third child. Who was born in 1909, when Edward's wife and my 3rd great-grandmother, Eva Meinberg, was 48. How likely was that without the help of fertility drugs, unheard of back then? So must not be my Edward...until I looked at page 2 and saw all familiar names from my family tree. So it WAS my Edward. And his son Edward George is listed as having a Catherine Graham as his guardian. Catherine Graham is listed as his mother in the 1920 census.

WHAT????

Edward's wife, Eva, was still alive in 1909 when this Edward George was born and as far as I know, Edward and Eva were still married. So what's going on here? Were they NOT married or at least not living together? Did Edward have an affair? Was Catherine his mistress? Did Eva and Gustave know about Catherine Graham and Edward George? I'm so intrigued by this unexpected family mystery and I can't wait to discover more!

More AncestryDNA fun - Dad's results are in!

First off - welcome to my new blog! If you're a reader of my old Blogger genealogy blog, Threading Needles in a Haystack over at http://www.threadingneedlesinahaystack.blogspot.com/, thanks for joining me here at my new website! And for any new readers who have just found me - welcome! Today we're going to be talking about more DNA genealogy fun, specifically my Dad's AncestryDNA results.

(Just as an FYI to my readers - the AncestryDNA disclaimer says it takes 6-8 weeks to get results back after they receive your sample, I've never had it take more than 2 weeks...my dad's results came back in 13 days...)

So I bought my dad an AncestryDNA kit for Father's Day - I've taken the test and my sister took the test. I'll admit that though the present was for my dad, since I know he's interested in genealogy as well, it was also for me - I'm using my known relatives as "cousin catchers," to see who they might genetically match to that I don't (these matches would also be my relatives, we just wouldn't have inherited the same DNA snippets...) But I'm also interested in the genetic differences between me and my close relatives - for example, while my sister and I have a lot of the same background, I inherited Eastern European DNA and she did not, and she inherited Italian/Greek DNA and I did not.

In the case of my father, I was interested in his results for several reasons - first, to maybe clarify which side of my tree my ethnicity results came from and to also help narrow down any DNA matches I had where there was no common ancestor (unfortunately, I think I have a lot of Irish matches, and since I can't trace my Irish lines that far back, I can't find a common ancestor for these matches) - but if, let's say, my dad was also a match to one of these people, I would at least know it was an Irish match on my dad's side and not my mom's.

My dad's immediate ethnic background is very black and white - his father's family was from Ireland and his mother's family was from Germany. No other immediate countries come into the mix for as far back as I can trace (ranging from mid-1800s to back to the 1600s). So I expected the 30 percent Irish and 25 percent Europe West (Germany) in my dad's results. I even expected the Scandinavia, European Jewish and Europe East, as these all probably mixed in with the German side at some point. I was a little surprised my dad had 28 percent Great Britain - there are a lot of Gorrys who hail from Scotland, and while it's not out of the range of possibility that one (or more) of his Irish family members intermarried with someone from England or Scotland, 28 percent is a huge amount to show up with no genealogical evidence to show for it - if we inherited DNA evenly from every ancestor (which we don't), that's equivalent to one grandparent being 100 percent British, which I know my dad doesn't have - what it more likely means is he inherited a huge chunk of DNA from some British ancestor somewhat further back who I haven't found yet...interesting. Then we have the three surprise ethnicities - Italy/Greece, just like my sister...we are neither Italian nor Greek, so somewhere along the way we inherited some Mediterranean DNA; Caucasus, which is technically Asian but on the border with Europe - neither my sister nor I inherited that, but I imagine it's from a ways, ways back in my dad's genetic makeup - it's kinda cool to see something so ancient show up, that survived and was passed on after so many genetic mixes over the generations; and last but not least, Polynesian.

Yes, Polynesian. My dad, who technically has just Irish and German ancestry, not only has a much more diversified genetic makeup than I ever expected, but he somehow has South Pacific DNA. Now, a lot of Gorrys also ended up in Australia, but no one from behind us in the Gorry line that I'm aware of...so where did this come from? Is this also an ancient strand that somehow survived millennia? Was someone somewhere, sometime a sailor or explorer who somehow intermingled with and carried that gene back to Europe many generations later? Or was this just a laboratory mistake, a contaminated DNA sample? I'd be curious to hear from any of my readers what your thoughts are - do you know of many mistakes that have been made while using DNA for genealogy research? Have you experienced this for yourself, an extremely unexpected DNA result? Thoughts and comments are welcome!

And also just FYI - AncestryDNA kits are on sale 20 percent off ($79) until August 17th - so if you've been thinking of ordering one, now would be a good time to consider it! (I always buy them on sale :))

In light of recent prison escape events: Charles Ricklefs, career criminal, in the 1940 census

This is an image from the 1940 U.S. census of a listing for my great grand uncle Charles Ricklefs, once again in prison, I believe this time for the bank robbery in Mattituck, Long Island. He actually started out being sentenced 15-30 years to Sing Sing Prison in 1938, eligible for parole in 1948 - but as you can see from this picture, by 1940 he was a resident of Clinton State Prison in the way upstate New York village of Dannemora. These names should sound familiar to you as Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora is where those two murderers escaped from last week - it's still in the news because they're still on the run. Charlie is still in Dannemora in 1942 per his World War II draft registration. I don't know what happened to him after that, but I hope Dannemora was his last stop after 30 years of being in and out of the prison system. Oh those black sheep - they sure do make family history research more interesting!!

Nobody's family is perfect: all the hullabaloo over Ben Affleck and "Finding Your Roots"

Whether or not you're interested in genealogy, you've probably seen all the news articles about Ben Affleck asking that a slave-owning ancestor of his not be included in his story on the Henry Louis Gates Jr. PBS genealogy show "Finding Your Roots." For some reason, it's even front page news on some websites. As a writer and a family historian, I have two points to make on this story.

The first, in defense of Gates, is that just because the discovery of Affleck's slave-holding ancestor was omitted from what aired doesn't mean it was deliberately excluded at Affleck's request. On any of these genealogy shows - on any show, really - all we're getting is an abbreviated glimpse of the story. We are all the product of thousands of years and millions of people - can't cover 'em all in one third of an hour long episode! Every family tree we see on any of these genealogy programs is edited for time, for entertainment value, for drama or for interest. And no disrespect to any of those people, but not everybody on your tree provides a compelling story to viewers - they might be compelling to you as part of your personal story but they might not even be all that interesting to you, either. It happens. Sometimes people just live ordinary lives. That's probably most people. From a writer's perspective, the omission of Affleck's controversial ancestor might simply be for editorial reasons - maybe he didn't fit with the story they were weaving. "Finding Your Roots" in particular covers a lot about the history of American slavery, from both sides - celebrities with slaves in their family trees and celebrities with slave owners in their trees. On this show, Affleck's slave owner ancestor is not necessarily an interesting and/or unique storyline, and possibly not as compelling as some of his other found ancestors.

My second point is important whether or not the show and Gates acquiesced to Affleck's request, and especially in light of his request - nobody's family is perfect. The course of our family histories is imperfect because our family trees are made up of individual humans, who are imperfect. We have to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors. By showing these imperfect people and events, we can show that we can become better as individual people, as a society, as the human race by not ignoring the unpleasantness of the past, by acknowledging it and moving forward in a positive manner. It does a great disservice to genealogy and to humankind to gloss over periods of terrible atrocities and the individuals who participated in them, such as American slavery. We all have those stories. Shows like "Who Do You Think You Are?" in particular have become somewhat guilty of whitewashing ancestors of questionable character in recent years, with a noted exception of the recent Sean Hayes episode - uncovering the generational cycle of paternal criminal activity and family abandonment helped Sean not only find compassion for the father who left him but also helped him determine to break the cycle. Though it was not his act, Ben Affleck should be embarrassed that he had slave-holding ancestors - it's a national embarrassment. But he's not alone in it. He would have been better off acknowledging it on camera, if the showrunners deemed it important enough to be part of his story, and then acknowledging that he's happy to be a part of the process that continues to fight against discrimination and inequality of minorities and all people, or something to that effect.

What are your thoughts on this incident? I'd love to hear!

Some genealogy quotes for a lazy, rainy Monday

It's hard to get going on days like this. Meaning Mondays. But on top of that, it's dark, dreary, and rainy out. So today I'm embracing the lazy and sharing a few genealogy quotes that always strike my fancy and remind me how important it is to keep doing what it is we do - not just because we love doing it, but because it needs to be done, even on lazy, rainy Mondays. Hope your week gets only better from here!

Today is a good day.

Today is a good day.

Today, April 5, is a special day. For anyone who is Christian, today is Easter, the holiest day of the liturgical year. Christianity molded many generations of my family, and church records, both Catholic and Protestant, have been invaluable in my family history research.

Today, two years ago, was also the day I entered the hospital to give birth to my daughter, the first of the next generation in my immediate family. I am so grateful for her and can't wait till she's old enough to tell about our family history! So far, she’s still the only one, though she has a cousin on her father’s side and many second cousins on my side – I see them playing together, which brings back many fond memories of being young and playing with my cousins. My cousins were some of my first friends, and over the years as a family historian, I have connected with many cousins beyond the second-cousin circle, to fourth, fifth, and many more. While these cousins aren’t playmates, some of have become friends, and almost all of them have become very important partners in researching our common family trees. 

Today also would have been the 100^th birthday of my grandmother, Mary Cronin Raynor, who passed away last May at the age of 99. She was my genealogy inspiration and mentor, as those of you who read this blog regularly well know. Though I am sad to be missing celebrating this milestone birthday with her in person, I know the 99 years she was here with us all were years well spent. I also know she is spending her first birthday in heaven celebrating with all her family – from those she knew well like her parents and husband to those from further in the past who she spent so many years trying to find. 

Today is a good day.

Éirinn go Brách - a Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all!

Unless you're deaf, dumb, blind, and live under a rock, you are aware, I'm sure, that today is St. Patrick's Day. I am half Irish - my mom was half Irish, and my dad is as well - and though I have a tendency to identify more with my German side of late, my Irish pride can't help but spilleth over every year on this date. My Irish ancestors have been some of my toughest nuts to crack, and I am still for the most part unsuccessful tracing any of those lines further than a generation back in the old country. I know a lot about many of them, though, on this side of the pond, though I have a few who have maintained their Irish mystery, much to my chagrin.

I boast ancestors from Counties Cavan, Westmeath, Cork, Limerick, Kerry, and Longford. My Gorrys and Corrs were here in New York by the mid- to late-1840s, refugees of the terrible Great Potato Famine, and on the other side of my tree, the Cronins didn't arrive till the mid-1890s, searching for new opportunities in a new land. My great-grandfather, Timothy Cronin, is the most recent immigrant on my tree, generation-wise and year-wise - my family has been here so long that a lot of the culture from their European homelands has been lost, though some of the Irish has managed to live on, passed down to us by Timothy's daughter, Mary, my grandmother. It is she who first told me about leprechauns, and how her father saw one once when he was living as a boy in Ireland. Well, my grandmother would never lie, and her father probably never lied to her, so when my elementary school teacher asked us to name made up creatures and one of my classmates threw out leprechauns among all the dragons, unicorns, and fairies, I promptly raised my hand and announced to my whole class that leprechauns were, in fact, real.

My grandmother used to complain about the leprechauns a lot - they are a mischievous lot and apparently continued to play tricks on her and hide her belongings well into her later years, even here in New York. I live in her old apartment now and have yet to see a leprechaun, though whenever I lose my keys or misplace a book or some other item, I have a feeling there are some wee Irish shoemakers behind it. My grandmother passed away last year and would've celebrated her 100th birthday in a couple of weeks and today, especially, I really miss her.

So today I will raise a pint and teach my 2 year old, who is half Latina and only a quarter Irish but looks more Irish than I do, how to say "slàinte" instead of her usual "cheers" (she'll be drinking milk btw!). As they say, "If you're lucky enough to be Irish, you're lucky enough." Luckily, today we're all Irish, in spirit if not ancestry, so wherever you are and whomever you're with, a Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all!

Genealogy Roadshow New Orleans Redux

Last night's episode of Genealogy Roadshow was confusing at first, since they were already there this season, but it appears they split each city visit into two episodes...just in case you were also a little lost. But maybe it was just me.

I still don't have the time to properly review this show but last night's episode really spoke to me on a personal level, so I felt compelled to comment on a few things:

• When Joshua Taylor was helping the first guest, the man whose family lost all their photos and documents during Katrina, he visited and talked about local archives and historical societies, smaller, localized repositories where one can find family Bibles, letters, photos, and other mementos that have been donated to their holdings. Everybody should know about these places. Does every archive have every single family Bible ever made? No. Is it guaranteed you will find a photo of Great-Grandpa Cletus in their files? No. But you never know who might have inherited this photo or that letter and who might not have had anyone to pass it along to...and it's actually a wonderful suggestion for anyone who has their hands on these things who doesn't have anyone in their family to pass it to - don't throw it out! Donate it to somebody - I guarantee some society or archive will want it. I came across a wonderful photo on the Internet, completely by accident, from the late 1890s of my great-grandfather, about age 10, his little sister, and his parents - I had never seen a photo of any of these people any younger than 50 years of age, and I had only ever seen one other photo of my great-great grandparents. And where did I find it? In a digitized photo collection of the Freeport Memorial Library - somehow they had gotten their hands on a photo of my family. I don't know who had been in possession of it but I'm glad the photo made its way there and not into the trash bin!
• My husband's family is from Honduras, and many of them worked on the banana plantations, or for the railroads or shipping companies that brought the produce from Central America to the United States...several of his relatives, including his great-grandfather, sailed into New Orleans many times in the early 1900s. There's actually a decent size Honduran population in the city because it is the port through which most people from that country arrive...so hearing the woman's story about her great-grandfather was of particular interest to me.
• The woman who was trying to find out if her great-grandfather actually had a sister, Alice, or if he had imagined her all those years...that story was heartwrenching. The fact that he actually did have a little sister, name unknown, who died as an infant when he was about 5, and then he lost his mother only a few months later, and then his father remarried to "New Mother" - she didn't even have a name! - then the FATHER died only a few years later, and New Mother sent this woman's great-grandfather away to school, didn't return for him, and he ended up in an orphanage??? Yikes. But that's sometimes what we discover - the hard, sad side of life. The story reminded me a little of my own great-great grandmother, who lost twin girls as infants, then her husband died quite suddenly in his late 20s leaving her a 20-something year old widow with two young sons, one of which died shortly after before the age of 10. She never remarried and because she had to work, her late husband's three siblings basically raised my great grandfather, the only surviving child. Life is hard and sad sometimes.

What did you think of the episode?

Snowy Saturday nostalgia & thoughts on Genealogy Roadshow

Snowy winter days always make me nostalgic - today the snow was melty and sticking, perfect for building a snowman and having a snowball fight with my husband and 22-month-old daughter...first time she got to experience that. Afterward, we came in and I made hot chocolate for everyone. Just reminded me of my childhood, playing in the snow, having fun and getting all cold and coming inside where my mom would make us hot chocolate. Still waiting for snow deep enough to take my daughter sledding for the first time - might even take her to the hill where I used to go as a kid!

Hope everyone's been checking out this season of Genealogy Roadshow on PBS. For some good, insightful reviews of these episodes, check out Cousin April's blog at Digging Up the Dirt on My Dead People. I don't enjoy this show quite as much as I do Who Do You Think You Are and Finding Your Roots but I just had a couple of bullet points to make about it:

• Unlike the other two shows I mentioned, it's a bit refreshing to see the everyday person, and not celebrities, getting help with their family trees.
• I love Josh Taylor, one of the expert genealogists on Genealogy Roadshow - I think he's fantastic at what he does and it would be awesome to work with him doing family history research, but it drives me absolutely nuts that he pronounces it "jen-ealogy" and not "jean-ealogy" like everyone else I know. Who knows - maybe he's right and it's the rest of us who are all wrong, but it's like nails on a chalkboard to me whenever he says it!
• I think Cousin April might have pointed this out in one of her reviews, but one thing that bothered me about the first season of Genealogy Roadshow is that it seemed like everybody was trying to connect to a famous person in history. That's annoying. Yes, it's cool if and when it happens, but your family is your family, whether they're famous or not, and you don't have to have a famous ancestor to have a super interesting and awesome or infamous and nuts ancestor. And yes, it's cool if you can find a gateway ancestor that links you to European royalty but for most of us, that gateway ancestor is so far back that that connection is fairly meaningless - not to burst anyone's bubble, but practically everyone of European descent can claim William the Conqueror as an ancestor. My point is, though, that this season seems to have stepped away from that, which is awesome, and seems to be focusing on the unique and interesting individuals and stories that are important to the particular person or family.

That's all for now. Keep your eyes out for the return of Who Do You Think You Are sometime next month, I think...and just an fyi, I'm in the middle of figuring out how to move this blog over to Wordpress, so if and when that change ever happens, I'll keep you posted. If you're in the middle of this snowy day - have fun building a snowman, drink some hot chocolate, then come inside, get warm, and look through all those old photos of your childhood snowy days - this kind of day is PERFECT for nostalgia!!

Enjoy your weekend!

Revisiting a personal connection to New York's deadliest maritime tragedy

I was watching an episode of Mysteries at the Museum on the Travel Channel last week - the description had caught my eye, about a museum dedicated to the Mothman mystery in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. I got distracted, missed that whole segment, and just happened to leave the show on. The next segment was a visit to the New York Historical Society, where a tiny pair of girls' shoes, over 100 years old, were on display, a remnant of a tragedy that was the worst loss of life in New York until the terrorist attacks on 9/11. My husband was intrigued and tried to guess what it could be, but I knew instantly.

"It's the General Slocum steamboat disaster," I told him, without hesitation. Which is exactly what it was. I could have written the segment - how on June 15, 1904, a steamboat full of more than 1,300 German immigrants and German-Americans from Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens going on an annual church picnic outing - meaning it was mostly women and children - caught fire in the East River; how most of the people on board couldn't swim; how when they donned the life vests and jumped into the river most of them sank because the vests had rotted and were full of nothing more than cork powder; how the captain of the boat tried to save everyone by sailing full-steam toward an island in the middle of the river but instead only fanned the flames; how more than 1,000 of those on board were killed. Though I could've written it, the show had a lot of pictures and images of the ship, before and after, that I had never seen. It was heartbreaking.

A lot of people have never heard of this disaster, but I know it well. It hurts my heart to read about it because my 3rd great-grandmother's sister was on the ship, and she was one of those who died. Hulda Lindemann lived in Brooklyn and wasn't a member of St. Mark's Lutheran Church, which sponsored the trip, but the family she worked for in the city did belong to the church. The father didn't go on the picnic - Hulda joined the mother and the son for what was supposed to be a day of fun. All three of them died.

I think it was meant to be that while I turned on the show for one reason, that I ended up watching it for another. As a genealogist, I trace family lines, but some family lines just end, and some of them end rather abruptly. While we are all the continuation of somebody's line, and we read about and remember and honor those who come before us, I like to remember those in our families who are the ends of their lines - the aunts and uncles who never married or had any children, the babies and young children who never grew into adulthood - they don't have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren to visit their graves, but we can.

You can read an earlier account of mine on Hulda Lindemann and the General Slocum steamboat disaster here.