Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Gone Over to the Dark Side


In a move that’s sure to garner me a lump of coal in my stocking for Christmas, I’ve gone a-wandering through forbidden fields. The struggle I’ve mounted to uncover the story behind the connection between Fort Bellefontaine in Missouri territory and Fairfield County in the new state of Ohio has yielded me little. I’m still puzzled about what connected the widow Elizabeth Howard Ijams with the widower John Whistler—and later, forged the connection between John Jay Jackson and Elizabeth Ijams’ daughter Sarah. Frankly, I feel as if these stubborn forebears refuse to come out of hiding.

I confess: I’ve gone looking for what others have posted online for those intransigent Jackson and Ijams ancestors.

I know: shock and disbelief. Lectures on how you need to do your own research. Scoldings for not relying only on source documents.

Yep. A lump of coal in my stocking. This Christmas.

So…now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…do ya wanna know? Aren’t you just a bit curious?

I don’t know about anybody else, but when I hit a brick wall, I’m not opposed to taking a peak around and seeing if anyone else has found a chink in the masonry, a toe-hold or a hand up. Of course, I’m cautious to see if I can replicate any results others have already found. But I’m not averse to learning from my peers. After all, I’m not that good at re-inventing wheels.

My thinking was: if I could find someone else in the family constellation for whom documentation could be located, perhaps those papers would reveal a hint of a trail. Perhaps another child in the family died after the date in which states began collecting additional personal information. Perhaps a report of a sibling’s birth location different than the other children’s might reveal travels that I hadn’t previously anticipated.

At any rate, cut me some slack, you who are saintly genealogists. The need to know has led me in the path of temptation, and I have yielded.

Onward to the dubious world of online genealogy. My first stop was to FamilySearch.org. Not to besmirch their name—I’m so grateful for all the documents I’ve found at this resource—but here I found my first indication of squishy reportage. Searching for Sarah Howard Ijams, no documents popped up in the search results. However, there was an item from the Pedigree Resource File.

Alright, I know it: warning bells are going off in my head as I speak. The file indicated Sarah was born October 6, 1798, and died February 12, 1829. Of course, no source was cited for those dates—dates I’ve already struggled to verify. How did the supplier of this information know these dates were correct?

Next came the marriage information. The file named John Jay Jackson as the groom—no surprise here—and the event’s date as January 25, 1818, in Saint Louis. Both those latter details may actually be correct. I’m a bit more convinced now than I was before about the marriage location in the Saint Louis area. And the year of 1818 is more acceptable to me than the other entry I’ve seen of 1816.

Seven children are listed in this file, though unfortunately not in date order. The firstborn arrived in 1819, and the last on December 30 of 1828. These two dates at least frame the possible time span between marriage and Sarah’s early death. An infant’s arrival that late in the year could actually have been what precipitated Sarah’s demise.

There are other online resources, too. Of course, the narrative that I’ve already mentioned—that of Sarah’s mother’s second marriage to John Whistler—included a statement that there were ten children in the Ijams family. Where are the other three?

Other online files give more of a hint as to what happened to the Ijams and Jackson families. The disputed count for the number of children in the Jackson family shrinks to six in a Rootsweb file here, but reveals information on John Jackson’s own second marriage. Another Rootsweb file, focusing more on the Ijams ancestors, shows no descendants for John and Sarah, but provides ample resources for tracing Sarah’s Ijams family back multiple generations.

While I cannot just appropriate the information found online as impeccable truth—I must exercise my own due diligence in checking these lines myself—when confronted with a bewildering maze of false leads, it helps to lift up one’s head and take a look around. Why insist on playing the trailblazer on the edge of civilization when you can lift your blindfolds and take a look around. Who knows? You may discover you are actually walking in an urban jungle with a road map already in your hand.



Picture above: a print by Winslow Homer entitled, "A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year," published in Harper's Weekly on December 24, 1859; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

12 comments:

  1. No shame there. I look around too for hints and clues. The only shame would be in accepting all posted trees wholesale without verifying for yourself. I think your stocking will be coal-free this year.

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    1. Wendy, to hear some people talk, you'd get the feeling of needing to hide one's head in the sand--all for the sin of peaking at others' posted research. I totally agree with you: it is certainly permissible to observe and learn from fellow researchers--only do our own due diligence in verifying the results.

      And I join you in looking forward to a coal-free Christmas!

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  2. I also look around to see what other researchers have found and then look for the documentation to verify. With a lot of those older postings there are no citations. I have been adding citation to the information that I add.

    I even sent an email to someone once when I first started and asked where he had gotten the information. He sent a reply and said he was sorry he could not help me but he had just copied it from another family tree.

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    1. Claudia, that's exactly it. And to add to that frustration, sometimes you can then go and find the sources, and realize everyone else's copied tree actually has the wrong information...but when you report it to the originator of the mistake, get denounced for trying to set the record straight!

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  3. While searching around online, don't forget to also check out Google Books.

    I've found a few family history books listed there that, while only including one or two people from my own family tree, have given me a tiny bit of extra information I did not have before.

    Of course, this found information goes into my family tree marked as "private" (won't show in any exports of the data), with the tag or description "UNSOURCED" so I know to verify the information later (if not sooner).

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    1. Good point about Google books, Chris. And also about entering the data found there. I think every bit of info we find can help us replicate the paper trail. Even if an item is "unsourced," quoting the book in which we found the mention will still help us retrace our steps back to that book, if we wish to recheck it in the future.

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  4. I worked late last night going through unsourced information trying to understand how a distantly related ancestor met his wife from Iowa before ending up in California from his home in Pennsylvania about 1852. Am I allowed to write historical fiction for that part of my ancestor's journey? I'll probably get a lump of coal if I do that. That's better than nothing at all.

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    1. Frustrating, Grant! I can so relate to that temptation. But don't yield. I cling to that mantra, "Never give up!"

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  5. I completely agree with you. I mean, hey, you're not going to accept online sources or public family trees at face value. As a diligent genealogist, you're going to check them out. AND HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT TO CHECK OUT WITHOUT SUGGESTIONS FROM THESE ONLINE SOURCES, IF YOU'RE AT A BRICK WALL? These sources come from family lore, I suppose, and some of them, surely, might just be right -- what are the odds that all of them are wrong?

    Dark side. Pooh. There is no dark side -- it's all research with "due diligence," as you say.

    I like the way Ancestry does it, with the little leaves -- you check each leaf-hint, and some offer perfectly respectable sources (like tombstones), while others have a collection of public family trees. But then some peeps in the public family trees may have a collection of respectable sources themselves, and bingo, you've made a find.

    Happy hunting! Thanks for the post.

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    1. The dilemma is particularly accentuated when the generation in question is so far removed as to no longer even carry the telltale prints of family lore. I would love to know what the stories were about this family, but suppose the tales are quite disintegrated at this point. Totally agree with you, Mariann. It does come off somewhat like a Catch-22 to not be able to peak at others' work when I'm totally at a loss, myself.

      Those shaky leaves I've often found helpful, myself. Sometimes, though, they seem totally off base. But at least I know enough about my own family to sense the difference. I think the more we research our own lines, the more of a sense we develop about what works and what might be a reasonable possibility. It's not just a matter of blindly matching up leaves with names. But I'm still thankful for the hints.

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  6. Ok so I left a comment on your other post..you have already thought of a child birth death..boy he did remarry fast..if the baby was born the last few days of 1928.
    You will find the clues you need. I am sure of it! :)

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    1. I am thinking these bereaved fathers were truly desperate. I've seen these quick remarriages in other family lines, too. It's not like the dad could trundle all the kids off to daycare. If there were no relatives nearby, and the dad was gone at work all day long, there wasn't much of an option for child care, otherwise.

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