Oh, The Places Where Our Ancestors Hide

It’s all well and good to say you can, as a genealogical researcher, go to historic newspaper archives to find references on your illustrious ancestors, but what of the ones who weren’t world class citizens?

Admittedly, turning to the Library of Congress’ NUCMC catalog won’t suit your taste, if your ancestors were pioneer settlers on the prairie. Nor will a paper chase through the archives of any university holdings or governmental repositories. We just have to face the fact that some of our ancestors were near-anonymous commoners who lived out their days, hoping to grow enough or make enough to cover for their daily bread.

Still, I say there is hope in finding something of record. When that means more “hope” than “finding,” these are times when we need to think, “crowdsourcing.”

I’ll tell you why I say that. Remember my Tully family—one of the Irish immigrant families I’ve been researching in preparation for our trip to Ireland last October? One of the Tully daughters, shortly after fleeing the famine, settled in Ontario (Canada West) and thereafter was married to a man by the name of Edward Ryan. For whatever reason, the couple chose to head further west, and, rather than settle in Chicago as had her siblings, they continued beyond that point. For a while, they lived in Winnipeg. Then they tried their hand at farming, claiming a land grant in the Dakota Territory. After what must have been a horrendous bout with influenza or another ravaging disease, what was left of the families in their party chose to return to Canada. But some stayed in the Dakotas.

You know me: I’m not satisfied to only pursue my ancestral line. I want to know what happened to all the siblings. And their descendants. So I pursued the lines of each of their children—the ones who survived the illness that swept through the family’s settlement.

Other than land records, thanks to the Bureau of Land Management, there would not be many documents to grant me a peek into what made up the daily life of these settlers. Or at least, that’s what I assumed.

At that time, however, I was still actively pursuing the genealogy forums, asking questions about resources that the locals might be aware of, but which would not usually be known by those not living in the area. Thankfully, several respondents to my queries helped me find archives tucked away in university holdings that I would otherwise never know about. This happened both in North Dakota and back in Canada, where some of the family migrated to the western provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. It would otherwise have taken more search prowess than I possess to have flushed out these resource diamonds in the rough. But that’s the power of crowdsourcing our research solutions.

Granted, there are those ancestors out there who never owned land, never died and passed along their property and possessions by official means of wills, never wrote letters, never were part of family photographs, and maybe never even lived near a town or went to a church that published those folksy gossip columns about who was coming to town, or what the neighbors were up to. I can relate to that quandary—after bemoaning the lack of documentation during our research trip to Ireland in search of pre-1849 records of our Irish ancestors, I winced to read Black Raven Genealogy’s blog post on how Dara relied on a collection of dog licenses to find any record of one of her relatives. Now, that’s desperate. But ingenious. We can take a lesson from those like our fellow genealogy researchers in Ireland and learn to be resourceful in our research approaches.

There are other forms of research crowdsourcing. Unlike the organized approach of queries on genealogical forums, these are more scattered, requiring more perseverance to flush them out of hiding. Or reminders that they are there. Take the GenWeb system, for instance. Most of us (especially in the United States) remember that old resource, organized by nations, states, and eventually counties. Unwieldy to navigate, unpredictable in how much—if anything—can be found in any one given domain, the GenWeb sites may hold just what you are looking for. You will never know, though, unless you pay them a visit and take a look around. Volunteer driven, the site resources are as eclectic as the people who contributed to building the site.

Other resources are entirely locally based. You may have to ask many questions before you discover a promising local repository that could hold the details on your specific ancestor. Try contacting the county historical society or genealogical society for any resources on finding your ancestors. Some county collections—either at these societies or at the local library—may not be shared as part of a larger system. I know that is true in the county where I live. For some reason, our newspaper collections have not been included in the holdings of large online archives such as GenealogyBank or NewspaperArchive. Sometimes, the only way to inquire about such collections is to go straight to the source: the county in question.

People often seem to be happy to share what they know about local resources. Sometimes, the leads I’ve found, just by asking questions or getting on mailing lists, have been enormously helpful. Consider the Perry County, Ohio, website put up by a lone volunteer on his own dime, because he felt it was the thing to do. For those researching the same location, those discoveries are indeed gems.

One other form of crowdsourcing resources is one I hope to see more of. That is the volunteer who sees resources that would be useful for research, but which are tucked away in unknown corners where they would be of use to no one. These are the people who stumble upon photographs or journals of the strangers of bygone years, tucked in a corner of an antique store, and devise a way to let the rest of the world know about them. “Far Side of Fifty” launched one such project for “orphan photographs” back in 2009, and shares one photograph a day in hopes of reuniting photo with family. So far, she’s posted nearly two thousand photographs. Out of those, over one hundred have already found their way home.

Far Side is not alone in this task. If you want to know of others bringing old photographs to light, Far Side keeps a hyperlinked list of other blogs doing the same thing.

What I have yet to find is a blogger who is sharing old journals. While some bloggers will transcribe a family member’s journal and post it for others to read, it is a rare thing to run across someone doing so for a non-relative. Think of all the historic references that could be tucked away in such diaries. A few years ago, archivist Melissa Mannon blogged about finding one such diary, which launched her into the project of transcribing it.

Of course, as wonderful as all that sounds, as the photograph or writing of a mere stranger, it is only of academic interest. What would make me perk up and get really enthused would be if someone walked into an antique store and found a photograph, a journal, a letter, or some other keepsake from one of the ancestors in my family tree.

Now, isn’t that what we’d all love to find?!

Perhaps it is each other we should be looking to, when we wish to find those traces our ancestors have left behind.