Day Twenty-Four: When People Get to Talking

Despite my guess, yesterday, that the next folder to work through in my Fall Cleanup project would contain emails from the other Flowers researcher I had mentioned, it didn't. Apparently, I've forgotten just how many Flowers family genealogists were out there, eager to discuss their findings, back in 1999.

Before I could reach part of the alphabet—I had labeled the first folder "Flowers emails" and then added the last name of the person whose letters I had saved—there were two other folders with similar letter exchanges. One was devoted to notes with a man who was a prolific researcher on several family lines which crossed paths with my mother-in-law's lines, in which we had gone back and forth on a number of other surnames besides Flowers. The other folder contained emails which were an outgrowth of the earlier one, in which one by one, we Flowers researchers from Perry County, Ohio, found each other online.

Eventually, those emails became group emails, and before long, there were four of us sharing notes in this collaborative effort. Even after all these years—and despite my regular travels to Ohio—I have never met any of these researchers face to face (although I am now Facebook friends with one of them). Each of us had spent our fair share of time crawling around very old records from the region, and we enjoyed figuring out where our mutual connections were.

Even so, in short order, I was able to clean those files out completely. While reviewing the notes brought back fond memories, I know those lines so well now that I am certain the facts we covered then are now all documented and included in my online database. The only part I'm now holding on to are the several GEDCOMs each of us sent to the others. Basically, I've reduced all those letters down to about five or six reports. I'll likely spot check each of them against my database, then toss them, as well.

Recalling all those contacts met through the early years of online research makes me smile. Back then, genealogy was a team sport, not the game of solitaire it seems to have morphed into in our current situation. Still, family is family—and even now, there are opportunities to reach out and meet third or fourth cousins online. The "Make a Connection" link at Ancestry.com is just one of many ways to connect with other researchers who are also family members.

When I teach my beginning genealogy classes now, I use the examples of experiences such as these to try to encourage people to connect with fellow researchers. (And, of course, fervently hope the people they reach out to are as cordial in response as the ones I've met over the years.) Sometimes, these students take that advice to heart, and return to class full of excitement with encouraging stories of having met third cousins they never knew, who live close enough to visit. There is nothing as special as meeting family members you never knew you had—and then discovering they share that same love of family history. That's when a family search really becomes a family search. 

Still, while it was nice to recall that golden era of the early years of online research efforts today, it certainly felt good to rid myself of so much paper. Bit by bit, every piece of paper shed from those bulging file folders adds up to more space in that file cabinet for new projects.

Above: "Rainy Evening on Hennepin Avenue," oil on canvas, circa 1902, by German-born artist Robert Koehler; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Day Twenty-Three: Lost in More Letters

Yes, I know I'm still stuck on the letter "F"—don't think those "more letters" I mentioned refers to my suddenly conquering the back half of the top drawer in my file cabinet. Today's reference to letters is different. This time, I've been wandering around the pages of an old file which contained multiple email exchanges with another researcher who shared a joint interest with me in the Flowers family of Pennsylvania and then Perry County, Ohio.

Reading that old email exchange—most of the letters I saved were from 1999—caused me to realize something: printing out those old notes resulted in not only preserving my friend's letters to me, but also copied her copies of my letters to her. Not only did we discuss the Flowers lines we were researching, but also exchanged news of the things that were currently happening in our own lives. It's as if I just re-discovered some pages from my own diary. 

After dispatching a folder so quickly yesterday in my Fall Cleanup, it reminded me of my preferred method of online genealogical searching. You see, almost all of the material in yesterday's folder was gleaned from surname mailing lists. Since I'm still stuck in the "F" folder in my file cabinet, you know that surname would be for Flowers.

Researching via those old online surname lists, circa 1999, wasn't the fastest way to connect with others researching the same surname. Often enough, I found better results by looking at the online lists based on geographic locations. It was far better to subscribe to a list for, say, Perry County, Ohio, and then look for any posts on the Flowers surname, than it would be to go straight to the list for Flowers. This way, I could better focus on people who were also researching the specific line of that surname.

Despite that logic—and the subsequent technique which I did apply through many of my early online research years—two of my best connections were made through an online group called the Flowers Family Genealogy Forum at the now read-only website, GenForum.

I met the first of these two Flowers researchers early in 1998, when she had posted a note requesting to connect with any others who were researching this surname in either Pennsylvania or Ohio. Of course, you know I was on that, right away. Before long, the two of us were comparing notes and emailing GEDCOMs to each other from our respective Family Tree Maker databases.

Somehow, out of that connection emerged a second Flowers researcher. Those first emails from her  would actually come from her husband's account at a university in Indiana—the return address information took up half a page when I printed out the note. (She subsequently signed up for her own Yahoo email account, which streamlined the process.)

Not many people had access to email back then, I guess, and not many of those were using it for genealogical purposes. Of those who were, I met the most wonderful people. Letters which started out inquiring about jointly-shared ancestors often blossomed into friendly conversations about multiple interests.

I couldn't help myself today, trying to clear out all these old genealogy files: I got lost in the contents. Bottom line was I couldn't bring myself to toss a single one of those notes. And that was for just one file. I suspect, since this woman's own name comes before the other friend's name, alphabetically, that tomorrow's file will contain this other friend's email exchanges. I'm sure tomorrow's task will be equally bogged down as I lose myself in remembering many of the things mentioned in those notes.

Researching family history for so many years has one down side: though the camaraderie of collaboration was enjoyable, eventually the inevitable would happen. I can recall losing some good genealogy friends over the years, mainly because so many of them were quite older than I. In the case of the woman whose letters I reread today, though, I estimated she was likely about my age.

That, of course, makes me wonder whether she is still researching her Flowers ancestors now—and whatever became of life's dreams for her, those many other events she shared in our letters. I'm tempted to try that old Yahoo! email address and see if we can still connect. With the many changes in online genealogical research since we first met, back in 1998, I'm sure we both know so much more now about our respective ancestors.

Above: "Pont Boieldieu in Rouen, Rainy Weather," 1896 oil on canvas by Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.  

Day Twenty-Two: A Quick Recap

It feels like I'm building momentum when I hit a stack of file folders which can be quickly dispatched into the recycling bin, but I have to remember it wasn't always like this in my Fall Cleanup project—and likely won't continue this way, either. I'm still in the "F" folder, but courtesy of my mother-in-law's maiden name—Flowers—and its many branches I've researched over the years, I'm, well, still in the "F" folder.

It was nice to toss the entire contents of today's file folder, which contained addresses and instructions for various early online resources for Flowers family history. Back during those earlier years of Rootsweb.com, several announcements came out regarding mailing lists for the Flowers line. Of course, back then in the 1990s, I was diligent to keep them all—not online, but printed and filed away in that folder for "F."

Now, those lists are antiquated, nearly ghost towns among the burgeoning new genealogy sites on Facebook. I didn't even need to think twice about whether I wanted to try and see if the addresses were still existent. My Flowers tree—with its many related lines—is so full of individual entries that it isn't even worth the time to ask myself such a question.

Meanwhile, it reminds me that today is my day to recap my research progress. I can't have managed to put too many new names on the four trees that I regularly tackle, considering how much time has been diverted to this Fall Cleanup exercise, but I still needed to take a look—even more so, keep track on my (now digital) tally sheets.

This becomes a reminder of how important it is to keep track of progress. No matter how fast or slow I work in each biweekly period, this reminds me that any work at all will equate to progress. And, when it comes to genealogical research, progress is all I ask.

So, how did things go on that Flowers line these past two weeks? With the exception of the DNA matches count at 23andMe (which always goes backwards, for some strange reason), I made progress. My mother-in-law's tree now has 12,822 people, including the eighty five person increase garnered in these past two weeks. My own mother's tree has 11,618—a similar increase of eighty nine. Even though my father's line has only 451 in the tree, I still managed to nudge that count up by one over the last two-week period. And my father-in-law's line also saw a small increase: eighteen more individuals, totaling 1,353.

Though the DNA matches for my family aren't under my direct control—it takes two to make a match, and I haven't yet figured out how to get a family member I don't yet know to take a DNA test—even there, I can see progress (well, with the exception of the retrograde 23andMe). I gained twenty six DNA matches at Family Tree DNA to total 2,459, while my husband gained seven to reach 1,568. At AncestryDNA, I gained twelve to total 753, and it was up nine for 367 for my husband. While yes, our numbers actually shrunk at 23andMe—mine by three to total 1152, and his by nine to reach 1,194—I'm more likely to cheer for upcoming holiday sales to boost the numbers at the other two companies than grumble about the disappearing cousins at 23andMe.

The main thing is to remember to find ways to encourage myself to continue the work. Whether for research progress in general or for specific tasks like this Fall Cleanup, even a little bit more at a time will, over the long run, yield progress.

Day Twenty-One: A Slight Detour for Indexing

"Buy one Marriage Index CD, get one FREE!"

It's been a while since I blitzed through a file this quickly in my Fall Cleanup project, but today's task took all of fifteen minutes—and that included reading the typewritten 1993 letter on the back of the recycled page I had used to print out a copy of my 1999 Family Tree Maker database.

Back then, it was Family Tree Maker, offered by the "Banner Blue Division" of Broderbund. And yes, I'm sure of those details. That's what it says on the User's Guide Supplement for Version 4.4, stashed in the folder slated for review in today's to-do list. (And yes, I still can operate that old version of FTM on my antique franken-computer.)

Going through this file cabinet has been a walk through the memorabilia of the earliest eras of online genealogy. I even had a couple old issues of Family Tree Maker Magazine—then out of Hiawatha, Iowa, it was mostly a catalog of research products for sale, such as the ad (above) for the marriage index CD sold in the late 1990s.

Things have changed quite a bit in the genealogical research world, and I'm glad of it. Yes, I will faithfully repeat the mantra that it's not all accessible online (and likely won't be, at least for a long, long time), but it certainly speeds research progress to be able to snare at least some of those digitized documents at any time from the comforts of home.

We have some forward-thinking organizations to thank for that convenience, and in at least one case, multiple thousands of volunteers who have donated their time to transcribe the writing encased in digital pictures of history's records on which we have so come to rely for documentation.

In fact, that one organization—those folks behind FamilySearch.org—is, this same weekend, encouraging volunteers to once again lend a hand to complete the "indexing" process to free several digitized collections from their "browse only" status online and include within the ranks of searchable documents. Volunteers from around the world are joining together to see how many collections they can slam dunk before the weekend is over.

You, too, can be a part of this. Just like I was—brand new at indexing, but at least familiar with genealogy—you can sign up to read the text in a given document (provided online) and type it out into a web-based entry form, following simple instructions provided by the FamilySearch coordinators. The process is simple, and the tasks are labeled by level of difficulty so that beginners can select an entry point at which they will feel comfortable while they get the hang of the process.

The Worldwide Indexing Event 2017 continues all this weekend. I noticed the page set up for this event provides a choice of specific indexing projects that FamilySearch.org hopes to complete—and graphs each project's progress toward completion right on that same page, a great way to encourage volunteers.

I particularly noticed two of interest: county naturalization records for New York, and the death index for New York City. Since today is my regular day to index, I'll likely focus on those two, mainly because I have personal ties to family who might appear in those records. You might rather pursue the project for Oklahoma School Records, or the one for Civil Registrations of Deaths from the National Offices in the Philippines—which, incidentally, is already showing as over seventy percent completed.

Whichever project you prefer to help complete, you can be sure, as a volunteer, you are becoming part of the effort that has transformed genealogical research from the then-cutting-edge CDs sold by Family Tree Maker in the 1990s to the streamlined online process it is today. All you need do, after signing up as a volunteer online, is click on the "Get Started" button next to the project name you prefer and...well...get started!      

Day Twenty: "F" is for Family

Where does a month disappear to? We're already two-thirds of the way through October, and I can't say I've made quite as much progress in the Fall Cleanup as I would have liked. This project has been more of a triage exercise: deciding which file folders yield projects that must go on life support immediately and which ones can survive without attention long enough to be lumped together into a subsequent project.

The "F" file looks like it will be worth a long trajectory. Full of folders with information on immediate family, it merits sub-projects of its own.

Like this one: the file was labeled "Family Christmas Letters." For all of you just primed for that cozy holiday season in the offing, imagine your family Christmas letters coming back to haunt you, years after you wrote them.

Yes, I am that relative.

Every year since I don't know when, I took every family letter enclosed with the requisite holiday greeting card and stuffed them inside this file folder. Every new child, then every new grandkid, complete with birth dates, first steps, first tooth, first missing tooth—they're all in that folder. Just in case I missed transferring any of those important firsts into my digital genealogical database, I need to go back through these kept records and make sure I didn't miss a detail.

Actually, I'm thinking of transcribing the letters. Or maybe scanning them. Or both. After all, as one computer whiz once told us—about our then-new 128 megabyte purchase, incredibly enough—"you'll never run out of room on this computer." I should have space to squeeze in at least all these letters. Right?

This puts the "family history" back into Family History. It's probably the closest I'll come to having diaries to transcribe from the words of my siblings, in-laws, aunts and uncles.

But it will be a project that will take a lot of time to complete. You can be sure I won't blog about it; grunt work like this seldom makes for scintillating reading. It will be a labor of love worth having, however. Just think of all the possibilities that can grow out of a database like this:

• Facebook post to nieces and nephews: "In this Christmas card from 1978, your mother bragged about victory over dirty diapers."
• Tally, per year: how many greeting cards included announcements of new arrivals.
• Treasure hunt: How many holiday family photographs can you find which include missing members who were photoshopped into the scene?

As it turns out, my year-after-year discipline of saving Christmas letters extended to include all birthday cards, anniversary cards, graduation cards, and other messages which contained information about the family. I have a lot of family details to compile from this decades-old trove.

Final verdict on this folder: set it aside for future transcription. New year's resolution: get to this project a.s.a.p.

Above: "American Homestead Autumn," undated Currier and Ives lithograph; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Day Nineteen: "D" is for "Done"

Sometimes, they bog you down. Sometimes they speed you up. I may have spent forever—or at least a good portion of the month—deciding what to do with the contents of the "B" folders, but I'm apparently making up for it now. This is encouraging news for my flagging Fall Cleanup project.

There were only two folders in my "D" section. Neither of them was for surnames. Nor were they for topics which require a lot of consideration. This is good. I dispatched them quickly.

Of course, I can't just move on without saying just what those two folders contained. But this will be easy. Remember that most of the contents of this file cabinet was assembled in the first few emergent years of online genealogy research.

One feature of the time was the sheer enthusiasm over discovering—be that surname ever so common, like Jones, or unusual, like Taliaferro—that we could connect with fellow researchers via email. Sight unseen, family history enthusiasts were sharing notes with fellow researchers all across the country—no, make that all around the world. (I can vouch for that, having reviewed some responses from Australia and England, as well as the more commonplace Minnesota or Tennessee.)

One way these researchers were able to find each other was through electronic forums. And notes from one of those became the sole resident in my file for "D": the Delphi Forums.

Now, don't go looking for the modern-day version of the Delphi Forums. My sign-in instructions told me to access the site by using the address my.delphi.com. I tried that, just now, and didn't get anywhere, so I guess that was a website that fizzled around the time of the dot-bomb.

That was an easy journey through the file folder! I was on to "E" in no time, where the story was similar. (You can guess the same is likely to happen when I get to "X," but I was as surprised as anyone to discover I hadn't filed anything in either of these two preceding letters.)

Another forum for genealogy chatting provided the papers stuffed in my "E" folder—for an entity named, logically enough, e-Groups. This was where I met up with some Catholic researchers for Pennsylvania and Ohio, so I owe them much in helping point me in the right research direction. Still, don't think you can access their resources nowadays—unless the company which swallowed them up (Yahoo!) still makes the e-Groups archives available.

Without a second thought, I tossed all those notes in either the recycling bin or the shredder—for those pages with personal information attached.

And just like that, I'm on to the "F" folder. There, unfortunately, I won't be keeping up that brisk pace. Remember, my mother-in-law comes from the Flowers line, and there are several files to inspect, just in that one folder. This will take a while.

Above: "Boulevard Montmartre à Paris," 1897 oil on canvas by Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Day Eighteen: Finally! An Emptied Folder!

For as imposing a topic as the American civil war, you'd think it would take me much longer to dispatch with the folder I pulled out of my nemesis file cabinet today. Under "C" for Civil War, it was the item I was due to tackle today, and thinking of all that conflict meant to our nation's history, it should have given me more pause to consider.

Thankfully, it didn't. The only research question I've faced—at least on the Union side—was whether I could find any records of my husband's great grandfather, John Tully, having served. After all, according to a long-winded version of his obituary, the man had served under "General Hooker." I can only presume this means Brigadier General Joseph Hooker.

Despite that note in John Tully's obituary, I never could locate any record of his having served. The folder I encountered in today's installment of The Cleanup reminded me of my attempt, back in 2004, to locate anything at the National Archives. I had saved files containing instructions on how to research the matter, back at that time, and records of my having located a possible John Tully—and paying the fee to gain a copy of his record.

Even so, that attempt was short-circuited when a kind employee, in the process, mentioned to me that he thought I might not be ordering the file for the right John Tully. I recall—though there is, unfortunately, no record of the exchange in this file folder—that the employee mentioned this John Tully had moved, after the war, to North Dakota. Thinking, at the time, that my John Tully had returned to the family home—then in Chicago—that North Dakota wasn't in the picture for our family history.

Of course, it was only later that I learned John's sister Johanna had moved with her branch of the family to North Dakota, so there was a connection, no matter how slim. If only I had thought to continue with the process. After all, what's another thirty seven dollars?

Now, with subscriptions to Fold3 and other research resources, surely I could replicate those files—or at least some smattering of something that could verify the information contained in that email exchange. At least, that's what I thought, as I worked through that Civil War file. But some things just need to be snatched when they are first spotted; I haven't been able to find anything now.

In the end, most of the links provided in the articles saved in that folder are so outdated that I decided to toss the entire folder. Score one for "progress." I'm on to the Ds.

Above: Civil War, Picket Duty in Virginia; oil on panel by American artist Albert Bierstadt; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.