Surviving "Shopping"

No, not the dreaded Black Friday kind of shopping. Just shopping for our Thanksgiving dinner.

I thought I'd play it smart and slip into the grocery store early on Monday. Surely that was a recipe for avoiding the crowds.

Did I ever get that wrong. Adding to the mix was the fact that, just a few weeks ago, our local supermarket decided it would be a great idea to scramble the locations for all the usual staples of the season's big feast. The store actually had to station extra employees out on the floor to personally escort lost shoppers to the new location for flour for their pie crust, or cream for their coffee. The only constant in the layout was the place where we picked up our turkey; thankfully, the meat department was tethered to a part of the building built specifically for the butcher's duties, making it near-impossible to acquiesce to any redecorating whims.

I understand the psychology behind mixing things up in such familiar territory as a food market. After all, we eat something every day, and likely go to the store to pick up such essential items at least once a week (more frequently, if you are like our family). We probably don't even give it much thought that we have actually memorized the location of every item we purchase regularly. The store's layout seems to make sense to us, only because of the repeated patterns we've worn in the floor, zooming in and out as quickly as possible with our routine purchases. The store manager's hope is, by shifting locations, to induce those programmed shoppers, in their sudden confusion, to take a look around and realize what else is there to buy, as well. A sort of forced browsing. A way to put on the brakes, and in the meantime, reap a bit more profit from impulse buys.

I don't suppose anyone has ever considered the practice of working on a pedigree chart to be roughly akin to shopping for ancestors. And yet, we have developed a routine of rushing in to all our accustomed best places where we can, most predictably, snag a census enumeration, or a marriage record, or a will, and quickly be on our genealogical way. We know where to look for all the best family history bargains, and which documents will give us the most bang for our research buck. When we encounter an ancestor whose personal circumstances don't yield us any trace in all our favorite searching places, we are tempted to put up a howl of protest.

And yet, the manager's device to scramble all the go-to sources can pay off. It does, after all, make us take a look around—in confusion at first, yes, but perhaps that, too, can awaken the long-forgotten skill of opening our eyes and taking a look around.

Not that there is a "manager" trying to redecorate the family history resources we've come to rely upon the most. But occasionally, we encounter the same effect when we bump up against a "brick wall" ancestor. Take the immigrant family who arrived on American shores just after the 1880 census—and settled in a place where no state census was taken in the interim between that last available federal census of the 1800s and the first one of the 1900s. A lot can happen in a family in twenty years; those howls of protest over that missing 1890 census can be real for some researchers.

I'm going through those same howls in trying to track down my Rinehart family from Greene County, Pennsylvania. Perhaps owing to Simon Rinehart's penchant for moving to other states—first to Kentucky, then back to Pennsylvania before heading west to Ohio—he skipped town just when the usual documentation was being created for the benefit of us family historians two hundred years later. No store manager orchestrated that scrambled personal history, but I'm feeling that same sense of frustration, nonetheless.

The frustration, thankfully, prompts me to learn where else to look for all the usual traces of this family. If everything progressed exactly according to routine, I wouldn't have felt the need to learn how to look elsewhere.

If ever I've seen an excellent example of such resourcefulness, it would be among those researching their Irish ancestry. It is well known that the "store manager" exercising influence over the genealogical records layout of that nation had an unseen hand in destroying many of the most genealogically pertinent records of the early 1900s and half of the preceding century. What to do in a case like that?

Thankfully, the innate compulsion to know where we came from has superseded any external circumstances blocking research progress for those with Irish roots. The Irish have become wonderfully inventive in finding alternate resources for piecing together their family history. Though I first learned about such resourcefulness years ago, I still marvel at discovering that our Irish counterparts have learned to glean significant information, for example, from dog license applications. Could this really be true that a snippet from this document combined with a snatch from another could eventually add up to an accurate snapshot of an ancestor's place in history? That is how resourceful researchers learn to look around and combine the substitute records they've found when the customary sources aren't where they were accustomed to finding them.

It's true that we sometimes need a "store employee" to guide us directly to the new location for information we seek, and in this online era, we have assistants in abundance. Besides the blogs of major genealogy corporations, we have hundreds of volunteer genea-bloggers (and a few professionals who offer their commentary as a public service). We have digitizing services which post hundred-year-old genealogy books online for us to not only consult, but search with the convenience of a mouse click or touch screen. We have the crowdsourcing prowess of experienced peers who can be found at thousands of online forums, mailing lists, and even Facebook groups. Local genealogical societies are pondering ways to get into the act by adding digitized local resources to their own websites, either behind firewalls for members only, or on their main site for public access.

As it turns out, what was immediately inconvenient—whether at the grocery store yesterday or in my family history research last week—eventually gives way to the eye-opening experience of realizing there are other ways to achieve our purposes, whether in purchasing all the right ingredients for a Thanksgiving feast, or in locating records that will lead to the right answers about our ancestors. It's all there—somewhere—just not where we thought we'd find it.  

Easing Into the Week

It may sound strange to hear that I consider this upcoming week to be an easy one. ("What?! This week?") You may be thinking of the endless shopping list, the multi-day preparations ahead, the hordes of company about to descend on your altogether-too-small humble abode—or the many miles you will be driving (in the snow, uphill both ways). After the schedule our family has been through in the past few weeks, though, this week will seem like a vacation. And it will be.

You have to remember: I've had a rocky relationship with this holiday called Thanksgiving. Not that I'm ungrateful; on the contrary, my family and I have been overwhelmingly blessed over the years. It's just that, ever since I was a child, Thanksgiving was a lonely holiday for me. In later years, it also marked the time of sad memories of family members lost. Yet, even approaching one Thanksgiving season, there was the surprise of some particularly welcome genealogical news, when a fellow researcher pointed out my relationship to a line reaching back to the landing of the Mayflower.

Putting my Thanksgiving angst in more recent context, this has been a hectic month. Our family owns a small training company and several times in this past year, my husband has been privileged to speak internationally. The only down side is when he is gone for long periods of time to locations which are not exactly politically stable.

Let's just say it was good to pick him up at the airport this past weekend.

For just this small while—this upcoming week leading up to Thanksgiving—it will be nice to set aside all the classes that need to be taught, all the scheduling obligations, all the papers needing to be reviewed, and all those incessant meetings. While we love what we do, it's nice to have a break. Just cooking a turkey and "all the fixin's" will be a welcome reprieve.

As for our visits here at A Family Tapestry, it will be a time to sit back and relax, as well. Those frustrating Rineharts aren't yielding me anything further of interest—it is almost looking like I will have to go wrestle the truth out of that family in person, either in Ohio or Pennsylvania at a later date. Meanwhile, nothing exciting has appeared on the research horizon, as far as other family stories are concerned.

That doesn't mean I'll be doing a disappearing act, though. With the change of responsibilities at our local genealogical society, I've been doing a bit of thinking, and perhaps the fireside-chat mood this holiday week evokes will be the perfect setting to just sit back and start a conversation on the note of those thoughts.

Ahead of the Holidays

It's almost time for that dreaded event: Black Friday. Yes, I know, it would be nice to actually celebrate a holiday (Thanksgiving, in case you—like commercial America—hadn't noticed) instead of sweeping it out of the way so a more "profitable" season could be ushered in, but that is how our culture currently works.

Despite the caricature that the gift-giving season has become, I've noticed some backlash. For one thing, the stores themselves are devising ways to encourage people to get their holiday shopping done early—ostensibly so the impact of frenzied shoppers won't hit the front doors all at once next Friday. After all, this American rite of passage can't be easy on the employees, who sometimes even have to leave their own Thanksgiving dinners early to appease the "demand" for early shopping.

The other trend is that shoppers are looking for ways to escape the crush, themselves. This is, after all, an insane way to go about purchasing well-thought-out gifts for cherished family and friends.

At the same time, for a culture in which many have more than they could possibly need—or use—it makes sense to divert the gift-giving urge to items other than commodities. It's been an interesting trend to observe: that of replacing the gift of gadgets with presents providing experiences or non-consumable entities.

Perhaps that is what is behind the groundswell of people gifting each other with subscriptions to services like Ancestry.com or "unique" items like the ethnicity reports that come with DNA test results. It's no surprise to see many genealogy-related companies join the clamor with pre-holiday sales; one of my best DNA matches from last year only tested because her husband gave her a DNA test just for fun the previous Christmas—he liked the holiday commercial. She had no tree posted online, but when responding to my email (one of the rare non-tree customers who actually did respond), told me she was willing to work with me on figuring out our impossible mutual ancestry. If it weren't for the lark of giving something "different" for the holiday season, I would have lost that opportunity.

Already, my count of DNA matches has leapt almost double the usual biweekly amount at one company—Family Tree DNA. It couldn't possibly be on account of the holiday sales; that company only announced their flash sale last Sunday night. What went into that forty six person jump to give me 2,531 matches at FTDNA for today's tally? My husband's FTDNA count only went up by twenty five to total 1,613. I'm holding steady with that biweekly rate of eight new matches at AncestryDNA, as is my husband; where I currently have 769 matches, he now has 383. (I won't even go into the issue with my shrinking results at 23andMe, where once again, I lost eleven matches to drop to 1,138 matches; at least my husband only lost two this time.)

No matter how many matches I might have at a DNA company, one thing is sure: after the holiday bulge hits the lab at these respective companies, there will be a lot more matches than we've seen in the past several weeks. Sales certainly make it more interesting to explore those matches, mainly because in the increased number comes a greater possibility of finding a close family member whose tree actually parallels some of my family surnames.

In preparation for that—as well as a result of the research I've been tackling for projects on current branches of interest—I've been expanding the number of descendants' lines I can add to my database. Since I've been focused on my mother-in-law's Pennsylvania Rinehart line and its related Gordons, you'll find it no surprise to learn her tree was the recipient of most of my research attention this time. Right now, I've got 13,395 in her tree, up 186 from two weeks ago.

In comparison, my own mother's line went up a measly thirty eight to total 11,682. And absolutely nothing happened over on my father's line and my father-in-law's line. The problem with that is: if I'm hoping to find a link to help resolve those lines where I'm stalled, I'm going to need a more robust tree to start with.

In a way, right now, we are getting ready to "harvest" the holidays. Eventually, those anticipated DNA test sales will materialize as matches for all of us. The trouble is, unless we're prepared with records and tools to determine how those mystery test-takers match us, all we're left with are guesses. And I've spent a few years struggling with DNA guesses. From experience, I can tell you there's nothing more frustrating in genealogy than getting close enough to a breakthrough answer, knowing you have a DNA match but not being able to figure out why that person matches. 

Partnering to Augment Our Reach

In the midst of the rainy weather that blew through my stretch of the west coast last Thursday, our genealogical society happened to have the privilege of hosting probably the most important speaker ever to appear in our local lineup: Crista Cowan, corporate genealogist for Ancestry.com.

Of course, we bemoaned our fate of having our biggest day turn into our soggiest day, to date, of this season. Everything we had planned so meticulously to insure we were ready for the crowd that was sure to materialize for this learning opportunity seemed futile. There's no competing with yukky weather.

Things did not bode well for us from the minute, in mid-morning, that my power went out. A weather-related outage, it was an unscheduled annoyance which wouldn't be resolved, according to the utilities company, until after I had to leave my home to set up for the evening's meeting.

On the other side of the equation, our fearless speaker, traveling to us from her last engagement hundreds of miles away, had to scramble when her flight was diverted to another airport on account of the weather—and then landed later than anticipated. Hello, Bay area rush hour traffic. This was not in the itinerary.

Still, everything worked out, and we can now safely declare the event a success. In retrospect, I'm realizing this was an occasion which could not possibly have happened without one element—and facing the uncooperative weather has reminded me of the true support which bolstered our efforts. That key element was partnership.

Here's the thing: we are a small society—less than one hundred members. We may be situated in a city of three hundred thousand, but we have a lot of growing to do. More to the point, the facility which hosts our membership meetings provides a room which holds about thirty five people. A room that size would never do for a guest speaker of that magnitude. Nor would the facility's less than adequate technological capabilities; there is no way the wifi in that building would be up to handling a live demonstration of the Ancestry website.

What to do? The answer to that question—and likely to many challenges genealogical societies will face in upcoming years—is to seek innovative answers through partnerships. I'm not talking about formal, long-term arrangements, but simply the teamwork to put together an event that meets the needs of multiple organizations.

In our case, the answer to our quandary came quickly. We are a city which celebrates its ethnic diversity, and one such group had approached our society almost a year ago, asking us to help teach their members how to preserve their ethnic heritage through the skills inherent in family history research. Now that their native-language-speaking ancestors were all but gone, this association wanted to pass their heritage down to subsequent generations before it was forgotten entirely.

Once we had shared that educational opportunity with this other organization, we got to know them better—well enough to feel comfortable asking them if they were interested in partnering with us in other educational outreaches. Can anything make more sense than blending groups which seek to preserve their heritage with genealogical societies mandated to preserve local family history?

It was thanks to this ongoing partnership that we were, months later, able to bring in a well-known speaker and host her presentation in a top-notch facility (a lecture hall at a university in our city).

Every group is different, of course, and the potential for partnership must be viewed on a case by case basis. But it is as clear to me as the next day's sparkling sunshine against the raging storm of our event's evening that the only way our event could have been a success was if we were able to pool our resources and talents with another group sharing mutual goals.

If You Can't Find One Family, Look for Another

Granted, I'm chasing myself in circles, trying to piece together the story of Sarah Rinehart Gordon, my mother-in-law's second great grandmother. Sarah's father, Simon, supposedly came from Greene County, Pennsylvania, but Sarah herself was born in Kentucky—and we found the tax records to confirm her father Simon (or at least someone with that exact name) was in Bracken County there. By the time I found Sarah in Perry County, Ohio, the home of my mother-in-law's family, she was married with several children.

So how did that Kentucky girl find a Greene County Gordon to marry? And what brought them all to Perry County, Ohio?

All of Sarah's first seven children were born in Pennsylvania—Greene County, specifically, was listed as the birthplace for some of them. Only with daughter Sarah, born in 1832, did the rest of Sarah's children report their birth as happening in Ohio.

It's obvious that, despite a birth in Kentucky, Sarah and her parents returned to Greene County. That was, after all, where she met her future husband, James Gordon.

In fact, Gordons were there aplenty to chase in that county in Pennsylvania, and the same book in which we searched in vain to discover Simon Rinehart's place in the Rinehart lineage in Greene County just happens to have plenty of Gordons to talk about, too. At the bottom of page 436 of Howard Leckey's The Tenmile Country and its Pioneers, we can easily spot James Gordon, firstborn son of William Gordon and Mary Carroll. As for James' marriage, the book simply reports that he "married Sarah Rinehart."

It would have been a nice gesture, in the midst of all that genealogical detail, if he had chosen to extrapolate on that entry just a little bit more. After all, in a county full of Rineharts—not to mention, full of women named Sarah Rinehart—one would think it would help to differentiate between two people claiming the same name in the same place.

Perhaps that's what makes this chase called genealogy so challenging—and yet so compelling. 

Scoring a Triple D

If I can't find any further documentation about the Simon Rinehart I'm seeking—no, not the one ambushed by Native Americans back in Greene County, Pennsylvania, but the one who moved from there to Perry County, Ohio—I'll try a different approach. I'll look for any records which can verify that at least two of his children had his name and his wife's name mentioned in their own death records.

Of course, I'm still trying to make this second approach work. Despite finding Simon's daughter's death record, it contained a name for her mother which did not agree with a published report of that daughter's brother's parental names. And then, I couldn't even find the actual death record for that same brother, leaving me to wonder about editorial inaccuracies in published works.

Thankfully, though, Simon had more than two children. In his later years—like, those years when the census enumeration actually included the names of all family members, not just the head of household—Simon's census record included the name of three younger Rinehart women: Hannah, Lucinda, and Charlotte.

The difficulty was that these three thirty-something spinsters had some marks against them. For one thing, in the 1850 census, the blot on Charlotte's name was that she was listed as "idiotic." Likewise, that same label persisted in the 1860 census. While I can't yet locate the three sisters in the 1870 census, the one sister I can find in the 1880 census, Lucinda, was labeled as "insane."

Realizing that family members of an ancestor were seen in a less than sterling way can be a deflating discovery. Of course, the wide variety of diagnoses that could have been lumped into such labels in that time period don't necessarily constitute our understanding of those labels today. In addition, options left open to family members for dealing with such health issues in that century were drastically limited and often not adequate to address the individual's treatment needs.

A timely blog post by professional genealogist Amy Johnson Crow, "Do You Have a Defective Ancestor?" addresses such issues from both a historical and genealogical perspective. One suggestion was to look for the special census schedule that expanded upon that category focused on health issues. That schedule was known as the "Special Schedule of Defective, Dependent, and Delinquent Classes"—handily shrunken down to the abbreviation, the DDD Schedule.

Though poor Charlotte, the "idiotic" daughter of Simon and Ann Rinehart, was nowhere to be found by the time of the 1880 census, her sister Lucinda was listed that year, so I thought I'd check out her entry in the DDD Schedule.

Unfortunately, as I found out, not all states provided the federal government with their records from the extra schedules taken along with the regular enumeration. Still, I gave it a try since Ancestry.com includes a copy of the 1880 DDD Schedule in their holdings. Yet, in browsing the collection's holdings, after selecting the state of Ohio, the listing of available counties that popped up did not include Perry County.

It would have been interesting to see what additional information could have been found for Lucinda in the DDD Schedule, but I have to remember my original reason for pursuing additional documentation: I wanted to find a record of her parents' names. Of course, I'd also like to find an entry for either Hannah or Charlotte, as well—though finding the right Hannah will be a challenge, since that was one of the favorite names in the extended Rinehart family.

Even if Lucinda was the last of the remaining Rinehart siblings, it was difficult to locate a death record for her. My first clue was an entry at Find A Grave—without the customary headstone photograph—but for dates it included only years and one of them seemed wrong. However, the entry also indicated the burial was in Perry County, in a section of the cemetery reserved for charity or "infirmary lots." The dates given were a birth in 1820 and a death in 1900.

Remembering the death records in the holdings at FamilySearch, I went back there to see if I could find an entry for Lucinda Rinehart. Under the spelling for Lucinda "Rhinhart," the entry contained the same year of birth (1820) but a full date of death: June 2, 1900. Her place of death was given simply as "infirmary." No marital status was indicated, so I didn't even have that hint to help determine if I had the right Lucinda Rinehart. And her place of birth was listed as "U.S.A." Clearly, there was no close relative available to provide the details of this abandoned woman's connections to family life.

Appreciative, at least, for the exactness of the full date of death, I followed the line for Lucinda's entry to the point on the second page where her parents' names would be listed. Sadly—and I had noticed that trend when I was searching for her brother Jesse's entry in the 1880s—it had been a habit in that county to omit collection of this information, despite a heading on the form clearly provided for that purpose.

So, was this the right Lucinda? Or not? Once again, history's record-keepers have cheated me out of an answer to my family history questions. 

About Those Old Genealogies

What is it about things that are claimed to be "old" and therefore more valuable than the same item from our own time period? Perhaps that makes sense to value an antique piece of furniture or artwork from a prior period of history. But family trees? Though some people get excited to find an old genealogy about their family, I've learned it is quite possible for diligent genealogists of prior centuries to make just as many mistakes as those of our current century.

The only difference, in finding an "old" genealogy of a family I'm researching, is that I can check out what my fellow researchers of a hundred years ago might have heard about their roots. But those grandmothers of the early eighteen hundreds, say, who passed along the family lore to their younger generations certainly didn't have the opportunity to check out those family legends against the proof in the digitized documents we can so easily call up today.

Your eyes may have lit up when you saw me mention discovering an old history book about the families living in western Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. After all, the Rinehart family which still keeps me in the dark about their origins were once from Greene County, Pennsylvania. And other researchers have also felt sure that my Perry County, Ohio, Rineharts were indeed once residents of Greene County.

Taking a look at the entry about the Rinehart family in this book—The Tenmile Country and its Pioneer Families—does show us one useful detail, at least. Looking over the Rinehart genealogy detailed in those pages, beginning at page 322, gives us a clue that that family liked to re-use the same names, generation after generation. They nearly wore out the use of names like Simon and Jesse. Cassa, Sarah, and Hannah were winners in the name-after contest, too.

The difficulty was how hard it made it to sort out which Rinehart family might be the correct line for this Simon Rinehart I've been seeking. Yet, if I kept my bearings by insuring that other details about our man were also represented, it would still be possible to not be led astray by all those same names in the Rinehart extended family.

The trouble with all those Simons, however, was not in how many of them there were, but in how nobody among the whole of them shared the same details our man would have to have. For instance, there is no Simon listed with a wife named Ann. Furthermore, if this Simon was father of our Sarah Rinehart Gordon, he would have to be a man born at least twenty years before Sarah's arrival in the late 1790s. As far as I can tell, no Simon mentioned in The Tenmile Country contained the full complement of those requirements.

What complicates matters is that this same Greene County is the one in which I found several of our family's Gordon relatives, too. It is obvious the Gordons from Greene and the Rineharts from Greene lived close enough to each other to know each other well. In addition, despite the distance between the two counties—Greene, where the families once lived, and Perry County, Ohio, where some of the Gordons and Rineharts eventually settled—I am able to find a cluster of those same families in Perry who once were neighbors back in Greene.

There are so many names, it almost makes me want to sketch out this Rinehart family line, as detailed in The Tenmile Country. Better yet, to enter it all into a test tree database in my Ancestry.com account. I've got to come up with a way to examine the narrative for gaps. After all, Bruce Anderson found some missing segments, as I mentioned yesterday. There may be more.

The most glaring false start is the Simon Rinehart reported in Tenmile who lost his life during an ambush out on his frontier property. Obviously, he couldn't be the one who ended up in Perry County. None of the other Simons mentioned in the book would match the age and dates, though. Could there be other branches of this family who were not included in the genealogy in this book? Or does our Simon Rinehart coincidentally come from the same county, but not the same Rinehart family at all?