Walnut, Kansas: Snapshot in Time

Trying to weave a family history from the strands left on the back of an antique photograph can transport you to unexpected places. Take my last such experiment: an entire photo album with nothing but a few first names led me from the place of its discovery in northern California to its origin over five thousand miles away in County Cork, Ireland.

And oh, the stories we learned in the process! That kind of experience led me to the conclusion that nobody has a boring life story.

But what are the chances that we'll see a repeat performance with this next photo discovery? While I doubt I'll find a life story originating in that same country across the Atlantic, with a picture found in California, the possibilities are wide open.

Though the photograph I'll be chasing this time does contain the hint of a complete name—we have the benefit of a surname along with the generic given name of John—there is nothing much else to go by, other than the photographer's imprint on the front of the photograph. From that, we learn that the picture was taken in Kansas, in a small town called Walnut.

Whether the subject of the photograph actually lived in Walnut, we can't yet be sure, but at least we know he was in the vicinity, at least momentarily.

Since I'm not very good at guessing dates of photographs from either the style of the frame or the style of the clothing sported by the subject of the portrait, I decided to first learn what I could about that little town.

That, as it turned out, was a good start to the project. Right away, I learned that the population of Walnut in the 1880s—my guess for when the picture was taken—was barely two hundred. That, of course, increases our chance that, if we take a look at the 1880 census for that town, any matching name would not merely be a case of mistaken identity.

But was the photograph taken in 1880? By 1890, the town's population had multiplied to over five hundred residents. I took a look at other reports about the town to see if I could pinpoint dates even further.

According to one report, the town was relatively new at that time. Only laid out in 1871, the town was originally called Glenwood. Since our photograph clearly mentions the name of the town as Walnut, we know the photograph wouldn't have been taken that early.

That same report mentioned the town's name change had occurred in 1874—but that the post office didn't officially change its name until April of 1877. Another report, however—and this one was drawn up much closer to the time period, itself—explained that growth of the original town was hampered by dispute over the original title to the land, a difficulty which was not resolved until 1876. Upon that point, additional land was added to the original town plans up through 1882, thus allowing for expansion of business as well as the population beyond that date.

With a town that small, it goes without saying that there would be no "city" directory available online for me to look up any reference to the photography studio. Thankfully, though, the border of the picture clearly bears the imprint for a studio named Shuck, with the location, "Walnut, Kansas" included alongside the studio's identity.

How the photograph made it from Walnut, Kansas, to the antique shop where I found it in Lodi, California, is the question. I often imagine romantic stories accompanying such pictures: a beau missing his intended and sending a reminder; relatives back home missing their fortune-seeking children. The possibility for stories is immense—at least in my mind.

As I've done before, with this project, I'll start by constructing a hypothesis about the subject of the photograph. We've already noticed the imprint giving us a hint where the item originated; now, we need to see if anyone by our subject's name lived in that vicinity. If so, that will provide us with some additional facts to go by.

Then—if we can even find that much information—comes the tedious part of piecing that person's life story together, using documentation from all the usual sources genealogists are so familiar with handling. What comes next is anyone's guess, but getting to the point where we can figure this out will certainly be worth the journey. The added bonus, of course, is if we can reunite the found photo with the family to whom it really belongs.

Not in the Mail

I have a confession to make. No, it isn't that I haven't yet gotten my Christmas cards in the mail; I've still got plenty of time for that (says the procrastinator). It's an entirely different item that I neglected to send off in the mail.

My confession is that I am horrible at mailing things. Email was made explicitly for people like me, people who, though still supplied with pen, paper and envelope—even the stamp, for crying out loud!—somehow can't find a way to transform those raw materials into the item intended for delivery in the mail.

In today's case, it wasn't a letter I meant to mail, per se, but a package. A small package. A flat package. One containing a photograph from, oh, maybe one hundred thirty years ago.

I'm just guessing about the age of the thing, of course, because I haven't yet researched it. But when I first obtained the photograph, I had meant to send it on—along with that Christmas photo album I had found at the same time—to my friend and mentor, "Far Side" of Forgotten Old Photos. She has a talent for reuniting old photographs with family members, so I had thought she could try her hand at finding a home for this one. All except for one thing: I never got it mailed.

So much for good intentions. At this point, casting about for a story, I've decided to take the suggestion of a friend and head for the hills to peruse the antique shops near Gold Rush country in California. I have a traveling companion to keep me company—thanks to the offer of good friend and mentor Sheri Fenley—and the date for our road trip is already set.

There's only one problem: I want to write about those old photographs now. Thus, I remember my transgressions and sheepishly pull out the folder storing the old, unmailed treasure and swipe it for my own blog post here.

So, with apologies to Connie at Forgotten Old Photos, we'll be off on our own adventure, seeing whether there is any way to connect an old face with a new family member. This week, we'll start in a small town in the eastern part of the state of Kansas and work our way westward as we journey through the decades since a young man posed for his portrait at the Shuck photography studio in tiny Walnut, Kansas, sometime around the 1880s.  

Closing in on Another Year's End

It's December. Already. It may have seemed like a long year while it was unwinding, but now that we're in the last month, I'm seeing a to-do list longer than the calendar page.

Keeping up with my progress in family history research for the entire year will yield some interesting observations, come the end of this year. After today's count, I only have two more biweekly tallies, then the year is gone forever. It will be interesting to measure how much has been done—a little here, a little there, for a whole year. Baby steps can add up.

For now, I'm still switching back and forth between my mother's tree and the tree for my mother-in-law. Each of them are relatively easy to work on, and sometimes yield interesting stories. (After moaning over the lack of such stories yesterday, I went on to discover one fascinating tidbit about an in-law for a distant cousin on my mother's side; if the facts check out and there is no mistaken identity, I may have a story to share, after all.)

My mother-in-law's tree is still the one out in front, mostly by virtue of those traditional Catholic values multiplied out by countless generations since arriving on American shores. Right now, her tree includes 13,586 individuals, an increase of 191 over the past two weeks.

Meanwhile, my mother's tree lags behind at 11,820, though I did manage to add 138 additional, documented family members. Perhaps it is a bit more challenging to research her lines, after all.

One thing I absolutely must change for next year is to attend to the trees of both my father and my father-in-law. Granted, I'd be delighted if I could return to Ireland to pursue my father-in-law's ancestry, but that is not in the plans for quite a while. Still...one can hope. It would help, though, if my father's tree hadn't remained at 452 for the entire month of November, nor my father-in-law's at 1,392. That's no way to make progress.

With the onslaught of the holiday shopping season, there is one thing I can look forward to: seeing the results from all those DNA test kits which will be gifted to family members this Christmas or Hanukkah. I don't suppose we'll see the bulge in our match lists until well into January, but still...at least Hanukkah comes early this year (beginning the evening of December 12), giving a jump start on getting those kits back in to the lab. Besides, I'm curious to see whether my ordering yet another kit from MyHeritage DNA will be the key opening the door to more European matches for my father's elusive line.

Right now, our DNA situation stands rather still. I have 2,562 matches at Family Tree DNA, up thirty one from last time, a nice jump. My husband has 1,625 there, up twelve. At AncestryDNA, my count of matches (fourth cousin and closer) increased by only two—hurry up, holiday sales!—but I have 771 matches, which is enough to keep me busy. My husband has 388, up five, so it looks like things are slowing down for him, as well. At 23andMe, the only place where my husband has more matches than I do, he's got 1,181 and I have 1,134. Of course, that's the company where our numbers shrink for almost every tally, but this time, my husband didn't lose any from the previous count, though I lost four matches. Checking this at the end of the year will be interesting.

We've yet to see how the holiday season will impact research progress. Though life in general gets more hectic in this last month of the year, at least many regular obligations take a hiatus during the month of December. Hopefully, in the rest of the month, I'll be able to squeeze in a few more hours of research before closing the year out with my last report on New Year's Eve.

Desperately Seeking Stories

It's gotten so bad, even my daughter's friends are sending suggestions. I'm finding myself inexorably pulled away from the stories I've loved so much and into the morass of unadulterated genealogy. I am drowning in begats, with no delightful details to put flesh on the bones of those names, dates and places. If we must pin down the date of the crime, couldn't we at least get the chance to learn a bit more about the whodunit?

So my daughter's friend suggests taking a drive up to the foothills. After all, those were the same hills that drew people from all over the world, at the height of the California gold rush. So many came there, made their fortune—or went bust—and returned home, wherever home used to be. But many stayed on and called home towns with picturesque names like Angels Camp, Railroad Flat, or Jenny Lind.

Over the years, those California transplant forty niners surely received letters from folks back home, sometimes even letters containing photographs of sister's new beau or brother's new set of twins.

Fast forward one hundred sixty years or so, and those photos end up in antique shops. Of which there are several up in those same foothills. That's where this friend came in: she suggested I go looking for more stories up in the back corners of the antique stores up there. Surely there will be some CdVs up there with a name stuck on the back. Perhaps that would be worth a story to pursue.

When I first started this blog, it was with the intent of sharing all the family stories I had already located about the many branches of our families. In both my own and my husband's family, those stories abounded, making for some easy sharing. As the weeks—then months, then years—flew by, there still were more stories to share, many which only made their appearance after a serious stint of research.

Now, I'm beginning to wonder: is there no one else in this family with a story to discover? I'm adding at least a couple hundred names to the various trees I'm researching on a biweekly basis, including confirming documentation about the details of their genealogy—those dreary dates of birth, marriage and death. I'm also following the trail of each of these new adds decade by decade with each census enumeration. Included with that is trailing the line of each sibling in that generation, then researching the descendants of those same siblings, following the same protocol of documentation.

And yet, no new stories. Maybe it is true: farmers make a boring lot. Hard working, but unremarkable. Nobody is off to seek his fortune, or gain the glory of a hero's life in a war. Nobody has gone off to college to break out of the mold and better himself. Nobody's even played the part of the town scoundrel or landed himself in jail. Nothing that even hints of a grand story.

It may turn out that I'm forced to take that drive up to the foothills, after all. If that's where the stories are, sure, I'll try my hand at poking through dusty bins in the back of antique shops. Who knows? Maybe I'll find another family treasure just waiting to be sent back home to Ireland.

 

The Urge to Organize

That urge to organize my DNA results lists has struck again. Especially now, not only considering my expansion to consider matches beyond the fourth cousin level but also because I just sprung for a Cyber Monday sale to add a fourth DNA testing company (MyHeritage), I've got to more finely hone my system for keeping track of correspondence with all those matches.

Since I do most of my contact via email for DNA matches, I've already set up folders for each of the family members for whom I serve as administrator. Now, for five individuals times up to three testing companies—plus GEDmatch results—I'm thinking it might help to differentiate that folder system a bit more. And if I migrate any other family members' raw data to that fourth testing company, it will make sense to set up a subcategory for each company under each family member's folder.

I may be over-thinking this a bit. The urge to also set up sub-categories of "answered" versus "not answered" is strong—I want a way to separate out the pending from the solved cases, to know what work still needs to be done. And the idea of finding a way to sub-categorize by surname headings is also pushing me. If nothing else, I want a way to split everything into "maternal" versus "paternal" branch categories.

The possibilities keep mushrooming. What started out as a simple pursuit of grouping ancestors' descendants by similarity of genetic background is exploding into a complex project begging for management tools more akin to PERT diagrams or Gantt charts than email folders.

The worst of it is the sense that, if all systems are worked just right, I'll turn this DNA mountain of mystery matches into the mole hill it more rightly deserves to be. That sense may well be deceiving me. There may not be any magic solution to figure out how these thousands of people match me; no matter how well I organize my system, the only way to really know that may well be to do the hard work of building others' trees for them. I may have to find the path from my door to that of my match's most recent common ancestor, myself.

On the other hand, figuring out the connection with a DNA match can be deceptively easy. I write an introductory email to my match, my match actually answers it, we exchange links to our respective family trees, we find a mutual surname, and bingo! We find the answer. Whenever that happens, it always startles me, because the occurrence seems so relatively rare. I start thinking I must do penance to turn that situation around, when it's likely that is not what needs to be done, at all.

What does need to be done still eludes me, though more organization will certainly help keep track of progress. Or at least assuage my sense of needing to get something done. But how to measure progress, when the end lies beyond a murky shadow, is hard to determine.

Never Say Never

With well over a thousand matches for each of the family's DNA kits I manage, I had long ago promised myself I'd limit my frustration by only pursuing those matches whose relationship was likely to be fourth cousin or closer. After all, it would have to be a dedicated researcher who could come up with a reliable, documented tree stretching back to the fourth great grandparent which would be necessary to go beyond that point of relationship. Granted, there are plenty of serious genealogists out there with trees numbering in the tens of thousands of relatives, but the great majority of my matches who don't have the dreaded "No family tree" label have trees with less than one thousand members—often, less than one hundred. Not much of a potential for locating most recent common ancestors among those sparse familial branches.

In this season of reconsideration, when I'm revisiting my protocols for sorting through this haystack of disparate matches, I'm beginning to see my way around that dictum. At Ancestry DNA, at least, segmenting my results by using their "Shared Ancestor Hints" filter has demonstrated the value of including the more distant cousins in my viewfinder.

In fact, using this approach has led to a few observations. Easiest to see, among those new insights, is that quite a few of my distant matches actually share their own surname with a surname prominent in my family tree. Of course I'm going to check out the results for a distant cousin who himself bears the surname Broyles or McClellan, for instance, since those names are part of my own genealogical heritage. While that approach might seem naive for someone searching their Jones or Smith heritage, it is a gimme for people researching hard-to-find names like Taliaferro or Aktabowski. Not too many of those around, you know.

Two other observations popped up, now that I've shifted from my old policy of never going beyond fourth cousin, but they seem to contradict each other. The one thing I had long ago noticed was that, at least at Ancestry DNA, the estimated level of relatedness usually seemed spot on—and when giving a range (say, "third to fourth cousin"), the end result usually settled with the closer relationship.

However, these two observations broke from that pattern. In the one, my kit would be estimated to compare with a match at a certain level, and then fall short of that. In the other, my kit would turn out to match the other person at a more distant level than predicted.

Several of my husband's matches were predicted to be more distant relationships than they actually turned out to be. For instance, one match slated to be within the range of fifth to eighth cousin turned out to be a third cousin, once removed. Another "distant cousin" proved to be his fourth cousin, rather than the fifth to eighth cousin it was predicted to be.

Granted, some of those were near-misses. But in exploring this new world of distant cousins—which, previous to this point, had been off limits by my own policy—I observed something. In these lines, which all happened to be related to my husband's mother, looking at the details of the matches' trees confirmed that they, like my husband, had more than one route to relatedness. Yes, that means they were their own cousins. But it also means that there is something in their genetics which foils the algorithms for deducting which level of relatedness the two parties should be.

On the flip side, my own mother's lines have inter-relatedness, solely by virtue of being early colonists in a vast—and vastly empty—new continent. Repeated inter-marriages among extended family members over the generations should predictably produce results similar to those of my husband's family. But in some cases, I see the opposite result.

Particularly in the lines involving my Lewis, Meriwether, Gilmer and Taliaferro iterations, the relationship turned out to be more distant. One match, for instance, was predicted to be of a fourth cousin level, but turned out to be fifth cousins, once removed. Another supposed fourth cousin turned out to be a seventh cousin.

I'm sure we'll all see surprises in this new world of genetic genealogy. Some will come with scientific explanations in hand to help us understand the dynamics behind the aberrations. Other situations may end up, hanging around on the street corner, waiting for someone to come up with the reasons why it turned out that way.

One thing is sure, though: if I had never bothered to explore these far distant relationships, I probably wouldn't have noticed such anomalies hiding in my genetic outliers. With the more finely-honed tools, though, there needn't be any reason to shy away from exploring these even more remote relationship possibilities. 

The Difference Four Days can Make

Just as I am agonizing over the thousands of DNA matches I can't fathom in my own family's lists, AncestryDNA issues a press release with the astounding news: in the four days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, they "more than tripled the number of kits sold during the same period in 2016."

While that is indeed news, it doesn't present the entire picture. We need to have a number to help us get our heads around this nugget of information, and The DNA Geek was just the one to do the math. In her own blog post, she estimated that, since Ancestry sold about 560,000 DNA kits last Thanksgiving weekend, "more than tripled" would mean sales exceeding 1.7 million kits for the 2017 Thanksgiving weekend.

There is a corollary to that news, of course. According to Ancestry's press release, this turn of events marks the first time the year-to-date number of kits sold exceeds the entire count of Ancestry subscribers.

That's right: that means even more of those mystery cousins sans family trees. And we're just the ones to help them out.

While you and I—and the genealogical societies we belong to—may not have foreseen that turn of events, we may find ourselves standing in the exact path of a tsunami of interest (or at least questions) regarding what to do with all this "stuff." Now that nearly two million more DNA customers will be opening their pretty packages—and eventually taking their first peek at those colorful ethnicity reports—they may begin wondering, "What's next?"

You and I already know that "what's next" may include a learning curve whose arc rivals that of the tsunami of interest we're already eyeing with caution. While I can easily see that such circumstances may evolve to insert genealogical societies straight into a love-hate relationship with facts like these, we need to focus on the up side to the situation.

For one thing, more test kits out there eventually will translate into more matches for all of us. That is a good thing, especially for those of us still struggling just to pinpoint our immigrant origins. It's the enormity of the possibility, though, that astounds me: if the Ancestry DNA database already crested six million as of last October, this past weekend's sales nudge the eight million mark.

Will any of those eight million customers be interested in a personalized, hands-on approach to learning more about their DNA results?

For the first time, this past fall, our genealogical society experimented with offering a beginner's workshop in using DNA testing to augment family history research. We offered the workshop at two different library settings, and were pleased with the response. Indeed, a third library requested us to get our show on the road and bring it to their city.

Perhaps because DNA testing seems relatively new and unknown, I am still surprised when the first thing strangers ask me is, "Does that test really work?" The new normal, in the world of family history, may turn out to be a scenario in which, when people think the word "genealogy," they automatically connect it with "genetic." This is what is happening, I'd like to note, not with brainiac academics, but with man-on-the-street genealogical novices.

The opportunity to step up and provide hands-on, personalized training to people who are brand new to the world of genealogy is right at our doorstep now. The chance to meet a community need may well be the shot in the arm so needed by flagging societies worried that online databases had sounded the death knell for genealogical organizations. When those online services are running sales reports like this, boots-on-the-ground genealogical societies like ours certainly can remain alive and well.