Introducing Ralph

In researching the identities of the photographs in Thirza's collection, it would be quite handy if each of these people grew up to marry each other, or turned out to be cousins, or some other convenient and handy resolution to my research problem.

Apparently, that is not the case. The only nexus that I've been able to find, so far, is a link to the state of Colorado. Neighbors in Greeley, perhaps, but nothing more.

I can't help but think, though, that surely there is a story line weaving its way in and out of the three families we've discovered so far in this odyssey through Thirza's photograph collection. Perhaps at some point we'll discover it, but for now, it's a well-kept secret.

So we'll move on to the next photograph. Today's picture is the faded photograph I referred to the other day, one which makes me think it was taken much earlier than that of baby Mildred. This one, of the head and shoulders of a young man, bears no date or location. Though I don't know enough about photograph trends to date the style of the composition, I had thought this was an earlier type of photograph, perhaps from the 1880s, as opposed to the turn of the century date for Mildred's picture.

In a hand similar to the writing on the front of Mildred's photograph, someone had inked in the name Ralph Pollock. Just having a full name was a great help. However, trying my hand at locating a suitable census entry for someone with this man's name brought up too many possibilities. For one thing, the handwriting on the face of the card made it difficult to tell if the surname was Pollack or Pollock.

Time for a fuzzy search, I tried my hand at some guess work: what if Ralph was from the same town as Mildred? Figuring out Ralph's age and the date of the picture might make a big difference in finding the right Ralph, but it was worth a try.

Of course, to explain how I stumbled upon what I found, finally, will take another post, for there was another step in between these two that landed me on a page in a census record with a clue that nearly reached out to slap me in the face. Besides that, we have one more baby picture to examine before we arrive at that step.

In the meantime, let me introduce to you a young Ralph Pollock—yet another person whose likeness was sent with Thirza's name written on the reverse.

Above: Photograph of a young Ralph Pollock, from the collection of Thirza Cole. Undated and without any indication of location, this photograph is currently in possession of the author.

Meet Mildred

How to explain the winding path I followed from my research question to the answers I've found...

This project I've taken on to send the pictures of Thirza Cole and her (presumed) relatives back home to family has turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be at first. Granted, despite having found her photograph in an antique store in Jackson, California, I already knew it would be unlikely that she was a resident of that area. Besides, one of the pictures I found along with hers, clearly marked "To Thirza," came from Greeley, Colorado. Whoever Thirza was, I figured she had relatives back in the then-tiny town of Greeley.

My first step, once purchasing all these photographs containing Thirza's name, was to research each of the identities indicated on the front of each picture. I tried to locate the name on the Greeley photograph, for instance, in the census records for Greeley. Some of the other photographs, though, didn't even have geographic indicators anywhere on the photograph, so I'd try searching for the name, then seek out a family connection with Thirza.

When those attempts failed me miserably, I tried another approach: just build a family tree for Thirza, herself. This was a challenge for two reasons: for one, thanks to handwriting difficulties, I wasn't sure whether her name was Thirza or Thiega; and secondly, I still had to verify whether Cole was her maiden or married name.

With all those challenges, I just kept poking through documents in several directions, grasping at any possibilities and noting them, just in case.

Now, to try and reconstruct how I found out what I've discovered about Thirza—or at least a likely candidate for her identity—I'm not sure I can replicate the search, step by step. Complicating the matter—at least for those needing a straightforward explanation—is the fact that my mind does not work like the sequential path of a reasoned outline with step one leading to step two and only then moving to step three.

My mind, unfortunately, works more in a scattershot mode. It's similar to the technique known as mind-mapping, a process co-opted by genealogist Ron Arons in his recent book, Mind Maps for Genealogy, but I assure you, I've been following that process for much longer than Ron has been teaching the method.

The challenge is to translate my haphazard mind-mapping discoveries into a logical, blow-by-blow explanation. I'm not sure I can adequately complete that task. So for the next few days, I'll just give you the splat on each of the photographs in Thirza's collection, but just be aware that I've not yet uncovered the nexus. There are still many unanswered questions.

Today, we'll start with Thirza's copy of a baby picture. The photograph, as I mentioned, is from Greeley, Colorado. It was taken by photographer F. E. Baker—although checking in Greeley publications for any indication of that studio, all I could find, much later than the time of this photograph, was an ad for F. E. Baker, the realtor and land investor. Perhaps photography as a business just didn't work out for him.

The picture's subject was named Mildred Rigg. At least, that's what the handwriting seems to say. It also looks as if the name were either over-written, or erased and then redone, or that the ink was possibly not working well on the pen. Fortunately, it was relatively easy to locate a Mildred Riggs in the 1900 census and the 1910 census, both of them in the same county—Weld County—as the town of Greeley.

This Mildred was the daughter of Millard and Josephine Riggs, and happened to be born, according to the 1900 census, in January of 1898. Thanks to some online newspaper editions of the Greeley newspaper, plus some other documents found at Ancestry.com, I was able to locate a few more details about this Mildred, but not anything to sufficiently explain her link to our Thirza. Of course, that is provided that Mildred Rigg and Mildred Riggs are one and the same Greeley resident.

Above: Undated photograph of baby Mildred Rigg of Greeley, Colorado; photograph currently in possession of author.

Thirza's Photograph Collection

In seeking to return abandoned photographs to family members who will cherish them, I try to pay attention to all the details clustered around that photograph. Any names or locations mentioned or indicated, of course, would be prime items to research, but in the case of Thirza—or Thiega—Cole, I not only have the clues from the back of her portrait, but a welcome cache of other pictures with at least her first name attached to them. I suspect what I have is a part of her collection of family photographs—which, for our purposes, is a good thing.

Today, I'd like to introduce the main characters from this collection, as best I can read their names from the various handwriting samples found on their pictures. Some of them are part of this collection for sure, guaranteed by the name "Thirza" added to the reverse of each picture. One, at least, is likely part of Thirza's family, though I can't tell for sure; the name is so common, and besides, her name isn't added to the back.

Only one of those photographs has a studio imprint affixed to the front. It happens to also be the picture with the name that I have the most difficulty reading. It's a baby picture taken in Greeley, Colorado by the photographer F. E. Baker. The name above the baby's head looks like Mildred Rigg.

Another baby picture, this one without any mention of a location or studio imprint, simply bears the name Louise, though there is a note on the reverse for Thirza.

Yet another photograph looks to be the oldest of the three. It's a faded image of a young man, with the handwritten name above his head reading Ralph Pollack.

The only thing the three of these photographs have in common is the fact that the name Thirza is handwritten on the back. At first, I hoped that these were three individuals related to our Thirza, but now that I've been thrashing around the Internet's vast array of genealogical records, I'm not finding any such connections.

I'll begin by introducing each photograph in turn, one each day, and noting any possibilities for subjects. Of course, if a link to Thirza manifests itself in this cursory review, I'll make note of that as well. Meanwhile, I have plenty of work to do to prepare the rest of the story about Thirza, herself. If I have the right person, she is turning out to have an interesting life, indeed.

Above: Inscription from the back of one of the baby photos I found at a northern California antique shop. This is the clearest handwriting of all those pictures which include that name, which in this case is clearly Thirza, not Thiega. This inscription was written on the back of a photograph from Greeley, Colorado; the front has the name Mildred Rigg written above the baby's head in a different hand.

Taking a Peek Behind the Scene

There is a lot of guesswork involved in returning an orphaned photograph back to family. And, in juggling the information attached to multiple possibilities, the search also requires a way to organize all the findings. But to shelter those potentially false leads from a gullible genealogy public, the search also needs to proceed under cover—somewhere hidden so that others won't be tempted to copy those false leads as if they were verified truth.

In other words, I need a hiding place to park my trees-in-progress.

I learned this tactic from my mystery cousin, the adoptee who turned out to be an exact match to my matriline. If you remember, shortly after this cousin contacted me three years ago, thanks to our mutual mitochondrial DNA test results at Family Tree DNA, he was able to figure out—and subsequently meet—his birth mother. He explained to me what he learned from the volunteer "search angels" who helped him with his research: adoptees build several tentative family trees, actually plugging into a pedigree chart several possible, though not yet proven, names.

For the most part, this hypothesis-testing process serves to trigger "hints" for Ancestry trees, which then can be evaluated for plausibility. Obviously, more hypotheses end up being discarded than kept. But because they are not true family trees, all this guesswork needs to be done under cover. That's why adoptees—and the search angels who help them—often set up private trees, rather than public ones, on Ancestry. To add one more layer of protection, they change the privacy setting on the tentative tree so that it can't even be found in search results.

Taking my cue from my mystery cousin—who has since gone on to help many other adoptees, himself—when I work on sending an abandoned photograph home to family, I use the same process. So, for Thirza Cole—or whoever she turns out to be—I set up a private, unsearchable tree on Ancestry and started building her pedigree. In addition, I set up a file folder in my computer for pictures, and another file folder under documents for any auxiliary material I find on the family. That way, as I chase after all the possibilities, I have a place to park the photos and documents I run across.

As it turns out, there was someone by the name of Thirza Cole. The surprising first discovery about Thirza was that, despite my traveling to the foothills of northern California to find her, she turned out to live in the same town as the first antique store where I had begun my quest to reunite orphaned photographs with family. Since that place is so close to my home, I've had ample opportunities to head to the very place where Thirza lived and worked for most of her adult life.

Not to put a wet blanket over that enthusiastic discovery, but just in case, I also did a search for the alternate name I found on the photographs—Thiega. If you, as I did, thought that there would surely be no such name, think again. Apparently, Thiega is a thing. There were several hits for that term as a given name, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom. To do a thorough search, I'll need to attend to that due diligence requirement to ascertain which of the two names this really turns out to be—or whether I should be looking for two women instead of one.

Meet Thirza

We're about to explore the possibilities for identifying another mystery photograph subject. This time, our task will not be simply to return one old photograph back to family members, but four—and possibly more. The key will be to determine whether the name added to the back of each of these photographs is one and the same, and whether several different handwriting samples were all referring to the same woman.

There's no way to gradually introduce the suspected subject of this search, so I will start out with the splat: the photograph of the one woman which included not only that unusual given name—Thirza—but a surname as well. As I mentioned last Friday, I suspect the name which links each of these photographs will either refer to one person or to two. The handwriting on some clearly spelled out Thirza. The shaky hand on the others sometimes looked like Thiega.

I found all of these photographs in an antique shop in Jackson, California, a northern California town sometimes remembered for its former glory days as part of California gold rush country. One of the photographs came with the imprint of a studio in Greeley, Colorado; the others had no geographic location specified. The time span represented by these pictures likely included more than one generation of a family—if, indeed, these are photographs from the same extended family. The earliest one I'd guess to be from the 1870s or possibly earlier. The most recent one was a portrait of Thirza with a handwritten note on the reverse, "about 1920."

That, unfortunately, was one of the pictures with the name that looked more like Thiega than Thirza, but the handy thing about it was that it came with a surname: Cole.

I decided my first attempt at identifying the subject was to go with the name from the majority of the other photographs, and start out with the assumption that the person I want to research was named Thirza Cole. Whether that will turn out to be a false lead, we'll soon find out. Kept in balance by the handwritten names affixed to the front of the other photos, I'm going to trust in the FAN principle—Friends, Associates and Neighbors—to either corroborate my assumptions or rule them out entirely.

Above: Photograph of a woman named either Thiega or Thirza Cole, with the added notation, "about 1920." Found in a northern California antique store, the photograph was evidently removed from a frame to which it had been taped. The photograph as shown here is cropped from its original size. The damage visible at the top of this scan of the original was mild, compared to the damage across the lower border. Photograph currently in possession of the author.

The Cobbler's Children Syndrome Comes to Genealogy

I've realized something, now that I've taken to pursuing other people's family trees: I don't get so much done on my own.

I've heard others mention the same thing, particularly those members of my local genealogical society's board. It's those on the board who've volunteered to help others get their family tree started that seldom find enough time to work on their own. I dream of finding an office for our society, in part, so our board and committee volunteers can have a place to gather for coffee and work on our own family histories, collectively. If we're going to leave the comfort of our homes to help others with their genealogy, we may as well do the same to spend time on our own research.

In my case, I get the strange feeling that the time I spend searching for the ancestors of the orphaned photographs I find in antique stores results in taking less time to pursue my own history, as well. Thankfully, I've instilled the habit of checking, every two weeks, on my research progress. Though I feel like I haven't done as much on my own family, that apparently is not the case.

Over the last two weeks, in addition to figuring out the family line of Baby Fay and her mother—as well as taking a sneak peek at the upcoming story of Thirza and her collection of photographs—I did manage to make progress on my own lines. For instance, on my mother's line, I added 154 names to her tree of 12,304 individuals. On my mother-in-law's line, 115 names brought the total for her tree to 14,469. While I didn't gain any on my father's tree this time, I added three more names to my father-in-law's tree to bring it to 1410 relatives.

One thing I did neglect, over the past two weeks, was to check out any of the DNA matches our family has gotten in this time period. We are still getting a significant number of matches at most of the testing companies, which I presume are the tail end of the holiday sales still coming in, or perhaps a second bump in results from the leading edge of the Valentine's Day sales.

I saw an increase of thirty four matches for my results at AncestryDNA, seventy at Family Tree DNA, and a whopping 197 at my newest test site, MyHeritage DNA. The only decrease, as usual, was at 23andMe. That leaves me with 945 matches at Ancestry, 2,881 at FTDNA, 3,715 at MyHeritage, and 1,060 at 23andMe.

The increases were similar for my husband. He had a jump of twenty one at AncestryDNA to total 496 matches (at fourth cousin or closer), an increase of forty five at FTDNA for 1,836, and 154 more at MyHeritage for 2,555 total matches. This time, he also lost twenty two matches at 23andMe, where he now totals 1,113 matches.

The oft-worn phrase, "The cobbler's children have no shoes," is usually meant to point a warning finger at those who, being so taken with their professional duties, forget their other, more vital, responsibilities to family. Even with an avocation such as genealogy—which can absorb so much of our attention—I can see this as being possible. Ask any researcher engrossed in the pursuit of the elusive ancestor about suddenly realizing, still seated at the computer, that it is three in the morning.

Perhaps the cobbler's syndrome can apply to us. I'm glad to realize, after this biweekly recap, that though I felt that might have been the case, it wasn't. I think progress in the last two weeks has still kept pace with what I was able to do, prior to taking on this latest research interest on behalf of other families.

Off the Shelf: Give and Take

Collaboration. Influence. Leadership. These are all concepts held high by business experts. Indeed, "success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others," as the cover notes state for the book I'm reading this month. This, however, is not only the key to success in business, but "an approach...that has the power to transform not just individuals and groups, but entire organizations and communities."

While I've always kept an eye on those skills which can lead to success in business, what I've been focusing on lately has been success in other types of organizations—and of communities. In particular, stepping into my new role as president of our local genealogical society this month, I'm keen to examine what can help our group grow. More than that, I want to explore how we can build a community around the value of respecting our heritage.

I feel that, in our current decade, we've seen organizations build resources that are not only particularly helpful to genealogists, but have also fostered an interest in beginning to learn about family history. Thanks to everything from direct-to-consumer DNA test commercials to television mini-series exploring the roots of favorite celebrities, the concept that anybody can learn about his or her family heritage has become so widespread as to create a groundswell of demand for genealogical education.

Our local genealogical societies are uniquely situated to step in and be the boots-on-the-ground for this training mission. But we can't just work ourselves to the bone, trying to repeat the same time-worn tactics used in past decades.

That's where the book I'm reading, Adam Grant's Give and Take, comes in. A specialist in organizational psychology and a leading professor at the Wharton School of Business, Adam Grant zeroes in on one aspect of interpersonal working style that, in the long run, leads to successful outcomes. That aspect is what he calls giving.

There are givers, the author explains, and there are takers. Those who contribute to the success of others—through their help, their advice, their recommendations—while not expecting anything in return he calls givers. Givers don't operate on a zero-sum-game paradigm. They are willing to do what it takes for the benefit of the group's success.

The more I read of Adam Grant's book, the more I see his recommendations—backed up by a broad spectrum of research results—as applicable to us in genealogical societies. Everything from our overarching organizational mission to the nitty-gritty of our daily operational efforts has the fingerprints of giving embedded in it. Though I'm only halfway through the book at this point, I've found inspiration for re-envisioning our society efforts as a team building adventure. What we do as a society enables us to guide others, new to genealogy, in such a way as to encourage them to pass those lessons along to others in the community.

There is so much that genealogy can give to a community—a sense of who we are, of the value of our heritage, of a purpose for that to be carried forward into the future. The time seems more right than ever before to seize the opportunity to give back to our local communities with the gift of genealogy.

In order to do that, though, we need to equip ourselves with foundational concepts of how to develop such an organization. Adam Grant's Give and Take has sparked several thoughts in my mind about how to reshape our board and our entire organization to face the challenge of meeting this greater demand for training and coaching new researchers.

Several years ago, my predecessor, Sheri Fenley, had commented that there were many more people out there in our county interested in genealogy than attended our meetings and events. Perhaps that was her unscientific assessment, but her conviction that it was so is now becoming more visible to me, as well. They are out there, those people who yearn to know more about their family's saga. Somehow, we need to connect with them, to work together with them so they will be their most successful at digging for those answers. It would do us well, even as small and local nonprofit organizations, to learn from the work of authors and instructors such as Adam Grant. What this book contains is advice that reaches far beyond the realm of the business world. It speaks to us, too.