From Chicago to California

Now that I've returned from our family's trip to Chicago—and that significant detour to Fort Wayne for the FGS conference—it's high time to pull out that latest stash of old photos from my most recent trip to Gold Country. After all, it's been almost three weeks since my travel partner and genealogy mentor, Sheri Fenley, joined me to brave the smoke of distant forest fires to head to the hills of Sonora, California, where antique shops with ample stores of old photos beckoned.

The picture I have selected to launch this latest series of rescue stories just happens to be one from Chicago. And no, I didn't find the thing in Chicago. The photo caught my eye, right as I stepped in the shop at Antiques Etc., back home in California—2,076 miles from its origin in Chicago.

Something about the gaze of the subject I found nearly arresting, and I knew right away I needed to learn more about the woman's story. Besides, each abandoned photograph I rescue from its discarded position has a secondary story of its own to tell: just how it arrived from its distant origin to end up for sale in a store in the foothills of northern California.

For now, just say hello to Rachel Webb. I think you'll agree there is something arresting about those eyes. As for her story—and why those eyes seem to haunt me so much—we'll have to wait on that discovery, whatever it might be. We'll begin, tomorrow, to see if we can uncover more of Rachel's story.

When Family History Surrounds Us

After a delightful time visiting Chicago family—and squeezing in a trip to family stomping grounds in Fort Wayne for the FGS conference—it is finally time to take our leave and head home. It's the travel effort that almost makes me think twice about these family safaris, for the unpredictable is sure to pop up. But here we go.

It wasn't lost upon me just how sensitized we become to tokens of our family's history when we begin to delve deeply into the details. The streets of Fort Wayne seemed to call to us that these were the very places where John Kelly Stevens' footsteps fell as he walked his beat for the Fort Wayne police force, one hundred years ago.

It was worth it to take the time to detour to places where tokens of that history might be obtained for future inquisitive family members. While I was hot on the trail of the people I needed to meet—and learn from—at the FGS conference, my husband was on the phone, looking for any way to obtain relics of his great grandfather's tenure in the city we were visiting.

Yes, as it turned out...

Where John Kelly Stevens and his coworkers reported for duty every morning.

The building as it stands today, home of the Allen County-Fort Wayne History Center and museum, including a display of the county jail in the basement. It just looks like a magnificent old building today. Who would have known the stories it held, a century ago, if we hadn't looked to find the details in old photographs and newspaper reports?

It's the same for the other cities I've visited, especially when I'm looking for old photographs to rescue. There are signs of our history all around us—we just need to know how to connect with those old insignia on buildings, the old faces in photographs, the old streets and the people they were named for. A walk down the streets of any city of any tenure by default contain the relics of the history of the families who built the place they called home.

Above: Closeup of the insert above of the Fort Wayne Police Department, circa 1921, standing in front of what is now the Fort Wayne History Center. John Kelly Stevens is in the middle of the five men, and third from the left in the full picture above. Photo of the old city hall building as it stands now, courtesy of Chris Stevens.

A Research Intermission

It's been a while since I last puzzled over my Florida ancestors—almost a week, it turns out, thanks to an intermission to attend the FGS Conference in Fort Wayne. What better place, though, to seek answers to my genealogical brick walls. Considering that Fort Wayne is home to the country's largest public collection of genealogical material, I couldn't just go there to spend my days in a convention center; I made sure to walk across the street to the site of that treasure trove during the evenings.

Of course, I planned ahead. No sense spending time while on location to look up research material. I wanted to hit the ground running when I arrived in Fort Wayne. My secret strategy: locate the call numbers ahead of time, using the Allen County Public Library's online catalog.

I had noticed that another researcher had found an entry on the potential father of my George Edmund McClellan, thanks to a hint announcing that fact at Ancestry. Another researcher had taken the time to transcribe an entry from a book, regarding a man named Charles McClellan of the Barnwell District in South Carolina, who had moved to Georgia, and then to territorial Florida.

Not one to simply copy what others have shared, I wanted to take a look at the source of that transcription, which, in this case, was a book originally published in 1957. A date that late, unfortunately, eliminated any possibility of finding the digitized text at a public domain resource like Internet Archive. While WorldCat told me a copy of the multi-volume set could be had for a mere fifty mile drive to the California Genealogical Society and Library in Oakland, I knew once I arrived in Fort Wayne, it would be even more accessible with a simple walk across the street from my hotel room.

What I was looking for was volume three of the collection known as Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia by Folks Huxford. There, on page 225, was a brief biography of the Reverend Charles McClellan. Though it was barely a page in length, the entry covered a listing of his children, as well as the mention of his origin and his occupation. This, perhaps, will help link me to documentation to support an old family story that one of my maternal grandmother's ancestors was a Methodist circuit rider; lacking the man's name, I was at a loss as to whose name to search in what I understand is a robust collection housed somewhere on behalf of the Methodist Church. It would be a thrill, indeed, to discover a journal kept by such a trailblazing preacher.

While I was in the neighborhood—both figuratively, in researching my South Carolina, Georgia and Florida roots, as well as literally, in the second-floor genealogical department of the Allen County Public Library—I took the liberty of researching all the associated surnames to the McClellan family constellation. After all, there was a whole library shelf of material related to that county in Georgia where I first located mention of Charles McClellan. I looked for the Tisons and the Charles family, and the Sheffields, finding mention of Revolutionary War soldiers to keep me busy with supplemental DAR applications for months.

That, as exciting as it sounds, was not my purpose in perusing those pages in Allen County's genealogy center. My goal, remember, was to figure out just how my Tison line came from Pitt County, North Carolina, and settled, eventually, in Florida—and how, having discovered my Mary Ann Charles who married William McLeran, she somehow had a mother-in-law who turned out to be a Tison.

Like a bowl of tangled spaghetti, these surnames seem to have twisted together with each other. My Tisons from North Carolina somehow connected with my Charleses from Florida and my McClellans from South Carolina and Georgia. They are so intertwined that I can't figure out how they actually made the connection. Perhaps they were not related lines, after all. But something tells me to keep looking further, thus leading me down a very long path of discovery of the bigger story of each family.

Hopefully, at some point, I'll discover the actual connection.

Can't Visit Family Without Talking Family Tree

I had decided, once I signed up for that SLIG class in southern research last July, to focus exclusively on my mother's southern roots from that point until I took off for class next January in Salt Lake City. That didn't last long, though, once we arrived in Chicago last weekend on our way to the FGS conference in Fort Wayne.

Chicago time is cousin-visiting time, at least for the Stevens family. I realized our official family tree on Ancestry.com didn't include kids and grandkids of our Stevens cousins, so this was my moment to rectify that oversight.

Not that I didn't also work on my mother's tree, but after spending a few weeks reading through probate files on my McClellan and related lines ahead of time for traveling to the conference, I didn't expect to have made much headway in this biweekly period. That's the main reason for counting names to track progress. It helps me not get discouraged when I think I haven't made any progress.

So...how did it go, this busy past two weeks? Not much different than expected. I managed to add 119 to my mother's family tree, despite traveling and slogging through long-winded probate files. Now, the count on her tree is at 14,505.

While there was absolutely no improvement on either my father's or my mother-in-law's tree, there was that little addition to my father-in-law's tree while we visited family in Chicago. Opening up my laptop and adding the names as each cousin gave them to me, I managed to add twenty three names of cousins' children and grandchildren, so now the Stevens tree includes 1,513 people.

On the other side of the equation, where I count the increase in DNA matches, I'm hoping to break out of the lackluster results with the new matches soon to be generated from this latest of sales. Now that the bulge in DNA matches has subsided from the Father's Day sale, I'm hoping activity will rev up again with results from summer sales. Family Tree DNA closes out its sales on August 31 and MyHeritageDNA launches its Labor Day sale through September 3. Nothing on the horizon for either AncestryDNA nor 23andMe—which was notably absent from the exhibit hall at the FGS conference, now that the genealogy industry is merely chump change in the face of the $300 million deal just signed with pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline.

It would be nice to find some additional close DNA matches, true, and sales do generate that possibility, but my main focus will always be on the paper chase, so my goal will be to continue the research work to verify each new name's place in each branch of our family trees. That means keeping on with bite-sized goals and biweekly checks on progress. There's nothing magic about this approach. Slow and steady work is what is most likely to produce results in the long run.

The Party's Not Over, But I Had to go Home

It sure was hard, yesterday, pulling out of the driveway at the FGS conference hotel after three wonderful days learning from and meeting some stellar genealogists and industry leaders. Thanks to a fluke in scheduling—if it weren't for this discovery, I wouldn't have been able to find a hotel room so close to the convention center at all—I was able to secure lodging nearby, but only for all the days of the conference except Saturday's sessions. Thus, I had no recourse but to leave Friday. Hey, I'll take what I can get.

Still, I was able to take in the morning keynote session aptly delivered by Steve Rockwood of FamilySearch. Echoing the "Connect. Belong" theme he introduced at this year's RootsTech, he inspired yet another audience yesterday morning in Fort Wayne. Encouraging us to remember the feeling when we first discovering anything personal about an ancestor, Rockwood urged us to transfer that experience to others, finding a way to allow others—as individuals—to feel that same sense of wonder, themselves.

I certainly was open to that experience, myself. I couldn't bring myself to simply drive away from Fort Wayne without another look at the tokens of family history our Stevens family shared with the downtown streets where we spent the past few days. My husband's great-grandfather, John Kelly Stevens, had walked those streets on a daily basis on his beat as a career-long member of the Fort Wayne Police Department.

This week, while I attended the FGS conference, my husband re-visited the local historical society, housed in the old city hall where the basement once served as the jail. Now, converted to a museum, the halls included photographs of the police force of that era, including a picture of our John Kelly Stevens. Yes, there he was, his picture hanging on the wall with those of his coworkers.

We spent time, before leaving Fort Wayne yesterday, driving past all the family's old homes—buildings which, by now, have stood for over one hundred years. We drove out to the Catholic Cemetery to spend time at the graves of our Stevens and Kelly ancestors, gently brushing the dust and growth from the old headstones to barely make out the outline of names of those documented in our family history.

Today will undoubtedly hold productive sessions for those who have remained to attend the final day of the Fort Wayne conference of the Federation of Genealogical Societies. I, however, am now in Chicago, another city playing a role in our family's history. In a few days, I'll be back home in California, ready to apply all the wealth of information and productive conversations that took place during those few days in Fort Wayne. It's been a wonderful opportunity—for connection, for research, for learning—but now, it's time to get back to work.

Photograph above: John Kelly Stevens, from a portrait of the members of the Fort Wayne Police Department circa 1911.

Enter the Exhibit Hall

There's a lot of talking that can be done in a genealogical conference exhibit hall. If you thought that venue was merely for purchasing all your genealogical supplies, think again. Here at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in Fort Wayne, this year's event boasts over eighty different exhibitors. Some are big, like Ancestry or MyHeritage, and some are small but fascinating, like The Tapestree by Elk Meadow Designs, which makes hand crafted copper family trees paired with miniaturized photo framed charms. Almost all are focused specifically on the passion of the conference attendees: genealogy.

It took a lot for me to get over my duty-bound sense of obligation to attend each and every session offered during the conference, but I think I am over that, now. I had a trial run last May at the Southern California Genealogical Society's Jamboree. There, however, classes were interspersed with half-hour-long breaks, affording one a moment to make a quick dash into the exhibit hall for a specific purchase. Here at FGS, you're lucky to be spared a brief fifteen minute respite.

And so, in order to conduct any business of substance, I simply had to let go of my compulsion to be present and accounted for at each learning session scheduled for the day. Now that the exhibit hall was officially opened, yesterday—after the morning DNA Big Reveal hosted by Judy Russell and Blaine Bettinger with four local media celebrities—I ended up parking myself at booth after booth until I had fully made the rounds.

I discussed indexing partnerships with representatives at the FamilySearch booth, learned about exciting product developments at the Family Tree Maker booth, asked some questions about the First Families of Ohio program at the OGS booth (no, I still haven't sent in that application), got to talk to Josh Taylor at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society booth, heaped compliments on one of my favorite conference speakers (Diahan Southard) at Your DNA Guide, and said hi to Janet Hovorka of Family Chartmasters. Somehow, I even managed to buy an economics book for my daughter (yes, she said she wanted it).

Wait! Economics?

Yes. As this year's keynote themes pointed out, the value of story in family history is a compelling force. Yet, how can we adequately tell our family's story without understanding the underlying culture and history which blend to make our ancestors who they were?  Thus, Maia's Books of Columbus, Ohio—one of the FGS exhibitors—added to the mix by selling books about a broad range of historical and cultural topics, as did the African American Genealogical Society of Fort Wayne.

Due to an unfortunate quirk in hotel reservations (no room within decent walking distance was available for the duration of the conference), today is my last day at FGS2018. Granted, I wish I could wring out every learning opportunity of the week by staying until the convention center doors were bolted shut for the night, but after one last dash to The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library, we'll be driving out of Fort Wayne at midday to return to family in Chicago.

And yet, we still can't just leave this place without taking one last look at the tokens of our family history in this city—something we will certainly squeeze in to the agenda before the day is over.

Above: History is all around us—even on the walls of the building across the street from the new, modern hotel where I'm staying in Fort Wayne. Detail from the side of the Embassy Theatre in Fort Wayne, Indiana, built in 1928. Photograph courtesy Chris Stevens.

F G S, Day Two

It isn't every conference that has a keynote not just once, but once every day. Setting the tone for each day of the FGS conference "On the Three Rivers" in Fort Wayne this week, genealogy luminaries like Scott Fisher, Judy Russell, Blaine Bettinger and Steve Rockwood set the bar high with their thought pieces. And we get left to process what we can do about such high octane inspiration.

Moving from yesterday's sessions focused on the business of running genealogical societies, we now delve into the meat of family history pursuits. In that, the FGS conference seems like every other large genealogy event—only, perhaps, more oriented to the research needs of the north-central midwest states. Lots of German here, as well as Scandinavian specialties, with a focus on the states contiguous to the host venue.

Unfortunately, my research interests aren't necessarily aligned with this year's educational offerings. Not to worry, though. I have the most excellent out: immediate access, during almost all my waking hours, of the nation's number one public genealogical research library. The Allen County Public Library, with it's Genealogy Center, kindly offered to provide conference attendees with extended hours.

When I say almost all my waking hours, I am not kidding. With a wave of my official conference badge, I can enter the library from its morning opening up through its special closing time of eleven at night—just about the time a wise researcher would call it quits when faced with a start time, the next morning, of eight o'clock.

I wasn't sure there is such a time as eight a.m. But evidently, that is when all good FGS members are to report for today's keynote. Today, in a Big Reveal style session, morning hosts Judy Russell and Blaine Bettinger will explain the test results of four media personalities from the Fort Wayne area who recently agreed to submit DNA tests to AncestryDNA, Family Tree DNA, and MyHeritage for today's program. Taking the program from there, each of the broadcasters will then be treated to a Who Do You Think You Are styled overview of their family history research results, provided by staff from the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.

After that event, and the grand opening of the exhibit hall which is to follow the morning session, I'll likely cruise the hallways, looking for people I've been meaning to connect with during this week. And after that? Other than for a few sessions of note, in my case, the pull of the library may well win the day.