30 April 2014

Dead End Street

WARNING! 
This post will involve a lot of scrolling. 
If you have carpal tunnel issues proceed at your own risk.
Post is continued after the jump. 
You can't say I didn't warn you.

25 April 2014

Not in Line for the Throne

This screen cap below was posted, by the tree owner, to a genealogy Facebook page last month. I have cropped the image to remove the tree owner's Ancestry.com username. She posted to ask about how to enter names from eras before surnames were common because, "I have many of the European Royalty in my line."
I just want to point out one thing but I'll let you take a look first in case you'd like to guess what the 'one thing' is.


Think you've got it? Here is that comment that I restrained myself from making on Facebook:
"The great-grandfather of the husband of your 14th great-grand aunt is not in YOUR line!"
It's easy to get sidetracked by a tangential family when there's a story or a mystery. If you don't keep track of where your family stops and the other family begins or you'll wind up researching the neighbor of the nephew of the great-grandfather of your 4th cousin's brother-in-law. If that's what you want to do, great but that wouldn't even be a collateral line, much less your line.
I will never understand the desperate need to be connected to royalty. And why does that desperation go hand in hand with fake coats of arms?


PREVIOUS POST: Bang Your Head
NEXT POST: Dead End Street

14 April 2014

Bang Your Head

Back to the trees today :-)

 Jane Bangar
 Birth 1712 in Virginia, United States
 Death 25 Jun 1762 in Weston

 PARENTS
 John Bangar (1690-1725)
 Mary (1700-1724)

 SPOUSE & CHILDREN
 Benjamin Garner (1663-1713) married 1683, Weston, Wyoming, United States
 ✿ [female] Garner (1664-1724)
 ✿ William Garner (1680-1749)
 ✿ Charles Garner (1684- )
 ✿ Joseph Garner (1684-1776)
 ✿ William Garner (1686-1771)
 ✿ Thomas Garner (1687-1726)
 ✿ John Garner (1688- )
 ✿ Mary Garner (1689- )
 ✿ Jane Joyce Garner (1690-1781)
 ✿ Susanna Garner (1690- )
 ✿ Jeremiah Garner (1694- )
 ✿ Charles Garner (1733-1797)
 ✿ William Garner (1735- )
 ✿ John Garner (1739-1813)
 ✿ Mary Garner (1741- )
 ✿ Susannah Garner (1743-1841)

 SPOUSE & CHILDREN
 John Garner (1708-1762) married 1730 in Stafford, Stafford, Virginia, United States
 ✿ [female] Garner (1664-1724)
 ✿ William Garner (1680-1749)
 ✿ Charles Garner (1684- )
 ✿ William Garner (1686-1771)
 ✿ Thomas Garner (1687- )
 ✿ John Garner (1688- )
 ✿ Mary Garner (1689- )
 ✿ Susanna Garner (1690- )
 ✿ Joseph Garner (1692- )
 ✿ Jeremiah Garner (1694- )
 ✿ Charles Garner (1733-1797)
 ✿ William Garner (1735-1771)
 ✿ John Garner (1739-1813)
 ✿ Mary Garner (1741- )
 ✿ Susannah Garner (1743-1841)
 ✿ Lewis Garner (1750-1815)
 ✿ Bradley Garner (1754-1838)
 ✿ Mary Garner (1756-1849)

 SPOUSE
 Thomas Reno (1703-1777) married 1762 in Prince William, Virginia, United States

 RECORDS ATTACHED
 ✿ Family Data Collection - Individual Records
    Name: John Garner
    Spouse: Jane Joyce
    Parents: John Garner, Susanna Keene
    Birth Place: of, Northumberland, VA
    Birth Date: 20 Jun 1663
    Marriage Place: Weston
    Marriage Date: 1679
    Death Place: Weston
    Death Date: 25 Mar 1713
    Events attached to: Birth, Marriage to John Garner, Marriage to Thomas Reno, Death
 ✿ U.S. and International Marriage Records, 1560-1900
    Name: John Garner
    Gender: Male
    Birth Place: VA
    Birth Year: 1663
    Spouse Name: Jane Joyce
    Marriage Year: 1678
    Events attached to: Birth, Marriage to John Garner, Marriage to Thomas Reno
 ✿ U.S. and International Marriage Records, 1560-1900
    Name: John Garner
    Gender: Male
    Birth Place: VA
    Birth Year: 1660
    Spouse Name: Jane Joyce
    Marriage Year: 1678
    Events attached to: Marriage to Benjamin Garner
 ✿ U.S. and International Marriage Records, 1560-1900
    Name: John Garner
    Gender: Male
    Birth Place: EN
    Birth Year: 1633
    Spouse Name: Susanna Keene
    Marriage Year: 1659
    Events attached to: Marriage to Benjamin Garner
 ✿ U.S. and International Marriage Records, 1560-1900
    Name: John Garner
    Gender: Male
    Birth Place: VA
    Birth Year: 1633
    Spouse Name: Susannah Keene
    Spouse Birth Year: 1634
    Marriage Year: 1660
    Marriage State: VA 
    Events attached to: Marriage to Benjamin Garner

There's a span of almost 40 years with no births but plenty of children were born before and after that dry spell. About half of the children were born before their maternal grandparents. Every "record" attached to the profile is for John Garner, and it's not even the John Garner Jane was supposedly married to. There's a marriage event in Wyoming a couple of centuries before it became a state. The tree owner couldn't find the name of one female child, or her spouse, but figuring out the death date was no problem. And of course it's always amusing to have a woman giving birth to children that have two fathers and showing that one of those fathers sired children after his death.
Did I miss anything?


Thanks to Kristin for the link to this profile ;-)
If you have a profile to suggest please email a link to buwtree(at)gmail(dot)com. Thanks!

PREVIOUS POST: You Only Live Twice
NEXT POST: Not in Line for the Throne

12 April 2014

You Only Live Twice

Sorry for the delay in posting. While clearing hints I came across an interesting puzzle in my tree that I've become obsessed with. It will probably be a future 'case study' post. A couple of children never living with their parents during a census year, a man's second family disappears after he dies, and a wanted man shot dead by a posse and sent to the electric chair. You know, the usual.
The wanted man is not in my tree. One of his victims, Matthew Jones, is but how can I not find out the entire story after finding multiple newspaper articles with conflicting reports? There is a Kentucky death certificate for the murderer from September 1912. So far I have found no retractions or corrections in newspapers for the November 1911 article and it was published in numerous papers across the country.

LONG HUNT TERMINATES IN DEATH FOR FUGITIVE

Middlesboro, Ky., October 26 - In a running fight with a Sheriff's posse early to-day, Cal Miracle, wanted for double murder at Pineville, was killed and Deputy Sheriff Thomas, of the posse, received wounds from which he died later.
The fight took place in the mountains near Clear Creek. A reward for the capture of Miracle has been outstanding for some time.
A posse had been on Cal Miracle's trail for several weeks. Late in August he killed Matthew Johnson [sic] and Mrs. William Gibson near Pineville.
Immediately a reward for his capture, dead or alive, was offered, but Miracle eluded pursuit until yesterday, when he was run down in the mountain country, near here.
All night the posse stalked Miracle, and this morning he came out in the open to fight. Well armed. Miracle stood off the posse until he fell, his body bullet-ridden.
The Hartford Herald (Hartford, KY)
1 Nov 1911, Page 6
ChroniclingAmerica.loc.gov
Almost a year later...

PAYS PENALTY

Cal Miracle, convicted in the Pineville circuit court of double murder, was electrocuted at Eddyville last Friday morning. Miracle was a desperate character, and went to his death without any apparent sorrow for the life he had led.
The Citizen (Berea, KY) 
5 Sep 1912, Page 8 
ChroniclingAmerica.loc.gov


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NEXT POST: Bang Your Head

04 April 2014

The Best Newspaper Site For You

"Which subscription newspaper site is the best?"
"Which newspaper site is the best for obituaries?"

These questions are asked weekly on genealogy message boards and Facebook pages. The answer? The site that has the newspapers you want.
Newspapers that have been digitized are scattered all over the web. Here are just a few:
Ancestry.com's Newspaper Collections
Chronicling America
GenealogyBank
Google News Archive
NewspaperCat
Newspapers.com
SmalltownPapers.com
Some are free, some require a paid subscription. Are the paid sites better than the free ones? Only if they have the newspapers you want. (Sensing a theme yet?)
The largest online newspaper collection won't do you any good if they don't have anything for the branch of your family you're working on. Your brick wall may come tumbling down because of a small site that hasn't been updated since 1998 and has a dozen pages from an old newspaper on it. Does that make it the best newspaper site? No. That makes it the best newspaper site for you.
For the subscription sites you don't have to pay to find out if they have what you need. The same goes for genealogy research sites in general. These companies do not want unhappy customers which is why their card catalogs are free and not behind the pay wall. If they have what you need you will subscribe and most likely find something useful. If they don't have collections that apply to the places and time periods you're researching you can walk away. 
Many card catalogs for newspaper sites are organized by state. Of course you can't just assume that because they have a number of newspapers for your state that your ancestors will be in them. A site may have 20 papers for Texas but if they're all from the Houston area and your family was in Amarillo they won't be much help. (Houston and Amarillo are over 700 miles apart.)
Be sure to check the dates of the papers included in the collection. If your ancestors moved to the area in 1912 and the paper you need only goes up to 1910 on a particular site then you'll need to look elsewhere. On the other hand, if your ancestor left in 1910 and the collection starts in 1912 it might be worth checking. A retired teacher who moved to another state to be closer to her siblings might have an obituary in the town paper where she taught.
If your ancestor was involved in a newsworthy event, e.g. a murder, a weather catastrophe, or a scientific discovery, it may have been covered outside of their county or even outside of their state. In that case it might be worth subscribing to every newspaper site you can find for a month or a year each. In my tree I have a newspaper article from San Antonio, Texas for a murder in Pineville, Kentucky. I also have an article from a paper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for a deadly tornado that happened in Melissa, Texas. The former was found on Ancestry.com, the latter on GenealogyBank.
If you're on a tight budget keep a list of items to look for in papers. Maybe start a spreadsheet with the names, places, dates and notes on what to look for, e.g. obituary, marriage announcement, crime. Also note death certificates with causes of death that might warrant a newspaper article, e.g. "gunshot", "injuries from an accident" or "struck by lightning."
Once you've searched the card catalog or had a subscription and cancelled don't cross the site off your research list. More newspapers are being added to most of these sites every month. Some of the subscription sites will send monthly emails with details about newly acquired collections.
All that said, the number of newspapers not digitized is far greater. What you are looking for may not be online in your lifetime. You do not, however, need to spend your children's inheritance on plane tickets and road trips. Unless you want to, of course. A little online research can help you find alternatives. Just a couple of examples:
1. In their research services the Minnesota Historical Society offers obituary and other newspaper article look-ups for a small fee.
2. The Public Libraries of Saginaw (Michigan) has an online obituary index and will mail copies of obituaries if you are out of state. The service is free but a donation is always good for your research karma.
Check your local library to see what newspaper databases they have access to and here's a list [the 3rd green box] of subscription sites that are available for free at Family History Centers.
In some cases finding a the newspaper you want may involve a bit of serendipity. I took a road trip to visit the cemetery where my 3rd great-grandparents were buried. While I was there I stopped at the local library. They had a few random issues of the local paper on microfilm. One included my 4th great-grandmother's obituary and also had an advertisement for my 3rd great-grandfather's shop.
If you need to go completely old school and are looking for newspapers from 1821 to 1936 try to find a copy of THIS. At the link enter your zip code to see if there's a copy at a library near you. It is a list of every paper published that had copies existing in 1937 and where to find them. You'll still have phone calls to make and/or emails to send to find out if they still exist but it's a start.


RELATED LINKS:  
Newspapers for Genealogy Research, a YouTube playlist of tutorials
Newspapers!, links galore from Kenneth Marks
Elephind, a search engine for world's historical newspaper archives
Newspaper category on Cyndi's List
Newspaper Archives, Indexes & Morgues from The Library of Congress

RELATED POST: Obituaries
PREVIOUS POST: April Fools
NEXT POST: You Only Live Twice

01 April 2014

April Fools

He who is born a fool is never cured. ~Proverb

These comments were found on Facebook. There will be no "Aprils Fools" at the end of this post because, unfortunately, these are all real.

 ✿
enjoying all the research i already did today back to 1765 already in a couple hr period
 ✿
Ruth, they give you a free week. I was done in that.
 ✿
Got the family back to 1824 thanks to the work others have done. And I thought the Hungarian side was going to be hard!
 ✿
i just want to stop by for a min to tell everyone thank you for sharing ur trees and for helping others to do theirs if it wasnt for a few of you i dont know if i would have gotten so far in my tree im now on my 80th great grandfather .thank you so much once again :-)
 ✿
I just had to delete 200-300 family members in my tree due to wrong info in other peoples trees. I'm so pissed. I spent, hours, days, weeks working for nothing. I don't think other peoples family trees should be shown unless they have been professionally verified. Lesson learned.
 ✿
Is anyone working on ancestors BEFORE 500AD? Let's share results. This area of time between 100BC and 500 Ad seems to be pretty wild Working on Scandinavian and german tribes.
 ✿
I have found 10,000.00 ancestry on ancestry.com on fathers side and they are a Royal lineage. Is this unusual? I hit 4th grgrandma [name], Greenbrier, W. Va. went directly to the Stewarts of Scotland, Ireland and England. And at 10 thousand it has become overwhelming, as stated, this is what I found and I am not a pro at this.
 ✿
I'm addicted to Ancestry.com. They can use DNA to help in tracing your roots. I just found my 11th Great Grandfather. An Englishman of Nobility. Whod a thunk?... And where's my crown?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_John_Wynn,_1st_Baronet
Sir John Wynne (1553 - 1626)
is your 11th great grandfather
Robert":Mayor of Canterbury: Wynne (1558 - 1609)
son of Sir John Wynne
[The full pedigree was listed but can anyone see the problem between the 11th great-grandfather and his son?]
 ✿
just a question ,hope don't mind ,but people don.t worry much about there DNA and in Uk and a lot come from royalty,so many on here want Indian DNA, but where shot by cow boys.


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