Stories Told in Stone

On Memorial Day, numerous ceremonies were held throughout the United States and elsewhere honoring this country’s veterans.  Many of these ceremonies will take place in cemeteries where hundreds, even thousands, of simple gravestones mark the burial places of those who fought in wars dating back to the American Revolution. Not only do their gravestones remind us of our nation’s history and the freedoms for which our men and women in the Armed Forces fought, they remind us, also, of just how fragile life often can be.  And sometimes the only reminder of that life many years later is a simple gravestone in a cemetery among others like it. 

Cemeteries and the gravestones contained in them are among the most valuable sources of information for family history researchers throughout the world.  Inscriptions on gravestones often reveal not only a birth date and a date of death, but they may include other vital information as well. This additional information often includes where the deceased was born and limited relationship information, such as a spouse’s name, parents’ names, or a woman’s maiden name. In older locations in the United States, it is not unusual for several generations to be buried alongside each other in a cemetery that bears the family’s surname. And often, families who intermarried may be buried in the same cemetery in close proximity to each other.  Discovering a family cemetery and especially one where allied family members are buried is simply “pure gold” for genealogists everywhere.

The cemetery where your parents or grandparents are buried may be the first place to visit if you have decided to embark on the journey to trace your family’s history.  And some amazing discoveries about a family’s origins and relationships within that family often have been made from just one trip to the cemetery.  Most of us are not fortunate enough to have families that have lived in the same location for several hundred years. But if you are one of those people, that one trip to the cemetery may provide you with enough information to fill the branches of your entire family tree. In reality, the one cemetery trip scenario is certainly not the norm, simply because our early ancestors were adventuresome people who seemed  to be forever “on the move,” searching for personal freedoms, land, and always a better way of life.

If your ancestors were already living in the south, the southeast, in Indian Territory, or in other locations west of the Mississippi River in the early to mid 1800s, tracing your roots certainly will involve trips to more than one cemetery.  Most of the early settlers to these areas of our nation’s expansion, migrated through the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.  Some later moved into northern Louisiana, Texas, and to points further west. Many who began the trip decided the journey was too long and too arduous and decided to put down roots somewhere along the way. Others settled for a time near family and friends, eventually choosing to forge ahead to distant places where others waited for them in newly opened lands to the south and to the west.  Because the Great Migration took years to complete, family members often died along the way and were buried wherever it was convenient to do so.  

Because such a large majority of our families’ early generations were so transient, it was extremely difficult at one time to determine a location to begin researching a family’s origins. The free database known as Find-A-Grave (www.findagrave.com), however, now makes it easy to pinpoint the locations where our ancestors lived and died - all without ever leaving home.  Although it is only one of many tools available to family history researchers, this website is absolutely among the best.


If you are among the many families throughout the country who attend summer family reunions, consider taking the time this year to visit a family cemetery. Talk to older family members whose ancestors may be buried there. And take a few photos of the gravestones....you never know what you might discover.

Tracing Your Family Tree

Blogger's Note: Last month, I began writing a column entitled "Tracing Your Roots," for my local newspaper.  Beginning here today, and continuing each Monday, I will be posting a copy of the article as it appeared in the newspaper on the previous Friday.

Interest in genealogy research, or tracing one’s family tree, is a hot topic these days. Once viewed by many as simply a hobby, genealogy has become one of the world’s newest industries.  In case you haven’t heard, family history research is the subject of two very popular television series, NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” which airs on Friday evenings at 7 p.m.,  and the Sunday evening PBS program “Finding Your Roots,” hosted by Harvard professor, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. If you haven’t watched either of these shows, I encourage you to do so.  

The current interest in family research and the fast growing number of resources available for conducting that research have made it easier than ever to search for one’s family roots.  But if you are like most individuals who want to begin the journey down the family history trail, you may be asking yourself the question “Where do I begin?”  And that’s what I want to discuss here today.

Family history research is like a puzzle - one piece is added to another, and another, and another, until the entire picture is visible.  Often the puzzle’s picture tells a story.  And the search for our ancestors sometimes begins with just one piece of information - the name of a known ancestor. Luckily for most of us, we know the names of our grandparents, possibly the names of our great-grandparents, and more often than not, we also know where they lived.  Armed with just a single name, one can successfully search literally dozens of online databases that contain bits of data about our ancestors.  

One of the best sources of genealogical information out there are census records, and thanks to www.familysearch.org, a website maintained by the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) Church, the information there is free. This same website also contains information gleaned from birth, marriage, and death records. Probably the most widely publicized source of online family history information is www.ancestry.com, which requires a subscription to access the millions of records contained in this huge database.  According to its website, the company “has spent more than a decade building the world’s largest family history resource” that includes birth, marriage, divorce, death, military and census record information.

Some of the least known but best sources of free information for beginning family history researchers are genea-blogs. When I first began blogging in 2008, there were only a few hundred of us who were writing blogs about our family history. Now there are over two thousand genea-bloggers who hail from around the world, and many have become leaders in the genealogy community. Thomas MacEntee, well-known as one of those leaders in the genealogy world and a blogger himself, maintains the www.geneabloggers.com website, where links can be found to each member’s blog.  This site also features a search function where anyone can search a family name contained in the many blogs listed there.  

An important source of free information for online researchers is the website known as www.findagrave.com, a site that contains information and photos of millions of cemeteries and gravestones throughout the world.  Founded by Jim Tipson, the website was originally maintained as a place for posting photographs of the celebrity graves he visited, a hobby of his. However, the site no longer contains just photos of celebrity grave stones - it contains over 80 million grave records, including photos of gravestones posted by its 800,000+ volunteers.  According to statistics available on the website, more than 11 million pages were viewed today by its visitors.

The resources mentioned in this article are but a few of the thousands of databases, repositories, and publications available to family researchers.  But if you are ready to start the search for your own roots, they are excellent places to begin.
   

This is the Face of Genealogy

  

Margaret Susanna Merriweather Porter and John J. Porter
My Paternal Great-Grandparents
Attala County, Mississippi
Circa 1920

I have posted the photo here in response to an insensitive (to say the least) photo that accompanied a recent article in the LAWeekly announcing the Southern California Genealogical Society's 42nd Annual Genealogy Jamboree. You can see a copy of the photo in question and read the background of what happened here. The outcry from the geneablogging community that began yesterday has been huge, and the photo in question has since been replaced with a photo of the "Jamboree app" on an iphone. 


The more I think about what happened with the LAWeekly, the more I wonder why this incident occurred in the first place. Do some members of the public feel that researching one's family history is some sort of joke and that it is less than a worthy and noble effort? I don't think so. Viewer response to two seasons of  "Who Do You Think You Are" has surely proven otherwise.  What I do know is the LA Weekly now knows first-hand the geneablogging community believes genealogy is a subject that deserves respect.

Reading, Writing, and Family Research: "How to Survive a Snowstorm"

Since I haven't posted since last Wednesday's photo of the beginning of our most recent winter storm, I thought today's post would bring my readers up to date on what has been going on here for almost a week now.  Like most of the rest of the country, we had another severe winter storm.  Really, I don't know how I would have survived this storm without an Internet connection, and I am tremendously thankful that we were not without the power to keep my good old laptop battery charged up. So besides keeping warm and baking a lot, I used the indoor time to begin reading another of Greg Iles's books, "The Devil's Punchbowl" and to do an awful lot of online family research. The results of that research, I might add, will be included in posts later this month. I also spent quite a bit of time responding to comments about some recent postings on this blog, three of them from relatives of those about whom I wrote, readers who live in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Receiving positive comments from living relatives, for me, is a particularly pleasant form of what I refer to as "blogger satisfaction." And my ultimate level of blogger satisfaction is achieved when individuals who are researching their own family history find something useful in one of my posts.  The bottom line is that I did not mind being snowbound last week, forced to read and research in front of a warm fire, bundled up in soft, fleecy clothing, with a hot cup of my favorite Caribou coffee beside me.  Oh, and I forgot to mention the goodies I baked. 

 Just how much better can research get?

Newspaper Archives and Census Records: Reconstructing An Ancestor's Life

As a seasoned family history researcher, I can say from experience the use of genealogy research sites and online databases has never been better than now. And with all sorts of new technology designed especially for family researchers becoming available every day, online genealogy research in 2011 and future years will see drastic improvements. 


I first began my foray into online family research in 1997, when ancestry.com was still relatively new, and when familysearch.org was not yet available. Actually, my very first trek on the genealogy trail took me to the Family History Center at the local LDS Church, where I searched the International Genealogy Index (IGI) and requested the loan of microfilmed copies of several books and various records located in Salt Lake City.  The information I received during that first visit, and from a later review of the microfilmed documents I had requested, was enough to get my own family research off to a fantastic start. I will be forever grateful to volunteers at that Family Research Center who were not only expert researchers themselves, but were so willing to help a novice like me. That was fourteen years ago, and technology has definitely changed the research world.  Now anyone who has an internet connection, which is practically everywhere, and a PC, laptop, MacBook, notebook, i-phone, or similar device, can make use of all sorts of websites and databases that contain a mind-boggling amount of family history data.


During the past two weeks, I wrote a series of posts that began when I found the name Carlotta Nelson Fairchild on a grave marker in a cemetery in Goodman, Mississippi.  The Fairchild part of the name is what peaked my interest, since two of my children have Fairchild ancestors in their family trees. Interestingly, initial research for a possible connection to Fairchild names that I already knew suddenly took me in a totally different direction.  Once I learned that Carlotta had married someone from New Orleans, I wanted to know more.  And it was with little more than articles from newspaper archives (the Times-Picayune, in this case), census records, and references in an online book or two, that I was able to reconstruct and write about Carlotta's life and the lives of her huband and children.


The most amazing part of this project were the details revealed in newspaper articles, specifically the society pages of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Not only did the articles chronicle a plethora of parties and other social events, they often provided in-depth details about engagements, marriages, births, and christenings. Without information available in the newspaper articles, discovering details about Carlotta and her family members would have taken months, if not years, to find. In fact, some of the very personal information revealed in those articles might have been available only through interviews of individuals who knew the family well, a task that would have been impossible so many years later.


Although the newspaper archives provided much of the substance for my posts, census records definitely made up the foundation for my research. Initially, I searched census records available for Mississippi on ancestry.com for "Carlotta Nelson" and "Carlotta Fairchild" , beginning with 1900 and continuing through 1930.  When I came up with nothing, I opened up my search to include census records for all states.  Bingo!  Carlotta Fairchild was shown on the 1910 U. S. Census record for New Orleans, Louisiana, where she was living with her husband and his adult children in a household that had five servants. I was both surprised and amazed that Carlotta, the daughter of Danish immigrants, whose father was a dry goods merchant in the tiny turn-of-the-century hamlet of Goodman, Mississippi, was a society matron living in the Garden District of one of the Old South's grandest cities. Although I had found nothing to connect Carlotta Nelson Fairchild to the Mississippi Fairchild family that I was researching, I knew at that moment that Mrs. Louis Howes Fairchild had a story that needed to be told.


The rest of Carlotta's story appears in previous posts on this blog.  If your haven't already read the story, I invite you to do so.  The introduction to this series of seven posts can be found here.