My Trails into the Past

This past week, I have been watching recorded presentations from the Texas State Genealogical Society’s conference. Craig Scott gave a presentation about  Fold3 , and since that site is not easy to use, I always watch a webinar on it, as I will learn of a new database or a new way to locate items there. This presentation did not disappoint me. He showed examples from the “Confederate Citizens File.” I found it by clicking the browse feature, selecting Civil War, Confederate, and then typing “citizen” in the keyword search. There are three categories: Business, Citizen, and None. Each have thousands of records. I did locate Jesse Loveless. It is one record, where he sold on 6 Dec 1863, 30 bushels of corn at $2 per bushel and 1900 pounds of hay at $2.35 per hundred, for a total of $102.75. The quartermaster, Captain T.C. Burch signed the receipt. It was received near Rome on 6 December 1863. It looks like Jesse Loveless signed it, but there is also a cross after his name. [1] S...

Eva Holmes, cg® gave a wonderful webinar last week, a BCG-sponsored webinar at Family Tree Webinars, called “ Social Context and the Kinship Determination Project (KDP) .” She discussed how social context helps researchers understand our ancestors’ actions, the records they created, and their place in historical and social lives. As I listened, I thought about the book I had recently read, The Farmers’ Frontier 1865-1900 by Gilbert C. Fite. [1] I found this book browsing a used bookstore in the social sciences section. That is where we can locate good sources for understanding historical and social context. This book describes the history of migration in the American lands west of the Mississippi River. Many of us have farmers who migrated to the West. Have you wondered why? Have you wondered what they found when they got there? Have you wondered how well they fared? Do you understand the process for getting land from the Federal government? From the railroad? From another land ...

I watched a webinar this week called “Creating Your Ancestor’s Resume.” It was presented at Kinseekers in November by Karen Molohon. This topic intrigued me as another way to get information about my ancestors and family members onto paper (figuratively speaking). Creating a resume about an ancestor can have two purposes. If this is all you do, then you have written something about their life. A collection of these could be shared with your family. The other purpose is that it can serve as a starting point for further writing, such as adding historical and social context about their work. I thought I would create a resume for one of the ancestors I am working on. I will use these headings: genealogical summary, parents' names, spouse’s name, children’s names, skills, education, hobbies, and work history, starting with the most recent job down to their first job. My grandfather, Tom J. Johnston, saved some of the letters of recommendation he had five men write, who knew him we...

image from Pixabay In October, Jan Joyce gave a webinar to the Writers SIG of the Association of Professional Genealogists, titled “Restarting Research: Writing Your Way Back after a Break.” I was finally able to view the recording this week. It was a great interactive webinar, and I’m sorry I missed it live. She had five tips: recall, review, prompt, write, and recap or restart, which she expanded on with the help of the audience. Recall was basic. Try to remember what the research goal or objective was. It’s a big picture approach to the original problem. We were to consider why we were working on it, and to try to remember any challenges we had, and if we remembered what our next steps were going to be. For my project, I want to find the parents of Benjamin W. Jones, born about 1822 in Virginia, who married Amanda A. Haley on 26 June 1845 in Rankin County, Mississippi. I know her parents, but not Benjamin’s. One of the challenges is that I have no idea where in Virginia he i...

During the government shutdown, Brian Rhinehart of CivilWarRecords.com, presented a webinar, “Researching Your 19th Century Ancestors,” about researching military records at Fold3 . His pitch was to help support his employees since they could not work at the National Archives while it was closed. Learning to do better searching at Fold3 is always welcome, and I liked the idea of supporting those who were caught in the shutdown. I didn’t attend live, as I had other obligations, and watched the recording later, which turned out better because we had exercises to try out his methodologies. Seeing the recording allowed me to work on the problems without any stress. The way Fold3 is set up is different from most websites, where you enter a name in a search field and you’ll get all the documents about that person or persons with similar names. You can do that at Fold3, but you won’t get everything. Fold3 is better searched using their browse feature. He used the analogy of file drawe...

This past Saturday, I attended the Board for the Certification Ed Fund presentation given by Judy G. Russell and Carolyn Ladd. The theme of the day was studying documents, creating citations, and learning the law to understand the documents’ meaning. It was a great day of learning. I thought I would show how I gather the information when locating a document on FamilySearch ’s full-text search. Crafting a citation is not straightforward. I have to go to several screens to gather the information needed. Searching Let’s start with finding a document on Full-text search. I always put the search in quotes in the keyword box. Once I get the returns, I then filter using the place first, down to the county level. If I still have too many hits, I’ll filter by the year, working through the decades. Collecting Citation Information The following image shows the second document from the returns list. From this view, I see the page number, 332. The deed actually begins on page 331, so I will wan...