AmericaGen Study Group

Chapter 12 Homework 

Marceline Beem

Reference: Greenwood, Val D. “Compiled Sources and Newspapers.” In The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy, 4^th ed.,255-78. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 2017.

I love newspaper research. I've found a wealth of information on my family from newspapers. Don't limit your newspaper research to marriage announcements and obituaries. Newspaper articles can help pinpoint where an ancestor lived at a particular time, provide details about a family's activities, and give context to historical events.

Here are some of the things I've learned about my ancestors from newspaper articles:

• Dead letter lists: These are notifications to local residents that they had letters at the post office that needed to be picked up. I've often wished these lists gave more  than just a name - like who was the letter from? But even though the list is just a name, it does give you a time and place to look for other documents about your ancestor.
• Prior residences: Sometimes a newspaper article will provide the only documentation of a person's prior residences. Griffin Mashburn, my great-great-grandmother's brother, was the subject of a brief article in the Pell City Progress. In it, Griffin stated he was born near Jameson's Mill in Talladega County. This tidbit helped me identify both a father and other siblings. (For more information, read my blog posts: Martha "Blind Granny" Mashburn: Identifying Siblings and Martha Golden Mashburn: Who is her Father? Eliminating the Possibilities.)
• Military leave: My great-graandfather served during the Spanish-American war. His military record shows he was given leave to go home because one of his siblings was critically ill and not expected to live. The local newspaper confirmed his visit home and the sibling's illness. 
• Occupations: My Beem family worked for one of the railroad companies in Mattoon, Illinois. The local paper reported on workers' activities including promotions and days off for illness or other reasons. 

If your ancestors lived in a rural area that did not have a newspaper, check newspapers of the closest city. In addition to obituaries, marriages notices and news of other major events, look for the "local news" articles. These columns are my favorite, as they provide details into our ancestors' social lives that often isn't available anywhere else. They often tell who visited a community and who they stayed with - confirming relationships and building an ancestor's FAN club.

The author mentioned Chronicling America as a resource for newspaper articles. That collection is now available at MyHeritage. The collection includes The Palatka News, one of two papers to carry such articles about Melrose, where my family lived. Using the MyHeritage search form, I searched for articles about Allen Price, my great-great-grandfather and added "Palatka, FL" as the location.

One of the hits was titled, "Keuka," published on January 16, 1914 in The Palatka News. Keuka is a very small village (if you can call it that) in northern Putnam County. Three of the first four paragraphs were about my family.

"Keuka." The Palatka (Florida) News, January 16, 1914, p. 4, column 4.

From this article I learned that Allen and Carolina Price visited their son, who my grandmother called "Uncle Henry," when he lived in Keuka. Keuka is about 13 miles from where the Price family lived in 1914. Today that trip would be about a 15 minute drive, but in 1914 it would have taken much longer as they would have traveled by horse. I know from prior research that Uncle Henry moved to Palatka and owned a grocery store there, but I now know that he did not make that move before January 1914. 

AmericaGen Study Group: Successful Correspondence

AmericaGen Study Group

Chapter 8 Homework 

Marceline Beem

Reference: Greenwood, Val D. “Successful Correspondence.” In The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy, 4^th ed.,165-74. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 2017.

I have to admit that when I first saw the topic for this week’s session, I was underwhelmed.  Reading the chapter didn’t change my opinion. My first reaction was “More printing and filing? UGH!”

Last week I finally started digitizing my research files. One of the first documents I scanned was a death certificate for Calhoun Cail, who died in Ft. Myers, Florida in 1967. In going through his information in my Legacy file, I realized I did not have an obituary for him.  Googling for Lee County, Florida obituaries, I came across an obituary index maintained by the Lee County Genealogical Society. I found an index entry for Calhoun Cail’s obituary and sent a message to the email provided on the website, asking for a copy of the obituary.

As the author mentioned, be as specific as possible in your request for information. My email was short and to the point:

I would like to request a copy of the obituary for Calhoun Cail. It was published in the Fort Myers News-Press on March 13, 1967, page 2, section a.  Thanks in advance for your help.

If there is a fee for the request, please let me know the charge and how to pay it.

Just this morning I received a fabulous reply that not only included the obituary but also information about the funeral home and how to order the death certificate. I already have the death certificate, but I do intend to follow up with the funeral home.

I tend to not save emails because Gmail makes it so easy to keep and search for old emails that I felt it wasn’t necessary. But in going through my documents to digitize, I realized that I have correspondence from old accounts that I no longer have access to. Geocities, anyone?  I printed very little of my early correspondence and now wish I had some of it. So, I am adding saving my email correspondence to my organization project.

The request for the obituary and the reply are definitely ones I do not want to lose access to, but I don’t want to print it just to scan it again. That’s using a lot of resources (paper, toner, my time) for paper I don’t intend to keep. Instead, I can save the correspondence as a PDF, right from Gmail. Instructions for printing to straight to PDF can be found here.

I’ve already shared that I save all of my digital documents in one folder, rather than having multiple subfolders broken down by surname or location. To name this file, I am using the person’s name, the word “Correspondence,” and a brief description of the subject and date of the correspondence. When I sort the files by name, I can quickly see all of the correspondence I have about the person of interest. For the obituary request, the file name is “Cail-Calhoun_Correspondence_Request-for-Obituary-August-8-2018.” The reply was saved as “Cail-Calhoun_Correspondence_Answer-to-Request-for-Obituary-August-13-2018.” And of course the PDF of the obituary was also saved under a separate file named “Cail-Calhoun_1967_Obituary.”

Since I am horrible with research logs, I am not going to bother with a spreadsheet or log as suggested in the chapter. However, as I go through my current project, I will search my Gmail account for past correspondence, save the emails as PDF, and do the proper analysis and correlation, just as I am with other documents.