Heartland Genealogy

This morning, I watched part of the Wacky Wednesday episode: The Source Is Gone and hope to finish it watching it later today. During this presentation, Cousin Russ discusses how he is rethinking how he cites memorials on Find A Grave. During the presentation, Cousin Russ compared the suggested citation for a Find a Grave memorial to how he was citing the memorial in his software. This made me curious about my own citations and how they compare. Below is the suggested citation for the memorial of my second great grandfather, Washington Marion Crawford. When I looked at the footnote for the Find a Grave source in my software (RootsMagic), I found that the footnote was similar to the suggested footnote. My footnote is 'created' using a template to enter the information. The above template is a 'custom' template that I created. I often copy a built-in template and then customize the copy. I like using templates. They make it easy for me to remember to include the importa...

As mentioned in a previous post, my John Thompson ancestor and another John Thompson of a similar age are both living in Warrick County, Indiana at the same time. I'm hoping that land records for Warrick County, Indiana will help me separate these two families. Buried in my paper files were some notes I took from the deed index books for Warrick County. Since there are additional notes in the margins of these notes, I'm assuming I looked at the deeds while on a research trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake.

Last week, I stumbled upon a hint that the father of my ancestor, John B Thompson , was David Thompson of Barren County, KY. Following that hint, I found the will of a David Thompson in Barren county, KY. Among his children was a John B. Thompson.

I descend from John Thompson -- the John Thompson who married Sarah Iglehart in Ohio County, Kentucky, lived in Warrick County, Indiana, Wapello County, Iowa and Adams County, Iowa. The 1830 and 1840 census records for Warrick County, Indiana include two men named John B Thompson. 1840 Census 1830 Census

I am researching John Thompson who married Sarah Iglehart in 1820 in Ohio county, Kentucky. According to cemetery records, John was born in Kentucky. According to a history of Adams County, Iowa, John resided in Warrick county, Indiana before migrating to Wapella County, Iowa and then to Adams County, Iowa. John and Sarah's children include William Taylor Thompson (1820-1898) md Mary Ann Evans Jacob Thompson (1822-1905) md Rhoda Evans Benjamin Franklin Thompson (1824-1875) md Catherine Black Levi Thompson (1826-1828) Martha Jane Thompson (1828-1848) md Alexander Van Winkle Andrew J Thompson (1832-?) Mary Elizabeth Thompson (1834-1917) md Henry Evans John Lowe Thompson (1836-1917) md Martha Ingersoll Francis Marion Thompson (1838-1921) md Martha Schooling Sarah Ellen Thompson (1841-1844) James Allen Thompson (1841-1868) md Margaret Scott

I recently have been working on a 'go over' for my 2nd great grandfather, George Mentzer . In the process, I utilized Scrivener . I had probably heard about Scrivener, but when I saw it mentioned in the recent Twitter #genchat , I decided to try it. In the process of learning more about Scrivener and genealogy, I discovered Lisa Alzo's Ancestor Profile Template  along with her 25 Genealogist Hacks Every Genealogist Should Know . I haven't used my George Mentzer Scrivener project to write his biography (yet). However, I have used it to transcribe the various documents I've collected over the years.  My research folder contains the actual document files.

For my genealogy research, 'brick walls' and 'same name' often go hand in hand. Hiram M. Currey and James Crawford are two examples where a 'brick wall' also involves working thru 'same name' issues. In the case of Hiram M. Currey, I have four generations that go by that name. To further complicate the issue, there is another Hiram M. Currey that is about the same age as my Hiram M. Currey of Peoria, Illinois. My James Crawford research is more complicated. I have identified three James Crawford families in the same area of early Kentucky. Histories of the region refer to a Rev. James Crawford who is likely the Rev. James Crawford -- a fourth James Crawford. Over the years, I have been able to figure out the relationships between the multiple Hiram M Curreys and to separate the multiple James Crawfords. I have found the following techniques useful: Perform a reasonably exhaustive research of all people of the same name in the same area and time perio...

I feel like I'm going in circles trying to eliminate yellow light bulbs for Ancestry hints. I've been working on the descendants of Albert Hutchinson and it feels like I keep accepting the same hints for the same people. Today, I decided to work with Netta M. Clickenbeard . RootsMagic says I have 4 pending hints. At some time in the past year, I figured out that the hint # doesn't group Ancestry Member Trees but counts them individually. So, this 4 pending hints could be 4 databases, 4 member trees or any combination of the two.   Since I don't accept the hints from RootsMagic, my next step was to locate Netta Clickenbeard in my Ancestry tree.  When I clicked on her profile, it indicated that I didn't have any hints to process.   I then went back to RootsMagic and clicked on the 4 to try and figure out the pending hints. According to the Ancestry WebHints window, I have rejected 2 hints. All of the other hints -- including all trees -- have green c...

As a genealogist and an information junkie, I read quite a few genealogy blogs, belong to quite a few genealogy Facebook groups, have a lot of genealogy friends on Facebook and follow a lot of genealogists on Twitter. (Remember, I am an information junkie!) Thus, I have encountered quite a few discussions of the European Union's G eneral D ata P rotection R egulation (GDPR) . Based on what others - especially the Legal Genealogist - have written, I have tried to understand the GDPR and to implement changes to my blogs and my website. As a volunteer for the Nemaha County Historical Society, I have also tried to inform their board about the GDPR and help them implement changes. One of the challenges was guidelines on what the historical society needed to do. Other than the genealogy related blog posts, there wasn't an organization or government site providing help for non-profits. When guidance was sought from statewide organizations, the responses received were not as inf...

During the last month - and especially the last week - there has been a lot of discussion in the online genealogy community about the European Union's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). I didn't pay much attention at first. After all, it is a European Union regulation and I live in Kansas. As the discussion became more frequent, I began paying attention. So, should I care? One blogger made the comment that as a citizen of the United States, he didn't see how we could be subject to any fines imposed by the European Union in regards to GDPR. I don't earn money from my blogs. Nor, do I have 'subscribers' to my blogs. Thus, it would be easy to take the attitude that the GDPR doesn't apply, especially for those of us living in small town America. As I read more and more about the issue for bloggers, I realized that I should pay attention and try to be compliant. So, Why Care? Even though I live in Kansas, I have done research for people fr...

I'm working my way thru GDPR and my various blogs and websites. In the process, I'm having to learn more about how these free sites (Wordpress.com and Google) work. One of the first things I did today was to search my email for GDPR and search again for action required. This was so that I could opt in to the various email lists to which I subscribe. At this point, I don't think I've received emails from all of my lists. Thus, I will be repeating this step in the days to come. The second task on my "GDPR TO DO" list was to create a page for my privacy policy on my blogspot.com blogs ( Heartland Genealogy : Developing Skills and Nemaha Tales ) and then to actually write a policy. For the most part, I copied my privacy policy from my Wordpress blog and modified it for the Google aspects of a blogspot.com blog versus a Wordpress.com blog. I ran into a 'stumbling block' in that my new page wasn't showing on my blog -- even though I had published i...

I'm a 'sometimes' blogger -- with several blogs and websites from Kansas. Being a 'sometimes' blogger means that I blog or add to a website when I have something I want to share. Even though I try to follow laws and regulations affecting the Internet, I tend to focus on Kansas issues. Thus, I was vaguely aware of privacy regulations in Europe but I didn't really pay attention to them. Let's face it, I didn't think they applied to me -- until about 2 weeks ago when discussion of the GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation ) began appearing in Facebook genealogy groups. Since that time, I've been trying to figure out what I have to do to be compliant! Even though I can usually find the information I want thru Google, figuring out how to be GDPR compliant hasn't been easy. Instead of trying to find information thru Google, I resorted to the forum for Wordpress and the Site Help menu for my Google Site. I'm still working on this...

While searching the Yates Center News for an article stating that Cleo B. Peake was awarded the purple heart, I discovered another cousin killed during World War II: PFC Lovell Mentzer. Notice of the death of Private First Class Lovell J. Mentzer first appeared in the May 3, 1945 issue of the Yates Center News on Page 1. PFC Lovell Mentzer Killed in Germany Mr. and Mrs. E. E. Mentzer received the information Tuesday from the War Department that their son, Private First Class Lovell J. Mentzer had died in Germany. Nineteen-year-old Lovell had seen ten and one-half months service in the European theatre. Graduating from Yates Center high school with the class of '44 he was inducted in the army and trained for an infantryman. In the latter part of last November he was sent over seas and was with the Seventh Army Private Mentzer has five brothers in the service, Technician Fourth Grade Keith in south Pacific, Corporal Talmadge (Tye) in England, T/5 Burdette with the AAF at C...

While going thru Ancestry Hints for my Wells line, I found an intriguing military record for a distant cousin, Byron Peake (Cleo Byron Peake). The records said he was reported missing in action on 28 April 1944. ("World War II and Korean Conflict Veterans Interred Overseas." Database. Ancestry.com . www.ancestry.com : 2018.)

When I spit in a test tube for my first DNA test, I had high hopes of proving a relationship to another Crawford line and ultimately breaking through our brick wall in early Kentucky. Those hopes were greatly diminished when I wasn't a match to a known descendant of the James and Martha (Knight) Crawford line. However, I had matches to descendants of William N. Crawford of Washington and Isaac and Nancy (Miller) Crawford of Kentucky. Those matches have revived hopes of figuring out how my Crawford line fits into the greater Crawford genealogy. Since I have those matches 'painted' on DNA painter, I decided to experiment to see how they overlapped with DNA from my 2nd cousins.

Thanks to a marriage record for Mary Crawford and Alexander Moore in 1793 in Madison County, I've been able to learn more about Mary Crawford. Mary Crawford is shown on the tax lists for Madison County, Kentucky in 1787, 1789 and 1791. According to the document, " Tax Lists (1792-1840): An Overlooked Resource for Kentucky History and Land Title " by Kandie Adkinson, Land Office, Ky. Secretary of State, "women are included on the tax lists if they are the head of household." Thus, I've long assumed that Mary was a widow living in early Kentucky.

For a long time, the Mary Crawford of early Madison County has been a puzzle! Mary appears on the 1787 tax list for Madison County .(1)  She is also listed on the tax lists for 1789, 1791 and 1792 -- all in Madison County, Kentucky.(2) In 1791, Mary purchases 100 acres of land on Sugar Creek from Richard Cave .(3)

I'm writing in response to Russ Worthington 's comment on the Genea-Musing's blog post, When Did Ancestry.com Last Index Ancestry Member Trees ? In the comment, Russ brings up the issue of hints not showing. Since I haven't noticed an issue with 'missing' hints on my un-indexed tree, Russ's post made me question whether I was indeed missing hints. However, I did notice one difference between my tree and Russ's experiment. I work with a public tree and Russ' test was with a private tree. Thus, I wanted to know whether public trees produced hints when the tree lacked Ancestry sources. Thus, I needed a public tree (small) without Ancestry sources. Since I've been searching for Judson Crawford to see if my tree was indexed, I decided to create a small public tree on Ancestry for Judson Crawford, his wife, children and parents.  My first attempt at creating the tree was to drag Judson and his family into a new tree. When I tried to use TreeS...

Thanks to the help of users on the RootsMagic Discussion Forum , I have figured out some of my issues with my narrative report and learned a formatting trick. One of my issues was with the first letter of a few sentences not being capitalized. When I looked at the sentence structure for these facts, I discovered that the 'person' field wasn't capitalized in the template: [person] lived< [PlaceDetails:Plain]>< [Place]>< [Date]>. When I capitalized the 'Person' field, then the sentence began with a capital letter in the narrative report. According to the forum discussion , the capitalization of the 'person' field should not affect the sentences. Thus, I didn't go thru my various fact types and change all of the [person] fields to [Person]. I'm guessing that I did something to the sentence structure for these few sentences that kept them from formatting correctly. Since my 'work-around' (capitalizing the 'person'...

As a former user of The Master Genealogist, I expect my current genealogy software to take the sentences created by each event and build a narration for an individual's life. Unfortunately, I still have a lot to learn about the way RootsMagic builds the narrative report. Thanks to information posted in the RootsMagic Community Forum , I did figure out how to create paragraphs (i.e. some white space). I elected to customize the sentence where I wanted a new paragraph by adding two carriage returns at the beginning of the sentence. Those two carriage returns create a blank line before the sentence. Now, I need to figure out how to resolve several other issues: The first letter is not capitalized for some sentences (see second paragraph above) In many cases, there doesn't appear to be a space between the superscript at the end of one sentence and the first letter of the next sentence. Hopefully, the forum will help me figure out how to resolve these issues.

During the last few years of my career in teaching, I was required to write SMART Goals. Even though I did not excel at writing those goals, I think about the acronym (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) when considering genealogy goals. Although I haven't written my 2018 genealogy goals in true SMART goal fashion, I have broken a broad goal of 'researching my family history' into smaller more specific tasks. With these smaller goals, I will be able to check them off within the next year (hopefully). Although I'm always working on my broad 'research my family history goal', I hope to be better at being able to 'measure' my progress in 2018. Thus, I need to establish my 'baseline' or beginning stats for 2018. RootsMagic 11,269 People 3,744 Families 29,407 Events 3,215 Sources 39,752 Citations Ancestry 11,257 People 2,095 Photos 99 Stories 1,753 Records 1,105 People with Hints 8,151 Total Hints 6,541 Rec...

While thinking about my goals for 2018, I started thinking about what I've accomplished during 2017. Since I didn't record statistics from my tree, I can't 'brag' about the number of ancestors added. However, I have learned a lot during 2017. In January, I learned all about Bullet Journaling thanks to a Wacky Wednesday hangout sponsored by DearMyrtle . Even though I had tried various planners during my career, I failed to consistently use a planner. I wasn't even good at checking Google calendar, let alone getting everything into an online calendar. However, I did create and use a bullet journal for 2017 and have started one for 2018! During the spring of 2017, I applied to become a beta tester for RootsMagic's tree share feature. Around the middle of May, I was accepted as a beta tester and spent the next month working with uploading segments of my tree to Ancestry and playing with the various features to help RootsMagic find and fix errors. When the ...

This week's ' Saturday Night Genealogy Fun ' challenge was to create at least one genealogy goal for 2018. Thanks to DearMyrtle's Wacky Wednesday on Bullet Journaling , one of my goals for 2017 was to learn to use a Bullet Journal. I can truly say that I've accomplished that goal since I've been planning my 'journal' for 2018. In the process of that planning, I've written several goals in my genealogy journal. Knowing that I need specific goals that I can check off (i.e. SMART goals), I have broken them down into smaller steps. Below are some of  my broader goals: Get my tree indexed on Ancestry! Reduce number of shaky leaves on Ancestry Use RootsMagic's link to FamilySearch to add sources for my direct line ancestors Connect with cousins on Facebook by sharing family photos Blog about my ancestors  SCAN -- I still have some photo albums to scan Clean up files (sadly I have duplicates of some photos and others that need re-scanned) DNA...

My list of sources has a LOT of duplicates. The vast majority of these duplicated sources are coming from Ancestry.

Ancestry recently made some changes to their Ethnicity display. I first became aware of this change during a webinar. I was reminded of this change this morning when I read " Ancestry Updates DNA Ethnicity Presentation " on The Genes Blog. Thus, I decided to check out my Ethnicity screen. The 'new' part of the presentation is the time line. As I began clicking thru the time line, it showed the migration from Europe to the United States. I still need to learn about these maps and how they can help me with my paper research!

My first 'research logs' were paper based and I was fairly consistent about keeping those records. However, when I started using software to manage my family tree, my diligence in recording what sources I had used began to slip. My software of the time, The Master Genealogist, had the ability to maintain a research log but I incorporated that tool into my research process. Recently, webinars and blogs that I follow have emphasized the need to maintain an accurate log of sources used. Knowing that I was lacking in this area, I decided to try the tools within RootsMagic to see if I could improve my research process. I first tried this logging process while on a trip to the Midwest Genealogy Library. I transferred data from my TODO spreadsheet into tasks on RootsMagic. During my visit to the library, I was able to mark the task completed and transfer it to the Research Log. With the Research Log window open, I then entered the bibliographic information and transcribed dat...

Historically, I have published most of my genealogy research under 'Heartland Genealogy'. When RM introduced TreeShare, I was having trouble getting a new tree established with that name. Thus, my TreeShare name is currently called 'Crawford-Briles'. For the sake of consistency, I would like my old tree name back. Thus, I asked the Facebook community if it was possible to change the name. So, I'm going to try to change the name of my tree. I have closed my tree in RM and backed it up. Dropbox is in the process of syncing both the file and the backup. On Ancestry, I opened Tree Settings and changed the name of the tree. I then re-opened RootsMagic. In RootsMagic, my file is called Crawford-Briles. Hopefully, it will still link to my renamed tree on Ancestry - Heartland Genealogy. To test that, I clicked on the TreeShare icon. Thankfully, it is telling me it is connected to my Heartland Genealogy Tree.

Due to my tree not showing in a search on Ancestry, I'm learning more and more about how TreeShare works. One of my observations is that I often have a 'note' at the bottom of my sources on Ancestry. One of those notes was a 'burial' note. Most of the time, they are titled, 'residence note'. Pictured is such a note on the record for George Mentzer in my Crawford-Briles tree.

After working thru my 'study' of what happens to sources with TreeShare, I wondered whether an image gets downloaded multiple times when attaching a census source to individuals of a family. In my previous post, TreeShare and Sources , I looked at the 1900 census for Paul Emory Mentzer. In that census, Paul was listed as a 4 year old son of Charles Mentzer. Prior to accepting any Ancestry hints for the 1900 census for Charles Mentzer, I had one source attached to that event.

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to handle Ancestry hints, TreeShare and sources. I have a fairly well sourced database that includes a lot of census research. Some of that census research dates back to the microfilm days. I tried to use the standards of the time to write citations for the data. My original citations would have been written in PAF as a NOTE. Some of those citations still exist in my current data. When I transferred from PAF to The Master Genealogist, I tried to go back thru my file and convert those NOTEs to facts. In the process, I also started using one of the citations templates provided by TMG: Richard Lackey's Cite Your Sources (c1980). Since the Master Genealogist community promoted the use of Elizabeth Shown Mills' Evidence! Citation Analysis for the Family Historian , I switched to that set of templates for my sources. When my data was transferred from TMG to RootsMagic, I also participated in Thomas McEntee's Genealogy Do-Over ...

The verdict is in!   I need to accept hints on Ancestry in order for my tree to become searchable. Ironically, my DNA 'shared matches' list was working even though I was accepting the hints on RootsMagic and not on Ancestry! Not only do I have shared Ancestry hints and circles but the list of hints and circles has been growing. Thus, I didn't think there was an issue with the way I was using RootsMagic! Now, that I'm aware of the issue, I'm going to change my workflow. Accept valid hint on Ancestry Use RootsMagic to source that hint and manually add the image (as I was doing prior to TreeShare) Ignore pink sources and media on TreeShare  In the meantime, I'm going back thru my 5 generation pedigree and Clicking confirmed sources and changing them to undecided within RootsMagic Accepting those sources on Ancestry  Now, I wait for Ancestry indexing to pick up my tree. I would like to thank the RootsMagic community (both Facebook and Roo...