My mother and I would buy groceries every week at Spot Cash Grocery. As Mom shopped, I would peek around the meat counter and watch the butcher work. He had the largest hands and feet I had ever seen, and he spoke with a heavy accent. I was a little afraid of this stern-looking, powerful man but not enough to keep from watching.
I always found Edmond Harris, my great-great-great-grandfather, mysterious. While family stories and documents abounded on most of my ancestors, not one word or piece of paper had been passed down about him. All I had were a few dates filled in on a family pedigree chart.
The information I collected about his later life appeared fairly straight-forward.
My mother’s family came from Oklahoma. In exploring my family’s past, I came across the Historical Atlas of Oklahoma, a book with a whole lot of maps that I find appealing. My third edition trumpets on the cover that it’s “updated from the 1980 census.” The book includes maps of early trails, cattle trails, and railroads.
Dig up almost any tree in America and odds are good that you’ll find at least one German root.
Scratch an American pedigree and you probably will find some German branches. That’s because it is estimated that more than one-half of us have at least some ancestors of Germanic origins.
Taking a look at ethnic records can help uncover new details of an immigrant ancestor’s life.
In central Ohio, on any given weekend you can find church services being conducted in Spanish, Russian, Korean, and Vietnamese. These congregations are bound not only by religious belief, but also by language. And so it was with our ancestors.
How to use other researchers’ surname clues to help you make progress on your own family history
For decades there has been one surefire method for succeeding in genealogical research—communication.
We have all heard it said—statistics can be manipulated to reinforce a desired message. But any historian can tell you there’s another side to statistics: those same numbers can also be the evidence needed to support conclusions and theories.
How does that relate to the family historian? Statistics can help us develop research strategies that make us more efficient at finding our families.
Take a look at some cultural enclaves, where groups of immigrants from the same country clustered together and, in the process, perpetuated cultural components of their native lands.
Language, culture, sounds, sights, and smells—if you’ve ever been to a foreign country, it’s likely all of your senses were triggered—good or bad —the moment you stepped off the boat or plane.
Some ancestors are easy. You thumb through a census and find them at the right address with the right people. You find their obituaries in the newspapers you intuitively know they should be in. You easily obtain copies of marriage licenses, school records, or naturalization papers from the most likely sources.
Preserve the records you want to pass on so that they can bring joy to your descendants for generations to come.
There are times when I want to grasp the ghosts of my ancestors and shake their stories out of them. I get greedy and want to know everything they did, from sunup to sundown and maybe in between.