UpFront with NGS

10 October 2013

Mapping Deeds -- some options for family historians!

Wake County, NC Land Grant Research
Copyright 2011, James P Jones

Mapping deeds can be a tricky proposition! You definitely need to have patience and a tolerance for vagueness, ambiguity, surveyor mistakes and more.

My experience is with platting metes and bounds (versus the Federal Township & Range System). Understanding the context of any land granted to, purchased by or bequeathed to your ancestors has great relevance to our research. It can help identify heirs, maiden names of spouses, siblings, extended family, close friends, neighbors, and more. It can also help you, when combined with a modern map overlay, identify where your ancestor’s land was so that you may physically visit it. Additionally, you can use historical map overlays to correlated landmarks mentioned (bodies of water, mills, paths, river crossings, roads, etc) through time as they changed.

For example, in North Carolina, I might be tracing land that passed out of a family’s hands in the early 1800s as they migrated west and descendants want to walk where their ancestors lived. I could possibly do a title search through deeds in conjunction with inheritance records to find the current owner and use the counties Geographic Information System (GIS) to determine the modern location of that land. Or, I might start with a land grant plat, as well as those of a few neighbors (you do need to make sure that you have “anchored” your collection of plats to an immovable object such as a river, county boundary, etc). I then look at historical maps to see what nearby landmarks are identified. I might then shift to a Gilmer Civil War Map and see how the same landmarks (or new ones) are then identified. Next I will check county-specific maps including Soil Survey maps (typically early 1900s) to move forward in time and then check other more modern maps as needed to further correlate old route numbers to street names and so on until I can tell with precision where the old land is.

I am only directly familiar with Deedmapper. I was introduced to this software and its wonderful collection of already platted deeds by a colleague many years ago. I most recently used it to correlate the land in a land division in the latter 1800s with a land grant from the 1700s. I platted both descriptions (easily 30 entries each) and found out that they were oriented 180 degrees differently. When I then rotated the one, it perfectly overlaid the other! At least I hadn’t imagined that the metes and bounds seemed similar and yet were different. The two surveyors also went different directions. One went clockwise and the other counterclockwise.

Deedmapper is not the only tool available to those who want to plat land:

· Metes and Bounds: http://www.tabberer.com/sandyknoll/more/metesandbounds/metes.html

· Plat individual deeds, http://www.genealogytools.net/deeds/

For a bit more of a context for land platting, check out Metes, Bounds & Meanders (Kimberly Powell, About.com).

What is the neatest discovery you made after platting your ancestor’s land?

Are there other platting tools that we genealogists should be aware of?

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09 October 2013

Now Available -- September 2013 Edition of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly

Volume 101, Number 3 of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly is now available online in the Members Only section of the website.

Feature Articles

Overcoming Common-Name Barriers to identify Parents: James Johnson of Amelia, Essex, Lunenburg, and Pittsylvania Counties, Virginia, by Nickola Beatty Lagoudakis
Dead Men Do Not Sell Timber: The Sinking of the Snow Owen and Captain Plato Denney’s Two Deaths, by Allen R. Peterson, CG
Parents for Robert Walker of Rockingham County, North Carolina, and Orange County, Indiana, by Pamela Stone Eagleson, CG
Blind Faith versus Critical Analysis: Did Acadians Jean-Baptiste Martin and Marie Brun Have a Daughter Geneviève? by George L. Findlen, Ph.D., CG
A Family for William Gray of New Madrid County, Territory of Missouri, by Melinda Daffin Henningfield

and other regular features ...

Editor’s Note: Please note that online access to the NGS Quarterly and NGS Magazine are available only as long as your membership is active. If you wish to discontinue this option and continue to receive print copies of the journal, please with our website and update your profile to indicate the same.

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08 October 2013

WolframAlpha -- What is it and why might Genealogists care?

WolframAlpha ... what is it? As its own website states:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.

We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

If you are like me, you are scratching your head about both what it can do for you and why should you as a genealogist care!

WolframAlpha itself tries to give us a sense of this via a few posted genealogy examples where relationships are computed.

I found the description for the associated Genealogy & History app provided a little more clarity.

Were their names common at that time?
What happened on their birthdays?
What was the weather like on your grandparents' wedding day?
What were the towns they lived in like, including demographics, and how far are they from where you live?
What was 20 dollars worth the year your great-grandmother was born?
What is the technical relationship between you and your grandfather's sister?

Fortunately for us, two genealogy bloggers have tried to better illustrate what we, as genealogists and family historians, might do with it.

· WolframAlpha: A New Tool for Genealogy (Thomas MacEntee via Archives.com)

· Using WolframAlpha for Family History Calculations (Leiland Meitzler via GenealogyBlog)

I will be honest and say that I sorta see the potential and yet my first, second and third thought is that there are other previously available tools created within our own community that I would use to compute relationships, assess the value of money, and/or that I might consult to determine a birth date based on death date and age-at-death details, etc. Though, there is always value to having such tools aggregated.

And, are there other ways that something like WolframAlpha might be used to help us in our family research quest?

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07 October 2013

Effective 1 Jan 2014 Y-DNA Evidence Accepted for DAR Applications and Supplementals

Source: Official BlackBerry Images, http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackberryimages/8030747901/

Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

We have seen an explosion in the use of DNA testing as a genealogical tool.

The Daughters of the American Revolution announced on their blog this past week the following:

... a ruling was passed today by the National Board of Management to allow the submission of Y-DNA test results as part of a genealogical analysis of evidence under guidelines set forth by the Genealogy Department effective January 1, 2014.

So what that means is that beginning January 1, 2014, NSDAR will accept Y-DNA evidence in support of new member applications and supplemental applications. DNA evidence submitted along with other documentation will be considered along with all of the other source documentation provided to prove heritage. Y-DNA will not be considered as stand-alone proof of linage because while it can be used as a tool point to a family, it cannot be used as absolute proof for an individual.

Click here for the full post. Judy G Russell (the Legal Genealogist) posted on this subject yesterday, DNA and the DAR, and her interesting observation that ...

In other words, the women who would like to join the DAR can only use the one kind of DNA that they, themselves, don’t have. (YDNA, remember, is the kind of DNA passed from father to son; daughters don’t ever inherit YDNA.) It doesn’t allow mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) — the kind passed from a mother to all of her children but that only female children then pass on to their children to establish a direct female line. And it doesn’t allow autosomal DNA — the kind inherited from both parents so testing works across genders and helps identify cousins in recent generations.

Read her full post to learn more about this and she also talks about the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) and their acceptance of DNA results as an element of proof.

The DAR now becomes one of the few lineage societies to explicitly accept any DNA testing as a source of lineage evidence (along with SAR). If you know of other lineage societies which do the same, please post a comment!

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04 October 2013

Uprooted -- a new story published on MATTER about using DNA as a tool ... What do you think?

With the ease with which one can publish stories, blog posts and more, it’s interesting to see “where” the next interesting story for genealogists and family historians might crop up.

Until NGS received an e-mail about the online publication MATTER, I can say that I had never heard of it! We were told that a new article would be posted about genealogy and asked us to spread the word. Well, I don’t like to mention something until I can “see” it.

True to the e-mail, there has been an article posted, Uprooted. You can access a preview for free and then for just 99c you get the remaining 8,800 words, on the web, in ebook and audiobook form.

I wonder if this means that more and more articles will show up in less typical publications?!?! Where have you unexpectedly seen family history-themed articles show up?

Editor’s Note: MATTER is part of Medium and you can read more about that here.

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03 October 2013

My British Isles Origins: Where and How Do I Cross the Pond? Pharos Course Starts 9 Jan 2014 -- SIGN UP NOW!

Adriatic -- one of the ships that my emigrant ancestors took to "Cross the Pond!"

The National Genealogical Society proudly announces a strategic partnership with Pharos Teaching and Tutoring Ltd of the

to present My British Isles Origins: Where and How Do I Cross the Pond? This four-week online learning course begins 9 January 2014 and is designed to show genealogists with British ancestry how to “leap the pond” and discover their roots in the British Isles.

The four week course, My British Isles Origins: Where and How Do I Cross the Pond?, offers students a mixture of history, population study, sources, and research strategies. Its primary objectives are to present practical guidance for launching research into the British origins of immigrant ancestors and to offer help on building contextual knowledge of migration patterns and history, at national and local levels.

This course concentrates on the period from 1600 to 1830 and covers:

Find Your Immigrant Ancestor
When, Where From, Where To and Who?
1713 - 1830: Indexes Sources and Strategies
1600 - 1712: Indexes Sources and Strategies

Click here to access the full course syllabus.

NGS Members Discount: Members registering through the NGS member’s only website, receive a 15% discount. This brings the cost of the course to $55.25.

The presenter is Sherry Irvine, BA (History), MSC, CG, of Courtenay, British Columbia, Canada. Sherry, a favorite lecturer across the United States, is an established teacher and lecturer of family history with over twenty-five years of experience. Further biographical information is available here or at Pharos http://www.pharostutors.com/.

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02 October 2013

Grandparents and grandchildren -- oh the stories they can tell ... a way to celebrate National Family History Month

Here's my mom with her father, paternal grandmother and paternal great grandmother -- I wonder if when she was older, if she interviewed any of them?
Copyright 2013 Diane L Richard

As we celebrate Family History Month, let’s talk about some ways to take advantage of this month-long focus on family + history.

Let’s start with opportunities for children and grandparents (or great grandparents or even parents) to engage and learn the stories of the older generations.

I was reminded of this when I read One listened, one spoke, two drew closer in my local newspaper in August.

The Legacy Project’s National Listen to a Life contest as mentioned in the article is currently underway. Full details are here.

In fact, a high school project is what got me started with my own personal genealogy research, please read this post on Upfront with NGS, Dreading the Family Tree Assignment to see my first family tree. Unfortunately, my grandparents lived in England and Virginia at the time – equally un-accessible back in the 1960s! Though I wrote letters to my Gran (in England), I didn’t know enough to ask the right questions and hence didn’t always get the most detailed responses. Though, when I did visit her, I also found the same reticence to talk family . The same was very true for my Grandma who lost her mother as a child, her husband while young, and had a father commit suicide. Talking about the family was a non-starter.

Fortunately (and I was thrilled) when my kids were in Girl and Boy Scout troops, they each worked on a merit badge that was about family. Because of that, they interviewed (via e-mail) their three surviving grandparents (who live across the country) and learned some really neat stuff. With so many templates out there on questions to ask, it is now easier than ever for grandchildren to interact with their grandparents. One such list to get you started is Fifty Questions for Family History Interviews:

What to Ask the Relatives (Kimberly Powell, About.com Genealogy). And, feel free to vary from those listed. The key is to remind the grandchildren to not ask questions that can just be answered Yes or No!

Nowadays with all the technology, even if grandparents and grandchildren don’t live near one another, they can still conduct an interview and record it. Read Recording Interviews When You Are NOT in the same room? What's a Genealogist to Do? for some suggestions on how.

Might such an interview lead us to the next generation of genealogists? My high school assignment got me started and then after college I picked up the reins and I haven’t looked back since!

Have the grandchildren in your family interviewed their grandparents? What worked? What didn’t work? What was the “neatest” or most “unexpected” thing a grandchild learned?

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01 October 2013

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Library of Congress and other Federal Facilities CLOSED TODAY and until US Federal Government Shutdown Ends ...

source: bmills, http://www.flickr.com/photos/32485328@N00/7175133946/

used under Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

The shutdown of the US Federal Government does affect us genealogists both personally and as family history researchers.

Here are two announcements pasted on Facebook (FB) about how we are affected.

If you know of other closures that impact us as we research our ancestors, please post a comment!

Research at the US National Archives

Due to the Federal Government shutdown, the National Archives (www.archives.gov) is closed. We are unable to post or participate in any of our social media channels during this closure. All National Archives facilities are closed, with the exception of the Federal Records Centers and the Federal Register until the Federal government reopens.

The Library of Congress

Due to the temporary shutdown of the federal government, the Library of Congress is closed to the public and researchers beginning Oct. 1, 2013 until further notice. All public events are cancelled and web sites are inaccessible except the legislative information sites THOMAS.gov and beta.congress.gov.

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