How Did They End Up There?

by Juliana Szucs

Migrations have always fascinated me. Perhaps it’s because I have lived my entire life within about 30 miles of my birthplace. Yes, I am a comfort creature who craves familiar surroundings.  

How the heck did our ancestors pack up their lives and move their entire families long distances with no modern conveniences—and to destinations sometimes largely untested? That takes a special kind of courage.

These folks leave us with many questions. How and why did the guy I wrote about, get from a home in Connecticut where he was born in 1805, to the Indiana wilderness, where he was married in 1827 at age 22? 

This week let’s look at some ways in which we can learn more about our ancestors’ journeys to new homes and why they made the decision to leave one place for another. 

Assessing the Community

As we research back in time, often our first indication of a migration is a birthplace on a census record, as was the case with my Connecticut-born friend Warren, who was living in Indiana. Typically migrations of this type, weren’t done in isolation. Extended family and others from a common community may have traveled together or followed one another in succession to a new location. Observing your ancestor’s “neighborhood” and the shared backgrounds of the people in it can sometimes clue you in to a more specific location.

Looking around him in the 1850 census, I found thirty families had at least one member who had been born in the Nutmeg State (Connecticut). Armed with these surnames, I can see whether any of the people in the area who hailed from Connecticut appear to be associates of Warren’s family. Court and probate documents might provide answers. And as always, stories and insights found in the records of the contemporaries of my research subject could also shed insights on his family. 

The Wikipedia entry for Fulton County, Indiana, where the family was living in 1850, gives me some information about how New Englanders began moving into the area in the 1820s and 1830s, and how the Erie Canal helped make the region more accessible, right about the same time as my subject made his way here. Deeper dives into the history of the area should provide even more information (and provide necessary verification of the details on Wikipedia). 

Educational materials and learning opportunities at conferences and institutes can also help fill in blanks. The NGS Annual Conference will also include several lectures on migration, and even one on river pirates in the Ohio River. (You can view the entire NGS conference schedule here.)

Population growth in New England and a shortage of land in the region around that time had made moving to the Midwest more appealing. The basic summary information provided in Wikipedia mentions that these “’Yankee’ settlers were descended from the English Puritans.” While that’s possible, there were people of many other faiths and ethnic backgrounds present in New England and many schisms occurred in the predominant religions as well. 

Indeed, I am finding his wife’s family and close associates of Warren’s family in Quaker records in Indiana. Since Quakers (and another sect called the Rogerenes who practiced a similar faith) lived in the area from whence the family reportedly came, I’ll keep this in mind as I seek out records in Connecticut. Moreover, religion could have played a factor in their migration, as was the case with many denominations in this country.

A look at the FamilySearch Wiki for Fulton County provides me with a good list of available records for that county.  It also includes links to access online collections. I’ll be keeping in mind my roster of names of those who lived near Warren’s new home and who shared Connecticut (and nearby Rhode Island) origins.

In my ongoing research, I discovered that in 1840 one Revolutionary War pensioner was named in the county, which proved to be another fascinating lead. Bounty land, and in later years, homestead records are also excellent resources that may help you learn about your ancestor’s migration. The more information I absorb about the people who surround Warren’s family and the societal considerations of the times, the easier my trek will be back to Connecticut. The knowledge I gain will also give me a better understanding who these people were and how they found that special kind of bravery. 

Photo courtesy the Library of Congress Photo Collection, Erie Canal, Tonawanda, N.Y.

Come Out to Play in Louisville!

by Juliana Szucs

Do you long for a place where everyone loves history as much as you do? A place where we can gather and learn about the lives of our ancestors through engaging sessions and one-on-one discussions with others who share our passion? We have the perfect place for you. The National Genealogical Society’s annual conference is taking us to Louisville, Kentucky, from 23-26 May. It will be held at the Galt Hotel, a place steeped in history, which doubles as the convention center. Here, you can mingle with fellow genealogists and family history buffs who appreciate the importance of safeguarding our collective history, by preserving the stories of those who made it.

The Program

 Want more? How about presentations and workshops given by the country’s best and brightest genealogists, with plenty of tips and tricks to jumpstart your family history projects or break through some brick walls. We’re really excited about our speakers and the program we have in store for our guests on Saturday and Sunday. (As an added bonus, attendees will have continued access to all the lectures in the Whova app through 15 July 2025.)

Let’s talk about these sessions, and why you need to join us. NGS conferences don’t just provide you with tools to build or expand your family tree. Sure, there will be plenty of discussion around unique records that can aid your research, but you will also learn where to find them, and perhaps most importantly, how to use and understand what the records mean.

Regionally, waterways powered migration and life in the Ohio River Valley. Residents used rivers to bring in new settlers and supplies and create economic opportunities. Initially, political boundaries were fluid in this area, so knowing the history can determine where the records you need can be found.

Beyond records, there will be a track on methodology, but not the boring kind. We go past those names and dates and weave social history into your family legacy. Its importance goes further than just turning out a good story; a full understanding of the social conditions of the day will help you better understand your ancestors and the choices they made, leading to new breakthroughs. And the Family Stories and Oral History track will help you to memorialize what you’ve learned so that it can endure for posterity.

Of course, you’ll be able to attend lectures that take deep dives into the latest technology, using DNA to find connections not found in records, and looking at unique clusters in your matches to find out where they originated. Learn from the leaders in genetic and forensic genealogy field (and while you’re at it, pick up a copy of the latest NGS publication, Forensic Genealogy: Theory & Practice, by Michael S. Ramage, JD, CG, and Catherine Becker Wiest Desmarais, CG).

We’ll also examine AI's strengths and weaknesses for various tasks, including transcribing, translating, extracting, summarizing, and analyzing the data we find in sometimes complicated and cumbersome records.

Side Trips

Still not enough? Then sign up for one of several tours available on 23 May. How about a trip to the nearby Filson Historical Society, where you’ll have access to its vast collections documenting not just Louisville but the entire Ohio River Valley, the Upper South, and beyond?  Here you can access manuscripts, maps, diaries, correspondence, business and organizational records, newspapers, and more. Its microform collection also includes the Lyman Draper Manuscripts, which focuses on the history of the "Trans-Allegheny West," including regions like the Ohio River Valley, Virginia, the western Carolinas, and parts of the Mississippi Valley, primarily between the 1740s and 1830s.

Another tour will take you to the state capital for a research day at the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives and the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort, an hour or so away.

In a mood to just explore Old Louisville? A third 1.2 mile walking tour will teach you about the architectural elements and historical styles of the third largest historic district in America. Points of interest include the Fredrick Law Olmstead-designed Central Park, the Conrad Caldwell House, the Landward House, and for urban folklorists—the Witch’s Tree.

And let’s not forget our host society, the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR), whose library and museum is in Louisville. Not only will their volunteers be welcoming us to Louisville, they can help you connect with your Revolutionary War past just in time for America’s 250^th celebration. On Sunday, Deborah Maddox and William Burchfield, MSLS, both genealogists at the NSSAR will share their best advice to a successful lineage application. (Session SU26.)

Stay an extra day with us for a special Memorial Day Monday event at the famous Cave Hill Cemetery. (Now I know we’ve got you. C’mon, it’s a historic cemetery. No genealogist can resist a good cemetery.) Initially, the tour will allow you to explore at your own pace, the 296-acre grounds’ stunning gardens, towering trees, and iconic monuments honoring influential Louisvillians and a range of architectural styles spanning more than 170 years. The day will culminate with a respectful Memorial Day service in the National Cemetery section.

Note: The organized tours to the Filson Historical Society, to the library and archive in Frankfort, and the walking tour of Louisville come at an additional cost to cover transportation and admission where necessary.

FOCUS 2025

If you work with a society, library, archive, museum, or other institution in the genealogy and family history community, you’ll want to join us on Friday, 23 May for our FOCUS educational sessions. The 2025 event will be held at the Filson Historical Society and will be a unique experience to help your organization plan for a successful and sustainable future. 

Come Join Us!

While all of the above is more than enough to draw you to Louisville, you’ll also find a lot of love, hugs, and camaraderie that always dominate family history conferences. While we may come together as strangers, we leave as good friends, bonded through our passion for genealogy. As we learn and hone our skills together, we can preserve our shared story for future generations, so that they too can be inspired by the lessons our past has to teach us.

Register today on the NGS Conference website. We can’t wait to see you!

Finding Irish Origins

by Juliana Szucs

Exploring Irish ancestry can be a rewarding journey, revealing the rich history and resilience of a people whose impact is deeply woven into the fabric of history. While Irish genealogy presents unique challenges due to record losses and other complexities, with the right strategies and resources, navigating these challenges can lead to the discovery of fascinating and rewarding stories.

Before You Cross the Pond

Before you start wandering around in Irish records, for Americans, it’s best to start your Irish research here in the States. The same applies to other countries where the Irish migrated and left a legacy.  It’s critical to learn as much about your family here in the US, so that you can compile a comprehensive timeline of where and when they lived here. Arrange the details about your family chronologically in whatever format you think is most practicable based on your comfort. For me, a plain word processing document is the easiest way to create a timeline. I organize the details I’ve pulled from the records in a way that makes sense.

It's simple, but super effective in pinning down where our ancestors were at the time of important life events, such as births, marriages, deaths. residences, immigration, military service, and so much more. This leads to the records created by those events. Knowing an exact location can be particularly useful for many Irish who settled in large cities here in the US. Urban residents tended to be more mobile because they typically didn’t own property and thus were subject to rental terms and rates, which often prompted annual moves, so in these cases, a good working timeline is paramount.

What You Need to Know

Before you make the leap back to Ireland, there are several critical pieces of information that will help you to be successful.

·         Name. This one’s probably easy, but bear in mind that the way you spell a surname may not have been how your ancestors did. In fact, your ancestor may not have spelled at all, so spelling of names can be phonetic (e.g., Huggins, Higgins, Higgan, Huggans), and prefixes like O’, and Mc/Mac may appear and disappear randomly (e.g., Kelly/Kelley, O’Kelly, McLoughlin, McLaughlin, Loughlin, Laughlin, Loghlin, etc.). You may also run across variants with Gaelic-rooted spellings.

·         Age. You might think that this would be a rather simple thing, but if you’ve done any Irish research you know that age discrepancies are very common. So give the ages you find in your ancestors’ records a little wiggle room. They probably did the same, and with the records you have access to, you may find that you have more clues to that date than they did.

·         Birthplace or residence in Ireland. This one requires a little knowledge of Irish land divisions. There are four provinces in Ireland, which are in turn divided into 32 counties. Beyond that you have a number of smaller divisions, including baronies, parishes, poor law unions, and townlands. When asked where they were from, they may have given the name of any of these, so knowing about the various jurisdictions will help you to locate records in Ireland. An excellent resource for this is Townlands.ie, and Brian Mitchell’s A New Genealogical Atlas of Ireland.

·         Family structure, including extended family. The value of knowing the names of siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws cannot be underestimated. These families often traveled and settled with other families from the same areas of Ireland from whence they came. You will be incredibly grateful for your ancestors’ FAN Club (friends, associates, neighbors), as you’ll often find them linked to them in records in various ways. Maintain lists of all of the surnames you find associated with your people, including sponsors, witnesses, neighbors, business partners, and any other associates. A neighbor in Ireland may have signed on as a sponsor at a baptism, or a witness to some other record. Seeing these ties can provide additional evidence that you have identified the correct person in the records.

·         Immigration date. Knowing when your family immigrated can help you determine whether you should be looking in records here or in Ireland at a particular time. Use ages and places of births of children where possible to zero in on this time frame. In the timeline example above, I used birth dates and ages found in census records and the length of time in the US listed on a death record of one family member to help zero in on eight-year span during which the family likely immigrated.

Places to Look

So where do we find these details? Genealogy 101 tells us to start with home sources. Your Irish origins may be hiding in a family bible, correspondence, memorabilia, or even in heirlooms that may have originated in a particular part of Ireland.

Of course, we have the old standby of census records – both federal and state where available. City directories can fill in the gaps between enumerations. Vital records may give a more precise birthplace, although religious records are sometimes more detailed when it comes to this information.

Historical newspapers are increasingly available online, and some newspapers were good about putting in the names of townlands or parishes in obituaries and in other articles. Look for Irish newspapers, which also included links to the homeland, and also seek out other death-related collections, like cemetery records.

Military and related records like the World War I and World War II draft cards, can sometimes include a specific location of origin for Irish immigrants. Pension records also include close personal details and stories that can help you with your quest.

Probate records could include the names of family members who stayed in Ireland, and business and account records like those of the New York Emigrant Savings Bank,1850-1883, which are searchable on Ancestry. In this collection, to prove identity and access an account, “test books” were used that included personal details that presumably only the account holder would know. In the record extract below, Nicholas Walsh, a porter living at 52 Beekman St., gave the bank these details about his family:

Nat of Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny, [Ireland], Arrd. May 29 ’51 per the Scotland L’pool. Par. Living Jno & Alice Tully, 5 Bros. Jno here, Jas, Michl & Thos in [Ireland], no Sister. Is single.

Immigration marked an important point in their lives, and they often didn’t do it alone. As you narrow your search for an arrival record, keep an eye out for those familiar names. You may find groups of people from the same area traveling together, particularly in the famine years, where people were leaving en masse. And that migration in itself is a story that deserves to be preserved. Knowing when they left and the history of the period in which they emigrated can give you the reasons for their departure, the conditions under which they would have sailed. You’ll also find some stories of chain migration, where families came over a few members at a time, with typically one or both parents leading the way, possibly with older children, then later sending for the rest of the family once they were established.

Once you’ve conducted extensive research in the location where your ancestor landed, you’re probably going to find that you already have a good start on your Irish family history, and you’ll be prepared for the next step of your research journey in the records of the Emerald Isle.

*Photograph courtesy Loretto Dennis Szucs, Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, Ireland

Come to DC for Family History Hill Day

The Records Preservation and Access Coalition is hosting its second Family History Hill Day on 9 April 2025. RPAC advocates and others in the genealogy community are invited to attend the event and meet Members of Congress and their staff in Washington, D.C. Our focus in 2025 will be on support for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

If you are interested in attending, please sign up at https://forms.gle/5TyGZAtC2L5jhQSo8.

We will provide 

• additional training on March 24 and 26, 2025
• a schedule for the day and 
• help you set up meetings with your Representatives and Senators.

Materials from the 2024 event can be viewed here to give you a sense of what a day on Capitol Hill looks like and what RPAC’s policy priorities were in 2024.

Celebrating Women’s History Month

by Juliana Szucs

Every year in March the world observes Women’s History Month (WHM), and this year’s theme is Moving Forward Together! Women Educating and Inspiring Generations. Like the stories of our all of our ancestors, the women who came before us can inspire us to greater heights as we ponder their accomplishments. With limited rights historically, their achievements, and in some cases, their very survival, tell stories that are all the more remarkable. 

While they represent half of our biological heritage, women are underrepresented in records. They are often hidden behind the cover of the men in their lives, like their father, husband, or a guardian. In fact, the term feme covert, which refers to a married woman, translates literally to “covered woman.”   

Don’t overlook the single ladies in your tree either. Those spinster aunts or cousins often have an interesting story to tell. Because they likely didn’t have descendants, their records may also reference siblings and extended family as next of kin.  

Yes, researching women presents unique challenges.  Conversely, it can make discovering their stories all the more rewarding. Let’s talk about how we can use the details we have gathered through records and expand on them to uncover women’s stories so they can be preserved and shared. 

Create a Timeline 

Gather all the details about the woman you are researching and organize them chronologically. Where you don’t have dates, estimate them based on what you know from other records and events. (e.g., Estimating a marriage date, based on the birth of a first child, etc.)  

And don’t just look at the dates. Putting her life in the context of how old she was at the time of an event can be incredibly compelling. How old was she when she got married? When she had her first child? When she lost her parents? Did she work outside the house or perhaps work as a seamstress at home? At what age did she begin working?  

Compare and contrast what changed between census years. The loss of other family members or the employment status of breadwinners may have interrupted a young girl’s education and/or required her to go to work, sometimes at a young age, to help supplement the family income. 

All the Single Ladies 

Look particularly for young single women. Censuses, directories, and other records can include clues that the women in your tree were engaged in an occupation beyond “housekeeping.”  

Did they have to work to earn their own way? Were they dependent on family to survive? Or perhaps the family was dependent on them to care for family elders or orphaned children in the family?   

Some women may have found work in the garment industry or as a household servant. Social histories, like Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century, and Sewn in Coal Country: An Oral History of the Ladies’ Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945-1995 provide insights into the industries and occupations where women found work and what life was like for them. 

Education Levels 

Part of this year’s WHM theme is “women educating,” but at certain times, women themselves were denied education. Again, learning about the schooling opportunities that were afforded her can be insightful. Back in October 2024, we discussed Census Records and Your Ancestor’s Education, and that free article can give you insights into the details about education that can be gleaned in various census years. 

Beyond the education they received, women were often tasked with education at home and in schools. With a little digging, you can uncover some of the educational opportunities in the area. The Social Statistics schedules of certain US censuses, where available, can also provide insights into the number and types of schools in the location where your family lived. Local histories and historical newspapers may be able to add insights. Check the social pages in particular for women who figured prominently there. 

Know the Laws  

Knowing the laws as they pertained to women during the lifetime of your research adds to details from the records to provide context. Could she own or inherit property? Vote? Sign a contract? While women’s rights in colonial and early US history were based on English Common Law, statutes varied from state to state. Knowing how these laws evolved can add depth to the raw details.  

Hear From Her Counterparts 

Even if the women in your family aren’t noted in the history books or in personal correspondence, you can gain valuable insights into their lives by reading surviving diaries and correspondence of her contemporaries in the times and places in which they lived, or in the stories of women who traveled the same migration path they did. Browsing historical newspapers from the times and places your family lived can also provide interesting details. 

Share Their Stories 

Once you’ve gathered the details, consider writing a brief biographical sketch about them that can be shared with family. That small piece can later be incorporated into something larger, but for now, that small short story about her may be just what you need to educate and inspire everyone in your family to learn more about her and appreciate her contributions, making her a feme covert no more. 

Additional Resources 

Library of Congress, Female Ancestors: Finding Women in Local History and Genealogy,  

Boston Public Library, Researching Your Female Ancestors. 

Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University, 1983). 

FamilySearch Wiki, Introduction to Tracing Women. 

Lawthers, Ann G. Finding the Elusive Maiden Name, NGS Magazine free archive, Oct/Dec 2023, vol 49, no. 4. 

Wolensky, Robert P. Sewn in Coal Country: An Oral History of the Ladies’ Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945-1995, (Penn State University, 2020).