G-0LM5LRNCVT

Genealogy Holiday Gifts

November 22, 2024

It’s the week before Thanksgiving. That means it’s time to think about holiday gifts, ready or not. If you’re a genealogist, it’s also a good time to think about sharing some of the genealogical wealth you’ve amassed.

 

It’s probably too late to whip up a family history book this year, but now might be a good time to begin planning that for next year. If you will be meeting with relatives over the holidays, plan to talk to your older cousins and aunts and uncles about their memories. Maybe they have photos they’d like to share with you. Possibly they remember the real reason Uncle Joe disappeared from the family way back when. You won’t know unless you ask.

 

For this year, you might consider some smaller genealogical gifts. Most genealogical software makes it easy to print out a family tree. If you’re going to print it yourself, you may want to limit the number of generations you include. If you want a larger tree, there are many places that will print one for you. Local stores such as Staples and Office Max are one option. Online sources abound as well. Most people are interested in their ancestors, and the tree may bring back memories. There’ll probably be an aunt or cousin who will tell you got it all wrong, but that’s okay. Just smile and ask them to help you fix it. You might learn about a twist in the family tree you didn’t know about before.

 

Another simple idea is to make family-themed Christmas ornaments. Stores like Hobby Lobby and Michael’s sell inexpensive ornaments that can be personalized with your own photos. You might choose to put pictures of the grandkids in them, but old pictures of ancestors are another possibility.

 

Recipe books are another genealogy-related idea. If you inherited grandma’s cookbook or her recipe box, you probably know exactly which recipes she used the most. They’re the ones that the cookbook opens to automatically and the ones spattered with blobs of oil or chocolate. Other members of the family may not ever make Grandma’s Norwegian meatballs, but they’ll probably enjoy remembering how Grandma made them. If you take the time to write a brief story about when and why Grandma made a recipe, it will be even more meaningful when you pass the recipe along.

 

If you’re not into do-it-yourself genealogy gifts, there are several websites that can do the work for you. You just need to gather some photos and pick an item you’d like them printed on. This might mean placemats, mugs, puzzles, blankets, Christmas cards and calendars or almost anything else that you can imagine. Snapfish.com and Shutterfly.com are two well-known companies, but you can find lots more online.

 

Older family members who are not very computer literate may even enjoy a scrapbook of old newspaper articles. One year I found that the local weekly newspaper from my hometown was online. I learned that my great grandfather had written a local column for the newspaper for over twenty years in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Great grandpa tended to write about other members of our large extended family in those columns.

 

One year I printed out all the twenty plus years of those articles and put them in sleeves in a looseleaf for my dad. He was thrilled and spent the rest of that winter reading his grandfather’s articles. He told me it was the best Christmas present ever.

 

Genealogy Christmas gifts don’t need to be elaborate to be meaningful. Just spend some time thinking about your family and what they might like. I can promise you they’ll be like my dad who appreciated that simple binder of news articles more than another shirt, which was my usual default gift.

 

Carol Stetser

Researcher

Larimer County Genealogical Society

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Female Half

November 8, 2024

As any genealogist knows, it’s difficult to trace female lines. In fact, it’s so hard that many earlier genealogists didn’t even try. They concentrated on the male lines and omitted the women. If they did mention the women, it was usually in much less detail than the men.

 

There are a lot of reasons for this omission. The biggest one is, of course, that it’s not easy to trace women. In most places women lose their maiden names when they marry. If they’re mentioned at all on a document, it’s with their husband’s name.

 

In earlier times women were not legally even separate people. They were called “femmes couvertes” which means “covered women.” A husband and wife were considered as one legal entity with almost all the power in the entity invested in the man. A woman could not be sued or sue on her own, vote, own property, make a will without her husband’s consent, serve on a jury, or serve in public office. Since most of the records left by our ancestors deal with one of these activities, it’s no surprise that there are few records for women.

 

There are some records that will help you when you are looking for your female ancestors. One of the easiest to find is often a marriage record. This will give a woman’s maiden name and sometimes even her father and mother’s names. Marriage records were kept from an early period in most places since they were a legal contract which had implications for the transfer of property.

 

Obituaries are another good way to trace the women in your tree. Obituaries were common for women in the last quarter of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century. They usually name a woman’s parents and thus include her maiden name. Headstones are another potential source of a maiden name.

 

Deeds and other land records can be helpful in tracking female ancestors. Depending on the time and place, a woman may have dower rights in property. This means that she would have a share of the land were the husband to die. If the husband sold his property, his wife would need to agree to release her dower rights. Although a woman’s birth name is seldom mentioned, her first name is given when she releases her dower rights.

 

Starting in 1850, U.S. censuses named each person in a household. Women’s birth names are not usually given, but first names are. Sometimes other members of a household are named who offer clues as to a woman’s maiden name. For example, if a member of the household is listed as father-in-law to the male head of the household, he may be the wife’s father. His surname may be her birth name.

 

Your female ancestors represent half of your family history. You will miss a lot if you ignore them. It may take some extra research, but learning about the female half of your family can open the door to all sorts of amazing family insights.

 

Carol Stetser

Researcher

Larimer County Genealogical Society

Verifying Family Trees

November 1, 2024

Genealogists want to make their family trees as accurate as possible. We spend hours searching through old documents in repositories and online, looking for the records that give us the answers to our questions.

 

Experts tell us to find more than one source for every birth, death or marriage date that we list. Remember, though, that it’s not enough to just find more than one source. We also need to analyze them and draw a conclusion concerning their validity.

 

For example, I might decide to verify a birth date for my hypothetical great Aunt Mary. According to family stories Mary was born on July 4,1880 in Utah. I want to find documents that prove or disprove that date. Records such as birth certificates, death certificates, baptismal records, obituaries and cemetery records immediately come to mind. If Mary were a man, I might also include military records such as draft registration cards in my search.

 

As I begin my search, I learn that Utah did not keep statewide birth certificates until 1905. Although some cities such as Ogden and Salt Lake City kept birth records as early as 1890, Aunt Mary’s birth is too early to have been recorded in any of them.

 

Church records are also a good place to find birth information. They’re usually very accurate and often were kept long before governmental records. In the United States some denominations kept better records than others, but some people didn’t belong to any church. Mary’s family was not religious, and older relatives stated that no one in the family was active in any local churches.

 

Mary lived her whole life in Utah and did not die until 1956. That means that she had a death certificate. Utah is a state which makes older death certificates available online. However, some states do not consider birth and death certificates public. Mary’s death certificate was easily found at the Utah State Archives website.

 

Obituaries for people who died in the mid twentieth century are very common. Mary died in 1956 in the town where she’d spent her entire life, so there was an informative obit for her. It included her date of birth as well as her date of death.

 

Mary’s family placed a large headstone on her grave which included her dates of birth and death. Records kept in the cemetery office supplied an exact birth date. Not all cemeteries keep these kinds of detailed records, but it’s always worth checking at any cemetery office.

 

Mary’s death certificate, obituary and cemetery records all agree that her date of birth was July 4, 1880. This seems like it is enough information to prove her birth date, but it really isn’t. On Mary’s death certificate, her daughter is listed as providing the information. If you think about it, you’ll realize that you only know your parents’ birth dates because someone told them to you. You weren’t alive at that time and don’t know for sure that the information is accurate.

 

That brings us to the obituary and the cemetery information. Although we don’t know for sure, it’s likely that Mary’s daughter provided the information for them too.

 

 

 

The moral of this example is that sometimes what looks like several sources may only be one. In Mary’s case if I wanted to be sure of her birth date, I would need to keep looking for other sources. Information on her birth supplied by someone other than her daughter would help verify the birth date.

 

Carol Stetser

Researcher

Larimer County Genealogical Society