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Happy Birthday, Dad

September 6, 2024

Today is the 101st anniversary of my dad’s birth. He was born September 6,1923 in South Weber, Utah on his family’s farm.

 

Life was very different when Dad was born. When it was time, the doctor showed up at my grandparents’ house for the delivery. There was no rush to the hospital as is the norm today. There was one modern element to Dad’s birth, though. The doctor who delivered him was a woman. Dr. Alice Ridges was a general practitioner in Ogden. At the time, many people did not want a woman doctor, but my grandmother apparently was not one of them.

 

Early September was the harvest season in Utah. The local grain harvesting crew was scheduled to visit the Fernelius Farm on that sunny, September day. In 1923 the crew was still using horses to pull the combines, but according to family lore, 1923 was the last time that horses were used in South Weber. By the next year tractors had replaced them.

 

Dad’s birth certificate states he was born at 10:55 am. I’m sure that my grandfather was out in the fields helping with the harvest, since all the farmers helped on the combine crews. My grandfather was not the sort to shirk his work, and childbirth was for women. Men stayed away and left them to it.

 

Around noon he would have come inside for dinner. Dinner was served to the entire harvesting crew by the farmer’s wife. I don’t know who filled in for my grandmother that day, but I’m sure Grandpa’s new little son would have been the talk of the table.

 

My grandparents lived in what was a typical house for that era. It was an arts and crafts style bungalow with a living room, dining room, kitchen and bedroom. The kitchen had a coal/wood burning range, but it did boast a sink with running water. Many of the neighbors still had wells or springs that were not piped into the house.

 

The house also had electricity, but my grandparents only used it for lighting. An electric refrigerator and stove were too expensive. They make do with a coal range and an icebox. My dad would be a teenager before he and his sisters pooled their money to buy their folks their first electric refrigerator. The coal range stayed as long as my grandparents lived – well into the 1960s.

 

When it was built, the house didn’t include indoor plumbing, but my grandfather had a bathroom installed when he married my grandmother in 1918. She had lived in cities all her life and expected those sorts of amenities, even though indoor plumbing wasn’t considered a necessity in many rural households at the time.

 

Heating for the house was provided by the kitchen range and a parlor stove in the dining room. Those two rooms were cozy, but the other rooms could get icy. As late as my childhood, the sinks and the bathtub faucet were left trickling all night in the winter. Otherwise, the pipes would freeze.

By the time my dad was born, his father had a car, but Grandpa preferred horses to automobiles. As soon as the weather grew cold in the fall, he took the tires off the car and put it on blocks for the winter. He was relieved to hitch up the sled to take his family to town for groceries or to church on Sundays.

 

My grandfather loved small children and especially babies. Family stories say that the day my mother brought me, his first grandchild, home from the hospital, my grandfather hurried to the house to see me. He was in too much of a hurry to clean the barnyard muck from his clothes, and my mother was appalled when he asked to hold me. I’m sure he was even more excited when his son was born. I can imagine him sitting in the old oak rocker (my sister still uses it) holding Dad proudly.

 

Thanks to family stories and genealogical research, I know a lot about that September morning so long ago when Dad’s life began.

 

Carol Stetser

Researcher

Larimer County Genealogical Society

 

 

 

Census Tidbits

August 30, 2024

The U.S. censuses are often the first records that a new genealogist finds. Twenty or thirty years later, a seasoned genealogist is still referring to these important documents. Taken every ten years since 1790, the censuses are a snapshot placing our ancestors in a time and place and within a specific household.

 

Each of the censuses asked similar questions, but each also had several unique questions that can be helpful to genealogists. The censuses from the twentieth century are especially interesting because they included questions concerning naturalization, age, and family size that can lead a researcher to more detailed records.

 

Citizenship

 

Many Americans in the early twentieth century were recent immigrants, and the censuses can help a researcher determine if his ancestor was a citizen or not. The censuses from 1900 through 1950 indicate the citizenship of a foreign-born person. The person’s status is indicated by NA for naturalized, PA for first papers filed, and AL for alien.

 

Earlier twentieth century censuses also indicated the year of arrival of a foreign-born person. 1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930 include this information. The 1920 census also indicates the year that a person was naturalized, if applicable.

 

Age

 

Starting in 1850, every person in a household is listed by name. The census taker was also instructed to list the person’s age as of the official date of the census. Most census takers were unable to complete their work on the official date and often visited far flung farms and ranches weeks or months after the official census day.

 

Because of the delay in completing the census, many of the ages of the people listed on them are incorrect. Some people also fudged when telling the census taker their age, making themselves either older or younger. Despite this, the census is still one of the best and only ways to find at least a rough estimate for someone’s age – especially in the period before widespread civil registration.

 

Number of Children

 

In earlier times, child mortality was frequent. Birth and death certificates were not kept in some places until well into the twentieth century. This can make it difficult to determine how many children a family had. The 1900 and 1910 censuses can help with this problem.

 

Both censuses asked a woman how many children she had given birth to. It also asked how many children were still living as of the census date. Although this doesn’t help in figuring out how many children a man may have fathered, it does help determine whether a researcher has accounted for all the children of a woman.

 

These census tidbits appear on columns to the left of the names of individuals on the censuses and are sometimes overlooked by researchers. Because they contain so much potentially helpful information, it’s well worth going back to censuses that you may have already read to check that you haven’t skipped any information. You may find the key that unlocks a gate through a brick wall.

 

Happy researching.

 

Carol Stetser

Researcher

Larimer County Genealogical Society

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finding Non-Digitized Newspaper Articles

August 23, 2024

Newspapers are a great genealogical resource. They can help add context to people’s lives. They can also stand in for other more difficult-to-obtain records such as death or birth certificates. Obituaries are often the only written record of a person’s life. Newspapers are especially useful when a genealogist is trying to follow families forward.

 

Thanks to widespread digitization, newspapers are widely available online. Free sources such as the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America and paid sites such as Newspapers.com make a wide variety of newspapers accessible for most genealogists.

 

Most digitizing projects tend to focus primarily on newspapers from the nineteenth century and the first twenty or so years of the twentieth century. Due to copyright laws and privacy restrictions, fewer newspapers have been digitized and made available for the later part of the twentieth century.

 

Many newspapers published a digital version of their print papers beginning around 2000. These digital copies can be found at the website of the newspaper in their archives. Some will allow free access, but others will require a subscription.

 

This means that newspapers from the mid twentieth century until the beginning of the twenty-first century are generally not digitized. Many are available on microfilm in local libraries and sometimes in state archives. These newspapers, unlike the digitized ones, are not usually indexed which makes finding articles difficult.

 

Obituaries are the most easily found records in the unindexed newspapers if a death date is known. Obituaries were commonly published in newspapers during this period for most people. A manual search of a few days can usually locate an obit.

 

Sometimes, a visit to an out-of-area local library is not possible. In that case, it’s worth calling the library. Some have indexed obituaries from the local newspapers and can easily make copies. Other repositories will do a limited search if a date is known.

 

Searching for a name throughout the run of a newspaper as can be done with digitized papers is not easy. It can be done, but it is time consuming. Many microfilmed newspapers can be borrowed through interlibrary loans from various repositories. Reading through newspapers on microfilm is not for the faint of heart or those who suffer from motion sickness. It is a possibility that you may want to consider if you know that someone lived in a certain area, and you believe there may be articles about him/her in a local newspaper.

 

If you are searching for an obituary or other specific article and you know the date, it is usually possible to locate a copy of the article. It may take some time and effort, especially if you can’t visit the repository who holds the record, but it is worth being persistent.

 

Newspaper articles can help fill in many holes in a family tree. Finding that a newspaper from the area and era you need is digitized is exciting and can lead to all sorts of discoveries about your family. Finding that a newspaper exists for the time and place you need but is not digitized can be frustrating. It’s worth trying to obtain at least obituaries and other dated articles from those newspapers since they can provide so much family information that is unavailable elsewhere.

 

Carol Stetser

Researcher

Larimer County Genealogical Society