Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Your Stories are Powerful - Let's Start Here!


The Magical Science of Storytelling | David JP Phillips | TEDxStockholm

Stories are so powerful. As we share them, they can motivate, inspire, teach, bond and strengthen. They also deepen identity and purpose, and build resiliency in ourselves and in our family members.

Studies have shown that one of the greatest indicators in childhood resiliency and the NUMBER ONE predictor of a child's emotional well-being was in how well they knew their family's story -- not just their parents' story, but the generational family stories that show how families and individuals grow between lows and highs and highs and lows in life. What power these stories have for ourselves and our children!

Personally, I think this is where we start with family history. It's easy to get bogged down in names and dates and research. As a mom with young kids spending that kind of time researching in books is less valuable than being present with our children and sharing what we know from our own life experiences and those of our families. We start with ourselves and we begin to write down our stories. These stories have come from pivitol moments in our lives and how we reacted to them, what we learned from them, how we overcame them, how we changed, how we loved, and how we became a better person. From there, we move on to our parents and grandparents. What were their stories? If our parents and grandparents are still alive, we get them talking about their experiences and our experiences with them and we write them down.

If you want a little inspiration, The TedX talk I've shared above is delightful and fun to listen to. David Phillips makes the point that stories are powerful because of the way our brain's chemistry reacts to various types of stories. He shares three important things that I relate to family history:

1) Every person is a born storyteller. Yes, even you!
2) Write your stories down. We have 3-4 more stories from our own life than we think we have!
3) Index those stories -- put them into categories and use them in conversations with your loved ones.

Your stories are valuable and powerful and your kids will remember them -- the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful. They all have purpose and can teach an important narrative as your family navigates life.

Sunday, August 25, 2024

Scandals

There's nothing better than a good scandal to make genealogy a bit interesting. Newspapers.com helped me find some good ones as I was doing some broad surname searching. Not quite sure how this one fits in my family tree, but the family gossip must have been intense! In a nutshell: Carrie Wisler Swain, wife of Samuel Swain, was an actress in the 1870s. She married Mr. Swain in San Francisco in 1875 but was deserted by 1881. He had convinced Miss Swain, with the help of his doctor, that he needed to travel to the Bermudas to recover from an illness and would need half of her weekly salary -- $40 a week -- to live there. After traveling to New York, she learned that there had been several sightings of Mr. Swain in the city and connecting the fact that she would send her money to New York; she soon discovered that he had been in New York all along, living as man and wife with another woman on her salary!
While that one is a little more distantly related -- if at all -- to me, this one is just a few generations back. My third great uncle. It was never discussed in my family until I started doing research, and then my grandma in a quiet whisper shared a little about this saga with her great uncle:
This is one of many newspapers covering the event. And while I have many of the court documents around the trial, the newspapers articles make it all the more interesting.

Monday, February 16, 2015

Geographical Perspective

I was doing a quick internet image search today for some old maps of the United States and came across an awesome post by a cartographer, David Rumsey. He has a whole collection of old maps that are amazing to look at. What interested me the most, however, was this post about 19th Century Maps by Children. Back in the early 19th century, in order for children to learn geography they were actually taught to draw maps. The results are amazing.

Old map of Tennessee drawn by a Harriett Baker in 1819.

In that post he also shares a notebook by Francis A. Henshaw in 1823 entitled Book of Penmanship Executed at the Middlebury Female Academy April 29, 1823. Henshaw has hand drawn maps of the states in the Union at the time and writes beautifully drawn descriptions of them as well. Check out this one about Tennessee. It adds insight to the history of the state and country and more specifically my family as I see what they were learning and how they were learning about their geography at the time.  By 1820 my family had already lived in Tennessee for 10 years.

To check out more of these maps and descriptions you can find them here with an introduction about the history of the finding of America:

Slideshow of Francis A. Henshaw's Book of Penmanship

and to see them individually (and even export or buy prints from David Rumsey) you can click here:

Maps of the United States as drawn by Baker & Henshaw

I'm looking forward to using this website as I continue to study my family in the colonial days of the United States and refer often to these maps to help add a broader geographical perspective to my studies. Thank you to David Rumsey for making these collections available.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Patience

Years ago one of my most frustrating brick walls was my great-great grandmother, Margaret Deatherage Swain. It seemed impossible that someone who died so "recently" could be so difficult to discover. Census records didn't match with ages, and without consistency to Deatherage family residences, it was difficult for my inexperienced self to find her family. I stumbled upon a lead on a website by Mr. Ric Tobin, who has done extensive research on the Deatherage family, even publishing a book entitled "The Deatherage Family:  The First Four Generations in America." Through correspondence we figured out where she fit in the Deatherage chain (For more of the details here is the post describing how we came to this conclusion How I linked Margaret Deatherage to her Parents).

Although we had a lot of circumstantial evidence I wouldn't say any of it was hard fact, and frankly, I was just so happy to have her linked to a family with the information I did have that I didn't try any harder to find the concrete evidence to support the link. It's been nearly 10 years since that "breakthrough". Today I was just cleaning up my Deatherage files and decided to run a search for the father I linked her to, J.M. Deatherage, just to see if any "new" information could be found on him.




I found the typical census records that I already had (from the help of Mr. Tobin), but reviewed them again anyway. The key find wasn't Mr. Detherage's marriage record, but a marriage record of a J.M. Deatherage, his son, and the brother of Margaret. This is the brother who also went to Parker, TX (and died in Parker, TX) like my great-great grandfather, Milus Swain. When I looked at this marriage certificate, I found the evidence I needed! Surprisingly, on this marriage record of J M Deatherage to N E Dancer from McNairy, TN my great-great grandfather, Milus Swain, is written as the witness to this marriage.

 Although I felt confident in the relationship I had put together previously, this documents puts my mind at ease and provides solid support that Margaret Deatherage, the sister of J.M. Deatherage, and the child of J.M. Deatherage Sr is the Margaret Deatherage who married Milus Swain, my great-great grandfather.

Patience is one of the most frustrating aspects of family history work. When I get to brick walls and feel I've exhausted research avenues, I have to move on to a different family to keep myself motivated. Every once in a while I'll come back to my brick wall and do a quick search to see if I can find any new information. Inevitably, with all the new online resources available, something new will show up that adds more clues to help me piece the puzzle together.

Who needs a Facebook Crime Scene Game? I've got plenty of mystery in my family history as I look for real clues about real people. Unfortunately, patience is one of the keys to figuring it all out. I have been surprised over and over again how records find their way to me, a lot later than I sometimes hope, but they come at just the right time to motivate me and help me understand how my family fits in history.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

It's a Small World After All

The world is growing smaller. Finding connections with people is easier than ever, and today that was confirmed in the genealogy world again. My dad has a scrapbook of my great-grandmother's. I hadn't seen it until this weekend, but when I found it I spent hours reading it's pages and then photographing the contents.

My great-grandmother had cut out of the newspapers any article that was of interest to her - be it a relative who was getting married, or an acquaintance that was in the war, or just an article that showed the life and times of Orange County.

I took pictures of everything and hoped that I would be able to find the people on familysearch.org that I was not related to and post those articles there so others could get a hold of them. Several of the articles that were cut out were about a William O. Hart, a publisher for an Orange County newspaper, who died in a plane crash. Tragically, his son was killed the very next day on the way to the funeral.

I searched for this William Hart on familysearch.org and noticed that on his page someone had recently updated the information. There was an email address too so I emailed him directly the records I had in case he was interested. It turns out William Hart was his grandfather, and through a little more correspondence, we discovered his dad and my grandmother were in the same year of school at Olive Elementary in Orange County, CA . That got me excited, because I had these two pictures:
Olive Elementary School 3-4th grade classes, 1930.
My grandmother, Bernice, is sitting to the right of the teacher.
She was in the 3rd grade in this picture.
Olive Elementary School 3-4th grade classes, 1931
My grandmother, Bernice, is standing in the middle row, 3rd from the right.
She is in the fourth grade.

Sure enough his dad was in both of them. But the coolest part . . .  he sent me this one in return!!!! His dad is to the right of the teacher on the back row, and my grandma is the first little girl on the right bottom row. Now I have the 3rd, 4th and 6th grade pictures of my grandma!
In 1933 Bernice would be in the 6th grade. She is the first girl on the right bottom row.

I called my grandma, of course, and she remembers this Ross McClintock well. They had gone to school with each other from the 1st grade up until college and he even would drive her home from college on occasion. She described him as really good looking and all the girl's liked him, but very nice and a good friend to her.

 I value genealogical records and if someone had information about my family that they didn't know what to do with I'd hope they would try to find someone who might need it or want it. We can do that now so much easier through familysearch.org and ancestry.com or through blogging, facebook, twitter, etc. Sharing has become my favorite part of family history work, and it makes me realize that it really is "a small world after all".




Monday, May 26, 2014

Happy Memorial Day

Happy Memorial Day! 
Thinking today of a great (x3) uncle who died in World War II. Floyd Edmond Swain was the son of Milus. He enlisted in 1941 while living in Los Angeles. He was single with no dependents and was working as a chauffeur at the time.  He was part of the 450th Bomber Squadron 322nd Bomber Group, but on the foggy night of July 4, 1944 his plane flew into Cronk ny Arrey Laa (no that's not a typo), a hill on the southwest side of the Isle of Man and crashed. The pilot and one passenger survived. Floyd and four of his comrades were killed. He is buried in the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial in England.  Thank you for your service for our country.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Look Again


Family History work is detective work. Each source we find has clues about a person’s life that we can piece together to show a broader picture.  What’s so interesting, is that as you learn more information with each source, documents that you’ve already found can tell you something new from the new information you just learned. Let me try to illustrate this better as it’s happened to me twice in the last few months.



I have looked at this census record for as long as I have been working on my Swain family (almost 12 years) –
It’s the 1880 census of McNairy, TN.  My 3rd great grandmother Mary M.C.Swain  is living next door to her son M.F.L. Swain and wife, Margaret. (M.A. Swain). These are my 2nd great grandparents. Recently, however, I discovered that Mary M.C. Swain’s daughter, Nancy, married a J.T. Morris. When I went to discover them on the census, guess what! They were on this same census, also living next door to Mary M.C. Swain! All that time I’ve looked at that census and never realized that two of her children were living next door to her.




Tonight, I had a similar experience. I was teaching a family history class and brought examples of the types of documents that give you clues about your ancestor. I brought this marriage record of Milus Swain and Margaret Detheridge which I have looked at a million times but not in the last year. Today, however, I noticed that the witness to their marriage was J.T. Morris, which now I know as the husband of Milus’ sister. 


It's so important to keep looking over the documents you have already found as you get new information. You never know what will catch your eye.