Friday, August 5, 2022

Preaching to the Choir: Researching 102 - Principles and Anecdotes.01

 How to start -- how to proceed -- 

  • Move from the known to the unknown 

Consider a chain.  Dungeons spring to mind, but with Christmas approaching, (at least when this was written!), I prefer to go with paper chains, to festoon a tree or a room. In all chains, each link is the base for the next link, which in turn becomes the base for the following link, ... "rinse and repeat."  

         I met my grandparents when my mother took me to a house and told me that this man was her father and this woman was her mother.  The next week my grandfather took me into the city to meet his mother, my great-grandmother.  This chain is as solid as the memories and lives of the people involved.  My great-grandmother knew her parents, by name, and could tell me that. 

  • Test every hypothesis
  • Look carefully at all information available
... and/but in genealogy, paper proves it. Should you get information from a conversation with an aged relative, or someone who knows about your family, see if you can run a tape during the conversation. If a tape is not welcome, or is not possible given the setting, grab paper as soon as you can and write down ALL the particulars of the conversation - and be sure to date the paper. I have such paper on conversations with my grandmother, and my dad.  

 

  • The further back, the fewer records

Fewer people, fewer records.  More years passed, more chances for destruction (fires, floods, a few little wars), fewer records.  "That" information was not important to keep, fewer records.  Letters and journals are always wonderful.  Samplers and shaving mugs are wonderful remembrances, but, when seeking to connect people and lineages, 'follow the money' is always useful. 


 Follow the Money

Where is the money?   Historically (and in New York & Tokyo) the money is in the land, not in the skill.  Visit Plymouth Plantation, and its residents will tell you, almost to a man, that they are farmers, and "oh, I shoe horses when needed" or "I build furniture when it's needed."  

        And with the money in the land, how does land change hands?  Inheritance, marriage, "sale" to family, and, way down the list, sale to non-family.

A number of years ago, I was downstate Illinois to research both land and probate records.  Working in the courthouse in an age when everyone was much more relaxed about access to records, I was shown the stairs to the basement, and told that probate was to the right and land to the left.... and please turn the light out when I came up.  The difference between the probate side and the land side was amazing, and made perfect sense when thought about for more than one second.  All probate records are dead records; everything in those records has been settled, and if a question arose, looking for the answer could take time, and time was not an issue.  On the other hand, or rather, the other half of the basement, land records were very much of the moment. Anyone in the county might need a record from yesterday or 15 years ago to 'do something' with the piece of land bought or sold, ... whenever.  Probate is the archive.  Land is the tickler file. 

        As a consequence, the probate side was, to put it mildly, quite untidy.  On the land side, you could almost eat off the floor, and all the books were all in order.


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other pursuits: I'm tending my files, and emptying, so just a few days gone by. looking ahead I've registered for SLIG for advanced German research in January 2023. My recent ancestors (past 150 years or so) group in Chicago and downstate Illinois. All but a few tiny branches of those trees track back to Germany, some faster than others, and this course/learning seemed a good next step after the GRIP courses on Germany. I will put in a plug for any/all institute courses. Think of it like immersion learning of a language. Come and learn. Come prepared and learn more. 

best till next time.