Family History

I have a lot of unknowns in my family tree. While The Master Genealogist genealogy computer program is amazingly powerful, it requires that you have set a mother or father of a person before you can use the ADD PERSON feature to connect a brother or sister. I often find brothers and sisters with no mention of a parent, and I want that information in my database. So I type in “unknown” for the name.

However, Terry of Terry’s TMG Tips recommends leaving the names blank:

While some like to enter their preferred term in place directly in the name field in order to control how they will appear in the Picklist, I do not recommend that approach. I find that I can deal with the blank names in the Picklist just fine, and find the flexibility of being able to globally control how names appear in reports much more useful. If you enter a term you like directly in name tags and later decide you would like a different term, you may have hundreds or perhaps thousands of tags to change. But if you leave the unknown names blank, you can change how all of them will appear in reports with a simple change to the report settings. You can even have them appear differently in different reports (TMG 5 and later).
Terry of Terry’s TMG Tips – Leave the Unknown Names Blank

He recommends that if you have to use the ADD PERSON function in TMG, do so and type in whatever you want. Then edit the name field and remove the name, leaving it blank afterwards. Simple and easy.

Google News Alerts and Yahoo News Alerts allow you to set up customized new alerts that are emailed to you which may help you research your ancestors and relatives.

Google News Alerts are the easiest to use. Simply type in your keywords such as names or places, and select if you would like the emailed search results to include only news, only web, or a combination of both, or mentions from Google Groups. Then choose how often you would like to receive the information in your email inbox, and provide your email address. That’s it. Nothing to enter, login or mess around with.

Yahoo News Alerts are much more complicated. You can choose from a variety of preset alerts, but from that list, there is little that may help you. The list includes breaking news, autos, health, horoscopes, travel, stock markets, and things not associated directly with genealogy, though you might find something through the feeds/blogs preset alerts.

You can set up a custom alert in the News preset alerts, though it mostly covers news stories rather than the whole web. You must register with Yahoo and sign in to create an alert. From the drop down menu of types of alerts, select News. The next window that appears will allow you to customize the news alerts by Keywords. Put in the keywords to narrow your search results, and add your news alert to your My Alerts. The alert will be sent to the email you supplied when you registered with Yahoo.

I use the customizable keyword news alerts to find relatives by entering in specific names and places, and even dates. Or I will use phrases to open up the potential results. Examples include:

• Hans Anderson
• Blichfeldt
• Anderson Wisconsin
• West family Michigan
• civil war Wisconsin
• Norway immigration
• Norway Norwegian Wisconsin
• obituary Shawano Wisconsin 1924

Keep track of your keyword news alerts with the date you initiated them. You can leave them running indefinitely, but if a search word or phrase isn’t getting you any results after two or three months, consider changing it to something else, more specific or more vague. The same applies if you are getting too many results. It means you need to narrow the focus to something more specific.

If you have a Norwegian in your family tree, I’m sure that you’ve said worse things about hunting up Norwegian ancestors and dealing with all of the name games.

Those Norwegian Names – Tips for the Online Researcher from Norway Heritage will help you understand the alphabet soup of Norwegian names.

Through all times, the old names have been the subject of random changes, and developed along with the phonetics in the spoken language. Many names were shortened, and are hardly recognizable today from their original form. However, many of the old norse names are popular today in some form or another. People also started to use names consisting of only one component, and those are believed to originally have been “nicknames”, as they usually were descriptive of the person. Examples of this are names like KÃ¥re (Kaare), which indicates that the person had curly hair. As the old vikings started to trade and travel more widely in Europe, they also adopted foreign names which were imported in to Norwegian tradition. Up through the centuries there has been great influence from other parts of Europe like Germany, Britain and Denmark.
Those Norwegian Names – Tips for the Online Researcher

We have an Andreas Anderson, father of Hans Anderson, who came over on the British Ship “Alert” in July of 1851. We have information from the Manitowoc County Declarations of Intent (Naturalization), Wisconsin, that states that this is the ship he arrived on and the date. But we can’t find him on the passenger list. Did he have a different first name and his last name, Anderson, got slightly rearranged and made his new first name? Or did he have a totally different name upon arrival in New York. Or did his name change during his lifetime, too?

The article gives examples of the problems and confusion with immigration and names.

From Jeen Spencer on the NORWAY-List I got some very illustrating examples on how names would change, and how differently they can appear in different sources:

On the passenger list for the Harmonie, 1849, you will find #34 “Osmund Halvorsen” with his wife “Ingeborg Lisabet Torbjørbsdotter” and five children. He was listed as “Ã…smund Hallvardsson” at Rygg, Etne, in the Hordaland index. He followed his parents who had emigrated in 1847 on the Kong Sverre, and apparently most of the family began using variations of the name, Osman, Osmandson, Osmanson as surnames. In the 1801 census, Osmund Halvorsens father was listed as “Halvar Usmundsen”, and grandfather as “Usmund Halvarsen”. Osmund Halvorsen eventually used the name Osmon Osmonson, with his son Osmund Osmundsen finally using the name Austin Osman.

Another article worth exploring to help you with your Norweigan family names is Norwegian naming practices by John Føllesdal. He clarifies and muddies the waters of researching Norweigan family names:

This is not to say that surnames (as we know them) were not used in Norway prior to 1900. There were many Norwegian families who used surnames prior to the turn of the century. Most of these families were members of the educated upper class (the clergy, the military, and high ranking civil servants). In addition, people who lived in cities, such as Bergen or Trondheim, used hereditary surnames. These surnames were often very old, and were, in many instances, of foreign origin, be it British, Dutch, or German. (From the 1400’s onward, Norway experienced an influx of immigration from abroad, and these individuals had surnames in the modern meaning of the word). In Nordfjord, where my paternal ancestors lived, we find Frants Blichfeldt (1766 – 1839), a priest in Eid parish from 1809 to 1821. He was the son of tax assessor Henrik Frantson Blichfeldt and his wife Karen Katrine Fleischer. In nearby Innvik parish, Johan Sigfried Cammermeyer (1757 – 1844) served as a priest from 1806 to 1843. His parents were Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer, a priest in Bergen, and his wife Anne Kristine Gude. Blichfeldt and Cammermeyer were surnames in the modern sense of the word in that these names were passed down from generation to generation.

In a nutshell, we can say that prior to about 1900, rural Norwegians did not have surnames, unless they were members of the educated upper class (priests, high ranking civil servants, etc). City dwellers, including members of the educated upper class, did have surnames. The rural Norwegian farmers had a first name, and sometimes a middle name, which they were baptized with. They added a patronym and a farm name to that first name in their everyday interactions with other people.

It’s also cool that he highlights Frants Blichfeldt, who we are currently examining as a potential ancestor through our Anderson family line tracking Helen Blickfeldt in Wisconsin.

Both this and the article, Those Norwegian Names – Tips for the Online Researcher, have helped us with our Norwegian family members research, with good tips and advice on where to look, how to look and how to play Norwegian name detective.

One of the bonuses in the former article is the instructions on how to create the special characters in the Norwegian alphabet so you can type the names with the appropriate characters in your computer records or web page. The character codes or character entities use a combination of holding down the ALT key on your keyboard and typing the following numbers on the keypad, not the numbers along the top row. When you release your hands from the keyboard, the letter will be created.

• Æ – press Alt while typing 0198
• æ – press “alt” while typing 0230
• Ø – press “alt” while typing 0216
• ø – press “alt” while typing 0248
• Ã… – press “alt” while typing 0197
• Ã¥ – press “alt” while typing 0229

I’ve been on the road since March 2006 tracking down family roots and living relatives. I’ve driven from Alabama to Ohio, to Michigan, and across to Washington State. Then south to Oregon and back to Seattle. Along the way I’ve collected photographs and paperwork to scan, stories, records, and a lot of tall tales to tell.

Along the way I’ve also collected paper piles. I’d like to call them “paper trails” but they look more like piles than trails. I left Ohio with digital copies of paperwork and photographs, which definitely helped to keep my load light. But in Michigan, I gathered up about 3 inches (7.6 cm) of stacked papers along with digital records. In Spokane, I copied almost 500 pieces of paper at the local copy shop to drag along. That’s about a ream of paper, not counting paper clips and staples.

In Seattle, the paper collecting began in earnest. As did the collection of digital images and files. I have spent HOURS scanning old crumbling photo albums from many generous family members, old records, letters, notes, books, and everything I can find. I am still scanning and I don’t have a total yet, but I’m guessing that I have at least 50 gigs of material scanned. Probably a lot more. Thank goodness I brought along my 400 gig portable hard drive unit.

Then my mother got into this with a vengeance. When she gets “into” something, she gets very seriously into it.

The paper started arriving within a few days of my arrival. I made a makeshift desk in her spare bedroom to sort through what I’d already collected and now she is adding more to the pile.

She has an amazing ability to think so far outside of the box, there is no box. Which is awesome for genealogy research. She sits in front of her computer and comes up with word combinations and ideas on researching people, places, and events, and plugs them into the search engines. Unbelievably, she finds priceless connections, little bits and pieces of data that stun me.

Not everything matches up. She follows a tangent to its extreme, but sometimes there are sudden leaps of intuition and connects are made that we would have never thought possible if we thought in conventional manners.

We have a Seneca and Sealey Primley in our family tree and you would think that these would be fairly distinctive names. They are not. We’ve found a bunch of Seneca Primley and Sealey (Seeley) Primley names all over the place, in different time periods and different situations, but typically close in proximity to each other. She finds a hospital record of a Seneca Primley as witness to the court appointed submission of Sealey Primley to a mental ward in an Indiana Hospital. She tracks down census information, birth and death records, and all kinds of records, but we can’t seem to connect the dots. Still, how many Primleys can there be with the same two names? We are starting to think that these might be family names and we are looking at generations of Primleys. I just have to get through the piles and piles of research paper she keeps bringing me to figure out who is who and if anyone is the same who.

We were delighted to find out that most of the family history research on Nicholas Knapp has been done, and we are in the direct bloodline. Along with thousands of other descendent’s of Nicholas Knapp. In researching that line, my mother sent off emails to people researching the Knapp line requesting more information and giving them clues to link us to them. When she gets a response, she prints it out and brings it to me, asking me to follow through on the response.

Now I have more paper and more emails to keep track of. I respond and they generously send me batches of files, records, pictures, and notes that I’m thrilled to get and anxious to investigate, giving each its due, but the stacks of emails are climbing as high as the paper, and I can barely see what color the walls are.

One night she came down late with a long trailing ribbon of papers. I thought it was an art project. I wish it was.

She had printed out page after page from websites and files, cut them down and stapled them in some kind of order to larger pieces of paper, tracing a possible family line going back from Nicholas Knapp to England. Ignoring the fact that Nicholas Knapp has been thoroughly investigated by hundreds of expert genealogists for the past one or two hundred years and no evidence has ever been found on who his parents where, only assumptions that he came from Suffolk, England, my mother decided that she could track him down from her own office and computer.

She’d listened to me very carefully when I said that all this research was fabulous, but I had to be able to track down what she was finding later. I needed to verify things, see them for myself, and possibly follow a trail she missed. So when she cut out the pieces of paper on the people she was tracking, she also cut off the header or footer of each page listing the URL and stapled it to the edges, creating wings on the pages.

The ribbons of papers all neatly but chaotically stapled together flittered in the absent breeze with a life of their own. At midnight, this is just the kind of haunting artistic genealogical display you want to see.

I try to make sense of all the hard work she’s done, but I’m up against my own reluctance to push aside the research that has already been done. I’m not in Connecticut. I’m not at the courthouse, city hall or wherever all these records are stored so I can see them in person. I just found out we were related to Nicholas Knapp a month ago. How could I possibly make the assumption that I could track down the missing links from my home computer better than the experts can?

But nothing stops my mother.

I’m not saying she is doing anything bad. In fact, I’m really proud of her. I would never have made all the connections she has uncovered. She’s not hesitated emailing and calling people related or even possibly related to us and asking the hard questions about the family, digging through the material and making new connections all the time.

I hesitate, wanting to go through the stacks and stacks of paper that I’ve accumulated, carefully examining, cleaning up and labeling every image I’ve scanned, and process the information I already have. She pushes through all of that crap to plunge right out into the middle of things to get the information now, and deal with the rest of it later.

There is a great lesson to be learned in such courage.

I know she feels like time is running out for her. I’m sure she has another 20 years of running up and down stairs and putting all of us to shame with her vigor and energy. But she thinks of those 20 years as moving towards the end, where us younger folks are thinking of those 20 years as a long time. She’s been around enough to know that 20 years can be over in a heart beat. Literally.

So she needs no excuses to slow down or make this process sensible or slow. And me? I just have to figure out what I’m going to with all these boxes of paper that still need some methodical processing. I guess that’s what I’ll be doing for the next 20 years and the 20 after that.

Thank goodness for recycling.