Tag: Family Tree

Building a good Public Ancestry.com family tree

How to create a good, basic, high quality Ancestry tree

Building a good Public Ancestry.com family tree <h4>How to create a good, basic, high quality Ancestry tree</h3>

The lack of quality of Public Ancestry.com family tree s is legendary, to the point many family historians consider them nearly useless. They tend to be so poorly sourced that we’ll bet you’ve checked out and found an ancestor’s name and a detailed birth and death date, but the only source is an Ancestry Member Tree, and when you click that tree, it’s another tree-only, and so on. The worst part of these poorly sourced trees is they often become considered “legitimate” sources because they are repeated so often!

So, we decided we’d be a part of the solution and walk through how we wish all Member Trees were sourced. We’re going to first talk about how sources, facts and citations all work together, how we choose to link them and then what it looks like on Ancestry.com.

Before we get started, please understand this one approach, and it’s our approach. We would never be calling out how someone else is approaching tree sourcing as “wrong”, and this approach isn’t necessarily “right”. It’s right for our research, and if every Member Tree we came across was sourced like this we’d be very happy.

Defining the elements of a good citation, fact, source and proof

Let’s start by defining what’s meant when we’re talking about facts, sources, citations, and the notion of proof.

Citations

Understanding citations, and beginning to enforce the standards you settle on, is one of the turning points as family historians evolve into serious hobbyists. We are HUGE fans of Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained (Link) but at it’s most simple a citation must be a breadcrumb that researchers after you can follow to confirm your work. A well written citation should allow anyone to copy the path to review information themselves.

Image of window message detailing a citation from Ancestry.com

Sources

Sources are straight-forward as well, for the purposes of this discussion. They are the pieces of information that indicate a fact about one your ancestors. Family bibles, Ancestry.com indexes, headstones, interviews with family members, etc. are all examples of sources that yield clues about your relatives.

Image of a Marriage fact attached to a Source in Ancestry.com

Facts

Facts and proof are a little trickier. They tend to both confuse, and be ignored, those newer to genealogy. At their most basic, facts are events that have been proven.

Facts at first seem obvious. If my birthdate is May 4th, that seems like a fact. But facts and proof are intertwined. How do you know my birth date is May 4th? Honestly, other than me telling you it’s my birthday, you don’t.

Even in this simple example, that it’s not your duty as the reader to prove my birthday, it’s my duty to prove that date because I’ve made statement that it’s a correct birthday. For me to do that I can attest I’ve celebrated that day my whole life, my Mom told me it was the day, and there are some family members who were there when I was brought home from the hospital. Additionally I have many Aunts and Uncles who remember my mother being pregnant during the time that corresponds with my birth, and I have photographs of her pregnant that were date stamped during that same time, as well as letters and photos (also stamped) after my birth. I also of course have my birth certificate, which was completed and certified near the time of my birth by the attending physician.

But facts get much fuzzier as we look backwards. For our African American ancestors who died in the late 1800’s, we might have only 2 Census ages to show when they were born. Going back further, we might be relying on various Family History collections that are quoting dates that are 8 levels removed from the original source documents, and those documents are long since lost to history. Of course no one is around to provide a statement that they were present at the time of birth, and rarely do we have historical accounts of our ancestors.

Proof

This leads us to consider how we “prove” “facts” for an ancestor who’s long since gone. In many ways there will never be definitive proof for many of the events in our ancestor’s lives. We’ll hear in court dramas that crimes need to be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt”, but for our hobby the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS Defined) was designed to help guide us on this question. In the strictest definition of proof, the GPS describes 5 elements needed to argue that a fact is a fact. But we aren’t professional genealogists and the need to formally prove every fact isn’t required, however understanding the GPS will still helps guide us on how close we are to a proven fact, and when we have more work to do. For example, if we’ve just taken a few US Census entries and settled on an ancestor’s birthdate as “proven”, it’s likely we haven’t done a “reasonably exhaustive search”, and so we haven’t hit the first element of the formally proving a fact. That might be just fine for some facts, but just the beginning for others, and as hobbyists doing an Ancestry Member Tree that we aren’t required to be hyper-vigilant proving everything. However keeping the Genealogical Proof Standard in-mind should help you understand where on that spectrum you are.

What to do with Facts?

With the definitions out of the way, and with our basic knowledge of how to create Ancestry trees and ancestors in those trees, let’s get started by highlighting the best practices for sourcing our facts.

Each fact should have at least one source attached

The first key to a solid Ancestry tree is attaching a source for every fact attached to each ancestor. If there’s a fact asserted about an ancestor, but there’s no citation pointing to a source that lead us to attach the fact, no one can prove if it’s accurate or not and we increase the risk of passing bad information along. If we all followed this one rule then all Member Trees would have sourced and cited events and we’d all be able to get much further in our research.

Attach all sources to the preferred fact, or list a fact for each source?

How we decide to attach sources to facts plays a big role in our tree building, and there are two schools of thought on how to attach facts to sources online. The most common method is to attach all facts of the same type (say Birth) to the primary fact, even though Sources may not match that fact exactly. For example, our 3xGGF Wesley has facts that say his Birth was: 16 Dec 1837, Abt. 1836, Abt. 1837, Dec 1837, and Abt. 1838. Most people would be to set his primary date of birth as 16 Dec 1837, and attach all sources to that primary.

The other approach, and the one we use, is to attach each fact to each source as they are sourced. In this example we have chosen 16 Dec 1837 as Wesley’s Preferred birth date and we’ve attached the two sources that indicate that date: his obituary and his family bible. The 1850 US Census has Wesley’s birthday listed as “Abt. 1836”, and so we have an Alternate Fact for his Birth of “Abt. 1836”, with the 1850 Census attached as a source. The same for the 1860 Census and “Abt. 1837”. Repeating the process for each source until we have all known Birth dates (5 in Wesley’s case) listed, and each has the proper source attached.

Image of the records attached to the Death of Ephraim Tredawell

A lot of people avoid this approach because your ancestors will often end up with many events like dates of birth, where there can be only one, and because all the records can clutter an ancestor’s record. Alternatively, if all the records are tied to a single, preferred fact it becomes difficult researching which sources attached to a fact actually assert that fact.

As an example, as we did our research for this article we found our ancestor Ephraim Treadwell, and when we clicked through to review the sources attached to other’s Member Trees to confirm his place of death, we found each tree had a single Death date, with all sources of his death attached to that one date. A deeper dig showed this is how every of his Member Trees was sourced, and looking at his death fact, it indicates at first glance that every source supports that date of death and that his place of death is Fairfield, CT. However, none of the sources support his death location, and only some support his death day. To determine which sources support which facts, we had to review each source individually, and build a list on paper what each listed as a fact. It would have been MUCH easier if they had chosen to link each source to the fact as it was sourced, but by choosing to link all sources to the preferred death fact, we have to dig through each source to determine what those sources actually support.

In the end, we’re big advocates for showing what the sources support, with facts listed as they are asserted, as the best way to get a true picture of the facts that make up your ancestor’s record. Even when those facts aren’t precise or even correct.

Connect all facts, even when they don’t appear correct

We’ve found that only through the complete presentation of all records can you review and identify what facts are likely correct. Because of that, we prefer to present all our facts as they are sourced, and later interpret what’s likely accurate/inaccurate. If you’re editing out “mistakes” as you’re attaching sources, it’s very easy to make the facts fit your current understanding of your ancestor. It will also leave you blind later when you find a record that might support that “mistake” and you’re missing a new path to truth. This is within reason of course, and if you’re sure the ancestor died in 1767 but a records hint says there is a 1810 US Census entry for him, you can pass on that.

Sticking with our Tradewell family examples, Wesley’s father James Bennet Tradewell has records indicating a range of birth dates from 1790-1799. Originally we didn’t have a single solid record that indicated an accurate birth date, but most of what we had clustered around 1796-97. Seeing the range helped when we found a Family Bible entry for James that indicated 11 Aug 1796. Even though the bible entry was completed at some point after 1855 (meaning it was entered long after his birth and should be treated as suspect) we were comfortable accepting it because it fits the previously known range…which we can easily see in his “Timeline” view.

Image of the Birth records for James Bennet Tredawell

In the end neither choice is officially right or wrong, but we wanted to put this approach out there for your consideration. It can be counter-intuitive attaching facts that we are pretty sure are incorrect, but for us to better understand what’s correct we need to see the full picture so we can best interpret them to find the truth.

Building a good Ancestry.com family tree

The key to creating a good Public tree is this: make sure you have a source for every fact you attach to an ancestor, remembering that Members Trees are NOT sources. Let’s walk through how we can quickly get started with a new tree.

Start with what you know

We should start trees with what we know. If it’s a personal tree, adding parent’s information and what you’ve heard about grandparents is the perfect start. It’s ok at this point for there to be no sources attached to the facts, you’re just trying to get the outlines of your tree fleshed out with the data you know. Just because mom says grandma’s middle name was Marie, that’s fine to enter for now. If we’re building from a record that lists a new ancestor, it’s the same concept, in that we’ll use the information from the record as-is to start.

Let’s use our ancestor Hezekiah Treadwell (1707-1761) as an example for this process. This ancestor is in a “Working/Uncertified” tree of ours, meaning we haven’t proven the facts and there could be guesses in this tree. We first found Hezekiah as we were building out John Treadwell’s tree, with him listed as a child of John and Abigail (Minor) Treadwell in the Ancestry.com record “History and Genealogy of the Families of Old Fairfield, Vol. II Part II”. This is a good example of building a “skeleton” tree that we might build out quickly to get to a particular, known relative or when we’re building out new family connections as far as we can. They are skeleton because we won’t attach every source and do deep research right away, but we’ll go back later to flesh out these ancestors.

Image of Hezekiah Treadwll's Ancestry record

Review your “shaky leaf” hints one-by-one, with an eye towards accuracy

These hints are often only 10% of the records held by Ancestry, but if we’re just getting started on a tree it’s the perfect place to attach the most likely facts for an ancestor. But, just because something is listed as a “fact” on Ancestry, it doesn’t mean it’s either a fact or accurate. Take a few moments to understand the source, give it a quick “smell test” and decide what/how you’re going to use the source.

For example, there is a hint for Hezekiah that references “Connecticut, U.S., Church Record Abstracts, 1630-1920″ and it lists his father as “Jno Treadwell” and his residence on 9 Nov 1707 as Bridgeport, Connecticut. The record passes the first smell test: we think Hezekiah’s father was John, the location is about what we’d expect, and the date listed is within both of their lifetimes. However, when we clicked first on the hint, and then image of the original, we saw the record was actually for Hezekiah’s baptism. The church these records are taken from was in Bridgeport, but we can’t assume they were living in that town, and besides the baptism information is valuable and we would have missed it if we hadn’t reviewed the record completely. Don’t just assume what Ancestry is showing is correct.

Image of Connecticut, US, Church Record Abstracts for Hezekiah Treadwell
Image of baptism record for Hezekiah Treadwell

The same goes for Find a Grave. Hezekiah’s hints list a Find a Grave entry, which was exciting, but when we reviewed it there is nothing that attaches to an actual grave. It literally shows the Burial as “Burial Details Unknown”, and the Memorial is just a paragraph from the history book we’ve already cited. There’s no unique information in this “record”, and so we ignored it.

Image of the Find a Grave entry for Hezekiah Treadwell.

Filter out records that don’t provide value

Continuing with Hezekiah, the final two hints we’re provided reference the “Geneanet Community Trees Index” and the “American Genealogical-Biographical Index”. As a rule we try and avoid Index records where possible because they are derivatives of some other work, just one more generation removed from the original. In this case we have a couple of additional issues with these sources, First, there is no way to go back to the source for these indexes because they don’t specifically cite their sources. Second, the Geneanet Index is just a summary of the old public user trees from that old site and we’re trying to get away from unsourced public trees! Finally, the facts they list are also duplicated by other sources we’ve already attached so there’s no value to attaching these indexes.

Image showing two Ancestry.com record hints

Attaching Public Member Trees

Wait, weren’t we avoiding these trees?? Yes, but while we can’t depend on them for any facts we do want to link with other users who have our same ancestors in their trees, in case they do later attach a record of value and we want Ancestry to notify us.

When we review these Public trees, the first scan should be for any facts they have listed that we don’t and we can see that by the blue checks next to a fact. For Hezekiah, we see differences in his Birth, Marriage and Death records. Birth is easy to ignore because we know from previously attaching that date the record says he was born either in the towns of Fairfield or Stratford, so we used the county they are both in as his location and made a note of the two towns. The Public tree difference is the location of his birth is listed as Stratford, so that makes sense and we’re not accepting that fact, so we’ll leave the box unchecked. Similarly, the Death value is listing the date of the first court testimony regarding his will, and the court record doesn’t list a date of death. Given that it’s highly unlikely anyone would rush to court to swear in a Will on the same day someone died, we won’t be attaching that date to his death.

But the Marriage value is for an entirely new event, 28 years after his known marriage to Mehitable, and we’ll need to review the trees to understand their sources. Cancel the “New Information” screen, open Member Trees again in Hints, and select the ancestor’s record from the Ancestry Member Tree. That showed us the member’s tree, and when we scrolled down to the new Marriage record, we see it has no Sources attached. We’re not going to attach unsourced facts, so we know we can ignore this event.

Image comparing two entities for Hezekiah Treadwell from ancestry.com family tree
Image of Marriage record from Ancestry

Go back to the Add New Information to Your Tree screen, and make sure no facts are attached on the left side. Now, when we click “Save to Tree” this Public tree will attach to Hezekiah, but it won’t attach as a Source for anything and we won’t propagating unsourced facts from other members’ trees!

Attach the facts to the sources

Finally we need to ensure all of our new Sources are attached to Facts, and we have to be careful here because we’ve accepted some hints for Hezekiah with the Source attached to him, but the Source won’t automatically be attached to any Fact. Additionally, Facts often won’t all be linked to the source, like when we accepted the “History of…the Families of Old Fairfield” record above it not only didn’t link to any Face, it didn’t create the listed death year at all. Make sure each of the facts listed in the record exist in the ancestor’s timeline, and attach the Source to each Fact right away. Skipping this step is how we end up with unsourced trees!

Image of source for Hezekiah Treadwell, not attached to any Facts
Image of source for Hezekiah Treadwell, not attached to Facts

You’ve got a strong Ancestry.com family tree…what’s next?

When we’re done we have created a new Family Tree for Hezekiah and Mehitable Treadwell, and their children, that is fully sourced and supported by those sources. This entire process took us less than 10 minutes to complete showing it doesn’t take much time to create an accurate record, even when you have 15 hints. Anyone reviewing your tree, including yourself when you come back later, will be able to easily identify all of the facts relating to this ancestor as well as all the records that support those facts.

If this is a direct ancestor you can do more work to build out their information. Start by running a search in Ancestry, and since you have a solid base of facts the search results will much more focused and likely to be an accurate match. Just attach new sources and facts as detailed above, and your tree will continue to be well sourced.

Our example, Hezekiah, is not likely a direct ancestor of ours but we are building his tree out as we hope to catch more DNA matches. Since we don’t need a full picture, and since we have solid Birth/Marriage/Death info and a complete accounting of his children we will leave his record as-is, and we’ll repeat the process for each of their children, then grandchildren, and great grandchildren, etc. (Matching unmatched DNA Hints by Casting a Wide Net)

Finding the Yeomans

2+ years of research on one of our stubborn bricks walls fell with the discovery of a single record

Finding the Yeomans <h4>2+ years of research on one of our stubborn bricks walls fell with the discovery of a single record</h3>

A few years ago it was time to tackle the brick wall of who were the parents of Andrew and Hannah (Yeomans) Place. The Place family history after they arrived in Wisconsin is well known to us. They were some of the first 50 or so Americans to arrive in the Wisconsin Territory during the summer of 1835, and their arrival and early experiences were documented years later by Charles Dyer in a 1871 speech to the for the Old Settlers Society of Racine County (Link). However, despite their Great-Granddaughter Myra (Tradewell) Morse (1870-1960) being the first great historian of our family, she never documented her Great-grandparents.

Family tree showing Hannah Yeomans descendants to Catherine (Morse) Leonard
Andrew and Hannah (Yeomans) Place’s descendants to Michael’s Great Grandmother Catherine (Morse) Leonard

Starting with Andrew Place’s parents

Andrew Thomas Place (1793-1837) was known to have traveled with his wife and 6 children by Ox cart from Greene County, NY, however not much before that has been documented. Searching for Place families and birth/marriage/death records for him produced no results.

The Hudson River valley in New York between the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the Civil War is a well known dead zone for genealogical records (Suffering the Black Hole of Hudson River Valley Genealogy). For whatever reason(s) collection of church records are spotty at best, governmental records weren’t kept until later, and the Morman Church’s microfilm projects capturing this area’s civil records has large holes. Combine that with this area being very transitory over a few generations, with families moving in from Massachusetts and Connecticut soon after the Revolution, and their children/grandchildren moving West as they reached adulthood. Our ancestors didn’t leave as much of a paper trail in this region, and few of those papers have been digitized and indexed compared to other parts of the country.

Using Greene County as a jumping off point we built a table of each of the Place family entries in the 1790 US Census for there and the surrounding counties. Repeating the same process for the 1800-1830 census’ built a decent map of the original Place settlers and their children who stayed in the area.

The first item that popped out was an entry in the 1820 Census, in Greenville, Greene County, NY for Andrew T Place. The known birthdates of Hannah and their children matched the 1820 entry for Andrew, which was a strong lead that he was from the Greenville area. Assuming he might have bought his farm near his parents, we found a Thomas Place in Greenville, and these were the only 2 Places listed in Greene County. Searching the 1810 Census there was no entry for any Place family, but going manually through the entries for Greenville we found Thomas Place indexed under the wrong last name.

There is that 3 minutes of bliss when you realize all those years of research just paid off, out of the blue, and you just made a link that no one has ever made before…But very quickly the bliss fades and you ask the inevitable question: “I wonder who THEIR parents were?”

Now that we had a good lead that Andrew’s father was Thomas and they resided in Greenville, NY we searched Ancestry for records that match him. There were several hits for various parts of Thomas’ Will/Probate in 1848, but nothing that spelled out his children other than his son and executor, Jeramiah Place. Using those records, we went to FamilySearch and browsed the Probate records for Greene Co. We found his Will, but his wife and 2 surviving children were the only ones listed. It’s not surprising, but frustrating nonetheless!

Given that Thomas is a much more common name than Jeremiah, we tried a newspaper search on his name, narrowing down to 1848, and we hit paydirt! As a part of Thomas’ Probate process Jeremiah published a Notice of Hearing for the commissioner, calling out the heirs of Thomas specifically which included: “children of Andrew Place, a deceased son, all of Racine, Wisconsin Territory”. It also listed the other siblings of Andrew, which we’d established previously. With that we’d firmly proven that Thomas and Phoebe Place from Greenville, NY were Andrew’s parents.

It was on next to establish Hannah (Yeomans) Place’s parents, and while it took just a few weeks for Andrew, it would take over 2 years to break through and find hers.

Finding Hannah’s parents

Since we now knew that Andrew as raised and likely married in Greenville, NY, we started searching for Hannah’s parents in Greene County. There were 3 Yeomans registered in the 1810 US Census for Greene Co., and all 3 had a daughter Hannah’s age listed in the census. Next, as we did with Andrew, we built out tables for the 1790-1820 Census for every Yeoman in the counties bordering Greene, and tried to establish patterns of which children might be associated with which parents, and from that built 9 working trees to flesh out the people and families we were discovering.

Excel spreadsheet cells listing values from the 1790-1830 US Census and the Yeoman family names that match each value
Our makeshift pre-1850 US Census tables, used to align the generic numbers from the census to the known family members we’re researching, to visually identify the gaps and narrow down if there’s a match. Green means the census value matches a known family member, Yellow means the value is within 2 years of a known family member

Right away we hit that Hudson Valley wall and kept running into dead ends as we searched Ancestry and accepted as many shaky leaf hints as we could. We started searching for any Greene Co. Yeomans in member trees, and in a Public tree we found Elisha B Yeoman (1814-1850). The person didn’t have any facts attached in the tree but when we searched we found an index page for Greene County Probate Records from 1850, and we could see his probate was recorded on page 55. We switched over to FamilySearch, which had the Probate books microfilmed, and guessed which book to check based on his death year.

In Book H of the Greene County “Record of Wills” we found Elisha’s will recorded and it listed his location as Greenville, which puts him in the same town/time as Andrew Place…and likely Hannah. Unusually, his heirs weren’t just his wife and children. Elisha also listed 4 siblings as back-ups in-case his children didn’t survive to adulthood to collect their share: Leonard, William I, George C, and Catherine. We added the siblings to our tree and searched for birth/marriage/death records for each helped flesh out the tree, and it gave us more data points to track as we compared various Yeomans in the area to the families in the 1790-1820 US Census.

Still focusing on the 1810 US Census (knowing it should list Hannah in her father’s home for the last time), and breaking out all of Yeoman/Youman/Yumans in Greene and surrounding counties, 3 families came into focus: James and Jeremiah Yumans in Coeymans, Albany County and William Yeoman in Greenville. William would seem the most likely patriarch, being in Greene County, however the Coeymans and Greenville townships (Greenville is in New Baltimore) abut each other separated by the country border. The areas both families lived in were likely less than 10 miles from each other, which makes it reasonable Hannah could have been a part of any of them.

Old map of Albany and Greene County New York
Map from 1875 showing the proximity of Coeyman’s Hollow and Green Ville, where our 3 target Yeomans/Yumans families were located

During this time we also found a cluster of Yeomans that could have been the father and siblings of Hannah, except they were in Delaware County, NY (about 55 miles west of Greenville/Coeymans). William Yeomans (1773-1857) census info matched what we knew for the most part, but it wasn’t a complete match. We found Delaware County William’s Probate and it listed 7 of his children. Those children didn’t overlap Hannah’s known siblings, but we couldn’t rule him out because at this time we only knew of a cluster of 5 siblings in Greene County that didn’t even include Hannah. FindaGrave had a record in Delaware for “William” that seemed to match William I, but that was the only record to go on.

All attempts to research the James and Jeremiah families in Albany County were a dead end. The few Albany County land and probate records are almost entirely unindexed, and most of them are missing from any online microfilm collections.

From Dead Ends to Breadcrumbs

Since we had run into dead-ends in Albany, Greene and Delaware counties we expanded our search for any Yeomans to surrounding counties, which is where we hit our next big breakthrough. We found the will of an unmarried woman, Emaline Yeomans (1806-1849), who died in Union Vale, Dutchess County, NY which is 75 miles from Greenville and across the Hudson River. She died with no heirs, but a substantial estate. Since she had no heirs-in-law she left her estate to her 8 siblings, including the 5 Yeoman siblings in Elisha B’s will, also Hannah (positively identified as “Hannah Place, wife of the late Andrew Place of Wisconsin”) and 2 new sisters: Lucinda and Annis.

Emaline’s will is probably our favorite probate document we’ve found! You can only glean hints at personality and family dynamics from dry vital records documents, but her will speaks volumes. First, she had 3 nieces name Emaline, and she bequeathed each $50 to be paid on their 21st birthday. To her 4 brothers (Leonard, Elisha, George and Williams) and her sister (Catherine, also listed in Elisha B’s will) she bequeathed to each of them one of her rocking chairs (their choice) worth between $12 and $15 each. The remainder of her estate was to be split between the 3 other sisters (Hannah, Lucinda and Annis), who each received about $250. There clearly was a schism between the two groups of siblings, as Elisha would pass away only a year later and leave nothing to the sisters who received the bulk of Emaline’s estate while rewarding all those who received rocking chairs. She also must have been beloved, with 3 of her sisters naming children after her…at least amongst one faction.

Diagram showing the siblings of Hannah Yeomans and which were mentioned in each others' wills

Armed with the entire, confirmed list of Yeoman siblings, we were able to confirm that both the Coeymans and Greenville patriarch’s 1810 Census entries still matched the ages of these 9 children. However, we were then able to eliminate the Delaware William as a potential father.

The trail went completely cold after this. Searching for the Probate records of each sibling lead to no new leads on their parentage. Even more frustratingly, even with a known death date for William I we could not find his probate/will.

This stalemate lasted for almost a year, and while we found more information to flesh out the spouses and children of the 8 of the 9 siblings (William I was still a mystery), there was nothing on the 3 possible patriarchs of these families.

Breakthrough!

Our focus had turned entirely to researching William I Yeoman, as he was the one sibling we had no records for. While searching for anything William Yeomans related in Ancestry one Saturday we found an image attached as a profile picture in a Public Tree that came from one of the vanity books published around the first Centennial that listed important people in a county. These books were largely self-sourced, where the subjects would pay a fee to be listed, so they often are nearly first-person family/history descriptions even if it overestimates the subject’s “importance”. Reviewing the image for William listed his wife as Mary and a son Henry J who lived in Dutchess County.

Searching Ancestry trees for Henry J Yeomans of Dutchess County, NY broke the brick wall down completely. Again, someone had attached an image to their Public tree as a profile pic for Henry J. It was an entry in another vanity book where Henry J was the subject, and it was a gold mine. It was much longer than most such entries, and it described details about his father Henry Ira who was born in Greene County and was a lifelong resident of Greenville. Just like that we’d gathered William Ira’s birth date, place, and marriage details!

Paragraph detailing the life of Henry J Yeomans

But even more amazingly the write-up (which usually wouldn’t include parents information) went further and detailed William Ira’s parents! William Yeomans (1782-) and Lucinda (Blackmer) Yeomans (1762-1819) were William I’s parents, and through the transitive properties Emaline’s, and thus Hannah’s, parents was well!

Just like that, the wall was gone. We knew the identity of Hannah’s parents! 2+ years of research had paid off and we’d moved her tree back one generation.

There is that 3 minutes of bliss when you realize all those years of research just paid off, out of the blue, and you just made a link that no one has ever made before, even your ancestor genealogists who were researching 100+ years ago. But very quickly the bliss fades and you ask the inevitable question: “I wonder who THEIR parents were?”

We can report we have no idea who their parents were…yet. It’s the same issue as when we started: there are very few records from that area, fewer are indexed, and other researchers haven’t made the links we’d build off of yet. We searched on the text of Henry J’s write up, so we could properly identify and cite it, make sure we had all of the facts of what was a working tree cited and proper, and then attached it to our main tree so that anyone else who’s been struggling with this line can now build off our research.

Family tree diagram showing Andrew and Hannah (Yeomans) Place's parents
Our final family tree after researching back one generation

In remembrance: James Bennet Tradewell (1797-1885)

In remembrance: James Bennet Tradewell (1797-1885)

On this day in 1885 James Bennet Tradewell at his home in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin at the age of either 88 or 93. He was Michael’s 4th Great Grandfather, and was the first of the Tradewell line to move to Wisconsin, arriving in 1844. He was born in Greene County, New York most probably in 1797, however his obituary claims it was about 5 years earlier.

There are no records of James’ early life, and one of our biggest genealogical brick walls is trying to identify his parents and siblings.

James served in the New York State National Guard, and we have records from 1819-1821 that show he was the equivalent of a modern 1st Lieutenant, although his obituary refers to him as a Captain so it’s likely he continued on and was promoted further. There’s also some unconfirmed indications he may have served in the War of 1812, but we haven’t been able to validate that yet.

He married Catherine (Edwards) Ellarson 3 Jan 1820 in Gilboa, New York and it appears they lived in/near this village until they moved to Wisconsin Territory. Catherine was born in 1793, and had been married for 12 years to William Ellarson before he passed in 1818. Mr. Ellarson had significant land holdings in and around Gilboa, which were inherited by Catherine upon his death. One of the parcels was sold to James’ brother Ephriam which became known as “Treadwell’s Taven Stand” in Gilboa, which was located on the plank toll road that ran through the town. Land records show that James and Ephraim and their families lived across Schoharie Creek from each other.

James and Ephraim migrated to Wisconsin in the summer of 1844, with them both settling in Kenosha before James quickly moved to Racine. In Racine James and Caty first settled at Mygatt’s Corner (currently the corner of Hwy 20 and Hwy 31) and in 1852 he sold a 1/4 acre of land the first School District in Mount Pleasant which erected the Mygatts School. James eventually settled near what was then know as “Western Union Junction” (now Sturtevant).

James and Caty (as she was known) had 5 children together: Margaret Mariah, Mary Ann, Aurelia Louisa, Harriet Augusta, and William Ephriam Wesley. Margaret (10) and Aurelia (1) both died young. Mary Ann married James Bogardus in 1844 (Sullivan County, New York) just as her parents were to set out of Wisconsin, so only Harriet and Wesley (as he was known) made the trip. Harriet married twice and ended up in Black River Falls until she passed in 1872. Wesley married Jane Place and eventually inherited Jane’s family farm that would be known to us as the Tradewell farm, about 240 acres near Spring Street and Highway H in Mount Pleasant.

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net

In early 2018 we made a series of posts on how to use the multiple “Shared Matches” in AncestryDNA to narrow down the DNA line that connects you to them. The challenge was that often they have no trees, or small trees that don’t come anywhere close to matching your (much more complete!) tree.

This strategy was a way to use mirror trees to match them to themselves, which should indicate a Most Recent Common Ancestor for them, and in all likelihood to be your MCRA as well. For this series we broke down a large set of matches (5000+) to Felice’s mother, to try and establish her first DNA link outside of the immediate family.

There were all of the challenges we all face with African American genealogy (fewer family histories to draw off of, smaller trees, difficulty with 3x/4xGGP’s due to the “1870 Wall”, etc.), and in this series we found the MCRA…but we failed to find the link between them and our family. However, about a year later we broke through that wall, and we’ll be following up on that shortly. In the meantime, here’s the complete series in one page:

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 1 – A crazy, desperate idea

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 2 – Identifying all “Matches of Matches” as a Group

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 3 – Building a single tree using all of our DNA matches Public Trees

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 4 – Proving the matches, and establishing a theory of connection

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 5 – Rolling up our sleeves and doing some genealogy

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 6 – Our crazy attempt to leverage 288 DNA matches to expand our tree comes to it’s conclusion

 

 

Taking a step back from working on our Family Tree – A follow up

Taking a step back from working on our Family Tree – A follow up

In September we wrote about what is a common problem in the genealogy community: not enough time to balance work, family, and our research. We took a radical step and decided to stop working on our family tree, so we could instead focus on wrapping up other projects and to get our research, citations, and document/photo collections in order.

It’s been 7 months since wrote that piece (Link)…here’s how the plan’s going:

Keep blog posts to 500 words (Grade: F) – Our last post was almost 2000 words, our average since September is about 1000, AND we have been lucky to post 2 times a month instead of publishing weekly like we intend. Lots of work to do here.

P18-002-054

Clean, scan, and store the 2000 glass plate negatives from the Home Studio Collection (Grade: B+) – We decided not to clean them, we have the storage taken care of with all of the proper archival products. However, we got to about 70 plates scanned in October and stopped. It was too much time per plate. In response, in the last 3 months we purchased a lot of equipment to scan these more quickly and we were able to process 225 plates in about 2 hours last time we tested. We are about to finish the first crate of plates (~440 images) in 10 days! We’ll publish more details when we’re done.

While we are scoring a GPA just over a C, it’s mostly because of we failed at our primary approach of stopping work on our Family Tree.

Install a temperature/humidity control solution in our archive room (Grade: A) – It’s done! Our archives have spent the last 5-6 months at 62-65 degrees, and 42-45% humidity! There will be more work to do this summer, to cool/dehumidify the space, but we already have the controls in place.

Ensure each Source in our main, Public tree is properly cited and every Fact is supported by at least one Source (Grade: Inc) – To be fair, we started on this effort, beginning with 4xGGP Royal and Eliza (Jones) Morse (whom we’ve owed this documentation to the Morse Society for 2 years now!) 4 times, but the Family Tree Maker data corruptions kept setting this effort back (MacKiev’s Family Tree Maker is garbage). Once we got past that, we’ve made some progress, but we lost a lot of effort on this one.

Properly transcribe and index all family history interviews (Grade: C) – We’re half way there! But the last set of transcripts will be the hardest.

PUBLISH! (Grade: F) – Out blog posts are lagging, and we haven’t actually published anything outside of blogging. We’ve been reading some great family histories though, to get an idea of how others publish  their stories, so we have good ideas once we’re ready!

Write our autobiographies, as well as begin to write out what we know about our family (Grade: F) – Yeah, so…we’ve written nothing. Looking back, this probably should have been left off the list…we were just setting ourselves up for failure.

Ensure that we’re printing out all electronic sources, so that our paper files are complete copies of our electronic files (Grade: A) – We’ve been pretty diligent on this one, and while we’ve had to redo a lot of electronic source citations, we did print them all out as we created them.

Spend a little more time with the family! (Grade: A) – We could have made a lot more progress on this list if sacrificed this one, but we’re spending more time together as family now than when we first wrote this.

While we are scoring a GPA just over a C, it’s mostly because of we failed at our primary approach of stopping work on our Family Tree. Instead, we shattered our largest brick wall (while adding nearly 40 new DNA matches) and made a huge dent in another brick wall. Much more on that will follow, but both efforts took a LOT of work, and those hours spent working on the trees directly slowed down the other work we hoped to accomplish.

That said, we’ve rededicated ourselves to getting these other tasks complete so we can finally turn our full attention to building our tree. Our properly cited and sourced family tree!