Genealogy Jottings

Archive for the ‘Genealogy’ Category

I have mentioned before that I have found a great deal of late 19^th century and early 20^th century family information in local newspapers.

I spent this week researching the life of one of my great-grandmother Anna Petronellia Sherman’s half-brothers. He can only be described as a black sheep. The newspaper repeatedly carried stories of his exploits including excessive drinking, wife-beating, womanizing, on-the-job injuries, and a divorce.

This man must have caused a lot of heartache to his family. I can only imagine the damage he inflicted on the lives of his four children. All this hard living finally caught up to him when he died in 1933 at the age of fifty-one.

Anna’s own father was said to have drunk to excess as well—a family trait? Anna herself did not imbibe as far as I know. In fact, she married young and left the state, never to return. Perhaps she had had enough.

I still have the remaining half-siblings to learn about, and I wonder if they all had trouble coping with life the way their father did. Most of them lived in the same small town, so I will be combing those newspapers again to learn more.

A have had a week without genealogy. My life keeps getting in the way of any serious research.

It goes this way:

• Sunday, being Valentine’s Day, I spent enjoying some leisure time with my husband/tech advisor,
• Monday, being President’s Day, I spent shopping at all the great sales,
• Tuesday, I took care of my three-year-old granddaughter, and she is not very interested in genealogy, yet,
• Wednesday, I spent catching up on all the correspondence I had neglected earlier in the week. I did sneak in some time to read the newest issue of the NGS Quarterly.

Here I am now on Thursday with nothing to show in the way of genealogical progress. I do plan to work on some genealogy today. I have a stack of Sherman family documents on my desk that I need to analyze. I also have on online webinar that I want to hear.

I also discovered a little gem among some genealogy material I inherited last year. Our cousin Alta Kaessinger had a membership in the Coles County, Illinois genealogy society for many years, and she saved all their newsletters. I want to go through them to see if I can find any Reed or Sherman-related information. Of course, I could take a short cut and just look this up on PERSI, the Periodical Source Index for genealogy publications, but I would get a better sense of place if I read the newsletters.

So, I have big plans, just not big amounts of time. I will do what I can.

Yesterday I attended my usual monthly lunch with ladies from my neighborhood. We enjoy our time together as we swap news and talk about neighborhood issues. This month our conversation turned to our plans for our various family heirlooms.

Most of us have found that our Millennial children do not care to learn about what we have. They probably do not want most of it. So the members of the group began to compare notes on what to do with the antiques, scrapbooks, historic documents, etc. that we have collected.

I like the solution that one neighbor offered. She has taken photographs of everything of family importance in her possession and written summaries of the significance of each item. She placed an album with all this information and her Last Will and Testament in her safe. When she is gone and her family must dispose of her things, they can use the notebook as a guide for what they want to keep.

I think that I would like to do this with my own things. We have a few heirlooms I hope my family will want. I know their provenance, but perhaps my sons do not. Certainly my daughters-in-law and grandchildren have no idea of where I acquired certain items and why I keep them.

After talking this over with the ladies at lunch yesterday, I have come up with a plan. When my oldest granddaughter gets a little bigger (she is in the second grade), I think I will hire her for the summer to help me with this project. Taking the photographs, writing the descriptions, and putting them together in a notebook would be fun for both of us. She could gain an appreciation for the mementos documenting her family heritage. Best of all, someone in the next generation would have the necessary background for knowing what to keep and what to let go.

Have you ever used newspapers in your genealogical research? Most of us routinely look for obituaries, but newspapers often include other information about our ancestors. These great resources can really flesh out their stories, if we can locate them.

During my early years of genealogy, our large local genealogy library carried reference books that spelled out the names and dates of historic newspapers for most locales. For my research, I found that I usually needed to make a trip to view a relevant newspaper for the mostly-rural locations of my ancestors. This, of course, was an expensive undertaking, and I did it only a couple of times. One of those trips, to the Nebraska Historical Society in search of newspapers from southwestern Nebraska, yielded nothing useful.

As time went by, more papers were microfilmed. In theory, one could get these films on interlibrary loan. This was less expensive, but still awkward. Sometimes the process did not work very well.

One year, I tried to get the newspaper from Charleston, Illinois via inter-library loan. Imagine my amazement when it came in for me—8 rolls of microfilm for a newspaper from that small town! Unfortunately, I soon realized they had sent me the newspaper from Charleston, South Carolina, not Charleston, Illinois.

Last year, I decided to take another chance on finding newspaper articles. A more modern tool has become available to me. I subscribed to Newspapers.com. When I looked at it, I was delighted to find that it has databases for papers from rural areas in Illinois and Indiana where my ancestors lived.

These papers are searchable, and I have found several articles of interest about my ancestor, Thomas Sherman, and his family:

• Accounts of marriages of his nieces Cynthia and Mary Sherman in Ninevah, Indiana,
• Reports of out-of-town travel and letters waiting for another niece, Laura Sherman, also of Ninevah,
• A story about a shower of gifts for local widows in Ninevah, including Thomas’ sister-in-law, Sarah Jane Sherman,
• Notice of an Illinois court order requiring Thomas’ sons George and Claude to each contribute $1.50 a week to the support of their elderly father,
• Week-by-week updates about the health of elderly residents of Coles County, Illinois, including Thomas Sherman.

Another surprising article from Mattoon, Coles County, Illinois contains the story of one Thomas Sherman who had confessed to counterfeiting and had been jailed. The article says the authorities searched the man’s shop and found metal ready for casting. My ancestor was a blacksmith, had a shop, and certainly worked with metal. Was the counterfeiter my ancestor? More than one man named Thomas Sherman resided in Illinois at the time, so this merits further investigation.

Obviously, local newspapers contained all sorts of interesting information. If you are persistent, you will have the opportunity to search one and discover something new about your ancestors.

Despite spending quite a bit of time this week on census records for my current research project, I did not discover anything new about my subject, Thomas Sherman of Coles County, Illinois.

Several men named Thomas Sherman lived in Illinois during the life span of my Thomas. If I have identified the correct man, he lived from 1841 to 1912. He resided in Kentucky as a boy, but he had settled in Illinois by 1870. The census records for 1870-1910 tell me this:

1. His birthplace is uncertain, having variously been reported as Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio.
2. He worked as a blacksmith in every census year and usually owned a shop.
3. His middle initial was A.
4. He was married three times. Two of the wives were named Mary and Alice.
5. He was a natural-born citizen.

Unfortunately, these records do not tell me what I want to know. The big questions:

1. Did Thomas serve in the Civil War as the family claims?
2. Who was the first wife, the woman who was my great-great grandmother?
3. Why was my great-grandmother, the daughter of Thomas and the unknown woman, omitted from Thomas’ obituary?

I must keep digging if I ever hope to answer these questions. I have done all I can with census records and county histories. Now I must move on to locate other records.

This week I received word that my extended Bentsen family has lost not one, but two, of our patriarchs. They were first cousins to one another, Ron Bentsen and Floyd Fleming. Both were grandsons of our Norwegian immigrant, Ole Bentsen.

Ronald Bentsen (1931-2016)

My uncle Ron took care of me a lot in my younger years as he pursued his college studies. He even lived in our basement for a while, so I knew him quite well back then.

When he finished school, he married and moved away, so I seldom saw him. Still, we kept in touch. He often sent me family photos or tidbits of newly-discovered family information. The last time he visited, we had a great time reminiscing about the old days.

He had a long career as a civil engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, serving in Japan and West Germany. He ultimately settled in the Atlanta area. He spent his retirement years enjoying his family and fighting kudzu.

You can find his obituary here: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/atlanta/obituary.aspx?n=ronald-bentsen&pid=177332981&fhid=5328

Floyd Fleming (1938-2015)

I met our cousin Floyd only once. As he was quite a bit older than me, he took little notice of his cousin’s kid that day. Still, he seemed to have an appreciation for family.

Floyd left behind a wonderful testament to his mother and the baby sister who died in infancy. He created beautiful cemetery markers for them in the Redstone, Montana cemetery.

You can read Floyd’s obituary here: http://www.sheridanmedia.com/obituary/floyd-fleming

Sherman. The 422^nd most-common last name on a list of 5000 American surnames. A lot of people share the Sherman name, including my great-grandmother Anna Petronellia Sherman. Because she always went by her middle name, Petronellia, I usually have had an easy time locating her in the records.

Her father Thomas Sherman presents a more difficult case. Still, I thought I had him culled from the list of other Thomas Shermans who populated late 19^th-century Illinois. Then I looked for his family tree on Family Search. There I found him with his daughter Anna Petronellia—and two sets of parents. Uh-oh. Something needs sorting out.

To which family does he belong? Thomas, born in 1841 to Rebecca and Daniel, with siblings Polly, Anderson, Evalyn, Emily, Eliza, Gilla Ann, John, and Jasper? Or Thomas, born in Indiana in 1844 to Maria and Lewis, with siblings Mary, Chapel, James, Benjamin, Delilah, Greenlee, and Tilchman?

For the last ten years I have thought my Thomas belonged to Rebecca and Daniel. I have the following evidence:

1. According to The Reeds of Ashmore [Illinois] published in 1988 by Dr. Michael Hayden (another descendant of Petronellia), our Thomas Sherman was an Illinois blacksmith. Hayden relates that after Petronellia’s mother died, Thomas married Alice Farris and had several more children.
2. U.S. census records for Illinois in 1880, 1900, and 1910, confirm that Thomas the husband of Alice did work as a blacksmith. Daniel Sherman was also a blacksmith as were Daniel’s sons Anderson, Thomas, John, and Jasper.
3. The 1912 obituary for Thomas Sherman, husband of Alice, states he was born in 1841 in Ohio. It lists surviving siblings as John, Anderson, Evaline, and Gil.

This evidence points to Daniel and Rebecca Sherman as the true parents of Thomas, the father of Petronellia. What could link him to the other family? The Family Search tree placing him in the Lewis Sherman family has no attached sources.

Someone submitted that family tree to Family Search in 2014. Fortunately, she provided e-mail contact information. I will follow up with this researcher to see what additional evidence she can offer. We may be researching a common name, but we need to get it right.

I have a great-great grandmother missing from my family tree. This year I would love to fill in the box where her name belongs. Several years ago I attempted to do this with little success, but this year I will try again. With so much more information available online, I hope to identify her and learn something about her family.

A good genealogist knows that you begin to answer a research question by reviewing the evidence you already have. Then you develop a research plan. Last time I worked on the life of this woman, I gathered the following:

1. A letter written by my great-aunt Bertha Reed Evert sometime in the 1980s that mentions her mother and grandmother (the missing ancestor). She says, “[Mother] born at Indianapolis, Indiana. Only child of Thomas Sherman and Katherine Staninbaugh Sherman. [Mother’s] name Anna Petronellia Sherman Reed.”
2. A family group sheet prepared by Bertha Reed Evert stating that Anna Petronellia Sherman was born 1 April 1865 at Indianapolis, Indiana. She says her grandmother Katherine was German and came to America when she was 8 years old. She was buried in Indianapolis.
3. Anna Petronellia Reed’s 1961 death certificate stating her parents were Thomas Sherman and Catherin Stanabaugh. The informant was her son, and Bertha’s brother, Thomas Reed.

Not much to go on. The family story relates that Thomas Sherman married a German girl, Katherine Staninbaugh/Stanabaugh during the Civil War. They lived in Indianapolis and had one child, Anna Petronellia. Katherine died shortly thereafter. Thomas subsequently married Alice Farris and had five more children.

Last time I worked to find any information on Katherine or her family, I encountered several roadblocks:

1. Descendants of Thomas Sherman and Alice Farris claim that Alice was the one and only wife. They say the five children had no half-sister, and they deny any knowledge of or relation to Anna Petronellia. The problem with this notion is that our family has photographs of Thomas and Alice’s children. If we are not related to them, why would we have these pictures?
2. German researchers tell us to verify the veracity of German surnames by checking for them in the German telephone book. If they do not appear, they are probably not valid German surnames. Neither Stillenbaugh nor Stanabaugh appears in a German directory. If the mother truly was a German, what was her family name?
3. In researching Thomas’ life, I have found no mention of Anna Petronellia’s mother. I have not located their marriage record, and his obituary does not mention her. Even worse, it does not mention Anna Petronellia as a survivor.

So the question remains, who was this mysterious great-great grandmother of mine? Was she a German girl from the large German community in Indiana? I hope I can uncover some more clues to her life with my research this year.

As a gift for our December anniversary, my husband/tech advisor gave me a partially remodeled office. He knows I love offices and office supplies, and I am thrilled with the result. I cannot wait to begin another exciting year of research in my new surroundings.

He upgraded the space with following:

1. LED lighting that really brightens up the room,
2. New bookcases for the 400+ genealogy books I acquired from the estate of my father’s cousin last spring,
3. An perfectly-sized office work table we spotted in the IKEA scratch and dent department,
4. A newly-organized supply closet,
5. A Varidesk adjustable standing desk that I received for Christmas.

Everything would be perfect except for one thing. I promised myself that I would begin work in the new year in a clutter-free environment, but so far I have not achieved this goal. I have books and paper everywhere. Guess what I will spend much of today doing!

Over the past week I have seen a lot of chatter about the upcoming demise of Family Tree Maker genealogy software. As one of the more popular record-keeping software products, many genealogists rely on it for their work. Understandably, they are unhappy.

I faced the same situation some time ago when Wholly Genes discontinued my software product, The Master Genealogist (TMG). Do I see a trend developing?

The Geneablogger Thomas MacEntee seems to think so. He argues that desktop genealogy software is becoming a thing of the past. The industry is heading toward subscription-based cloud products. These offer the user several benefits including off-site storage and continuous updating.

So what should the frustrated genealogist do? For my own work, I have continued to use TMG with no problem. I like the trees and reports I can run from it. I do not want to follow the learning curve needed to effectively work in another product.

Yet I do not know how long I can continue with TMG as Windows evolves. I keep receiving prompts to upgrade to Windows 10. Will TMG play well in the new sandbox? If not, what should I do?

My long-term plan for preserving my research is to post it with Family Search. I have already submitted everything I know about my Norwegian and Finnish ancestors to them. Each time I complete a research question, I add my results to my online tree. Perhaps I can begin using their site for my work when TMG ceases to be a viable option.

The technology world continues to evolve faster than many of us would like. Family Tree Maker users, I feel your pain.