Genealogy Jottings

My Dad’s family has lived in America since Colonial times. Whenever I work on one of his lines, I can find several other researchers pursuing the same family tree. I really enjoy collaborating with them, and the exchange of information moves my research along at a good pace.

I do not find this kind of help when I research my mother’s family. As I work on her Finnish line this year, I have not found another soul researching the Mattila family. No one has replied to my postings on the genealogy message boards. I cannot find family trees on Rootsweb, Ancestry, or personal websites.

It is clear that no one will be providing me with any helpful hints on my project for this year. I must be the lone wolf. So I am working along in the tried-and-true way of collecting census data for Alex Mattila and the sisters I know about. I already have a few vital records and obituaries for some of these people, and I will order more. Once I have collected all the American records that I can find, I will begin the search for Finnish ones.

I remember working alone this way in the days before the internet. I may not have research partners, but I do have internet resources that were not available before. I can do this!

Every year from about February through May, the genealogy societies offer seminars featuring prominent genealogical speakers. These allow people like me to learn about new sources and research approaches. I could spend a lot of money to attend something like RootsTech in Salt Lake City or this year’s NGS conference in Cincinnati. But I am fortunate to live in a large metropolitan area where local societies bring in national talent. For example, this season we have Dick Eastman coming to the Computer Interest Group seminar and Hank Jones will speak to the Palatines. In lean years, I can avoid travel to a conference and still attend something nearby. Time to get signed up!

Recently we upgraded our genealogy software to Version 8 of The Master Genealogist. My husband did the installation, and it seemed to go smoothly for him. As I began working with it, I encountered no difficulty, and most of it looked very similar to Version 7. I did have to re-create my customized screen layout, but I could immediately begin working in the software.

I did find one problem though, and I do not know whether to blame myself or the software. It ate one of my sources, the Alex Mattila Estate. This source, which I have cited 13 times, has disappeared from the Master Source List although the associated tags continue to show that they do have a source. Where did the source information go, and how do I get it back? Via an internet search, I cannot find anyone else who has experienced this problem. I cannot find any information on how to recover source information.

Rather than trying to do a repair to the data, instead we opted to re-install Version 8. I will have to redo the small amount of work I had done after the initial installation, but at least the data set is intact. I hope my experience with the data-eating vampire was my own fault and not a bug in this new product.

Last week I spent time in upstate New York caring for my grandchildren. Not much opportunity for doing genealogy that week, but it offered precious time to know the youngest generation of the family. After all, I pursue my research in order to hand some family history down to them someday.

This year I will reach my goal of documenting for them the lives of my great-grandparents, except for one great-grandfather whose identity may remain unknown. These people are great-great-great grandparents to my grandchildren, just 8 of the 32 ancestors they have in that generation. Their lives spanned a huge time period from the birth of Samuel Harvey Reed in 1845 to the death of Ole Bentsen in 1976.

It is the story of immigrants and of homesteaders, and how they came to live in the American West. It explains so much about who we are today. How I wish I had received this much information on my own third great-grandparents!

Earlier this week, I learned that The Master Genealogist (TMG) software sub-group will discuss the recently-released TMG version 8 at next month’s Computer Interest Group meeting. One of the facilitators already uses it, and he takes his laptop to the meetings. This will give me an opportunity to view the product before I upgrade to it.

I migrated to TMG a few years ago. I liked the software’s ability to handle more details and to create better citations than the product I used before. But the version I have does not work well with Windows 7. I have had difficulty preparing reports. Now I wish I did not have to wait an entire month to see Version 8 in action.

In the meantime, I am continuing to update my records in Version 7. When I did the original research on my Finnish family, I still used a different software that did not accommodate all the data from many of my sources. Now I am reviewing all those old documents and adding information to my database. Maybe as I do this, I will unearth an important clue for further research on this family.

Common wisdom tells us to write to relatives early in the process of researching a new line. So far with my Finnish project, I am finding that the relatives do not have much to offer. My aunt and uncle do not know any more than I do about the family history. Their cousins, who are younger than I am, know even less. It seems I will have to do the heavy lifting on this one.

I could not resist taking a sneak peak at census records for my Finnish family. I know I said I would wait until the new year to begin working on this line, but I just got the urge. So I fired up Ancestry.com to take a look at the 1920 census.

Years ago I had not been able to locate my Finns on that year’s census even though I knew they lived in Hibbing, MN at the time. They were not on the Soundex, nor could I find them with a visual inspection of the city lists. There was not much else I could do.

Now, one can perform creative searches in online census records. Neither “Alex Mattila” nor “Alexander Mattila” returned a result showing my family. After fruitlessly trying the names of other family members, I finally decided to look for just first names paired with other distinguishing information. I finally found them when I entered my grandmother’s data (Martha, born in MN in 1906) coupled with a father named Alex. This yielded my family, but the census report had really distorted their names.

The Minnesota census taker must have had an awful time understanding what these immigrants said. Although my great-grandparents had lived in America for 16 years by 1920, they still spoke English with heavy accents. When the head of household gave his name as Alexander Mattila, the census taker wrote the unfamiliar name phonetically as “Alex Sandermatella”. This “Sandermatella” surname attached to everyone else in the household. No wonder I could not find the family when I searched the “M” Soundex listing.

After misreporting the family surname, this census taker was not finished garbling the record. The mother and eldest daughter were listed correctly as Ada and Martha, but the younger children’s names were confused almost beyond recognition. Aida Sylvia became “Autoulia”; Hugo Alexander became “Hokeselander”; and Peter Bernard became “Petebarkardt”.

I wonder whether the records of other immigrants who lived in the Hibbing area have similar problems. It pays to remember that not all census takers made an effort to complete an accurate report.

In December I usually wind down my genealogical research for the year. This year, as I focused on my Reed line, I collected photos and documents on the Reed family of Ashmore, Illinois. I scoured records looking for any mention of my great-grandfather, Samuel Harvey Reed. Finally, this month I wrote a character sketch of him and mailed it off with a photo of him to other family members.

Now I will spend the rest of December preparing for Christmas and the new year. In January, I will turn to my Finnish ancestor line and see what I can find. I have not done much on that lineage since before the internet age, so I am eager to see what turns up.

Hyvaa Joulua! Onnellista uutta vuotta!

Since I retired from my day job, I have hoped to enter a piece in one of the genealogy writing contests sponsored by the National Genealogical Society and others. The deadline for this year’s contest comes up on December 31, and again I will not make it.

Real life keeps getting in the way of serious scholarship. Will next year be different?

I am hoping so as I prepare to move to a patio home later this month. With no yard work, my “stuff” all cleaned out, and my elderly father settled in assisted living, in 2012 I can devote more time to my passion, the family history. The last two years have been so filled with closing big houses and caregiving that genealogy keeps getting pushed aside. But once I get everything stashed in the new place, I hope to get all those tombstones scanned, that stack of documents entered into the database, and an article or two written.

The contests will be there next year, and perhaps one of the entries will have my name on it.

As I track my family back in time, I have found an interesting search aid. My family often lived near the Lincoln family, yes “that” Lincoln.

I first realized this when I began looking at 19th-century Coles County, Illinois records. The Reeds moved there in 1830, and Abraham Lincoln’s parents came shortly after. Next, I began looking at early 19th-century records for the Louisville, KY area. The Reeds went there after the Revolutionary War, and sure enough, Lincoln’s family was living in the area, too. There, his grandfather, Abraham Lincoln (or Linkum) was slain by Indians as his six-year-old son Thomas (father of the President) look on. Earlier generations of Lincolns lived in Hingham, Massachusetts where they were neighbors of another branch of my family, the Dunbars.

Although I have never found a family connection to the Lincolns, I have found research to be a little easier because of the proximity of the families. Presidential families are heavily researched, and I have benefited from the availability of records in areas where the Lincolns lived. It helps when others have unearthed and published important records.