Category: Research

Filling Out the Menzies

Posted on by Kathleen

Today I am working on my Menzies family line. It’s still been a struggle to get back in the swing of what I was doing. Mostly I’m struggling to keep focused for long periods of time. To combat this, I’ve been doing short bursts to try and work up to longer work sessions. This means sometimes I work on one small family one day, and someone completely on the other side of the tree the next.

This screenshot is from my “clean” file where the only things that live in it are things attached to a source.

James Menzies and Anna Parks family

Today I am trying to fill out the census records for this family. I have a few here and there but I’ve never fully researched them. The Municipal Archives in NYC has a invaluable resource for records in Manhattan, so now is a good time to start filling out these branches of my ancestor’s siblings.

Gathering the Information

Right now I have James and his family in the 1860 and 1880 United States Censuses. I wanted to also fill in the New York State Censuses but unfortunately, Manhattan is missing from these. So 1870 is my new target. I have tried basic searches for this, (I know because I made notes of it!). None of the searches worked and I knew I was going to have to change strategies.

If you notice, one of their children was born in 1870, so I checked to see if I had that birth record. I did.

James was born in October of 1870, which is perfect for me. This means the address given as residence on this record is probably where they were living in June when the 1870 census was taken.

Side Note: This record also says James is the 6th child of his parents, and I only have 5. This means I need to look further for another child. Maybe the 1870 census will help!

Working with Maps

Now the problem comes of where to search for them? Manhattan is a very big place. I know I want to look for 320 Tenth Avenue, but where was that? What district was that in 1870?

A quick Google map search shows me the general area where the address would have been. How do I then translate that to 1870 districts?

Thanks to Wikimedia, we have a November 1870 Hardy Map of Manhattan.

Breaking Down the Hardy 1870 Manhattan Map

This map says a lot. The red outline and number indicates the Ward. The blue outline and number gives us the Assembly District. The last breakdown on this particular map is Election Districts. When you are looking at a state or federal census, they will be using one of these designations to distinguish each area they are counting. So going off our Google Map, if I’m honest, the election district is not exactly clear. I don’t know where exactly my address will land. I’m going to say either the 6th or 7th district. Mainly because of the side of the street that even numbered addresses are on in all the NYC maps I’ve looked at.

Ward: 20
Assembly District: 15
Election District: 6 or 7

Does this narrow things down for me to one exact place? No. Does it eliminate thousands of pages of census? Yes. This is what we call a win. No it wasn’t tied up in a quick indexed search. However, we are talking about Scottish and Irish immigrants, maybe they had thick accents or no accent. Maybe the census taker had horrible handwriting and the name was not legible. There are just as many scenarios there as districts in New York City. 😂

We could keep trying to find it in the index, or we can take a Saturday afternoon and check Election District 6 and 7 and see what we find. Can’t hurt to try!

The Search is On

In order to not have 1,000,000 images in this post, I’m just going to document what I find as I start browsing.

  • Opened to first page of Ward 20, 6th Election District on FamilySearch. Location description on the side of the page says 10th Avenue between 26 and 27th street.
  • 8 pages in, 10th Avenue between 27 and 28th street. I find a James Parks family, from Ireland.
  • 11 pages in, 10th Avenue between 28 and 29th street. I start noticing that maybe the dwelling number is the street address? There was not a second family number indicated for each family. Just a bunch of families, under the same dwelling number.

12 pages into my targeted search. James Menzies family, written as Menses. We have James, his wife Anna, the three living children. James will be born in just a few months. Not bad for a Saturday afternoon I would say. Indexes are nice, I use them a lot but I have to say the payoff of this targeted search feels so much more satisfying.

The Moores and the Great Chicago Fire

Posted on by Kathleen
The Currier & Ives lithograph shows people fleeing across the Randolph Street Bridge. Thousands of people literally ran for their lives before the flames, unleashing remarkable scenes of terror and dislocation. "The whole earth, or all we saw of it, was a lurid yellowish red," wrote one survivor. "Everywhere dust, smoke, flames, heat, thunder of falling walls, crackle of fire, hissing of water, panting of engines, shouts, braying of trumpets, roar of wind, confusion, and uproar."

Above is a reproduction of a Currier & Ives lithograph showing people fleeing the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. I’ve always wondered if my Moore family were present in Chicago at the time of the fire but I’ve never pinned down their actual location or where they were in relation to the fire. Recently, I tasked myself with finding that information.

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Spent My Weekend With The Johnsons

Posted on by Kathleen

In my previous post, Word of the Day: Avoidance, I lamented that I have never really made progress with my Johnson family. I found a new to me resource that gave me the push I needed to go ahead and see what I could find.

NYS Historic Newspapers

I am loving the efforts of libraries and archives to make their collections more accessible. They are already fighting such a battle daily for funding and support, so anything that ends up being online, and free (!!) is an amazing accomplishment. I sent a donation by the way, because this site is truly amazing.

The NYS Historic Newspapers website is honestly really amazing. You can choose by county and then it will show you all newspapers they have and what years they have. My interest is Suffolk County for the Johnson family. I really want to know what was going on in Babylon, New York. My luck was on my side as they had South Side Signal which was a paper in Babylon from 1869 through at least 1920. 1920 being the last year they have issues online for.

Once you choose the paper you want to look at, you can then search the entire paper for something, which I believe is OCR searches. (I might be wrong, wouldn’t be the first time. 😅) When you go into month, you can also just search the month. Unfortunately for me, there was an advertisement for a Dr. Clark Johnson’s medicine. So my search results are a mess, I probably should learn the tricks on how to exclude those. If possible anyway.

Using the one trick I do know, I searched for Arthur, just to see if I could narrow down my results and I did! I want the 1880s so that left me with one result. Well, better than zero. Maybe the 1890s will be helpful too.

This is my one result from the 1880s, which is announcing Arthur’s death. I’m not sure who the Arthur Johnson is in the 1917 articles, but I will have to keep it in my pending folder for another day. Right now, I’m trying to focus on Arthur and his family. Always in the back of my mind, I have the one clipping on Newspapers.com as well.

This is a few years before his own death so this made me naturally curious to see if the South Side Signal would have mention of the deaths or even obituaries. There were 135 results for Johnson on my search results and the majority of those were for Dr. Clark Johnson. 😐 Never fear, I have Spotify and a healthy patience for paging through newspapers. I will side note here…

Side note: I understand that I need to look at each page of the paper, and see if there are other mentions. However, this paper has a section for birth, marriages and deaths reported in the town. In fact, they put instructions for it on the front page of the paper regularly for a very long time. I made a decision for this task, I was just going to check the one section for anything for my Johnson family to at least establish a clearer timeline for events. Some issues of the paper are very hard to read and faded, so it was really an eye strain issue in the end, but also I hope it was a practical one and not just lazy on my part.

There is a state wide death index for New York that spans 1880-1956. I decided to use FamilySearch to narrow some Johnson results by Babylon in the 1880s. Again, I’m just trying to narrow things down here. The plan was to hit the results of the index search and then go through the time frame needed page by page. I could be doing this the hard way or the wrong way but it’s definitely my way. 😂

My Results

I worked first from this index, then I’ve paged issue by issue from the papers first issue. Which was July 7, 1869. I’m up to 1885 now. 😂 Still going as I write. Of course all this is not written in permanent marker, but now I have certificates I can order, which will take me awhile, because New York State is currently backlogged by 4 years. 😅

This is where I currently stand with the Johnson now. Some of the announcements did specify some of the children as child of Arthur and Ann Johnson. Others did not. Mary’s a little trickier. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, probably I did. She disappears from her husband’s household after the 1910 census. In 1915 and 1920 the children are at the same address (838 Hendrix Street, Brooklyn) as before with their father. In 1920, her husband Robert Moore is even still listed as married. However, his 1925 death certificate, with his oldest child as informant, lists him as a widower. Then the 1926 Caldwell, New Jersey city directory, listing Robert’s death also shows a Mrs. Robert Moore living at the household. This is almost a decade before Robert Jr. will be married and he lists that 1933 marriage as his first. Then in the Moore family plot records for Evergreen cemetery it lists Mary Moore as being buried in Brooklyn on September 7, 1945. This is 20 years after Robert Sr.’s death.

So just color me confused. 😂 I’ve ordered the death certificate for a Mary Moore who is the right age, died September 4, 1945 in Marcy, New York. This happens to be the same location as a State Hospital. Is it a shot in the dark? Yes. Did I send the request 2 years ago? Yes. Am I still waiting? Also yes. Like I said New York State has a backlog. I’m about halfway through my wait allegedly, but at this point, I’m hesitant to send anymore requests. Its really a crazy thought process. I’m hesitant to send when I don’t even know if I’ll receive the first request, but I also feel the need to get the long wait started. For now I’ll sit and ponder it some more.

Anyway. Long story even longer. This was my weekend spent with the Johnsons. 😂

Samuel Redford, the story continues

Posted on by Kathleen

What We Know

It’s time to start updating where my family research is at these days. I thought I would start with Samuel Redford. He was previously the first known Ancestor on my Redford line. I believe I’ve gone one more generation back now but there are still so many questions. For the first part. I still have no record of Samuel’s birth. I’ve gotten many different records through the General Register Office.

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Word of the Day: Avoidance

Posted on by Kathleen

Definition: The action of keeping away from or not doing something

Well, that definitely describes me. Not only for today, but also for a long time when it comes to the Johnson line of my family tree. I actually need to be more specific, because I have a Johnson line on both my Mom and Dad’s side. Right now I’m talking about my Dad’s side.

The Johnson family on my paternal side.
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Answering Comments: Bartholomew Taylor and Nancy Dismukes

Posted on by Kathleen

One of the most popular posts on the blog

Two of my previous blog posts have comments from people who are wondering about my Bartholomew Taylor. They want to know if my Bartholomew is connected to the one they are researching. Their Bartholomew Taylor married a Nancy Dismukes in Georgia in 1819. 

04 Nov 2024 Edit: Apparently this post was garbled when backing up and importing to the new URL. I’ve used the Wayback Machine to restore the post the best I can.

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Not a Genealogy Cage Match: Find My Past First Impressions

Posted on by Kathleen 
Alert: This is a Long Post!
For the record, this is not my actual "first impression" of Find My Past. I have used it for British research a few times over the last few years. I have not used it on a regular basis. I have received no compensation for this post and expect no compensation. This is my honest opinion.

Being Realistic

In order to give Find My Past an honest look, I will be using mostly English ancestors to test it out. I’m going to give the American records a shot, but then I will move on to what I know they excel at… British Records!

Exhibit A: Grandma Gene (Emogene Taylor-Mays-Utter)

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Not a Genealogy Cage Match: MyHeritage First Impressions

Posted on by Kathleen 
ALERT: Long Post!
This is a long blog entry on some of my first impressions on using MyHeritage's website. These opinions are my own. No one asked for them and I decided to give them anyway. I pay the bills around here, so it's all good! No one sponsored this post and I don't expect anything in return for posting this. Just my honest opinion follows.

I just can’t let the cage match idea go! Once something is in my brain, it’s there fermenting for awhile. So I apologize for the terminology. This is definitely not a cage match. This is just me, giving things a chance for once. 

To get a good first impression, I didn’t want to base it solely on working my way up the tree. That means I am using my old file of reasonably documented people to do these tests. I feel like to truly get to know a website, you have to use it a lot and with a variety of different challenges. Otherwise you’ll never really know until way down the line when you actually start finding those things.

First Impression: MyHeritage

To be fair I will say when I first started using MyHeritage a few weeks back, I hated the family tree section. The Family View was really hard to navigate. Note: This was before Pedigree View was added. My screenshots were taken this week and not when I first tried using MyHeritage.

As you can see from my screenshot, the wideness of the tree made it really hard to navigate. Especially if I was working on someone not in my direct tree. Since a lot of my families have 5 or more children, I go on genealogy tangents often and this view was just too hard to use. This was a big disadvantage over Ancestry’s easy to navigate Family Tree.

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Breaking the Habit

Posted on by Kathleen

Wait a minute, what kind of habit are we talking about here?

Hold your horses, nothing crazy is going on here. I’m talking about my Ancestry.com habit. Don’t worry this is not an Ancestry bashing post. This isn’t even a post about how disappointed I am in Ancestry. While there are some problems with the website, as a website owner, I’m sympathetic to issues that pop up.

So why are you breaking your Ancestry habit then?

To be upfront, I fully intend to imbibe in my favorite genealogy website later. That’s right I said favorite. It’s my first genealogy love, it’s the one that I learned on. It however… expired on me. I didn’t have the subscription saved up to pay up front for it, so I decided to break my habit. I was not going to go into credit card debt just to keep Ancestry. Aren’t you proud? I’m trying being all grown up and stuff. Ha!

ancestry screenshot
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