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.
Continue reading “The Moores and the Great Chicago Fire”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.
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. 😂
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. 😂
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.
At the time I only knew two things, it wasn’t Josephine Doremus and that it was probably a Thorward. That was 50% correct.
Continue reading “Mystery Monday: We found Her!”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.
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.
Continue reading “Answering Comments: Bartholomew Taylor and Nancy Dismukes”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.
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!
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.
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.
Continue reading “Not a Genealogy Cage Match: MyHeritage First Impressions”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.
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!
Oh boy, sometimes those census records can really throw you for a loop. Sometimes they might even change the entire way you think about a family you are researching. There is never a family that confused me more than the Mays family. Any Mays researcher out there will agree with me. They are hard to pin down! This week I’m going to spotlight Rebecca Mays, for sheer stubbornness!
In the 1850 Census, everything seems fine. Nothing out of the ordinary here. We won’t even go into the fact that I don’t believe I have ever found a document that states William Mays Jr was the son of William Mays Sr. Especially since I know from watching many webinars that sometimes the Sr and Jr were added by enumerators if there was an older and younger man of the same name living near each other. I’ll get to that in my Do-Over when it’s time to stress over that! This census is important because it’s the earliest one that is going to give me ages of the children closest to the birth. This is especially important for Rebecca, who is aged 9 in this census.
Continue reading “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: In the Census (Week 05)”