Slow . . . and Steady
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
You can’t rush the genealogy research process. Achieving success is time-consuming and it requires a methodological approach.
Here’s what I mean.
I didn’t begin to do serious genealogical research until after I retired from teaching in 2012. I began the way everyone does – starting with myself and moving backward, generation by generation, as I built a very shaky tree. Then I began to fill in gaps and verify questionable sources. Within a couple of years, I had a reasonably presentable tree, and I began to wonder exactly what to do next.
I decided I needed to write about what I had learned – mainly so I could figure out what I knew. So I took one of my lineages, and, beginning from the earliest people on the tree, I wrote about each generation – or, I wrote what I knew about each generation. My format was very simple. My sentences included the bare bones of my ancestors’ lives. “Someone was born here, to his parents, along with brothers and sisters. He married there; his wife had been born wherever, to her parents. They had children.” And so on, and so on, until I had written out the lineage from that deep ancestor to myself.
This process made to realize where I had gaps or where my information didn’t make sense. I found myself writing a sentence like “John Smith was born when his father was 25 and his mother was 4.” What?!?!? Or I had people being born at great distances from where they married.. Always possible, but less likely in 17th century Massachusetts than it would be today. This often made me go back and check – how sure what I of each of these “facts” I was trying to spin into a story? Not so certain, I often found out. The process of writing made me evaluate – and reevaluate – the information on my tree.
I finished the first of these manuscripts, sent it off to Lulu.com (a self-publishing site) and set to work on the next line. I found the same thing happened, and, with each effort at writing about my ancestors, my tree improved.
Slow and steady.
Once I had incorporated all of my family lines in their own books (it was now two years later, and I was up to four books by now), I decided to cut across my tree and write about all of the men on any of my lines who had fought (or could have fought) in the American Revolution. I decided that I would look for men who were of military age (mid-teens and above) and put them on my candidate list. Then I checked to see if I could find evidence of their Revolutionary War Service. I found many who were already identified as Patriots by the DAR, and others where I had found sources that said they served but that had not been identified as Patriots by the DAR. I found still others who were of appropriate age but apparently didn’t serve.
Overall, I had 16 ancestors that I felt reasonably certain had served in the Revolution. So I proceeded to write about their lives and their service. Because I had already developed the narrative trees I mentioned earlier, I was pretty comfortable with my information. When I finished writing about these ancestors, their stories became a book also.
I was on a roll. Slowly but steadily.
What was next? I had identified two clusters of ancestors in colonial America – one group in Virginia and one in Massachusetts. I had created titles for the two books I was going to write, focusing more deeply on the ancestors who lived in these locations. The book about Virginia was going to be called Carry Me Back and the book about Massachusetts was going to be called Quaint Little Villages. I had also begun to wonder about how much my ancestors moved around – I had ancestors in 11 of the 13 colonies before the Revolution (only Delaware and Georgia failed to make the cut), but none of my direct ancestors were still living east of the Appalachian Mountains by 1840. I wondered – when and how did they move? I had a title for this book as well – Over the Hill.
I’m very good at titles.
I began to sketch the outlines of this project. I began collecting information about traveling to the West in 19th century America – documents, scholarly articles, maps, and so forth. I wrote an introduction and identified the individuals who would be the focus of this project – primarily my 3rd great-grandparents, more or less who were born east of the Appalachians and died west of the Appalachians. I made a spreadsheet, identifying the ancestors I was interested in, where they “launched” from and how I knew that, where they “landed” and how I knew that, and any notes I wanted to make to remind myself of anything important. This was a preliminary spreadsheet, and I knew that it would evolve over time.
I decided to write a preliminary draft about the migration of one of these ancestors, just to see how the idea would hold up. However, I soon ran into a problem. Migration stories make sense only if you understand the push/pull factors that led the migrant to move from one place to another. I realized I didn’t know enough about either the launch or landing sites to tell an intelligible story. What to do, what to do.
I decided to deviate from this project to study these locations. I was looking for a way to do this when I happened upon the 52 Ancestors project for 2019. I realized that what I was looking for at that point was not a focus on 52 Ancestors, but a focus on 52 locations. When I first had this idea, I wasn’t sure I actually had 52 locations to write about, but it didn’t take me long to determine that I could do this. I came up with 44 locations without looking at my tree, and enough other locations emerged once I looked at my tree to make up the magic number of 52.
I decided to do this in December of 2019, and scoped it all out so I could begin writing in January of 2020. I alphabetized all of the counties and made a schedule, allocating one week per county to write about my ancestors who lived there. I started each essay with a series of maps and a section called A (little) Bit of History, in which I set the county in its geographic and historic context. Then I focused on my ancestors who lived there, explaining how they came to be there, what happened to them while they were living there, and why they moved on.
Here's one example of how that worked. My mother’s maiden name was Workman, and I was able to write out her family from the date of their arrival in New Amsterdam in 1647 until the date of my parent’s marriage in Tucson, Arizona, in 1940. Here’s a chronological list of where my line of the Workman family lived over the years and the approximate dates they “landed” in these locations:
Kings County (Brooklyn) New York – 1640s
Richmond County (Staten Island) New York – early 1700s
Somerset County New Jersey – 1740s
Allegany County, Maryland – 1770s
Bourbon County, Kentucky – 1810s
Overton County, Tennessee – 1830s
Christian County, Illinois – 1870s
Logan County, Oklahoma – 1890s
Wharton County, Texas – 1910s
Pima County, Arizona – 1930s
The terms of the contract I had written with myself to work on this project meant, of course, that I couldn’t write about the locations in this order. Instead, I had to write about them in alphabetical order. I am a rule follower. Here’s a list of the order in which I wrote about these locations in my book.
Week 1 Allegany County, Maryland
Week 6 Bourbon County, Kentucky
Week 9 Christian County, Illinois
Week 24 Kings County, New York
Week 30 Logan County, Oklahoma
Week 37 Overton County, Tennessee
Week 39 Pima County, Arizona
Week 41 Richmond County, New York
Week 43 Somerset County, New Jersey
Week 49 Wharton County, Texas
This actually worked out better than trying to trace each line individually, as the first list above (the chronological list) would have demanded. My lines crisscrossed each other, with several different family lines living in the same county at various times. My focus on the location helped me realize how much the lives of disparate ancestors connected in ways I had not understood before doing this project. This also meant that I was jumping into and out of the Workman narrative throughout the year. Each time I got back to it, I knew a little bit more about the family and enjoyed visiting some old friends. An added advantage was that I did not get tired of this family; each time I circled back to them, I realized I was coming to understand them more fully. I was also writing about the family lines they intersected with, so, again, I was gained a fuller understanding of them.
I followed the same procedure each week. I gathered information about the location from whatever resources I could find (generally, websites that were easy to access). Then I organized my ancestors who were in each location. To do this, I had to figure out how to identify who lived where. So I learned how to download my GEDCOM from Ancestry, convert it to an Excel spreadsheet, and then manipulate the spreadsheet so that it sorted 13,000 ancestors by location. I didn’t know how to do much of this before I began to work on this project, but after a while, I became very efficient at doing all of this. It was helpful that I began this project in early 2020 – when COVID shut everything down, I had nothing to do other than work on my genealogy research. The result was a 579-page book that I was able to self-publish through Lulu.com in early 2021.
So what happened to Over the Hill? This was the project that started me down the path of examining migration patterns. It’s still sitting on the back burner – in fact, writing about it for this prompt has made me think about getting back to it soon. But in the meantime, I developed and taught a class on westward expansion for my local adult education program. I was able to incorporate what I had learned while working on 52 Locations. The course was very well-received and I’m teaching it again this fall.
Maybe Over the Hill will be my project for next winter.
Slow and Steady.
Thank you for outlining the details. Impressive! 😎
Karen, Hope you don't mind, but I have forwarded this message to my younger brother Ridge, who has gotten down into the weeds of our family since his retirement. He is was more intersted than I, and may want to find out more about your project(s). If so, I will effect an online meeting for the two of you.
Very interesting, but not my cup of tea! win