I'm Ancestor Approved!

A pleasant way to finish up the year 2010 was being notified that I've received the “Ancestor Approved" award from Kelly (Coghan) Holderbaum, author of Sunny Ancestry (http://sunnyancestry.blogspot.com/). Thank you, Kelly! I hadn't read Kelly's blog before, and am glad to have discovered it, it's really good!

The “Ancestor Approved Award” was created by Leslie Ann of "Ancestors Live Here" in March 2010, and has been passed along to many genealogical bloggers. Recipients are asked to make a list of ten things they have learned about their ancestors that have humbled, surprised, or enlightened them. Then they are to pass on the award to ten other bloggers who are doing their ancestors proud. 

Being a professional genie and all, I'd like to extend the criteria for the "Things I've Learned" list to include clients' ancestors as well!

1. I had a hard time letting go of Cotton Kimball as the father of Elizabeth Kimball wife of Nicholas Colby of Haverhill. Cotton has some great people in his line, especially fearless Hannah Duston, of scalping fame. But this year I replaced him with John and Mary (Kimball) Kimball, so now I have twice as many Kimballs as I thought.

2. I've learned how to say no when asked to help with volunteer activities. I already do too much and though I want to help all of the societies to which I belong, there just ain't enough of me to go around! To remedy this dilemma I just switch around from society to society. This is good for networking, also.

3. When working as a consulting genealogist at Ancestors Roadshows, etc., I've learned that most people don't have questions they want to ask me. Almost everyone simply wants to tell me what they've done and who their ancestors were. A little validation of their research techniques goes a long way! 

4. Tom Jones (Thomas W. Jones, Ph.D., CG, CGL) taught me that just because you write as you go along doesn't mean you're not going to have to write the whole danged thing over again because of something you discover towards the end of your journey. One little piece of evidence can make you have to reorganize the presentation of your data, and if you don't do it, you're not able to prove your point effectively. Thank you, Tom! 

5. I keep thinking of a trip we took to England when I was 6 months pregnant and my eldest child was 18 months old. The flight was delayed, he got completely hyped from being overtired and cried (screamed) his way across the Atlantic Ocean. We were mortified at the horrible experience we were providing for our dagger-eyed fellow passengers. We were seated in the middle of the 5-seat row and the hostesses totally ignored us, even when he threw up while we were landing. This took all of 18 hours from start to finish, I had my husband and good friend to help, and still I think of the trauma! Recently, I was researching a lady from the Azores who came over with her 2-year old and a 9-month old in 1907 by ship. Who knows if she may have been pregnant? I keep thinking of her now and being awfully glad we were able to fly to England rather than take a ship! What a whiner I am!

6. I've learned that it is much better to just hand over a not-quite ready gedcom file to a friend than to make her wait another ten years because I've almost discovered something else. This is humbling.

7. It makes me feel centered and calm to study the past. Researching ancestors and reading about the history of countless localities has an effect on you after a while. You see patterns in behavior, in the ways that people react to certain situations and it makes you feel like the past is not so distant. You feel like you can predict the outcome of so many events based on whether or not people are paying attention to the past.

8. Plenty of people know very, very little about their ancestors, even as close as their own grandparents. Most people cannot name their eight great-grandparents. While not beneficial to those people, it is good for the professional genealogist because it brings more clients our way, but more important, gives us the gift of telling people about their own families and seeing their happiness as a result. I love this!

9. Having a family reunion is a great way to get the entire extended family interested in genealogy. It brings out photos (Essie, I haven't forgotten your album!), introduces people with different political beliefs, or from different parts of the country to the concept that they have much in common with each other, starting with 99 percent of their ancestors, and makes for great deviled egg consumption!

My nephew John Kemmett, cousin, Esther (page) Klaiber
and brother Tim FitzGerald
Barnes Family Reunion 2010

10. Twentieth century research is tough! The completely new dimension of dealing with live people is introduced and suddenly we have to be conscious of people's feelings and sensitivities! This is scary, but worthwhile in that we get to bring families together!

Blogger awards are a great way to get to know my fellow bloggers because they usually have a requirement that you pass along the admiration, so below you will find my top ten favorite blogs. The challenge lies in winnowing down my list to just ten. I just can't believe how many great writers there are out there! And how fascinating the variation in people's approaches to genealogy. Some of them encourage me by their own dogged research, others keep me up to date on technological issues,  a few make me want to call them and enjoy a loooooong cup of coffee together discussing life and ancestors, and the rest are just plain entertaining! I hope you enjoy them all as much as I do!  I hereby pass the "Ancestors Approved" award to the following geneabloggers (in no particular order)!

1. Heather Rojo's Nutfield Genealogy

2. Bill West's West in New England

3. Marian Pierre-Louis's Marian's Root & Rambles

4. Anne Morddel's The French Genealogy Blog

5. Paula Stuart-Warren's Paula's Genealogical Eclectica

6. Mel Wolfgang's Mnemosyne's Magic

7. Stefania [unknown]'s L'origine della famiglia Basaba

8. Miriam Robbins' AnceStories: The Stories of My Ancestors

9. Susan Petersen's Long Lost Relatives

10. Caitlin GD Hopkins' Vast Public Indifference

"Hey, Can you Give Me the Family Genealogy?"

No, actually. Not easily! There's too much of it! It's going to take years to write it up, if I ever feel ready to do that. We're having a family reunion this weekend and I want to provide information for my relatives. It lies relatively hidden on my computer and in files in my office, and it's certainly not ready for distribution, yet there is plenty I will share with my Barnes cousins.

For over twenty years I've been gently working on my family lines. A great deal had been done by other family members, so often I'm just verifying or trying to break down the few brick walls, especially on the Barnes side. I have to admit though that I spent most of my early years learning about resources, methodology and professional practices until I felt reasonably qualified, then I began taking clients. What I haven't done is concentrate on descendants of my ancestors because there are far too many. I've got enough Barnes descendants to make an impression, but probably not even one tenth of the total! I just document them as I run into them, to distinguish them from my own direct lines, for instance. But let's not even talk about the descendants of my other lines! There are scads of Litchfields, for instance, probably a billion living in Scituate alone (haha), but I've only taken note, again, of those families that are in my direct line, or those who could be confused with them. This is hard to explain to people who wonder why I can't just hand over the book. Yes we're related to Israel Litchfield of diary fame, but not directly, so he doesn't appear in a pedigree or fan chart. He's my 5th great-uncle, brother of my 5th great grandfather Capt. Daniel Litchfield Sr. (see my John Hancock post).

Now we're about to gather a big gang of Barnes descendants together and I wish I had a book to hand out! So instead I've made some charts––big ones––to hang up on the side of the house. I'm bringing red pens so people can make corrections. I've asked them to sign their notations so I can know who my sources are (I neglected to do that in 1995) and I'm bringing along some family group sheets for those extra large families of unknown cousins. 

Here are the charts I'm making:

•  10-Generation fan chart starting with my grandfather and his siblings and moving back to 1600s.

•  All descendants of Capt. Joseph Barnes and Polly Vinal, mostly via Israel Merritt Barnes I. This one has photos included.

•  Descendants of the father of immigrant ancestor Thomas Barnes for 6 generations.

•  Lists of Revolutionary War, Mayflower, and Ancient and Honorable Artillery ancestors.

I use Reunion for Macintosh, which creates lovely charts but is quite buggy, especially with a 100-page chart. These charts contain so much info that they have to be huge in order to be legible. It's much too expensive to print them in color so it's black and white and the photographs suffer. 

The fan chart at the beginning of this post will be 16 inches by 30 inches. Not too bad considering how many names it has. People enjoy seeing the whole she-bang at once. Get a load of those glaring brick walls. How they torture me!!

The next chart is the descendants of Joseph Barnes. This one took a lot of tweaking before I could get it down to 100 pages. I forget the final dimensions, but it's something like 18 inches by 120 or thereabouts! It will include everyone at the reunion and many more.

And the final one, below, is 16 inches by 51. It has descendants of the immigrant down six generations. I love doing these because they show me gaps. I need to do some work on the early Barnes generations.

When I feel ready, I'll get one done up properly by the Chart Chick, Janet Hovorka, at generationmaps.com, who does wonderful work, but for now, we intend to scribble on these and use them as information-gathering vehicles, so I don't want to spend too much money or time. Besides, I'm not ready yet. This is kind of joke because you're never ready. You can never be finished with genealogical research. There is always one more source to consult, one new ancestor who blesses you with two more progenitors. 

Anyway, I'm excited to display these for my Barnes cousins and even more excited to see everyone!