I Look for America

"They've all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
All gone to look for America"
(Paul Simon, America)

In the last three weeks I have driven over 4000 miles back and forth across the United States of America.  I had plenty of company. As Paul Simon wrote, it sure looks like everyone was out on the freeways and highways looking for America. Here are a few observations on American and traveling:

1. There sure are a lot of cemeteries. After driving 1300 miles in two days from Provo, Utah to the Mississippi River, the first thing we did was go see a cemetery. It is the Galland Cemetery, just north of Keokuk, Iowa in Lee County, overlooking the Mississippi River. This small cemetery has a gravemarker for my wife's Great-great-greatgrandfather and grandmother, Jesse and Mary Pettit. They both died in 1842 leaving six young children. Their son, Edwin Pettit, walked across the Plains to Utah as a young boy, with only his older sister to care for him. The place where they were originally buried is now under the waters of Lake Cooper behind the Keokuk Dam (Dam No. 19). Their graves were moved up on a hill to the Galland Cemetery, but the actual locations of the graves were lost. A few years ago, a group of Edwin Pettit's descendants raised a fund to establish a gravemarker. There is something sublime about standing in these small, almost unmarked, cemeteries and reflecting on the lives of those buried there.

2. There are even more cemeteries. If you live in the Midwest you have your projects all outlined for you. There are hundreds of small cemeteries scattered all over the countryside. I only feel a little bit sorry that I don't live in the Midwest to help.

3. The U.S. is dry enough to blow away in the next windstorm. We saw hundreds of miles of mainly corn crops that were killed by the drought.

4. I like back roads a lot more than freeways until I am really tired of driving, then I like going 70 mph instead of 45 or 50 mph.

5. All in all, the U.S. is showing very definite signs of the recession. There are a huge number of deserted business buildings.

6. I really like visiting with the genealogists across the country. What a great group of people!

Ron Tanner speaks on FamilySearch Family Tree

Since I was traveling to and attending the Family History Expo in Springfield, Illinois, I missed attending the BYU Genealogy and Family History Conference in Provo, Utah. One do the things I missed was a presentation by Ron Tanner about FamilySearch Family Tree. So far, I have found a few reports of what he had to say. If you would like to keep up with the latest news on Family Tree, I suggest the following sites:

• Susan's Genealogy Blog:BYU Conference on Family History and Genealogy 2012: Day Two
• The Ancestry Insider: Lick from the Same Lollypop

If you happen to have links to any other accounts of the presentation, let me know. 

Looking for clues

Yesterday, I was asked a question about an ancestor who lived in Illinois but was supposedly born in Missouri in the mid-1800s. The question was asked in the context of trying to find the ancestor's parents. Unfortunately, I did not have time to explore the situation in more detail, but the basic methodology for solving such issues is always the same: look backwards and come forward. In this situation, the person asking the question, as I understood the question, had a death place and date for the ancestor in Illinois. So instead of looking for birth information in Missouri (the obvious choice) he should be looking for birth information and information about his parents, in Illinois.

When looking for clues, you have to start with the known facts. Those facts are going to be found where the person lived. I have mentioned this before, but I am reminded of the old Bazooka Joe comic, where Mort, is looking for something at night under a street lamp. Joe asks Mort what he looking for and is told that Mort lost a quarter. Joe asks, "Where did you lose the quarter?" Mort says over there half a block away. Joe says, "Why are you looking here then?" Mort says, "The light is better."

I think a lot of times we go looking for clues where we think the light is better and the most common mistake is looking for information about an ancestor where we "think" the ancestor lived. The person who is looking for a birth date in Missouri is looking there because the "light is better." That is, they believe that is where the information is located so that is where they look.

There are several possibilities and I cannot name them all, but here are some things to think about:

• The ancestor was not born in Missouri at all, the unsubstantiated information is wrong.
• The ancestor was born in Missouri but the no record was made of the birth because of the early date.
• The ancestor was born in Missouri but moved as an infant to some other area.
• The ancestor was born somewhere else, but carried to Missouri at an early age and thought he was born there.

The list could go on and on. But all of these speculations point to the fact that information about this person's birth is more likely found in records made during his lifetime and therefore in Illinois or whatever other locations it turns out he lived. So, in effect, you start at the end of his life or even with the lives of his children, and work backward or other other words, come forward in time from the event.

What kinds of records should this researcher be looking for? Practically anything, from a birthday card or announcement to an obituary, from insurance records to medical records. In short, anyplace someone would have given their date and place of birth in conjunction with any kind of transaction, legal or otherwise in their entire life.

Don't be like Mort and look where it is convenient. Spend the time to find out about this person's family in great detail. The more you know, the more likely you are to find the birth parents, even if you never find the birth date or place.

Hello from Springfield, Illinois

I am honored to be here in Springfield, Illinois at the Family History Expo. It is just getting started but there are a lot of enthusiastic people here and I am looking forward to the eight classes I am teaching.

My most impressive memory of the trip across the U.S. is the huge drought. We passed hundreds of miles of dying corn fields and stressed soy bean plants. Hundred year old trees are dying and almost every house is surrounded by a brown, dead lawn. This situation calls to mind the fact that our ancestors crossed these barren lands without the luxury of staying in hotels and driving on freeways.

The important lesson about the drought and genealogy is to remember that external conditions such as droughts, floods, storms, extreme cold and other factors may have had a tremendous impact on our ancestors and without the historical context of these events, it is nearly impossible to understand some of the events of their lives.

Well, more later on the conference. Except for the opening and closing, I will be teaching every hour, so I will not be able to report much on the other presenters, but I will give you all some impressions of the Conference.

Merge, the missing link in FamilySearch's Family Tree

The documentation for FamilySearch.org's Family Tree program discusses the imminent introduction of a true merge function. However, that particular feature is not yet available as of the date of this post. What that means is that I can do nothing with my ancestral lines further back than about 3 generations. Past that point, there are unresolvable duplicates in the file that totally prevent me from making any further progress in sorting out the data ported over from New.FamilySearch.org.

In New.FamilySearch.org, there was an artificial limit on the number of individual records that could be combined for any one person. However, in the case of my ancestors, the limit was way too low and there are many uncombined copies of the same individuals that cannot be combined due to the fact that the total number of duplicates exceeds the arbitrary limit. So now I have unresolved duplicate pedigrees, as well as individuals in Family Tree. So, by the time I get to my Great-great-grandfather Sidney Tanner, for example, I cannot begin to untangle the duplicates and problems without the merge function.

There is also some controversy over whether or not Family Tree will allows users to add individuals to the file directly in Family Tree. Two days ago, I was in the new FamilySearch Center in Nauvoo, Illinois and one of the missionaries there showed me how he had been adding names to his file. Until I can get a handle on the merges, I have no one to add to the file, so I cannot duplicate what he was doing. I am getting mixed messages as to whether or not adding individuals is yet possible.

The Limitations of the Cloud

There have been a huge number of comments to Thomas MacEntee's questions on the Technology in Genealogy group on Facebook. Everyone online has an opinion about the convenience and reliability of using the Internet (aka the Cloud) for running programs and storing information. I think there is a lot more that needs to be said on this topic.

Fundamentally, when you store anything on any other storage device, other than your own, you are relying on their equipment and expertise to keep your information safe and secure.  The terminology in this area is clouded :-) and I will refer to storing your data in "Cloud" as offsite storage or with an offsite provider.

With some repetition, the factors here are as follows:

1. You are relying on the offsite servers and storage devices over which you have no control. The computer servers may not even be owned by the offsite provider. The storage may be in a huge "server farm" somewhere in the world or in someone's basement. If you knew that the place where your information was physically being stored was in an area subject to earthquakes, storms or other natural disasters would you be concerned?
2. Once you put your information on the offsite provider (the Cloud) you are at their mercy for service access. Their company could go into bankruptcy, be bought out or simply go out of business at any time. Do you know what happens to your data in those events?
3. What if the offsite provider's computers are illegally operated? How do you know that the offsite provider is not using its computers for illegal purposes and your data is at risk because of potential shut downs by government agencies. Do you even know what country your data is being stored in?
4. If you are storing any kind of private or sensitive information, are you prepared to have it made public. What if you get into some kind of legal action, can your data be "discovered" by subpoena or other court action?
5. What happens to your data if you cannot continue to make the periodic payments? 
6. What happens to your data stored for "free" on the offsite provider's computers if they decided to charge for the "free" storage such as just happened with Google?
7. What if you are in an area, like happened to me this week, where you cannot get reliable Internet service?

I think there are a lot of other issues that should be considered about online storage. The convenience is great, the whole idea is life changing, but the risks are real and not well thought out or discussed.

Following the Mormon Trail

In the last to days, my wife and I have traveled from Salt Lake City, Utah, up Emigration Canyon and followed the Mormon Overland Trail all the way to Nauvoo, Illinois. 14 of my 16 Great-great-grandparents took this trail, in wagons or on foot going west instead of east. Even in a fast car and mostly on freeways, it is a long trip. But two days is nothing compared to the average of about three to four months for the pioneers.

My journey began in the dry deserts of Eastern Utah and crossed the high desert of southern Wyoming. The highest point on the trail is almost 9000 feet in the Wyoming mountains. It looked to me that the biggest problem would be water for the entire trip. Eastern Iowa is green and covered with woods, but the rest is open prairie and water would be a huge problem. For this reason, the trail follows the rivers and streams.

I couldn't help but think of the hardships my own ancestors, and most of the other pioneers faced as they walked across the huge expanse of treeless desert looking country. One of my Great-great-grandfathers died in the attempt. Jens Christensen died somewhere on the Plains. Fortunately, all we had to look out for were speeding pickup trucks and semis.

Food was also a problem. It was extremely difficult to carry enough food to live to cross the plains, much less have anything left when they got to the desert in Utah. Most of the pioneers were hardly experienced in living in the desert and many times they suffered from lack of knowledge even when food was available because they didn't know where or how to find it.

Wood for fuel was also a problem, solved in part, by burning buffalo chips,  a polite way of referring to the manure left by these large animals. The pioneers were not hunters and only occasionally were they able to kill a deer, antelope or bison for meat.

Driving across the country did give me time to reflect on the reasons why I do genealogy. Guess what the first thing we did upon arriving at the Mississippi? You guessed it. We went to a cemetery and took pictures! I will share those in other posts soon.