How to Analyze Genealogical Sources: Part Three

It has been a while since I started out with a pancake illustration. This is the best example of what is involved with the levels of jurisdiction in geographical naming conventions. There is a legal definition of the term "jurisdiction" that refers to the legal authority of a particular court to act, but according to a more common usage, the term can also refer to a geographic area that is subject to a particular government or private entity. For example, the jurisdiction of the State of Arizona extends to its geographically designated boundaries. The idea from a genealogical standpoint is, as I have written previously, that genealogically pertinent records are usually associated with the various government and social entities surrounding the place where a recordable event occurred.

What this means for genealogical researchers is that the records created are not duplicative, in most cases, and searches are necessary at every level and in every possible recordset. It is convenient to use the term "jurisdiction" to sort out the levels of documentation.

Let me explain this more clearly. Let's suppose that a baby is born in Fredonia, Arizona. That birth will be most likely recorded (if at all) in the State of Arizona. But if the baby happened to be born about six miles or so north across the state line, the baby's birth record, if any, would more likely have been found in the State of Utah. For the time being, I am ignoring questions of citizenship about babies born on airplanes or whatever.

Here is how the "jurisdictions" stack up on a single location going from the smallest geographical level to the most expansive similar to the pancakes shown above.

The example is a very small town in Arizona; Joseph City, Navajo, Arizona

1. Joseph City, an incorporated community
2. School Districts, Church Subdivisions, and other local organizations
3. Power district, irrigation districts, hospital districts,
4. Navajo County
5. State of Arizona
6. United States of America

There may be other pertinent jurisdictional levels so my list is open ended.

Why the pancake analogy is helpful is that each level (pancake) is separate but all the records pile up so you have to search the location of any of the records separately as I explained above. So let's go back and look at the U.S. Census record I previously used as an example.

How many different jurisdictions does this particular U.S. Census sheet refer to directly or indirectly? Here is the list of what I found:

United States of America
Supervisor's District
Enumeration District
State
County
Precinct
Foreign countries listed as birthplaces
States other than Utah listed
Manufacturing organizations or companies
Schools
Farms
Tradesmen

When we view this list in the context of people living in the year 1880, there may also be other sets of records from other jurisdictional entities.

Now, think about this. How much of this information is incorporated in a usable manner by the fields you fill out in your genealogical database program. More coming.

For the previous parts of this series see the following:

Part One: https://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2020/04/how-to-analyze-genealogical-sources.html
Part Two: https://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2020/04/how-to-analyze-genealogical-sources_17.html

Where is the United Kingdom? More about standardized place names

By the way, the above map is both inaccurate and misleading. This is a sort-of series about standardization for place names. What I mean by a "sort-of series" is that I have no intention of maintaining a series of articles that specifically relate to each other. this sort-of series is more eclectic and less focused.

In my first post on the subject, I brought up the issue of the use of British Colonial America, a designation for early European colonies in America that seems to be gaining popularity as a location used in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. The Family Tree is the only large online consolidated or unified family tree that specifically suggests a wide variety of place names as "standard." Most recently the Family Tree has also incorporated time-specific entries to enhance the places. Here is an example of a suggested place name:

Let's assume that this person was actually born in the geographic location known as Albany, New York. Here is a Google Maps screenshot showing where this place is currently located.

Here is a quote from Wikipedia to get us started learning about Albany, New York.

Albany is one of the oldest surviving European settlements from the original thirteen colonies and the longest continuously chartered city in the United States.

OK, now it gets complicated. I am going to summarize this city's very long history. The location of the city was first claimed by Henry Hudson, the English explorer, for the Dutch East India Company in about 1609. The land was claimed for the United Netherlands. Of course, the European explorers ignored any land claims made by the original inhabitants. In 1614, Hendrick Christiaensen built Fort Nassau, a fur-trading post and the first documented European structure in present-day Albany.

You might notice that so far, the dates haven't quite made it up those on the Family Tree. More history passed and Fort Nassau became Fort Orange. I am wondering is there were any babies born in either fort? In 1652, the forts were incorporated into a village named Beverwijck (Beaverwick).

Hmm. The name of the place was changed from Beverwijck to Albany when the English captured New Netherland. In 1673, the Dutch regained the city and renamed it Willemstadt. However, the English took it back in 1674 and here is a further quote from the Wikipedia article about Albany, New York.

On November 1, 1683, the Province of New York was split into counties, with Albany County being the largest. At that time the county included all of present New York State north of Dutchess and Ulster Counties in addition to present-day Bennington County, Vermont, theoretically stretching west to the Pacific Ocean; Albany became the county seat. Albany was formally chartered as a municipality by provincial Governor Thomas Dongan on July 22, 1686. The Dongan Charter was virtually identical in content to the charter awarded to the city of New York three months earlier. Dongan created Albany as a strip of land 1 mile (1.6 km) wide and 16 miles (26 km) long. Over the years Albany would lose much of the land to the west and annex land to the north and south. At this point, Albany had a population of about 500 people.

So, it would appear that the two dates shown above from the Family Tree standardized selection are really for two different entities: Albany County and Albany city as a part of Albany County. How much of this history is pertinent to your genealogical research and how accurate do you have to be to adequately indicate where and when the events in your ancestors' past are documented?

By the way, where or what is British Colonial America? The term was not entirely made up by FamilySearch. Here is a link to a reference to a "Timeline: British colonial America." But is the name a specific geographic location or an expedient? Why do we ignore the earlier Dutch colony? Let's look at another standardized place name list from the Family Tree.

I didn't just choose this example randomly. The European occupation of what is now Arizona began in 1539 with the arrival of the Spanish Priest Marcos de Niza. The European settlement of the state began in around 1700 and the city of Tucson was established in 1775. So where is Spanish Colonial America? There are what were originally Spanish settlements in both what is now Arizona and New Mexico that date back into the 1700s. By the way, the first English speaking settlers in St. Joseph/Joseph City arrived in 1876 when the location was in Yavapai County. The settlers lived in Yavapai County for about 19 years before Navajo County was created.

What is the point? You have to know the history of the area and do a detailed timeline. If the issue is finding records that pertain to the place your ancestors lived, there are three main factors: the jurisdictional changes, the exact geographic location of the events in your family's life, and the changes in the jurisdictions over time.

Now, what about the United Kingdom? Here is the explanation of the origin of the name "United Kingdom" from Wikipedia: United Kingdom.

The 1707 Acts of Union declared that the kingdoms of England and Scotland were "United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain". The term "United Kingdom" has occasionally been used as a description for the former kingdom of Great Britain, although its official name from 1707 to 1800 was simply "Great Britain"

The use of the designation "United Kingdom" is similar to the use of British Colonial America. The terminology has been used but the designation refers to a concept and not a strick geographic location. Here is a further quote from the same Wikipedia article.

The Acts of Union 1800 united the kingdom of Great Britain and the kingdom of Ireland in 1801, forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Following the partition of Ireland and the independence of the Irish Free State in 1922, which left Northern Ireland as the only part of the island of Ireland within the United Kingdom, the name was changed to the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".

If you look at the standardized entry above, you will see a date of 1801. Farcet parish was established in 1851. This screenshot was taken from an entry for a person who was born in 1830, so is this designation correct?

Stay tuned, next time I will focus on whether or not it is even possible to establish standard (arbitrary) place designations. 

How to Analyze Genealogical Sources: Part Two

The most effective way to learn how to analyze any subject is through the "case method." This is used almost exclusively in law schools to teach people how to be lawyers although the use of the case method does spill over into other disciplines and professions. In law schools, the case method has evolved because of the complex and extensive nature of the world's legal systems. Learning through the case method is extremely time-consuming and challenging.

Becoming a good genealogist is very similar to becoming a good lawyer (attorney). Both law and genealogy take a significant amount of time and effort. Essentially, the case method of teaching law involves studying thousands of legal cases using a structured series of questions. Learning by the case method in genealogy involves looking a hundreds of thousands of records and applying the information gleaned from those records to thousands of individuals and families. In this blog post series, I am not going to look at thousands of documents and cases, but I will look at enough to give you an idea of the structure of the questions and how the answers to those questions as they are applied to individual classes of records and documents help you to evaluate the resultant information.

Here we go with the first "case" or record. This is a copy of a page from the 1880 U.S. Federal Census. Usually, I am searching census records for information about specific individuals and families. However, for the purpose of illustrating how to begin to analyze this and other records, I do not yet need to focus on any specific individual or family. I can analyze the record without extracting any particular information. Here is the record.

I chose to start with a US Federal Census record because census records will likely be the most familiar to anyone in any level of expertise. Here are the first two of many questions.

What is the geographic location of this record? What was the Census date of this record? Here is a screenshot of the pertinent part of the record.

Note: You can click on any image to see an enlarged version.

You can answer both questions by looking at the information indicated by the 5 arrows. It may seem like a good idea just to dive into the record and start copying out the information but, in the case of U.S. Federal Census records, it is a really good idea to make sure you understand the content and history of census records before you make assumptions about the information that may or may not be valid. When I first started researching, almost 40 years ago, I had only some very vague knowledge about the U.S. Census records. At that time, the records were only available in a few locations on microfilm and the main index to the records was the Soundex system of indexing. The ease of searching and extracting information from those same online census records today obscures the need to understand the records.

I would start by reading and studying the extensive explanation and history of the U.S. Census on the National Archives website. See Census Records. One note about the comments made by the U.S. Census records as presented on the National Archives website is that the National Archives fails to tell you about important online sources where the Census records are available for free. For example, they mention their "digitization partners" Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org (Fold3.com is owned by Ancestry.com) but they do not point out that Ancestry.com (Fold3.com) is a subscription website and that FamilySearch.org is free. They also fail to mention that a free copy of the entire census is also available on the Internet Archive or Archive.org.

It may seem obvious but before you can analyze a document or record, you need to be able to access the record.

You can find a step-by-step tutorial about the U.S. Census in The Family History Guide. See Census Records.  Here are some additional books and publications that will help with understanding the U.S. Census records.

Ancestry.com (Firm), and D.C.) Board for Certification of Genealogists (Washington. Genealogy Standards, 2019.

Dunn, Michael. A Beginner’s Guide to Online Genealogy: Learn How to Trace Your Family History and Discover Your Roots, 2015.

Eakle, Arlene H, and Johni Cerny. The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy. Salt Lake City, Utah: Ancestry Publishing Company, 1984. (Many later editions)

Foy, Karen. Family History for Beginners. History Press: Stroud, Gloucestershire [England, 2011.

Greenwood, Val D. The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy, 2017.

Meyerink, Kory L. U.S. Federal Census Records. Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Pub Co., 2012.

Thorvaldsen, Gunnar. Censuses and Census Takers: A Global History, 2018. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351373302.

Now, back to the particular census record shown above. The location information is specific as to the town and county of residence of the people on this page but as we shall see, the location information is even more specific. But look at the date. Does this mean that the census enumerator counted these people on the 7th day of June of 1880? Here is an explanation from Ancestry.com about the date of the 1880 Census:

The 1880 census began on 1 June 1880 for the general population of the United States. The enumeration was to be completed within thirty days, or two weeks for communities with populations of 10,000 or fewer. Regardless of when an individual was contacted, all responses were to reflect the status of the individual as of 1 June 1880, the official Census Day.

So, what does it mean when the record shows that the date was June 7, 1880? this is the type of question that needs asking but is only pertinent if one or more of the people enumerated had birthdays after June1st because the age information given by the census was recorded as of June 1.

This is only a very basic example of the way I will proceed to analyze these documents so stay tuned. 

For the first part of this series see the following:

Part One: https://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2020/04/how-to-analyze-genealogical-sources.html

How to Analyze Genealogical Sources: Part One

It has been some time since I wrote about analyzing genealogical sources and so I am once again addressing this topic in a series of posts. First a bit of background.

To start out, I would strongly recommend that anyone who is interested in becoming a proficient genealogist read about the history of genealogy in America. This book is one of the very few that deal with this important subject. If you do not know the history of genealogy, you have no idea of the pitfalls and problems we are currently trying to resolve. Here is the book.

Weil, François. Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674076341.

Now to begin.

Many fields of study have a very specialized set of terms usually referred to as "jargon. My own profession, the legal profession is known for its arcane and almost impenetrable jargon but that is also the case with medicine and many other specialized professions. Genealogists also have a certain amount of jargon but it is certainly not as specialized or arcane as law or medicine.

As I have written about previously, over the years, genealogists have adopted and tried to adapt, mostly unsuccessfully, some of the more common legal terms particularly those dealing with the legal Rules of Evidence. I say unsuccessfully because only a very small number of genealogists understand or correctly use the evidentiary terms. The rest of the genealogical "jargon" is pretty mundane, not too specialized and hardly impenetrable. Unfortunately, the particular part of genealogy that has adopted the most "jargon" is that part having to do with "evidence." The most complete list of genealogical terms I am aware of is the following:

FitzHugh, Terrick F.H, and Susan Lumas. The Dictionary of Genealogy. London: A & C, 1998.

The prevalence of legal jargon in genealogy is due, in part, to the fact that some earlier prominent genealogists were lawyers and they automatically applied their own legal methodology to their genealogical research. The current basic concepts of genealogical evidence and proof are found in the writings of Elizabeth Shown Mills. Here are her two most important books.

Mills, Elizabeth Shown. Evidence!: Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian. Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1997.

———. Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace. Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Pub. Co., 2007.

Another book that was influential in teaching a whole generation of genealogists is this one by Derek Harland.

Harland, Derek. Genealogical Research Standards: Instruction to Help Beginners in Genealogical Research. Salt Lake City, Utah: The Genealogical Society, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1975.

There are, of course, many other books. However, genealogy books are not easily found. The best source is to find a new or used copy, if available, on Amazon and buy the book. I have been collecting genealogy books for years from library discards and used book stores. 

Even though I have an extensive legal background, I have tried to employ a genealogical methodology that is not primarily based on legal jargon and words that have a strict legal meaning. The issue of maintaining a "genealogical" and historical research methodology and not overly infusing that methodology with legal terms is more difficult than it would appear. Because legal terminology has become part of our world culture due in large part because of the prevalence of law-related movies and TV series such as Agatha Christie's The Witness for the Prosecution and Perry Mason and their successors. Hence, a legion of genealogists has set out to "prove" their ancestry. 

The concept of having genealogical standards has been extensively codified by the Board for Certification of Genealogists or BCG. A substantial portion of those standards deals with evidence evaluation. The latest edition of these standards is contained in the following book.

Ancestry.com (Firm), and D.C.) Board for Certification of Genealogists (Washington. Genealogy Standards, 2019.

You can also see links and articles about the standards on the BCG website. There are very specific standards for researching, documenting, writing, and educators.

Now, the issue of analyzing a historical (genealogically significant) document is fairly complicated. The information contained on the document or record may be correct or not. It is entirely up to the researcher to evaluate the information and then form an opinion about its veracity. It is fairly common to find contradictory information in different records or documents. Copying information from an inaccurate document,  a book or other derivative records may result in perpetuating false information. This series of posts will not answer every question but it will, hopefully, provide you with a lot of questions and increase your ability to form more educated conclusions about the available historical records and documents.

Stay tuned

New Home School Resources pages on The Family History Guide

https://www.thefhguide.com/home-school.html

The Family History Guide continues to expand its resources to include direct links to pages that are helpful for those families that are involved in homeschooling. This page, as shown above, helps you get started with four main sections of The Family History Guide website that are ideal for providing a great at-home experience in family history. We hope you enjoy your home-schooling experience with The Family History Guide!

As always, The Family History Guide is your free, structured, and sequenced resource for teaching and learning all things about family history and genealogy.

Where is British Colonial America? Can we standardize place names?

Chart of the World on Mercator's Projection with the most recent Discoveries. Published by W. Faden. January 1821. Palmer Sculp. (to accompany) Atlas minimus universalis, or, A geographical abridgement ancient and modern of the several parts of the earth ... Second edition. Jan 1, 1821.

From a genealogical standpoint, the idea of "geographic location" involves two distinct systems. The first can be summarized as a global positioning system (GPS) that can identify the exact location anyplace on the surface of the earth. The second, completely different system, involves identifying the location of an event in relation to its geopolitical location over time. For example, if I were to state the location where my father was born, I could say he was born in St. Johns, Apache, Arizona, United States (or USA) or I could also say he was born at 34.507118, -109.363181. 

In the first instance, the geopolitical location, the "location" would have changed over time. Each of the designated locations would have been different at different times. St. Johns was first used anciently as a crossing of the Little Colorado River as was called Tsézhin Deezʼáhí in Navajo. Later, it was called El Vadito in Spanish. The next name for the town was also in Spanish, "San Juan." The first building, a stone house, was built in 1874. Another small town was built beginning in about 1879 named Salem. Eventually, the entire community became known as Saint Johns or St. Johns (with an "s"). The two ways of spelling the name of the town are somewhat arbitrarily used depending on the context. The official website of the location uses the spelling, "St. Johns."

The town is also presently located in Apache County. However, when the first settlement was made about 1874, Arizona had been a territory of the United States of America since Monday, February 23, 1863. At that time there were no counties. The first county that contained what would become St. Johns, was Yavapai County formed on Wednesday, November 9, 1864. The townsite became part of Apache County on Thursday, February 13, 1879. So, technically, the first house was built in Yavapai County. Arizona became a state on February 14, 1912. So, depending on my father's birthdate, he could have been born in Arizona Territory or the State of Arizona. But in either case, the location of his birth by geocoordinates would not have changed. 

What has all this got to do with British Colonial America? Well, genealogists have for some time now had a rule that the place of an event in a person's life should be recorded as it was designated at the time of the event. As you can see from this very short example, place names change over time as do the jurisdictions to which any particular locations belongs. This is the case because of the simple fact that genealogically significant records are created at or near the place that an event occurs and recorded either by someone who witnesses the event or has some duty to report the event. So depending on the place and the time period, a genealogist would start looking for significant records from the jurisdictions in force at the time the events occurred. 

Of course, genealogically significant records can move around (not by themselves but by those who claim ownership or whatever to the records). In many cases, notwithstanding the movement of records, the identity of a person can only be known by establishing the EXACT location of an event in the person's life. 

So what about using the designation of "British Colonial America?" First of all, there is no such place and secondly, there is no firm time period for the non-existent entity existence. Here is one almost definition from Wikipedia: British America.

British America refers to the British Empire's colonial territories in America from 1607 to 1783. These colonies were formally known as British America and the British West Indies before the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and formed the United States of America.

When did the United States of America officially become an independent country? Certainly not in 1776. How about 1783? How about 1789? By the way, Canada was a British Colony and arguably part of British Colonial America ( What is America anyway? Does America include Hawaii?) and Canada was a British Colony until when? Canadian history is even more complicated than some of the history of the United States of America and what if you were born in North Carolina in 1863?

Let's just say that deciding on a particular name for a country can be more complicated than most can imagine. Most politically inspired names of locations are somewhat slippery. There are some genealogists who routinely use "British Colonial America" for any event that occurred in one or more of the colonies up until 1776. On the other hand, there are those who resent that usage and have their own designation.

I have long been an advocate of using geographic coordinates to identify exact locations and then using historical narrative, like my discussion above about St. Johns, to identify the possible location of records assuming the researcher can identify the time period in question.

More about this as time goes on.

Now over 2,000,000 words

I began using Grammarly.com consistently back on October 8, 2017. That is about 30 months ago. Since that date, the Grammarly program has logged all of the words I have written using the program (primarily as a spell checker). Accordingly, as of the date of this blog post, I have written 2,004,441 words. Of course, I have written many more than that because the program did not and does not work with a lot of the other programs I use such as Microsoft Word (this week Grammarly.com announced support for Microsoft Word). By the way, Microsoft is coming out with an app that will work with the Microsoft Office 365 program (soon to be Microsoft 365) that will have similar features called Microsoft Editor which will be available on April 21, 2020. See "Introducing Microsoft 365."

As I may have written previously, I seem to have traded off talking for writing. When I was younger, I talked a lot but as I grew older, I started to write more and talk less, although now I sometimes talk to myself.

Obviously, you can take classes on learning how to write. Perhaps my writing would have been better over the years if I had actually taken classes in writing. But somehow, I think that writing over 2 million words is probably a good way to learn how to write. Depending on the complexity of the subject matter, I can spend quite a bit of time re-reading and revising what I write, but usually, I do the revisions as I write so I can write more. It does take time and a lot of thought to write but once I have a subject, I can usually just explain what I have in my head. However, I often need to do a lot of research both before I start and while I am writing.

I think that my first "serious" writing began when I was in my late teens and early twenties. My first attempts were writing poetry and I ended up studying the History of the English Language as a second major to my degree in Linguistics so I did take a few English classes. I was also employed on a National Science Foundation project to develop a sequenced instructional program for teaching poetry to Middle School students. I wrote a lot of poetry but then just stopped. Subsequently, I began to dream of writing novels, mostly science fiction. I did write a few but never pursued trying to get any of them published. Meanwhile, I started writing and technically publishing a huge amount of legal stuff while in law school and afterward while working as an attorney. The blogs came about as a development of my legal writing. Here is a link to the first "Genealogy's Star" blog post I wrote back on November 21, 2008. Check out the FamilySearch Wiki. You can see that I have come a long way from those early attempts.

Now, I am at blog post number 5,718 just from those blog posts for Genealogy's Star. My other passion is photography. I have gotten to the point of publishing books, I think I am author and co-author on about 25 or so books and I do publish my photos on Adobe Stock and sell a few from time to time. I think a lot of authors and photographers assume that "selling" their work is a validation of its worth. Since there are probably billions of photographers now and maybe just about as many authors, I am not deluded enough to think that I could ever make any serious money from writing or photography although that might have been the case if I had decided to focus on writing or photography much earlier in my life.

I guess I will end this blog with a photo I took recently.

This seems appropriate for the time being. See https://walkingarizona.blogspot.com/