Cousin Bait Strategy Needed

I use this blog for a couple of reasons. Mostly it's to hear myself "talk" -- and see the error of my ways, of which there are plenty -- and get feedback from you, dear generous reader. The other way I use it is to catch a cousin. I get about one every couple of months and I've been happy with that rate of return. But I think it can be better.

When lost or unknown to me cousins contact me it's a trip! We furiously compare trees, exchange packets of info in the mail, and email a bunch of photos to share. It's some serious genealogy fun! Being a fun junkie I want more: that's what junkies do;) So I want to build better bait so as to attract more cousins.

My Grandpa Williams, Mom's dad, was a fisherman who made his own hand-tied flies. You have to think like a fish, he said. So let me try to think like a cousin and see what I come up with.

Searchability.
How can I increase searchability so that when my cousin googles grandpa Camey Williams, the fisherman, they are going to find me? Right now I'm using those labels Blogger provides and includes below the blog post... and I have to remember to use as many as appropriate and Blogger allows so that they get picked up by the search engines.
I wonder if google will pick up grandpa if I just put his info here in the text: Cambria Williams (1897 - 1960)? And then what happens if I add a hyperlink in a new window to Mom's Ancestry page for him? Does that help catch a cousin? Do more links out get me higher on the search results page? Gosh if you know please won't you post a comment?
And do I remember something about Alt tags being useful if you know how to use them? I just for the first time used the Alt tag on the photos below. Maybe I should have been doing that all along.
Anything else I'm missing here to improve searchability?

Photos.
Maybe it's just me, but I love photos. Could have jumped right through the screen and hugged that distant cousin who posted a photo of my great great grandmother, Mary Myers (1837 - 1909) on facebook. Here it is below. She was the granddaughter of my Revolutionary War ancestor, Nehemiah Newans (1740 - 1820) whom you can find on Mom's Big Tree on Ancestry at: http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/18168528/person/19373593834

Mary Myers 1837-1909

Place names.
My ancestors came from such specific places that I think maybe I could be using those too to catch a cousin. Places like Frostburg, Maryland, a town of just 8,000 people in 2000, and Magnolia, West Virginia, now gone entirely. You wouldn't be searching Magnolia unless you have an ancestor who lived there, and if so there's maybe a one out of two chance we're related.
Here's a link to those two places on Wikipedia, and I'm going to use a hyperlink as well as a regular link in the text:
Frostburg : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frostburg,_Maryland
Magnolia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnolia,_West_Virginia
Do you think this will help with the cousins?

Lists of names and dates... ?
I see Randy Seaver's beautiful blog, Genea-Musings and his posts, Surname Saturday. Here's a sample: http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/12/surname-saturday-clark-england-to.html
Now, my first take on it is that it looks like a whole lotta work! And the second thought is that it looks like perfect cousin bait;) Maybe I need more of that, useful to myself and others and cousin bait crafted to attract.

Trees online.
I do get a couple of messages a week in response to Mom's Big Tree on Ancestry. But that has nothing to do with the blog and I'm wondering if it need be connected in some way or other or does it matter? Maybe they are two different vehicles entirely.

Prominent contact information at the top of the blog.
So if I catch a cousin on a search then it needs to be easy for them to contact me, right? I'm gonna go check my blog right now.... Yup, it's there, but I could repeat it a couple of more times in the page layout so it's easier to find.

OK, that's all I can think of. You have any ideas? I just love it when cousins email!


Photo of the day from the Archive:


 

My Grandfather, Cambria Williams (1897 - 1960)

The best fisherman I ever knew.
Look at the size of that rainbow trout!

 

After I wrote this post I thought, hey, maybe I should google "cousin bait" and see what pops up... after I wrote this, d'uh. Here's what sharper tacks than I had to say.

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings:

http://www.geneamusings.com/2010/06/what-is-best-place-to-leave-cousin-bait.html

Amy Coffin at The We Tree:

http://wetree.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-to-write-cousin-bait-genealogy-blog.html

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Deb Ruth at Adventures in Genealogy:
http://deb-adventuresingenealogy.blogspot.com/2012/11/genealogy-blogging-is-cousin-bait.html

There are more so if you're interested go run the search for yourself. I likes these, above.

Full Screen

Rota

 

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/01/cousin-bait-strategy-needed.html

Beginning at the Beginning

So you know, I have this project going, the non-book project. Am trying to work on it day by day and keep the momentum strong. Easier to say than do. I know from a couple of previous experiences writing books that in the beginning and before it all gets weighed down under too many tangents, things are fun. Then later it's not so much fun as it is hard work. It's fun now.

Have an outline and it looks solid. The next step is to write an introduction.

The goal of the introduction - and the reason that it's written first - is to be a model for the book, to be the book in miniature, so to speak. It tells the why and the wherefore of the book and lays out chapter by chapter what the book contains. If the writer can, it's intended to give the reader a taste of the adventure, romance, and excitement that they will find in the pages that follow.

The original purpose for doing it this way was that you'd then have a proposal to show a publisher. It has worked for me in the past - a working method with which I'm familiar - so I'll do it this way even though at most this will be a self-published affair.

It's fun to write an Introduction! I like it:) It's your first shot at getting the flow of things going and a first shot at seeing where your boat holds water and where some of the more obvious leaks are. For that reason it's fine to take time writing this bit... or at least that's what I'll have to remind myself whenever I get frustrated and get bogged down, which is bound to come. I'm expecting a very leaky boat!

I do like constructing the introduction because it's the first rough draft of anything that gets down on paper. Someone once said, I love having written: it's the actual writing I hate. I could say I like having written because it's the only way I get to the editing bit. Kind of like going through kids to get at the grands;) And I know not to start editing in earnest too soon. There will be lots of time for that later. And I know from previous sad experience to lett all the word remain in the piece until later because it's a shame when you edit out a paragraph only to later realize that while it might not have fit there it shure would work there.

So that's where I am at present: have the outline in hand, and am gathering together my pile of random thoughts and ideas, then pouring them into the Introduction in no particular order. It's a real mess at the moment. It's supposed to be. It's just a mind dump of all manner of collected thoughts from here and ideas from there: the written version of the pile of scraps of paper I keep over on the corner of the table together with notes written in that spiral notebook I keep handy. But I have to say, I do love this project so far. There will be plenty of hard work and time to get angry at it later... but for the moment the bloom is definitely on the rose.


Photos of the day from Aunt Betty's Archive:

My GGF on Mom's side, Daniel Williams

Camey is my GF.
This is the earliest photo I have of him.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/11/beginning-at-beginning.html

Another Drinking Man Story

Actually, this is a drunken story about an ancestor who didn't drink much at all. And Mom might "spank me" for telling it, but I'm willing to bet not because it's about someone who was good and true and we both loved very much, my Grandpop Williams.

Grandpop Williams was a real sportsman in the old sense of being a wonderful hunter and fisherman and his family ate all that he caught or bagged. I can clearly remember him making his own flies for fly fishing and they were beautiful and treasured. When he passed, the only thing my Dad wanted of his was a small case of his hand-tied flies. I too found them fascinating. Some of my favorite photos of him were with his catch or kill.

He only drank when he was out hunting or fishing and just to keep warm. Seriously, he was not a Drinking Man, and believe me we know who our drinking men were and have plenty of stories about them, most already blogged about here! (If you want to read the other Drinking Man stories, just type in "drinking man" in the search box to the right.)

Mom only remembers her father being "in his cups" one time. He came home from a particularly cold day hunting, smashed. Now there are a wide variety of drunks from surly and mean to jolly and happy, and he, as it turned out, was of the jolly variety.

"Children," Grandma Williams said to the three little ones and furious at his showing up in this state, "Just look at your father! He's drunk!" She was really mad!

"Yes," the Jolly Drunken Father replied with an enormous grin, "Yes children, just look at your father!" he retorted with an enormous grin. Insert rollicking laughter here;) And off he went to bed to sleep it off.

Mom remembers this story and can see her Dad in her mind's eye as clear as if it was yesterday. Her father's big grin was a treat! What fun, especially because it was the only time she ever saw him drunk.

Photos of the day from the archive:

Grandpa Cambria Williams (Mom's Dad), 1897 - 1960.
Top: with big bass.
Bottom: seated with his kill, rabbits maybe.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/05/another-drinking-man-story.html

Ya Never Know Till You Look: Benjamin Thomas (1793 - 1846)

Was working on my tree on Ancestry.com this morning. It's the really short and abbreviated version of the GEDCOM that Mom built (hers with over 60,000 individuals on it!) Specifically, was adding photos to the small handful of ancestors there because I think it's nice when people find old photos of their ancestors, and maybe they didn't know what they looked like or didn't have that particular picture.

So there I was and you know how those little green leaves go wagging around at you... and I started wandering off task. I knew that Benjamin Thomas (Abt. 1793, Wales - 1846 Lonaconing, MD) came over on the Tiberias in 1838 into the port of Baltimore but I personally didn't have a copy of the ship's manifest. And one of those leaves was wagging about that so I had to go check it out.

Let me tell you who Benjamin Thomas is to me. My Mom's Father was Cambria Williams (13 JUL 1897 Ocean Mines MD - 13 SEP 1960, Frostburg MD). Everyone called him Camey and he was named after the Cambrian Mountains of Wales. His Mother was Jane Price (5 May 1862 Mt. Savage MD - 2 Feb 1939 Frostburg MD), and her Mother was Diane Thomas (Abt 1832 Wales - 17 Jul 1871 Mt. Savage MD). Benjamin Thomas was her Father and my 3rd GGF.

OK, back to Ancestry and those leaves and the Tiberias. The search result had it at "Liberias" but his name was spot on as well as the birth year so I had to take a closer look. There he was: Benjamin Thomas, 45 and wife Hannah, 40 with children: John 23, James 20, Benjamin 18, William 15, Diana 6 (my GGGM), Joseph 3, Phillip 2 and little Jane an infant. A party of ten!

His occupation was listed as collier. But wait! Look at the rest of the men on the ships list: all colliers!! Now what was a collier? Googled and Wiki said that anyone who worked with coal was a collier. That seems about right for the region at the time. Then I took a zoom look at the ship's list page and saw a notation in modern hand that said " Invitation (? perhaps) is Georges' Creek Co. for all except Mary Bannista of Baltimore." And I do know about Georges' Creek Iron and Coal Company. See this link for real interesting bits about it from the site, Western Maryland's Historical Library, or WHILBR: http://www.whilbr.org/GeorgesCreek/index.aspx



So that was the deal: the Georges' Creek Co. recruited Welsh coal miners and shipped them with family over to staff their booming coal and iron business. Benjamin Thomas was 45. Was he a miner all his working life? Probably. Am thinking that they wouldn't have paid him to come all that way if he didn't know the business. However, he was long-in-the-tooth for a coal miner when they started kids working at about 16 years old and even younger.  But his son was coming too and he was a strong young man of 23.

I'm still amazed at how one thing leads to another in this genealogy stuff!

Photo of the day from Aunt Betty's archive.

And mother to my Grandfather, Cambria Williams.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/02/ya-never-know-till-you-look-benjamin.html