Wisdom Wednesday: Where did they put that?

Oh gosh! Either I'm getting old and the mind is going or stuff is changing too fast! Maybe a bit of both:) Because it's Wednesday, I'll try to keep track of it all and use the GeneaBlogger's blogging prompt called Wisdom Wednesdays.

FamilySearch: Oh no you didn't! Just when I thought that I was finally getting the hang of finding my way into the FamilySearch site in an orderly and useful manner, they went and moved it all around again! Much blogging has been done about what it all means and how to now make your way in to find what you're looking for. Here's what Randy Seaver wrote on Genea-Musings, and you might want to bookmark this as a guide. He quoted Dear Myrtle on the subject: "In this day and age, bookmarks on a specific computer should not be the mainstay for Internet researchers." I missed that post from Ol' Myrt but as usual she hits it on the head!
I understand from fellow bloggers more in the know that I that FamilySearch feels that just 11% of their users are dedicated genealogy and family history buffs. The rest are casual visitors. Really? I do find that difficult to comprehend. Do they mean the population of unique visitors? Maybe I could understand that and they are thinking in terms of being similar to Ancestry.com with lots of people who come and go, but mostly eventually go. But what about page loads and time spent on that site? (I could possibly account for a tenth of all their measured user time on that site because some days I feel like I'm just "parked" there all day long.) Really, FamilySearch? Really?
Keep Randy's Genea-Musings on your favorites. I know that he'll lead us through.

New-To-Me Cousin, Rich, who knows what he's doing! I just love meeting new cousins on the ol' internet thingy! Well, Mom met him first way back when, because they both have been doing this for years, or should that be decades? I like Rich because he's easy to communicate with and is willing to share. Cousin Rich is going to visit Mom this week. As you might remember, Mom is 94 and still working on her Big Tree. Rich and she have been emailing for about 10 years and they've never met, as happens in this crazy game.
Do you also run into new-to-you cousins who just want a copy of a document or to pick your brain and then disappear in the night? Hello, you there cousin? No reply or just a short email back saying they aren't working on that anymore. (Yeah, but I am!)
Must say that I've run into a couple of really lovely cousins lately and that feels super good! I just love "community"! Guys like Cousin Rich make it all worth it:)

GEDmatch! Where art thou? Just when I started loving the heck out of GEDmatch, they crashed and burned. But late yesterday they got back up. I was sitting here with two ID numbers in hand that I needed to compare chromosomes with and a juicy GEDCOM waiting to be uploaded and no way to get to the goodies. But now it sure looks like they are making a come back, and with a newly designed layout and sign-in feature too. It took me a moment to realize the GEDCOM upload feature wasn't yet functional, and another little minute to locate the old features I had been using. Never mind, they'll get there.

Haplogroup H: New Info! Where did we come from, ask the folks on the Haplogroup H3 message board where so many have Irish ancestors! A new article which you can find here reveals a lot about we Hap H people.
"Says Dr Brotherton, "This is a very interesting group as they have been linked to the expansion of Celtic languages along the Atlantic coast and into central Europe."
So Ireland it is:)

This has been such a crazy busy week... and it's only Wednesday!

Wills Creek Bridge near Cumberland, MD.

Photo by Curtis, about 1910.

(See tab at top, Nat'l Highway, to view full album.)

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/wisdom-wednesday-where-did-they-put-that.html

Thoughtful Tuesday: Young and Old, Grandma Kelly

I love the Geneablogger's wonderful Daily Blogging Prompts because they lend structure to my blog posts and keep me moving through the week. They inspired me to make up a couple of themes on my own: DNA Monday, and The Creative Process on occasional Fridays. I had the idea for another theme while at an Eric Burdon concert on Sunday evening. Hey, ideas come at all times and places:)

Here's the concept: contrast what is known about an ancestor in their youth with the way they were in their maturity or old age. You see, there was Eric Burdon giving a knock-out performance and yet I could see in my mind's eye his young face super-imposed over the old rocker before me belting out "We Gotta Get Outta This Place." His age hadn't taken a thing away from his talents but rather added a new and deeper dimension to his performance. So I wondered if that was also true of ancestors? Let's try one and see, shall we?

Here are two photos of my paternal grandmother, Helen Zeller Kelly (1894 - 1985). The first one was taken when she was just a girl and the apple of her father's eye. Her father, Gustav "Gus" Zeller (1858 - 1925) was a very successful barber with a large barber shop with bathtubs and all, right on Main Street in Frostburg, Allegany County, Maryland. The large and prosperous coal mining community insured that there was a constant steady stream of men who needed a bath, hair cut and shave. Gus invested his earnings in property which were mostly rentals. And nothing was too good for his only daughter.

Look at her outfit! And that big grin on her face! Her hat, her stance, and that fur muff all of it tells of a well-off life and its enjoyment. I love this picture of her because she looks so young and carefree. And, I think, lovely and very sweet. Was she a tad spoiled? Oh, perhaps:) She always got her way!

 

 

Below is Grandma Kelly, as I always called her, in the 1940s. She'd raised six kids during the Great Depression and now three of her four boys were going off to war. She's standing in the back yard on a cold winter day, perhaps late fall or before the mercies of spring arrived, with someone else's jacket that doesn't quite fit, on her shoulders. She's wearing her usual house dress and apron and there's a cold wind blowing her skirt. But to my eye she stands solid as a rock in sensible shoes and hands folded across her middle. She stands on her own land, in her own yard on the property her father left her.

 



The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/thoughtful-tuesday-young-and-old.html

DNA Monday: 3.1% Neanderthal, What Does It Mean, Really?

Well poor ol' GEDmatch is out so there's no chance of playing around there. The main page now explains that the servers are out and a message that says this:
17 April 2013 - There have been recent unrelated malfunctions impacting the operation of 2 servers. One will likely result in the loss of recently uploaded genealogical (GEDCOM) and triangulation ('match' files) data. The other server is being repaired. No time estimate yet, but it will probably take at least a week to resume limited operation.
Below that is a plea for donations to purchase additional back-up equipment. Yikes! Are they underfunded? Hope not. Maybe some large deep-pocketed group could buy or invest in them. They seem to have a very workable business concept.

I could continue to refine my list of surnames and locations associated so that I have something at hand to give potential DNA matches, but frankly I don't feel like it right today. My sinuses are all clogged and I'm working in slow motion so working on a list that needs to be perfect doesn't appeal. Instead, let's have some fun with the Neanderthal results from my 23andMe test.

Must confess to liking the idea of being 3.1% Neanderthal and in the 99th percentile of those who tested with 23andMe! At least I'm naturally in the 99th percentile at something, if an extreme outlier with no practical application. Here's a screen shot of the Neanderthal results page.

 

I think I'm more European in appearance than Neanderthal, for which I'm thankful;)

 

I scroll on down the page to find a link to a white paper on the Neanderthal issue and testing. The first thing it mentions is whether humans and Neanderthals interbred. I've been on a DNA message board for a bit now and this Neanderthal/human interbreeding topic comes up often. Guess people are thinking about this a lot. Here's what the white paper says, by Eric Y. Durand:

As a member of the Neanderthal Genome Analysis Consortium, I participated in the analysis of the first draft of the Neanderthal genome that was published in 2010. More specifically, I was involved in the analysis that led to the discovery that Neanderthals did indeed interbreed with modern humans. We found that 1-4% of the genomes of all modern humans outside of Africa is of Neanderthal ancestry.

 

OK, so yes, they had real physical contact. Big deal, now let's move on. What does having Neanderthal DNA mean? I have no answer here, sorry, and it seems by the scant information on their web site (nifty t-shirt aside) neither does 23andMe.

 

I Googled around and so can you. Here are some interesting, at least to me, locations on the web.

 

What Neanderthal DNA can teach us about race, autism, and more.

 

From the Smithsonian Institution: Ancient DNA and Neanderthals

 

From National Geographics: Neanderthals... They're Just Like Us

 

You can find a lot more on this fascinating topic by just searching on Neanderthal and DNA.

 

I confess to finding this particular topic interesting because in a way it does connect us to our deep roots and paths of human migration, with mental images of very deep ancestors trying to survive climate, food opportunities or lack thereof, pest and pestilence alike, and yes, maybe interbreeding. It does make me thing in terms of deep time and about the possibilities of survival in the long haul. It takes me out of the mundane (and my sinus headache) and puts me in a really big picture. I like that!

 

 

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/dna-monday-31-neanderthal-what-does-it.html



Surname Saturday: That's Waggoner with Two Gs

Off we go on an adventure for Surname Saturday, the blogging prompt from GeneaBloggers! I just love writing up these posts because it's another occassion to review what's known and what is yet to be discovered! We're in the 2nd great grandmothers and this time we'll be checking out the Waggoner line. Recently, while on a message board for Allegany County, MD., I happened across someone who is also researching some Waggoners from there. We haven't found a match yet and her people are from a more easterly location in the county, but there just aren't very many Waggoners so we're suspicious!

Diane Kelly Weintraub

2. Francis Patrick " Pat" Kelly (1916 - 2007)
3. Virginia Williams, living and loving it

6. Cambria Williams (1897 - 1960)
7. Emma Susan Whetstone (1897 - 1956)

14. Joseph Hampton Whetstone (1858 - 1938)
15. Catherine Elizabeth House (1865 - 1947)

28. Joseph Edward Whetstone (1816 - 1897)
29. Sarah Waggoner (1825 - 1880)
Joseph Edward and wife Sarah Waggoner were born and died in Garrett County, Maryland in and around the tiny community of Grantsville. He was a stonemason but for a time around 1840 - 45 took care of the inn and roadhouse his father-in-law's managed on the way west, The National Pike. In the 1850 US census Joseph E. Whetstone reports that he's a blacksmith and he and Sarah are living in close proximity to the Inn.
The winters are harsh here and my guess is that daily life then was not easy. I blogged not too long ago about a letter Sarah received from her mother, also named Sarah, just before she died and you can read it here to get a feel for the times.
Sarah is the start of the Waggoner line for Mom and me.
They had these 13 children:
Elizabeth Jane Whetstone 1842 - 1896
Susan Emily Whetstone 1844 - 1877
Peter Yeast Whetstone 1847 - 1918
William Whetstone 1850 - ?
Charles Whetstone 1851 - 1880
Charlotte "Lottie" Whetstone 1852 - 1872
Mary Alice Whetstone 1856 - 1862
14. Joseph Hampton Whetstone 1858 - 1938
G. O. Theodore Whetstone 1860 - 1861
John Edward Whetstone 1862 - 1896
Bradford Whetstone ?
Zoe Violet Whetstone 1864 - 1948
Frank Whetstone 1869 - 1959

58. FNU (first name unknown) Waggoner (dates unknown)
59. Sarah Wooden, then Waggoner, then Yeast, and finally Durst (1810 - 1870)
Sarah was born Sarah Wooden. She had my 2nd great grandmother by a Mr. Waggoner, and we frankly do not know if they were married or not because Mom has found no record. Next she married Peter Yeast (1808 - 1851) and had seven children with him. When he died she married Phillip "Major" Durst (1817 - 1888) presumably after 1851. Major Durst had  two adult children at that time.
She had just one child with the elusive Mr. Waggoner:
29. Sarah Waggoner (1825 - 1880)

It's funny how information comes to you. When I write these posts I invariably recheck Mom's Big Tree on Ancestry.com to see what's what and look at member trees too. This time I reached out to two people who looked like they knew what they were doing and one replied back with information that might be promising. From looking at her tree she has plenty of folks on it from the geographical area most of my peeps come from... so who knows, maybe we're cousins!

Looking towards Grantsville, about 1910.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/surname-saturday-thats-waggoner-with.html

House Heirs Association: Part I, The Basics of the Case

This is a case that has some real juicy bits: land swindles, embezzlement, fraud, malfeasance, and a whole lot more including a group that tried to do legal battle with the US Government. It starts almost 200 years ago and even today some riddles still are not solved! But let's begin at the beginning, and I'll tell you how it all started, at least as I see it.

One day not too long ago Mom said to me, very casually, "Oh, those are the papers from the House Heirs Association meeting held about 1900 or so." And I nearly flipped my wig. What?!! What's the House Heirs Association, I bleated over the phone?! Poor Mom. I've always been the kid asking all the questions.

In a nutshell, the descendants of one Andrew V. House believed that he and his son, John Valentine House, had been swindled out of payment from the US Government for a 99 year land lease on an immense tract of land they owned reported to be as large as 64,000 acres. At the end of the lease the government and people living on that land in about 1884 or 85, located roughly in Frederick County, Maryland, all forgot that the House family were the rightful owners.

Around 1887 a bunch of descendants of those two House men got together, thinking, "It ain't right", and decided to sue the government. (Good luck with that.) They called themselves the House Heirs Association. At the first there were about 30 or so individuals who claimed to be House Heirs and chipped in to pay for the services of a lawyer. By 1900 there were 300 to 400 individuals involved, and from all reports, even more money for more lawyers.

The really cool thing for researchers is that in order to make claim to being a House Heir people had to provide their ancestral history tracing back to John V. House as well as report on all that they knew about the land lease. You can still find some of the correspondences online on a RootsWeb message board listed as House Heirs Association meeting Williamstown, KY, Jan 9th, 1899. The author of the bulk of these post is Leonard Granger who began the lengthy and laborious task of transcribing the minutes of the meetings as well as the letters and posting them to the RootsWeb board. He started posting on 25 March, 2002 and got most of it posted by 19 May of that year. Looks like he went back and updated and edited the posts around 17 November of 2003. I sent him a message through Ancestry.com messages system and hope to hear back... please let me hear back. I thanked him for transcribing and posting all he did, without which we'd surely be losing another piece of our shared history. Bless him.

I also stumbled over a RootsWeb orphan page about the House Heirs Association that looked promising but goes no where. No name or contact info is available and I can't tell when it was set up so that's a dead end. One more dead end is the link on the House Heirs message board about a GeoCities web page on this topic. That page is long gone.

My thought is to post here for a while and see if anyone else is interested in this aspect of the history of our House ancestors. If this topic interests you or you are a House descendant, please email me at dianew858@hotmail.com . And let me be clear: I have no intention of reviving that suit! Makes me laugh to think about it:) Mom has some papers that are relevant and Cousin Karen does too, so maybe we can share what's known with our House cousins thereby keeping this story alive and moving it down the road a bit. Imagine: 400 of them intended to sue the US Government... for $300 billion dollars!

Overview
The best short overview available online comes from that old and now orphaned and archived RootsWeb page mentioned above, with no date or name attributed. As you can see, for a very long time these descendants hoped to get payment from the government. They were from "the middle walk of life" and saw this as a way to improve their lives and provide a better life for their families. Here's the text:

Welcome to a website I created to provided information on the House Heirs Association of years 1889 to 1923. The House Heirs at that time felt a real injustice had occurred on their ancestors, Andrew V House and his son John Valentine House, when the United States Government failed to make payment on a 99 year lease for a large estate located in State of Maryland. The organization held several meetings around the eastern and mid-west states, appointed several investigation committees and asked all House Heirs to submit their family ancestry lists, if they felt they were related to John Valentine House. Many House families of the time submitted letters, some up to six pages in length, when making their claim. The letters will be listed as found in the files, and I hope no one is upset if a House relative talks about their family. They all meant good and saw a real opportunity to have a better life, as most had experienced a difficult time around the turn of the century.

I have no idea who the "I" is in the first line and would love to know, as well as when he or she created it. Too bad it all got lost to the vagaries of time on the internet.

Just the facts
Here's a short list in no particular order of the facts gleaned from the copious material Leonard Granger posted to the House Heirs Association message board on RootsWeb. Without his posts, there would be close to nothing on the web about the House Heirs Association.

Timeline (short) of the House Heirs Association (HHA):
1896: A few (estimated at 30 people) House Heirs "instituted proceedings" against the government.
Jan 9, 1899: First meeting in Williamstown KY. About 300 to 400 in attendance.
1900: Meeting of HHA in Chicago
1901: Meeting of the HHA in Kokoma Indiana
1902: Meeitng of HHA in Ohio (?)
1923: HHA, one family accused of embezzling money collected to fund the suit. HHA disbanded.

About the land:
64,000 acres
Value in 1785 was about $6 billion.
Origins of House ownership: 1715, attributed to inheritance from a member of the English Royal Family.

Lease:
Began in 1785 just about the time iron mines discovered on the property.
Lease length: 99 years
Terms: 14 cents per acre per year
Lease would have expired in 1884.
Terms at end of lease: ownership to revert to House heirs.

There's more, way more! Next time let's have some fun and follow the money:)

My 2nd great grandfather, Samuel Albert House (1832 - 1917).

Wonder how much he knew about the House Heirs Association?

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/house-heirs-association-part-i-basics.html

Wisdom Wednesday: Wow! This is Strange

It's Wednesday again and time to take stock and visit the GeneaBlogger's blogging prompt called Wisdom Wednesdays. It keeps me grounded yet moving forward to make a tally each week of what progress I've made learning about the wild wacky world of genealogy. This week I seem to be noticing a lot of things that maybe I should have noticed before and used or taken advantage of. This has been a week where I feel like I've been missing some great stuff and need to pay more attention to what's going on around me. But then maybe I need to cut myself some slack. There is so much to learn and we are all doing a lot of learning all the time, aren't we?

New Favorite Thing Person: Ancestry Anne and her blog! Message to Anne Gillespie Mitchell of Ancestry Reference Desk, and that's the official blog of the Ancestry.com Library Edition: here's a big e-hug for you, Anne, and how you deliver such good stuff in such a neat, clean package. I can hardly wait for my email syndication of her blog posts to arrive! I'm not a library at all but I surely do like her posts.
I dunno, Anne popped up on my radar all at once just about the time of RootsTech. Then Randy Seaver mentioned her and her presentations - especially the one about searching which is pure gold - on his wonderful blog, Genea-Musings. So poof! There she was seemingly out of no where, at least to me. Strange how someone with such valuable info can be around and you don't know a thing about it until she pops up a couple of time in a short period! Don't ya love it when that happens?

YouTube! Do you know how many great genealogy videos are on YouTube? I don't either but it's a lot! FamilySearch has a channel there as does Lisa Louise Cook as Genealogy Gems. Or Dear Myrtle! There are so many but I'll stop now so that you can have the fun of discovering more yourself! Just plug "genealogy" in the search box and see what you get. If you don't use YouTube for anything but Psy's latest video you're missing a sure bet. This week I watched a couple of videos and vowed to watch more on a regular basis because it's fun and just takes five to ten minutes, except for Ol' Myrt and the Hang Outs. I even found some interesting videos of the B&O Railroad in Western Maryland, which is where I do a lot of my research. Strange, YouTube was there all the time and underutilized by me.

This is not strange: Armchair Gelealogist on Citing Sources! Here's a different slant on citing sources from one of my fav bloggers, Lynn Palermo over at The Armchair Genealogist. It's a post and chart about how to use a workflow strategy for citing your sources so that it's not a great big hairy deal but something you do automatically as you work, or at least that's what I was reading into her post. I like it because it gives a way to refine and develop all of your sources for one ancestor and just tuck it into your overall workflow. Had not thought about it that way before and was thinking that citing a source is a single stand-alone function. Lynn shows us how it's not some isolated strange event that hangs off the side. Bigger picture, and very cool! Thanks, Lynn!

Strange Visitors to the Blog! For about a month now I've noticed that all of a sudden between 1 and 2AM there will be 200 to 300 visitors to this blog, all to the same obscure post! I have no idea what the heck that's about but it was freaking me out so I took down the post. I checked the post for anything that might be taken another way or the unfortunate misspelling of a word or turn of a phrase to make it X-rated, but I got nothing. Too strange for my tastes so I took the post down. What was that about, I don't know?!

"National Pike Through the Cumberland Narrows"

By E. Irwin Gilbert, 1906.

(For more National Pike photos from this historic album, click on the tab at the top.)

The URL for this post is:

Tuesday Tips: Time with Thomas MacEntee

Well, wasn't I a lucky girl to spend Saturday last at a workshop with Thomas MacEntee in Carlsbad, CA, hosted by the North San Diego County Genealogical Society? Yes! Got to chat with Thomas a moment before the presentation - and that's always nice - as we compared notes on Palm Springs. But the big guns started firing in the meeting room just after as Thomas proved his rep as a wonderful speaker.

I could post about 20 tips a day from his four topic presentation and not be done in a month or two, it was that packed with information! But the thing of it that I appreciated most is the way he organized everything into a handout with web sites and resources such that you only needed to take a note or two if you had a thought about your own research. He's one of the best, and this coming from a woman who made a living as a corporate trainer for the Fortune 50 and later a college prof. Smooth and graceful is he.

OK, so here goes with a couple of small items that blew me away, in no particular order. And sorry, Thomas, if I'm putting my words in your mouth... yuck.

1. No guilt, no scolding. So we all didn't start citing our sources from day one, and we didn't keep a research log. Who did? Just start as soon as you can and do it in a way that makes you happy and is useful to you ... so that you don't find yourself looking it up again. And if you do have to look it up again, no guilt, no worries, and especially no scolding!

2. Search collateral lines. Collateral lines are those folks not in your direct line of ancestry. We hunt for stuff about them so we can, selfishly, know more about our direct ancestors. Hadn't thought of it that way, but now that I have, can't wait to go back and look some more. This could be very interesting.

3. Privacy: no body had any, ever. Hadn't thought about this either and maybe you'll have to wait to hear Thomas when he comes to your town to really understand what he said, but here's my version. Today we think we're losing privacy. In reality, I can see now that I have way more privacy than my folks did in little Frostburg in Western Maryland, a town in which everyone did really know everyone's business, and couldn't wait to tell everyone else! There are connections there with church, work, and social groups, all with records of some sort. And local newspapers too! Gotta love those:)

4. Timelines. I love timelines. Always have. Did not know there were web sites to do all the heavy lifting for me. That's nice.

5. Chicago! Because Thomas lives in Chicago he knows a ton about the resources there and was super generous in sharing them as his presentation went on, a smattering here and a dollop there. I especially enjoy that because I have direct line people who lived there I want to track down. As he went along I could see how rich the online resources are for the Windy City and could imagine that there would be equally rich resources for other cities of any size. Framing my ancestors in even more of the history of the time and place enriches their story... and keeps me interested.

And those juicy morsels are just from the first topic! See what I mean about not enough time here for all he shared! So "thank you" Thomas for a truly entertaining and professional day.


The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/tuesday-tips-time-with-thomas-macentee.html