those little hints could be telling you something...

Take a moment to attach records to every name mentioned - not just the principal person.  I was given a list from family search of ancestors that were found in historical records.  Almost by rote, I began the attaching process.
A few minutes in, however, and I noticed the name for Nelson Willits wife was not what I was expecting.  Someone had listed her as Lucy A. Holsinger (no documentation attached and no parents. see 2S3B-SK9)  This record spelled her name Hattinger.  As I began attaching records, I found her name as Haltinger and Haddinger.  These new spellings open up opportunities to find her family: parents, brothers, and sisters.

census records

divided into 4 time periods:
Early census years (1790-1840) = citizenship, occupation, disability, education
mid 19th century (1850-1870) = where born, school, occupation, property
late 19th century (1880-1890) = ages, marital status, where they were born and where their parents were born
20th century (1900-1930) = all the birth dates of the household, where they and their parents were born, if they own their home, immigration/naturalization

visit: lesson 1: the federal census:an historical overview
note (to view the video, you need to be in firefox)

What information was collected about the people in different census time periods?  It might provide new clues to research.

Census records are available to view 72 years after a census was taken.  (This provides privacy for living individuals.)  The 1950 census will be released April 1, 2022.

Most of the 1890 census' population schedules were badly damaged by a fire in the Commerce Department Building in January 1921.  The records of only 6,160 of the 62,979,766 people enumerated survived the fire.
The original 1890 census enumerated people differently than ever before that time. Each family was enumerated on a separate sheet of paper. 1890 was the only year this was done.

Hints: start with what you know and work back in time.  That way you start with more accurate information to guide you in the right direction for your research.

Spelling it wrong can make research go right

Often, beginning genealogists miss their ancestors by sticking too firmly to the idea that “that’s not how my family spelled their name, so it can’t be my ancestor.”

This statement ignores these basic truths:

1) Ancestors who were illiterate would have no idea how to spell their own name, let alone how someone else should spell it.

2) Until the twentieth century, spelling rules were far more flexible and fluid than what we think of today. That was true for routine words, not just surnames.

3) Even if your family was highly educated and truly did feel strongly about how their name should be spelled — the record taker might not have been as concerned. Ultimately, it depends on how the record creator chose to spell the name – not what your family thought about how it should be spelled.

4) Human error happens.

I’ve divided the types of errors into three basic categories – “sound alikes,” “look alikes,” and simple human errors.

SOUND ALIKES

Many so-called “spelling errors” can be attributed to various ways of spelling the same sounds. Consider the following situations:

Even single letters can sound similar. Think about a time when you may have had to spell your name for someone on the telephone. How many of our letters sound similar when said? B, C, D, E, G, P, T are just some examples. Even if your ancestor was spelling their name for the record-creator, it might not have been heard and recorded correctly.

This matter is further complicated if there was an accent involved. Perhaps your ancestor was an immigrant, struggling to still learn English, or unable to speak it at all. Maybe the  census taker was from Boston, but had recently moved to southern Alabama. Undoubtedly differences in pronunciations might affect how a name or other information was recorded.

I personally remind myself to “think like a third-grader” when I’m trying to develop a list of alternate spellings for a surname.

LOOK ALIKES

Anyone who has looked at original handwritten records knows how difficult they can be to read. If the ink has faded or blurred, or the original microfilm image was poorly filmed, legibility is further compromised. It can be easy to misread letters, and even a single letter may throw off your search.

Many genealogical search interfaces, like that of Ancestry, allow you to control how precisely your search term is matched,  and broader matches catch many misspellings of little consequence (like an O being misinterpreted as an A for example). But sometimes, a misread or truly misspelled name may not be able to be picked up by a search engine.

Just as there are audible confusions among letters that sound the same (B, C, D, P), likewise there are written letters that can often be visually confused. Lowercase As, Os, and Us may be almost indistinguishable.  Uppercase I and J are extremely similar, and may rely heavily on the rest of the word to be interpreted accurately. Lowercase double Rs can look like a single N.  The lowercase letters N, M, and U can also shape-shift into one another.  Think about likely visual misinterpretations as you conduct your searches, and use these “misspellings” in your search terms.

HUMAN ERROR

These examples point out our third category of misspelling – human error.

All of the indexes and data contained in databases like Ancestry are typed in by people. And despite many levels of quality control and review, human error can still occasionally creep in. Transpositions, extraneous insertions, or accidental deletions and oversights within the typed indexes can occur. 

SEEKING OUT MISSPELLINGS

It can be helpful to compile a list of alternate spellings, either that you have brainstormed yourself, or more importantly, that you have actually encountered in records. Use this list of alternate spellings when searching databases and indexes.

Recognize that as a practical matter, few individuals will have their name spelled precisely and consistently in all records throughout their entire lifetime. Records keepers might have been careless, uneducated, or used different spellings for the same phonetic sounds. Handwriting interpretation and transcription is always difficult. And even the most detail-oriented and accurate people may still occasionally make small errors which could impact your search. The myth of believing that “our family always spelled it that way” can impair your research, and hamper your progress. Using broader, “sounds like” settings and thinking of creative, alternative ways to spell your family’s surname can help move your research forward.

Note: for the full article go here.

Ogden Family History Center Open House

I hope you got a chance to experience some of the fun things there.  Let me share with you just a few discoveries under the apps section of family search.  (scroll down to the very bottom of the page where it says App Gallery in the footer.)

In the search bar type in "All the Stories".  This free app will show you which of your ancestors have stories attached to them and how many.  You can click on them in the sidebar to read what has been written.  (And you can see who needs information added to them!)

Games that Emma enjoyed:
Match game
Geneopardy

I discovered that there are 3,684 people in the United States with the first name Linnea.



what my maiden name means:



plus what was going on in the world the year I was born:



I also saw a pie chart showing how much of me is made up from what countries.  This was all done on a giant computer screen.

David liked the documentary movie about the family history center with the cookies and lemon water.  Emma had fun playing horseshoes and hula hoop, but she saved her coloring book and crayons for later.  What did you enjoy?

sharing the work

After researching so hard to find names, the tendency is to want to keep them to yourself.  But there comes a point when you can't keep up with the temple work for the many names you have found.  You need help.  What can you do?

In the old days, you could print out ordinance cards and mail them to relatives or hand them to ward members on ward temple night.
Today they've made it even easier.

You can email ordinances to family and friends from your computer. (share a name)  All ordinances for that person will be e-mailed to your friend, but you can attach a note (for example, please complete the initiatory and send the name back to me.)  A little letter symbol will appear next to the name and your friend has 2 weeks to claim them or the name comes back to your list under temple: all names reserved.
You can share with the temple system (and see when ordinances are completed.)  These ordinances will be marked in red.  If you later have time and means to do the work yourself, you can unreserve the name from the temple list under the share tab (unshare with temple).
You can still print out cards and put them in the stake family file.  You can print out a complete card with all ordinances that need done or select specific ordinances for temple patrons to do. (Credenzas are found in the men's dressing room hallway in the temple.)  Pull out drawers are organized by stake and then by ordinances needing done.  Completed cards are put in the back awaiting pick up.

You can print out just the ordinances you want to share or the whole card.

You can look for or create opportunities:
1. send your names with the youth on a ward baptism for the dead trip
2. take your kids during family time at the baptistry
3. have your child and their date do names for you at the temple
4. find family members or friends with nitches and share your names with them.  For example, my kids do baptisms, my mom does initiatory, Dennis does male endowments, my nephew does sealings, etc.

Note: If anyone in the ward needs baptisms done, my kids are looking for names to do and would be happy to do yours!  Practice your sharing skills by sending some to me.  I will give you my email address.

duplicates and merging

Sooner or later in your family history research, you are going to discover that someone else has been working on your same line.  This may cause excitement ("that's the information I've been looking for!") or frustration ("All that time and effort for nothing!").
So, how do you discover duplicates?
It may be apparent when you add a new person, such as a child or spouse to a record.  A long list of possibilities will pop up in family search as "this person may already exist in our data base."  Seldom is there enough information at this point to confirm a match.  Usually, I go ahead and create a new person knowing I will have other opportunities to make a match and merge.
Once I have a name, place, and birth/death dates, I can submit the name for temple work.  At that time the system might alert you that possible duplicates exist which you must check out before submitting the name for temple work.
There are other times when duplicates will appear such as when attaching a record.  A little warning "!" will appear indicating that this record is already attached to someone else in the system.  They will give you the ID code and you can check to see if it is the same person or not.
Computers are not perfect at finding duplicates.  You must be the eyes and brains in this operation.  After merging a family, you may find that several researchers found the same children so you will need to go to each child and merge them.  Don't just delete them as you will lose the records and memories attached, not to mention the ordinances already completed.
After spending an entire evening researching back several generations, I discovered I was working on a duplicate line that had all the temple work completed.  My first reaction was "that was a waste of my time!"  Then I realized that I had made several important contributions: I had attached records, filled in more complete names and dates, found missing spouses and children, discovered parents.  If I spent hours researching a family and found save it be one name, what do you think my efforts would be worth to that one child whose name was found?
Everything you do is for a purpose.  You may be fine-tuning research skills, discovering new ways of doing things.
Do not fear merging data. (Most things can be undone.  If not, they will warn you beforehand.)  Be cautious in deleting information unless it is obviously an error or a duplicate.  Far better to spend an evening of your time discovering you have duplicate information than to do all the temple work for dozens of names only to find out someone else has already done it!  (That is called "fat" names and unfortunately far too many people were having their work done multiple times in many different parts of the world.  That is why this whole system of sharing information was created in the first place: to eliminate duplicating the work!)

Let's practice merging.  A ward member had two of his living sons listed twice.  He can't delete them., but he can merge them.  Here's how:
Copy the id number of one of your duplicate sons. Go to the other version of that son under the detail page. Look down the right side of the page for possible duplicates. The computer won't find any. Click the button at the bottom of that search that says merge by ID. Paste the ID number of the duplicate. A split screen will appear. Move everything you want to keep to the left side. Then click merge. Repeat for your other son. You should end up with two boys instead of 4. Let me know if you run into a snag during the process.

Turn Major Life Events into Family History Moments

May 22, 2017 By Angie Lucas

Many of the most meaningful and important moments in our lives can be recognized only in hindsight, like that chance meeting that eventually led to an engagement ring, that one classroom lesson that started you on a lifelong career path, or the random recipe you tried one night that turned into a long-standing family tradition.

There are other moments that you know from the beginning are going to be important and transformative. Some you anticipate for years, like a wedding, the birth of a child, an anniversary, or a milestone birthday. Others, such as a funeral, may be less welcome and anticipated, but no less life-changing. All these events will be recorded in your memory and reminisced about for years to come. They are the threads from which family history tapestries are woven.

If we approach them mindfully, these major life events can provide wonderful opportunities to make larger connections to family heritage and ancestry. Here are three ideas for doing just that.

1. Create a Wedding Heritage Display

Marriage is about more than the joining of two people; it also links entire families together, reaching back generations. Thus, a wedding celebration is the perfect time to acknowledge and celebrate this joyous multigenerational union that surely sparks rejoicing in heaven as well as on earth.

When my husband and I married in 2004, we kept the decorations at our reception fairly simple. But there was one display that meant more to me than almost anything else in the room. On a table near the entrance, I arranged a series of matching frames that contained three generations of wedding photos.

In the center was our engagement photo, flanked by our parents’ wedding photos: Donald and Beverly Lucas, married in 1959, and Janet and Jeff Hill, married in 1973. On either side of those photos stood the wedding pictures of Donald’s parents (1922), Beverly’s parents (1932), Jeff’s parents (1941), and Janet’s parents (1947). Many of our guests were drawn to this simple display, which illustrated how the joining of six young couples over the course of 51 years eventually led to this particular moment. Without each of them, there would have been no celebration that day.

After displaying these heritage wedding photos in our bedroom for years, I eventually preserved them in a keepsake album that includes names, dates, and places for each marriage.

Try It Yourself

The next time there’s a wedding in the family, hunt down ancestral wedding photos from both the bride’s and the groom’s families and present them as a gift—either framed or inside a simple album, with room for the bride and groom to add their own wedding photo at the end. You might find some of the wedding photos you need by searching your family tree on FamilySearch.org. To access photos from the other half of the wedding party, however, you’ll have to recruit a member of that family to search their online family tree.

2. Make a Collective Keepsake at a Milestone Birthday or Anniversary Party

When my in-laws celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2009, they opted for a low-key backyard barbecue, with just their children and grandchildren in attendance. To make the day extra special for them, we created a memory book at the event and sent it home with them.

My husband took a picture of each attendee, and we printed the photos on the spot using a personal photo printer. We handed each person a 5×7-inch card, and asked them to share a treasured memory of Don and Bev or a note of love and thanks. Their kids, grandkids, and in-laws wrote about family trips, harrowing bike rides down steep Carnation Drive, memorable injuries, visiting Bev when she worked in the gift wrap department of the old ZCMI, countless hours spent eating and chatting on the patio, and the thoughtful gifts Don and Bev would drop off, just because.

We paired each person’s photo with their handwritten card and slipped the photos and cards inside a photo album to present to the honored couple. On the first page of the book, we placed their original wedding photo next to a photo of just the two of them taken at the party, 50 years to the day later.

Try It Yourself

1. This idea works equally well for a milestone birthday party. We created similar albums (on a much larger scale) for my grandma and grandpa on their 80th birthdays.
2. Put one person (probably you) in charge of collecting the photos and memories during the event. If you ask people to bring something in advance or expect them to follow up after the fact, you’ll find that they don’t all do their part.
3. Instead of individual portraits, make sure each person takes a photo with the guest of honor, so everyone has a recent picture of themselves with their parent or grandparent.
4. Try this idea using a Polaroid camera (yes, they still exist) or a Fujifilm Instax, which take and print photos instantly. Have each person tape or glue their picture inside a spiral-bound journal or art journal with heavier-weight pages (can be found at big box stores), and write a memory next to the picture.
5. Use your smartphone to take the pictures, and print them on the spot using a mini wireless photo printerdesigned for that purpose.
6. Have everyone upload their photos and memories to Instagram or another social-media app using the same hashtag (such as #donbevlucas50th).
7. Capture audio recordings of each person’s memories using the FamilySearch Memories app.
8. If you create a physical keepsake, scan or photograph each page to upload to the guest of honor’s profile on FamilySearch’s Memories.

3. Preserve Precious Memories Shared at a Funeral

When my beloved grandmother Neva Turner Nielsen passed away earlier this year, just shy of her 88th birthday, my sorrow was lifted and tempered by the many moments of family love and unity I witnessed. As I sat in the chapel listening to my Aunt Diane deliver a life sketch, I heard several tidbits and stories I had never heard before, including these:

1. As a child, Grandma used to dress the barn cats in doll clothes and try to sneak them into the house, despite the fact that they would be flung by their tails out the back door and over the lilac bush if her mom ever spotted them in the house.
2. At age 12, she had to take over all the ironing (using a heavy old flat iron heated on the stove), housework, and cooking (including feeding large hay crews on the farm) for two months after her mom broke her shoulder in a car accident.
3. She attended her first high school dance with my grandpa on September 17, 1943—and they got married four years to the day later.
4. She served as the LDS seminary president during her senior year of high school, on top of being on the drill team and student council.

Not wanting these and other details to get lost to history, I asked my aunt to send me a copy of her remarks so I could post them on my grandma’s profile on Family Tree.

As is the case at many funerals, there were also tables overflowing with memorabilia from Grandma’s life—precious pictures and keepsakes that would likely be divided among her four daughters. After the mourners dispersed, I took the time to document the contents of those tables using my smartphone. Despite my best intentions, I knew I would never get around to borrowing these original photos from my aunts in order to take them home and scan them. So I did the next best thing. I photographed the complete displays and took close-ups of individual pictures, briefly removing some from their frames to do so. (To be honest, a photo taken on a smartphone often can’t be distinguished from one that has been scanned.)

I posted several of these pictures on my Facebook page for our fellow family members to enjoy, and I also uploaded them to Family Tree, where they’ll be accessible to all of Grandma’s posterity.

Try It Yourself

Depending on your emotional state at the time of the funeral, see if you can listen for tidbits and details that are new to you about your loved one, so you can make sure these stories are preserved for future generations. Maybe even ask for a copy of the life sketch after the funeral, so you can keep it for your own records or post it to Family Tree. Take a moment to photograph the photo displays for the same purpose.

Bonus idea: After attending the funeral of a family friend, Wendy Smedley of Centerville, Utah, offered to collect all of the tributes posted to the woman’s Facebook page and upload them to Family Tree—with permission and access granted by the family, of course. Sometimes being just outside the inner circle will make you the perfect person to perform this kind of service. Immediate family members will often be too overwhelmed and grief-stricken, and they’ll appreciate this small but simple act that can impact generations to come.

Note: This article was found on the FamilySearch Blog.

Notes from Linnea:  I remember well the wedding luncheon for my nephew Brandon Cardon.  His mother had decorated the tables with photos of not only the bride and groom, but wedding pictures of their ancestors (parents and grandparents) so that everyone could be present to celebrate even though they had passed on.  She did this quite inexpensively by purchasing frames from the dollar store and making copies of the original prints.

When David's parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, the invitation contained a picture of their wedding day next to a current photo.  We also had a large group photo taken at the event with all of their descendants present.

Margene Goff, from my ward, had the most wonderful display at her funeral featuring things she loved to do such as sew, sing, and quilt.  Even though I wasn't family, I took pictures because it is something I would want my family to do for me.  (The next thing to do would be to load those photos to her memories on FamilySearch!)