Book Review: "History for Genealogists"

As a fan of timelines for family history, I have a great appreciation for the many condensed historical timelines and background explanations included in Judy Jacobson's History for Genealogists, published by Genealogical.com and updated in 2016. 

The subtitle of this book really says it all: 

Using chronological time lines to find and understand your ancestors.

In ten chapters plus bibliography, index, and addendum covering the 20th century's two big wars and Great Depression, as well as a 20th century fashion and leisure timeline, Jacobson provides the building blocks needed to put our ancestors into historical and social context. And, as she ably points out, understanding chronology can help us locate elusive ancestors by suggesting where people might be at a certain point in history.

The index is excellent, more than 30 pages long. I found it particularly helpful for pinpointing pages with info and timelines on ethnic groups, immigration patterns, military conflicts, state-by-state settlement, Westward expansion, and many other specific topics. Interestingly, "Mayflower" was not an index entry but "Plymouth" and "Plymouth Colony" were both in the index. So do consider a variety of ways to describe your ancestor's past and investigate all of this terminology in the index.

Here is the jam-packed table of contents:

1. Seeing Ancestors in Historical Context
2. Creating a Time Line: Why? How? Case Studies
3. Why Did They Leave? Military, foreign skirmishes, racism/injustice/unrest, politics, religion, disease, economics, disasters
4. How Did They Go? By road, rail, water, air
5. Coming to America (including historic migration patterns, traditional trails and roads)
6. Myths, Confusions, Secrets, and Lies
7. Even Harder to Find Missing Persons (including name changes, slaves, orphan trains, place-name changes, changing boundaries, more)
8. Social History and Community Genealogy (immigration, industrial revolution, associations/unions, genealogy in books, oral histories)
9. State by State Timelines (including Colonial times)
10. Region by Region Timelines (North America and well beyond)

For folks like me who are researching immigrant ancestors in my tree and hubby's tree, the chapter on coming to America (Chapter 5) includes a 4-page detailed timeline of who tended to leave their European homelands and settle in North America. My hubby's tree includes Scots-Irish who were part of the movement shown in the timeline on p. 66 and discussed on 11 other pages in the book. My own immigrant grandparents are put in historical context by the timeline on Russia (and nearby places, including Lithuania) beginning on page 238. And as a native of the Bronx, the New York state timeline is of great interest.

I highly recommend this book as a reference tool for understanding the sweep of family history and putting individual decisions into the context of local, regional, national, and international history.

Please note: I was given a free copy of this book for review purposes, but my opinions are entirely my own.

Family History Photo Book: Timeline Helps Readers and Myself

Family historians know the chronology of key ancestors' lives, but the next generation may not understand the flow as easily. 

That's why, in each of my ancestor photo books, I'm including a timeline to show major events in order.

Timeline helps readers

Who was born first? Who got married when and where? When did our immigrant ancestors arrive in North America? The timeline shows readers this info at a glance. I use terminology like "1850s" or "1855ish" when the year is only an approximation. I also cover ongoing activities, such as children going to school, in a range of years.

From my most recent book about paternal grandma Henrietta "Yetta" Mahler and paternal grandpa Isaac Burk, here is one of the timeline pages I created. The timeline continued to another few lines on the following page, ending with the year these ancestors passed away.

My audience tells me over and over that quote black and white is boring unquote so I add color on every page. Here, the title of the page is in blue and the text is in black on an ivory background. Small colored hearts catch the eye and reflect my feeling that these ancestors are held in our hearts.

Timeline helps me

Creating a draft timeline also reminds me of important events as I assemble what I need for a new photo book: 

• Photos from different periods in ancestors' lives (sharpen/crop/fix before using, check resolution so photos will reproduce well)
• Selected documents or excerpts (a few intriguing ones such as a marriage cert, a naturalization cert, etc)
• Signatures (enlarged/cropped from ancestors' documents)
• Postcards, maps, other illustrations as appropriate
• Bite-sized bios of focus ancestors, plus their parents, siblings, in-laws, children, which become even more bite-sized in my books.

Watch for more posts as I continue developing my third ancestor photo book, about my maternal grandparents, Hermina Farkas and Theodore Schwartz. 

Lifespans at a Glance in New MyHeritage Feature

New feature alert!

At RootsTech, MyHeritage announced a number of new features. Today I tried the Family Tree Timeline.

Above, one example of how the timeline allows a graphical view of ancestors' lifespans. I can select any starting ancestor (here, my late mother-in-law, Marian Jane McClure Wood), and see as many as 9 generations back (here, I selected only 3 generations back). The color-coding tells me at a glance which ancestors belong to each branch, a practical visual reminder. 

I particularly like the age of death shown at right of each bar on the graph. When a death date isn't known, the bar fades in color and no "age at death" number appears. I can also turn on and off more complete info to be shown on each bar of the graph (such as birth/death years). I can use the length of each bar and the number at the end to analyze patterns (such as short or long lifespans in a particular branch).

This feature allows me to display or not, as I choose, major historical events (such as World War II), for context. Another useful element is a consistency checker, in which a dot next to a parent/child relationship alerts me to double-check dates (did I list a child's birth date that's after the mother's death, for instance?). 

Hovering over an ancestor's name on the timeline leads me to additional options, such as opening the profile to edit it or researching that ancestor. If I wish, I can download and/or share any timeline with a click. 

In short, I find this an easy and helpful way to visualize lifespans at a glance and put them into both family and historical context.

Writing Ed's Musical Family History

Page 2 of illustrations to accompany "Music in the Life of Edgar James Wood"

In the previous episode of "obsessed family historian," I said I was going to write a brief biographical booklet introducing the sheet music fake book created by my late father-in-law, Edgar James Wood (1903-1986).

Brief? Good grief. My original estimate was a couple of pages. Once I got going, I found more and more to say and show.

To create a narrative about Ed's musical life, as an intro to the fake book being given to his grandchildren this holiday season, here's what I did, step by step.

Start with the Research

What do I know about Ed and his piano-playing? I have a great deal of info on his life. Some of the sources I consulted included:

• My paper files on Ed (including his copyright documents, passports, etc.)
• My trees on Ancestry and MyHeritage (to check what happened when and locate passenger lists and other documents) 
• A new Google search for his songs, which turned up published copyright notices like the one above!
• My digitized photos of Ed's life (ranging from his Roaring Twenties period to the year before he died)
• My archival boxes, which held treasures such as Ed's photo album from his 1926 European tour with the Dick Bowers Band and Ed's album of negatives (with captions!!) from his 1928 European tour, again crossing the Atlantic on Cunard's R.M.S. Berengaria.
• Interviews with Ed conducted by my husband in the mid-1980s and later transcribed (easy to search for key words).

I typed out a few notes from these sources, showed them to my husband to get his recollections and any corrections. Then I arranged my notes in rough chronological order.

Create a Time Line


Next, before I began to write, I put together a simple two-column table of years on the left and events on the right. This timeline kept me on track and forced me to expand my research and add notes when I had little or nothing for a particular period.

Also, the time line revealed a conflict between what Ed remembered when interviewed in 1984/5 and what Ed's passenger lists revealed from my research. How did I resolve this conflict? I opened one of the archival boxes where I store Ed's photo albums. There, in his own handwriting, were captions dated 1926 for the trip I was referencing. It's not surprising that Ed was a year off when trying to recall events from nearly 60 years earlier, is it?

Write and Insert Subheads

I wanted to tell Ed's musical story chronologically, a sneaky way of spoon-feeding some of his family's history. But too much text can be daunting. To break up the pages, I inserted subheads that guide the reader through each stage of the story--and lead to the eventual reason for this musical bio, Ed's fake book:

• Playing [piano] at home and at school
• Playing at college
• Playing all summer
• Playing after college
• Playing for Gershwin
• Playing for his wife and his family
• Playing from the fake book

Include Lots of Illustrations

Younger relatives, in particular, always enjoy illustrations. I had some they'd never seen! I scanned Ed's photo albums from the 1920s to show him with the band on the Lido in Venice, in Paris, on board the S.S. Rotterdam and the R.M.S. Berengaria.

I also included his passport, some news clippings about his musical exploits, and copyright publications. I arranged the illustrations with captions as shown in the sample page at top. Page one is a title page with a large, full-color photo of Ed playing piano for family caroling on Christmas, 1985. These pages all include a touch of color, and I'll have them color-laser-printed at the local copy shop, to catch the eye of younger descendants.

Present in an Easy-to-Keep Format

All pages (bio and sheet music) will be three-hole punched and inserted into a small loose-leaf binder, ready to be saved for posterity. Of course I'll use my trusty label-maker to add the title "The Musical Life of Edgar James Wood" on the front and "Ed Wood's Fake Book" on the spine. The binder is easy to flip through and easy to store on a bookshelf.

In all, the brief booklet I envisioned as a couple of pages turned out to be eleven pages: four pages of text, two pages of time line, and five pages of illustrations. But because I did this little by little over the course of a couple of weeks, it was fairly easy and very satisfying.

I can't wait for the family to open their fake books this holiday season and peek into their ancestor's musical life!

Which Ancestral Family Arrived First in Elkhart?

Of my husband's three intertwined ancestral families--Larimer, Short, Work--I wondered which was first to settle in Elkhart county, Indiana. In my earlier post, I mentioned the Presbyterian church records showing these three families worshipping together in Bremen, Fairfield county, Ohio, around the turn of the 19th century.

Summer of 1903

I also had a couple of newspaper clippings describing the intertwined families meeting for reunions early in the 1900s. This 1903 clipping from Elkhart, Indiana, says the Larimer family was first to arrive in Pennsylvania and then moved to Ohio, followed by the Short family. From there, descendants went to Elkhart and that area. But could I confirm this?

I constructed a rough timeline as I looked for clues. Also, I read through the genealogical booklet "Larimer Family, 1740-1959" by J.C. Work (he's mentioned in the 1903 clipping). The booklet's names, dates and details aren't always entirely accurate, but the numerous family stories are fascinating and enlightening. You can see the Larimer booklet on Family Search here.

According to the Pioneer History of Elkhart County, Indiana, the Larimer family was first to pioneer (see excerpt at top of post). Abel E. Work (middle name is actually Everett or Everitt) arrived in 1841, a few years after his brothers-in-law, James and John Larimer. Abel was married to Cynthia Larimer, sister of James and John.

Further research confirmed that John Larimer (my husband's 3d great-grandpa) did indeed acquire Elkhart county land on April 5, 1836 and more land on March 15, 1837 (according to Family Maps of Elkhart County). Moses Larimer, hubby's 4th great uncle, acquired land in Elkhart county on May 30, 1837, adjacent to one of John Larimer's parcels.

Thomas Short married hubby's 3d great aunt Margaret Larimer in Elkhart, Indiana, in January of 1842. The bio of his two doctor sons (John and Isaac Short) says that Thomas bought land in Eden township in 1841, in LaGrange county due east of Elkhart county. Eden is where he and his bride settled after their marriage.

Finally, in the Larimer genealogical booklet, I read about Cynthia Hanley Larimer, who married Abel E. Work. Here's an excerpt:

Abel Everitt [sic] Work was a blacksmith, had a shop on the N.E. corner of the crossroad 2.5 miles east of Bremen [Ohio] and one mile north of Bethel Presbyterian Church. In year 1841, he made a trip to Elkhart Co., Indiana and purchased land from James Larimer, his brother-in-law. John, James, and Robert Larimer had settled in Elkhart Co., year 1835. The big move to Indiana began Oct., 1842. [Goes on to state that several members of the Work family moved there in 1842.]

My conclusion: The Larimer family migrated from Ohio to Indiana first (1835 or 1836), with the Short and Work families moving to Indiana a little later (1841 and 1842). Hubby's McClure family also pioneered in Elkhart, circa 1844, which is where William Madison McClure later met and married Margaret Larimer, becoming my husband's maternal great-grandparents.

Happy Independence Day to these pioneer families in my husband's family!

Ancestor Timeline Reveals Gaps (Gasp)

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun this week was to create a timeline for one ancestor and explain how we created it, along with the image.

Since I'm still a RootsMagic7 newbie (less than 4 months' experience), I was delighted to follow Randy's detailed directions for how he created his ancestor's timeline in RM7. I did the same for my 2d great uncle, Bela Bernard Roth (1865-1941). His first wife was Sali/Zali Kunstler (? - 1895), sister to my great-grandma Leni Kunstler Farkas (1865-1938). Bela's parents were Shlomo/Salomon Roth and Hannah Klein.

After I created the timeline in RM7, I took a screen shot with my "Preview" function for Mac. To do that, I selected just the timeline itself as it appeared on my screen and saved it as a .jpg. There is more info available in the timeline, but I didn't include all in this screen shot.

As Randy indicates, the look is bare-bones but practical. At a glance, I can see how old Bela is during each moment on the timeline. When his children were born, when he came to America the first and second times, at the point of each census, when he died.

This timeline reveals (gasp!) gaps for me to research. For instance, Bela had four more children with his second wife (Bertha Batia Weiss, 1885-1967), including one mentioned in a 1907 passenger manifest and a 1914 passenger manifest.

This son, Imre (or Emery) Roth, vanished before the 1920 U.S. Census. He's a gap that I'd like to fill with more information so I can record him and honor his memory. For now, Bela's timeline will have to state that son Imre/Emery died "before 1920."

Sentimental Sunday: Pages from the Story of Wood and Slatter

The Story of James Edgar Wood and Mary Slatter Wood is written, photos and maps are in place, and I'm going to bring the .pdf to be color-laser-printed in the local copy shop. In all, I needed 21 pages to tell the story of hubby's paternal grandparents James, Mary, their family backgrounds, along with a brief overview of what happened to their four sons (including my late father-in-law, who took these photos of the 1917 Ford).

Just in time for the June Genealogy Blog Party, here are two pages from this newest family memory booklet, and a few lessons learned along the way toward preserving this family history:

• Maps help readers follow along as ancestors migrate or take a trip (as in the page at top, a 1917 trip from Cleveland to Chicago).
• Photos personalize the story and bring readers face to face with faces and places from the family's past. I included lots of photos!
• Include quotes from ancestors to keep their voices alive for descendants who never met them. I had quotes from interviews, letters, a diary.
• Include a timeline to give descendants a better sense of what happened, where, and when. I constructed this last, after I pieced together the entire story.
• Include sources for that rare reader who asks: "How do we know that?" The actual booklet has a few document excerpts but full documents are sitting in my files.
• Caption all photos. I have 2 pages of captions at the end of the booklet, with lots of details, including a reminder of the relationships between people in the photo and the readers ("Mary Slatter's older sister" is an example, plus an explanation that Mary Slatter was my husband's paternal grandmother). 

Don't forget to include a family tree! I included one in the back of the booklet, showing this branch and how it extends back three generations on James's side and on Mary's side.

This is only one way I'm sharing my family's history with the next generation. More ideas are in my genealogy book, Planning a Future for Your Family's Past.

Timelines, Family Trees, and James & Mary's Wedding Day

My local genealogy club was lucky enough to recently host a talk by genealogy/history expert Laura Prescott. She spoke about "Timelines: Placing Your Heritage in Historical Perspective."

Among the many things I took away from that presentation was the idea of creating timelines to show my ancestors in the context of their family's events and local/national/international events. Laura mentioned free sites like xtimeline.com. (A wonderful find!)

She also mentioned that we have the ability to publish timelines, among other things, using Ancestry and the family tree data we've already posted. I'd never looked at that "Publish" button along the top row of the Ancestry home page. Pushing "publish" started me on the easy process of printing an 18 x 24 inch poster for my hubby's siblings, showing the four main families that correspond to each of their grandparents. (If you don't want to buy the tree poster, you can still print it free on your home printer--I did that too.)

Along the way, I enlisted hubby's help proofreading the family tree before we published the poster. He noticed I was missing an exact month and date for his grandpa's marriage.

In another browser window, I opened Family Search and quickly found an updated database of Ohio marriages. Info that wasn't indexed or digitized a year ago has been put online! (My lesson: Keep searching for those elusive ancestors or events--eventually new clues will present themselves.)

With just a couple of clicks, we now have the marriage document of James E. Wood of Toledo and his bride, Mary Slatter, who were married on 21 September 1898. All because we wanted to put together a family tree poster (see below).

The poster points up a glaring hole in the tree: We still don't know the parents of Mary Amanda Demarest. Cousin Larry has been on her trail for decades.