For You, Sweetheart, on Valentine's Day 1946

On their first Valentine's Day together as an engaged couple, my father (Harold D. Burk, 1909-1978) sent my mother (Daisy Schwartz Burk, 1919-1981) this sentimental card.

The date was February 14, 1946.

Harry and Daisy met in October, 1945, on a date arranged by his aunt and her aunt. Harry had been serving overseas with the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II. When he returned home to New York City, he was 36 years old and looking for the right gal to settle down and start a family.

Daisy was ten years younger than Harry, a romantic who wanted very much to fall in love and get married. During the war years, she dated but didn't find anyone she wanted to spend her life with (according to her letters). Then her Aunt Rose and his Aunt Mary introduced Daisy to Harry.

They both were smitten. After a whirlwind courtship, Harry proposed to Daisy on New Year's Eve. They were engaged for six weeks when he sent her this frilly card on February 14, 1946.

Mom and Dad had hoped for an early wedding but due to the severe post-war housing shortage, among other reasons, they decided to get married in November of that year. That allowed enough time to gather both sides of the family for a very nice Thanksgiving weekend wedding in New York City.

Sepia Saturday and Saturday Night Genea-Fun

James Edgar Wood in his 1917 Ford, Summer of 1917

This week's Sepia Saturday ties in well with my response to Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge! So I combined the two.

Sepia Saturday: Posing with the Car

Above, a photo taken of my husband's grandfather, James Edgar Wood (1871-1939) by hubby's father, Edgar James Wood, (1903-1986). Ed was only 14 when he took this photo of his father during a road trip from their home in Cleveland, OH to downtown Chicago, visiting Wood family members along the way. Ed had gotten a camera for his birthday and began a lifelong hobby of chronicling family activities.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Top 20 Surnames in Family Tree

Using RootsMagic7, and following Randy's instructions, I went to Reports, then Lists, scrolled down to "Surname Statistics List," and selected "Frequency of Surnames" from the list.

With 3,128 people in my husband's Wood family tree, I could have printed 17 pages for the "Frequency of Surnames" report. Instead, I printed only the first two pages. After that, the frequency of surnames dropped off sharply.

And the winner is . . . WOOD, which appears a total of 204 times (125 males, 78 females). The oldest date of a Wood ancestor record is 1551, the most recent date is 2019.

The top 20 are: Wood, Larimer, McClure, Work, Steiner, Slatter, McKibbin, Hilborn, Denning, Smith, Cushman, Brown, Taber, Nelson, Johnson, Bradford, Short, Caldwell, Rinehart, and Miller. 

By the time I got to Miller, there were only 17 appearances in the Wood family tree (11 males, 6 females), with the oldest date of 1803 and the most recent date of 2006. A Miller married a Work (the granddaughter of a Work-Larimer marriage) and that's how the Miller surname connects to my husband's Wood family tree.

Backup Is Cheap, Family Trees Are Priceless

Ancestry's instructions for downloading a family tree

One big reason I use RootsMagic7 genealogy software is to be able to sync with the family trees I've created on Ancestry.

Although I back up my RootsMagic trees every month or whenever I make major changes, I also like to download my Ancestry trees periodically.

It's easy to download a tree as a gedcom, as you can see from the above Ancestry screen shot. I give each downloaded tree a distinctive name AND date, so I can distinguish the "Wood" family tree download of February, 2020 from the "Farkas" family tree download of December, 2019.**

Keeping my family history safe is a top priority. Multiple backup processes (both RootsMagic and Ancestry trees backed up, stored on two hard drives, and stored daily in the cloud) may seem like a lot of duplication, but it offers me more options for restoring my trees, if ever the need arises.

Backup drives and cloud storage are relatively cheap -- carefully researched and documented family trees are priceless and deserve protection.

**RootsMagic will also download an Ancestry tree for me, including all media attached to the individuals--very convenient! I do this as well, but also like to keep a separate gedcom downloaded directly from Ancestry in case I need to recover.

The Weddingest Months in His Family Tree

February 14, 1861 marriage of Adaline Steiner Sigler and John Dome in Crawford county, OH

My husband's family tree has one Valentine's Day wedding, among 25 marriages that took place in February. But February isn't the month with the most weddings in that family tree.

Valentine's Day Wedding

Above, the marriage license of Adaline Elizabeth Steiner Sigler (1837-1912) and John Dome 1824-1902). Adaline was my hubby's 2d great aunt, the sister of his great-grandfather Edward George Steiner.

Addie's first marriage was to Albert Sigler (1833-1858), who sadly died at the age of 24, just three months before their only child was born.

When this child was nearly three years old, Addie married for a second time. She and John Dome applied for the license on Thursday, February 14, 1861, and were married the same day. This was two months before the official start of the Civil War. John did register for the draft in July of 1863, but he was not called to serve.

By the time great-great-aunt Addie died, she was widowed again and a grandmother several times over.

August and December, the Weddingest Months

In my husband's family tree, the most weddings took place in August and December. According to the anniversary list I generated using my RootsMagic7 software, 40 couples were married in each of these months. By comparison, only 25 couples were married in February.

On the first day of August, 1722, Andrew Allen and Abiah Lovell were married in Barnstable, Massachusetts. Andrew and Abiah were my husband's 5th great-grandparents. This is the earliest August wedding in the anniversary list.

There were three New Year's Eve weddings on the anniversary list. On December 31, 1863, John N. McClure and Rebecca Jane Coble were married in Wabash county, Indiana. John was my husband's 2d great uncle. They were part of the McClure contingent that left Indiana to try farming in Emmet county, Michigan.

My husband's great-great-grandpa William Madison McClure, part of the contingent, briefly farmed in Little Traverse, Michigan before returning to Indiana. One of his four children was born in Little Traverse. That child was Grandpa Brice Larimer McClure, born on December 29, 1878. The other three were all born in Indiana.

I wrote this post for Elizabeth O'Neal's Genealogy Blog Party, February 2020 edition!

Two Ancestors Named Margaret Larimer

L-R, Lucille E. McClure with husband John E. De Velde
and mother Margaret Larimer McClure

My husband's family tree is filled with multiple versions of John, Mary, Elizabeth, and Thomas. Just one example: he has "John Slatter" ancestors in three generations.

Today I want to look at two female ancestors with the same maiden names but very different lives. Margaret Larimer Short was my husband's third great-aunt. Margaret Larimer McClure was my husband's great-grandmother. The two Margarets were granddaughters of Isaac Larimer and Elizabeth Wood Larimer.

Margaret Larimer Short, Pioneer Mother of Doctors and a Dentist 

Margaret Larimer was born in 1825 in Bremen, Fairfield county, Ohio. She was a granddaughter of Isaac Larimer and Elizabeth Wood Larimer, two Ohio Fever ancestors who were living in the "Territory north west of Ohio River" in 1800, according to a land-claim petition submitted to the U.S. Congress in 1801. These ancestors had moved from Pennsylvania to the frontier near the Ohio River in search of fertile farmland.

Isaac and Elizabeth's son John Larimer, a farmer, married Rachel Smith in 1818 in Bremen. Margaret was their third child (but first daughter). When Margaret was 11 years old, her father John purchased land in Elkhart county, Indiana, and was moved the family westward to pioneer in rugged country yet again.

In 1842, at age 16, Margaret Larimer married a farmer, Thomas Short, in Elkhart county, Indiana. Thomas was the son of pioneers, James Short (born in Ireland) and Frances Gilbert Short (also born in Ireland), who had left Pennsylvania for the wilds of Indiana. Thomas and his bride Margaret continued the pioneering spirit, farming in LaGrange county, Indiana. Of their ten children together, the youngest was only 11 when Margaret died in 1877, at the age of 52.

Remarkably, four sons of Margaret and Thomas became physicians, and one son became a dentist!

Margaret Larimer McClure, Mother of an Inventor and a Teacher

Margaret Jane Larimer was born in 1859, the youngest child of Brice S. Larimer and Lucy Emeline Bentley. Brice was a son of Ohio Fever pioneers Isaac Larimer and his wife Elizabeth (the common ancestor with Margaret Larimer Short). Lucy was a daughter of Indiana pioneers born in upstate New York.

Margaret's father Brice farmed only briefly before becoming a postmaster and then railroad agent in the fast-growing county of Elkhart, Indiana. Like the other Margaret Larimer, this Margaret married young, at age 17. Her husband was William Madison McClure, who grew up on his family's farm but decided to work for the railroad in Elkhart.

Not one of Margaret and William's children became a farmer, despite the long tradition of family farming on both sides of the family tree. Their youngest son, Hugh Benjamin McClure (1882-1960), became involved in industry, first as a shipping clerk, then a salesman, then the owner of a thriving manufacturing firm in Peoria, Illinois. Ben invented a folding machine and received a patent in 1954.

The older daughter, Lola, graduated from high school (not typical for the time and place), became a teacher, and married a civil engineer. The younger daughter, Lucille, embraced city life, marrying a plumber in Chicago and remaining in the Windy City.

The older son, Brice Larimer McClure, was a master machinist who worked for the railroad and, later, put his skills to use working in a company that supplied equipment for the U.S. military during World War II. This Brice was my husband's beloved grandfather.

This is the Week 6 prompt for #52Ancestors.

1950 Census: Infant Card Innovation

Did you know about the 1950 Census Infant Cards?

When the 1950 US Census is released in April, 2022, we will NOT be able to see a new innovation introduced that year: Infant Cards.**

Here's the Census Bureau's explanation: "An infant card had to be completed for each baby born after January 1, 1950 (since experience had shown that babies are easily missed)."

The idea was to have enumerators ask specifically about any baby born in January, February, or March of 1950. This is in addition to enumerating the baby by name in the regular population schedule page. Below is a sample Infant Card.

Sample Infant Card from 1950 Census

Why are Infant Cards so valuable? Let me count the ways!

• When listing the baby's name, enumerators were told to "check the spelling with the informant." Well, that alone is an improvement over the days when enumerators simply wrote down whatever they thought they heard!
• The card asks whether father is enumerated in the same household as the infant--and if yes, name, age, occupation and industry of father. If no father in the household, no father info will be written on the Infant Card. A good clue to be followed up.
• Exact date of birth of this baby. I'll be sending for birth certs!
• Name of hospital, place of birth (the assumption is clearly that the infant will not be a home birth).
• Maiden name of mother. Yippeeeee! 
• Age of mother, education of mother (meaning highest grade finished).

Question #17 is very important for spotting gaps in families: It asks about the order of birth for this infant. Is this the 1st, 2d, 3d, etc. child the mother has ever borne?

In this question, the enumerator was to count all live births, including children who died.

Being a twin, I paid attention to the fine print here: If the Infant Card listed a twin, the birth order was to be recorded for each one separately. Instructions say not to call both twins "1st child" of the mother.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, according to the U.S. National Archives, infant cards will not be released when the 1950 population schedule is released in 2022. The National Archives does not have the cards--in fact, the cards don't seem to exist at this point.

For links to the rest of my #1950Census series, please check the summary page here.

1950 Census Question: Where Were You Born, Eh?

Excerpt from "The 1950 Censuses--How They Were Taken"

For the 1950 Census, enumerators were asked to write down the state or foreign country where each individual was born.

Sounds straightforward until you consider how many people living in the United States were born in places where boundaries or names had changed by the time of the Census.

No More Austria-Hungary

Both of my maternal grandparents were born in part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In April of 1950, however, that entity no longer existed. As the instructions above indicate, if an enumerator had written "Austria-Hungary," the people coding the answers for tabulation were to change the entry.

They were given lists of surnames common to the 1950-era countries of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Where necessary, the coders consulted the surname lists and changed the "where born" answer to replace any "Austria-Hungary" answers. I'll be very interested to see what my grandparents answered when the 1950 Census is released in 2022!

Oh, Canada!

I was surprised to read that people born in Canada would be enumerated in one of two ways. If they spoke French when arriving in America, their birthplace would be listed as "Canada-French." If they weren't French-speaking when they came to America, the birthplace would be "Canada-other."

Fine print: What if the enumerator wrote only "Canada" as an individual's birthplace? The coders were provided a list of so-called "typical French-Canadian surnames." Then they replaced a birthplace of "Canada" with "Canada-French" if the individual's surname was on that list or "Canada-other" if the surname was not on the list.

See below for full listing of countries to be coded from enumerated Census pages. Eye-opening, isn't it?! I was especially struck by the list of "all other" at bottom right.

For more about the 1950 Census, please see my summary page here.