Some advice for genealogy conference attendees

This year for the first time I attended a full genealogy conference, the New England Regional Genealogical Conference (NERGC), held in Manchester, New Hampshire. [See my previous three posts for my three days there.] I wanted to take the experiences of myself and of people I knew there and met there to provide some advice for genealogy conference attendees. If you are an old hat at conference-going, these may seem basic to you; that’s OK.

My tips:

1. Take along business-sized cards to give to people you meet. It doesn’t matter whether you are a professional in the industry or not; these are a fast way to ensure you are able to keep in touch with people that you meet there. I recommend that, at a minimum, you include your name, email address, and (if applicable) the URL of your blog and/or your other genealogical/historical website. Many people include such additional items as their phone number, their mailing address, and/or ways to contact them on social media. Some people compile a list of major surnames and/or areas of research and include it on their card, which I think is great, but my research is so scattered and the number of surnames I am researching so large that I personally would never be able to fit it all on a business card.
2. Don’t hesitate to give your card or other contact information out the first time you meet someone in person. There were a number of people at NERGC for whom I did not do this, assuming I would see them again, but then I didn’t.
3. Bring along some of your research for connecting with possible mutual researchers. This can be as basic as a brief list of the major surnames, locations, and time periods you are researching or as comprehensive as your entire computerized database on a device you have brought with you.
4. Wear layers. While many advise that U. S. venues tend to run cold year round, in my experience at NERGC, some of the rooms were stuffy, some were chilly, and some alternated between stuffy and chilly depending on whether the air was on at any given moment.
5. If you have a technology device on which you plan to take notes, bring a back-up pen/pencil and paper just in case. You never know when or how technology might fail.
6. Circle your “must-attend” talks in advance, and then discuss the talks you are considering attending but undecided with others before and during the conference. There’s little better than getting a glowing recommendation for a specific talk or speaker from another attendee!
7. Don’t be afraid to sit a session out. If there’s a time slot when no lecture seems compelling, or you’re just feeling overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to skip a session to socialize, visit the vendor hall, spend time updating online, and/or simply recharge your mental and physical batteries.
8. Keep in mind that the only way to be relatively sure (though still not 100% sure) that you will not run into others who want to talk is to completely leave the venue. A number of people I know who were staying at hotels in Manchester took breaks by literally returning to their hotel rooms. As someone who wasn’t staying over, I didn’t have that option. The one time I tried to find a quiet place to take a break by myself, in the most out-of-the-way spot I could find, I still saw several people I knew. Accept this as an innate possibility beforehand.
9. Take as little along as you think you will need, but also be careful not to weed out too much. Someone I knew at NERGC felt they’d had too much in their bag on their first day there, and had taken a lot of papers out of their bag before their second day. They discovered after arriving at the conference that they had accidentally removed the schedule they had made for what they wanted to attend at the conference. They said with a rueful chuckle that their hotel maid would know where they had planned to be during each session that day.
10. Bring along a reusable water bottle. Many people got very thirsty at NERGC, and the water dispensers kept running out of water. Others asked me to help, but a number of people I asked did not even know whether the venue or the conference was responsible for refilling them, and kept deferring me to others to deal with it. The easiest thing is to just have a reusable water bottle along so that you can refill it at a water fountain or sink and carry it with you.
11. Bring your checkbook along. Most vendors at NERGC took personal checks and, at least at NERGC, many expressly preferred it to a credit card.

For those of you that have attended genealogy conferences before, what would you add to my list? For those of you that are planning to attend your first one within the next year or hope to attend one sometime in the future, what is going into your planning?

New England Regional Genealogical Conference (NERGC) 2013: Day 3

This year for the first time I had the pleasure of attending NERGC. Like Friday (Day 2), Saturday (Day 3) consisted of 5 lecture slots, starting at 8:30.

I chose to begin my day with “Getting Ink on Paper: Publishing Your Genealogical Material in a Digital Age,” the other lecture Craig Scott gave at NERGC this year. [See my NERGC Day 2 post for some information on his French and Indian War lecture.] For those that don’t know, in addition to being a military records expert, Craig Scott runs Heritage Books, one of the major American reprint publishers. I was a writer and editor before I became a genealogist, and have attended several things on this subject, the most noteworthy being the 2011 session of Boston University (BU) Center for Professional Education’s course, “Writing Family History Narratives and Other Genealogical Works,” taught by Dr. John Colletta and Dr. Thomas Jones, and a one-day seminar on writing and publishing held by New England Historic Genealogical Society in 2010. However, unlike Craig Scott’s French and Indian War lecture, I did not circle this as one of my few must-attends as soon as I registered; the most compelling reason I decided to attend it was because he had been such a good speaker at his other lecture. My friend who went with me to this lecture has (as far as I am aware) never attended anything formal to do with writing, editing, or publishing genealogical works and for them, Craig Scott being such a good speaker seemed to be the only reason they decided to go with me.

Continuing from the previous day, we reserved our seats early to ensure we would have spots in the lecture. We knew from the previous day that Craig Scott opens the room to questions on any subject 15 minutes before his lectures officially begin, so though we left to walk around a bit, I suggested we return when I noticed it was less than 15 minutes before 8:30. Indeed, when we returned he was taking questions from the small number of people who were already seated, scattered around the largest room. He spent the longest time on a question about a birth certificate that the questioner reported has a father listed but not a mother. Upon Craig Scott’s questioning of the question-asker, this was ascertained: A child was dropped off at a state home at about 6 weeks old, and the birth certificate for the child lists the person who dropped the child off at the home as the father, but no mother is listed. Craig Scott asserted that the home, which the question-asker said was run by the state of Vermont, had filed a belated birth certificate to have all the paperwork in order. He also noted that while the birth certificate lists the man who dropped the baby off as the father, just because the man dropped the baby off, that’s not proof that he actually was the father, regardless of the birth certificate’s claim.

After the pre-lecture Q&A, Craig Scott began the scheduled lecture. In a lot of ways, this lecture complemented the genealogical writing course I took at BU, which I think is rather impressive given that that was an intensive one-week all-day course and this was one hour. Craig Scott recommended the same books as had been required in the writing course – Evidence Explained (and Evidence! if possible), Producing a Quality Family History, and Numbering Your Genealogy. He also recommended the unfortunately out-of-print Indexing Family Histories: Simple Steps for a Quality Product, which he said consequently sells for ridiculous sums online.

Craig Scott made a lot of succinct comments that I thought were noteworthy. For example, he said, “Quality research is, in my mind, defined as ‘when people read it, they agree with you,’” and if they don’t, you have to define who it is that agrees with you – are other researchers producing quality work the ones that agree with you? Another thing he said really stuck with me: “If you’re not willing to accept scrutiny, you’re not ready yet.” I know a lot of genealogists whom I’m as sure as I can be would produce quality work if they did produce work, but aren’t doing so yet. But maybe my favorite was, “Do you know how I spell a genealogy that has no citations? C-R-A-P.” – a quip which got a lot of laughs and knowing nods from the audience. He summed up the genealogical writer’s dilemma: Too few citations and it’s fiction; too many citations and it’s boring to most readers.

Do your best to strike the balance between history and your family – to put people in a place. More Craig Scott quotes: “Tell the story of your ancestors, not just their vital records.” “A book of family group sheets does not tell a story.” The more scandal and/or secrets about dead people, the more compelling the read. Craig Scott told a story about when he was a young genealogist starting out and found out via his research a secret about his grandmother’s family, and when he asked her about it, she said (approximately), “I’ve been waiting for someone to ask,” and gave him the details in exchange for the promise that he would wait to share them until after she died. Include as many pertinent maps, photos, and other illustrations as you can afford – and Craig Scott did stress the pertinent part. In his opinion, if there’s an illustration, it had better somehow relate to the story of the family, and you had better establish a clear relationship between any artwork and the person(s) to whom it relates. If an illustration does not help to tell the story, it’s irrelevant and should simply be left out.

Craig Scott went on to talk about the nitty-gritty of publishing: Marketing, book construction, publishers and printers, the market, and things like pricing. I will hit a few of the highlights here. Craig Scott stated that part of the market is people who have helped you put the book together (always collect names and addresses from them). A couple more comments: “Do you know when a book is most in demand? Immediately after it’s gone out of print.” “If their name is in the book, they might buy two copies – one for them and one for their local library.” (I can attest to having done this last one with books that mention an area and/or families I am researching.) He suggested putting out a newsletter for such reasons as helping get buzz out for the book, collecting more information and illustrations for it, and generating new content. He said to keep in mind that roughly a third of people who say they will buy a book actually do.

He suggested that every author give a pre-publication offer, announced about two months before the book is ready to be sent to the printer, which also is a month after the three-month time window that he suggests setting aside a book between writing it and sending it off. As he phrased it, “What I do when I prepare a book is prepare it and let it sit for three months.” (So you are setting the book aside, already finished but not yet published, and then one month after you set it aside, you begin offering a pre-order deal.) He suggests providing a discount of about 20% for pre-payment, and to be sure to provide a date when the pre-publication deal ends, which he suggests be about 30-60 days after the publication date. Don’t do any postage-paid orders; keep shipping separate. Also keep in mind that in some states in the U. S., shipping is taxable.

Craig Scott stressed that in this digital age, you have to print a copy of the book at least once to have copyright in the U. S.

Next up, I attended “Family History Resources in the Vermont State Archives” by Vermont State Archives Senior Archivist Scott Reilly. A number of NERGC’s lectures were sponsored by societies that co-sponsored NERGC, and this was the lecture sponsored by the Genealogical Society of Vermont. I had already had the pleasure of emailing with Scott Reilly several times, and he happened to be standing outside the room waiting for the previous lecture’s attendees to trickle out when I arrived, so I introduced myself and said that I didn’t know if he would remember me from our emails, and he sounded a bit surprised as he said that actually, he did remember me. I also noted that the volunteers with whom I’d chatted at the Genealogical Society of Vermont’s booth were in attendance at the lecture. I had pretty high expectations for this lecture, and it exceeded them all.

The holdings of the Vermont State Archives consist almost exclusively of public records, from circa 1760 to the present. There are very few personal papers or similar items. As in most locales, some public records in Vermont are ‘exempt’ from public inspection; in Vermont all exempt records are closed forever except adoption records, which are closed for 99 years. Scott Reilly mentioned at the end of his talk that one of the future plans of the Archives staff is to propose a ‘sunset law’ to the legislature, allowing more exempt public records to become open to the public after a certain amount of time.

Scott Reilly spent a while on an overview of vital records in Vermont. Vermont town clerks have been required by law to record births, marriages, and deaths (henceforth “BMDs”) since 1778. In 1857 town clerks were required to start sending a list of vital events to the office of the Secretary of State annually. These are bound into large volumes and available on-site at the Vermont State Archives. In 1908 town clerks were required to start sending monthly returns to the Secretary of State to create a card index. (These card indexes are probably familiar to researchers who have been keeping up with digitized Vermont records.)

In 1919 town clerks were required to transcribe all BMD records in the possession of the town and the churches, as well as inscriptions on gravestones in the town cemetery(ies), for all individuals who died prior to 1870; in Scott Reilly’s experience, some town clerks were more diligent about doing this than others. Scott Reilly explained that any card that has a cemetery listed lists a vital record that was transcribed from a gravestone, which I’d not realized before; this means that one of my ancestors had a standing gravestone a century ago, though a FindAGrave volunteer was unable to find an extant stone for me last year. My suspicion now – though he was not explicit on this part – is that for the other events where there are two cards, there were two sources in the town and the clerk copied them both; if so, this would explain why I have found the two cards to sometimes conflict or one of the two cards to have more information listed than the other.

The original cards are at the Vermont State Archives. There is an original card index covering c1760-2006. The bound annual returns submitted to the state cover 1857 to 1908. The Vermont BMDs are believed to be “substantially complete” post-1908; if you can’t find the event, it probably didn’t happen in Vermont and you should probably start looking in other states for it. But before 1908, you may simply have to start looking elsewhere in the state for the record. As regular researchers of Vermont may already be aware, Ancestry has Vermont BMDs from 1909 to 2008, and FamilySearch has the BMD card index from 1760 to 2003. So far, no post-1954 BMD cards have been indexed on FamilySearch, though you can browse them by image.

Scott Reilly then moved on to discussing local government records. The Vermont State Archives has copies of microfilmed versions of municipal and county records, which frequently date back to the organization of the town. Depending on the town, they can include:

• Proprietors’ records
• Town meeting records
• Vital records
• Church and cemetery records

Scott Reilly said, “If it [a vital record] wasn’t recorded in the town, it most likely wasn’t recorded.” FamilySearch has digitized some of the town record films, but has not indexed them yet; so again, you can browse the record set by image online.

Lotting plans divided land amongst the original proprietors (grantees) of a town. They sometimes include the names of grantees on the maps. A list of lotting plans at the Vermont State Archives is at http://vermont-archives.org/lottingplans.asp

Scott Reilly encouraged people to make use of civil and criminal court records. While he readily stated that Vermont court records can be tricky to locate and difficult to access, he asserted that they can nevertheless be a great resource. The first step is to try to identify the court where the case occurred. In Vermont records, all these heard different types of cases at different time periods:

• Justices of the peace
• County courts
• Superior courts
• District courts
• Municipal courts
• Vermont Supreme Court

Scott Reilly recommended calling a court to get advice on locating a specific case.

In Vermont, these types of cases were heard in probate courts:

• Probate of wills
• Settlement of estates
• Adoptions
• Guardianships
• Name changes
• Corrections of vital records

Prior to 2011, there were as many as 19 probate districts in Vermont, with several counties being covered by two districts. Now, each district covers one county. The Vermont State Archives holds microfilm copies of probate record books for every district up to 1850. They also hold up to at least 1945 for: Fair Haven (Rutland County), Windsor (half of Windsor County), Marlboro & Westminster (each covering half of Windham County), and Franklin (Franklin County). The Vermont State Archives also holds naturalization records.

The Vermont State Archives holds a number of records for public institutions, although not all records of them. These include records for many prisons, hospitals, and schools (except most of the town schools). Unfortunately for researchers, most information pertaining to residents of public institutions is ‘exempt’ from public inspection under Vermont law. However, registers of residents may be extant and available, so you may be able to get at least some summary information on your research subject. He also stressed that institutional records may lead to court cases. While he did not explicitly state so, I took from his not explicitly stating so that the court cases regarding institutions are public in Vermont. (I know from frustrating experiences in other states that this is not necessarily the case. In some states, the court case is closed to everyone, forever, regardless of whether the person is [even long] deceased, one’s relationship to the person in the case, or how long ago the case occurred.)

Institutions represented at the Vermont State Archives include:

• Vermont State Prison: Registers and “description books,” from 1809 to 1975, are available to the public for research. They typically contain biographical information and information about the nature of the crime and the sentence.
• Vermont State Hospital: The Vermont State Hospital suffered extensive damage from Hurricane Irene, and recently transferred their archives to the Vermont State Archives. Again, the registers are open to the public; they provide basic information on patients admitted to this Waterbury hospital between 1891 and 1969. Register information generally includes name, age, residence, date(s) of admission, and whether the individual was admitted by the state or was a “private patient.” State law permits disclosure of some patient information to “family members.” What this means is not well-defined by the law, so the Archives staff interprets it to mean relatives.

The Vermont State Archives also holds the Eugenics Survey of Vermont (1925-36). Because this was a privately funded organization, organized and directed by Henry F. Perkins, a professor of zoology at the University of Vermont, these records are not ‘exempt’ records like most medical-focused records. Included in these records are extensive pedigrees of many of the families that were targeted by the Survey. There are indexes to lists of informants at the Archives.

The Vermont State Archives also has military records, the Manuscript Vermont State Papers, and annual returns of divorces. Surviving military records are most complete from the Civil War onwards. Mary Greene Nye, the Editor of State Papers from 1927 to 1950, created a name and subject index to the papers, much to my endless delight. The Nye Index from 1760 to 1800 is available as a database on the Vermont State Archives website. Nye’s index goes to c1860, but the 19th century index is only available on-site at the Vermont State Archives to date. The Nye Index is a tremendous help; I really can’t even stress how much. For example, it’s greatly helped me in locating the Treasury Records for my Vermont American Revolution research that I mentioned in my NERGC Day 2 post.

The Vermont State Archives recently got a two-year grant from the grant wing of NARA (known as NHPRC) to do a County Court Records Project, digitizing three counties – Caledonia, Lamoille, and Orleans – from c1780 to 1945. They are about two-thirds done with the digitizing project at present, though there has not been any indexing yet. Scott Reilly and his fellow staff members hope this will serve as a model to digitize the other counties’ court records.

There is more available on their website – both databases and information – than what I have covered here. I strongly suggest anyone with Vermont roots check it out.

I thought this talk was so fantastic that not only did I give it high marks on the surveys we filled out at the end of every talk, but I mentioned it specifically in my general post-NERGC survey in response to the question about whether attendees felt that talks at NERGC 2013 had given them ideas for resources about which they had not previously known at New England repositories as an excellent example of a talk that did this. If you ever get the chance to hear it, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

“Unopposed Exhibitor Time” was slated for the next time slot, followed by a lunch break. A few of us were already hungry and decided to eat lunch first, ahead of the rush, and then check out the exhibition hall. The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) has recently started posting blog post prompts for its upcoming conference’s registered attendees, and the first prompt was to blog on why to attend a genealogical conference at all. My Twitter friend Connie Forbis Yen (@SoulSister48) of the blog GeneaHistory posted her top four reasons in a post titled “Why Genealogy Conferences?”

I generally agree with Connie’s four main reasons – education, people, books, and research opportunities – and especially the first three, as the fourth depends so much on exactly where each conference is held. I have already spent much of my blog posts on NERGC discussing many of the educational opportunities I had at NERGC. As for research opportunities, the one that was stressed several times at NERGC was the French-Canadian library down the road from the conference site; so far I have no French-Canadian research, and if they had resources beyond that scope, no one specified so. But the other two reasons in Connie’s post – people and books – are ones that I have spent little time discussing here (primarily because I figure they are generally more interesting to experience than to later read about) but found very valuable at the conference. I had purchased some books from the Genealogical Society of Vermont’s booth on Thursday evening, and during my time in the hall on Saturday I purchased some more from another vendor. Here is one of the books I got Saturday:

A book I purchased at NERGC: The Homestead Builder: Practical Hints for Handy-men by C. P. Dwyer. This is a reprint of Dwyer’s 1872 book, with a modern introduction.

The book shown above, The Homestead Builder: Practical Hints for Handy-men by C. P. Dwyer, was a how-to book for someone looking to build a homestead and its accoutrements, such as fencing. As the longest-time readers of my blog know, some of my family homesteaded in North America. The line with whom I started in genealogy came from Scotland to the Upper Plains of the U. S. in 1880 to homestead. The modern introduction of this reprinted 1872 book mentions that the book was available for sale in Europe as well as in the U. S. and Canada. While I cannot say for sure whether my Scottish emigres read the book before they left their old homeland for their new one, I find it interesting to know that it is a possibility.

As for people, it’s so difficult to describe what it’s like to be at a genealogy conference unless you’re actually there and also experiencing it. I already knew a good number of people at NERGC in person from the classes and events I have attended, the local group I run, the repositories I visit, and a variety of other means. I am used to strangers striking up conversations at genealogy and history events, but I discovered two things at the conference: First, a number of people I had not yet met in person recognized me from my online profile photos [hi, Twitter friends who were at NERGC!]; and second, since my name – Liz Loveland – is fairly unusual, a number of people I had not met in person recognized my name on my name tag from things like mailing lists. After the first day, I got used to people peering at my name tag before talking to me, and to people coming up to me expectantly when I did not yet know who they were. By the third day, I had gotten used to intending to do something – say, look through the vendor hall or take a walk to stretch my legs – and instead end up spending almost all of my time talking with people; even if a hallway, room, etc., was fairly empty, there was a good chance there would be people I knew nearby. It is pretty amazing, in retrospect, how many people I talked with at the conference – including strangers who struck up conversations.

After the lunch break, three lecture slots were scheduled for this last afternoon of NERGC. One of the people with whom I’d had lunch had attended a previous version of one of the first afternoon lectures, “Weaving Together New York’s Metro Area” by Linda McMenihan, PhD, and Jill Martin, JD, and recommended it when I said at lunch that I was considering attending it, so I decided to go to it. It was held in the same small room where the Vermont State Archives lecture had been; awkwardly placed up a small flight of stairs topped by a large landing near the hotel’s front desk, I don’t know how I would have found it if we hadn’t had the BU reception there on Friday evening and, after the conference’s hospitality desk hadn’t been able to answer my question as to where the named room holding the reception was, several of us had peered at the map until one of us had finally located it. I had to point the room out to a couple other attendees on Saturday, and wouldn’t be surprised at all if some people had intended to go to lectures held in that room but been unable to find it and simply given up.

As people came in, McMenihan and Martin passed out a double-sided handout literally full of URLs, explaining that they had compiled their syllabus submission several months ago and had waited to print the website handout that week to verify that the URLs were up-to-date. To me this was a good sign, as it showed that they were cognizant of a possible issue with a syllabus and thus probably experienced at speaking. So often I have returned home from an event excited to check out a particular webpage, only to discover upon typing it in that the URL had become invalid between the time the resource was compiled and the time it made it into my hands.

Each lecture at NERGC was introduced by a volunteer, whose styles varied from literally reading aloud from the sheet of recommended introduction points to simply saying something like, “I’m sure you’ve heard this all before, so let me just turn it over to the speaker.” For this one, we had the most comical one I heard at NERGC, who started out with asking who had been at the lecture where in his introduction he’d said that anyone who left their cellphone on during the lecture should be pointed at and called a fool. Several people raised their hands and chuckled, and I would soon discover why, as our introduction volunteer explained that the cellphone of that speaker, Steve Morse, had gone off twice during that talk, and consequently he didn’t want to phrase the cellphone comment the same way again. He went on to ask a number of obscure trivia questions about New York City, and at least one person in the audience knew every one well enough to quickly answer. “What are you all doing here then?” he finally (approximately) asked jovially, and then turned the floor over to McMenihan and Martin.

McMenihan and Martin started out by noting that New York City has been called the “fifty-first state” for research by some American researchers. They split their talk in half, each doing part of it.

1899 is the “watershed” year for New York City, when it became the five-part city we still know today. In 1899, there was a major centralization of records; most records created in the boroughs prior to consolidation were collected and taken to Manhattan to be held as New York City records. However, there are some “Brooklyn remnants,” as they put it: Brooklyn still has a separate library system and the Brooklyn Historical Society, originally named the Long Island Historical Society, is separate and contains a treasure trove for researchers of the area. New since my aforementioned lunch companion had attended this talk at a previous conference, McMenihan and Martin had added three of the surrounding counties – Westchester, Suffolk, and Nassau. Westchester County was home to some of the early Dutch colonists, and originally used the Dutch manor system in its land records. Suffolk County was an original county and primarily consisted of New England founders. Nassau County was formed in 1898 from Queens. They stressed that they had added information on these counties to their talk because there was a lot of migration between them and the five boroughs.

Many of the urban towns and cities began records as early as the 1850′s and 1860′s. (Clarification for New England researchers: Yes, for New York state, that is early.) As researchers of New York City are likely already aware, the older New York City records are held by the Municipal Archives. Recent/current marriages are at the City Clerk’s office. The New York City Municipal Archives does not allow photographing on-site. They recommended searching the New York City vital record indexes on both ItalianGen and GermanGen simultaneously through Stephen Morse’s One-Stop Genealogy Site.

There is a contract with Ancestry to put the New York State Index online. The counties surrounding New York City are part of the state vital records system, like the rest of the counties in New York state beyond the five boroughs that comprise New York City. The index should be going “live” later this year. It will be on Archives.com, one of the multitude of companies which Ancestry has bought.

Burials in Manhattan were banned after 1851. City residents used cemeteries in the outer boroughs and the suburbs, including northern New Jersey. Two major City cemeteries have records online:

• Green-Wood, which has a database of names & plots
• Evergreens, which has burials for 1849-1877 and 1942-present and is “actively filling in records in the gap.”

Prospect Cemetery in Queens was a colonial cemetery and there are transcriptions online. Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx was another major cemetery but there is nothing online for it to date as far as the speakers were aware. New York City’s “Potter’s Field” (Hart Island) database quite recently went live; records from 1977 forward are searchable.

Probate record highlights: Kings County (Brooklyn) estate files from 1866 to 1923 are on FamilySearch. Brooklyn Genealogy Info GenWeb, a site they mentioned several times during their talk, transcribed early New York City wills. Westchester County’s website has some indexes/etc., and Suffolk County’s site has some for the early period.

They said that in New York City property records, you can often search by address, finding information on the home even if the family did not own it. During the periods of 1939-1941 and 1983-1988, New York City photographed every building for tax assessment purposes. My companion at this lecture and another person in the crowd knew that the latter ones had been put online, and mentioned so in the questions and comments period at the end of the talk. According to my companion, the indexing on these is a bit “funky” and you may have to try multiple search tactics, including possibly searching for another building on the block to find the one of interest. I do not know what the URL is for this photographic set. The website PropertyShark.com is a commercial site that covers all counties in New York state; you need to register to be able to use it, but using it is free once you do.

In answer to a couple of questions at the end, they provided these additional tidbits: Body transport records are extant and open for Manhattan from approximately the 1850′s to the late 1880′s, for both those bodies transported into and out of Manhattan. However, the body transport records are not even indexed, much less digitized. The New York Public Library has lots of old New York City area maps; some are online on their site, and some are only accessible on-site.

At this lecture, my aforementioned companion was someone who has a ton of New-York-City-area research and probably could have given the lecture, but said later that they had thought it was excellent, which I thought also spoke highly of McMenihan and Martin. In my summary of it, I have mostly provided information that I thought would be of general interest and have excluded a number of things I already knew quite well, partially because I did not take notes on the latter. Some of these resources that I didn’t mention are included in my blog’s “Resources (Free)” sidebar, with the ones they most emphasized in the talk being the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online and Old Fulton Post Cards, both of which are excellent newspaper sites.

Next up, I moved from one of the smallest rooms back to the largest room for “Researching a Community,” the second lecture I attended by David Allen Lambert, this one sponsored by NERGC co-sponsor New England Historic Genealogical Society. Quite the opposite of David Lambert’s lecture that I’d attended in a tiny room that Thursday (Day 1), the largest room was crowded with people to hear this lecture that had gotten rave reviews from folks who had attended it at RootsTech 2013. I spotted a good number of people I knew scattered around the large crowd, but I was happy with my seat close to the front and none of them chose to come sit with me. After three days of interacting nearly non-stop with other people, I readily admit I rather enjoyed sitting alone there, and chatted a bit with a few strangers sitting near me while waiting for the lecture to begin.

David Lambert discussed building an online community archive about a location where you live (or perhaps for one of your ancestral locations), using his own work building an online community archive for Stoughton, Massachusetts, for many of his examples. The basic idea is to utilize your genealogical research skills to create a site that will help researchers of a location where you live – wherever these researchers may be and regardless of whether you have any personal research where you live. It’s kind of like taking “doing more photos for FindAGrave than just requests” to a much broader level – and indeed, David Lambert mentioned that he had photographed all of Stoughton’s extant gravestones, put the photos on FindAGrave, and linked to them from the website he had built.

I did not take any notes at this session. Some of David Lambert’s suggestions: Check to see whether someone else has already started a project like this before you begin (don’t reinvent the wheel). Check to see what’s already been put online in disparate locations, and determine whether it’s done in a way you find useful, in which case you should consider simply linking to the item on the other site from yours, or whether there’s something about it that makes you feel it would be worth the effort for you to do it over for your site (e.g., poor quality scans or the information is organized in a way that doesn’t make much sense to you). Get to know your town clerk (in New England) or equivalent staff member elsewhere; if you find your town clerk to not be amenable to your project, try to figure out someone else “over their head” in the town government to whom you can pitch your project. Work with local historical societies, churches and other religions’ institutions, civic groups, schools, etc. See what projects got funded and/or got volunteers but never went anywhere and see if you can get permission to put them online; a couple of specific examples he gave were old cassettes sitting at the town high school from an oral interview project past students had gotten funding to do, and a church that has already scanned their records but not done anything with them beyond putting them on the church’s computer.

Repeatedly throughout the lecture David Lambert stressed the importance of being a sensitive content curator. If records are about people in the 1800′s or earlier, he advocated absolutely putting them online regardless of what secrets or scandals they might reveal. But if records are about people in the 1900′s and may contain information that the person does not know – say, a person in their 80′s may not realize they were adopted or ‘illegitimate,’ things which can plausibly be found in public records in Massachusetts (though in many states they probably would not be found in public records) – carefully weigh being kind against putting information that you found in the public domain online.

Another thing David Lambert stressed is getting to the original records whenever possible; the way he put it during one mention was that he always wants to get to the record that’s handwritten. He told an entertaining story about a prim person who had transcribed Stoughton’s very old church records and left blanks in what seemed to be the juiciest parts. While he guessed that, for example, many of the blanks were supposed to be the word “fornicate,” without the originals he did not know for sure. Some time after he started his project, someone bought the long-missing oldest church records at a yard sale (!!), and he was able to see the originals – and just like he expected, all the juicy parts had been clipped by the prim transcriber, and he had indeed guessed correctly that many of the missing words were variations of “fornicate.”

I found this lecture really inspiring and would recommend it to anyone who is considering a similar project. One of the towns in my area doesn’t have an active historical society and has no centralized online community archive presence (as far as I am aware) and hearing this lecture rekindled my long-time desire to do something about that. There are a few people with whom I want to check first to make sure that I’m not starting a project someone else is already trying to build, so far doing it out of sight.

My last choice for NERGC was difficult for me, with my top two choices being “The Symbolism on New England Gravestones: 17th Century to Present” and “Exploring Your Pioneer Valley Heritage.” I am very interested in gravestones and the history of their symbolism and of graveyards, and spend a lot of time in graveyards; and I have a good amount of research in the “Pioneer Valley,” which is the name by which a large swath of Western Massachusetts is known here in New England, though my biggest reason for considering the latter talk was that one of the allied families in the case study, according to the description and the syllabus, was the Sheldon family, which I am also researching.

In the end I chose to go to “The Symbolism on New England Gravestones” by Donna Walcovy, PhD, who used to be a professor and is now a professional gravestone restorer. She is also a friend of my Twitter friend and gravestone blogger Midge Frazel (@midgefrazel) of the blog Granite in My Blood, and Midge had introduced us that Thursday (Day 1). Many people have sympathized with my descriptions and/or photos of what I consider to be the deplorable state of the Old Burial Ground in Arlington (formerly Menotomy), Massachusetts, but when I met Donna and mentioned a bit about it, she was the first person to ever provide a concrete suggestion for something I could try. I don’t know whether it will work, as it will depend on whether Arlington is participating in something particular, but at least it’s a step I can take.

Donna was an extremely entertaining speaker, though as someone who has spent the last several years visiting cemeteries in my area of New England, with a concentration on the older ones, I turned out not learn much I did not already know. Donna said that she had included more of a variety of information in the syllabus than she was including in her talk because she didn’t have good enough photos for slides for some of the syllabus material and had prioritized including material in her talk for which she had good photos. I subsequently learned that two of the other people I know who have a lot of research in the Pioneer Valley did go to the other talk, and said they left it feeling confused about how the different families in the talk were connected to each other, so I’m glad I chose the talk that was entertaining.

I had considered asking my ride home that day if we could stop in the vendor hall before leaving, but when we left the last lecture, which was in one of the small rooms by the vendor hall, we discovered that the vendors had already taken down their booths and the hall was empty except for some scattered tables and dividers. So we simply headed home from NERGC, running into a few people we knew on the way to the car. It was strange to suddenly be done after three days of “rush, rush, rush” and “learn, learn, learn” and “people, people, people.” As a somber reminder of the area events of that week, as we got close to metro Boston on the highway, we saw a good number of police cars evenly spaced along the highway’s shoulder on the other side of the highway, all sitting silently with their lights flashing, their cars marking them as from a variety of different towns in the area. I would later learn that the MIT officer’s funeral was that day and that they had been there in solidarity. When we had been driving back the previous night, the highway signs on our side of the highway had warned motorists to check local media for the current situation in metro Boston. That evening, as we drove past the silent police cars towards the city, the highway signs thanked passing cars for the support shown to Boston.

New England Regional Genealogical Conference (NERGC) 2013: Day 2

This year for the first time I had the pleasure of attending NERGC. Thursday’s schedule was a bit slow-paced, but Friday’s schedule (Day 2) was jam-packed with activities.

On Friday and Saturday, the first lecture of the day started at 8:30. On Friday I first chose “Loyalist Migrations: Leaving & Returning to the States,” given by Chief Paul Bunnell, UE. For those that don’t know, Paul Bunnell has published several books on Loyalists as well as a number of other books. So far, my earliest immigrants to what eventually became the Canadian province of Ontario were Loyalists who left the rebelling Colonies behind. My family eventually came back to the States, but they left many of their relatives behind in Ontario, and most of the folks I’ve met through my research who are researching one or more of these same lines still live in Canada. Loyalists are still a hot topic here in New England after over two centuries, with some researchers whose family all stayed in New England and who believe all of them supported the revolutionaries becoming bitter any time any Loyalist who fought in New England is mentioned, so I had been pleasantly surprised to see on NERGC’s schedule that there was a talk on Loyalists.

I really enjoyed Paul Bunnell’s lecture. He started out with two statutes that were supposed to apply to Loyalists in the new States, one included in the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and another passed in 1784. Loyalists were, for example, supposed to get their seized land and other seized property back. I knew from my research that this did not happen, and indeed, he pointed out that not a single state honored these statutes. Turning federal theory into local practice was apparently simply not possible for the young United States.

The thing that struck me the most was that though there were only approximately 3,000 Loyalist claims put in to the Crown, not all of which were approved, he mentioned that since he had started doing Loyalist research many years ago, the total number of Loyalists who left the American Colonies has been significantly revised upwards several times, to the point where it is now estimated to be around 150,000. With a staggering difference of 147,000, he advised that the some of the best ways to try to determine whether your research subject that moved to Canada was a Loyalist if there was no claim are to try to determine when they left the now-United-States, where they settled, and who settled in the same immediate area. He also suggested checking shares in ships as a possible record source for locating a Loyalist and finding associated people, as many times families and associates would all buy shares in one ship.

Paul Bunnell said that the fastest, easiest way to determine who settled in the same immediate area is through the maps of the initial land grants, but unfortunately, as he noted, these appear to primarily survive for New Brunswick. This is great for researchers of New Brunswick Loyalists, but many more people settled in Nova Scotia and the future provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Often people from the same original location in the Colonies and/or the same military regiment would settle in the same immediate area, and he has been able to use the New Brunswick maps to successfully track many people back to their origins in the now-States via their associates. As someone who tremendously loves maps anyway, I remain disappointed that there appear to be so few extant ones for the early European now-Ontario settlements.

Paul Bunnell stressed early and repeatedly that Crown land grants were not given out evenly nor fairly. The high-ranking military officials got by far the most land, and single white men and any black men (single or not, military or not) got the least, at only 50 acres per man, which was very difficult to successfully live off in most of the areas Loyalists settled. Due to this unfairness and other issues, there were a number of riots of white and black Loyalist settlers, especially in certain areas.

Paul Bunnell also noted that there were a number of Loyalists, especially elderly women, still alive in Canada in 1851, and should clearly be marked as “UE” (for United Empire Loyalist) on the 1851 census. After NERGC I tried this with the only one I personally knew was a possibility – the daughter of a UE who got a land grant for her family when the Crown started allowing children of Loyalists to apply – but her entry does not list her as UE. I don’t know if this is because technically it was her father who was UE, not her, or if it’s because the enumerator in this district seems to have been kind of phoning it in; for example, her birth place is only listed as “Cda” (standing for “Canada”).

Next up, I continued with the day’s “Military Track” by attending “Researching Your French and Indian War Ancestor in New England,” by Craig Scott, CG; the conflict that we usually call the “French and Indian War” here in the States is known in Europe as the “Seven Years’ War.” For those that don’t know, Craig Scott is an expert on military records relating to American conflicts, including colonial-era ones. I am generally interested in the history of this war that so impacted the New Englanders and New Yorkers in my tree and have also accidentally found numerous casualties of the Native American raids on colonists’ settlements in the late 1600′s to early 1700′s in New England vital records of the time period [the latter, though more closely tied to the earlier war generally known as "King Philip's War" than the French and Indian War, is the subject of another draft in my blog files, hopefully to be posted here someday soon]. Additionally, I have at least one ancestor that local histories state was a soldier in the French and Indian War, but I have done very little research on his possible service to date. Consequently, this was one of the lectures that I circled as a must-attend as soon as I registered for NERGC. It exceeded my expectations.

Craig Scott set the stage for his lecture by showing a French map of colonial North America followed by an British map of colonial North America. The differences in their views, including the way they colonized a place, were more starkly illustrated visually than they ever could have been in words, and just looking at the two maps, it was apparent that there was likely to be conflict over the places these views overlapped. Craig Scott expressed the opinion that in retrospect, there was no question at all which of the approaches to colonization would win, and which of the societies would consequently become the permanent new settlers of North America.

Craig Scott went on to discuss some of the colonial wars in North America, putting them into two categories – wars exclusively with Native Americans, primarily over land issues, and wars between colonial powers, most of them starting in Europe. He stated that the French and Indian War is an exception to the latter category; it started here and ended there. While it is commonly called the French and Indian War here in the States, he generally referred to it as the Fourth Anglo-French War, and stated that part of the issue was that the Third Anglo-French War had never fully ended here in North America; though the French had stopped fighting in North America, many of their Native American allies continued fighting between the two “official” wars. In North America, the Fourth Anglo-French War was fought from Acadia (now Nova Scotia) to Fort Niagara down the Ohio and Monongahela Rivers in Pennsylvania and the South.

In 1748 the British Crown approved a 200,000 acre grant near the forks in the river where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stands today. Craig Scott argued that the French built their fort at now-Pittsburgh in direct response to this. The fort became one of the issues that led to war. Despite the war so impacting North America, he pointed out that most of the colonial fighting took place in the British Crown’s top-priority colony of India and that the last battle of the war was fought in Manila Bay. He mentioned as an aside that this same prioritizing of India would stretch the British military thin, causing the Crown to not send enough troops to quickly quell the 1776 rebellion in North America.

Troops fighting on the British side in the French and Indian War/Fourth Anglo-French War included the British Army, the Colonial Forces, two types of militias known as the Colonial Militia and the County Militia, Sailors and Marines, and Native American allies. The Colonial Militia was generally tasked with protecting the home front and had “no great interest in wandering far away.” Many in the British Army treated the colonial soldiers poorly.

The general guideline Craig Scott suggested is to look for possible service of any North American man of British descent who was between the ages of 18 and 60 during the war. No New Englanders successfully obtained bounty land from service in this war, so that would be a fruitless search. Because so much of the war was fought by New Englanders in New York, Craig Scott recommended the New York Historical Society Museum & Library as a good resource for those of us researching New Englanders who served in the war, as well as mentioning multiple times that the National Archives [UK] has a good number of records since anyone serving at the time was technically serving in the British military. He also advised researchers “follow the money” by utilizing treasury records, including people being paid for military service and colonists being paid for logistical support. I can personally attest to this as an excellent strategy; I have utilized treasury records extensively in my research of the American Revolution in Vermont.

My Twitter friend Beverly Hallam (@Beverly_H_) is the volunteer research co-ordinator for the Families in British India Society (FIBIS) and did some follow-up when I mentioned Craig Scott’s comments on the impact the Crown’s heavy military investment in India had on their global interests at this time. On FIBIS’s Wiki, she found some internal and external links on the Seven Years’ War in and near India, which you can read here.

For those of you that have never attended an American genealogy conference before, there are typically conference-sponsored workshops, luncheons, and dinners that cost extra to attend beyond the conference price and generally have a limit, after which further people are placed onto a waiting list. The luncheons and dinners are typically sponsored by a genealogical society, genealogical company, or similar. The only one I attended at NERGC was next up on my schedule – the Friday luncheon sponsored by the Massachusetts Genealogical Council (MGC) and featuring Laura Prescott giving a presentation titled “Jousting with the Gatekeepers” of records. MGC is an umbrella organization whose primariy mission is working to monitor records access on a state and national level and, if necessary, to mobilize genealogists and others that need to access American records to support or oppose specific legislation.

This luncheon was a bit different than ones I’ve attended at one-day events in the past; they waited until about everyone had finished eating before beginning the presentation. After a brief introduction on what MGC does, the first speaker introduced Laura Prescott. I didn’t really know what to expect from her presentation, but much of it consisted of specific stories regarding people having anywhere from an incredibly easy to extremely difficult time accessing records in specific locations. This wide mix reflected my own experiences, and I’d imagine that anyone who has tried to access records in a variety of different locations has probably had similarly varied experiences. The talk succinctly illustrated how important the “gatekeeper” is to our ability to access records. Laura Prescott ended with some steps we can all take to try to keep the best access to records possible, including being ever-vigilant towards proposed legislation.

Our table was a mix of people I already knew and ones that I had not known before sitting with them. The couple that sat down next to me turned out to live in a town in Vermont where one of my lines settled in the late 1700′s, which is also next to a town where another line of mine settled around the same time. They had moved there from elsewhere and were excited to meet someone who has an ancestor mentioned in the tome* on the history of the town, though I suspect I was even more excited than they were at meeting people who live somewhere of research interest to me! Since NERGC, we have been emailing. (*You probably think I’m exaggerating, but it’s one of the books I jokingly keep in mind at the library as a way to injure an attempted attacker if it’s ever necessary.)

As a side note, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the vegetarian entree was actually good. As a vegetarian I often find that at catered genealogy events, non-vegetarians take most of the vegetarian choice(s), for whatever their reason(s) may be, and that the vegetarian choice(s) tend to be rather boring and sometimes not very tasty. Thankfully for this luncheon you pre-ordered your entree when you registered, and were served it by waitstaff rather than the much more common self-catering.

On Friday and Saturday, the afternoon contained three lecture time slots, as it had on Thursday. On Thursday I had heard reports from people I knew that they had been unable to attend the lecture they wanted to attend because the room was full by the time they arrived, so by Friday I tried to make it to a room quickly to reserve a seat even if I ended up temporarily leaving between my first arrival and the start of the lecture.

My first choice on Friday afternoon was Steve Morse’s “Genealogy Beyond the Y Chromosome: Autosomes Exposed.” The largest room was crowded for this talk on DNA, showing the great interest in the subject that was also reported by people who attended DNA sessions at RootsTech 2013. Steve Morse made it very clear at the beginning that he was not a genetics expert, but rather a layperson interested in explaining the science behind DNA tests to others. Thanks to his clear, concise, visuals-heavy explanations tailored for fellow laypeople, I felt like I finally fully understood the science behind the autosomal DNA testing my family had done.

At the end of his talk, Steve Morse recapped the different kinds of testing currently widely available to genealogists. According to him, Y-DNA tests can potentially find both recent and “deep” cousins, mtDNA tests are primarily for finding “deep” cousins, autosomal DNA tests are primarily for finding recent cousins and/or testing amongst potential recent-common-ancestor relatives, and the tests that tell you your percent of each ethnicity are junk science that doesn’t really tell you anything.

In the last part of his presentation and again in answer to some questions, he stressed that you are at the mercy of the statisticians to match you and/or interpret your results; for tests where you are matching to recent cousins, it’s much more difficult for the statisticians to make an error that will significantly impact your matches, but once you get back to deep ancestry or if you are taking a test to determine your ethnicity percentages, it is much easier for a statistician to interpret your results in a way that skews your results and/or your matches. He also stressed repeatedly that because autosomal DNA changes with every generation, with potential significant differences even between full siblings, it’s not very accurate beyond about 4-5 generations at the way the technology stands today.

Next I stayed in the large room for Lori Thornton’s “Digging Up the Dirt on Your Farmer.” While I thought the lecture was interesting, it wasn’t what I expected from the title and description. Most of the highlighted records were ones that could apply to people in a variety of occupations rather than specifically applying only to farmers.

For me, my best takeaway from the lecture had nothing to do with farmers. One of the example record sets she gave was the Vermont Religious Certificates, which early Vermont required of Christians who were of other denominations besides Congregationalist, what the Puritan denomination had become over time. I had forgotten this record set existed, as almost all of my New Englanders were Puritans/Congregationalists. I have been trying for some time to figure out what church my great-great-great-grandmother attended at the end of her life; she mentioned it in a letter to her grandson using a church name that appears to have been colloquial, as I have not been able to use the name to successfully determine the church. I was briefly hopeful that perhaps this could be a source to utilize in my search, but unfortunately I later quickly determined that the certificates had stopped being required decades before she would have switched churches, and also that they often don’t mention the specific alternate church the person is attending anyway. However, it is good that I was reminded of the record set and it will now stick in my head as a possible future source.

I was somewhat surprised that when discussing land grants and homestead applications, Lori Thornton only mentioned the low-information one-page land patents that have been scanned onto the Bureau of Land Management’s General Land Office (BLM-GLO) site, but did not include information on ordering homestead or other applications, what the applications could contain, nor the survey maps that the BLM-GLO scanned onto their site a few years ago. I wondered if perhaps this was because it seemed from her presentation that almost all of her research was in the Deep South of the U. S., and in the federal land states in the Deep South the process was mostly a cash-entry land patent system rather than systems such as the land grants offered to veterans of the War of 1812 (or next-of-kin if they were deceased) starting in the 1850′s primarily in the Midwest and the homesteads primarily in the Plains and West that began via the Homestead Act of 1862. Cash-entry applications, such as those that were common in the South, typically are only a few pages long and typically contain almost no information on the research subject, though I have heard stories from other researchers about surprise gems found in those slim applications as well, a good reminder to never write off any record as automatically being useless in a search.

On the way home that night I asked the person with whom I was carpooling that day, who had been sitting with me at the farmer lecture, if they had checked whether their New Englanders who moved to the American Plains had taken out a homestead. They said they had not, and in response I detailed some of the information that can be found in the applications and they said that they had never realized how much information can be found in them and that they were going to investigate further. I readily admit that I am biased; homestead applications are one of my favorite American and Canadian record sets.

As my last lecture choice of the day, I continued with the previous lecture’s “Occupations Track” and went to Jayne Jordan’s “Indentured Servants in the New England Colonies.” She didn’t have enough handouts so I never received the handout of resources, and she had no working projector so we had no visuals for what she said was supposed to be a visual presentation. I left that talk not really having a better idea of how to research indentured servants than when I arrived. The primary benefit for me personally from that lecture is that one of the examples she gave was of a family that I’m as sure as I can possibly be from the given date and location was headed by a brother or first cousin to my direct line, but is a collateral line that I haven’t thoroughly researched so far. From the lecture I now know that at least according to her research, some of their children were removed from their home and placed into indentured servitude, which provides me with a place to start, even though I will have to figure out on my own how to do the research. She did not state whether she found the information on that family in original records or some other source.

I have had Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 by Christopher Tomlins (USA: Cambridge University Press, 2010) in my to-read pile for some time. Not having read it, I cannot tell you how good it is, but I can tell you that based on the index, there are many references to indentured servitude, including a number of specific references regarding the various English colonies, with the largest amounts being for Pennsylvania and Virginia.

After the last lecture of the day, I attended a private reception for alumni and teachers of Boston University (BU) Center for Professional Education’s Certificate in Genealogical Research program. It was nice to see a number of familiar faces and meet some new folks. Around 50 people attended, though I am sure that there were more program alumni present at NERGC than at the reception. The NERGC Special Interest Groups (SIGs) were pushed back from their original scheduled start of 7:00 to starting at 7:30, so unfortunately I never made it to so much as the beginning of any of them.

………

My own experiences that day will probably go down as one of the strangest days of my life. We are of course always living future history, but at least for me, only occasionally does it really strike me that I am, at that moment, living history that will be remembered by many around the world.

I woke at 5:00 and turned on the news to discover that there had been a shootout the previous evening between the police and the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. Shortly after I began watching the news, the authorities announced that much of metropolitan Boston was now in “lockdown” and the entire public transit system had been closed. I live a little beyond the lockdown area – about a 15-minute walk from the border of the nearest locked-down town – but my friend with whom I was carpooling that day called at 6:00 to say they were on their way and would call back if they encountered any roadblocks or other problems. We were able to make it up to Manchester, New Hampshire, with no issues, though we did see a good number of speeding, siren-blaring police cars zip past going the other direction while we were leaving the metro area. I would subsequently discover that the BU staff member who had coordinated BU’s NERGC reception was not present at the reception because she did live in one of the towns in the lockdown, so I was lucky to have made it there.

When I arrived at NERGC many people who knew me expressed happy surprise to see me there, saying, “I didn’t know if you were going to make it.” I often responded, “I made it here, though I’m not sure at this point whether I’ll be able to make it home tonight.” This was true; I knew it was possible I would have to spend the night outside the metro area, depending on how events unfolded that day. NERGC volunteers had printed out stickers that said “WE ARE BOSTON” for attendees to put on their badges and had put them at the registration desk. Before the first session started and during every break, a throng of people clustered around the hotel lobby’s television, perpetually on a news channel on mute, to see if there were updates, and in the hallways people often asked me if I’d heard anything new recently.

On the car ride home we turned on the radio and discovered that the remaining suspect had been located but not yet apprehended. Shortly after I got home authorities announced that he had successfully been apprehended. I was so busy all day that I did not get the chance to check Twitter until I was home, and many of my Twitter friends had expressed worry over the day. (Thank you all for your concern.)

New England Regional Genealogical Conference (NERGC) 2013: Day 1

This past week, for the first time I had the pleasure of attending the New England Regional Genealogical Conference (known as “NERGC,” and pronounced sort of like “nerk”). NERGC is held every two years in various places in New England, mostly small cities. This year NERGC was held in Manchester, New Hampshire, about an hour’s drive from metropolitan Boston, and I was able to find people with whom to carpool each day.

NERGC opened with a first-timers’ session, which folks recommended I simply skip as they thought the information in it would be too basic for me. After the session I talked with another first-timer who did attend it and said that there wasn’t any useful-to-them information given in the session, so I was glad that I had decided to socialize instead. In the lobby of the hotel where the conference was being held, I met Heather Wilkinson Rojo of the well-known blog Nutfield Genealogy in person for the first time after meeting her online a number of years ago, and saw many other people.

Next on the schedule was what the program called the “opening session,” which was comparable to what many other conferences and events term a “keynote speech.” While I was waiting in the crowd to enter the big hall, another person waiting said that as of that morning, there were 863 people registered for NERGC. While as a first-timer to NERGC I don’t have a basis on which to compare this, reactions of others to that number and generally to the large crowds for the venue suggested that this was a lot for this conference.

For the main speech of the opening session, Sandra Clunies discussed the mill workers of Lawrence and Lowell, towns in Massachusetts that were built on the mill trade, spending a fair portion of her lecture on three specific example mill workers. As regular readers of my blog know, some of my family lived in Vermont starting in the 1700′s. One of my ancestors was born on a farm to a large family. My ancestor was the oldest child and stayed in Vermont, but his three oldest sisters sized up their options in the small, mostly rural Vermont community and decided to head to the booming mill towns around the time they opened in eastern Massachusetts. There is a very good chance that they were introduced to mill recruiting materials in their town and it is quite possible that one of the mill agents actually visited their town, as the agents knew that girls and young women from small farming communities were excellent candidates to recruit to mill work and traveled around talking with them and urging them to sign contracts with the mill they represented and leave immediately. [I have had a partially written post on his sisters and the mills in my blog draft file for months; hopefully one of these days I will finally finish and post it.]

Like one of Sandra Clunies’s three main example research subjects, my ancestor’s sisters made money and met husbands there. All three of his sisters married in Massachusetts and then literally went in different directions from there. I had hoped to gain new insight into the mill towns via the lecture, but as someone from one of the mill towns whom I met at a later lecture phrased it regarding themselves, “I already knew too much.” That’s certainly not Sandra Clunies’s fault.

For anyone who has an interest in the New England mill towns, I recommend reading Loom & Spindle: or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls by Harriet H. Robinson. I particularly recommend the revised edition that was published in 1976 by Press Pacifica. Future abolitionist and suffragist Harriet Hanson Robinson started working in the Lowell, Massachusetts, mills in 1835 at age 10, and Loom & Spindle is the memoir that she published decades later reflecting on her early life in the mills. Press Pacifica slightly revised the work based on notes in Robinson’s own copy of her book and added a succinct, informative introduction by Jane Wilkins Pultz that greatly helped me understand the mill girls’ politics and lives.

Next up was a break, for attendees to have lunch and for the venue to break the large hall where we had heard Clunies speak into smaller rooms for the afternoon lectures; at the end of the talk they requested everyone leave the hall so they could do just that.

After lunch I first attended Laura Prescott’s talk entitled “Spinsters and Widows: Gender Loyalty within Families.” The description led some of the other people I knew there to suspect the lecture would be too basic for them, and as far as I am aware, I am the only person I knew there who attended it. This was a shame, as I enjoyed it and did not find it overly basic. She started out talking about more and more American women waiting longer to marry starting around the mid-1800′s, and cited some specific examples of stories and songs from pop culture of the time period. This is something that I have noticed in my own research, but I had not heard the subject addressed in a genealogy lecture I attended before.

Laura Prescott then moved on to a variety of strategies researchers can use in researching the women in their families, including a variety of types of documents, websites, and repositories. I thought it was particularly interesting that she had found a document in a 19th-century American deed book wherein a woman who had waited some time to marry and thus accumulated some of her own belongings before marriage entered into a contract with her future husband, with a detailed list of a number of her belongings and a statement that these belongings were to be brought to a house secured by her future husband and his family in a specific town. Laura Prescott said she basically thought of it as an early prenup. I don’t think I would personally think of it in those exact terms, but I’m always fascinated to learn there is a record type of which I had previously been unaware.

The other thing I found most noteworthy about Laura Prescott’s talk was that she cited some examples of “spinster” being used in colonial documents to mean a woman legally acting for herself rather than the definition many of us most often encounter, a woman who has never married. When I heard it I didn’t remember ever hearing it before, though on the car ride home I was reminded that Melinde Lutz Byrne gave the same explanation in her National Genealogical Society Quarterly [U. S.] article on Zipporah and the headless baby. This is a good example that sometimes we just forget things! The article Laura Prescott suggested reading for more information is “Spinster: An Indicator of Legal Status” by Eugene A. Stratton, CG, FASG, in The American Genealogist 61:3 (Jan/Apr 1986).

I next attended David Allen Lambert’s talk titled “Massachusetts Native American Research.” Despite the schedule’s title, the description made it clear to me that this was not a general lecture geared towards learning how to research any southern New England Native American tribe, but rather a case study of the tribe known as the Punkapoag. I had already attended a talk of the former type at the Boston Public Library last year so I did not mind. I spent a semester of college living on a Reservation in British Columbia and traveling to other Native communities (or more precisely, “to other First Nations,” as it is phrased in Canada), and Native American tribes’ histories and cultures remain of interest to me. I found the lecture very interesting, though I don’t know how I would summarize it here. The audience for this lecture was one of the smallest of any of the lectures I attended at NERGC, which was too bad.

One thing that especially stuck with me is that David Lambert gave a few examples of people for whom he has only found one extant document for their entire life, and it made him wonder about all the people for whom he has not found any. This is something I think about a fair amount in my own research, especially when I am researching farther back in time and/or researching in frontier areas of North America.

The last lecture I attended on Thursday was Colleen Fitzpatrick’s “You Will Never Look at Your Old Photos the Same Way Again!” Forensic genealogy expert and retired rocket scientist Colleen Fitzpatrick gave several lectures at NERGC, and I chose to attend this one on using background details to help analyze old photos because I felt that it could be immediately useful in helping me to identify my old photos that have no date, no place, and/or no people listed. I was right.

Colleen Fitzpatrick successfully analyzed bits of background details that it never would have occurred to me to even attempt to do. My favorite example was her longest one, of trying to date a photograph of some men in a bar in New Orleans. She picked apart every background detail she could, including the cash register and the items on the wall, and when those didn’t successfully identify the date, she moved on to the items you could barely see outside the bar through the door, such as a car you could kind of see that she and the people she works with were able to identify as a particular type of Model-T, and the first manufacture date of the car gave a precise earliest date that the photo could have been taken. By the end of her work with the photograph, she was able to pinpoint the exact street address of the bar, the approximate date that the client’s ancestor took over the bar, the business across the street, and an approximately year-long time range when the photograph could have been taken.

In the process Colleen Fitzpatrick also found a number of background-information items that she considered interesting but which turned out not to help date the photograph. However, as she illustrated well, there is no way to know for sure whether something in the background of a photograph (or mentioned in a document, or…) will be useful in photo identification or other research until you do the background research and determine whether it is. This is very much the same way I work when I am researching so I found her process very easy to follow and understand. At the end Colleen Fitzpatrick took questions. Someone asked her what software she uses and she said that she does not use PhotoShop but rather freeware called IrfanView. I intend to try it out, but haven’t done so yet.

After the last lecture of the day, there was a structured hour-long break, followed at 5:15 by the “Society Fair & Social Hour” and at 6:00 by the opening of the “Exhibit Hall.” The Society Fair was comprised mostly of some of the smaller genealogical societies, most of them geographically- or surname-based. The vendors in the Exhibit Hall were primarily a mix of genealogical societies and libraries; genealogical services such as educational opportunities, websites, and professional genealogy companies; and private vendors selling such items as books and maps. Thanks to a tip from someone I know, I stopped by the Genealogical Society of Vermont‘s booth to check out the old books they turned out to be selling there in addition to their own publications. I ended up spending much of my hall time looking through their old books and chatting with the volunteers that were staffing their booth.

While we were chatting one of the Genealogical Society of Vermont’s volunteers told me a story regarding Vermont-born Chester Arthur, who was elected Vice President of the United States and then assumed the presidency when President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881. Arthur’s father had emigrated from northern Ireland to Canada, and their nuclear family had initially lived in Canada before moving to Vermont. Though Arthur was born after the family moved to Vermont, the question of whether or not he was an American citizen was a hot political topic during the campaign. The volunteer I was chatting with said that he had attended an event at Arthur’s historic house in Vermont where the staff said that having been unable to prove Arthur’s Vermont birth through vital records or other similar records, the staff had used state directories (small Vermont’s equivalent of city or county directories elsewhere) to prove that the family was residing in Vermont by the time Arthur was born.

I arrived home in metro Boston around 8:30-8:45 and was in bed by 9:30, before the shootout that night between the Boston Marathon bombing suspects and police in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, had made the news, as I would discover very early the next morning.

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Some Tangential Further Thoughts

I know that often people who don’t normally visit a blog will visit certain posts specifically to read about conferences and other special events, so I’m putting most of my personal reflections and more tangential thoughts on each day at NERGC at the end of the post so these visitors don’t need to wade through them to read the rest of the post. Think of them as paragraph-sized bullet points rather than a narrative. You are of course welcome to simply skip this section.

For those of you that have never been to a genealogical conference before, it can kind of be a bit overwhelming, with a mix of information overload and sensory overload. I had hoped to blog during NERGC about the conference, but found that I was just too overwhelmed and tired to do so. I apologize that this first post is being posted a week after the conference. I am working on drafts for my other two days at NERGC as well as a draft of some general food for thought about what various genealogy conferences are doing well and some ideas they could maybe take from the way other conferences do some things. I hope to post all of these within the next few days or so.

My Thursday afternoon lecture choices were ones I consider pretty safe. I had heard both Laura Prescott and David Lambert speak on other subjects in the past, and a number of fellow alumni of Boston University’s Center for Professional Education’s Certificate in Genealogical Research Program had taken the Forensic Genealogy course that Colleen Fitzpatrick co-taught at Boston University last summer and raved about her teaching skills. Some genealogists I know prefer to stick to the well-known names in lecturing and teaching because they feel that guarantees a good lecture. But those well-known names became that way because someone initially gave them a chance. Personally I prefer to go to lectures by people I have heard before, speakers and/or lectures that are recommended by people I know, or subjects about which I am interested in learning more. This last one means that I have heard some dud lectures in my lifetime, but it also means that I have heard some gems where I was one of only a handful of people in the room.

One of my good friends says that there are two kinds of genealogists, the type that are interested narrowly and very specifically in genealogy and are only interested in  any history that they believe is directly applicable to their research, and the type that are also interested in history for history’s sake. As readers that are my friends and/or follow me on Twitter are likely already aware, I fall squarely in the latter category. I enjoyed David Lambert’s Punkapoag lecture for its own sake, but I can understand why attendance was small and most attendees chose to instead go to lectures that they hoped would directly* impact their research. (*Almost everyone I saw at NERGC seemed to be white, though of course I can’t speak to other people’s heritage nor research interests.)

As someone without a car, I am limited in what events I can attend by what is accessible by public transit or knowing someone with a car who is attending and willing to take me along. I count myself as lucky that I was able to carpool to NERGC this year and greatly thank those that carpooled with me and the additional person that offered to carpool after I had arranged all my rides.

Connecting the dots: Charles Evans (Part 2)

If you haven’t already, please first read “Connecting the dots: Charles Evans (Part 1).”

Did Charles Evans have two families?

Charles Evans seemingly disappeared from England after the 1851 census and seemingly reappeared in England on the 1871 census, newly with a wife named Catherine and a son named William. In 1871 William was reportedly age 8 & born in Scotland. Since searches of the 1861 England & Wales census had gone nowhere, a search was conducted of the 1861 Scotland census. Evans may be a very common surname in Wales and a relatively common one in England, but it is an uncommon surname in Scotland, and there were very few Charles Evanses of any age listed in the index to the 1861 Scotland census.

A Charles Evans in Scotland

A Charles Evans was located in the district ScotlandsPeople calls “Shipping” and I used some of my credits to purchase the scan of the census page. Rather unusually for Scotland censuses of the time period, Charles Evans’s exact birth place in England is listed – “Devon Hartland.” Charles Evans is listed as married, age 32, and an “A.B.” (which stands for Able-Bodied Seaman). The enumeration page doesn’t list any details at all at the top, but thanks to a tip from Kirsty of The Professional Descendant, a search for the citation on Ancestry yielded an enumeration district of “Hogue” in Greenock, Renfrewshire. I developed the theory that the enumeration district was the name of a ship. It took much less time than I expected to discover that a ship named H.M.S. Hogue was serving as a Coast Guard ship out of Greenock at the time, according to this site. This is the only Charles Evans who was indexed as being within 2 years of “my” Charles’s estimated age; the next closest one was listed as 5 years younger than “my” Charles.

A search for births of children named William Evans in Scotland similarly yielded a small number in the entire country. One of them was indexed as having been born in Greenock, Renfrewshire, in 1862, and I used some of my ScotlandsPeople credits to purchase the record, which turned out to be a wise purchase. The birth record for William John Evans listed his father as Charles Evans who was serving on the Hogue, but any hopes of discovering Catherine’s maiden name and confirming this was the same family were shattered. Rather, William’s mother was listed with the maiden name of Susan Stokes. Scottish birth records handily also list a marriage place and date, and Charles, who reported the birth, listed their marriage date as 23 December 1859 and the place as “South M__ Middlesex,” the __ being difficult to read on the scan. William John Evans’s exact birth date was listed as 1 September 1862 at 3 a.m.

A search of “Scotland, Births and Baptisms, 1564-1950″ on FamilySearch did not turn up any further births of an Evans child to a Stokes mother in Scotland. This index-only database allows for searching by the maiden name of the mother in the mid- to late 1800′s, which ScotlandsPeople’s site does not.

A Charles Evans in Middlesex

Using the information from William’s birth record, a banns record was located for Charles Evans and Susannah (not Susan) Stokes in the London Metropolitan Archives records that have been scanned onto Ancestry, their banns taking place in January 1860 at St. Giles in South Mimms, Middlesex. They subsequently married at St. Giles in South Mimms on 23 March 1860, exactly three months after the marriage date that Charles listed on William’s birth record. This initially puzzled me, as William wasn’t born until over 2 years later, so why lie?

A possible answer was quickly discovered. On the 1861 census, Susannah was not in Scotland but in the parish of South Mimms, living with her brother Andrew Stokes’s family and with a 1-year-old child named Charles Evans. Susannah’s age was listed as 36. Susannah had no occupation listed, not even a reference to her husband’s occupation, though the latter was included on English censuses for many other women who had husbands working away from home and no paid job of their own. Susannah and Andrew’s widowed mother Ann Stokes was living next door with John and William Stokes, sons who reportedly had never married.

Younger Charles Evans’s baptism record, at Christ Church in Barnet, lists his name as Charles Evens Evans (that’s not a typo) and his parents as Charles and Susannah Evans; the baptism occurred on 29 April 1860, a day that two other baptisms also occurred at the church. FreeBMD has an index of the birth of a Charles Evans Evans (also not a typo) in the 1st Quarter of 1860 in Barnet Registration District, which includes both Barnet and South Mimms; the certificate has not been reviewed.

It seems that perhaps marrying a bit longer before the birth of his apparent first child (or possibly “before at all”) was more acceptable to the elder Charles, though apparently only enough to lie about it to others, not to do it. It is particularly interesting to note that the banns took place two months before the marriage. A fellow researcher believes that some men wanted to wait to see whether their pregnant and betrothed girlfriend was very likely to carry the fetus to term as a living infant before going through with the marriage. It seems that the Charles Evans/Susannah Stokes marriage could be used as an example of that researcher’s theory, regardless of whether that is a correct interpretation of Charles’s behavior.

“You’re the best he’s had, you’re the best so far

All the way to the church from the back of a car.”

The Beautiful South

Susannah on Her Own

In 1871 Susannah, age 37, listed as married and still listed with the surname “Evans,” was living with her widowed mother Ann Stokes, age 76, and (only) a third child, Sarah Ann Evans, age 4, in South Mimms at a “Brewers Company Almshouse,” of which Ann is described as an “Inmate.” This almshouse seems to have been exclusively for widows, as everyone listed as an inmate of it in 1871 was also listed as a widow. By this point Susannah is listed with a paid job as a dressmaker. It took little time to determine that by “Brewers Company,” the enumerator meant the Brewers’ Livery Company of the City of London, which had run almshouses at South Mimms since 1686. Ann Stokes’s exact connection to the Brewers’ Livery Company is unknown so far.

Sarah Ann’s baptism was not until 11 September 1876, but the baptism record lists a birth date of 13 March 1867, consistent with Sarah Ann’s 1871 census enumeration. Listed as Sarah Anne Evans on the baptism record, her parents are listed as Charles and Susannah Evans, but it is the only baptism in the surrounding 4 pages of 1876-1877 baptisms at St. Giles where the father’s profession is left blank. There was no space provided for listing the mother’s profession.

Had Susannah and her husband Charles split up by this point? Was Susannah supporting herself and her daughter on her own? Was Charles’s profession blank on Sarah Ann’s baptism because Susannah now did not know for sure what it was?

Is this Charles the same Charles Evans who in 1871 was reportedly married to Catherine Evans and was living with a William Evans who was described as a son, 8 years old, and born in Scotland? The William John Evans who was born in Greenock in September 1862 would have been 8 years old when the census was taken in April 1871. But just because it could be the same William, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is. In 1871 this Evans family was living in Mile End Old Town; while it was near the other end of Middlesex from South Mimms, it was within the same county.

No matching Charles Evans has been found on the 1871 Scotland census.

More Questions Than Answers

So far, the 1876 baptism record of Sarah Ann Evans is the most recent record located that lists Susannah (Stokes) Evans. It is possible that Susannah shortly remarried or died. A search by birth place of the 1881-1901 censuses on FindMyPast did not reveal any Susanna(h)/Susan Evans who reported her birth place as South Mimms (or variant spellings) nor Potters Bar (the parish next to South Mimms, Potters Bar had been part of the parish of South Mimms when Susannah was born and was where Susannah generally stated on censuses that she had been born). The search did locate a few women named Susanna(h)/Susan who were living in various places around the UK and were married to other men. While almost all of the households had children who were born before Susannah would have remarried, without having done further research tracking the other families back in time, I must keep in mind that it is possible that they were the wife’s stepchildren.

There is no definitive indication of what happened to Susannah and Charles’s first child, Charles, after his 1861 enumeration, though he may be the Charles Evans who is indexed as having died in South Mimms’s registration district, Barnet, in the 1st Quarter of 1864; the certificate has not been reviewed. A burial record was found in the St. John the Baptist in Potters Bar burial records for a Charles Evans who died at age 4 and was buried on 27 Mar 1864; while this is consistent with what is known so far about Charles Evans Evans, nothing in the record clearly identifies this Charles as Charles Evans Evans. This is the only Evans burial that matches this family in the digitized burial records from St. John the Baptist in Potters Bar and from St. Giles in South Mimms.

While a separate parish named Potters Bar was created in 1835, St. John the Baptist was a part of South Mimms parish even though it was called St. John the Baptist at Potters Bar. Similarly, the Stokes family seems to have lived in the section of Potters Bar that remained part of South Mimms parish when Potters Bar parish was spun off, as the family’s records usually refer to the children as born in Potters Bar, the 1841 census says they are living in Potters Bar in South Mimms parish, and the family primarily used St. John the Baptist after it was opened in 1835 as the second church in South Mimms parish. This map shows South Mimms parish in 1842, when Susannah would have been about 9 years old, and includes part of Potters Bar near the upper right edge of South Mimms. The railway came to the area in 1850, with a station opening at Potters Bar/South Mimms, and apparently drastically changed the area. There is more on the Potters Bar and South Mimms area at Potters Bar History Online, where I found the linked map and station photo.

To date there is also no indication of what happened to Sarah Ann Evans after her 1876 baptism. An initial census search for a Sarah Ann Evans or Sarah Evans who was born in South Mimms or Potters Bar did not return any good hits past the 1871 census. This isn’t conclusive that she died; for example, if Susannah (Stokes) Evans remarried, Sarah Ann could be enumerated under her stepfather’s surname. There are also no indexed deaths of a Sarah Evans or Sarah Ann(e) Evans dying in Barnet Registration District between 3rd Quarter 1876 and 2nd Quarter 1881, though this could just mean she wasn’t properly indexed (misindexed or not indexed at all) or that she died elsewhere.

Leads on Charles Evans

The records tell more than what I have revealed so far.

The 1860 records indicate that the Charles Evans who married Susannah Stokes and had a child Charles Evans Evans with her was living in South Mimms at the Militia Barracks there, working as a “Sarjeant Middlesex Rifles” (marriage record)/”Staff Sergeant of Militia” (baptism record). South Mimms was in the corner of Middlesex on the Middlesex/Hertfortshire border and was already occasionally listed on records as being in Hertfordshire, which it would later officially become. The younger Charles’s baptism record says that the family was living on New Road in Barnet at the time of the baptism, but since this was only about a month after the marriage record that listed both adults as living in South Mimms, it is unclear whether this is correct. It is possible that the family had the child baptized in a different church than where they were married so that they would be interacting with a Curate that didn’t know they had married around the time of their child’s birth, and consequently they may have deliberately lied about their residence.

Unfortunately the banns and marriage records only list Charles and Susannah as of full age. However, the marriage record, which correctly (based primarily on censuses so far) lists Susannah Stokes’s father as Andrew Stokes, Wheelwright, lists Charles Evans’s father as John Evans, Pensioner. This fits with the large amount of known information on “my” Charles’s father, but since John Evans is such a common name overall in the UK, it could simply be a coincidence. To date, the only record that definitively ties Charles and Susannah together and lists an age for Charles is the 1861 Scotland census, which lists his age as 32. This age is most consistent with the stated age of the Charles Evans who was discharged from the Army in (probably) September 1850 at a stated age of 22. This does not necessarily mean that it is the same Charles Evans, nor that it rules out the possibility of a deliberately or mistakenly given incorrect age on any record. If it is the same Charles Evans who enlisted in the Army, it could even be that the military already had an incorrect age from his previous service and simply continued using it.

A Search for Military Records

A search of digitized militia records has so far not revealed a Charles Evans serving in that area at that time, although the search is ongoing, as a thorough review of the files necessitates going through each one page-by-page to confirm that the indexing is accurate and the file holds no additional information that might confirm or discount that it is the correct Charles Evans. Based on Charles Evans showing up on the 1861 census serving in the Coast Guard, he appears to have transferred to the Coast Guard before the 1861 Army Census, but I searched the Army Census as well to be thorough, and did not find any matching Charles Evanses.

In My Ancestor Was in the British Army, Watts and Watts help explain why I have had so little success so far, such as: “It must be noted, however, that much material relating to the militia was never collected centrally and should be sought in County Record Offices and private collections.” According to them, so far no full book has been published on militia records, though they believe the subject deserves one. Through reading on the National Archives site and other websites I grasped that: 1) the militia consisted of volunteers by the time that Charles Evans the Sergeant or Staff Sergeant was serving in it; 2) the militia was generally a part-time job; 3) the militia group known from 1794-1813 as “the Volunteers” was, to quote the National Archives site, “revived as the Rifle Volunteers in 1859.” This fits perfectly with Charles Evans being listed as in the Middlesex Rifles in 1860. If the two Charles Evanses are one, the typical part-time nature of the work could help explain how Charles would have had the time to pick up the trade of tailoring.

While Coast Guard files are digitized as part of the Royal Navy files on the National Archives site, when I didn’t find any matching Charles Evanses nor any matching people from Hartland in the indexed files, I reviewed the section on possible reasons why the person one is seeking may not be indexed even if they did serve in the Royal Navy, and determined that people who were serving as early as Charles seem to only be included in the digitized but unindexed register, not the indexed files. I downloaded the Coast Guard register, but it is 202 pages of handwritten lists of names that aren’t indexed and aren’t listed chronologically by enlistment date nor alphabetically by name, so searching it has been extremely slow going. The only relevant things I have managed to determine so far are that people from the time period Charles enlisted and people who enlisted directly onto the HMS Hogue are both included in the register. Unfortunately the register only lists the name of the first ship onto which the person enlisted, so if Charles initially enlisted onto a different ship, scanning for the word Hogue wouldn’t help locate him. So far I have failed to find him in it. If I do locate him, it would give me the number through which his Coast Guard file could be located.

How Many Charles Evans from Hartland Are There?

So far it seems reasonably clear that a single Charles Evans reportedly was in the militia in Middlesex (apparently in the one known as the Middlesex Rifles, though googling that gets one, um, interesting results) and married Susannah Stokes in South Mimms and had at least two children – Charles Evans Evans and William John Evans – and probably a third, Sarah Ann Evans. Because of William John Evans’s birth record, it also seems reasonably clear that this same Charles Evans transferred from the militia in Middlesex to the Coast Guard and was stationed up in Greenock, Renfrewshire, Scotland, by April 1861, and that Susannah went up to Greenock to give birth in 1862. Something happened to Charles Evans Evans between 1861 and 1871, but while it was most likely death, that is not clear. William John Evans was not enumerated as living with Susannah (Stokes) Evans in 1871, but whether he had died or was living elsewhere, perhaps with his father, is also unclear.

Susannah was listed as married in 1871 but also still as an “Evans,” suggesting that she was still married to Charles Evans and likely at a minimum believed her husband was still alive, but whether he really was alive and where he was, if so, is not clear from the census. There is a Susannah Evans indexed in Barnet Registration District as dying in the 2nd Quarter of 1877 at age 43, which is consistent with what is known to date about Susannah (Stokes) Evans, though the certificate has not been reviewed. This is the only indexed death for a Susanna(h) Evans at any time in Barnet Registration District, although Susannah (Stokes) Evans could have remarried and/or could have died in another registration district.

As mentioned, William John Evans could be the William Evans living with Charles and Catherine Evans in Mile End Old Town in 1871, but that is not clear. There is a William Evans, 18, b. Scotland, living in Hertfordshire on the 1881 census (when William Evans is not living with Charles and Catherine); he is boarding with a family and listed as being in the Militia. So far no militia record has been located for a William Evans that even roughly matches the census information, so it is unclear whether this 1881 William Evans has any relationship to any of these other Evanses. To date no marriage record has been located for Charles and Catherine (___) Evans in England & Wales or in Scotland. While at this point it seems possible that they did not officially marry, that is far from definitive. Even if they did not officially marry, that does not necessarily mean that “Charles Evans the common-law husband of Catherine ___ and apparent father of William Evans” is the same person as “Charles Evans the husband of Susannah Stokes and father of Charles Evans Evans, William John Evans, and probably Sarah Ann Evans.”

And one overarching question lingers: If this isn’t the same Charles Evans, then where was “my” Charles Evans from 1851 to 1871?

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

[genealogical saying]

Major Additional Steps Taken So Far

1. Contacted someone researching the Stokes family and Susannah’s Charles (no response yet)
2. Searched digitized newspapers without success
3. Traced some, but not all, of the Stokes family members looking for further clues to Susannah and Charles and their children, since Susannah and (at least some of) the children seem to have spent most of their time living with her biological family rather than with her husband

Planned Next Steps

1. Continue searching for/through military records from afar
2. Order more certificates from England
3. Continue tracing Stokes family members looking for clues to what happened to the Evans family
4. Attempt to determine connection to unidentified marriage witness (one witness was Hannah Stokes, probably Susannah’s brother Andrew’s wife; the connection, if any, of the other witness to the couple is unknown)

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Note

Due to a small but significant editing error on my part, when I initially published “Connecting the dots: Charles Evans (Part 1),” one bullet point was missing a “not.” While I corrected my error in my post when I realized it, I am also noting it here for anyone who may have read that post before the correction. The bullet point should have read, “In these census searches it was also noted that there did not appear to be any other Charles Evanses living in England & Wales who reported a similar age and a birth place of Hartland” (with emphasis on the “not” added here for clarity).

Connecting the dots: Charles Evans (Part 1)

A child, likely an infant, named Charles Evans was baptized in the parish church in Hartland, Devon, England, on 15 October 1826, his parents listed as John and Ann Evans. What happened to Charles?

Here are some possibilities:

1. In 1845 a Charles Evans, who reported his birthplace as Hartland and his age as 16 years and 10 months, enlisted in the Army in Monmouthshire. He was discharged in 1850 due to health issues. His file is now in the Chelsea pensioners record set.
2. In 1851 a Charles Evans, age 24, “Chelsea pensioner & Keeps a Night School,” is living with John K. Evans, Ann Evans, and Grenville Wakely in Hartland, Devon, England. Everyone in the household was reportedly born in Hartland.
3. In 1871 a Charles and Catherine Evans, listed as a married couple, are living with William Evans, age 8, in Mile End Old Town, London. Charles is listed as age 44 and a “Military Tailor,” and Catherine as age 54 and with no occupation listed. William’s relationship to head-of-household is described as “Son.” Charles is listed as b. Hartland, Catherine as b. Bideford, Devon, England, and William as b. Scotland.
4. In 1881 a Charles and Catherine Evans, listed as a married couple, are living in Islington, London. There is no son William but there is a boarder, Henry Ratcliffe. Charles is listed as age 54, born Hartland, and Catherine probably as age 64 (a mark over her age makes it difficult to read), born Bideford. Charles is listed as a “Tailor” and Catherine has no occupation listed.
5. In 1891 a Charles and Catherine Evans, listed as a married couple, are living at 1A Geneva Place in Bideford, Devon. Charles is listed as age 64, b. Hartland, “Tailor,” and Catherine as age 76, b. Bideford, no occupation listed. They have two lodgers, George Cheveroll(?) and Catherine Hobbs.
6. According to the FreeBMD index, a Charles Evans died in Bideford Registration District in the 1st Quarter of 1896 at age 69, and a Catherine Evans died in Bideford Registration District in the 2nd Quarter of 1899 at age 80.

Some things to keep in mind about summarizing research as in the list above are that it makes research seem fast and easy, leaves out the reasoning behind each step, and in this list, also leaves out negative results, which are key to keep in mind when doing research. So before going any further in the search for Charles Evans, let me explain some of the research steps I took to compile the above list and some of the reasoning behind those steps.

• Charles Evans, son of John and Ann Evans, was not listed as living with them in 1841 yet had returned to living with them in 1851. What happened to Charles to make him absent in 1841? Using the “Chelsea pensioner” reference in 1851 as a clue, I searched the Chelsea pensioner record set and yielded a possible match; the birth place matches but the age is off. The age being off does not necessarily rule him out, as many people lied about their ages or simply did not know their correct age. Unfortunately Charles Evans’s Chelsea pensioner file does not include information on family members as many of those files do, so it doesn’t indicate one way or the other whether this is the same Charles Evans.
• Charles is indexed on the National Archives catalog as having been discharged in 1850, but the original image in the Chelsea pensioner file says 23 Sep’t 185_ with the “_” probably being a “0″ but possibly being a “1,” though if it was 1851, he would have spent 1 1/2 years being treated after leaving for England, as he “Embarked for England 25 January 1850,” according to the file. The surgeon also dated his opinion “Chatham Aug. 20 1850,” which would fit well with being discharged in Chatham about a month later. On the other hand, the final discharge also lists him as age 22, which would only match his stated age at enlistment if he was discharged in 1851, though being discharged at age 22 in 1850 would more closely match “my” Charles’s age than the stated enlistment age of 16 years, 10 months. However, according to the file his original enlistment paper has been transcribed into this file, so it is possible that it has been transcribed incorrectly; it is of course also possible that Charles deliberately or unknowingly gave an incorrect age. Regardless, the probable 1850 discharge of the Chelsea pensioner Charles Evans would have given John and Ann’s Charles time to be back in Hartland by 1851; however, even if the Charles Evans of the file was discharged in 1850, this does not necessarily mean it’s the same Charles as John and Ann’s son.
• I also searched the National Archives [UK] catalog for anyone in the Chelsea pensioner record set who had the phrase “Hartland, Devonshire” (as the catalog puts it) in their file description. The search did not yield anyone else from an even marginally close time period with the surname Evans nor any variations on the surname. This does not necessarily mean that another Charles Evans of approximately the same age from Hartland is not among the Chelsea pensioner files, just that if he is, he didn’t report his birth place as Hartland, his birth place isn’t in the file, or his birth place and/or name isn’t/aren’t properly transcribed into the catalog. It is also possible that the file has not survived; according to My Ancestor Was in the British Army by Michael J. Watts and Christopher T. Watts, a number of discharge papers, especially for many Chelsea pensioners who were discharged overseas, have been lost. Indeed, a search of some other record sets in the National Archives catalog that were recommended in that book yield a good number of various Evanses (with a variety of given names/initials), including many with catalog descriptions saying that their discharge papers had been lost, but few of them have specific dates or birth places listed in the catalog. (Unfortunately, as I discovered upon contacting the National Archives, their staff will not copy these records for a copy fee even if the researcher provides the exact reference number, as they consider the task of looking them up to be research rather than copying.)
• The 1845 enlistment date on the file does not explain where Charles would have been in 1841 even if he is the same Charles who has a Chelsea pensioner file. However, the possible enlistment provides a new clue; the Charles who enlisted reported his birth place as Hartland, Devon, yet enlisted in Monmouthshire, Wales, not in Devon. What was he doing in Monmouthshire? Could he have already been there in 1841? Unfortunately it can be difficult to find lone people on the 1841 England & Wales census, since the enumeration does not list exact birth places – only whether or not the person was born in the county in which they were residing, which I have not always found to be accurate – and enumerators were instructed to round off ages above approximately age 15. It can be particularly hard in 1841 to locate a lone person with a common name like Charles Evans. While there are not too many Evanses in North Devon, there are a tremendous number of them in Wales. So far no one has been located that seems very likely to be the Charles Evans who would enlist in 1845 nor the Charles Evans who was born to John and Ann Evans of Hartland.
• Charles’s brother John and most of John’s family, including John’s adult children, left for Canada in the 1870′s, yet a Charles Evans was listed as a witness on the marriage in Bideford in 1887 of the one niece/nephew that research indicated remained in England. An obituary for one of Charles’s nephews/nieces in Canada also states that there was only one niece/nephew from Charles’s brother John’s line still living in England. Charles’s nephew Charles (presumably named after his uncle) had died in England before John’s family left for Canada – the death certificate confirmed it was the nephew – so the brother Charles could not have been the Charles Evans at the wedding. It is quite possible that the Charles Evans that attended the wedding was Uncle Charles. If this is correct, it means Uncle Charles was still alive in 1887 and was able to make it to Bideford for the wedding.
• A search of 1861 England & Wales census enumeration transcriptions for a Charles Evans born in Hartland in approximately 1827 (factoring in that his birth date seemed to be later in the year than the census enumerations, causing his birth year to generally be estimated at 1827 in census indexes) yielded no results. A search of 1871 census enumeration transcriptions yielded the result that searching for someone by using a birth place on FindMyPast in 1871 does not work. So I jumped ahead to 1881 and did the same search, finding a Charles and Catherine Evans in Islington, London. Working backwards, I found them in 1871 in metropolitan London as well (Mile End Old Town in Tower Hamlets), this time living with someone described as a son to head-of-household. They were in metropolitan London both times, albeit different districts, and on both enumerations Charles is listed as a tailor. The birth place of reportedly 8-year-old William – Scotland – could explain why the family does not seem to appear on the 1861 England & Wales census – though that is certainly not the only possible explanation.
• A search forward found Catherine and Charles Evans in Bideford on the 1891 census enumeration. Bideford was where Catherine had reported all along that she was born, so it seemed plausible that they would return to it later in their lives. Later, going over a timeline, I realized that if Charles and Catherine had moved there by 1887 it would make it very easy for them to attend his niece’s wedding in Bideford, or that if they had visited for the wedding perhaps that had sparked a desire to move back.
• In these census searches it was also noted that there did not appear to be any other Charles Evanses living in England & Wales who reported a similar age and a birth place of Hartland.
• No one that definitely appeared to be Catherine nor Charles was found on the 1901 census enumeration indexes on multiple sites; searching for them as a couple and separately did not yield any good hits.
• I searched FreeBMD’s death indexes for Bideford District from Quarter 2 1891 to Quarter 2 1901 for deaths for Charles Evans and Catherine Evans. The searches yielded a good match for Charles’s known information and a possible match for Catherine’s known information. Catherine’s age fluctuated a bit more on censuses than Charles’s did, so the fact that the age was within the known age range for Catherine was taken into account. The theory that perhaps they both died between 1891 and 1901 was formed.
• Since Charles and Catherine were both from the same region of Devon, I hypothesized that they had met and married before leaving Devon, and searched FreeBMD’s marriage indexes for Bideford District from Quarter 2 1851 to Quarter 2 1863 (the former being around the time of the 1851 census and the latter being William’s approximate birth) to see if a Charles Evans had married a Catherine (or variant) during this time period. There were no hits at all.

It is important to stress at this point that while the records and indexes I have found are relatively consistent with a single Charles Evans, born in Hartland, Devon, England, in approximately 1826, it does not necessarily mean that they are a single Charles Evans. Go back to the first list in this post and reread it. To me, the situations detailed in that list can be clustered into three groups:

• The Charles Evans who was born to John and Ann Evans, was baptized in Hartland, and was living with them in 1851 when it was reported by an unknown informant (possibly Charles himself, but not necessarily) that he had been born in Hartland, was age 24, and was a Chelsea pensioner and kept a night school.
• The Charles Evans who enlisted in the military in Monmouthshire in 1845, reporting his birth place as Hartland and his age in 1845 as 16 years and 10 months, and was discharged in 1850.
• The Charles Evans who married Catherine ___, had a son named William, was a tailor, was reportedly born in Hartland in approximately 1827, and lived in Mile End Old Town in London, Islington in London, Bideford in Devon, and possibly Scotland (based on his son’s reported birth place, although it is possible that that is incorrect or that Charles was not with Catherine [or an unknown mother] when she gave birth). This Charles appears to have died in 1896 in Bideford Registration District, but the certificate has not yet been reviewed.

While it is certainly possible that these three groups are a single Charles Evans, right now they are dots in a child’s book of games – disparate and awaiting connection.

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One of the accidental benefits of my tendency to write part to most of a post and save it in a draft file to finish or polish later is that sometimes I get answers to some posed questions before I publish the post on my blog. Around the time I started this post, I sent away for the Bideford District death certificates that seemed to fit Charles and Catherine (___) Evans. Enough time has passed that I have received the certificates here in the States. They connected more dots than I had expected.

Charles Evans died on 11 March 1896 at a reported age of 69 in Bideford. He is listed as a “Tailor (Journeyman)” and Catherine Evans reported his death. Catherine is listed as his widow and as present at the death, and says that Charles died at 32 Albert Place, Bideford, the same address she gives as her own residence. It also lists that Charles died of “Phetrisis[?].” This certificate tells me some information but not too much – it strongly suggests that the Charles Evans on this death record is the same Charles Evans who was reportedly married to Catherine ___ and who was living in Islington and Mile End Old Town with Catherine. The fact that he was reportedly a journeyman tailor – a part of the story not on the census enumerations found for the family – also helps explain why the family was so mobile.

But Catherine’s death certificate tells a much more connecting story. Catherine is not a blood relative of mine, and it would seem that Catherine herself had no blood relatives of her own in her area by the time she died. She died on 23 May 1899 at a reported age of 80 at the “Alms Houses Bideford,” and her occupation is listed as “Widow of Charles Evans Tailor (Journeyman).” Jane Copp reported her death, listing herself as present at the death and her residence as 1 Tydenham Place, Bideford. My most recent blog post went into some detail about Jane Copp and her family and in-laws; I already know that Jane Copp was the sister of “my” Charles Evans, but even if I had not known before receiving this certificate, Jane is listed on it as Catherine’s sister-in-law.

While Catherine’s death certificate very clearly connected the dots between the Charles Evans who was born in Hartland, Devon, England, baptized there in 1826, and living with John and Ann Evans there in 1851, and the Charles Evans who was reportedly married to Catherine (__) Evans, lived in Greater London and Bideford, was a tailor, and apparently had a son named William, I still haven’t proven or disproved connections between these connected end dots and the dots that cluster in the long gaps between the bookends of Charles’s life. Once the  certificates arrived, I began working on the family again to try to figure out what had happened between 1826 and 1851 and between 1851 and 1871. Subsequent research has not only failed to definitively answer these questions, but has raised new questions. I will post more about it all in a second post on this family.

A trail around the world: Percy’s story

My ancestor’s little sister, Jane Evans, moved to the booming town of Bideford, Devon, England, that was on the rise in the heady days of the Industrial Revolution at the same time as her birth place, the once-booming market town of Hartland, Devon, England, had become a rural parish with few options for a young woman in search of a bright future. Jane’s story was quite common for mid-1800′s England, from her moving from a rural parish to an increasingly urban one, to her starting out her working career as a domestic servant in Bideford. Bideford’s rising importance was signaled by it being appointed the town around which the new Poor Law Union – and consequently the new statutory registration district – had been formed, yet her birth town of Hartland had formerly been so important that the old governmental Hundred had been named after it. However, by this point Hartland was in the tail end of its long decline in regional importance, the town that the railroad literally did not reach.

Despite Jane’s very common name I was able to connect the Bideford Jane up to the Hartland Jane, primarily because their father lived out the last years of his life with Jane’s family and died at her family’s home in downtown Bideford. Jane had married William Copp, a man with an occupation that would soon be all but extinct in the face of the Industrial Revolution; he was a basket maker. Jane and William had one surviving child, a daughter they named Josephine. Josephine grew up in Bideford and married into the Redcliffe family, a large extended family that lived in the East-the-Water area of Bideford.

The Redcliffe extended family’s story was the story of the dawn of the 20th century in England, a family that slowly spread out around the country and then around the world. Josephine and her husband Frederick Albert Redcliffe left Devon, moving around a bit before settling in Hereford, Herefordshire. Frederick was listed as a Brewer’s Cashier on the 1911 census. By the time he wrote his final will in 1947 he described himself as an Accountant, which is not particularly inconsistent with the census description, so perhaps he remained in the brewer industry his entire life. Frederick, Josephine, and their three surviving children were apparently happy in the Hereford area, as they all eventually died there.

Josephine’s brother-in-law was John Penhorwood Redcliffe, given the middle name of his mother’s unusual maiden name. John and his wife Phoebe Elston had two surviving children, Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe and Elsie Mary Redcliffe, who appear to have been twins. Phoebe and John had moved from Devon to London – a very common move in the late 1800′s – where Phoebe gave birth to Elsie and Percy, and the family had then moved back to Devon, eventually settling in Bideford, where John and Frederick’s widowed father James was living with John’s family in 1901. According to the 1901 census, John had followed his father James into the “Earthenware Manufacture” industry; both are listed as employers on that census.

John died in 1903, leaving Phoebe a widow with two children to raise. John was buried in the neighborhood where he had grown up, East-the-Water in Bideford. What the family initially did after John’s death is not clear from the records I have viewed to date, but by the 1911 census Phoebe does not have an occupation listed, Elsie’s occupation is listed as “Home,” and Percy is a 16-year-old listed as working as a “Telegraph Messenger,” presumably supporting his mother and sister. The census states that Phoebe had only had two children, and sadly it lists that she has been married 17 years next to her status as a widow. Was she still actively grieving her husband, dead for 8 years by that point?

Soon the Redcliffes’ world would come crashing to a halt as war broke out across Europe. On 4 October 1915, Percy John Redcliffe went to Exeter and enlisted in the British Territorial Force for a term of 4 years. He listed his home address as “No 3 Torridge Mount / East-the-water Bideford.” Though the document does not list his age, Percy was 20 at the time. Luckily for him, he survived the war, unlike so many of his young British counterparts. The corner of his enlistment paper is stamped, “Entitled to bonus under A. O. 54 of 1919.” Looking up Army Order 54 of 1919, I discovered that the bonus was for the “armies of occupation.” So Percy was still in the British military when the order was passed in May 1919, meaning he likely completed his full 4-year term and was likely in Continental Europe at the time the law was passed. Since Percy is not related to me personally, but rather to my cousins who descended from my ancestor’s first cousin Josephine (Copp) Redcliffe, I have not tried to locate his military file to date, though I believe many British World War I military files were destroyed during the heavy bombing of World War II anyway.

I next find Percy three years later, leaving London on the Esperance Bay on 1 August 1922, listed as “P.J.P. Redcliffe,” his last address imperfectly typed as “2,Forridge Mount, Bidiford.Devon.” – likely really 3 Torridge Mount, Bideford, the same address at which he had been living when he enlisted in World War I. Percy had decided to leave his homeland and his widowed mother Phoebe and twin sister Elsie behind. Percy was bound for Brisbane, Australia, and the column headed “Country of intended future permanent residence” leaves little doubt as to whether he was planning to live in England again: Every other person on the passenger list page has a ditto mark of the first person’s answer,  “A U S T R A L I A.” According to an article in the The Sydney Morning Herald (12 June 1936, p. 8), this was the Esperance Bay‘s first year of service, and at the time the Australian Commonwealth government owned it. The ship would eventually go on to repatriate Indonesians in 1945 in a disputed event that made headlines. I wonder if as Percy read or listened to news of the ship and the controversy, he thought of how he had first come to his adopted homeland on the same ship.

But that was 23 years in the future.

By 1925, Percy had settled in Innisfail, Herbert, Queensland, and was registered to vote. The electoral roll lists the same occupation for “Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe” as the passenger list, the generic “labourer.” As a working-class young man, it had only been while Percy was in the military that he had gotten the right to vote in his home country of England, a right which his sister Elsie wouldn’t get till her 30th birthday; the Representation of the People Act was passed in 1918, giving the right to vote to almost all men 21 and older, almost all women 30 and older, and women 21 and older who were householders or married to a householder.

By 1930 the electoral roll listing has changed – the exact name, occupation, and exact location are all different:

Percy John Redcliffe, greengrocer, listed in a 1930 Innisfail, Herbert, Queensland, Australia, electoral roll. Scan courtesy of Ancestry.

While there is historical backing for Percy being listed as “Percy John Redcliffe” – such as on his enlistment – and the name “Percy John Redcliffe” was not at all common, as a researcher I cannot assume that a name that is uncommon is never duplicated. However, newspaper research provides evidence that Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe the labourer and Percy John Redcliffe the greengrocer are the same person, and that Percy was likely still living in Innisfail in 1932:

NO TAX RETURNS.

For failure to furnish income tax returns and information to the Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, Mr. H. L. Archdall, C.B.E., C.P.M., in the Summons Court, imposed a fine . . . For a similar offence each of the following was fined £2, with 3/6 costs: . . . Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe, greengrocer, Innisfail; . . .

[From the metropolitan courts column in The Brisbane Courier, Wednesday, 20 July 1932, p. 12. Article courtesy of Trove.]

Whether his income tax return woes were a symptom or a cause of troubles, or had nothing to do with anything, the electoral rolls show that by 1936 Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe had moved to Paddington in the Brisbane metropolitan area and had returned to being listed as a “labourer.”

For reasons unclear to me, Ancestry has multiple copies of the Queensland electoral rolls for some years, including 1925, the first year I have found Percy in them. They are not identical copies. Initially this doubling does not make much of a difference in researching Percy, as Percy’s entry is identical in the early duplicate rolls. But by 1937 his listing is different in the two copies. He is listed as Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe both times, once at the same address as in 1936, the other time at a different address. I have found no evidence to date that there were two people named Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe registered to vote in Queensland, and the addresses in 1937 suggest that the two rolls on Ancestry were compiled at different times of the year. The apparent first 1937 listing is also the first time a second Redcliffe appears on the same roll as Percy, a Percival Richard Redcliffe. Percival appears to have moved around a lot. Appearing three times in the Queensland electoral rolls around this time, every time Percival is in a different town, and then Percival seems to drop off the rolls altogether. Percival’s relationship, if any, to Percy is unknown at present.

In the apparent second 1937 electoral roll, Percy had moved from Paddington to Merthyr, another town in the Brisbane area. After this, the trail gets murkier and murkier. In 1943 a Percy John Redcliffe, labourer, is on Brisbane’s electoral roll. While this is likely still the same Percy, moving around the Brisbane area working as a labourer, to date no evidence has been located proving it. Percy would have been 48 at this point, certainly a plausible age to still be working as a labourer. But it is simply plausible, not definite.

In 1949, a Percy John Redcliffe, garage attendant, is listed on the Griffith, South Brisbane, Queensland, electoral roll. A second Redcliffe is listed at the same address, Hilda, tailoress. Percy and Hilda move around as a unit: In 1954 they are both registered in Ryan, Ithaca, Queensland, Hilda still listed as a tailoress, Percy now listed as a garage hand; in 1958 and 1963 they are both registered in Carina, Bowman, Queensland, Hilda still listed as a tailoress, but Percy now in a new occupation, “wardsman.”

Was this Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe and a relative named Hilda, perhaps a wife or daughter? So far no articles or other evidence have been located so far to indicate one way or the other. It is just as possible that Percy John Redcliffe was a grown child of Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe, named after his father, and that Hilda was his wife or sister. It is also possible that Percy John Redcliffe was a cousin or an unrelated person who happened to have almost the same name as Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe. The more specific job than “labourer” suggests it may have been another person early in their working life, rather than Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe late in his, but it is not conclusive.

Exactly what a wardsman would have been in 1958-1963 Australia is not entirely clear to me, but an internet search provided this suggestion: “On enlistment he gave his occupation as Wardsman which in 1998 was defined as someone who is required to undertake limited duties associated with the care of patients such as preoperative shave, bathing of patients, general assistance in wards and cleaning duties. One can supposed [sic] that his role would have been similar in the 1930s.” While it is possible that Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe was working as a wardsman in 1963, when he would have been around age 68, it seems more likely that by this point a second Percy John Redcliffe was the person working. Tailoress Hilda’s accompaniment from move to move suggests it is the same Percy in  these disparate places, but which Percy it is – or whether it is two Percys – remains unclear. It is quite possible that someone with more Australia research than I have (which is to say, more than a teeny bit) would know of resources I don’t know that would quickly answer these questions.

Whether or not the last few electoral roll listings were Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe, Percy John Penhorwood Redcliffe died in Queensland in 1964, on 8 May according to the index. His death index listing gives his father as John Penhorwood (apparently leaving out the surname Redcliffe) and his mother as Phoebe Elston. Since he is related to my cousins who descend from Josephine, not to me, I have not ordered his death certificate, which might provide some evidence as to whether he was the Percy moving around and what his relationship, if any, was to Hilda Redcliffe and/or the likely second Percy John Redcliffe. Some of Percy’s twin sister Elsie’s records give her birth date as 8 May 1895. If these and Percy’s death index listing are correct (and if Percy wasn’t born just before midnight the day before or just after midnight the next day), Percy died on his birthday.

On 5 April 1955 Percy’s twin sister Elsie followed many post-War Britons before her, setting sail for Brisbane on the Stratheden. Her address in the UK was listed as 3, Torridge Mount, Bideford, North Devon, and her occupation as Machinist. Elsie and the Stratheden had both seen war come and go. Like her brother 33 years before her, she listed her intent as settling permanently in Australia. But unlike Percy, Elsie changed her mind. In 1958, she left Australia on the Strathnaver, a sister ship to the one on which she had arrived, returning to London on 26 October. Her intended address in England was listed as the familiar, again imperfectly rendered, “3,Torridge Mount,East-the-River, Bideford,N.Devon.” Elsie died in Devon, the land she had not been able to permanently leave, at age 84.

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Notes

I received a photograph of John and Phoebe (Elston) Redcliffe’s gravestone in what it calls “East-the-Water 2 Cemetery” from Gravestone Photographic Resource Project. The site appears to have nicely cataloged two East-the-Water cemeteries’ monuments and I suggest others researching East-the-Water check to see if their research subject(s) has/have surviving monuments as well.

For anyone researching Hartland, I recommend visiting the Hartland Forum website and the Hartland GenUKI page, and reading the detailed book titled The Book of Hartland by R. P. Chope (Torquay: Devonshire Press, 1940; reprinted in 2006 by the Friends of St. Nectan’s).