"One Step" Closer to an Old Friend

I first encountered the work of Stephen P. Morse as a young engineer when I read his "8086 Primer", a down to earth (well, to an electrical engineer) introduction to the Intel 8086 micro processor. So when I discovered his One Step genealogical web site ( http://stevemorse.org/ ) many years later it was like meeting an old, trusted friend again. It was an even greater thrill to find him making several presentations at the 2009 National Genealogy Society conference.

If you are not familiar with his One Step site, you should be. He has teamed up with several equally bright and motivated individuals to provide a free, highly intelligent search front-end that interfaces with other free and/or commercially available databases (notably, the Ellis Island records and the US Census). His tools provide a superior way to search these records, often allowing searches and providing results in ways not possible on the original sites.

In the first session that I attended (titled “Playing Hide and Seek in the US Census”) he provided some background on how the US government organizes and categorizes the census results as well as a look forward to the availability of the 1940 census information (due for release in 2012). Of particular interest to the "I want it now" generation of genealogists was the revelation that these records will NOT be searchable by name at first, since it will take some time for Ancestry (and, presumably others) to key in the names and create the databases after the data is released.

Until that work has been completed, genealogists will have to rely on the work being done by Dr. Morse and his team of volunteers as they work to provide tools to allow searches by address and enumeration district (which, as I just learned, is an area that can be canvassed by a single Census taker).

The second session I attended was “What Color Ellis Island Search Form Should I use?” The useful content this presentation can be summarized in one sentence: when searching for information about immigrants passing through Ellis Island on his One Step web site, use the Gold search page. But there is so much more to this story....

Dr. Morse recounted his love/hate relationship with the Ellis Island foundation that began with the introduction of their web site in April, 2001. He was frustrated by the interface that was available at that time and created an innovative way to create his own way to submit queries to the Ellis Island search engine.

Word of his web page spread quickly, and thus began a 5 year (so far) technological and legal dance between Dr. Morse and the Ellis Island foundation. In that time he has developed a series of improved search pages with features that, usually, found their way into the Ellis Island search engine. This journey was briefly interrupted by a lawsuit that was soon resolved with the unintended consequence (to the Ellis Island Foundation) of making the database in its entirety available to Dr. Morse. As a result, his web page now has search capabilities not available on the Ellis Island site. His efforts have also made it possible to search and locate the various ships manifests directly.

His One Step web site also has links supporting enhanced searching for many other genealogical data sources, including ports of entry. I have been searching (unsuccessfully, for several years) for information about my Great Grandfathers trip from Norway (via England) to the United States. Having gained a deeper understanding and appreciation for how the One Step search engines works I used it to check again when I got home from the conference and found it!

Musings from the National Genealogical Society Conference

I guess it was only appropriate that I discovered that my professional skill-set was dead while attending a Genealogical convention. I have been developing web pages for my company for the past 10 years and am thoroughly knowledgeable about HTML, Perl and PHP. However, while attending a session titled "Blogs, Wikis & Flikr, Oh My! Sharing and collaborating on the Modern day Web" presented by Jordan Jones (Jordan@GenealogyMedia.com) I quickly realized how completely unaware I am of what has been happening in the real world. I am certain that I was the only person in the room who has never used Facebook, Flickr, a Blog, RSS or Footnote.

I can only remember a fraction of all of the information presented by Jordan, but I did walk away with a personal commitment to get with the times and begin using several of the tools he covered (the URL's are from Jordans handout):

Blogs - if you are reading these words then you know I have fulfilled my first commitment to begin blogging.

Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) - this looks like a great tool for sharing genealogically significant images with my family. It allows you to upload images and "tag" them with Meta information that others can use to search for and locate them. The tools available seem to provide a great deal of flexibility when it comes to deciding who can access and view what you post. It even allows you to provide low resolution images, suitable for sharing on the web but not likely to be downloaded and pirated without your permission.

Footnote (http://www.footnote.com/) – Although this is not a free service, it appears to be a good companion to Flickr. Its focus is on scanned documents, and they apparently have images from the National Archives available.

Delicious.com (http://delicious.com/) - A web tool that allows you to organize and share your favorite web pages. It has links that can be incorporated into your personal web page. It is also a great web based tool that will have a record of all your links even if your PC (and all your favorites) crashes.

Print on Demand - This looks like a really exciting development. There are several companies specializing in printing small quantities of Adobe Acrobat formatted documents - perfect for things like family histories.

• CafePress – http://www.cafepress.com/
• Lulu – http://www.lulu.com/

Mapping - there are some really fascinating capabilities available with Google and Yahoo maps.

• Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/
• Google Maps – http://maps.google.com/
• Google Earth - http://earth.google.com/

Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.com/) - By this point in the presentation I was reduced to writing and underlining the names of sites that looked really interesting... this was one of them. When I got home I looked at the handout and found that this is a great source of information concerning issues of privacy that are important when sharing and collaborating with others on the web.

Old Newspapers Reveal Surprise

It shouldn't be a surprise any more, really. I mean, once I discovered that my great-grandfather, Daniel Hardie, had 3 wives, the second of whom had an illigitimate child prior to the marriage, I should be inured to surprises. I guess having ingested some silly childhood mental mantra-myth that goes "no one in our family (except poor, unfortunate Uncle Eddie) has ever been divorced" explains why I am surprised by today's findings reported in the 1924 Utica Observer-Dispatch and in The Ostego Farmer and The Ostego Republican.

Background
Mary Brown (1888-1976) married Pearly Hanlon in 1907. They had 2 children. Last March we visited her grave in Oneonta, NY. She was buried in a plot with her children, notably sans first husband Pearly. I was curious where he was buried -- and actually still am. I figured Pearly had died prior to Mary's second marriage. Au contraire!

News Articles

Pearly Hanlon of Oneonta, charged with desertion of his wife and children, threw himself upon the mercy of the court and sentence was suspended on the plea of his attorney Tennant. He assured the court that a position was awaiting him on the D. & H. and that arrangements had been made to have the company pay a stated sum to the wife.
-- The Ostego Farmer, March 7, 1924

Several cases appear reflecting matrimonial infelicity. Among these is one in which May (sic) Brown Hanlon seeks a divorce [OMG] from Pearley (sic) Victor Hanlon, and there is another in which Pearly Hanlon is seeking damages from William T. Norwood for alienation of affections.
-- The Ostego Farmer, March 1, 1935

Alienation of Affections

At common law, alienation of affections is a tort action brought by a deserted spouse against a third party alleged to be responsible for the failure of the marriage. The defendant in an alienation of affections suit is typically an adulterous spouse's lover . . .
-- Wikipedia

It may be readily obvious, but Mary Brown's second marriage was to one William T. Norwood. So much for my mental mantra-myth . . . How on earth do such myths get transmitted anyway?

An SS-5 Form Points the Way

I've been doing some family history research for a friend and sent off for her grandmother's 1937 Social Security application, her SS-5 Form. My friend did not know much about her grandmother's family so I was hoping for some leads from the SS application. I wasn't disappointed; the form listed the applicant's parents' names.

Armed with this information, I was able to discover a good deal about her family, who have farmed in Gibson County, Tennessee for many generations. I was struck by the fact that one ancestor, Samuel Hughes, was born in 1805 in North Carolina. I wonder when his parents arrived in America? Differently from my own ancestors, my friend's ancestors have deep, even pre-revolutionary war, roots in America.

One interesting discovery was that David (Davy) Crockett, himself a descendent of pre-revolutionary war ancestors, was an early settler of Gibson County, Tennessee. At first, when I saw "David Crocketts" on 19th century US census records in the same civil district as my friend's ancestors, I smiled, not yet knowing that these Crocketts were actually relatives of the famous man himself! Nice.

Patrick Brown 1841-1901

To the best of my knowledge, Patrick was born in Murraugh Parish, County Cork, Ireland in February of 1841. He immigrated to the United States about 1851, along with his parents, James Brown and Johannah Murphy, as well as his sister, Ellen, and his three brothers, John, Michael, and James. The 1860 US Federal Census indicates that Patrick, his parents, and his sister Ellen could neither read nor write.

Patrick was 43 when he married Mary Watson in 1884 at St. Mary's Cathedral in Ogdensburg, New York. Mary died at home from Typhoid fever in 1899 at age 44. Tragically, Patrick died two years later at age 60. While in the process of oiling a staging platform in the elevator of the Rutland Transit company, he fell 14 feet and fractured his skull. He died shortly afterwards. In September 2007 we found the grave site of Patrick Brown and Mary Watson in St. Mary's Cemetery in Ogdensburg, New York.

The story in the Ogdensburg Advance News reporting Patrick Brown's death states that he left "a family of five children, the oldest a girl of fifteen years of age". My grandfather, James Lawrence Brown, was eleven at the time of his father, Patrick's, death.

Beginning

After thinking about my own blog for the last few years, this evening I finally took the plunge into what appears to be the shallow end of blogspace. I was recently encouraged to do this by Tony's willingness to collaborate in the effort. We both thought it might be fun to have a place to share discoveries, travels, and adventures regarding our family history research. So, today we're up and off!

Fargo, North Dakota was a significant stop on the first family-history vacation we took. Tony had hooked up with the Red River Valley Genealogical Society in Fargo and we went there to see if they could help solve the question of where his great grandparents from Norway were buried. This was our first experience of sitting in a room with a bunch of records and books, splitting up the names we were interested in, and combing for facts.

At this stage, we now fall easily into this divide-search-conquer method of research in any library or archive or repository we visit. But Fargo was our first significant effort. Looking through cemetery records in that genealogy resource room in Fargo led us to Tony's great grandmother's final resting spot in Fargo. And an obituary in the Fargo newspaper led us to Tony's great granfather's grave in Fort Ransom, North Dakota.

That research trip to Fargo was the beginning of our genealogical travels. It was complete with searching funeral home records for ancestors, combing newspapers in the local library for obituaries, walking cemeteries in search of head stones, discovering previously known and unknown places where family members had lived, photographing everything that wasn't moving, and recording fresh findings on our computers each evening. The journey has yet to end.