Friday Findings: McCLELLAN Pension Record, E-mails, Atlas Project, BORCHERS

I ordered the Civil War Pension Record for my 4th-great-grandfather, Levi E. McCLELLAN (McLELLAN, McLALLIN, etc.). That along with subscriptions for Internet Genealogy (renewal) and Discovering Family History (new) were some of my Christmas gifts this year.

On Saturday, I e-mailed the VALK and LEWIS cousins that had left comments in my website's guestbook a couple of weeks ago. I also went through my Juno email inbox (nearly 900 messages), deleted all the junk and forwarded the good e-mails to my Gmail inbox. I used to use Juno for many years, and keep this freebie account open for those times when a distant relative or other researcher comes across a query I left on a message board with the old address. One of the messages was the following:

I have been searching for over 5 yrs. for a missing link, my Gr. Grandfather Lewis Harding. I knew his name, his wife’s name, when he was born, where he is buried and I knew that he came to Michigan when he was 2 yrs. old. I spent some time on looking at the Atlas Project, did a search and found him in the biography of George M. Campbell. Thank you so much for your Atlas Project. I not only found Lewis Harding’s parents, but also his sisters and brother. I have an old album that belonged to my grandparents, M.C. and Matilda Harding that has pictures of several of the people named in the Atlas Project. I knew they were relatives, but I didn’t know their connection and thanks to you now I do. I am thrilled to get this information that I have been seeking for so long.

Thank you again.

As you can imagine, this made my day! I haven't worked on the Atlas Project in a couple of years so it's nice to know that the information I put on it has helped someone. Here's another person I need to contact to see if she would be willing to add her photographs to the website for the benefit of others.

I heard back from my LEWIS cousin we are collaborating. I have the information she needs on the earlier, older generations and she has information I've been wanting on the more recent ones--info I couldn't access because of restrictions to current vital records. I also sent her quite a few ancestral and gravestone photos. I'm very excited to find how easy it is to find things and send them to others using my new filing system for documents, photos, and research notes.

Speaking of which, I spent a lot of time this week organizing digital files, answering a backlog of emails, and even got some scanning done. My dad loaned me the funeral book of my paternal grandmother's adoptive father, Alfred Henry HOLST. There are lots of gems inside: obituaries, signatures of nearly everyone in town (including other relatives), and pages where relatives are specifically listed. One of the list of relatives had some unfamiliar names on it. I remembered that I had discovered that Alfred's father, John, had a sister that had also immigrated from Germany; this was from John's FBI Case File, which I found at Footnote. His sister was listed as Mrs. Anna M. BORCHERS, so using Ancestry and FamilySearch Record Search, I was able to piece together her family and identify the individuals by the same surname listed in the funeral book: Anna's sons and Alfred's cousins. Doing research on this family uncovered that Anna and her husband Claus immigrated from Germany in 1874, so when John and his wife and infant son Alfred immigrated in 1882, it was obvious that they were joining his sister and brother-in-law. I love how putting pieces of the puzzle (facts) together gives a larger, deeper look into the family history!

Lastly, I happened to go to the Zeeland (Netherlands) Provincial Archives website and saw that they had added birth records, which they were lacking before. I've been able to add quite a few details and family members to my TON and VanKLINKEN lines.

On Vacation

Tomorrow I'll be headed out with the Midkiff Clan for the wilds of Northeast Washington for a week of fun, sun, practical jokes, and late-night sessions of Balderdash! Having no wireless Internet service available, I'll be catching up on a lot of reading and possibly doing some offline blogging on my laptop to post later when we return to civilization.

In the meantime, here's some suggestions for those of you who can't bear to be without their AnceStories fix (ahem!):

• Go back and read my old posts. I've been genea-blogging since January 16, 2006, albeit at another URL; all the old posts were moved to this blog last winter. See "Blog Archive" in the right-hand menu.
  
• Read my journal prompts at AnceStories2: Stories of Me for My Descendants. Start your own blog or journal, if you haven't done so already, and record your stories.
• Read my other blogs, The Atlas Project or &Etc. There's not a lot on them right now, but they'll give you some other perspectives of my life. For a look at where we're vacationing right now, see the slideshow of last year's vacation on &Etc.
  
• I do have quite a lot of my ancestors' biographies on my website. For the pure genealogists out there, no, they don't have citations. They were written for family members from family stories I heard, backed up by documents I found in my early research years. But I've been told they're interesting...! I also have handy forms here.
• Visit the websites I've created for others: Midkiff: A Family, Town, and Way of Life and The Vorpahls' Website.
  
• Visit some of my favorite websites: Find A Grave, Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, or Footnote.
• Visit my social networking pages listed on the right: Fuel My Blog, Technorati, StumbleUpon, MyBlogLog, and BlogCatalog. You'll probably see other blogs that capture your interest linked to mine. And please don't forget to visit "My Favorite Genealogy Blog Links" in the right-hand column, especially if you're new to reading genealogy blogs. There are some terrific bloggers with great material that I hope you'll discover.

There, I've listed seven things to do for the seven days that I'll be gone. I can't wait to get back and read all the new posts from my favorite bloggers when I return!

Finding Out More on My ROBBINS Family - Part I

As a family historian, you get so that you think you know a lot about your family. I have the disadvantage of having always lived far away from my extended family, and so sometimes there are gaps in my knowledge that don't get noticed until I start really analyzing my records. And then there are just the serendipitous surprises that make genealogy oh-so-fun!

It started off yesterday afternoon while examining the information I have on my paternal grandfather, Robert Lewis ROBBINS. I'm re-organizing and cleaning up my file folders, making sure I have copies of all the records I need, especially printouts of things I've found on the Internet. I've got my U.S. Research Checklist I created to help me remember to find certain "must have" records for each of my direct ancestors. There were some documents I figured I'd better scan and keep both on my hard drive and in my Picasa Web Albums. Copies of the documents are going into the file folders, while originals and photographs, as well as expensive copies I've paid for, are being placed in acid-free sleeves, ready to go later into a newly-rented safety-deposit box at my financial institution. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time to keep these heirlooms safe. And then there's the (dreaded) source citations I need to do properly in my RootsMagic software!

Besides my grandfather's birth and death certificates that I need to order, I realized I didn't have any land records for him. I knew he bought land in Coopersville, Ottawa County, Michigan at 185 River Road, on which he built his house and business--this was after he had served in World War II. I also knew he purchased property on Crockery Lake in the northern part of the county sometime after 1953, and there built a cement-brick cottage on the foundation of an old barn for family summer vacations. And I knew he bought a house in Coopersville sometime around 1972 at 131 Madison Street for his widowed mother to live in and for Grandma and him to stay at when they weren't snow birding in Texas. I thought he might also have owned land in several Texas counties, although it was more likely he rented lots for the various RVs and mobile homes he and Grandma had in their retirement.

The only evidence I had of his property records were oral history from my dad and one of my aunts, and a copy of the advertisement flyer the real estate auctioneers printed shortly before Grandma sold the house on Madison Street in 2005. I did a Google search on Crockery Lake to see if I could stumble upon some land records or assessment records though the county clerk's office. What I found instead was more than I could have imagined! The Chester Township History & Genealogy website has a wealth of information about its communities, including old photographs, biographies, history, and maps (including some of Crockery Lake). What surprised me was that on its Genealogies page the surnames Robbins and Lewis were listed. There isn't a search engine on the site, so I did my little trick of using Google to search a website: search term, followed by a space, then the word site followed immediately by a colon and the URL (no spaces between site and the end of the URL).

robbins site:http://mysite.verizon.net/res6xy3i/

(Notice that I didn't include the index.html from the URL, because I wanted Google to search the entire site, not just the index--or home--page).

Wow! Was I ever in for a treat! The first link I clicked went to the page about the American Legion Auxiliary founded in 1946 in Conklin. As I scrolled down the page, I noticed that Marie Robbins, Josephine Robbins, and Joyce Robbins were charter members of the Reinhart W. Roman Post 537. Why, those were the names of my great-grandmother, my granduncle's wife, and my grandaunt! Could it be...? A little further down the page, it said that Marie Robbins was the first President of the Auxiliary. Really? And yet, I wasn't done! Just a little further, and I found Great-grandma's smiling face staring back at me from the Internet. Holy cow! Gosh, I knew Great-grandma had been in the Auxiliary, because her grave had an Auxiliary marker at it. But I had never before heard she had been the movement behind getting an Auxiliary started in her community! And isn't that grand: a photo of her I didn't have before!

Well, then I went to the American Legion page, and there was information that my great-grandfather, William Bryan Robbins, Sr., and his son--my granduncle, Bill Jr.--were charter members of the Legion post. Very cool! Again, new information!

But, wait! There's more! In 1948, the Conklin school district published its one yearbook ever in its short-lived history. I browsed through the photos and text, not finding anything on my family, but being interested in the small-town history and nostalgic drawings. A quick check with my RootsMagic program confirmed that all my relatives were either too old, too young, or living in another community at that time to have attended school there that year. As I neared the end of the yearbook (third-to-last page), I noticed in the advertisement section there was a notice of compliments to the graduating class from Marie's Gift Shop...yes, that Marie! I had already written about Great-grandma's little shop in her AnceStory on my website, but it had always been a kind of vague story from the past. It suddenly became very real to me. This wasn't easy to find, either. I had to go to the Schools page, then click on the Conklin district page, and finally the yearbook page. It would have been easily overlooked, but somehow, I found it.

My Robbins family were latecomers to this area. They had arrived from McKean County, Pennsylvania at Hesperia, Michigan on the Newaygo-Oceana County border in the late 1860s, migrated south to Muskegon County in the 1910s, and settled in Conklin sometime in the 1930s. Yet, it is evident they were heavily involved in their community. Great-grandpa died in 1972 and Great-grandma moved to my grandparents' home in Coopersville. I do have some very faint memories of visiting my great-grandparents in Conklin in 1970, when I was three! I distinctly remember the inside of the little white house and eating a meal there. I also remember going to see Great-grandma there two years later when Great-grandpa died. She was sitting out in the yard with the grandaunts and uncles, and I ran to give her a big hug (prompted by my grandfather).

The Chester Township History website won the State History Award in 2005 from the Historical Society of Michigan for an outstanding website design, and it's easy to see why! The design has a standard I'd love to meet with my Atlas Project. Needless to say, my printer was very busy last night! I wrote the webmaster, asking for any more information she might have on the Robbins and Lewis families. I also fired off several e-mails to extended family members, excited to share my find with them.

What exciting, new discoveries about your family are awaiting you on the Internet or at your favorite archives?

(Coming up next: More finds on the Robbins family in online property records!)

New Genealogy Blogs

Dick Hillenbrand, over at Upstate New York Genealogy, has created a new blog called Genealogy Miscellanea. A description can be found at the beginning of his first post, "CHASE family founders of NECCO Candy Company":

This Blog site was created for the express purpose of posting miscellaneous items of possible interest to others that does not otherwise fit within the realm of our original Blog for “Upstate New York Genealogy” which can be found by visiting our website at www.unyg.com.

And ever the blogger addict, yours truly has created a companion blog to my website by the same name, The Atlas Project, currently hosted on my AnceStories website. The Atlas Project is my personal project dedicated to the history and genealogy of the citizens of Atlas Township, Genesee County, Michigan, located southwest of Flint. Four of my ancestral lines immigrated to the area from the Town of Clarence, Erie County, New York, and in my genealogical research, I discovered that many other residents also did. Their families had intermarried in New York, and their descendants continued to do so in Michigan. As a way to untangle my Atlas - Clarence roots, I developed this project as a connecting point for other Atlas researchers.

The Year in Review (2006)

Jasia is encouraging those of us who participate in the Carnival of Genealogy to write about our New Year's (Genealogy) Resolutions for 2007. Before I do that, I need to write about my accomplishments in 2006. Too often, when we set out to make New Year's Resolutions, we don't take the time to credit ourselves for all we HAVE done. Our resolutions tend to have a negative theme in that they stress what we should have been doing, yet didn't do (lose weight, pay off debt, quit smoking, etc.). So here's a list of things I achieved in 2006, genealogically speaking:

• My main theme in 2006 was to get documentation for my great-great-grandparents' generation. I think I did pretty well. I searched for 8 birth records and came up with 4 (one was a duplicate, though). During my search, I did find quite a few birth records for siblings of these ancestors, which expanded my knowledge of their families as whole groups. I now have 6 of the 8 marriage records and 9 of 16 death records needed for this generation. I have 15 obits and 15 grave photos for this generation, thanks to the wonderful volunteers at RAOGK and Find A Grave.
• Speaking of RAOGK and Find A Grave, I performed many volunteer services doing records lookups and some gravestone photography at local cemeteries. I researched the life of Herman THOENI, a gardener for the Campbells, a wealthy Spokane family from the turn of the century, whose home is now a part of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. I also took on more responsibilities for my local genealogical society. Helping out the genealogical community is one way of paying forward the many favors I have received over the years!
• My husband's ancestry is one that we've had a lot of info on for many years, but precious little documentation, so this year, I started gathering evidence to support all the events I have listed for his ancestors: vital and census records, obits and grave photos.
• I started keeping better track of my research, using research log forms bound in a notebook, as well as a research log in Notepad, and this blog. I don't always have time to sit down and blog my research notes, but I can always quickly whip open my Notepad log and jot down a few notes, everyday. I learned this trick in an article in Smart Computing magazine: Open Notepad and in the first line of the file, type .LOG (make sure you enter this in all uppercase). Press ENTER twice. Then choose File and Save. Create a name like "Research Log" and file in a folder you'll easily remember ("Genealogy," etc.). I created a shortcut to my desktop by right-clicking on the folder icon and choosing "create a shortcut." Then I can easily access it. The cool thing about this Research Log is that every time you open it, it date and time stamps the log, so it's all ready for you to record your notes.
• I purchased a copy of RootsMagic, upgrading from my old Family Origins software. I love that it has an electronic form for easy citations of sources! I also purchased GenSmarts, and it has given me tons of possibilities for finding and researching documents of my ancestors. I was able to obtain a good used laptap, and although it doesn't currently have a wireless card, it is handy to do non-Internet computer tasks. We also upgraded to a new, larger, faster computer with a flat screen monitor, and DSL Internet connection. These technological upgrades and additions help make Internet research faster, more efficient, and productive.
• Through my local community college district, I taught online genealogy for three quarters, as well as two Internet genealogy classes for my local genealogy society. I didn't get much of a chance to add to my Atlas Project website, but did create another genealogy site for a client.

Now that I've listed what I've done, I can write about what I want to achieve in 2007.

Week of July 23 - 29, 2006

Saturday, July 29
Diana Wilkes, a Find A Grave photo volunteer, blessed the socks off of me by not only taking many photos of my Robbins ancestors' graves at Hesperia West Cemetery in Hesperia, Michigan, but also submmitting a cemetery map with all the Robbins' graves marked! In addition, she will be mailing me a CD with all the photos. The photos she submitted to Find A Grave were for Joseph Josiah Robbins, Marinda (Robbins) Robbins, Charles H. Robbins, and Viola Gertrude (Peck) Robbins.

Sent a link to my Robbins Family Page to the McKean County, Pennsylvania GenWeb site.

Found info online about the Wyckoff House Museum, which my ancestor, Pieter Claessen Wyckoff, built c. 1652 on Long Island. It is the one of the oldest standing wooden homes in North America, and New York City's first Landmark.


Friday, July 28
Andrew Whitlock, a Find A Grave submitter, e-mailed to say he had updated my Civil War ancestor Benjamin Henry Kimball's information, which I had sent him a few weeks ago.


Thursday, July 27
Requested photos of my Higby ancestors graves in Old Westfield Cemetery in Middleton, Connecticit from Norma Unger.

Matt and I went to Holy Cross Cemetery and took photos of the graves of George Ogden and Dessie Lola (McCready) Purviance for a requestor. It was my first time there, and I found it to be a beautiful, well-laid-out cemetery with easy-to-find graves. It is a newer cemetery (built 1931).


Wednesday, July 26
Added details to a memorial page on Find A Grave, which I created for my grandaunt, Mary Louise (Hoekstra) Glashower.

Heard back from Judy Zenge, a Find A Grave photo volunteer who is looking into taking a photo of the grave of my infant brother, Aaron James Robbins. She talked to an individual in Metlakatla, Alaska who said his parents are buried right next to Aaron, and he and other Metlakatla citizens continue to tend the grave out of loving respect and memory of all my parents did as Salvation Army officers to that village over 30 years ago. He also stated that the cross Dad made for Aaron's grave was still intact. Judy is hoping to get over to Metlakatla on Annette Island from Ketchikan soon, to take a photo. This news was very touching to me.


Tuesday, July 25
As pre-arranged, I received a telephone call from Laurie Perkins, Education Historian at the Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing. She is in charge of developing and overseeing the Future Historians program for 9 - 15 year olds at the Museum. She told me about the program and answered my many questions. She also gave me contact information for the person in charge of the Genealogy Sprouts Day Camp program through the Library of Michigan. I am hoping that my local genealogical society can develop (a) similar program(s) in the Spokane area, with the help of the Spokane Public Library and/or the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.


Monday, July 24
My son, Matt, and I went to Greenwood Memorial Terrace to take a photo of the grave of Allene Eugenia (Castlio) Castlio for someone who requested it through Find A Grave. We stopped first at the cemetery office, and were informed that Allene was not buried there; she was buried at Fairmount Memorial Park. Greenwood and Fairmount are both owned by the Fairmount Memorial Association, which also owns Riverside Memorial Park, Spokane Memorial Gardens, and Woodlawn Cemetery, so they have all the records at the central office at Greenwood. I was given the locations of some more Castlio burials; two at Greenwood (Edwin Sparks and Dora A. Castlio) and two at Spokane Memorial Gardens (Raymond W. and Alma L. Castlio). Since I was already at Greenwood, I went and took the photos; then I went to Fairmount and, after a little help from the office there, found Allene's burial place (her grave is unmarked, except for a curbstone family marker off to the side). After adding Allene's photos to her memorial page at Find A Grave, I created pages for the other Castlio individuals at that site. I used information from the Washington State Death Index at Ancestry to fill in some unknown information.


Sunday, July 23
I worked on my friend Bev's family tree website, and I now have three pages up. Once I get it complete, I'll put a link here for my readers, so that they, too, can read it. Bev is a great writer; a professional journalist who writes for many genealogy magazines, and her family stories on her new website will warm your heart and make you feel like you've known these people all your lives!

One of the ladies from the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society contacted me; she recently ordered a copy of the GenSmarts software by phone. She talked to Aaron Underwood, the owner of the program, and suggested that he donate a copy as a door prize for our October workshop. He agreed, and I think that this will make a wonderful addition to a great program (Michael John Neill will be our guest lecturer)!

I've agreed to be the coordinator for the EWGS' educational program for 2007. We offer free computer classes for members each month with a different topic. So far, we covered Using the Boolean Search Method, Using Ancestry.com, Placing Queries for (and Finding) Surnames Online, Using FamilySearch.org, How to Fix Broken Links (see my blog entry of July 16th), Patriotic and Lineage Societies Online, and Using GenSmarts Software. My job will entail signing up people for the classes (there's a limit of 15, due to the amount of computer stations in the computer lab), of which we hold three each program day.

I also started adding a lot of cemetery information from various sources to the Goodrich Cemetery (Atlas Township, Genesee County, Michigan) listing at Find A Grave...kind of an outgrowth to my work on The Atlas Project.

Remembering Ruth Lillian (Hoekstra) DeVries

Today would have been my maternal grandmother's 87th birthday, were she still living. In her honor, I sponsored her page at Find A Grave. Take a look and then go to her AnceStory on my website to learn about this loving grandmother of mine.

Speaking of Find A Grave, one of my goals this year is to add as many names as I can of those in my three databases (mine, Norm's, and the Atlas Project's) to this website. The original goal was that each day I would use the search feature of my databases to find who had been born or died on that day's date (January 16th, for instance), and if they had a burial place listed, I would add their information to Find A Grave. Lofty goal, as I have about 35,000 names combined in those three databases. But I am square up through January 8th.