Your Boring Ancestors . . . or NOT!

I was alerted to a blog post by Gail Dever in her “crème de la crème” post this week: How to Write about your Boring Ordinary Ancestors by Jessica Benjamin.

I had seen another post by Chris Paton on his The GENES Blog recently as well, titled, Boring Ancestors?! That one was a reprise of an article he had written in 2009.

If you search the Internet for “boring ancestors” you actually get quite a few hits.

I confess I have had similar thoughts about my ancestors, that they were, for the most part, just regular people – no royalty, brigand, explorer, cult figure, war hero or captain-of-industry types. And none of them descended from Charlemagne! In other words: Boring!

But . . . however one might want to characterize them, from my parents on back as far as I can trace my forebears, having now given some thought to the idea, I do not think they were boring at all. One does not have to be royalty, brigand, explorer, cult figure, war hero or captain of industry to be adventurous or entrepreneurial, generous or kind, witty or clever, affable or gregarious, loyal or encouraging, or kind-hearted or benevolent. Probably with few exceptions I can point to my ancestors as having been hard-working, strong-minded, supportive, caring, determined, family-oriented people. And that is definitely not boring!

Many of my family members have had relatively normal occupations or careers: farmers, carpenters, mason, mechanics, salespeople, etc. They may not have made headlines in their trades or professions, but their work was no less valuable to themselves and the people around them. Raising a family and providing for their welfare is not boring. Depending on the circumstances, though, it might be considered meritorious. I have not yet found an ancestor that did not have some trials and tribulations in their lives that they persevered through.

My wife and I both have very close family members that decided to uproot from their (boring?) lives in Britain and strike out for Canada. They had nothing much to their names in terms of wealth or possessions, but they had a determination to find a new life in an unknown world.

My paternal grandfather was just 16 when, in 1907, he boarded the Empress of Britain in Liverpool, England, bound for Canada. He may have fibbed a bit about his age which was shown on the passenger manifest as 19. On his own, he worked in Ontario before coming to Alberta where he was employed as a wrangler for a while. After marriage he became a farmer, though I understand not a great one. His father joined him in Alberta in 1913 and went homesteading himself, in 1926, at the age of 61. How boring is that?

My maternal grandfather was born in Kansas in 1870, homesteaded in Oklahoma in 1893, returned with his wife and family to farm in Kansas in 1904, then moved to Washington about 1912, again to farm, and to Oregon around 1915. Their final move was to Alberta, Canada in 1928. Grandpa was 58 then and looking to start all over with new, unbroken farm land.

My wife’s mother came to Canada, in 1930, at the age of 21, settling in Calgary. She knew no one here and was obligated to work as a domestic to pay off her passage. Her husband, my wife’s father, had arrived in 1927, to work first for an uncle on a farm in Saskatchewan and then on to Calgary a year or so later. Both came with only their dreams.

Many other great-grandparents uprooted their families and immigrated to Canada and the US, most in the 19^th century. Others before them had migrated to different parts of the British Isles, also seeking opportunity. None of their lives could said to be boring as they were continually challenged to make a living and raise a family.

Once the earliest immigrants of my mother’s family had arrived in the US, in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, many made their way across the country, different generations settling in Maryland, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Oklahoma and Oregon. My father’s ancestors arrived in Ontario, then moved around the province and subsequently to North Dakota before my great-grandparents made their way to Alberta. I cannot imagine starting up new farms around the continent was boring.

My wife’s ancestors originated in many different parts of Scotland, from the Shetland Islands to Glasgow. They were fishermen, farmers, career army men, weavers and domestic servants, a few having several different occupations within their own lifetimes. They went to wherever there was work and opportunity.

And yet they were all just regular people – boring people according to some definitions.

I can attest that among more recent generations, we have lots on non-boring people. Some family get-togethers are exceedingly un-boring.

I suspect there are no boring people, especially in our past family trees. Nor ever have been! Every family is exciting in its own way, all people being different.

It is not what ship an ancestor boarded, what house they lived in or what crop they grew that is important; it’s why they boarded the ship, why they chose to go and live where they did and whether they chose to be a farmer, or something else, that is the real story. The addresses and dates might be boring; the lives of the people are not, not even for regular folk.

Winter Weather

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Online Family Trees Revisited

I have written before about reviewing information on family trees published online.

·         8 Jul 2014, Family Trees Online – My MyHeritage Website Example

·         9 Sep 2014, More About Asa McDaniel on the FamilySearch Tree

·         16 Sep 2014, Finding Asa McDaniel in Online Trees

·         4 Oct 2014, The Value of Online Databases

I have to say that, from my experiences, it has not always been enlightening.

My test subject for looking at such trees or databases is generally one of my great-grandfathers, Asa Harvey McDaniel. We have a great deal of information about him and his immediate family, most of it assembled by my aunt decades ago. I have added some information to the tree as well over the years. There are many online family trees that contain information about the family. Some of the contributors are not actual members of our family and most appear to have just copied data from other trees. That, as I have reiterated, makes it difficult to discuss results with anyone who has done original work. Many of them publish excerpts from work shared by my aunt in the 1970s, without citing that source, incidentally, which makes you wonder about the depth of their own work.

I was reminded of the data on FamilySearch trees in a short note in one of the many email newsletters I get, labelled, Getting Started:  FamilySearch Launches Powerful New Simplified Search. The whole article can be read on the FamilySearch Blog. So, I figured, what the heck, why not go see if there was anything new about Asa and the McDaniel family.

I filled out the form with the basic information about Asa and clicked Search.

Up came a page with all the references the library has for McDaniel, and specifically, Asa McDaniel. Looking at the summary page, it is initially quite impressive how much data there is that might apply. The presentation is also a marked improvement with what we used to see. But is the data good?

There are currently 72,515 people with the McDaniel name in the shared Family Tree, according to FamilySearch: 52,633 in the USA, 829 in Ireland (?) and 432 in Canada. They further break it down by BMD documents, Censuses and Lists, Migration and Naturalization, Military, Probate and Court, and Other. TMy first impression is that no one would ever have time to go through the 22,327 documents that mention Asa Harvey McDaniel!

Further along on the opening page are three individuals that FamilySearch concludes are the “top people” in the tree. Two are definitely not my great-grandfather. The other is our man. That reference has a copy of the same photo I have and which I shared with several people. But on FamilySearch the photographer’s name and the location where the photo was taken have been cropped. Somehow, I don’t think this is right. The name of the contributor of the photo is not one I recognized so I contacted her to see where she fit in the family tree. She is a cousin and got her copy of the photo from her grandmother. We have made a connection and can move forward to share data.

Anyway, it was time to go see if anything had changed since last I looked at the tree. Some of the names of Asa’s children still don’t match what is in my tree, so they need to be checked. There is missing census data for him. I looked closer at what is there for my grandmother, one of Asa’s daughters. It is mostly correct but does not have all the information about her children, particularly my mother. Most of the relevant censuses in which Gramma is recorded are not shown. One is totally wrong.

The most egregious error that I always have found in the past concerns Asa’s father and it is still on the shared tree. Many family historians, in most databases, show a man named William Solomon McDaniel (1774/1782-1857) as Asa’s father. The problem is that no document we have shows my 2^nd great-grandfather with a middle name. It is also clear from census data that he was still alive in 1860, and still living in Virginia, with his daughter and granddaughter, in fact, and right beside (same farm?) as son, Asa. That record indicates his birth year as 1778.

William Solomon is shown on many trees as dying in Clinton, Ohio or Clinton, Virginia, in 1857, so the man could not have been in Virginia in 1860. No document has been presented to confirm either place. I have pointed that inconsistency out to many people over the years, but the errors have never been fixed. On some of the trees he married Elizabeth Pendleton on 26 January 1801 in Amherst County, Virgina. No documents have been shown for that marriage. Our William married Elizabeth Gentles on 26 December 1801, in Frederick County, Maryland. We have that certificate. Elizabeth Pendleton (1787-1839) does not appear to be on the FamilySearch shared tree. You can see where the confusion comes from. In my opinion, there were two different men named William McDaniel who both married women named Elizabeth, possibly in the same year. But their life stories are much different.

So . . . with my Asa test today, the same mis-information is still on the FamilySearch shared tree. There are some other sources on his file which might be worth looking at. I am not sure the basic data or dates I have will change, though.

I did one other test as well. I searched another of my 2^nd great-grandfathers, this time on my father’s side. John Shepheard was born in 1830 in Cornwood, Devon, England, and died in Torquay, Devon, England, in 1901. He is not listed on the FamilySearch shared tree at all. That is not a big problem for me as I have all the parish information and can show Shepheard generations back into the 1600s with a high degree of confidence. It appears no one else is researching this family, so the FamilySearch shared tree remains very much behind.

John’s son, James Shepheard (1865-1940), my great-grandfather, is on the tree but shown with the wrong parent. James’s son, James Pearson Shepheard (1891-1965), my grandfather, is on the tree as well, with some information but far from complete.

My father is also listed, again with little information, but that’s ok. Unfortunately, my father’s younger sister is shown as deceased when she is still very much alive. For that reason, her name should not be shown at all, in my opinion. Information about her death was only added last year, but I do not recognize the person who did so. One might conclude they are not related to us.

The FamilySearch shared tree has certainly undergone some modifications and improvements over the years, but it still fails my basic tests, so it is quite inadequate to me, I’m afraid. And I do not have time or the interest to continually go through the database to alert people to the mistakes anymore.

On a more positive note, this trip into the FamilySearch tree allowed me the opportunity to connect with two cousins I did not know, and who are studying one particular common family line in more detail. So, I guess that is the main benefit of shared online family trees. I expect the new cousins and I may be able to add to each other’s family lines.

There is my rant about online trees for today!