1940 Census!!

If you do genealogy you may be aware that every US Census is kept private for 72 years. Yesterday, April 2, the 1940 census reached its 72nd birthday and is now available free to the public. Well, sort of.

The US census bureau is releasing free digital images of the millions of pages of records. If I knew the city where a John Doe lived in 1940 I could wade through hundreds or thousands of pages looking for the record. Or I could wait for the records to be transcribed and made searchable.

Volunteers are needed to read the records, decipher the handwritnig, and type the names, ages, etc into forms which will be permanently stored and searchable. One site where anyone can volunteer is FamilySearch.org.

What's a first cousin twice removed?

Cousins are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer.
- Ed Cunningham

Knowing your family history can help you to remember all those relatives that you met yesterday with Thanksgiving dinner. Doing genealogy online is another way to discover distant relatives.

I recently received over 20 pages of family data on relatives of my grandmother's mother, a Sanderson. The individuals listed are my 2nd and 3rd cousins many times removed.

What is a 'removed' cousin? Let's start with siblings. A person is your brother or sister if you share the same parents. (For this blog I'll ignore half-X relations where just a single relative is shared.) A person is your cousin if you have a pair of common grandparents. Your second cousin if the nearest shared relative is a great-grandparent. Third cousins if a shared 2*great grandparent and so on.

But what if the two people comparing family trees are not of the same "generation"? The 'removed' tag indicates how many generations the separation is. My cousin's children are called my cousins once removed. My cousin is also a grandparent so her grandkids are my 1st cousins twice removed.  My parent's cousins are also my cousins but once removed.

Bottom Line

How many cousins once removed do you have?

Who's in your Genes?

I think I'm a clone now
'Cause every pair of genes is a hand-me-down
- Weird Al Yankovic lyrics

This wonderful graphic I found at http://visualecon.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/usancestry-2000.jpg  It shows the ancestry with the largest population in each county according to the 2000 census. However, the ancestry listed might not be a majority (>50%) of the population, just a plurality. In 2000, 58 percent of the population specified only one ancestry, 22 percent provided two ancestries, and 1 percent reported an unclassifiable ancestry such a mixture or adopted. Another 19 percent did not report any ancestry at all.

I'm surprised by the large midwest region descended from Germans. These are low density population states so we're not talking huge numbers of people but still, Germans? During my vacation this summer I drove through many of the bluish states. While visiting the Pabst mansion I learned that Milwaukee was a very German town in the early 1900s and that Pabst was just one of many German families with a Milwaukee beer brewery. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa I visited the Czech Village and learned that the town was once 25% Czech, drawn to the region by a huge sausage factory? Perhaps the German ancestry includes the old German-Austrian Empire such as Poland, the Czech Republic, etc?

I'm also surprised to see so little English ancestry on the map (why Nevada?) I can trace most of my family lines to England, with one ancestor from Germany, a few from France, and several from Sweden. Perhaps those of British descent are the ones declaring themselves as "American"?

Bottom Line

Genealogy can be a lot of fun and many records are available on the Internet. I've found many Quakers in my colonial ancestors, no idea why. The Swedish line were Mormons who emigrated to Utah and created some unusual family group sheets. Both my father's and mother's main line trace back to early Virginia farmers with several generations who settled new territories in the Midwest (Illinois, Nebraska) and kept moving westward along different paths until all my great-grandparents settled down in Idaho. Most of my relatives are still in Idaho four generations later with a fifth generation just started; my cousin's grandchildren.

How can you NOT know what year you were born?

"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near"
- To his Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell

I enjoy doing genealogy, especially now-a-days with so many resources available on the Internet. But one thing always amazes me: the multiplicity of dates listed for the life event of a single person. A relative might be online as born on 15/1/1753 or 1/15/1752 or 15 Jan 1752/3 or 26 Jan 1753 or 1 Feb 1753 and all could be correct to some degree. How can that be?

The answer begins with the year 1582 when the Catholic church took action regarding calendar creep. The Julian calendar used since ancient Rome had a leap year every four years which is very good but still has an error of 11 minutes per year compared to the sun. By the 1580's this had accumulated to 10 days of error. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decreed changes:
1. All calendars in October would be advanced by 10 days to sync with the sun
2. Leap year would be skipped in years divisible by 100 (l900 was not a leap year) unless also divisible by 400 (so 2000 is a leap year) to eliminate the small drift.

Now this occurred after the Protestant Reformation so many countries ignored the papal decree which led to more confusion as different countries had different dates. Imagine it's Oct 11 in Italy with a contract to deliver something to Germany on their Oct 2, tomorrow. Eventually all(?) countries updated their calendars to the Gregorian system. This did not occur until 1752 in England by which point they had to skip 11 days to catch up. Wednesday, 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752.

Back to genealogy: John Smith was born Jan 15th, 1752 so this was just before the calendar change in September in England, right? Wrong. Like many murder mystery novels I've held back a vital clue. Gregory also changed the start of the year from March 25 to January 1. Under the old calendar the year went Nov 1752, Dec 1752, Jan 1752, Feb 1752, March 1752, April 1753 (new year).  Jan 15 was very late in the year 1752 under the Julian calendar but would be listed as 1753 under new system. Genealogists recommend writing this as 15 Jan 1752/3.

The change of starting month also affects Quaker dates. [I have a lot of Quakers in my family tree.] Quakers refused to use the days of the week names since this mention foreign gods: Thursday (Thor), Wednesday (Odin or Wodin), Saturday (Saturn). So they would list a birth as the 15th day of the 1st month of the year 1752. But what is the 1st month?  It was March prior to 1752 and January afterwards.

When doing genealogy dates should be written as
day(#) Month(full or 3 letter abbreviation) year(4 digits)
to avoid the confusion of the American 1/15/1752 vs the European 15/1/1752 for the same date. I saw this problem in a British relative last night - some records said  7 Oct and others 10 July - clearly someone was confused over 10/7 vs 7/10.

But the confusion does not stop there. Some people try to be helpful by "correcting" dates from the Julian to Gregorian (especially if the person was born under one calendar and died under the other). They add 11 days to the birthday so John Smith gets a birth date of 26 Jan 1753. The trouble is how do I know if the date was adjusted or not? I don't. Hence the formula  15 Jan 1752/3 to indicate a Julian date between Jan 1 to March 24 without "correction".

Bottom Line

If you follow the rules above will you have the correct date? Maybe not. There's one more common point of confusion. Many dates are taken from old church records which typically record the Christening date (baptism) and the burial date instead of the birth date and date of death. In my example at top, 1 Feb 1753, might be the baptismal date and entered mistakenly as the birth date for John Smith. It's important to know what event the date represents.

Russian Orthodox Christmas

"Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas."-Calvin Coolidge

In my workplace we have citizens of many nations - Japan, Russia, Poland, India and more. Today I learned that some of my colleagues (of Russian Orthodox faith) will be home celebrating a late Christmas? The web site Russian Crafts has a great explanation for celebrating Christmas on Jan 7.

In ancient times, many, mostly unreliable methods had been used to calculate the dates according to either the lunar or solar cycles. By Roman times, the calendar had become three months out with the seasons, so in 46 BC, Julius Caesar commissioned the astronomer, Sosigenes to devise a more reliable method. This, we know as the Julian Calendar and was used widely for 1500 years. The month of his birth, Caesar had named Quintilis, but the Roman Senate later re-named it Julius (July) in his honour. In those days, February had 30 days every 4 years.

However, this calendar was still 11 minutes and 14 seconds longer than the solar year, so that by the year 1580, the calendar had accumulated 10 days off again. In 1582, therefore, Pope Gregory XIII corrected the difference between the sun and calendar by ordering 10 days dropped from October, the month with the least Roman Catholic Feast days. His calendar, we know as the Gregorian Calendar, which is used in almost all of the world today. Pope Gregory made further changes to keep the calendar in line, which on average is only 26.3 seconds longer than the solar year. The Gregorian Calendar is so accurate that it will take until the year 4316 to gain a whole day on the sun.

That year, 1582, October 5th became October 15th and was immediately adopted in most Roman Catholic nations of Europe. Various German states kept the Julian Calendar until 1700. Britain and the American Colonies didn't change until 1752, but Russia and Turkey did not adopt the Gregorian Calendar until the early 1900's. So, January 7th by the Georgian Calendar would have been December 25th by the old Julian Calendar [used in Russia] and is therefore why it is still Christmas Day for the Russian Orthodox Church. Many Russians will have celebrated along with the rest of us and will then celebrate again on the Orthodox date.

Bottom Line

When Pope Gregory skipped 10 days in 1582, fixed calendar date holidays shifted to 10 days earlier than under the Julian calendar. If you kept your birthday on the same calendar date, then in 1583 your next birthday occurred only 355 days after your party in 1582 (instead of 365 days). If you wanted to track your "real" date of birth by the sun and 365-day years, then you had to add 10 days to your date of birth. The Russian Orthodox Church choose to add 10 days to Dec 25 to keep Christmas on the same 365-day cycle it had always been celebrated on in Russia.
Does this matter today? Surprising yes. If you do genealogy you'll often see two sets of dates for birth and death for persons living several centuries ago. One date will be their birthday on the Gregorian calendar and the other (+10 days) on the Julian calendar. Since not everyone used the same calendar, your April 1st might not be the same date as my April 1st. How confusing!

Historical Perspective

... he slept with his fathers [ancestors], and Nadab his son reigned in his stead. Bible, 1 Kings 14:20

Yesterday I talked about how a little knowledge can change one’s perception; in particular an old and “worthless” violin becomes valuable when you learn Stradivarius made it. During the past month I’ve been doing a lot of Genealogy and have experienced similar paradigm shifts and “aha” moments.

One of the Holy Grails of genealogy is linking to a noble lineage. There is the prestige of course but also a sense of hitting the jackpot. Most noble lines are well documented so you get easy access to centuries of family history. Some noble lines even include genealogies back to Adam and Eve.

In my family tree I’ve rejected several popular and questionable links to nobility but still one or two remain. It’s been fun learning that I may to related to Robin Hood (Robert Earl of Huntington), Godiva and her husband Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and other notables. I take all this with a grain of salt and pinch of doubt. The historical reality of connecting to Adam and Eve is just as reliable as my Viking ancestors with a genealogy linking them to the Norse God Freyr. One Viking claimed descent from a polar bear, another from the Norse God Odin.

Anyhow, back to the theme, historical perspective. Where did the British nobility come from? The oldest lines date back to the Norman Conquest of 1066. This means that the noblest of the English are Frenchmen. How ironic given the centuries of French/English rivalry. And where did the French Normans come from – Frankish invaders and Vikings. Again ironic. The barbarians that defeated the Empire of Rome would build empires of their own that would someday become the height of culture and sophistication.

My current commuting CD is Late Antiquity: Crisis and Transformation whereby the instructor makes the case that the Dark Ages were not as dark as we think but merely a long transition from pagan Rome to Christian Europe. I looked up “Dark Ages” on Wikipedia and learned that modern scholars avoid the term. Some call it Late Antiquity, others The Age of Migration. Huh? What migration? So more research and this map from Wikipedia.

In the 300s and 400s AD, hostile climate in the north encouraged the Angles, Saxons and Jutes to invade England (displacing the Celts and fighting the Romans) – a few centuries later the pattern repeated with Vikings trying to displace the Saxons in Northumbria. To the far East, the army of Attilla the Hun (about 434-453) was destroying everything in its path. The Vandals, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths fled west and bumped into Rome. Rome fell and the “barbarians” then had free reign to migrate and settle across southern Europe.

In 767 the barbarians would create the “Holy Roman Empire” under Charlemagne, King of the Franks, which included most of Europe. Charlemagne claimed that he was the renewer of the Roman Empire, which had fallen into degradation under the Byzantines. From 801 AD onwards, Charlemagne used the title, "Charles, most serene Augustus crowned by God, the great, peaceful emperor ruling the Roman empire".

Bottom Line

To say I’m American describes my culture but not my family history given that America is merely two centuries old. Am I British (1700s-1066) or French Norman/Frank (1066-600) or Norse barbarian (600-?) or Roman (400 AD-100 BC) or …? It’s all a matter of perspective. Everything changes given enough time.

Family Coat of Arms

“If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.” - Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Monk, Activist and Writer. b.1926)

When I first started using Ancestry.com I imported everybody that was “hinted” as related; every spouse, every child, etc. Belatedly I discovered that this had created a mess. Consider my mother; she has a brother; he has a wife. My uncle’s wife has a twin sister who is married and he has parents. By this point I am so far off the main branch of my tree and in no way related to the persons I’m importing.

As part of my pruning effort, I thought I would assign an image for every person that I am directly descended from. This picture replaces the generic man/woman face in the tree and makes it easy to spot my main branch. For distant relatives I’m using the family coat of arms as the image.
This has been fun but exhausting. For some names multiple Coats of Arms are available. Which is correct? For others I can find no Coat at all and must find a substitute image. In this post I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned about Heraldry – the profession of managing Coats of Arms or Blazons.

Family arms are much like university logos. It makes it easy to spot who is playing on a field of combat. Once a coat of arms was adopted by a noble family, the design was placed on shields, embroidered on tapestries, carved in stone about the castle, placed on swords and even burnt into the top of breads for special occasions.

As everybody who was anybody created a Coat of Arms, heraldry became essential to keep track of the images and who was who during the Crusades. Rules were established in medieval times and a language of symbols and colors created. For instance:

Yellow = generosity
White or Silver = peace and sincerity
Blue = loyalty and truth
Red = strength and military might
Green = hope, joy and loyalty in love
Purple = royalty
A lion = courage
A tiger = one who is fierce in battle
Escallop shell = long naval journeys or naval command
A crescent = one who has been honored by the sovereign

Unfortunately this new language got carried away with specialized terms in English and French. It now requires a bit of learning to understand official Heraldry speak:

"A lion's head erased azure langued gules"

translates as

“A lion's head cut off at the neck with a flourish in blue, with a red tongue.”

Or this

“Azure a bend Guiles, fimbriated and embattled Argent, three quills or surrmounting three ink bottles Sable; separating six over seven mullets of the third.”

See How do you blazon a Coat of Arms for the description.

The earliest coats of arms were fairly simple -- bars or wavy lines, a lion rampant or an eagle displayed. The designs became more complex as the years passed, and the practice of quartering developed (i.e. adding in the arms of other families acquired through marriages).

A full Coat of Arms has several parts:
· A motto on a ribbon scroll at top
· The “crest” – an animal or item placed above the shield.
· Shield elements – this can represent two, four or even more families via quartering.
· Supporters – typically two animals holding the shield

Bottom Line

It is a mistake to call a Coat of Arms (CoA) the family crest. The crest is just one part of the complete “blazon of arms”. It also a mistake to assume that there is an official coat of arms for your surname. Often a CoA was assigned to a specific noble in recognition of a new title or lands or in exchange for favors done to the crown. The noble could pass the blazon to the heir of his title and authority. It was never meant to cover all future descendants.

Today CoAs are just a fun way to link ourselves to possible noble ancestors and hope that a little bit of that nobility rubs off on us.

Genealogy

“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family” - Anthony Brandt

Every few years I’m bitten by the genealogy bug and obsessively work on family records for a month or two. When I’ve exhausted the available online records, I set my family tree aside and wait for technology advancements and new records to appear. It is wonderful that people keep scanning state and church records so more and more data are accessible as time goes by. I’m also looking forward to the release of the 1940 census records on April 2 of 2012.

My ancestor hunt was resumed last week when my mother wanted some information on the family of a great-great grandparent. We have some really old family photos that my grandmother collected of her grandparents. Now my mother is scanning these photos and making new albums to pass on to her relatives.

Over the years I’ve used many online forums and genealogy programs. A great free program is Personal Ancestral File (PAF) that was last updated in 2002 but is still available. For $30 you can buy one of the top rated programs like Legacy Family Tree, Family Tree Maker, Roots Magic, and Ancestral Quest.

For ease of use, my favorite program is the online Ancestry.com. It works in a web browser and the data is stored via the Internet. I can access my tree from anywhere in the world and share it with the public or a few private friends. The online research material is amazing but not cheap: $20/month for US or $30/month for World data. Modest discounts are available if you buy 3 months or 1year of access. I typically pay for a few months then cancel. Fortunately I can still read and update my online Tree “for free” after I stop paying. I just cannot access the online historical records.

One very good thing about genealogy programs is that you can share historical data between them. Any decent family tree software will support GEDCOM, GEnealogical Data COMmunication, which was created by the Mormon Church as a genealogy standard. But keep in mind that GEDCOM is “Text Only”; designed for preserving who begat whom, who married whom, years of birth, death, etc. It does not transfer audio files, video, photographs and other new media that enhance the modern family trees.

Bottom Line

Online genealogy is blessing and a curse. There is a lot of BAD genealogy online with parents younger than children, individuals giving birth to themselves, the location Maine, France listed as Maine, USA, and so on. I imported a lot of junk ancestry years ago and am now pruning it back. I would hope by now for one definite source for British royal ancestry but I’m not aware of it. Some people get excited about tracing their line back to Adam and Eve. Frankly this is just as reliable as my British lines linked to the Normans linked to the Vikings which link back to the Norse God Frey.

According to Wikipedia, a bogus genealogy from Charlemagne to Adam & Eve was created for Carl Springer in the mid 19th century and continues to be used online today. But the errors also go further back to European royalty who wanted to show divine descent. Read about the Charte d'Alaon genealogy that is now discredited.

I'm thinking I may have to buy a Family Tree program to edit and correct my Ancestry.com data. I have over 7000 entries in my trees but it badly needs cleaning. Ancestry.com lacks data cleansing tools like duplicate finding/merging, orphan tracking, relationship calculator, etc.

Family Photographs

“He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.”- Henri Cartier-Bresson (French Photographer)

On Saturday, my church held a "Family History Fair" providing the public with information on Genealogy. I volunteered to put together a handout on preserving family photos. Here is what I learned:

Do's and Don'ts for preserving family photos

• Fully identify and label all photos so people won’t be forgotten.Use soft pencils like 6B or special ink. Never use ballpoint pens.Do not use rubber cement, glue, magnetic pages, or adhesive tape in albums.


• Old albums are like diaries; don’t take them apart. The exception is magnetic Vinyl album pages emit harmful fumes that damage photos. (Vinyl smells oily and the pages are sticky.) Use only Mylar or plastic labeled “for archival storage”.


• Keep photos away from areas that may become hot, damp or bright. Heat, moisture & light are bad for photos and may encourage mildew growth.


• Keep photos clean. Oils from fingers can damage the film.
  


• If you want to display a photo or include it in a child’s scrapbook, use a copy and keep the original safely preserved. When framing a photograph, keep an air space between the photograph and the glass.


• Copy home movie film and original videos, and use these copies to absorb most of the viewing wear and tear.


• As insurance against catastrophic loss, store your negatives far away from your prints. Send copies of favorite photographs to friends and family.
  
• Even the best color film will fade within 50 years. Black and White photos may last at most 150 years.


• Digital copies of your special memories won’t fade but computer hard disks will crash. CD discs can fail after just 10 years. Upload images to the Internet for long-term storage. Be mindful of copyright laws on professional images.

Bottom Line

The top recommendation is to label all your photos. One site argued, why save pictures of total stangers? I have that problem with old photos from a hundred years ago. No one knows who is pictured. Is it a relative or an old neighbor? Sometimes the caption is less than helpful, "Uncle Joe" or "Mom's friend".

Don't let your family become forgotten or lost through time.