Author Archives: Larry Hamilton

About Larry Hamilton

This site is to help me organize my thoughts, process, and information. It will give others insight into what to do or not do in ones search for ancestors.

Gaw/McGaw – The Big Rabbit Trail

My biggest rabbit trail was one that I inherited from my parents. I believe they used another researcher’s information and went with it. Unfortunately, this information is on many CDs and if all over the place online.

My Great-great-great-great grandfather was John Gaw. The confusion is that he supposedly was born John McGaw and dropped the Mc. The reason for this confusion is that there was a John Gaw and a John McGaw from South Carolina who both fought in the Revolutionary War, and both moved to the same region of Ohio.

In the days before the internet, it is easy to see how one person searching a microfilm and finding a John with almost the same surname and the right age to confuse the two.

I spent a lot of time trying to get John McGaw and his brother William and their father John back to Ireland. The confused source had them from Dunferaline, Ireland. I can find no such place, and think it is a confusion with Dumfermline, Scotland. They supposedly went to Ireland before they went to South Carolina. Again, it is easy to see how a confusion of hand-written notes could lead to a garbled name for a town in the wrong country.

After I found this, and had spent a couple of years off and on trying to find them there, I learned that I was researching the wrong people. I mentioned this to my Dad and he got upset over it. This is my Mom’s side of the family, why should he care? He’s the one who proved another of my Mom’s ancestors was not an unknown person among the Regulators hung by the British in North Carolina. There were several among that branch of the family that were not happy with this.

That is one thing in genealogy that one encounters quite often. Disproving the favorite family story, or proving something that no one else will accept. Genealogy stands on evidence, yet too many people take as gospel what they read in a book someone put together. If the book does not tell you where they found the information so you can verify it, how do you know it is true? In this way, genealogy is a science. Given the same sources and the same information, two people should be able to come to the same conclusion.

There is a lot of gray area in that last sentence. If the sources do not have names and dates or are not primary sources, there can be a lot of room for supposition. However, any supposition should be supported by the facts, not that we are trying to prove something because we want it to be true. That is why the study of genealogy begins with the present and works from what we know, and goes back one generation at a time.

We must make a good start of it, or how will two or three generations from now know that we gave them the right people? We have to document it. If we knew the people, such as our grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren, we need to document that we had first-hand knowledge of that person, and that we asked our parents to give us all they knew. Documentation of such interviews, will go a long way to help future generations and help them avoid unnecessary rabbit trails.

Archiving Email

Archiving email to free up disk space and insuring it is available for future reference is an important task that is best not left for later. One can put off long-term storage until there is nothing to store.

Two programs from Fookes Software offer excellent choices for backing up and archiving email so that it is easy to retrieve and use. Mailbag Assistant and Aid4Mail are two products that one should not do without. The needs of an individual or organization will determine which one is best suited to the task. Both can handle a wide range of email formats.

Mailbag Assistant has an interface that allows one to view the contents of Mailbag Archives, and if you choose you can forward or reply to a selected message using your default email program. In addition, it offers advanced sorting, and searching to quickly find the email you seek. It can handle tens of thousands of email messages in an email folder. It also has scripting options if you want to make a script to process on a regular basis.

Aid4Mail has multiple versions for the individual to the corporation. It can read a variety of mailbox formats, but is designed to archive rather than read the archives. One option allows it to create a CD of selected email messages that can be read in a web browser. Aid4Mail is also very valuable for converting mailboxes from one format to another if you want to move to a new email program.

Both of these relate to genealogy as a way to store important information received in email. One way to back up ones genealogy is to email it to yourself. Both products can split attachments from messages so they can be accessed independently of the email message.

There is a lot of overlap between these products in the area of creating archives, but they are geared to different uses. If all you want is a quick archive of your email or to move to a new email program, then Aid4Mail is the one to choose. However, if you want to be able to look through the archive and interact with it like an email program, then Mailbag Assistant fits the bill.

Whichever program you choose to do the job of archiving your important email, be sure to keep a copy of the archive in a safe place, in case disaster strikes. If you do not have the room to store print-outs of all the information in all your email, then archiving is the way to go.

Organizing Pictures

Today, after benefiting from organizing all the cords for my computers, and rearranging and organizing and storing things, I found yet more to do. Isn’t that they way it always works?

My wife’s grandfather died several weeks ago, and I still had not moved the photos off the camera and onto my computer. I have promised to share them with other of my wife’s family, and with my wife’s recent knee replacement, and other things, just have not gotten it done.

After I got the photos onto the computer, I also wanted to make sure I had all the digital photos in one place. I soon found that I did have all or nearly all digital photos I have ever taken, but in multiple directories and in multiple drives. I was afraid I would have to go to digging through backup CDs, but instead had to sort out duplicate photos, etc. I then made sure to do the same consolidation on my USB backup drive, and then updated the backup to include the new photos.

The consolidation of the digital photos will make it easier to get it all organized as I move forward. This includes digital photo albums I made of my parents 40th anniversary a few years ago. I now need to make albums of other photos and post online to share with family and friends. I use one of two programs from Fookes Software, Album Express or Easy Imager. Both allow re-sizing of images, and adding text and create web pages that can easily be navigated. Album Express is geared more towards the web novice, Easy Imager has lots of bells and whistles. Fookes Software has several other programs that are of use to genealogy. I am a little biased, as I have helped beta test all of them. You can find my name in the acknowledgments in the help files. I will have articles on the other products from Fookes Software, including reviews and how-tos.

In addition to digital photos, we have tons of photos. Unfortunately, most are not labelled. We have two storage boxes holding the album my mom made for me as a young child, and I added to some in college, and our wedding album, and tons of unlabeled photos. Back this winter, I did get started and labeled about a hundred photos, with who and when. Some will only be approximations without a receipt for development.

It is important when labeling photos to use the right kind of pen. A photo safe, acid-free, archival quality pen cost about $2.50 at Wal-Mart. Be sure to store photos ink side up and do not stack them, or the ink will stick them together and you will have writing on the front of photos. I learned this the hard way, but not before I caught the issue, and the ink would wipe off the picture. Plan ahead and do not have a fan or strong breeze when you do start labeling the photos.

Once they are labeled, it would insure you have a copy to scan them in. Services exist to scan photos, but a good letter-sized scanner can be purchased for$100 or less.

Both labeling and scanning and making physical albums are good winter or rainy day activities for a couple or family. Be sure to label photos before the one who knows who people are is gone. When my Granddad was sick, we went through all of his pictures and labeled them to make sure we knew who they were, since he was the only one left who knew. I hope that all of my parents photos are labeled, at least the ones my Mom was the source of knowledge. There is still time for my Dad. Note to self: Find out if all the photos of Mom and Dad are labeled.

Those albums will require the most precious resource – time. So check back here for the progress I make.

Cleaning House

This is both literal and figurative.

I need to “clean house” with my inherited, merged, and other messy data in my genealogy DB.

I also need to clean house, by organizing my workspace better. I let my home office get messy over the fall, but I did a major clean-out and reorganization this winter. However, I ran out of steam and did not finish the job. So, ever so slowly, it got piled up again. Not as bad as before, but I could not get to the genealogy reference I knew that I had stored “where I could find it”. Those will probably be my famous last words.

If I file away something I am working on, even if I do not get back to it for awhile, it takes me longer to get back in the groove, than if I put it all away neatly. I tend to have stacks of things that I know what is in that stack, until my wife or sons move it…. My wife had knee surgery last month so the week after, my in-laws came to help so I did not have to take off work. I love my mother-in-law, but she cannot sit still, and if I clean something and have it done, she comes behind and re-organizes it. Thankfully, she stayed out of the home office, but she got into the garage, my tool box, and re-arranged things. I appreciate the good intentions, but I have to make another mess to try and find things that are not where I had them.

Anyway…. I started back at cleaning up the clutter in the home office, so I can finish the job I started a few months ago, and get it all put neatly away, and keep track of where I put it. This will also give me room to start going through the ten file boxes of research from my parents.

Getting paper information organized, is just as important as good organization of the information electronically. I urge all those new to genealogy to find a system that works for you to keep your research organized, and stick with it!

Getting Things Done (GTD) websites, such as 43 Folders and LifeHacker, have lots of hints for organizing and focusing on doing tasks that get the results you want with the minimum of distraction. While they have some good ideas, that I have adopted in part, some of their suggestions are either not a good fit for me, or do not fit what makes sense for organizing genealogy. For example, in my email, I have a genealogy folder for general information, and under that, I have one for each surname for which I have email correspondence. If I organized it by date or other matter, I would have a hard time finding it. The key is to find what works for you to be efficient in you efforts.

I do like suggestions for a clean workspace and getting rid of “cord clutter” from all the extension cords, power strips, and accessories on your computer. I have some “spaghetti” that I need to clean up, it is just a matter of deciding how I want it to be when I am finished.

I will have another article with links to websites with systems for organizing genealogical research, plus some more specific tips.

Well, I made the dent in the clutter, so I can finish what I want to do in the office, but now, it’s off to mow the lawn and enjoy some sun! After that break, back to organizing!

Citing Obituaries – Good Information, Bad Reference

I received a scanned image of an obituary of a cousin today. The information filled in a few gaps, such as the surnames of the deceased’s sons-in-law, but not their first names.

In spite of this good information, there is no note to indicate what newspaper, or the date it appeared.

If I lose this image, or an original on a scrap of paper, without any information about what newspaper it appeared in, future researchers are prevented from verifying it. If I had a typo on a name, it could create a brick wall or a rabbit trail for others.

The Hamilton-L maillist on Rootsweb had a posting a couple of years ago with a long list of obituaries. They were either hand-typed from a newspaper or copy and pasted from an online source. One of them happened to be my mother’s. I know for a fact that her obituary in at least three forms appeared in three different newspapers. The reasons for this are that one was the old hometown newspaper out of state where she and my dad grew up and graduated high school and got married. Another was the local big city newspaper that charged a fee, so it was carefully constructed to have as much information as possible for the base fee. The third was the nearby smaller city newspaper.

A future researcher could easily be confused by finding one obituary from one of these newspapers, and when they see it does not match what is online, or in my database would be tempted to think that I fudged my data.

Such a simple thing as the name of a newspaper, city and state and date of publication, become critical when the ones in the know have joined those who have gone before.

If you expect your family to throw all your research in the trash when you’re gone, then such things do not matter. But if you have a plan for a book or a donation to a society or library, these little details matter.

My goal is to have the best sources I can, and cite them accurately. I will never be finished, and may not break through the brick walls I face, but what I do will be as right as I can make it for others.

Isaac Hamilton & Abigail Martin

My brick wall for my Hamilton’s are my great-great-grandparents. I knew my grandparents Claude Louis and Rowena Merle [Gibson] Hamilton, but both died by the time I was 6 or 7. My great-grandparents William Elmer and Carrie May [Cardwell] Hamilton, both died before I was born. My dad knew his grandmother, Carrie, who only died a few years before I was born. His grandfather, William, died when he was 7. But my grandfather, Claude, was 37 when his father William died, and he at least had information and knowledge, as did his sisters, Leona and Laura.

William Elmer’s parents were Franklin Pierce and Mary Pearl [Hill] Hamilton. Back to this point we are very solid, as family information and census records and death certificates attest. Franklin’s parents were Isaac and Abigail [Martin] Hamilton. We have them on the 1860 census, but they seem to have disappeared after that. Was there an epidemic? Did Isaac get killed in the Civil War? What about Abigail and Franklin’s two younger sisters? There is a Franklin Hamilton of the right age in 1870 in a school in Illinois, was this the right one? Then in 1880 we have Franklin and Mary and two children, one being William Elmer.

From there we have some of the Kansas State censuses, and the 1900 Federal Census. William Elmer and family are found on the 1910, 1920, and 1930 Federal Censuses. However, Franklin and Mary have not been found in 1910. Franklin died in 1912 in Missouri, and Mary died in 1924/5 in Oklahoma. The census takers make it hard to find ancestors, when they use initials for everyone. This seems very prevalent in Kansas for the head of household. In this case F. P. Hamilton. Even with the advances of the internet and indexes, if one keeps looking for Franklin, F. P. gets missed.

The only way to find out what happened to Isaac and family is to find a sibling of Isaac and/or Abigail, and try to track them down. Without some sort of paper trail, like land ownership, this is one brick wall that may never come down.

One high-tech hope was joining the Hamilton Surname DNA project. My dad joined in hopes of finding a distant cousin of a common ancestor. We ended up in Group X. Which means that no one else quite matches us. We did have a hit from someone who might be related within the last 500 years, but without a hint of a researched line with names to connect us, there is no way to know where to go from here.

The key to this is to gather every piece of information available on all the descendants of Isaac and Abigail, which at this point, only Franklin is known to have children, and he and Mary were prolific. As I organize what I have from my parents, I hope to find any hints or clues they may have missed. If they do not have copies of original records, I will have to be prepared to spend money to obtain them.

Brick Walls & Rabbit Trails (BWAT)

The term “brick wall” is used as in many other areas of life, to indicate an obstacle to further progress. In genealogy, this is used to indicate the furthest ancestor of a given branch of your tree you can prove. All efforts to go over, under, around, or through the brick wall have been fruitless. Getting past a brick wall is cause for celebration, especially, if it is one that has existed for twenty or more years.

Likewise, the term “rabbit trail” is used to indicate a diversion from the real goal. It is easy in one’s research to find something interesting and run with it. The next thing you know, you are nowhere near where you had planned to be. Rabbit trails can be very fruitful, but take you away from a planned course of action. Rabbit trails can also end up to be a waste of time. Either way, lack of restraint can lead one off the path of keeping research in order for future review. Chaos in a research intensive activity, makes for more work than keeping it organized from the start.

Here I will share my Brick Walls and Rabbit Trails to both help me in my genealogical quest, and help others learn from my successes and failures.

In genealogy, as with other things in life, the basics must be mastered. Always start with what you know and go from there. It is like the detective shows where they have to piece things together. Genealogy is much the same. One cannot claim to be related to a famous ancestor if there is no proof to tie the intervening generations together. Start with yourself, then your siblings and parents, and work back a generation at a time. All the while, accumulate documentation to support it.

In my case, I have the base of my genealogy from my parents. They did a lot of research and proved a lot of it. However, they did not get it all into a genealogy program, and did not keep it organized as genealogical program standards changed. When I started, I made the mistake of running down the rabbit trail and starting trying to break down the brick wall of the furthest ancestors my parents reached. I spent a few years researching one line in particular, only to learn that the information my parents relied on from another researcher was wrong. I knew better, but still had to learn the hard way. I am now starting at the beginning, and verifying each generation and each person. At the same time, I am cleaning up the data entry my father did. A lot of source information is in the notes, instead of in the sources. This is the way early genealogy programs worked. With nearly 5,000 individuals in their database, it would be a big effort to clean up. However, it is hard to figure out what they found, since a source report will not find what is in the notes. Once again, the slow, methodical approach is needed to make sense out of everything. Only then will I really know what I have. In addition, I now have ten file boxes of the research and correspondence my parents collected. Only a fraction was entered into the database. Back in the days when a ten megabyte hard drive was considered huge, my dad entered enough information into the database, spreadsheets, and documents, to soon fill it.

As will be seen in my continuing efforts, the change in technology in the past twenty plus years, is enormous, and is both a help and a hindrance to moving forward.

As I continue my data clean up and do some online research along the way, I am finding certain self-imposed brick walls of my parents, need to be ignored. For example, one of my great-grandmothers had two older half-sisters. My dad has a note on her in the database that since they never heard from them they must have died. I may have found them on a Kansas State Census with one of their uncles. When taking research from those who have blazed the trail, make sure their “notes on the map” are correct.

I ran across a genealogy tip last week that went something like this: “The easiest brick wall to break down is the one you do not build.” Assumptions must make sense, and stand up to new evidence. Do not swallow the assumptions of other researchers whole hog. Test their assumptions and make sure it fits the available facts.

If what you get from others does not have sources, how can you test it? This is like a text book without footnotes. What good is research without a way for others to verify it? Even the most honest person there is cannot be believed if there are no verifiable facts to back up their claims.

It is better to organize the facts now, so that future family members can trust the work you have done. Without good documentation, they will have to re-do all the legwork you have put in to build your genealogy. Like any other endeavor in life, it is always easier to do it right the first time. Hopefully, I and others can learn from my hard knocks.