Category Archives: Sources

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.

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.