Editor’s note: This is a non-political post on a subject that has inexplicably become political, and is merely a family history post discussing genealogy techniques. If this subject bothers you please skip it or at least keep your comments non-political. We will delete your comments and ignored if you can’t.

The hobby of genealogy, as we now practice it, became popular in the late 1800s when membership in lineage societies such as the Sons/Daughters of the American Revolution and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants helped promote it. Genealogy has evolved quite a bit since those days, as has the types of data applied to our ancestors. In the late Nineteenth Century the terms we used for immigrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ people, or African Americans were so archaic that most people now consider them slurs.

That evolution followed the progress of society and we are in the middle of exactly this type of social evolution in our lifetimes. The LGBTQIA+ community continues to gain recognition and our genealogy needs to evolve accordingly, and we’ve given a lot of thought how we’ll address it.

Early in our journey to document our family history we made discoveries that upended conventional family lore, often secrets intentionally buried decades ago, and we had to decide how we’d proceed. Our North Star on these discoveries became that we’d tell the truth as we knew it because researchers 100 years from now are going to find our work and will want to know the complete stories we’ve uncovered. Additionally, these truths are fundamental to the story of our family and why we are who we are, so we’ll share them.

But there is a level of respect and love called for in how we tell these stories. For instances one of our biggest discoveries involved living relatives and we consulted them and their children on how best to proceed (Link).

Limits of traditional genealogy for newly accepted mores

The design of our genealogy tools reflects the assumption of a traditional American nuclear family. Family Tree Maker still assumes the opposite sex when you enter a new marriage fact as well as noting parents of a child as “Spouse” even if they were never married. Ancestry follows these traditional notations as well as limiting each person to Male, Female or Unknown genders when many official bodies recognize other options. However, over half of the US States recognize (or have previously recognized and issued documents with) “X” or “other” as valid genders, which challenges our ability to note the truth of these documents.

For instance, if a child is born male and, during their first 20 years, gets a driver’s license, graduates high school, and enrolls in college under one name and gender before later transitioning, the historical record could be totally confusing 100 years from now. Without context, a new woman appears to have graduated college, gotten married, worked various jobs, and renewed her driver’s license, seemingly out of thin air.

A future family historian likely be able to link what looks like two children to the parents, guessing they had two children, one who died about age 20 and the other about the same age establishing all sorts of records but nothing before the age of 20. They could also trace their ancestors back to this child and quickly find a brick wall because they can find no record of them before adulthood.

Properly recording facts for our Trans family

When we were faced with these issues in our tree, we first asked our Trans family and friends how they would like us to approach it. They largely hadn’t given it much thought, but they recognized both the inherent risk of using what they know as “dead names” (which are so named because they are hopefully never to be used again) in our quasi-official documents, as well as wanting to accurately preserve historical records for later generations to consume and understand.

The solution we arrived at was to use “at birth” attached as secondary facts. For a trans family member their current name and gender is noted as default, and we attach their dead name and original gender as secondary facts.

Adapting our tools to integrate our LGBTQIA+ family

We use Family Tree Maker as our primary family tree tool (link), which allows us to define custom facts. We’ve defined the custom facts “Name (at birth)” and “Sex (at birth)” in FTM and use those to attach sources listing original information. We keep those facts flagged as “Private” to ensure that even though the person is alive (which makes all their records hidden by default), these facts will remain private even if we choose to share info on living relatives. This is an extra step to respect our family member’s wishes, and ensure we don’t create reports, etc. where we’d accidentally share this information.

Another of our favorite family tree tools, RootsMagic (Blog link), allows for custom fact types as well, but we run into challenges using some online tools. FamilySearch and MyHeritage both allow for custom facts and we’ve been able to create “at birth” facts on each, however Ancestry does not allow for this. Given that Ancestry is the largest commercial ancestry website, and it has our default online integration with both FTM and RootsMagic, this limitation means we’ll be restricted in sharing these elements publicly when the time comes.

Marriage/Relationship facts

The question of how we will capture various relationship facts is related to our LGTBQIA+ family, but not exclusively. We sit at a time where social mores on adult relationships are more broadly defined and we are moving past the European notion of one lifelong marriage.

Divorces are much more common today, as are parenting relationships that never included marriage. Beyond that, “modern” marriage traditions increasingly include same-sex relationships, polyamory, non-traditional/non-official marriage (like handfasting), etc. We are left to decide how best to capture these relationships properly for history’s sake with tools that are not ready for relationships outside of husband and wife.

For instance, our tree has children born to couples who never married and Ancestry, MyHeritage and Family Tree Maker want to default the parents’ relationship to “Spouse”. We can manually override that and select relationships like “Partner”, “Single”, or “Other”, but that’s a small list for accurately capturing relationships.

Other tools like FamilySearch don’t make it as clean or easy. Trying to create the same relationship for a child of a never-married couple results in a convoluted mess. Technically we can capture the relationship, but you can only view both parents from the child’s record.

Flexibility falls by the wayside when we try and document polyamorous couples. Polyamory is emerging as an increasingly common relationship type, but none of our tools are yet able to effectively capture these marriages. Non-traditional partnerships cannot be accurately recorded in our tools, nor can the parenting arrangements their children were born into.

Make it work!

Our family 100 years from now will likely be much more versed in these notions than we are today, at the dawn of this evolution. They will be expecting the information we have and regardless of the tools we use and regardless of the evolving nature of our family’s relationship our job is to capture our family history as we know it during our time. It’s important we capture these facts with truth and detail so the genealogists that come behind us can build off our work.

In many ways, given the current limitations of capturing this information formally, our work may be the only records that can decode the truth of our people and we need to ensure we capture it completely and with respect to the people who are living these new ways to fully enjoy their lives.

A few weeks ago a good friend Cameron who helped create, preserve, share and star in one of the greatest historical collections we own made a comment on Facebook about not being sure how the collection was being stored and it dawned on me: we’ve gone to great lengths to protect the things we’ve been entrusted with but we’ve never shared the details. Today, in what I hope will become a series of how we archive all our collections, we’ll go over how we store and protect what we’re calling “The Lost Northside Negatives”.

How did we start?

We’ve all seen the meme’s in our socials about how Gen-X had the advantage of growing up hanging out and going to parties without anyone having a camera. For us, that wasn’t the case. When I was 14 my Mom took my request for a camera for Christmas and bought me a Nikon EM 35mm SLR with a 50mm lens.

About this time the whole neighborhood group was increasingly into BMX riding, first racing and then tricks. Skateboarding was soon in the mix and a lot of the kids in the little town of Racine, Wisconsin were quickly trying to emulate the riders and skaters in Southern California often by capturing our own photos to match the pictures we saw in all the BMX/Skating magazines. Film and developing was expensive, and we were young, so we’d scrape together $15 however we could to shoot and develop a roll. Eventually some of us had jobs and so we’d buy more film, and I often had that camera on my shoulder, and we shot roll after roll.

How we created the collection

From 1984 to around 1992 first myself, then Cameron and other friends, we’re shooting the events of our daily lives, the riding, the skating, the parties, the hanging out almost like the youth today with their phones. And this was the prime Gen-X 80’s when we were feral children, we’d be up early and out of the house all day deep into the night with little parental oversight. And there was a camera on my shoulder for much of it.

We would take the developed rolls and go through the 3” x 5” images to pick out the best, put them in photo albums, not care about the negatives at all or the prints we didn’t like so they got shoved in a drawer in Cameron’s bedroom forgotten about. Honestly, I can’t explain how we didn’t just throw them out like we did most of the prints we didn’t use. There were several hundreds of rolls of 24 or 36 images taken over the years and thousands of images total shoved in a drawer and forgotten about as we all grew up and moved out of Racine.

About 10 years ago Cameron came to the house and dropped the bomb that his mom, 20 years earlier, found the negatives when she was cleaning out his childhood bedroom and saved them all. She put the sleeves into a grocery bag and then put into an orange milk crate and stored in her attic. Approximately 5,000-10,000 35mm images documenting our shenanigans from the ages of 14-22 had survived.

How we’re protecting our collections

When we bought the house my family lives in now, during the showing, we found a room in the basement that is cinder block on two sides, shelves on the others, is window-less and has a drain in the middle of the floor. We jokingly called it “the murder room” because it was pretty creepy, but as I moved all our genealogy collections in I realized this was the perfect place to store them.

It’s smaller than the rest of the basement, so easier to climate control, it has many shelves and plenty that are over 3’ off the floor, and it’s clear that basement has never leaked. The drain leads to the city storm sewer so even if the basement flooded the drain would keep this area dry and we’d have our collections up off the floor.

We’ve installed portable heating and cooling units in the room (now called the “genealogy room”…much better than it’s old name!) as well as humidifier and de-humidifiers. With that, we can keep the space at 55 degrees (+/- 5 degrees) and 35% humidity (+/- 5%) which is close to optimal for medium term storage of our documents, historical photographs, and our photographic negatives.

Long term it’s important that all family historians look to move their collections to more professional organizations for proper safe keeping (link), but it’s increasingly difficult to find archives that are willing to take in new collections due to the costs. It’s expensive to properly archive them, and then store them, so we’re putting in the time, effort and cost of using professional archiving supplies to store our collections.

How we’re protecting the Lost Northside Negatives collection

Beyond keeping them in a temperature and humidity-controlled space, we’re purchasing professional archiving supplies from Hollinger Metal Edge (link). A polyester sleeve holds each negative strip with each of the sleeves for a particular roll collected inside of an acid-free paper envelope. The envelopes then stored in a buffered acid-free metal edge box.

When we scan in each roll (more to come on that!) we clean each negative with a lint-free cloth and proper cleaning solution, then place them in the sleeves/folders/boxes. The supplies work out to be about $3/roll, and I expect we’ll spend another $2,000 to $3,000 on archiving supplies to finish the collection. But, it’s worth it because not only are we ensuring the negatives are as protected as possible, by using top-quality supplies and industry best-proactive for archiving it’s more likely that if we ever want to donate these to a museum or archive they will accept them because there is less work for them to do to bring them into their collections.

What’s next

The negatives that somehow survived history are now well kept with full protection. I am taking longer than I would like to scan and present them because I have too many projects to manage, archival supplies are expensive, and the work itself is time-consuming. I’ve digitized about 1000 images so far (The Lost Northside Negatives) and each roll takes about 4 hours to fully process, so that effort took about three and a half work weeks. Now that we’ve got a new batch of supplies in I’m able to process a new set of negatives, but in the meantime they are protected and kept safe!

The Leonard line, as it runs through Michael, has ancestors who fought in every conflict since Europeans arrived on this continent. From King Philip’s war through World War 2, his ancestors have served, but thankfully none in his direct line have lost their lives in combat. Today, for Memorial Day, we remember one of his extended family members who gave the ultimate sacrifice: Eugene H Place.

Eugene, who was Michael’s 4x Great Uncle, lost his life in the Civil War. He was the grandson of one of the first Americans to settle in the Wisconsin territory (Finding the Yeomans), and came from a family that was staunchly committed to Abolition. In-fact, the farmers of Eastern Racine County were notoriously anti-slavery. Eugene’s parents, Thomas and Susan Place, owned a large farm in Mount Pleasant, WI in the neighborhood of the unknown safe house that Joshua Glover was smuggled to after he was freed from the Milwaukee jail. His older brother Luther enlisted as a regular in the Union army when he was 19 years old. Eugene, at 16, was the oldest son left to help on the farm. Many of the boys Luther’s age enlisted the day the war broke out, and Eugene’s younger sister would marry one of those men when he returned from service.

“100 Days Men”

Thomas and Susan had 4 sons. Luther was born in 1844, Eugene in 1846, Thomas Jr. in 1847, and Theron in 1853. Thomas was lost as an infant. By the Spring of 1864, when Eugene turned 18 years old, the Union campaign in Georgia was gaining momentum. The Governor of Ohio proposed a surge of lightly trained soldiers to replace seasoned troops who were doing rear-guard duty. The concept of a short-term enlistment for these rear guard troops was immediately adopted by President Lincoln. The 80,000 soldiers who joined were known as “100 Days Men” and Eugene enlisted 3 months after this 18th birthday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Days_Men). The Place family’s two oldest sons were now serving in the Union Army.

The impact of the 100 Days Men like Eugene was just what the Union had hoped for. By the time they mustered out in September of 1864 Atlanta had fallen. Sherman was resting and preparing for his glorious March to the Sea while the regulars re-positioned to their original posts.

The Wisconsin 39th Regimen mustered into service on 3 Jul 1864, and he was assigned to Company D. The 3 Wisconsin 100 Days regimens were sent to Memphis after a week of training. They performed guard and picket duty while the veteran troops they replaced shifted to the battle for Atlanta.

On 21 Aug 1864 the Wisconsin 39th was the only of the 100 Days forces from Wisconsin to see combat. Confederate Calvary under Nathan Bedford Forrest attempted a raid in Memphis to capture Union commanders, but they were ultimately rebuffed. During the time of the raid, Eugene was likely already in hospital in Memphis suffering through his last days of the disease that would take his life. He died on 23 Aug 1864 at the age of 18. His body was returned to Racine where it was buried in a family plot in Mound Cemetery.

Mound Cemetery

Thomas Place arrived in Wisconsin Territory at age 16, before the Native Americans had been pushed off this land. The first winter Thomas worked for the French fur trader in the area. He became acquainted enough with the local Potowatomi band that he was invited in the winter of 1835 to a mound-building performed for the death of a tribal leader. Those ceremonies were held in an area of Racine that was dotted with burial mounds. Now almost 30 years later, that land had become the cemetery Thomas buried his middle son.

The impact of the 100 Days Men like Eugene was just what the Union had hoped for. By the time they mustered out in September of 1864 Atlanta had fallen. Sherman was resting and preparing for his glorious March to the Sea while the regulars re-positioned to their original posts. 3 men of the 39th died in combat, while nearly 10 times that many would fall to disease. In November President Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address memorializing the men like Eugene who died for this country. By April 1865 the war ended.

Eternal Sacrifice, and Gratitude

Michael’s maternal line was just starting to taste their first freedom in this country. That was in no small part due to the sacrifices of men like Eugene H. Place. The Place family’s commitment to the ideals that people like Michael should be treated like human beings gave his later ancestors some of the rights the Place’s themselves held dear. The could now own property, vote, and to serve this country.

Without the sacrifices of men like Eugene, generations of people like Michael with African ancestry would likely still be enslaved in the brutal system the Southern States fought so traitorously to preserve. On this Memorial Day, it’s with profound thanks for the wonderful life we all enjoy today that we thank Private Place, and the countless others like him, for their service, their commitment, and their sacrifice.

The political upheaval the United States has experienced over the last decade can seem so extreme it’s historically unprecedented. At times it has felt that the country was facing a challenge to its democratic traditions unlike anything we’ve ever faced. However, our family history reminded us that the country has faced this political tyranny before, when one man wielded control over the White House and both houses of Congress due to Republicans not having the will to stand up to an American despot. It also reminded us that we can celebrate that ancestor who dethroned that tyrant with a courage and sacrifice that seemed completely absent from today’s Republican Party.

Michael’s 2xGreat Grandfather Elmer Addison Morse was born and raised in the farming community of Franksville, WI but he was elected to Congress in 1906 as a Representative from Antigo, WI. E.A. (as he was known) was aligned with the Progressive wing of the Republican Party and was one of the founding members of the National Progressive Republican League along with Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette in 1911.

The Progressive bloc of the Republican party came from the Panic of 1893 (Panic of 1893) which was so devistating to the economy many started to re-evaluate their political positions. The Republican party had become very business aligned, matching the historic position of the Democrats, but more and more citizens in the electorate saw the monopoly’s, the trusts, the Guilded Age businessmen as the main problem in the United States. At the same time there was a clear undercurrent of dissatisfaction in the greed of the market praying on people as they increasingly left the farm for urban jobs, and a feeling that the Federal government should protect people from predatory business as well as use it’s power to improve the quality of life amongst the public1. The Progressive wing of the Republican party was born of this movement, as politicians across the country started openly agitating for this new political perspective.

“I believe the Republican party is progressive to the core, and I want it thoroughly understood that I am not a stand-patter in any sense of the word.

The Republican party was born to make men free from slavery, and I believe that there is vitality enough in it still to free this generation from the aggressions of Trusts and oppression of Monoploy, and to protect the remainder of our natural resources from being plundered by the favored few, to the entitlement of the many.”

E.A. Morse, 1910

By 1900 the Progressives were gaining steam, with the ascension of Vice President Teddy Roosevelt to be the 26th President, Bob La Follette being elected Governor of Wisconsin, and a significant bloc in the Republican-majority Congress. Upon his election to President in 1904 Roosevelt leaned in to his Progressive nature and pushed reforms such as eliminating the rampant corruption in politics at all levels, seizing land valuable in natural resources from private companies to ensure those now Public resources would be used for the public good, initiating actions to break up the large company “trusts” that monopolized large sectors of the US economy, creating Federal agencies to regulate the safety of Food, Medicine, and Meat for the first time.

During first Roosevelt’s Presidency, and then Morse’s time in Congress, the main block to many Progressive reforms was the Republican Speaker of the House Joseph Gurney Cannon. “Uncle Joe” Cannon was a conservative Republican and led the “Old Guard/Stand Pat” wing of the Republican Party. He served as Speaker of the House starting in 1903 and quickly amassed an unprecedented amount of power. He was not only Speaker, but he was also the chair of the House Rules Committee which determined how bills could be debated, amended, and voted upon. Bills couldn’t reach the floor unless Cannon approved of them, and he alone could determine what form they would take if they reached the floor for a vote. Additionally, he solely appointed all committee members, of both parties, which ensured that the blossoming group of Progressive Republicans were kept off of important committees and could leverage very little influence.

His power was such that even the Presidency was diminished under Cannon! While Cannon was a key foe to Teddy Roosevelt, the election of William Howard Taft in 1908 led to Uncle Joe taking complete control of the Republican Party and thus dictating the actions of the Senate as well as the President. One man now controlled two of the three branches of government.

In the 1908 Presidential election, the majority of Republicans (and all of the Progressives) ran on a platform of lowering tariffs. Protectionist tariffs had been passed years earlier, but since they were designed more to protect business interests than consumer interests, prices on key consumer items had skyrocketed. Cannon understood his power, and sensing that Taft was not as formidable as Roosevelt, he decided to break Taft of any Progressive leanings while crippling the Progressives. Against the wishes of almost the entire party, Cannon ensured that the 1909 Payne-Aldrich Tariff was signed into law.

The tariff bill was a thinly veiled punishment to those that challenged Cannon, and a threat to those that supported him, in a bid to ensure they continued that support.

Instead of the promised reduction of tariffs, Payne-Aldrich raised them on many of the 2000+ items listed. The few reductions were largely given out as political favors. The Republicans ultimately felt that failing to pass any tariff bill would be seen as a fiasco for the party, and they chose party above the relief they promised their constituents. Cannon recognized that and used it to bend the party to his will, and even many of the reformers (likely even our E.A.) fell in line and supported the bill.

Taft spun the bill that had been forced upon him by Cannon as “the best tariff bill that the Republican Party ever passed.” Taft also admitted that he put the interests of the party over the interests of the country: “I believe...the interests of the party required me to sacrifice the accomplishment of certain things in the revision of the tariff which I had hoped for, in order to maintain party solidarity.” Cannon had become the single man in charge of the American political system, and he effectively controlled both the Executive and Congressional branches of government. From this time on he was widely referred to as “The Tyrant from Illinois”.

E.A. Morse ran openly against “Cannonism” and was a part of a minority group of Republicans that bucked the party and stood up for what they felt was right. They wished to protect and expand the democratic institutions of this country and they did so at the risk of their political careers.

The Progressives had plotted their attack on Cannon for several years, and openly voiced their intention to break his power. But it took a long time before they finally found their opening and executed their courage move to stand up to Cannon. When they did move, they politically neutered him in spectacular fashion.

On March 17, 1910, the House was in session but lightly attended. There was a quorum, but many regular Republicans were celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and had either left for the week, or a long weekend. Many had celebrated well into the night and were in no shape to return to the Capital even if they could be found. It was during an otherwise routine management of House business that the full group of Progressive insurgents struck out at Cannon.

George Norris, a Republican from Nebraska, had been laying it the weeds waiting for this moment. For two years he’d carried the text of a resolution in his pocket to amend the House rules to remove Cannon from the chair of the Rules committee and to strip him of his ability to appoint committee members and leaders. There had been a seemingly innocent debate the day before on if bills could be introduced directly to the House floor if they dealt with a Constitutional question. Cannon and Stand Patters ruled that it was permissible, even if the bill was not pre-printed and that the House as a whole would have to vote directly on those bills. Cannon couldn’t control those bills from being debated and voted upon.

St. Patrick’s Day morning, Norris, sensing his opening, copied the text of his resolution on the back of an envelope and rose to introduce a “resolution privileged by the Constitution.” Cannon, not knowing the danger of what was unfolding, allowed Norris to proceed. Very quickly it became apparent that Cannon had accidentally allowed a direct challenge to his power and he didn’t have the votes to stop it. One of Cannon’s allies made a Point of Order that Norris’ resolution wasn’t privileged, and that set off 26 hours of political gamesmanship. Ultimately Cannon couldn’t muster the votes and allowed the Point of Order to be voted on by the House. 42 Progressive Republicans joined 149 Democrats to ensure that Norris’ motion passed, largely because there weren’t enough regular Republicans available to beat back the challenge.

This move broke the greatest concentration of power in American political history. Cannon’s hubris and display of punitive power in the tariff bill hadn’t broken the Progressives, it laid the groundwork for them to rise up and seize control back from Cannon.

These Progressives voted for Country over party, and saved this country from tyranny but at the cost of their political careers. In the 1910 election Democrats took over the House, while many of the Progressives survived re-election. However, the 1912 election was a disaster for the Republicans and the death of the Progressives in the party.

The Progressives planned to seize control over the Republican Party during the 1912 Presidential election, but they didn’t anticipate Teddy Roosevelt’s return to American politics and his usurping of the Progressive Party. The Republican Progressives were planning on their electoral reforms helping Democratic Progressives joining them to defeat the Democratic candidate, however Roosevelt had no support amongst Democrats, so when La Follette finished 2nd in the Progressive nomination even Roosevelt admitted the Democrats would win the 1912. Additionally, a dethroned Cannon had enough power to ensure that each of the Progressives that voted to remove him faced well-funded challengers in their House elections, as well as newly drawn districts that disadvantaged them. He also pulled strings to make sure that promised Federal projects like new Post Offices which were key to legislators in Progressive districts were delayed until after the election.

In E.A. Morse’s case, in addition to facing a Democratic “wave” election in 1912, the Old Guard Republican governor of Wisconsin helped ensure that this district was merged with another and that he faced a challenge from a popular Republican Secretary of State. In the end, Morse was handily defeated and returned to private life, in no small part due to his challenge to Uncle Joe Cannon.

Morse left public life after his loss, and had a long career as the principle of the Morse-Tradewell company in Antigo which specialized in insurance, banking, and logging. Their logging operation was so great that at one point they were the largest private holder of land in Northern Wisconsin and had a private railroad, including a steam engine, that would haul their timber for sale to the shipping depot in Lena, Wisconsin.

We don’t want to ascribe only the noblest of intentions to our ancestors, and there are troubling aspects of E.A.’s life and politics. In-fact, by 1932 Morse rant again for Congress in support of Herbert Hoover despite his overseeing our decent into the Great Depression, and explicitly denied any Progressive alignment. But that’s true for all politicians and in his case he was a part of a small group of Republicans that stood up for what was right and for what was best for the democratic institutions of this country over his political career, and he’s a heroic legend in our family. Each House Progressive paid for their courage by losing their seats soon after their insurgency.

We saw during the 2nd Impeachment of a Republican President 110 years after Morse and the Progressives stood up for what was right that the Republican Party couldn’t muster 3 people courageous enough to put an insurrectionist tyrant in check. The risk of losing their seats continues to allow a single man to dictate policies that the large majority of Americans are deeply disturbed about.

Just know we’ve seen this before, where one man stood above the Constitution and the country, and that it took just a handful of people to let their courage and sense of duty to what was right and best for the country be greater than their own needs. We can be proud our relative stood on the right side of history and ignored the political cost.

The lack of quality of Public Ancestry.com family tree s is legendary, to the point many family historians consider them nearly useless. They tend to be so poorly sourced that we’ll bet you’ve checked out and found an ancestor’s name and a detailed birth and death date, but the only source is an Ancestry Member Tree, and when you click that tree, it’s another tree-only, and so on. The worst part of these poorly sourced trees is they often become considered "legitimate" sources because they are repeated so often!

So, we decided we’d be a part of the solution and walk through how we wish all Member Trees were sourced. We’re going to first talk about how sources, facts and citations all work together, how we choose to link them and then what it looks like on Ancestry.com.

Before we get started, please understand this one approach, and it’s our approach. We would never be calling out how someone else is approaching tree sourcing as “wrong”, and this approach isn’t necessarily “right”. It’s right for our research, and if every Member Tree we came across was sourced like this we’d be very happy.

Defining the elements of a good citation, fact, source and proof

Let’s start by defining what’s meant when we’re talking about facts, sources, citations, and the notion of proof.

Citations

Understanding citations, and beginning to enforce the standards you settle on, is one of the turning points as family historians evolve into serious hobbyists. We are HUGE fans of Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained (Link) but at it’s most simple a citation must be a breadcrumb that researchers after you can follow to confirm your work. A well written citation should allow anyone to copy the path to review information themselves.

Sources

Sources are straight-forward as well, for the purposes of this discussion. They are the pieces of information that indicate a fact about one your ancestors. Family bibles, Ancestry.com indexes, headstones, interviews with family members, etc. are all examples of sources that yield clues about your relatives.

Facts

Facts and proof are a little trickier. They tend to both confuse, and be ignored, those newer to genealogy. At their most basic, facts are events that have been proven.

Facts at first seem obvious. If my birthdate is May 4th, that seems like a fact. But facts and proof are intertwined. How do you know my birth date is May 4th? Honestly, other than me telling you it’s my birthday, you don’t.

Even in this simple example, that it’s not your duty as the reader to prove my birthday, it’s my duty to prove that date because I’ve made statement that it’s a correct birthday. For me to do that I can attest I’ve celebrated that day my whole life, my Mom told me it was the day, and there are some family members who were there when I was brought home from the hospital. Additionally I have many Aunts and Uncles who remember my mother being pregnant during the time that corresponds with my birth, and I have photographs of her pregnant that were date stamped during that same time, as well as letters and photos (also stamped) after my birth. I also of course have my birth certificate, which was completed and certified near the time of my birth by the attending physician.

But facts get much fuzzier as we look backwards. For our African American ancestors who died in the late 1800’s, we might have only 2 Census ages to show when they were born. Going back further, we might be relying on various Family History collections that are quoting dates that are 8 levels removed from the original source documents, and those documents are long since lost to history. Of course no one is around to provide a statement that they were present at the time of birth, and rarely do we have historical accounts of our ancestors.

Proof

This leads us to consider how we “prove” “facts” for an ancestor who’s long since gone. In many ways there will never be definitive proof for many of the events in our ancestor’s lives. We’ll hear in court dramas that crimes need to be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt”, but for our hobby the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS Defined) was designed to help guide us on this question. In the strictest definition of proof, the GPS describes 5 elements needed to argue that a fact is a fact. But we aren’t professional genealogists and the need to formally prove every fact isn’t required, however understanding the GPS will still helps guide us on how close we are to a proven fact, and when we have more work to do. For example, if we’ve just taken a few US Census entries and settled on an ancestor’s birthdate as “proven”, it’s likely we haven’t done a “reasonably exhaustive search”, and so we haven’t hit the first element of the formally proving a fact. That might be just fine for some facts, but just the beginning for others, and as hobbyists doing an Ancestry Member Tree that we aren’t required to be hyper-vigilant proving everything. However keeping the Genealogical Proof Standard in-mind should help you understand where on that spectrum you are.

What to do with Facts?

With the definitions out of the way, and with our basic knowledge of how to create Ancestry trees and ancestors in those trees, let’s get started by highlighting the best practices for sourcing our facts.

Each fact should have at least one source attached

The first key to a solid Ancestry tree is attaching a source for every fact attached to each ancestor. If there’s a fact asserted about an ancestor, but there’s no citation pointing to a source that lead us to attach the fact, no one can prove if it’s accurate or not and we increase the risk of passing bad information along. If we all followed this one rule then all Member Trees would have sourced and cited events and we’d all be able to get much further in our research.

Attach all sources to the preferred fact, or list a fact for each source?

How we decide to attach sources to facts plays a big role in our tree building, and there are two schools of thought on how to attach facts to sources online. The most common method is to attach all facts of the same type (say Birth) to the primary fact, even though Sources may not match that fact exactly. For example, our 3xGGF Wesley has facts that say his Birth was: 16 Dec 1837, Abt. 1836, Abt. 1837, Dec 1837, and Abt. 1838. Most people would be to set his primary date of birth as 16 Dec 1837, and attach all sources to that primary.

The other approach, and the one we use, is to attach each fact to each source as they are sourced. In this example we have chosen 16 Dec 1837 as Wesley’s Preferred birth date and we’ve attached the two sources that indicate that date: his obituary and his family bible. The 1850 US Census has Wesley’s birthday listed as “Abt. 1836”, and so we have an Alternate Fact for his Birth of “Abt. 1836”, with the 1850 Census attached as a source. The same for the 1860 Census and “Abt. 1837”. Repeating the process for each source until we have all known Birth dates (5 in Wesley’s case) listed, and each has the proper source attached.

A lot of people avoid this approach because your ancestors will often end up with many events like dates of birth, where there can be only one, and because all the records can clutter an ancestor’s record. Alternatively, if all the records are tied to a single, preferred fact it becomes difficult researching which sources attached to a fact actually assert that fact.

As an example, as we did our research for this article we found our ancestor Ephraim Treadwell, and when we clicked through to review the sources attached to other’s Member Trees to confirm his place of death, we found each tree had a single Death date, with all sources of his death attached to that one date. A deeper dig showed this is how every of his Member Trees was sourced, and looking at his death fact, it indicates at first glance that every source supports that date of death and that his place of death is Fairfield, CT. However, none of the sources support his death location, and only some support his death day. To determine which sources support which facts, we had to review each source individually, and build a list on paper what each listed as a fact. It would have been MUCH easier if they had chosen to link each source to the fact as it was sourced, but by choosing to link all sources to the preferred death fact, we have to dig through each source to determine what those sources actually support.

In the end, we’re big advocates for showing what the sources support, with facts listed as they are asserted, as the best way to get a true picture of the facts that make up your ancestor’s record. Even when those facts aren’t precise or even correct.

Connect all facts, even when they don’t appear correct

We’ve found that only through the complete presentation of all records can you review and identify what facts are likely correct. Because of that, we prefer to present all our facts as they are sourced, and later interpret what’s likely accurate/inaccurate. If you’re editing out “mistakes” as you’re attaching sources, it’s very easy to make the facts fit your current understanding of your ancestor. It will also leave you blind later when you find a record that might support that “mistake” and you’re missing a new path to truth. This is within reason of course, and if you’re sure the ancestor died in 1767 but a records hint says there is a 1810 US Census entry for him, you can pass on that.

Sticking with our Tradewell family examples, Wesley’s father James Bennet Tradewell has records indicating a range of birth dates from 1790-1799. Originally we didn’t have a single solid record that indicated an accurate birth date, but most of what we had clustered around 1796-97. Seeing the range helped when we found a Family Bible entry for James that indicated 11 Aug 1796. Even though the bible entry was completed at some point after 1855 (meaning it was entered long after his birth and should be treated as suspect) we were comfortable accepting it because it fits the previously known range…which we can easily see in his “Timeline” view.

In the end neither choice is officially right or wrong, but we wanted to put this approach out there for your consideration. It can be counter-intuitive attaching facts that we are pretty sure are incorrect, but for us to better understand what’s correct we need to see the full picture so we can best interpret them to find the truth.

Building a good Ancestry.com family tree

The key to creating a good Public tree is this: make sure you have a source for every fact you attach to an ancestor, remembering that Members Trees are NOT sources. Let’s walk through how we can quickly get started with a new tree.

Start with what you know

We should start trees with what we know. If it’s a personal tree, adding parent’s information and what you’ve heard about grandparents is the perfect start. It’s ok at this point for there to be no sources attached to the facts, you’re just trying to get the outlines of your tree fleshed out with the data you know. Just because mom says grandma’s middle name was Marie, that’s fine to enter for now. If we’re building from a record that lists a new ancestor, it’s the same concept, in that we’ll use the information from the record as-is to start.

Let’s use our ancestor Hezekiah Treadwell (1707-1761) as an example for this process. This ancestor is in a “Working/Uncertified” tree of ours, meaning we haven’t proven the facts and there could be guesses in this tree. We first found Hezekiah as we were building out John Treadwell’s tree, with him listed as a child of John and Abigail (Minor) Treadwell in the Ancestry.com record “History and Genealogy of the Families of Old Fairfield, Vol. II Part II”. This is a good example of building a “skeleton” tree that we might build out quickly to get to a particular, known relative or when we’re building out new family connections as far as we can. They are skeleton because we won’t attach every source and do deep research right away, but we’ll go back later to flesh out these ancestors.

Review your “shaky leaf” hints one-by-one, with an eye towards accuracy

These hints are often only 10% of the records held by Ancestry, but if we’re just getting started on a tree it’s the perfect place to attach the most likely facts for an ancestor. But, just because something is listed as a “fact” on Ancestry, it doesn’t mean it’s either a fact or accurate. Take a few moments to understand the source, give it a quick “smell test” and decide what/how you’re going to use the source.

For example, there is a hint for Hezekiah that references “Connecticut, U.S., Church Record Abstracts, 1630-1920” and it lists his father as “Jno Treadwell” and his residence on 9 Nov 1707 as Bridgeport, Connecticut. The record passes the first smell test: we think Hezekiah’s father was John, the location is about what we’d expect, and the date listed is within both of their lifetimes. However, when we clicked first on the hint, and then image of the original, we saw the record was actually for Hezekiah’s baptism. The church these records are taken from was in Bridgeport, but we can’t assume they were living in that town, and besides the baptism information is valuable and we would have missed it if we hadn’t reviewed the record completely. Don’t just assume what Ancestry is showing is correct.

The same goes for Find a Grave. Hezekiah’s hints list a Find a Grave entry, which was exciting, but when we reviewed it there is nothing that attaches to an actual grave. It literally shows the Burial as “Burial Details Unknown”, and the Memorial is just a paragraph from the history book we’ve already cited. There’s no unique information in this “record”, and so we ignored it.

Filter out records that don’t provide value

Continuing with Hezekiah, the final two hints we’re provided reference the “Geneanet Community Trees Index” and the “American Genealogical-Biographical Index”. As a rule we try and avoid Index records where possible because they are derivatives of some other work, just one more generation removed from the original. In this case we have a couple of additional issues with these sources, First, there is no way to go back to the source for these indexes because they don’t specifically cite their sources. Second, the Geneanet Index is just a summary of the old public user trees from that old site and we’re trying to get away from unsourced public trees! Finally, the facts they list are also duplicated by other sources we’ve already attached so there’s no value to attaching these indexes.

Attaching Public Member Trees

Wait, weren’t we avoiding these trees?? Yes, but while we can’t depend on them for any facts we do want to link with other users who have our same ancestors in their trees, in case they do later attach a record of value and we want Ancestry to notify us.

When we review these Public trees, the first scan should be for any facts they have listed that we don’t and we can see that by the blue checks next to a fact. For Hezekiah, we see differences in his Birth, Marriage and Death records. Birth is easy to ignore because we know from previously attaching that date the record says he was born either in the towns of Fairfield or Stratford, so we used the county they are both in as his location and made a note of the two towns. The Public tree difference is the location of his birth is listed as Stratford, so that makes sense and we’re not accepting that fact, so we’ll leave the box unchecked. Similarly, the Death value is listing the date of the first court testimony regarding his will, and the court record doesn’t list a date of death. Given that it’s highly unlikely anyone would rush to court to swear in a Will on the same day someone died, we won’t be attaching that date to his death.

But the Marriage value is for an entirely new event, 28 years after his known marriage to Mehitable, and we’ll need to review the trees to understand their sources. Cancel the “New Information” screen, open Member Trees again in Hints, and select the ancestor’s record from the Ancestry Member Tree. That showed us the member’s tree, and when we scrolled down to the new Marriage record, we see it has no Sources attached. We’re not going to attach unsourced facts, so we know we can ignore this event.

Go back to the Add New Information to Your Tree screen, and make sure no facts are attached on the left side. Now, when we click “Save to Tree” this Public tree will attach to Hezekiah, but it won’t attach as a Source for anything and we won’t propagating unsourced facts from other members’ trees!

Attach the facts to the sources

Finally we need to ensure all of our new Sources are attached to Facts, and we have to be careful here because we’ve accepted some hints for Hezekiah with the Source attached to him, but the Source won’t automatically be attached to any Fact. Additionally, Facts often won’t all be linked to the source, like when we accepted the “History of…the Families of Old Fairfield” record above it not only didn’t link to any Face, it didn’t create the listed death year at all. Make sure each of the facts listed in the record exist in the ancestor’s timeline, and attach the Source to each Fact right away. Skipping this step is how we end up with unsourced trees!

You’ve got a strong Ancestry.com family tree...what’s next?

When we’re done we have created a new Family Tree for Hezekiah and Mehitable Treadwell, and their children, that is fully sourced and supported by those sources. This entire process took us less than 10 minutes to complete showing it doesn’t take much time to create an accurate record, even when you have 15 hints. Anyone reviewing your tree, including yourself when you come back later, will be able to easily identify all of the facts relating to this ancestor as well as all the records that support those facts.

If this is a direct ancestor you can do more work to build out their information. Start by running a search in Ancestry, and since you have a solid base of facts the search results will much more focused and likely to be an accurate match. Just attach new sources and facts as detailed above, and your tree will continue to be well sourced.

Our example, Hezekiah, is not likely a direct ancestor of ours but we are building his tree out as we hope to catch more DNA matches. Since we don’t need a full picture, and since we have solid Birth/Marriage/Death info and a complete accounting of his children we will leave his record as-is, and we’ll repeat the process for each of their children, then grandchildren, and great grandchildren, etc. (Matching unmatched DNA Hints by Casting a Wide Net)

In this week’s “In Remembrance” we’re featuring Leila Maude Smith (1909-1918) who died on this date in 1918.

Leila was the youngest daughter of William Arthur Smith (1880-1954) and Alice Maude (Crippen) Smith (1884-1958) (a descendent of Israel Standish), born on 18 Jun 1909 when the family was living near Otisville, Michigan just outside Flint. She was the youngest of two daughters and William Arthur and Alice Maude (they variously went by either their first or middle names) were farmers.

The family had survived the Spanish Flu epidemic intact, but Leila died on 22 Apr 1919 of inflammation of the medulla oblongata at the age of 8. The death certificate said the cause of the inflammation was unknown, and today what’s called brainstem encephalitis is known to often be caused by Listeria infections. Tragedy struck the family almost exactly a year older when her older sister Cleah passed away at the age of 14.

The Smith’s adopted a child the wake of Leah and Leila’s deaths (Bill) thinking they could no longer conceive children of their own, but 6 years later Maude gave birth to their third child Elizabeth when she was 41 years old. The Smiths would later adopt another girl, Ruth.

We’ve inherited a lot of family treasures since we became known as the group preserving the publishing our family history, but only one is on our desk at all times: A very old, unattractive portrait of Samuel FB Morse. The first great historian in our family was Myra (Tradewell) Morse (1870-1962), and she and her cousins spend decades building out a family tree we still use as a base today. She established our family line to her GGF Charles Edwards (1768-1811), who served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War so she could establish her Daughters of the American Revolution membership in 1904. She also established a link for her husband Elmer A Morse (1870-1945) (link) to his 2xGGF Samuel FB Morse, and this little portrait of the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and Morse code was venerated and displayed in the Elmer and Myra’s house proudly.

The only issue was, neither of those facts were true. A Charles Edwards might have been a soldier (still open for debate), but the link to that Charles was specious and called out by the organization in later years. Myra was a State DAR leader and lost her membership in the organization because they had re-evaluated her research and found it lacking what’s required as proof. Her daughter saved the day by identifying a new ancestor with qualifying service, getting her membership under that soldier, then Myra re-applied under the same ancestor and regained her membership. Also, there was no direct relation from Elmer to Samuel FB Morse (they are 4^th Cousins, Twice Removed). His 2xGGF was Samuel Morse, but they were born 50 years apart, in different States, never lived in the same State and our Morse died while telegraph Morse was still in his teens.

This is the kind of thing that pollutes the Ancestry.com algorithm and becomes cannon, and we almost plowed through doubt even as we thought we were being skeptical and reserved.

We keep Samuel FB’s portrait on our desk to remind us of how we can manifest results we want by bending facts in ways we aren’t even aware of. Myra did great work, there’s no way she just made this all up on purpose. And we were reminded of that this weekend when we followed that same path despite all of our efforts to avoid this.

It started Friday night, on Instagram, when one of my favorite creators Jen, The Formidable Genealogist (Link), posted an announcement that Ireland would drop (what we read as) the fully searchable 1826 Ireland Census at midnight. This was a massive breakthrough for us, and despite cooking dinner (with a glass of wine) we tried the site a few times to see if it dropped early. It did come online Friday night and we did some searching on the couch watching TV that evening.

The reason this was so exciting for us that the oldest Leonard ancestor, Michael (1799-1861), arrived in the US around 1830 with 2 young children and no record of a wife. John (1828-1891) and Ann (1829-1906) always listed their birth location as Tipperary, Ireland but we’ve never been able to establish they actually arrived or how the family looked at the time. Ann’s obituary said her “parents” arrived in the US when she was “just a child”, and settling in Quebec, Canada before moving to Lockport, New York. We know Michael remarried around 1841 in Lockport, and had 4 children with his new wife, and in the 1850 US Census Michael had moved to Wisconsin with John and Ann, his new wife, and the 4 children. The questions are numerous: Did he arrive with his first wife? If so, did she die before having any additional children? Were there additional children that we have no record of that didn’t make the move to Wisconsin? It all makes so little sense that we, along with a great researcher on Ann’s line, have never been able to gleen any fact about this family pre-1841, and we’ve hired professional genealogists in Canada to help attempt to establish Michael’s arrival details (he likely arrived in Quebec, not the US and moved).

With that backdrop, it was exciting to have a census just 2-4 years before Michael’s emigration, and we woke up Saturday morning and immediately searched and we found 162 Michael Leonard’s captured in the census! Narrowing to just Tipperary, and found 7 Michael’s, but only 2 were close enough in age to possibly be ours. The 17 year old was still living with his parents, and his record wasn’t of any value. But another was 32, and it stopped us in our tracks.

He’s obviously 5 years older than our Michael, but given the uncertainties of the time that is not entirely unreasonable. He lived with his father-in-law and his aunt, as well as his wife Mary but it was the children that made us gasp. Michael and Mary had John (age 6), Mary (age 4), and Annie (age 2). These ages don’t match entirely, but they are in the range and reviewing all of the Michael’s within the age range throughout all of Ireland, we didn’t find another John and Ann siblings. This felt huge, not proof per se but a huge lead that could mean we were going to break down a brick wall. If we squinted hard enough we could chalk all the dates up to the fog of history, this matched the family pattern we we’re desperately searching for, and with no other matching pattern from that critical year we were pretty certain this was our family!

It wasn’t until we started typing up this finding to share with our newly hired genealogists that reality smacked us in the face: this wasn’t the EIGHTEEN twenty-six Irish census, it was the NINETEEN twenty-six census. A full 100 years later than we’d read it, well after Michael, his children, and many of his grandchildren had passed away. This census had zero value to our research.

Once we misread the original IG post, the various 1926 designations escaped us. When we found a record that MIGHT work, we mentally twisted it until we were pretty sure it did work. Had that been an 1826 census we would have started treating that as a valid record despite knowing better. Sure, it could be a thread to pull, and we would have shared with our researchers, but it proved nothing and shouldn’t go any further until we knew it did. This is the kind of thing that pollutes the Ancestry.com algorithm and becomes cannon, and we almost plowed through doubt even as we thought we were being skeptical and reserved.

And it happened as we were staring at Samuel FB Morse trying not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors.

This week’s In Remembrance highlights one of Antigo’s forgotten matriarch’s, Elizabeth J (Frost) Boerner, who died on this date in 1943.

Elizabeth was born 4 Aug 1861 in Shiocton, Wisconsin to Asahel Frost (1828-1897) and Rosetta (Newell) Frost (1829-1892) at a time when Shiocton was a booming logging town. Asahel was a farmer and later a carpenter and Elizabeth was the middle of 9 children. Both the Frost and Newell families trace their arrival in North America to the early 1600’s and they largely followed the pattern of several generations residing in Massachusetts and/or Connecticut, then migrating to New York after the Revolutionary War for 1-2 generations, then on to Wisconsin.

She married John J Kupps in Shiocton on 16 Mar 1876 when she was 16 years old, and he was 27. Unlike Elizabeth’s family line, John was born in Bohemia and he and his parents arrived in the US only about 20 years before his marriage. He worked as a laborer in the lumber industry, which was winding down in Shiocton, and they moved to Bryant (in NE Langlade County) in 1885. Bryant, and which was the next logging hot spot in Central Wisconsin.

John and Elizabeth had two children, Emma Marrion (Kupps) Leonard (1879-1953) and Kathryn (Kupps) Driscoll (1882-) before moving to Langlade County. John was hired by T.D. Kellogg in Antigo in 1891 and the family moved into town soon after.

Elizabeth was widowed in 1899 when John passed away at the dinner table after, as the local paper put it: “a severe fit of coughing. Arising from a table he passed through the kitchen and reached the outer door when his strength apparently failed. He stopped to rest on the steps and leaning his head back on his wife’s lap, he quietly and silently passed away.” Family lore, shared by Emma’s granddaughter Peggy, has it that John had stopped off at the tavern unexpectedly for a few and when he returned home well after dinner Elizabeth refused to make him a plate, so his mother (who was visiting) agreed and Elizabeth went upstairs angry. John subsequently choked on dinner because he was so drunk, and suffocated. His official cause of death was heard disease, so we can take the story for what it’s worth!

Elizabeth raised her daughters alone until Emma married Dan Leonard in 1902 (In remembrance: Dan Leonard), and Kathryn married Jess Hawkings in 1904. She lived with Dan and Emma until remarrying Louis Boerner (1850-1935) around 1906. Louis was also a widower, and a Naturalized citizen originally from Germany, who brought two children into the marriage: Erma and Edward (adopted from the State Home when young). The Boerner family was well known in Antigo, and Louis’ father owned the main daily newspaper. He was a furrier and well regarded as his was about the only fur store in town at a time when fur was very common.

Her stepson Edward was killed in action in WWI, and she lost Louis in 1935. Her Grandson Floyd Leonard (1906-1941) was killed in Egypt one week after WWII was declared. Elizabeth died after a long battle of what was then called “Bright’s Disease”. We now know it as Chronic Nephritis, and is usually a byproduct of high blood pressure and heart disease, which are mentioned on her Death Certificate.

With the arrival of the 250^th Anniversary of the founding of the United States there’s renewed interest in all our patriot ancestors, and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) have been helping us establish the genealogical lines to those patriots for well over 100 years. The most common route to establishing a patriot ancestor is establishing them as soldiers in the Revolutionary War, and we have 20 or so DAR ancestors who followed that pattern. But we want to examine one ancestor who highlights a lesser-known path to being recognized as a patriot by the DAR: Patriotic Service.

Patriotic service covers those nascent Americans who didn’t pick up arms to fight the British, but still provided material support for the revolution. This could include providing funds or supplies to the Continental Army, or signing an oath of allegiance or a petition to support the cause.

In 1777 the US Revolution wasn’t going particularly well for the States. The siege of Boston had been broken in 1776, but the ousted British troops had sailed to New York and established control over the city, soon driving General Washington’s army off of Long Island and then out of New York completely. The British had captured a large number of prisoners of war from various battles and established their largest prisons in the New York city area. The largest, and most notorious was the Sugar House on Manhattan but the prison ships anchored off Long Island held just about as many POW’s. Conditions in these prisons can only be called horrific. There were no sewage systems, the food was rotten and there was very little of it (for example a standard ration at the Sugar House was 1 pound of rotten meat and 4 pieces of moldy bread every 4 days), there was no furniture to sit or lie on, on land prisoners would sometimes receive 30 min. of fresh air a week but often times they would just be granted turns standing and breathing out the windows for 10 minutes. On the ships, due to the waste-based diseases, it was almost impossible to come out of the holds for air…and if a prisoner could make it up the ladder the deck was usually so slick with excrement it wasn’t possible to stand (The Prisoners of New York). Mortality rates for captured Revolutionary soldiers was 75%, and the descriptions of their conditions can only be matched by the description of the conditions on the ships that traversed enslaved humans across the Atlantic for centuries.

It’s under this cloud of mistreatment that 32 men from Connecticut signed a petition to the newly formed General Assembly of Connecticut on 5 May 1777, pleading for the body to interve on the behalf of citizens of that State who were being held in New York. The petitioners are clear they are in favor of the revolution, and call those who risked their life for the cause as “noble”, but they are clearly pained by the conditions of imprisonment calling it: inhumane, barbarous and deplorable. However, they are also honest that they have no idea how to accomplish any solution since they know we can’t effectively pressure the British. They do however voice the opinion that if the Assembly can figure out how to accomplish this, the “Army [will] soon be supplied with a number of men sufficient to repel our enemies”.

Text of the petition for prisoners, 1777
To the Honourable the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut to be convened at Hartford within and for said State on the Second Thursday of May 1777.
Whereas. Since the commencement of the present unnatural War, it has so happened that great number of our Friends who have nobly ventured their Life for the Defense of our Injured Country have unfortunately fell into our Enemies hands and by them are held captive and prisoners of War and treated in the most inhumane and barbarous manner many having been stripped of their clothing, exposed to the weather and denied a sufficient supply of food for the support of life and under which suffering many of our Respectable and Worth friends have lost their life: and others who still survive are yet in the same deplorable circumstances in New York and on Long Island. Suffering under the insults of the enemy and destitute of necessities and clothing or money to purchase that necessities of life; all which are so publicly known that they are undeniable facts.
Whereupon we the subscribers inhabitants in the State aforesaid pray this Honorable Assembly to commiserate and take into consideration the disgusting condition of our Friends in captivity as aforesaid who are belonging to this State and in your wisdom devise some method for the support and relief when we know not how it can be effected without some exertion of the public and which if done by your Honour and publicly known among the people. We humbly conceive would be a very great inducement to other voluntarily to insist and engage in the cause of our country and our Army soon be supplied with a number of men sufficient to repel our enemies, or in some other way grant relief.
As your Honours in your wisdom shall judge most reasonable and just and you memorialize as in duty bound shall memorialize as in duty bound shall coc. (?) Pray. Dated in Connecticut this 5th day of May 1777 (Link)

Michael’s 7xGGF Israel Standish (1721-1802) was living in Preston, Connecticut when he was one of the 32 signatories to this petition. He was the great grandchild of Mayflower passenger Myles Standish, so he likely had at least some notoriety (not as much was we’d think today, but that’s for another day!), and he was an established farmer in his mid-50’s. His children lived in Preston as well, and he had at least 10 grandchildren under 5 years of age at the time living near him. Even a simple petition asking for something to be done to save the son’s of Connecticut from the horrors of British prisons was a deeply treasonous act. He had publicly attached himself to the cause of revolution, and he would have likely lost all that mattered to him, if not his life, had the rebellion failed.

And at the time, the Americans (outside of Boston) hadn’t shown much capability of defeating the British. His farm was just to the East of New York (and just across the sound from Long Island, which was easily crossed) and it was firmly under the control of the enemy. He was influential and known enough to be included in joining the petition, and doing so left him no chance for him to deny where his loyalties lied, so this was a significant act of defiance even though on the face it seems like a simple enjoinder. We can guess there would have been an effect on his neighbors. Those loyal to the cause of freedom stood up and be known as such, and there was a group on one the other side equally loyal to England, however those in the middle would have likely felt swayed by their neighbors risking everything to publicly support a United States free of the crown.

So in someways these acts of Patriotic Service had impacts as strong as those who served militarily, which is why the DAR recognizes the “simple” act of signing a petition as worthy of veneration for having served the cause of liberty.

For today’s “In Remembrance” we celebrate the marriage on 5 Apr 1866 of Wesley and Isabella (Odom) Gordon, Michael’s 4x GGP on his mother’s side of the family. “West” (as Wesley was known) was likely born in Virginia around 1838, but his birth location is listed as Mississippi and Tennessee in various records throughout his life. Isabella was born around 1850, also likely in Virginia, although she’s listed as being born in Mississippi in some records.

West and Isabella were married in DeSoto County Mississippi just under a year after they took their freedom once the Civil War ended, however they likely were betrothed prior to that as their oldest child Cora was born also enslaved about 1864. By 1870 West and Isabella are farming a sharecrop just North of Nesbit, MS in the extreme Northwest part of Mississippi. In-fact their farm was likely less than 10 miles from both Arkansas and Tennessee (Memphis was only 8 miles away). All records for the couple indicate they lived in this area, if not the same rented farm, for their entire lives. West had passed away by the time of the 1910 US Census and Isabella is listed as still living on a rented farm with many of the same neighbors.

They had 11 children (we know of), 5 boys and 6 girls. Many of them stayed in the NW Mississippi/Memphis area, but many of their grandchildren moved North in the Great Migration, including Cora’s son Ira White who moved to Hartford, Connecticut.

West passed away between 1900 and 1910, and Isabella survived until 1923. She passed away in DeSoto County, MS

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A few years ago it was time to tackle the brick wall of who were the parents of Andrew and Hannah (Yeomans) Place. The Place family history after they arrived in Wisconsin is well known to us. They were some of the first 50 or so Americans to arrive in the Wisconsin Territory during the summer of 1835, and their arrival and early experiences were documented years later by Charles Dyer in a 1871 speech to the for the Old Settlers Society of Racine County (Link). However, despite their Great-Granddaughter Myra (Tradewell) Morse (1870-1960) being the first great historian of our family, she never documented her Great-grandparents.

Starting with Andrew Place’s parents

Andrew Thomas Place (1793-1837) was known to have traveled with his wife and 6 children by Ox cart from Greene County, NY, however not much before that has been documented. Searching for Place families and birth/marriage/death records for him produced no results.

The Hudson River valley in New York between the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the Civil War is a well known dead zone for genealogical records (Suffering the Black Hole of Hudson River Valley Genealogy). For whatever reason(s) collection of church records are spotty at best, governmental records weren’t kept until later, and the Morman Church’s microfilm projects capturing this area’s civil records has large holes. Combine that with this area being very transitory over a few generations, with families moving in from Massachusetts and Connecticut soon after the Revolution, and their children/grandchildren moving West as they reached adulthood. Our ancestors didn’t leave as much of a paper trail in this region, and few of those papers have been digitized and indexed compared to other parts of the country.

Using Greene County as a jumping off point we built a table of each of the Place family entries in the 1790 US Census for there and the surrounding counties. Repeating the same process for the 1800-1830 census’ built a decent map of the original Place settlers and their children who stayed in the area.

The first item that popped out was an entry in the 1820 Census, in Greenville, Greene County, NY for Andrew T Place. The known birthdates of Hannah and their children matched the 1820 entry for Andrew, which was a strong lead that he was from the Greenville area. Assuming he might have bought his farm near his parents, we found a Thomas Place in Greenville, and these were the only 2 Places listed in Greene County. Searching the 1810 Census there was no entry for any Place family, but going manually through the entries for Greenville we found Thomas Place indexed under the wrong last name.

Now that we had a good lead that Andrew’s father was Thomas and they resided in Greenville, NY we searched Ancestry for records that match him. There were several hits for various parts of Thomas’ Will/Probate in 1848, but nothing that spelled out his children other than his son and executor, Jeramiah Place. Using those records, we went to FamilySearch and browsed the Probate records for Greene Co. We found his Will, but his wife and 2 surviving children were the only ones listed. It’s not surprising, but frustrating nonetheless!

Given that Thomas is a much more common name than Jeremiah, we tried a newspaper search on his name, narrowing down to 1848, and we hit paydirt! As a part of Thomas’ Probate process Jeremiah published a Notice of Hearing for the commissioner, calling out the heirs of Thomas specifically which included: “children of Andrew Place, a deceased son, all of Racine, Wisconsin Territory”. It also listed the other siblings of Andrew, which we’d established previously. With that we’d firmly proven that Thomas and Phoebe Place from Greenville, NY were Andrew’s parents.

It was on next to establish Hannah (Yeomans) Place’s parents, and while it took just a few weeks for Andrew, it would take over 2 years to break through and find hers.

Finding Hannah’s parents

Since we now knew that Andrew as raised and likely married in Greenville, NY, we started searching for Hannah’s parents in Greene County. There were 3 Yeomans registered in the 1810 US Census for Greene Co., and all 3 had a daughter Hannah’s age listed in the census. Next, as we did with Andrew, we built out tables for the 1790-1820 Census for every Yeoman in the counties bordering Greene, and tried to establish patterns of which children might be associated with which parents, and from that built 9 working trees to flesh out the people and families we were discovering.

Right away we hit that Hudson Valley wall and kept running into dead ends as we searched Ancestry and accepted as many shaky leaf hints as we could. We started searching for any Greene Co. Yeomans in member trees, and in a Public tree we found Elisha B Yeoman (1814-1850). The person didn’t have any facts attached in the tree but when we searched we found an index page for Greene County Probate Records from 1850, and we could see his probate was recorded on page 55. We switched over to FamilySearch, which had the Probate books microfilmed, and guessed which book to check based on his death year.

In Book H of the Greene County “Record of Wills” we found Elisha’s will recorded and it listed his location as Greenville, which puts him in the same town/time as Andrew Place…and likely Hannah. Unusually, his heirs weren’t just his wife and children. Elisha also listed 4 siblings as back-ups in-case his children didn’t survive to adulthood to collect their share: Leonard, William I, George C, and Catherine. We added the siblings to our tree and searched for birth/marriage/death records for each helped flesh out the tree, and it gave us more data points to track as we compared various Yeomans in the area to the families in the 1790-1820 US Census.

Still focusing on the 1810 US Census (knowing it should list Hannah in her father’s home for the last time), and breaking out all of Yeoman/Youman/Yumans in Greene and surrounding counties, 3 families came into focus: James and Jeremiah Yumans in Coeymans, Albany County and William Yeoman in Greenville. William would seem the most likely patriarch, being in Greene County, however the Coeymans and Greenville townships (Greenville is in New Baltimore) abut each other separated by the country border. The areas both families lived in were likely less than 10 miles from each other, which makes it reasonable Hannah could have been a part of any of them.

During this time we also found a cluster of Yeomans that could have been the father and siblings of Hannah, except they were in Delaware County, NY (about 55 miles west of Greenville/Coeymans). William Yeomans (1773-1857) census info matched what we knew for the most part, but it wasn’t a complete match. We found Delaware County William’s Probate and it listed 7 of his children. Those children didn’t overlap Hannah’s known siblings, but we couldn’t rule him out because at this time we only knew of a cluster of 5 siblings in Greene County that didn’t even include Hannah. FindaGrave had a record in Delaware for “William” that seemed to match William I, but that was the only record to go on.

All attempts to research the James and Jeremiah families in Albany County were a dead end. The few Albany County land and probate records are almost entirely unindexed, and most of them are missing from any online microfilm collections.

From Dead Ends to Breadcrumbs

Since we had run into dead-ends in Albany, Greene and Delaware counties we expanded our search for any Yeomans to surrounding counties, which is where we hit our next big breakthrough. We found the will of an unmarried woman, Emaline Yeomans (1806-1849), who died in Union Vale, Dutchess County, NY which is 75 miles from Greenville and across the Hudson River. She died with no heirs, but a substantial estate. Since she had no heirs-in-law she left her estate to her 8 siblings, including the 5 Yeoman siblings in Elisha B’s will, also Hannah (positively identified as “Hannah Place, wife of the late Andrew Place of Wisconsin”) and 2 new sisters: Lucinda and Annis.

Emaline’s will is probably our favorite probate document we’ve found! You can only glean hints at personality and family dynamics from dry vital records documents, but her will speaks volumes. First, she had 3 nieces name Emaline, and she bequeathed each $50 to be paid on their 21^st birthday. To her 4 brothers (Leonard, Elisha, George and Williams) and her sister (Catherine, also listed in Elisha B’s will) she bequeathed to each of them one of her rocking chairs (their choice) worth between $12 and $15 each. The remainder of her estate was to be split between the 3 other sisters (Hannah, Lucinda and Annis), who each received about $250. There clearly was a schism between the two groups of siblings, as Elisha would pass away only a year later and leave nothing to the sisters who received the bulk of Emaline’s estate while rewarding all those who received rocking chairs. She also must have been beloved, with 3 of her sisters naming children after her…at least amongst one faction.

Armed with the entire, confirmed list of Yeoman siblings, we were able to confirm that both the Coeymans and Greenville patriarch’s 1810 Census entries still matched the ages of these 9 children. However, we were then able to eliminate the Delaware William as a potential father.

The trail went completely cold after this. Searching for the Probate records of each sibling lead to no new leads on their parentage. Even more frustratingly, even with a known death date for William I we could not find his probate/will.

This stalemate lasted for almost a year, and while we found more information to flesh out the spouses and children of the 8 of the 9 siblings (William I was still a mystery), there was nothing on the 3 possible patriarchs of these families.

Breakthrough!

Our focus had turned entirely to researching William I Yeoman, as he was the one sibling we had no records for. While searching for anything William Yeomans related in Ancestry one Saturday we found an image attached as a profile picture in a Public Tree that came from one of the vanity books published around the first Centennial that listed important people in a county. These books were largely self-sourced, where the subjects would pay a fee to be listed, so they often are nearly first-person family/history descriptions even if it overestimates the subject’s “importance”. Reviewing the image for William listed his wife as Mary and a son Henry J who lived in Dutchess County.

Searching Ancestry trees for Henry J Yeomans of Dutchess County, NY broke the brick wall down completely. Again, someone had attached an image to their Public tree as a profile pic for Henry J. It was an entry in another vanity book where Henry J was the subject, and it was a gold mine. It was much longer than most such entries, and it described details about his father Henry Ira who was born in Greene County and was a lifelong resident of Greenville. Just like that we’d gathered William Ira’s birth date, place, and marriage details!

But even more amazingly the write-up (which usually wouldn’t include parents information) went further and detailed William Ira’s parents! William Yeomans (1782-) and Lucinda (Blackmer) Yeomans (1762-1819) were William I’s parents, and through the transitive properties Emaline’s, and thus Hannah’s, parents was well!

Just like that, the wall was gone. We knew the identity of Hannah’s parents! 2+ years of research had paid off and we’d moved her tree back one generation.

There is that 3 minutes of bliss when you realize all those years of research just paid off, out of the blue, and you just made a link that no one has ever made before, even your ancestor genealogists who were researching 100+ years ago. But very quickly the bliss fades and you ask the inevitable question: “I wonder who THEIR parents were?”

We can report we have no idea who their parents were…yet. It’s the same issue as when we started: there are very few records from that area, fewer are indexed, and other researchers haven’t made the links we’d build off of yet. We searched on the text of Henry J’s write up, so we could properly identify and cite it, make sure we had all of the facts of what was a working tree cited and proper, and then attached it to our main tree so that anyone else who’s been struggling with this line can now build off our research.

Quite some time ago I was a guest on the podcast for Ancestor’s Alive’s (AncestorsAlive!) “From Paper to People” podcast, discussing the connection we can establish with our family tree by cooking our ancestor’s recipes (Episode 26: Emily’s Casserole). It was a pleasure to discuss culinary genealogy, and if you’re not listening to Carolynn’s show you should be (subscribe in all the usual places) as she’s one of the few genealogy podcasts that’s really caught our attention.

She came to our attention with a previous episode on a family recipe that helped tell a story from her family’s history (Episode 23: Johnny Mazetti, or is it Marzetti?), at the end of which she put out a call for others who had similar stories. While ours doesn’t trace actual family history, and in fact technically doesn’t come from our direct family per se, it really does tell a story, so we reached out and Carolynn invited us on.

The episode discusses a casserole that was made by family “friend” Emeline “Emily” Ott (1908-1992). Emily was “adopted” by Michael’s 2x great grandparents E.A. and Myra (Tradewell) Morse in Antigo, as told by family lore. Apparently E.A. owned rental properties and happened to see the conditions she was being raised in and brought her home to live with his family. She’s listed as as servant in the 1930 US Census and she would continue that role when E.A. and Myra’s only child Catherine (1911-1991) married, took over the Morse home, and have 5 sons. Emily was a key presence in Catherine’s home, essentially serving as a nanny for the 5 boys. She lived with Catherine long after the children moved out, and we all grew up with Emily as a constant in Catherine’s home. Each of the boys were deeply attached to her and we all visited her in assisted living apartment after Catherine sold the home and moved to her lake cottage in the 1980’s.

Emily’s Casserole

3 lbs. thin sliced potatoes

1 bad of carrots, sliced

1 medium-large sliced onion

1 ½ lbs. ground beef, browned*

1 can Cream of Celery soup

1 can of milk

Directions:

Butter dutch oven, and layer in potatoes, carrots, onions and ground beef. Mix soup with milk, and pour over top. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for an hour and a half.

Emily’s casserole was a staple for Michael’s dad growing up. It was a favorite of his father’s and mom got the recipe from Emily knowing it was always enjoyed, and easy to make. It became a part of his comfort food repertoire, just like it had been for his father, and it’s now a part of his children’s. (Editor’s Note: In the interest of transparency, the subject of this blog is not a big fan of this casserole and it’s not as regular in our family dinner rotation as it once was…but it we keep trying!)

That a dish named for Emily was one of the comfort foods for Michael’s grandfather and great uncles when they were children tells us a lot about our family history. Emily was like a sister to Grandma Leonard, but never too much like a sister. She was always an employee from her first day in the household, first for the Morse family, and then for their daughter who was very close in-age. It was an interesting dynamic that wasn’t fully apparent to the grandchildren of Catherine, but it runs deeply through the fabric of today. She had a deep, emotional impact on us, but she wasn’t family…but she was, even if she was an employee.

We’ll feature Emily in more detail in a future post, but today take a listen to Carolynn’s amazing podcast, where she helps pull the details of this story out…and shows how sometimes a casserole isn’t just a casserole!

We’re willing to bet every family historian and genealogist has stories of areas where there isn’t the level of documents you’d find in other areas. Sometimes it’s a County where there was a devastating fire at the courthouse that destroyed every Vital Record and Probate/Property record before a certain date. Or it’s societal like if you’re searching for African American Vital Records in the South before 1905 or so, there was a concerted effort post-Reconstruction to focus on white records only. Other times it can be the “Manifest Destiny” states had European settlers long before any Federal/State government was established, and then when the States were formed formal Vital Record collection often lagged.

For our family there is no area in the United States that’s a more pernicious, more complete, black hole than the Upper Hudson River valley of New York from 1780-1840. When you’re looking for records in Greene, Ulster, Dutchess, Columbia, Albany, Rensselaer, Schoharie and Delaware County, every one found can feel like a miracle.

as Grandpa Ken Mandy the Charter Captain would always say, “That’s why they call it fishing not catching”. We guess this is fun because it’s not easy!

Contributing factors

There’s not a lot of empirical research on what causes this gap. It’s known to other researchers, but there’s no consensus on why. In our experience, there seems to be several unique factors that created this void of information:

Late collection of Vital Records on the County/State level

While the area was partially settled by Europeans going back to the 1600’s, when the Dutch left and Americans started their migration around the Revolutionary War. Migration picked up with the Mohawk Wars pushing Native residents off their land in the late 1700’s, but you see counties like Greene not collecting birth and death information until it becomes a statewide requirement in 1880. That’s true for most of these counties, and they didn’t capture all “required” records until 20-30 years after that. By then they had over 100 years of settlement with no centralized record collection. By comparison, our home county of Racine in Wisconsin was first settled in 1835 and Marriage records were collected by 1837, Deaths by 1853, and Births by 1876.

The area was often a migration waypoint

A pattern we see repeatedly is a family born in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Downstate New York migrate to the region around 1780-1800, establish a farm and then several of their children (or Grandchildren) migrate further West to Ohio, Michigan, or Wisconsin and establish their family histories in the new location. Almost invariably their records like oral histories, family bibles, etc. omit details of their Eastern families and the few church records, etc. will maybe list a birth/baptism record in an area in New York, but nothing further because marriages and deaths occur in other states.

Churches were numerous, and consolidation of records seems rare

New York in the late 18^th and early 19^th Century was a hotbed for the Second Great Awakening in American religion (Link), and while it doesn’t seem that “new” churches/denominations were as prevalent in this area as Western New York, it does appear that every village had it’s own congregation of each of the more established faiths (Dutch Reformed, Congregationalist, Methodist, etc.) but as these communities grew and contracted, the local church seems more likely to end than to merge with a neighboring congregation. This leaves a lot of records that were lost to history, or which were locally held and not collected in larger Church records. The Family Search library is full of these small congregational records, often collected by amateur family historians and published locally…which limits their availability.

The interest in genealogy by the public at-large started a Generation after the children/Grandchildren of the original European settlers in this area had moved on

Many of the self-published Family Histories that become more common in the mid-1870’s (tying in with the US Centennial) and remained a Genealogy staple into the 1940’s. These were compiled long after many of the children/grandchildren of the late 1700’s settlers had moved out of the area. The popularization of Genealogy as a hobby really kicked off with the ubiquitous “vanity” publications that became a staple starting around 1876. You start to see books like “History of Greene County, New York : with biographical sketches of prominent men” (published in 1884) which were collections of publicly available Vital/Historical records, knitted together as a narrative (often by local historians hired by the publisher), and included biographies of any “notable” family that paid the requisite fee to have their family history published (that they themselves drafted and submitted to the publisher). Because the biographies were self-submitted, they are often a wonderful almost first-hand listing of parents, marriages, and children but only for the families of means that stayed in that area. Similar books were published in the locations these New York children/grandchildren migrated to, but they rarely list more than the county of their birth (at best) and we’ve never found one that listed details on their parents of siblings back home.

Another way this manifested is that during this rise in interest of family histories, there’s numerous examples of individuals who dedicated years to collecting various local records into what now might be the only surviving data on birth/marriage/deaths. Lists like the Barbour Collection and James Arnold’s 21 volume “Vital records of Rhode Island 1636-1850” largely don’t exist for this region. Part of that is because there are no central collections to reference, part of that is because by 1880 most County local historians don’t have the experience or people to provide pre-1840 information about the area. Additionally Vital Records were just starting to be gathered by governments.

An example

Many of our most stubborn brick walls are related to families that migrated to Wisconsin from this area of New York, and we have little to no information on them before the migration. Our Tradewell, Yeoman, Place, and Blackmar lines all dead-end in the Mohawk Valley and have resisted our best efforts.

Our most recent example is the Blackmar line, which we discovered after we were able to prove our Yeoman line back one generation after 2 years of research (story coming soon!)

Once we broke through the Yeoman brick wall and first identified William and Lucinda (Blackmar) Yeoman from Greene County, New York as our 6^th GGP we celebrated for about 3 minutes before we wondered “who are their parents?”.

Given the pain we had on the Yeoman line, we knew breaking down William’s parents was going to be a major challenge, but we decided that “Blackmar” was unique enough of a last name to take a quick look and see if we could identify her lineage. But, we’re searching in the Hudson River Valley Black Hole so of course we found literally nothing.

The only Blackmar from New York in right timeframe was Cain Blackmar who is in the 1790 US Census living in Dutchess County. We found Cain in the 1800 US Census, as well as the Federal tax records for 1801 and 1802 and that’s it. There is no records of his family, his wife, or his children in New York. It’s a hot lead that Lucinda likely is Cain’s daughter, but it can be nothing but a guess.

Searching Ancestry for Cain Blackmar immediately brought up one of the self-published family histories that, as we mentioned above, were pretty common in New England. We eventually found two, both published in the early 1930’s, whose authors both traveled the region and found 1000’s of local records from Massachusetts and Rhode Island then published detailed (but unsourced) family trees. Just like that we were able to back from Cain to his ancestors going back to arrivals in 1630. We can go back 6 generations from Cain in Rhode Island, but we have essentially nothing on Cain or his children in New York.

We had a complete line back to Hannah Yeoman (1796-1865) as soon we started charting our family tree. But getting from Hannah to her mom took 10 years, including 2 years of intensive research given the limited resources from the Hudson River Valley. After another 6 months of research we have only a guess on her father. There are zero records relating to that father’s wife (FamilySearch’s global, single Family Tree has his spouse listed as “Mrs. Cain Blackmar”), but since he’s from Rhode Island we can effortlessly trace him back to his English ancestors in the 1590’s.

This leaves us with a new brick wall merely because this family was in the Hudson River Valley in the early 1800’s. Just one generation in upstate New York and this branch became impenetrable. But, as Grandpa Mandy the Charter Captain would always say, “That’s why they call it fishing not catching”. We guess this is fun because it’s not easy!

[One quick note: As always, we receive no financial benefit or consideration for any product or service we review/recommend/discuss here. Everything we discuss is our opinion alone, and we talk about it because we use it.]

Ancestry has recently made a major update to their Ethnicity estimates, and combing how their notion of “ethnicity” changes with the cultural wariness of the “accuracy” of consumer DNA tests makes one thing clear: as a community of serious researchers, we need to be the voice of reason when it comes ethnicity/genetic admixture and call it out for dubiously valuable, largely inaccurate parlor trick that it is.

Here’s why we say that:

Ethnicity cannot be tested for. Ever.

Ethnicity is a social construct. Period. If we look at any test, any genealogical tree or other determination it will not build a social link to ones ancestral background. Using his father as an example, despite being able to trace 12.5% of my 3xGGP to Ireland, and despite Ancestry’s admixture pointing to an Irish background, I am not Irish. I visited Ireland as an American...a very obvious American. As will Michael when he visits. Nor will he be mistaken for Beninian when we visit Benin. We are Americans, all with European ancestors, some with African ancestors as well, but even with a perfect admixture that could pinpoint our ethnic ancestors exactly...we’re still not German, or Cameroonian, or English/Irish, etc. You can’t scientifically test for it, and DNA gives you no indication of how someone identifies ethnically. And that’s important, because Ethnicity is only about how someone identifies themselves and/or how others identify them...it’s not based on a gene. Neither is race, but that’s another rant for another day.

We need to voice a supportable, honest, accurate narrative of what commercial DNA is, and what’s valuable in it, to drive continued testing. A narrative that will continue after the “ethnicity” emperor is shown to have no clothes.

It’s not honest

All DNA testing companies, especially 23andMe and Ancestry, are for-profit enterprises that have a strong incentive to grow their number of DNA tests. The larger the test database, the more money the companies charge to sell access to your data. This isn’t to say they are selling personally identifiable data, the data is largely de-identified and aggregated, but it’s YOUR data...and it’s very, very valuable. 23andMe survives almost entirely on the revenue generated from your data, and it’s likely Ancestry is generating a large amount of their revenue from your DNA data as well. And no one’s advertising “come test with us, we are selling to great causes like Michael J. Fox Foundation” [23andMe], they are basing their sales pitch on the shiny bauble that gets the tests in the door: Ethnicity and pretty graphs. The more we play into the ethnicity pitch, the less credibility we’ll have when the public learns ethnicity is a sham.

It’s not a genealogical tool

Ethnicity (as determined by genetic admixture), has almost no genealogical or family history value, and the results will never break a brick wall or significantly add to your family’s stories. First, all of the major providers target who your genetic ancestors were 800-1000 years ago. Even those of us with great trees rarely go back to 1000-1200 AD...and we doubt there would be much value in anyone researching our 28th great grandparents. We have over 1 million 18th GGP’s. Admixture doesn’t rank even among the top 20 tools we use to build our trees, and it doesn’t deliver us any value.

It’s not accurate, and it’s not scientific

The biggest red flag from Ancestry’s last update was this: in 2018 they increased the reference samples from 3,000 tests to 16,000. Today they are using just over 56,000 samples. They have literally spent the last decade selling “ethnicity” to the general public as a great reason to build Ancestry’s test database, even though the entire house of cards was built on as little as 3,000 reference samples. Even at 56,000 total samples, some of their localities have just a handful: Ireland has 794, Korea is 280, and Nigeria is 569. There is little statistically valid data that be gleaned from a handful of total samples as they relate to our genetic ancestors 1000 years ago. Again, we each had MILLIONS of ancestors 30 generations ago...and to use this few samples to map “all” genetic admixtures just demonstrates the shoddy science that underpins this process. Even as Ancestry has grown to 56,000 samples, it’s a ridiculously small sample...assuming those samples were each perfectly tied to a region/culture 1000 years ago. “Ethnicity” is just enough science to seem valid enough to be scientific...and just scientific enough to justify the pretty graphs that facilitate the selling of more tests.

It’s hurting genealogy, and it will ultimately turn the public off of genetic DNA testing

YouTube is rife with videos of the general public discussing their “inaccurate” DNA tests, with the testee going into great detail about how they know their Ethnicity and when they see something they don’t expect the test must be wrong. There are now new discussions everywhere with people questioning the entire testing process when the “results” can be changed so dramatically by a change by Ancestry. Ancestry is aware of the strain this update is having on the general public, and we can see the efforts they’re making to try and calm people as they go through the update. There are explanations, surveys, etc. to try and make sure the public doesn’t freak out about these changes. It’s all just adding more weight to the idea that these tests aren’t accurate/reliable. Since the entire business case for the public taking these tests has been “ethnicity”, once that’s being exposed as the subjective “art” that it is, the reason people are testing will be questioned. We will hit a tipping point where our relatives are going to think of DNA testing as a “scam” that’s of no value/dangerous, and it’s going to make the process of getting tests that much harder.

So, what can we do? What impact can we have? Honestly, not much...at least not immediately. But, as the people serious about genealogy we can start being the voice of reason and begin to lay out a better justification for why the public should test, even if the focus of the commercial testing companies is only on adding more samples to their databases. If the thought-leaders and respected voices in the communities turn their back on genetic admixture, that will eventually drive the discussion.

To that end, here’s our suggestions:

• Stop discussing “ethnicity” as a testable value - Push back on this basic premise and start to educate the public on why DNA tests have no value as it relates to how they identify ethnically.

• Don’t give genetic admixture a place at the table - We should no more engage in admixture as a point of genealogical value as we phrenology. They both sound scientific, and their proponents would like them to be seen as science, but neither are science. Even making an anti-admixture discussion elevates it to a “con” in a pro vs. con debate. We need to stop engaging in a debate of equal positions with admixture.

• Develop other reasons the general public, and our relatives, should submit tests - The tens of millions of tests in various databases have a HUGE value to the genealogical community, and we all benefit as more tests are added. We need to voice a supportable, honest, accurate narrative to drive continued testing...one that will continue after the “Ethnicity” emperor is shown to have no clothes.

• Be honest with our relatives as they test and help them, and the general public, understand how these tests play into the for-profit world - Those who take tests aren’t purchasing a product, they are the product. 23andMe and Ancestry needs those tests to make a profit, and it’s the only reason why they offer these tests. Let’s discuss that, and what we get in return, to level set everyone’s expectations. If we don’t set these expectations, some scandal will do it for us, and when negative public opinion sets in, we likely will lose the value of having non-experts testing. All genealogy is a trade off of what you’d like to get from the research and what the people providing their services want to get from your research (see our piece Dancing with the Devil: The Tradeoffs of Modern Genealogical Research), so let’s be honest with those who trust us.

Bottom line is that we can see how the reality of DNA testing doesn’t match the perception of the testing public, and all eggs are in the “ethnicity” basket. As that basket starts to fray, we can either be a part of the rational message that keeps this testing world moving forward, or we can be reactive and wish we could go back to the “good old days” when people were testing without us having to fight for each one.

Dan (as he was known) was born in Algoma Township, Wisconsin on 12 May 1868 to John Leonard (1829-1891) and Louisa (Phalen) Leonard (1840-1925). He was the 5^th of 11 children born to John and Louisa, and he was raised on the Leonard farm just outside Oshkosh on Lake Butte des Morts. Unlike his brothers, and most of his sisters, Dan didn’t continue farming as an adult, instead focusing on physical labor.

He was still living at home when he wed Emma Marrion Kupps (1879-1953) on 29 Oct 1902, although family lore is he met Emma when she was a waitress in Antigo, Wisconsin. Emma was known as one of the first European children born in Langlade County. Dan moved to Antigo after they married, and in 1903 the first of their 8 children was born. In 1904, after 2 huge fires in Antigo within 10 days of each other, the city voted to pay their firefighters, and Dan was named the first paid Fire Chief. By 1910 he was listed as a laborer doing odd jobs, and by 1920 he was a teamster for a logging company.

Dan ran, as a Democrat, for Langlade County Sheriff in 1922 and he was elected to a 2 year term. The role of sheriff, beyond just law enforcement, also encompassed management of the County Jail which would usually have prisoners not just waiting trial, but also those serving sentences less than a year. The Sheriff, and usually his wife, would be responsible for the feeding and laundry of those prisoners and usually they would live on-site to provide needed services 24 hours a day. Their youngest child was 4 when Dan was elected, so they moved into the jail as a family. Just over a year into his term Dan became sick with what would be diagnosed as stomach cancer. He was seen in Oshkosh for treatment, and went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota as well, but with no success. He was moved from a hospital in Oshkosh to his home, but died the next day, 11 Mar 1924 at age 55.

Soon after Dan’s death, Emma was appointed Sheriff to complete Dan’s term by Governor John Blaine, making her the first woman to be a Sheriff in Wisconsin history. As she had effectively executing all of the functions of the office for the 6 months before her husband’s death Gov. Blaine felt she’d be the best candidate. Emma would go on to sell insurance for the Morse Tradewell Company in Antigo, where her 4^th child Gerald Francis Leonard (1908-1967) would meet the owner’s daughter Catherine Suzette Morse (1911-1990), and they would wed in 1937.