Thursday Night With Betsy

Image website: http://everlastingwanderer.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/obsession-werewolf-aka-mafia-game/

Do you function well after 4pm? I don’t. But not many people know that. My mom is the only other person who admits to that gift.

However…

…it was Thursday night at the Family History Center, and I was furiously finishing the bulletin board in the hallway. I only had to remove 12 staples out of whatever 17×4 adds up to. (I know. It’s not addition. But how else do you say it?) I can do math. But my brain doesn’t function after dark. It’s solar powered.

At 7pm, just as the sun was going down behind my eyes, and I was flipping the switch labeled. “From This Moment On, Watch What You Say and Do Because You Might Regret It,” Kathy walked in.

You know, I have to hand it to fate. I needed Kathy and she needed me.

I almost laughed out loud. Another notebook and pile-of-paper clutcher! But I restrained myself and led her into my office, sat her down, and asked. “Whatcha got?”

After about 10 minutes of searching through her papers to fill in the Betsy-required 4-generation pedigree chart, I started stealing her documents.

People are very possessive of their documents and paperwork, cluttered and disorganized or not. But I had a choice. Either we could both fall into the endless pit of confusion that sucks up time and creates the illusion that you’re working hard, or I could take control and make her relatively stressed out while we got her organized, thus saving us both from a lot of pain and anguish.

Yes. That’s how it feels when you are disorganized. I’ve seen it enough to recognize the signs: forehead rubbing, apologizing, downcast eyes, sometimes even a light sweat as documents and notes are shifted from one pile to the next with hopes that the elusive needle in the haystack magically appears, and a sigh of relief escapes.

I chose the latter and made generation piles where she had to choose which document belonged in which pile and put it there. Then, because I forgot to bring file folders, we paper clipped all of the scanned pictures and documents to the correct cover sheet, labeled with which generation and on whose side of the family (her mom’s or dad’s) the pile belonged.

Then we sat at the computer searching on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, for her great grandfather. I worked the mouse and she typed.

You see, she was half brain-dead, too. I laughed when I saw myself in her. She’d stop and ask, “What was I doing?” when in the middle of typing a name. She would sit back and stare blankly at the screen and say, “I’m clueless. I should be in bed!”

To ease her up a bit I told her that we sometimes do Dairy Queen runs (my friend does), but she said she got enough sweets working at her nursing home down the street and she was staying away from sweets.

When all else fails, break out the food. People get happy and relaxed.

“What do you do there?” I asked.

“I work with Alzheimer patients.”

“Is it contagious you think?” I stared her in the eyes and waited the millisecond it took to register the question. I was just having fun with her, but she doesn’t know me. It could have gone either way.

“Yes! I do!” she roared.

It was obvious that I’d found a kindred spirit when math became an issue.

(I even laughed that statement out loud to my friend who was getting free entertainment from us two computers down.)

Kathy and I both looked at each other and shook our heads in shame and amazement that we could each do the same calculations, agree that we were right, and find out we were both 20 years off!!  I was so amused. “Oh, my! It’s so nice to meet someone else who is number-challenged when night falls!”

We found Great Grand Daddy in the 1910 census right where he was supposed to be with his wife and children. He was farming land in Pennsylvania and his wife was “keeping house.” Note to self: do better with that one.

It was time to go home and I gave her some homework . She was so excited and is coming back on Tuesday night.

I left my wonderful friend to lock up and made my way to the parking lot where I learned that my son had been driving the car. No big deal except he has no permit or license, yet. He’s only 15 and often takes my keys. Note to self: keep keys on your person.

He doesn’t like math either.

From Anger to Love

(Before you read any of my posts, consider that you and I may experience death differently. I see it as a continuation of life where my loved ones grow, learn and share with me who they were in this life and what they’ve learned and are learning. I never mean any disrespect with my sense of humor about or exposure of what I consider to be the good, the bad, and the ugly experiences that every human being has had or will have while roaming this place called Earth. In fact, I know that my ancestors are tickled to be remembered, and never feel disrespected, but are very pleased to have had someone see their lives as worthwhile to those still living. Enjoy!)

I know he’s dead.

My mom remembered the other day how and where.

“My dad and he were on a fishing trip and he died. He was about 59. And as I recall (not her words exactly), fishing was like everything else…not much fun.”

Edward De Zeng Kelley was born in Connecticut in 1874 to Thomas and Estelle. By the time he was 32 he had a wife and two children, a boy and a girl. Actually, I learned from a census record that there had been three, but the first had died before my grandfather was born. How did that affect him?

I haven’t written a story of my ancestors in a while. Maybe a couple of weeks. I haven’t checked. Edward, my maternal great grandfather has been on my mind. I’ve felt a lot of judgement about him. I have been feeling melancholy since Sunday morning and have also been wrestling with thoughts about him, being patient, waiting for his story to unfold. This morning, as I searched again for a record of his death- an obituary, death certificate, newspaper article-anything to prove where and when he’d died, I felt his frustration with me.

He’s dead. That’s not his story.

He died while fishing with his son. I thought that was his story, or the story I’d tell.

“Just tell it, Betsy!”

How do you come to terms with the feelings of regret even they are someone else’s? How do you tell the truth about someone when it doesn’t sound so nice?

I honestly felt (feel) him pleading with me to lay it out there even though it sounds like a judgement. Why? Because there’s a lesson? Because he needs freedom? Or is it all about me?

Help me as I let it unfold while I telling you what I know.

Edward is a very hard nut to crack. He seems to have been an only child. The 1890 census was destroyed in a fire in 1921, so I can’t tell if there were more children born to Thomas and Estelle Kelley. Estelle died in 1899 before the 1900 census where I would have searched for the two columns, “number of children”, and “number of living children” and learned more about Edward as a teenager.

So, I’m left with a few records and one story- the recollection my mother had of him dying while on a fishing trip, something he did often (fishing not dying) with his son.

I’ve tried to focus on what type of person it takes to be a stock broker on Wall Street, and what it would mean to lose a child and all of your material wealth a few times during your lifetime, managing to rebuild it from scratch. That’s part of who he was. I don’t know what drove him. But I feel like he was very driven to succeed materially above everything else. I’m okay being wrong about that. Those are just feelings I get when I look at his picture, review his life, and sit and ponder.

But I keep going back to the fishing trip. His time was up and he didn’t know it.  His life had been lived. And the spirit of his life was passed down in that story.

Right now the feeling I get is that the truth of who he really was isn’t what really matters. What matters is what we leave-  the essence of who we have been to the people whose paths we’ve crossed while we were living. Edward may have left contradictory stories and memories with family and friends. But the one that I feel like he regrets the most is the impression he left of being stressed out, type A, difficult, and somewhat stern. Not pleasant.

Is that the truth? I think it is in part.

Does it really matter what made him that way? Sure. But understanding him doesn’t give him back moments of time where he had choices to leave a legacy of joy, contentment and happiness.

I know that Edward has moved past those regrets-the ones where the relationship with his son and wife may have been strained.

But, I’m alive right now, wondering why he won’t leave me alone.

Maybe it’s the kind of day where you trust that the stuff that you think matters and is weighing you down because it has to get done, isn’t the stuff that matters at all. Maybe it’s the kind of day where you know we’re all doing the best we can and love shines through regardless of how imperfectly we think we’re interacting with those who matter most to us.

Today might be the day to forgive those we love as well as ourselves for not measuring up to impossible expectations.

Perhaps it’s the perfect day to take the walk that my 6-yr-old Kenny asks me to take all of the time- the one “to nowhere, for no reason.” And while walking I’ll tell Edward thank you for doing the best he could and for inspiring me to look at my emotions and how they influence those I love for good and bad. Just a thought.

The sun’s out.

Thank you Edward. I got it.

What about you? Do you live in such a way that the legacy you leave is the one you deliberately choose? Will it be one of a positive influence? How do you make that shift?

I Ain’t No Mind Reader!

Thursday night was painful. At least it started out that way. You know that feeling of being brain-dead and tongue-tied while someone has just professed their undying confusion and their eyes are pleading with you to fix their problem, but all you want to say is, “You lost me at ‘Hello'”?

What do YOU do?

I smile and silently pray my guts out that we both don’t go careening over the embankment into the “She Has No Idea What She’s Doing” ditch. It works every time, as long as I keep asking questions. But not too many. That could be annoying. It’s a slippery slope.

Here’s what I learned. You are confused. Family history/genealogy can seem overwhelming, especially for us older folks who resisted technology until we couldn’t any more, and are in the process of rewiring the circuits in our brains- the ones that come with the newer models like my 10-year-old daughter who can see the same Facebook game that I see for the first time and knows immediately how to play it, whereas I feel like all of my clicking is going to make something REALLY bad happen.

Second thing I found out about myself? As good a listener and smiler as I might profess to be, I ain’t no mind reader! And I’m not on speaking terms with Alexander who “knows all”, or Zoltar , his brother, which I established in a previous post.

And neither is your computer. If you are going to enjoy genealogy and family history you have to know what you can find to help you on the Internet and what you can’t.

Not everything about a person’s life will be searchable on the WorldWideWeb (unless you blogged about it or added it to LegacyStories.org). I might be able to find out when someone came to America, but not when the tooth fairy collected her first installment of baby teeth from my 4th great grandfather. And that’s important to know!

It took about 10 minutes with each patron to get an idea of what they were seeing when they thought of genealogy so that I could give them a new picture, one that made sense and would never confuse them. Honestly, I felt like I was cutting new paths in the Amazon Rain Forest.

One had gaps in his ancestor’s lives that he wanted to fill with facts. Facts from documents. Facts from documents that may or may not be digitized or put on the Internet, yet. He had to figure out not only what his question was, like, “How can I find my great grandparents?”, or, “Did they own land in the 1800’s?”, but he also had to have a basic understanding of how to map a life and know what type of document would have the answers he was looking for.

I’ve said it before, but here goes again. Timelines. You can read and return. I’ll wait. Once he understood, his searching was a piece of cake. (Exaggeration!)

The other man was dealing with overwhelm. Well-meaning people had given him software that was taking too much of his time to figure out and was leaving him too tired to focus on what mattered to him.

While sitting and talking with him I felt a quiet desperation. When he walked in the door at the beginning of his session I heard him say, “I’m confused, overwhelmed, and disorganized.” Most of us, when faced with those feelings get in our figurative car and drive in the other direction. But he also said ,”I need help. I want to leave something for my children when I’m gone.”

THAT was the motivator. That was the goal. THAT was what I kept bringing him back to when I knew his brain was on overload. We agreed that he needed to simplify and focus on writing his ancestors’ stories sooner than later. And he had to remember to share his works-in-progress, whether it be a family tree or a story.

I showed him LegacyStories.org where he could create his own family tree website to share with family and friends NOW. He would have to learn how to upload a Gedcom file and I promised to help. I showed him my dad’s talking photo and explained how all of his could be scanned and shared, too.  He agreed and was quite relieved to recommit to his main objective of being able to leave something behind that would matter to his family.

I was so happy for him. He’d reached out for some help and had actually helped me! It’s easy for me to get overwhelmed by people’s confusion and to forget that I’m pretty simple-minded…in a good way.

I’m so thrilled that I can’t read your mind, and I’m more than happy to declutter and refocus yours if you want!

She Slipped Through My Fingers

 

“If I cannot understand my friend’s silence,

I will never get to understand his words.”

One minute I was on top of the world. I’d found her. The next I was in despair. She died too  soon.

I wonder how William took it? He was married for the first time at the age of 38, and lost his wife 10 months later to uterine cancer. Judith was only 37.

I have searched for Judith for a long time. When I finally got a hold of her, and felt like I was making progress getting to know her, she slipped through my fingers. She was my third great-grandmother on my mother’s side, and her silence is deafening.

Silence is a strange thing. Joanna, a childhood friend, never spoke. Her parents said she would talk at home, but never to anyone outside of the family. It was a personal challenge to me to see if I could get her to open up because we had become playmates and I sensed an inner joy that had gone underground for some reason. I was thrilled the day that she started giggling and then chatting away with abandon. We’d been playing and I was talking to her as if she and I were carrying on a normal conversation, and to my surprise she started holding up her end of it.

I learned something profound that day: people usually act the way that you treat them. Sometimes they’re secure enough in who they are to stay strong through whatever life hands them. But ofttimes they learn to cope. And sometimes they just get quiet and stop shining.

That’s how I feel when I think about Judith Carter.

Her conflicting records make me wonder what was going on, and how she was learning to cope. With every record I found of her I felt less and less of “her” present. That’s not something I usually feel when I’m getting to know one of my ancestors.

There is such a huge discrepancy between some of her records that I have to wonder what the real story was? When she marries Stephen Moody apparently she’s 21, born in 1823. But years later, after Stephen is gone she marries William Cassell and declares that she was born in 1829, making her 15 when she married Stephen. Huh? Could have happened.

When her son, Henry dies in 1864, she’s either 41 or 35. I don’t know. Maybe this doesn’t add up to anything more than making an under-aged bride legit. Or….maybe she’s the only one who really knew the truth. Maybe she hid her age from Stephen, too. But by the time William, her second husband comes along, she’s owning her real age. 37. Good for her!

I don’t know if her first marriage ended in divorce or abandonment. I’m pretty sure I found Stephen living and working in California. And as far as I know he’s roaming the Earth still. Maybe he and the marriage fell apart when Henry died? I can’t find a divorce record either.

I felt so rejuvenated when I found Judith’s second marriage record. I even clapped my hands and said,”Yay! She’s married! I found her!” But when I went to find her death record, one I’d been searching for with no luck because I had the wrong last name, I was quickly deflated.

Ten months. That’s all that they got. Most of it was probably full of pain. Her daughter Estella Moody, was only 18-years-old. I can’t imagine the anguish, thinking of leaving her daughter without parents, and probably with a virtual stranger as the inevitable sunk in. I have yet to find her between her mother’s death and her marriage to my 2nd great-grandfather, Thomas H. Kelley.

I’m moved by Judith. It’s so easy to let life silence you. It’s sad that we give our joy away and stop shining. I really want to shake her and make her tell me who she was and how she felt. Was she angry or afraid? Depressed? Sad and alone? Or was she just tired? Perhaps she was one of those rare few whose quiet world is full of joy and gratitude unexpressed.

She’s not talking today. But I suppose she doesn’t trust me yet. Maybe we’ll have to play a little longer!

Family History Sunday Series:1:3 Using the Census

Image link: http://www.visualphotos.com/image/1x4188646/close-up_of_russian_olive_tree_rings

If I were to make an analogy between tree rings and family history, tree rings would be generations of people. I was born in one generation, my children in the next, and their children in the next after them. This is a familial generation vs.  “Generation X”, and “Baby Boomers”, etc, which are cultural generations.

When searching for documents you’ll find government records like the census that pay attention to neither the familiar nor cultural generation. They collect data from their citizens on a regular basis. Some gather that information every 10 years, 5 years, or just once, or not at all. It varies from country to country. Google your country to find out what yours does.

This week:

Let’s assume that you’ve done all of the homework in the two previous posts in the series. You’ve got your worksheet out and you’ve filled out box#1 for you, your spouse and children. Now what?

Let’s start going back in time, one generation at a time, starting with your parents. They go in box #2/3. So will all of their children.

The first thing I do when researching a person is I draw a timeline on the front of a folder. I put dates and places that I already know on the timeline. Then I see where the gaps are. I focus on the gaps.

The next thing I do is I look for census records. Here’s a typical image of an original census document that you can find on Ancestry.com, and FamilySearch.org.

Here are some links to some great info on the census.

The 72-Year Rule”– Love this! Why did we get access to the 1940 US census THIS year? Because it was taken 72 years ago!

How the Census works

US Census Questions and Information by Year– I love looking at the different questions that were asked and how and why those questions evolved over time.

It is from the census that I find out (sometimes) if children of the parents had died, the place of birth for the person I’m researching as well as their parents. I find out occupations, whether they owned or rented a home, or if they could read and write. You’ll want to find a census that has a parent in it, but for a lot of us, that fun begins with our grandparents.

Here’s what I do on Ancestry.com:

1. I choose a name to search for.

2. I type in the information I have (name, place they might have lived, and approximate birth date) in the search window. I press search and look for “Census and Voter Lists”. From that list I choose a gap in my timeline where a census could fill in or add some information.

3. I never ever believe what I’m seeing on the record until I have other documents to corroborate it. There are so many reasons for false information being put on census records. Use the record as a tool to find the truth. For me they are a starting place, not an end point.

That’s it for today. Make sure that you fill out your worksheet and add that stuff to your online tree!