We are gearing up for registration opening on June 2, 2012 at 9:00 AM. To get you excited about all of the great offerings this year we've asked each of our coordinators to either be a guest blogger or participate in an interview on our blog. For more information on the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy please visit www.slig.ugagenealogy.org.
Without further ado I give you Dr. Jones:
Most family historians have a favorite ancestor, and I’m no
exception. Mine keep changing, though. One will grip me and not let me go until
I figure out his or her life story, write it up, and share it with others. Then
another comes along.
One of these was Ellender Crow, a Virginian who became the
second most important woman in my life (after my wife) for a couple of years.
Only Ellender’s third marriage was recorded, but she wanted me to document her
first two husbands, offspring of all three marriages, and her unrecorded parentage
and to tell her life story. This took hours and hours of in-depth research,
reading between the lines, piecing evidence together, testing hypotheses, correcting
other researchers’ errors, and making inferences about what “really happened”
in the 1700s and early 1800s. I learned that I descend from two of Ellender’s
husbands, not just the one I knew about, but also through another husband’s
prior wife.
After Ellender loosened her grip, Charles McLain grabbed me.
Charles seemed to have appeared out of nowhere to marry my great-grandmother in
Muskegon, Michigan, in 1873. She divorced him a few years later, and he
disappeared. Figuring out what happened to him was the easy part, though the
key record dates almost three decades after the divorce, and only indirect
evidence shows that another woman’s husband was “my” Charles. Records before his
first marriage appear under three names. These complications, along with
strained and unconventional relationships within his parental family, offered
intriguing challenges. Eventually I was able to assemble his life story,
including his motives.
Once I wrote about Charles McLain and his parents from birth
to death, George Edison came along. He left records under four names in five Midwestern
states between 1861 and 1940, married five times (including twice to the same
woman with no intervening divorce), committed bigamy, and was tried for
adultery and fornication—of
which a jury found him not guilty. His first three wives were ages 14, 15, and
19, but the last was 75—twenty
years his senior. As a union leader George shut down two major American cities
with electricians’ strikes. I had great fun figuring out that records under
different names with different wives in different states referred to the same
man. In the process I learned about George’s good and bad traits. George probably
didn’t want his story told, but his eldest child (of twelve) seemed to have
different ideas.
For me, family history research is at its best when I study
my subjects’ lives thoroughly enough to understand their personalities. This
was true of my experiences with Ellender Crow, Charles McLain, and George
Edison. For all three cases I used many kinds of records—online and off—and milked them for all they were worth, noting
details and reading between the lines. The effort paid off in the insights I
acquired—not just
about these subjects’ vital statistics and relatives, but their activities, the
contexts of those activities, how they responded to those contexts, and why they
responded the way they did.
Every one of these cases taught me new skills. I learned
about more kinds of records, and I learned how to get more out of record types
I had used before. Experiences like these keep my enthusiasm for genealogy at a
high level.
The course I coordinate at SLIG, Advanced Genealogical
Methods, includes the knowledge and skills I acquired and executed in my
research on Ellender, Charles, and George, and much, much more. It’s an intense
course, definitely not for beginners, not even “early intermediate”
researchers. Experienced researchers who want to acquire more advanced skills
might consider taking it in 2013 or beyond. SLIG also offers other advanced and
in-depth courses.
I’ve
just sent George Edison’s story to a journal editor. Now other ancestors—the pre-Civil War Buss
family, early New Yorker Julia Greenfield and her absent grandfather, and others—demand my research
attention. Researching their families promises steep genealogical challenges, but
I’ll enjoy surmounting the barriers and getting to know the families.
