Wondering about one's ancestry

We get a lot of requests at the museum for genealogy research. Every so often I'll end up talking with someone who's gone one step farther than just building family trees and spent money on DNA testing. One of my acquaintances, a sort of cousin, did that and ever since has bored the rest of us with her wondering out loud how she happened to end up with a high percentage of Azkhenazi Jewish genes when she thought the family tree was packed solid with Finnish Lutherans. I don't get the point of obsessing about it, unless she's planning to try to persuade the country of Israel that she's entitled to the right of return, but then I don't understand the simpler obsession with ancestry either. In any case, I figure that if I ever were foolish enough to spend money on DNA testing, this is the type of result I'd get.

Except mine would come back with a significant percentage of border collie instead of beagle.

I'm not into genealogy but

finding this yesterday was kind of cool.

I was at the county clerk's office to do research for the historical society. I've mentioned before people pay us to go check the various indexes for births, deaths, marriages, whatever. I had no luck whatsoever with the research request that sent me to the county administrative building, but when I asked the deputy clerk about divorce records, we started looking at the various indexes shelved in the room. She noticed the Declaration of Intention book and had no idea what it was. Neither did I. So we pulled it off the shelf and started flipping through it.

It didn't actually tell me anything I didn't already know, i.e., I knew the date when my grandfather arrived in Baraga County. It didn't come as a surprise to see evidence he was still here a year or two after he got off the train in Summit. At this point in time he was probably still working for his uncle, although at some point he decided to go up to the Copper Country and get a mining job instead.

One thing that did intrigue me was the existence of the form itself. Wherever the Declaration of Intention fell in the bureaucratic scheme of things, it wasn't used very long. The book they're in is the usual humongous volume that's a couple inches thick. The forms start sometime in the early 1900s (I did not look to see when the first one is dated) and go up to about 1905 and that's it. It's a huge book, but less than one-fourth of the forms got used. The deputy clerk and I were speculating (and laughing) about the verbiage on the form. It basically asks resident foreigners to declare that they're not anarchists. I have a hunch this was part of the U.S. Congress's reaction to Leon Czolgosz's assassination of William McKinley in 1901. In any case, we agreed that asking anarchists to swear that they're not would be about as useful as asking members of Al Qaeda to say they were radical terrorists if they happen to try coming into the country. If your intentions are evil, you're certainly not going to be honest about it when you're asked to complete some paperwork. It appears going through the motions, making it look like you're trying to do something even when it's obvious it won't work, has a long tradition in politics.

As for divorces, it turns out there is no index. You need to have a good idea of the date and then just start working your way through them, something I had no interest in doing yesterday. Maybe next week.

A slight digression: I'm never sure if I should be grateful or unhappy that the former historical society president set a firm precedent with the clerk's office of allowing us (the historical society/museum) serve as a proxy for people wanting genealogical information. Under Michigan law, the only index I should be allowed to search is the death index; marriage and birth are both restricted to family members. Thanks to Jim, however, we're able to continue doing the type of research he did for years. There are days (like yesterday) when it's fun to do the work, and other days when I'm totally convinced we need to make our fees much, much higher. And for sure there are days when I silently wish the County Clerk would tell me we can't do it anymore.

And another slight digression: Once again I was blown away by how perfect Martin Voetsch's handwriting was. Of all the county clerks, I think he wrote the best cursive. A couple of his successors also had great handwriting, but he's the only one who wrote in more of a copperplate style than Palmer penmanship. (This is the type of minutiae a person ends up focusing on when they're stuck doing research for money on topics that don't really interest them.)

It's not as easy as Ancestry.com makes it sound

I've mentioned before that one of the things I've gotten entangled with since beginning my volunteer association with the Baraga County Historical Museum is genealogical research. Our website indicates we have some family histories -- not many, it's true, but a few -- and we're willing to do research in local records that people living elsewhere don't have access to. Those records include the local weekly newspaper, The L'Anse Sentinel, and indexes to vital records (birth, death, marriage) that might be found at the county clerk's office. This is doing research the old-fashioned way: pulling large bound volumes off a shelf and reading line by line and page by page hoping to find something, anything, that will make the person who sent in the research request feel like they got their money's worth.

It is, to say the least, a remarkably tedious and time-consuming process. Want to find a death notice or an obit for someone who took a dirt nap in 1905? And all you know is the possible year because for some reason the death wasn't recorded at the court house? Good luck, especially when you're dealing with small town papers that have never been digitized. If the paper was a weekly, you've got a potential 52 issues to read through, page by page, because back in 1905 there was no real rhyme or reason to pagination. A 1905 L'Anse Sentinel has no specific page devoted to obituaries; there are no columns headed "Death Notices" or "Funeral Announcements." If someone relatively important died, maybe it would make the front page -- but it can be anywhere on that page. Someone who was not particularly well-known in the community, on the other hand, might not merit an actual obit or news report at all. The only mention in the paper might be one line in the column of "Baraga happenings" or "Skanee news" where tucked in among gems like "Mr. and Mrs. Walter Smith visited relatives in Ishpeming last week" and "Miss Carol Jones was feted on the occasion of her 16th birthday" will be a line saying "Mrs. Carl Erickson of Milwaukee was in town to attend her brother Isaac LeDuc's funeral."

Of course, if we're lucky and the death was recorded at the county clerk's office, no problem. We have a specific date to work with -- all we have to do is find the issue of the Sentinel that came out right after the person died. That's assuming the death was recorded, of course, or that the person was nice enough to keel over in Baraga County. Lots and lots of people died in Marquette or Houghton counties, not Baraga, because Baraga didn't have a real hospital. Want us to find a death record for someone who died out of county? Well, we're willing to do so, but first you better understand that the Houghton County courthouse is 30 miles away from the museum. If you're paying for two hours of our time, one hour of it is going just for driving to where the records are. And if we have to go to Marquette? Mapquest tells me it's 73 miles; I do know the drive time one way is about 90 minutes so don't expect us to do it unless you're willing to pay more than our usual 2 hours up front. You're going to have to fork over enough money to pay for a minimum of 4, and that's without knowing if we're going to find something. When we get research requests that look like they'd send us out of county, I tell people to contact the historical societies in those counties instead. Or, here's a thought: pick up the phone, call the county courthouse and ask if they have a death record for your ancestor. It's cheaper and faster than farming the task out to us, especially when those other counties are in the process of digitizing their older records (which is good, considering how fragile the original journals have become). 

Why am I thinking about this stuff this morning? I'm not sure -- maybe because I checked my emails and was reminded that the museum has a research client who's not satisfied that we've found everything we could about his ancestor. Family folklore had inflated the man's importance in the local community, there were also references to a falling out among siblings at some point in the past. Well, if family folklore says your ancestor was (and this is a hypothetical example, not the actual case) a banker but the death certificate gives his occupation as "laborer" and the obituary says he was a long-time employee of a local sawmill, not the bank, then family folklore is pretty obviously wrong. Not quite as bad as the classic joke among genealogists -- "You find out that the family legend that your ancestor was 'prominent in local affairs' turns out to mean he was hung publicly as a horse thief." -- but still a letdown. In any case, once I'm back up on the tundra I'll have to write the guy another letter saying that we found everything we could, and what we did find wasn't particularly easy to track down: the family has an extremely common surname.

People can be (no surprise here) a bit unpredictable when it comes to doing research for them. A couple years ago we had a research request where we came up close to totally empty-handed: the great-great-great grandparents had not been born in Baraga County, they didn't get married here, only one of their children was born here, and none died here. The family was hoping to be able to at least get photos of the house where the ancestors had lived (now a vacant lot) or worked (a sawmill that vanished before World War II). In short, very close to a total washout on information. We did find one group photo of workers from the mill that indicated their ancestor was in the photo, but the men were not individually identified -- all they'd know is that he was one of a dozen men pictured. I felt more than a tad guilty about taking the initial research fee because we found so little. Then the family members shocked the heck out of us: despite our coming up so totally blank, they gave the museum a $200 donation.

On the other hand, and I have a hunch the current client falls into this category, there are people who just don't seem to understand that sometimes we can't find anything because there is nothing to find. I suppose I could have told the man that if he'd send us more money, we'd keep looking, but I really don't want to do that when I'm reasonably sure we've already found everything that's worth finding. I just hope his letter doesn't include a complaint that he didn't get his money's worth because I know I put in a lot more hours than he paid for; I was intrigued because the extremely common name presented a challenge.

Everyone (or almost everyone) would like to have an ancestor who was important or did interesting things, but the reality is that most people live pretty ordinary lives. They work at ordinary jobs, they don't get involved in community affairs except at a low level (e.g., a veteran joins the VFW but never becomes an officer at the local post), they go through life as happy and productive people and are important to their immediate family but don't leave much of a mark in the wider world. And even when they do something this is a little out of the ordinary, will it be recorded or remembered a few years or decades later? Probably not. It won't matter if I spend 2 hours or 200 hours reading through old L'Anse Sentinels because unless the ancestor got nailed for something illegal and shows up in the court reports, most people never get their names in the paper.

Oh well. I won't know for sure what type of soothing phraseology I'll have to craft until next month when I see the actual hard copy letter. In the meantime, I think I'll work on figuring out how to update the museum's web page to make it clear that the research we do is meant to fill in the gaps left when resorting to Ancestry.com leaves you wanting to know more than just what's on the census records or state vital records databases. Ancestry.com might tell you that your great grandmother died in Baraga County in 1937; our research will find you her obituary.

Family trees with missing branches

I've been dealing with a research request at the museum that's turned into a bit of puzzler. As a result, I have a suggestion for anyone who's contemplating doing genealogy and delving into his or her family's past: pick ancestors with unusual last names. It is not exactly fun trying to track down the ancestors of someone with a surname like, for example, Johnson in a community where every other person seems to be named Johnson. It also does not help to be dealing with ethnic groups and generations where a lot of kids were given Swedish or Finnish names at birth so they were registered as Johannes or Jussi but decided they'd rather be called John when they got older. Or maybe they disliked their first name so always used their middle name instead. Then toss in the possibility that the only name you ever heard your grandfather referred to by was actually a nickname and not his actual name at all and things will get truly frustrating.

I have, in short, spent a whole lot more time worrying about this one research request than something as simple as the normal research request should take. After investing way too many hours in the project, I still have no solid information. The grandfather in question was apparently not married in Baraga County, or, if he was, his first name was different than what the grandson remembers. Similarly, he did not die in Baraga County -- there are death certificates for persons with the name the grandson remembers, but none are the man I've been looking for. He was well-known in the community so there should be an obituary. No doubt there is, but the L'Anse Sentinel isn't indexed and I'm not prepared to spend all summer reading through 50 or 60 years worth of newspapers looking for one dead guy. I'd like to have at least one solid clue before I turn on the microfilm reader at the library. Was he buried in Baraga County? He's not on any of the grave indexes we have for the cemeteries -- the one person I've found with the right name as born too recently to be the guy I'm looking for.

The requester did give me one solid clue: his mother's name and birthday. Theoretically this would yield a birth certificate with her parents' names on it. Only one problem: his mother's birth was apparently not recorded in Baraga County either. At the time she was born, pregnant women had three choices: they could give birth at home, they could utilize a small "nursing home" operated by a nurse-midwife, or they could go to a hospital in a neighboring county. Women who could afford it often chose the last option. (Small digression: we have not progressed since then. The choices have been narrowed to one: go to a neighboring county. There are no certified midwives available to attend home births, and the local hospital doesn't have a delivery suite.) If a baby was born in Houghton or Marquette County, there'd be no record locally.

There are other possibilities: he's remembering the wrong year for her birth or he's got his grandparents' names wrong. Either one is possible.

So how much more effort am I going to put into this request? I'm not sure. I know from reading through the correspondence files at the museum that people don't like it when we come up with null results. Personally, considering how incredibly low the museum's research fee is, I think they should be amazed we're willing to do the work at all, but then again most people have no clue just how time-consuming and tedious trawling through legal records and old newspapers can be. I'd love to raise our rates -- or, better yet, find out there are actually some professional genealogists locally I could refer people to -- because right now we're so under priced it's pathetic. If I were doing research work as a contract historian, I'd charge at least $80 an hour so it kind of floors me that I'm volunteering for an organization that only charges $10. Then again, maybe that low rate is one reason people get pissy when we can't find anything. After all, how hard can we be working when we're practically giving our time away?