Just Because It's Set in Stone...

There is a very important lesson that any family historian, and indeed, any researcher, needs to learn, and that is to not trust any single source of information as solid fact, not even a headstone or memorial.

Just because it's set in stone, it doesn't mean it's a stone fact.


Perhaps just to ensure that I do not become overly confident as a researcher, two examples of why any one source of information cannot be trusted completely (including those engraved in stone) has hit home with me in recent weeks.  The first example is detailed out in my prior blog post:  Solving the Case of the Missing Civil War Soldier, Thor Paulsen Sloan.  For quite some time, I could not determine where my Norwegian-American Civil War soldier from Wisconsin was buried.  I deduced that his remains were unlikely to be lost, because although he was wounded on the battlefield at Kennesaw Mountain in June 1863, he died as a patient in a Union hospital a few days later.  It turns out that the reason I could not initially find the location of his burial plot was because his name and/or his regiment were recorded incorrectly on important sources: the interment record for the relocation of his remains from the Kennesaw Mountain area to the National Cemetery at Marietta, Georgia, and the headstone at his gravesite.

The second recent example was related to me by a presenter at a genealogy workshop I attended earlier this month.  Family History Expo is a large genealogy conference held each November in the Seattle area.  Eric Stroschein, professional genealogist, was speaking on the subject of genealogical proof standard and the importance of using proper sources and documentation during research.  He detailed a story that illustrated why any single fact should not be taken as the gold standard without a reasonable exhaustive search to back it up, using other sources.

A client had hired Stroschein to research a potential family connection with a Confederate soldier who drowned during an early submarine test dive.  The name of the lost soul was one of several etched on a memorial erected in dedication to the submarine crew members, who died in the line of duty.  The surname of the prospective ancestor was rather unique, and this aided Stroschein while searching among censuses, military records, and other sources.  But, although he was able to trace many records for an individual with the same unusual last name, that surname was always connected with a first name different from the one on the memorial.  In the end, Stroschein succeeded in proving, through Civil War pension records and other sources, that the first name of the client's ancestor is incorrect on the memorial.  Now, that was unexpected.

This possibility makes a genealogy hobbyist feel a little insecure, does it not?  To think that information recorded on official documents, or even on solid tributes, such as headstones and memorials, may contain errors perpetuated by careless or hapless record keepers or decision makers upon the deceased individual... for an eternity.  But, this is where genealogists can really make a difference.  Perhaps it is the excitement of the chase that keeps many of us interested in pursuing family history, but it also has to do with an obsession to set things straight--to weave the various manuscripts, artifacts, and stories into an assemblance that makes sense, and that hopefully, corrects as many errors as possible.

So, as you continue to research, remember to always look for the unexpected, and to conduct as exhaustive a search as possible to answer your genealogical questions.  Your ancestors just may be depending on you to set the record straight!

Will the Real "Norden" Please Flap Your Sails?

In family history research, it is all too easy to take a wrong turn, as I was recently reminded.

A good part of my research for a recently published family history dealt with the emigrant voyage of my great great grandparents, Baard and Thibertine Johnson, and their two children, Ole and Ellen Julie (Julia). There was no doubt, according to Digitalarkivet (Norwegian census), that the family sailed from Bergen, Norway aboard the bark-rigged ship, Norden, on May 5, 1866. Many of the passengers, including my ancestors, were destined for the midwestern United States via Quebec. It was a common route for America-travelers at that time.

Though my family book has been published, I am a firm believer in always keeping an eye out for new sources and details. So, even though the ink has dried on the page, it does not mean that every last word has been written. While sleuthing around for information concerning a different project, I found an obscure bibliographic reference on the Norwegian-American Historical Association (NAHA) website that caught my interest: Tollefson, Arne. "The Voyage of the three-masted vessel, the 'Norden,' in 1866, from Bodoe, Norway, to Quebec." Norden, 23 (Dec. 1931). The article is based on the recounting of voyage events by a surviving Norden passenger.

Wow! What's this? I excitedly tracked down the journal via interlibrary loan. When it arrived, I was a bit disappointed to find it is only two pages long, yet it is quite interesting, nonetheless. I had hoped to find detailed information about the exact voyage my great great grandparents experienced. Instead, I found something quite different--a valuable lesson.

It turns out there was not just one ship named Norden that made a voyage from Norway to Quebec during the spring of 1866, but two! How could that be? Well, I cannot claim to know how the mid-19th-century shipping industry handled vessel identification concerns, but from a 21st-century research perspective, the potential for making an incorrect assumption loomed large.

According to the article, the other Norden was built at Bath, Maine in 1849, and was sold in 1863 to a Bergen shipowner, who renamed it from the original: Zenobia. By 1866, this Norden was described as " ...old and decrepit. The hull was mellow with age. The masts were rotten. It was wide of beam and a slow sailer." "My" Norden was eight years older than that, so what did that make her, I wonder? At least she held together long enough to get my ancestors to dry land in North America.

Another interesting fact is that the Norden on which my ancestors sailed left Bergen on May 5, 1866, and took only 30 days to reach Quebec. The Maine-built Norden left Bodoe, Norway on June 3, 1866, carrying about 700 passengers, and it did not arrive in Quebec until ten weeks later. "...the Norden staggered westward on her unhurried way day after day, and through-out the long nights for weeks and weeks--aye months." The ship's supplies were running out, and the water supply was low, and what there was on hand became foul. At the end of the tenth week, another ship was hailed off the New Foundland coast so that flour and salt pork could be purchased. Ten whole weeks at sea... I can only think the good ship and crew must have fought a head wind the whole way.

Though fairly short, the article relates a compelling story, well told, even though it is not my own ancestors' story, as I had hoped.

Perhaps the moral of this story is that before we can assert something as a fact, we should always seek the "triangle of proof": three sources that indicate roughly the same thing. The instructors in a certificate program in genealogy and family history that I attended always cautioned their neophyte genealogists to seek the triangle of proof as a method of weighing the truth of any fact.

Early on in my research, had I not known from another source that "my" Norden was built in 1841 at Åbo Gamla Skeppsvarv, Finland (thank you, Norway Heritage), or seen the passenger list information, complete with dates, on Digitalarkivet, or known from family members that my Johnson ancestors lived closer to the port of Trondheim than Bodoe, Norway, I might have turned a wistful blind eye to some minor inconsistencies in the article and globbed onto it as one of my prime sources. And, I would have been completely mistaken. Thank goodness I was on the track of the correct Norden from the very beginning, and, thank goodness both "old and decrepit" ships named Norden managed to limp from one side of the Atlantic the other in 1866.

Falling Backwards Into Research

Every face has a story

I don't know this person, and she is definitely not a part of my family history. But, as a dedicated and curious researcher who loves biography, I'm always on the lookout for new writing subjects, whether related to me, or not.

I came across this photograph while browsing the U.S. School Yearbooks collection at Ancestry.com. Originally, I had looked at a 1938 yearbook from Brainerd, Minnesota (just because), and was surprised to see the kids looking at lot older than their age, especially the girls with their intensely dark red lipstick. They seemed tired and worn, somehow. They didn't smile, and they just didn't look happy. I thought I'd look to see how high school seniors closer to home compared.


Turning to the Seattle yearbooks, I selected one from a school that my own daughter had attended briefly, and began viewing. Among the senior pages from decades ago, I came across this face. I continued on, but found myself intrigued and went back to look at her face a few more times. Why? Perhaps her smile was so different from all the rest: relaxed, composed, sweetly mature, intelligent, and confidently happy, or perhaps it was the graceful turn of her neck, or that perky hairdo so typical of the 1930s-1940s era. Perhaps it was something I discovered behind her eyes and felt intuitively.



I read the caption next to the photograph: "[Name] - Cabinet; Honor Society; Assistant Copy Editor, Messenger; Art Editor, Arrow; President, Stamp Club; Usherette, Quill and Scroll." With all of those activities on her agenda, I surmised that she must have also been a popular senior with a dedication to study, social activities, and perpetual learning. A rather artsy girl, in fact.

I tried to hunt down more information about her through the census, but lacked enough information to be certain who she was, or who her parents were. On a lark, I "Googled" her name along with the word "art," and was surprised when I discovered an obituary that told me her married name, occupation, and the fact that she had graduated with degrees in art from the University of Washington, and was well known as a Pacific Northwest painter. The UW was the logical place for a Seattle student to get higher education, so that in itself was not surprising. But, it was interesting that we both had walked along some of the same halls of learning: the same campus, and most likely, the same building. Then, when I searched the University Libraries catalog for any mention of her name, I found that before her death, she had donated her personal papers and correspondence to the archives--just one floor below the section of the library where I work!

That's what I mean about falling backwards into research: progressing from an interesting, but anonymous photograph found during directionless searching, to the discovery that the person's lifetime achievements are represented in files just yards away and waiting for perusal... now, what are the chances of THAT? I could have picked any one of dozens of photographs in that yearbook or any other, but it was hers that captured my interest.

Providence? Weird coincidence? Whatever the reason, it is exactly this type of hook that writers and researchers crave, whether it leads to a viable project, or not.


What's that?
Are you wanting me to reveal the identity of "The Face"?
That would spoil all the fun, now wouldn't it?


Try it for yourself... find an interesting face and bring someone's story to life, if only during a few moments of discovery. You might be surprised by what you find.

Why Did She Do It?

Time for an exercise in genealogy and social history detective work. Are you ready?

SCENARIO:

You are a Norwegian immigrant woman of good health living on the Chippewa prairie in southwestern Minnesota. You and your first husband came from Norway with two young children in 1866, and set up a homestead near the Minnesota River in 1868--one of the first pioneer families to settle in the area. In 1873, your husband dies from typhoid fever during the height of summer, leaving you alone with a 12 year old son, a 10 year old daughter, livestock to tend, crops to bring in, and bills to pay.

Along comes an upstanding local young man to the rescue, also a Norwegian immigrant. He quickly proposes, even though he is nearly ten years your junior. You decide you will marry him, but become pregnant before the homestead in your first husband's name can be finalized. The homestead is your son's rightful inheritance from his father, and you do not wish to start over again under your second husband's name. So, you decide to live together until the marriage can take place. The child, a daughter, is born about eight months before you marry her father. You are 32 years old at the time. After the homestead claim is finalized and your son by your first marriage is secure in his inheritance, you marry your second husband in March 1874.

With me so far?

During the mid-1870s, southwestern Minnesota suffered from repeated locust infestations, which severely depleted resources and plunged many families into heavy debt. You and your new husband, your baby, and your two children from your first marriage find it hard to make ends meet. Your husband tries farming, but he eventually makes plans to read for the law and become an attorney, and slowly relegates the farm responsibilities to your son, who is now becoming a young man. Circumstances will improve in the future, but for now, times are hard.

While waiting to be legally married, you become pregnant yet again. A few months later, during the summer of 1874, you and your husband give your healthy and beautiful one-year old daughter to her paternal grandparents, who live on a homestead nearby. You give birth to a new baby boy in September 1874. In future years, you will have six more children with your second husband, and the only one "given away" was the first-born daughter.

FACTORS TO CONSIDER

Since you are a kind, thoughtful woman of traditional Norwegian upbringing, raised as a practicing Lutheran, you would not indulge in considering your own needs first. If you struggled to put food on the table and manage a homestead, you would still carry on, stoically working for the good of your family. If you were tired or had postpartum depression, you would most likely just deal with it. You may not have really wanted to come to America in the first place, but were obligated to follow your husband's dream.

Secondly, your new in laws (your second husband's parents), only had one other son living with them, but he was old enough to help with farming. They had no daughters, however. What would the grandparents gain by bringing a one year old girl into their household? Perhaps they would gain household help in future, but for the time being, the toddler would provide only company and extra work.

In spite of giving your daughter to your in-laws to raise, she is still listed as a member of your immediate family in church congregation records. She lives only a few miles distant; you attend the same church, and you are fortunate enough to see her often.

When your "donated" daughter is 16, she writes a letter to family friends saying that she is indeed your husband's daughter, but that she has lived with her grandparents since the age of one. There is no question, therefore, that your daughter continued to live with her grandparents.

WHY DID YOU DO IT?

Why did you allow your daughter to go live with her grandparents? Was it illness during pregnancy or postpartum depression? If so, why did the grandparents not give your daughter back when you were well again? Was it poverty during those early years of homesteading? Once again, things eventually got better, and your daughter could have been returned to you... so, why not? Was filial duty the reason? Perhaps your mother-in-law anxious for a daughter of her own to raise, and you bended to her wishes under pressure? Was it your cultural obligation to provide comfort to your in-laws in the form of a dependent child?

I encourage you to think about the questions presented here and come up with possible explanations, taking into consideration, of course, Norwegian culture and tradition, the pioneer way of life, and potentially unknown factors.

Let me know what you think.