An Excellent Example of a Local Family History Center

Now that we are getting settled into our work at the Maryland State Archives, I am starting to get in touch with the local family history community. I have joined the Anne Arundel County Genealogical Society and made my first visit to the Annapolis Family History Center. I am very impressed.

Here are some views of this very inviting facility.

If you live in the Annapolis area, you can contact me and I will be glad to meet you at the Annapolis Family History Center to help with your research. Here are some more photos. Don't you wish your Family History Center looked like this one? By the way, when I visited the FHC there were only two volunteers there. Apparently, it is not being overused. One comment on the above photo, I guess the microfilm viewers will be getting very little use.

A nice printer with lots of computers for support.

I will be taking time to become familiar with all the resources.

A nice selection of reference books.

Stay tuned for some additional information in the near future. Remember, I speak Spanish fluently.

Here is the FHC's contact information.

• 1875 Ritchie Hwy Annapolis MD 21401-6229 United States
• The Family History Center entrance is at the center of the rear of the building.
• Phone: 1-410-757-4173
• Email: MD_Annapolis@ldsmail.net

Open Hours:

• Monday:9:30am-2:30pm
• Tuesday:9:30am-2:30pm and 7:00pm-9:00pm
• Wednesday:9:30am-2:30pm and 7:00pm-9:00pm
• Saturday:9:30am-2:30pm

A Family History Mission: A Genealogist's Goldmine

No. 25

Note: You can do a Google search for "A Family History Mission" to see all the previous posts in this ongoing series. You can also search for "James Tanner genealogy" and find them.

As I spend time looking at probate, guardianship, and indenture records at the Maryland State Archives, I am seeing records that assist in finding complete families. The guardianship records are from the Orphans Court Proceedings and often contain a way to identify every one of the children in a family. We usually look to probate records and hope to find a will from an ancestor, but so far, I have seen very few will transcripts but a lot of guardianships.

Apparently, when the father in the family died, guardians were appointed for any minor children. This could be the mother or some other member of the family. The purpose of the guardianship to protect the children's inheritances from third parties or in the event that their mother remarried. If the husband left all of his estate to his wife, then, if the wife remarried, all of the estate would then be owned by the new husband. In some cases, husbands left their wives property under the specific provision that the inheritance would be forfeited if the wife remarried. This was not so much a matter of jealousy but of the way the law worked. If the husband wanted the property to stay in his family lines, then the provision was mandatory.

Because of these particular ownership and inheritance laws, when money was left to minor children, it was necessary to protect the children's interests by appointing a guardian. Genealogists benefit immensely from the information contained these probate/guardianship files.

Perhaps, this observation on me types of records we are digitizing at the Maryland State Archives give you some idea of our motivation to spend the time to volunteer as missionaries.

Double Check Your Temple Opportunities

Automated Record Hints are just hints. The suggested records may not be for the person where the hints show up. Remember, they are "hints" and should be verified before attaching. But what about the "Temple Opportunities?" Are they real or merely hints that should be verified?

Everything in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is subject to verification with valid sources, i.e. records that actually support the information already in the Family Tree. Record Hints are links to records that might support events in your ancestors' or relatives' lives. Temple Opportunities assume that all of the genealogical links to the opportunity are valid. So let's look at the Temple Opportunity illustrated above. Here is the assumed "opportunity."

I can immediately reserve the Temple Ordinances by clicking on the blue button link or I can be a "spoilsport" and question the validity of the genealogical connection between me and the individual. Do I really want to reserve and do the ordinances for someone I am not related to? Isn't this a carte blanche from FamilySearch to do the ordinances? Who am I to question FamilySearch? The last question is somewhat rhetorical but is this a situation where we just go ahead and take advantage of the opportunity without checking the validity of the connection? Who cares anyway?

Well, since I have spent a great deal of my time over the past 36 years trying to verify my family connections, I am too old to be taught new tricks. I still don't believe assumed relationships without some sort of documentary support for the conclusion that I am related to anyone and this goes doubly for anything in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. I guess the fundamental question is if we are going to have standards about those for whom we can and cannot do ordinance work, why don't those standards apply to "Temple Opportunities?"

So, am I or am I not related to Joseph David Weise?

Here is the chart showing my relationship.

The first question here is am I related to all those people shown as my direct line ancestors. Let's check them off.

• Yes, I am related to my mother
• Yes, I am related to my maternal grandfather, Harold Morgan. 
• Yes, I am related to my Great-grandmother Mary Ann Linton.

Wait, how do I know this so far? Let me add one more check: the number of verified sources I find for each of these people.

• Yes, I am related to my mother: 34 sources
• Yes, I am related to my maternal grandfather, Harold Morgan: 49 sources
• Yes, I am related to my Great-grandmother Mary Ann Linton: 29 sources

Also, I simply have not gotten around to entering all of the hundreds of additional sources and memories I have for these near relatives. Let's go on back.

• Yes, I am related to Ellen Sutton: 40 sources
• Yes, I am related to John Sutton: 36 sources
• Yes, I am related to Sarah Yates: 24 sources
• Yes, I am related to Peter Yates: 25 sources

Of course, I strongly suggest checking the sources. But let's go on.

• Hmm, am I related to William Yates? There are six sources but he has no birth or christening dates. 

It is time to stop. Here is William Yates.

 

The problem is there is no actual birth or death information and the place of birth is listed as Lancashire County. How many William Yates were there in about 1688 in Lancashire?

 Was Lancashire the right county? There are 161 entries for the name William Yates in that county in that time period. Which one is my William Yates, if that is the right name? The children listed were born in three different locations, all in Lancashire County: Winwick, Wigan, and Leigh. Where were these places? How close are they to one another? The dates here are in the 1600s. One problem is that the listing for Winwick is apparently an ancient parish with three towns: Houghton with Middleton, Arbury, and Winwick of Hulme. Let's use Winwick of Hulme. 

The distances here are enough for me to question the accuracy of the inclusion of all of these children in the same family. The person we are concerned with is his son Peter Yates, my supposed ancestor. Peter Yates is one of the children supposedly born in Winwick. Remember, we have no birthplace for either the listed father, William Yates or the listed mother, Sybil. We also have no records showing the parents of Peter Yates. From this review, Peter Yates is presently the end of this line. We do not know his father's name. There is also a will and probate attached to Peter Yates that states that he is "of Lathom."

Where is Latham compared to the other Lancashire towns? What about Winwick where he is supposed to have been born or christened? It is about 18 miles away from Winwick. Once again, that is enough to make me do more research. How many Peter Yates were there in Winwick at the time listed? How many in Lathom? There only four entries in Findmypast.com for Peter Yates in Winwick at that time, about 1733. All four of them seem to be our Peter Yates. But what about Lathom? Peter apparently died in Winwick. Could be. But the only record is the will and probate. 

From this point on in the Family Tree, the relationships become mere speculation. I could go on and on, but the descendency part of the linkage is just a questionable. Do I really want to rely on an unsupported connection going back ten unsupported generations and then back down six more unsupported generations?

What do you think? I addition, I am not presently adding any more names to my Temple list. In fact, I am unreserving all of them. The reason is that the Washington, D.C. Temple is closing and I will be here for the next year. I will go back and reserve what I need when I am able to go to the temple regularly after my mission. 

Some Interesting FamilySearch Statistics for the Beginning of 2018

Well, here we are with a new year: 2018. When I was much younger, my friends and I used to speculate where we would be in the Year 2000. It was almost unimaginable that we would be over 50 years old. Because of my interest in science and technology, I was a fan of the Popular Science magazine.

Almost every month, there were new predictions about the future. Guess what? The future turned out to be far different than I could ever have imagined. One of the things that no one at the time could have predicted was the availability of historical records online. But back then, I could not imagine that one day I would be volunteering to digitize records for the online collections.

As of the beginning of 2018, here are some notable statistics about the digital collections on the FamilySearch.org website:

• Number of searchable names in the Historical Record Collections  5.84 Billion
• Number of digital images online of historic documents 1.25 Billion
• Digital images only published in the FamilySearch Catalog 618.3 Million
• 3 year rolling average of images of indexed images published 284.5 Million
• Number of Historical Record Collections 2279
• Number of digital books online 352,963
• Number of Family History Centers 5,082
• Number of digital cameras in operation 306

Four of those digital cameras are here in Annapolis, Maryland. All of this was unimaginable back in 1963 and as a matter of fact, was unimaginable only about ten short years ago. 

A Family History Mission:Indentured or Enslaved?

No. 24

Note: You can do a Google search for "A Family History Mission" to see all the previous posts in this ongoing series. You can also search for "James Tanner genealogy" and find them.

One of the sad things about preparing hundreds of documents for digitization is coming across these Indentured Servant Contracts. Here is the cover sheet for the above contract.

I will let you read the entire document so you can see what was done to this nine-year-old girl. Indentured servants were simply slaves for a term of years. In the case of this poor nine-year-old, she would be working for whatever the master decided to give her in the way of food, clothing, and shelter. In return, she learns to do housework for nine long years. Here is a description of Indentured Servitude from the Law Library of Congress:

Before the Civil War, slaves and indentured servants were considered personal property, and they or their descendants could be sold or inherited like any other personalty. Like other property, human chattel was governed largely by laws of individual states. Generally, these laws concerning indentured servants and slaves did not differentiate between the sexes. Some, however, addressed only women. Regardless of their country of origin, many early immigrants were indentured servants, people who sold their labor in exchange for passage to the New World and housing on their arrival. Initially, most laws passed concerned indentured servants, but around the middle of the seventeenth century, colonial laws began to reflect differences between indentured servants and slaves. More important, the laws began to differentiate between races: the association of “servitude for natural life” with people of African descent became common. Re Negro John Punch (1640) was one of the early cases that made a racial distinction among indentured servants.

Here are three more contracts for you to try your skill in reading old handwriting from 1822 in Maryland.  You can click on the images to enlarge them. You can also get some idea of the documents we are working with at the Maryland State Archives.

A Family History Mission: More About Working at the Maryland State Archives

No. 23

Note: You can do a Google search for "A Family History Mission" to see all the previous posts in this ongoing series. You can also search for "James Tanner genealogy" and find them.

There are six couples of Senior Missionaries working in the Maryland State Archives at the present time. There are also two Church Service missionaries and a number of volunteers. Some of the full-time missionaries will be finishing their missions and leaving so it is planned that there will be some overlap. This is wise because we need a lot of training.  It will take Ann and I some considerable time to learn what we need to know to be in a position to teach other new missionaries. We always need volunteers, so if you know anyone who would like to volunteer, please let me know.

The Archives is a very nice place to work. We have two rooms assigned to us. One has the cameras and the other is used to prepare the documents for digitizing. It is hard to see in the above photo, but the facility is called the "Hall of Records." It is quite a large building even though the photo does not seem to indicate that.

The full-time missionaries start work at 7:00 am when it is still dark and very cold. We are expected to work 40 hours a week. The Church Sevice missionaries should work about 8 or more hours per week. Volunteers can set their own times and hours.

The first thing we do upon arriving at work is to sign into the Archives. We work in the "Staff" areas not usually available to the public, but everyone who visits the Archives needs to sign in. Those doing research need to fill out an application for research also.

We need to turn on the lights, cameras, and computers and wait while they all warm up and boot up. Then we get back to work where we left off the day before. We work all morning, take a break for lunch and then work again in the afternoon. We are slowly getting into a routine and adjusting to being out and working all day again like we used to do.

The full-time missionaries get together from time to time to have dinner at a local restaurant or for other gatherings. It is interesting to get to know the people who come from all over the U.S. and have very different backgrounds. For some, this is their second mission.

Working With the FamilySearch Iceberg

Ice has 90% of water's density so 90% of an iceberg (or an ice cube) will be underwater and not visible from the surface. Interestingly, these percentages approximately apply to the number of records on the FamilySearch.org website. For those of you out there that are caught up in the "search by name" syndrome, you are only searching (or seeing about 10%) of the records that are available on the website.

What does this mean in numbers? Well, it really means that the numbers of digital images, searchable names are so vast that they defy our individual ability to comprehend. For example, there are presently about 5.84 billion searchable names in the Historical Records on the FamilySearch.org website. A billion is a one followed by nine zeros.

1,000,000,000

Here is a short video showing a graphic representation of 1 billion. Remember, there are over 5 billion names in the FamilySearch.org database on the website.

How much is 1 billion dollars in 1 dollar bills

In order to search through all of these records with a computer program, it is necessary to convert the information in the records into some searchable format, i.e. text files. Nearly all the records on the website are images in either microfilm or digital format. For example, here is a reference to a record in the FamilySearch.org Catalog that is only available on a physical roll of microfilm:

The little icon of a spool of microfilm on the right-hand side of the image indicates that this particular record has not yet been digitized so the only way to view this record is at one of the Family History Centers or Libraries that have a physical copy of the microfilm. Here is the list of available locations for this particular record.

If this particular record has information about your ancestors or relatives, the only way you can find out is by physically examining the record with a microfilm reader in one of the Libraries or Centers listed. This is one reason why the iceberg analogy works in describing the records that are available as opposed to those that are searchable online from your home. As an additional point of interest, when I searched online for this particular book in WorldCat.org, the largest book catalog in the world, it turns out that the only copy of this particular book is in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

This gives us all something else to think about. How many unique records are there that exist in only one copy in one record repository? 

Now, we could wait until this particular microfilm is digitized or we could go to one of the places that has a microfilm copy and search through that copy page by page. Either way, a name search on the FamilySearch.org website will not tell us whether or not our ancestor or relative is mentioned in this book. 

Now back to the iceberg analogy. Literally, only about 10% of the records available from FamilySearch are searchable by name online. What about the digitized records? Well, if the water book above had been digitized and made available on the website, we would not have to travel to Salt Lake City or some other place to see a copy. That makes our lives much easier as genealogists. Also, keep in mind that we need to search online generally for any one of the items in the Catalog to see if some other entity has the item digitized online. That is one of the main benefits of having the FamilySearch Partner Programs. 

But let's look at another entry from the FamilySearch.org website.

Now, let's see if we can search this huge record by the names of our ancestors.

Nope, this record is not indexed. Indexing is the process where we look at the images and type out the information so that the record can be searched, i.e. we create a text version of some of the information in the record. 

The only way I am going to see what is in this record with over 400,000 images is to start looking at the record. Perhaps, there is an index or table of contents to the record, but absent those types of helps, I will be looking through the online images just like I would with a microfilm. But, of course, I can do this from my home computer. 

Perhaps you can now begin to understand more completely the iceberg analogy. We have a huge number of records available in one form or another, but the number of those records that a name search actually searches is very small compared to the total number of records available on just this one FamilySearch.org website. 

Now, I am working in the Maryland State Archives helping to digitize records. How many of those records were previously available anywhere but in the individual counties of Maryland as paper copies? None of them. Think about it.