I was looking for a genealogist the other day to do some in-person research I can’t do. The web site for one of the genealogist search places was down, so I looked at the site affiliated with Ancestry.com. They charge $1900 for 25 to 30 hours of research. Basic research. I joked on G+ that people should hire me because I’m much cheaper.
But really, people should should hire me. I’m pretty decent at this. And cheaper.
For example:
I was going up to Calvary Cemetery to get some photos of graves of relatives, so I decided to fill some of the photo requests for the cemetery. Today I traipsed around for 30+ minutes trying to find a request for a husband and wife. The plot is in the largest section in the cemetery, and not one I’m familiar with. Eventually found the plot but the graves are unmarked. Left a message for the woman asking if she wanted the photos I took of the unmarked plot. She responded a bit ago saying she did, and also if I came across an Amalie Stevens would I get a photo of her grave?
I leaped into action. The information I was given was that Amalie Bouchard Stevens was the wife of James Stevens, birth name Stefanski, and that she probably died between 1930 and 1942 in Seattle.
First I searched for her name in the Seattle Times archive. However, when an obituary was in the classified, the OCR is really bad and usually doesn’t find it. Next I looked up James Stevens, Amalia Stevens and James Stefanski on the Washington Digital Archives. I found the marriage certificate for James Stefanski and Emilia Bouchard. No information to go on unfortunately. Some marriage certificates have ages and places of birth.
Then decided to look at the online burial records for Calvary Cemetery. I didn’t look there first because I figured the requester had already looked. But there was an Amelia Stevens buried there, and her grave was located in a section I photographed last night. It gave her date of death in 1949. Went back to the Seattle Times archive and found a funeral notice in the classifieds. No next of kin was listed, so I wasn’t sure if it was the right one. And then I looked at my photos from the section, and realized she was buried right next to a Helen Bush who had a maiden name of Stevens. Also, the same person had requested a photo of her grave. So yep, that’s probably Amalie Bouchard Stevens.
Amelia Stevens 1891-1949
All figured out in the space of 15 minutes.
I’m not a pro-level genealogist, and some of this went smoothly because I took 700+ photos in two days for the fun of it, and some of it because the person happened to have records available online. But still, 15 minutes.
I’ve looked at hundreds of gravestones for relatives in the last couple of years, at least. Perhaps that number is in the thousands. I don’t keep a count, but the number is fairly high. What’s on gravestones is usually correct, but not always so. Do you know offhand how old your parents are? What about aunts or uncles or grandparents? Most of us do, but sometimes we are wrong.
My dad died before I was born. Had he been an only child I would have been the person mostly likely to fill out my grandpa Weiss’ application for a death certificate when he died in 1988. He was 84, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew he was in his 80s somewhere. When you send those in, the recorder’s office doesn’t fact-check them. They rely on your signature and the doctor’s signature that what you put down is accurate. And that’s the information that usually gets put on gravestones these days. The informant gives the information to the funeral director who fills out the application, everyone signs it, and then that information is sent off to the recorder, the Social Security Administration, and the people who make the grave marker.
So usually the information is accurate, but the year of birth can be off sometimes. I’ve seen that a couple dozen times, particularly on older graves.
I can tell a year of birth is incorrect because lots of records created throughout a person’s life reference their age, and many of those are available. Census records in particular give an approximate age. For instance, the approximate ages for a person might be 5, 14, 15, every succeeding decade until late in life. Then the last census before they died gives an approximate age of 79, and the year of birth on their gravestone matches that, I’m going to look at it with suspicion. A caretaker probably just didn’t know exactly how old grandpa was.
I’ve also seen cases where someone appears in documents well before the year of birth on the marker. One relative appeared on the 1870 census, so I know he wasn’t born in 1872 as his grave indicates. People lie about their ages fairly frequently. Sometime they want to appear older to join the military. Sometimes they want to appear younger to their prospective spouse. The lie ends up on their grave.
But not only that, the date of death can be incorrect too. You’d think that people would know that because it just happened, barring cases when a body is discovered an unknown period after death. But I’ve run into a couple cases where it isn’t. Usually when this happens I’m pretty sure that the family placed the gravestone years after death. Perhaps they waited for a spouse to die before engraving. Perhaps one couldn’t be afforded at the time of death. My third great grandparents Knapp have markers with only their initials and surnames scratch into them. We’re currently considering placing a nicer marker there.
I’ve probably missed a few cases because I haven’t even looked for corroborating evidence. I suspect I can generally rely on the date of death on headstones. Finding the 0.25% of cases where it happens isn’t worth the effort for distance relatives.
It’s harder to detect than issues with the birth date. There aren’t a lot of documents that are functionally public after someone dies. There’s a will and whatever else is filed in probate, and the death certificate. Since the person isn’t living any longer, they aren’t creating a continuing paper trail.
In the two cases I’ve found, what showed that the date of death was wrong was finding the contemporary obituary or other references in newspapers.
For example, here’s the headstone for my third great uncle Richard Smith Blake:
Headstone for Richard and Elizabeth Blake
It has a date of death of 27 December 1897. But then I was looking at the probate record, which was dated in February of 1897 and gave a date of death of 29 December 1896. That didn’t match up. I thought it might be possible I was misreading the handwriting. Lots of rural legal documents are in an almost illegible scribble made worse by poor microfilming, including this one.
Luckily, the local paper, The Ackley World (of Iowa) for 1896 and 1897 has been scanned and is online. And there was an obituary on page 1:
Obituary for Richard Blake
The scan is not the clearest, but it was most certainly published on 1 January 1897, nearly 12 months before the date of death on his headstone. My best guess is that the headstone was placed when his wife Elizabeth died almost 15 years later. Someone asked the family what to put on for Richard, and they ended up giving them the wrong date.
Now the lesson that professional genealogists would tell you comes of this is that one should never trust headstones alone and to get corroboration for everything. Strictly speaking, that’s true. But that’s not the lesson I take. If I run across discrepancies like this, I dig deeper. However, unless the person is a direct ancestor, it isn’t important enough for me to spend the effort to double- and triple-check everything. If a third cousin once removed has a year of death on his grave, that’s good enough for me. Richard Blake is my third great uncle by marriage. Had I not had the record of his will that contradicted the headstone, I wouldn’t have cared if the year was off by one.
On my cross country trip, I stopped in a number of locations to do some research that can’t be done via the internet (yet). One of those places was the Iowa Historical Society in Des Moines, which has microfilmed official county records and newspapers. I also stopped at a number of cemeteries.
One of my goals was to establish for certain whether or not the Stephen Parker buried in Saint John’s Cemetery in Clarion, Iowa is my third great uncle. I wrote about Stephen Parker last year. The census records show him as insane. I can now definitely conclude that Stephen Parker related to me is the same one buried near Clarion.
Stephen Parker headstone
First, a visit to the cemetery shows his headstone includes the notation Company C, 12th U.S. Infantry. I know the Stephen Parker that lived in Grant County Wisconsin served in Companies C and F of the 12th U.S. infantry. So that’s him. Unfortunately, the grave doesn’t have any dates on it, as is common on many Civil War veteran headstones.
Death of Stephen Parker
I knew he died before Jun 1897 due to news reports on his autopsy that appeared in that month. The Iowa Historical Society library had on microfilm the Wright County Monitor, the local Clarion newspaper. I started in June and worked backwards looking for a report on his death. I almost missed it, since it doesn’t include any headline at all. Just a long paragraph on his death. It appeared on the 2nd of June, and reports his date of death as being on the 29th of May.
I still have some details to figure out on this collateral branch. I don’t know exactly when or where Stephen Parker was born. It was between 1935 and 1937 in Ontario. And I don’t know anything about his wife’s parents other than their names on Margaret Parker’s death certificate. She emigrated from Ireland, but I don’t know where in Ireland. I don’t know if she immigrated with her family or on her own. The first mention I’ve found of her is when Stephen and she married in 1873.
I am tired of the zombie apocalypse. I don’t mean books or movies featuring diseases run rampant that turn people into mindless flesh-eating things. That’s still awesome!
I am tired of people talking about zombie apocalypses as if they are real. Except, not. See, if the zombies come, it’s not going to be like Shawn Of The Dead and Zombieland. It’s going to be more like Contagion, except with shambling people who can easily infect you. People won’t be out in the streets blowing off zombie heads with shotguns and shovels. They are going to be holed up in houses wondering when they’re next, and wondering if there’s going to be any food.
So to all the glib zombie apocalypse macro-ers, and to the marketers asking questions like How will you survive the zombie apocalypse?, I saw meh. Do it if you must, but I’m just not interested.
My grandfather Cleo Knapp Hathaway was born to Raymond Hathaway and Gertrude Knapp on 2 June 1925 in Buckley, Washington. The Hathaways moved from Buckley to Wallingford and later to Fremont and then Ballard.
Cleo attended Ballard High School. He dropped out to work, but was later persuaded to return by the principal of the school. He graduated in 1942.
Unlike many others of his day, he did not enlist in the military for World War II. Instead, he joined the merchant marine and served on ships supporting the war effort in the Philippine Islands. He used the money he’d saved during the war to bankroll Ray’s Frame Shop, a furniture framing shop run by the family. Business was not steady enough to provide for all of them, so in 1952 Cleo joined the Seattle Fire Department. Cleo rose through the ranks and retired in 1977 as a Deputy Fire Chief.
In 1948, Cleo married Vera Lou Hallin, who he’d met at a dance in Vasa Park held by the Swedish Club. Their first house was on 65th and Dibble in Ballard, but they moved a few years later to Olympic Manor in Crown Hill. In the 1970s, they moved to Sunset West on Shilshole. They had two daughters.
Cleo suffered from congestive heart failure beginning in the 1970s. He had pacemakers implanted over the years, which allowed him to enjoy an extended life. In the late 2000s, he had to limit his activities due to the condition. He died on 3 March 2010 at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle while undergoing an operation to improve the performance of his pacemaker.
My second great uncle Frank Edward Weiss was born on 30 May 1862 in Cassville, Wisconsin. He was the third child of Anton Weiss and Clara Voigt. Around 1890, Frank married Nannie Conaway from Illinois. The two of them lived in Pukwana, South Dakota, where they had four children, one of whom died very young. Frank operated a hardware business like his father and three brothers. He died on 5 August 1927 and is buried in Community Cemetery outside Pukwana.
I just got back from the Sounders vs. Columbus game. I can’t not comment.
Eddie Johnson needs to learn how to pass to his teammates. Bryan Meredith comes off his line far too much. The defense can’t turn the ball over to the opposing team in our third. Our free kicks looked awful. And for heaven’s sake, we need to be able to pass the ball through the mid-field instead of turning the ball over. The Sounders live and die by the 50/50 ball.
The strong points: other than the free kicks, Fredy Montero combined hustle and skill and turned nothing into something more than once. Flaco got himself into dangerous positions several times. Mauro looks a bit off, but still a solid play-maker.
My 2nd great aunt Dina Margareta Öman was born on 22 May 1904 to my 2nd great grandparents Albert Öman and Brita Johanna Strand in Håkansön near Piteå, Sweden. She died on 16 Mar 1907 (age 2). As was common in Sweden, Albert and Brita named their next daughter (born 4 months later) Dina Margareta.
I will be heading to WisCon next weekend. It’ll be my fourth year attending. At the moment, I’m thinking of canceling, though I probably won’t do so. I have no problem spending two months on my own, but the idea of being in a convention where I know only one or two people for a weekend gives me the heebie jeebies. I love the programming topics, which is why I go.
I do wish I knew more people who were interested in the kind of science fiction that’s discussed there, so I could talk them into going and not feel so on my own. (I should probably start talking it up in like, January, and see if there’s interest. Not wait until 6 days before my flight when it suddenly hits me that I’m gonna be on my own.
The best year was two years ago when Kim went. When Kim’s around, I’ll feel at home.
Sara will be there (if her flight plans don’t get messed up like last year), so there’ll be at least one person I know. And I will love the discussions.
I just had the first practical need for the family history information I’ve assembled. The heirs for aunt Babe’s estate are all nieces, nephews, and grand-nephews, since she never had children and outlived all her siblings. The lawyers for the estate needed to know when her siblings died to establish that they are, in fact, dead. None of the living relatives were even alive when Babe’s oldest sibling Joe died in 1931. I just saved the family a bunch of money to research all of that.
