Part of our Heritage– an unknown girl and her Ramblings on a horse. Picture was found in with Lee family photos.
… if you are related, that is.
When we decided to put our family stories and research out there, we weighed how difficult it would be to cover all the family names we both had been researching for many years. We thought about separate blogs for each family, but knew that it would be hard to provide an adequate number of posts on a regular basis with so many blogs. So we lumped everyone together into our “Heritage Ramblings.” Now that we have quite a few posts up (58!), we have realized it may be hard for readers to figure out exactly which family member in a post might be one of their ancestors, especially once we go back a few generations and names may be unfamiliar.
We still do plan to get some pedigree charts up on the site, but haven’t found an easy or attractive chart to use yet.
In the meantime, if you are related to either of us bloggers, there are four ways you can easily find your family on our “Heritage Ramblings” blog:
1. NEW!I have created separate pages for the major family groupings of published posts. To access these, click on “Pedigrees” and look for a family group that might interest you. The title, an image, and an excerpt of each of the posts published to date that reference those families will be listed. Simply click on the title to be taken directly to the post. (Sorry the drop-down menu isn’t pretty yet, but it is finally functional. Under construction…)
2. Use the “Search” box on the righthand sidebar of any page. Just type in a name, keyword, or place, then click “Search,” and a listing of pertinent posts will automagically appear.
3. That same righthand sidebar contains a list of “Tags” that have been used on our blog posts. The size and boldness of the word indicates how frequently it has been used as a tag- the bigger and bolder, the more frequently that tag has been used to help you search in our blog. Click on the word and you will be taken immediately to a list of posts that are tagged with that word or phrase.
4. Continuing down the righthand sidebar, you will find a list of “Categories” used on the blog. Posts are categorized by family, such as “Underwood,” or a topic, such as “Genealogy How-To.” Just click a category to find all the posts associated with that category.
Happy ancestor hunting- and reading!
Notes, Sources, and References:
1) This image was in with Lee family photos. If related, the cutie on a horse could also be an Aiken or Alexander.
Please contact us if you would like a higher resolution image.
Copyright 2014 by Heritage Ramblings Blog and pmm.
We would love to read your thoughts and comments about this post, and thank you for your time! All comments are moderated, however, due to the high intelligence and persistence of spammers/hackers who really should be putting their smarts to use for the public good instead of spamming our little blog.
Edith Roberts- Declamatory Contest. Prairie City News, Prairie City, Jasper Co., Iowa, shortly after 2 Feb 1917. (From a clipping without date)
Telling the family stories is a wonderful legacy to pass on to your children.
But I can’t find ANYTHING about my ancestor ANYWHERE…
Don’t know much about the actual stories of the lives of your ancestors? There are many resources available, both online and at specific places that can help you piece together a life and/or a family. If you are not lucky enough to have many family stories, you can learn more about your ancestors to help put their lives in context.
Newspapers
Newspapers are a great resource for learning the stories of ancestors, or the places and times in which they lived. Newspapers of 50+ years ago included who was visiting where, long or one-line obituaries, detailed political and voter information, etc. The obituary of Jefferson Springsteen (1820-1909) tells of him running away to join the circus as a boy- how could he then be upset when his son Abram Springsteen ran away to join the Union Army as a drummer boy at age 12? There is a story there… A short note about Miss Edith Roberts (1899-1982) taking first place in the Declamatory Contest as well as “the Dramatic’ is on the same page as the notice of the “Death of Grandma Roberts” (her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Ann Murrell Roberts, 1835-1917). What mixed emotions Edith must have felt that day! Such information from newspapers allows us to realize and then understand the challenges and triumphs of those who have gone before, and help us tell the stories of our ancestor’s lives.
“Death of Grandma Roberts”- Elizabeth Ann Murrell Roberts. Prairie City News, Prairie City, Jasper Co., Iowa. Undated newspaper clipping but Elizabeth died 02 Feb 1917.
Genealogy Bank is my favorite newspaper website for ease of use and breadth of papers held, though it is a for-pay website. Ancestry.com also has newspapers, as do a few other for-pay websites. Some favorite free websites are chroniclingamerica.loc.gov, http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc for California newspapers, and http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html for New York state and other newspapers, postcards, etc.
If you can’t find articles about your own family, read through the headlines, ads, and social columns of the newspaper from where they lived and during that time period- it will help to put your ancestors into the context of their times.
Books
There are many books that can be found in the history section of the bookstore or library that can help you to piece together more information about your ancestor’s probable daily life. (Jane Austen’s England by Roy Adkins is on my list to read- it tells about everyday life in the late 18th and early 19th century England.) Used or out-of-print books may be found at abebooks.com, alibris.com, or a local used bookseller can do a search for you. Many other family or social history sources can be found on Google Books (books.google.com), such as county histories. Although your ancestor may not have had the money or inclination to buy a writeup in a county history (AKA “Mug Books” since they sometimes required a payment to be included), just reading about the area in the first part of the history can give an idea of the topography, religion, economics, goods and services provided, social groups, etc. Google Books may give you a snippet of information from a book so that you can determine if you would like to buy it, or it may provide an ebook for free to download. The Internet Archive (https://archive.org) has millions of pages of books, videos, etc. available for free. (Sadly, some of them are OCR’d images and may be hard to read, but may still be useful.) They also offer “The Way Back Machine” to help you find old web pages from now-defunct websites. Another good free online book source is hathitrust.org.
WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org) is a great place to find a book, and then your library may be able to get it on interlibrary loan for you if it can’t be found locally. College libraries that include manuscript or special collections and dissertations may provide wonderful information. Some may be dry and/or scholarly, but you may be able to find information that can help you enhance the date and place information you already know about your family.
Here are some social history questions to ask, and research, about your ancestor’s time, place, and life:
What events were going on locally, nationally?
What was the economy like? Boom time or bust, or just a long struggle like in the 1890s?
What were prevailing religious views?
What were political leanings and issues of those in the area where your ancestor lived?
What provided income to your ancestor, and how common was that occupation?
Some of the answers can help provide family stories. We inherited some strange tools- they were very old and it was hard to tell what they were used for. They belonged to descendants of George Lee (1821-aft 1880) who lived in Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire, England, which was a large shoe-making center. George and his sons all came to America, and at least one son, Josiah, was a shoemaker. With the knowledge that shoemaking was important in their hometown in England, and then the US Federal Census that listed shoemaking as an occupation for Josiah, some online research for shoemaking tools helped us identify the purpose of the artifacts. The tools we have were probably Josiah’s, and now we can add shoemakers to the family stories.
When telling your family stories, whether in print, electronic form, or oral stories, it is important to ALWAYS differentiate general facts from those known specifically about your family. Also, document sources with proper citations, so that you or others may revisit those sources to verify or disprove ideas and ‘facts.’
Adding social history to your research can give a deeper understanding of the lives of our ancestors, and enrich the family stories we leave as a legacy to our descendants.
Notes, Sources, and References:
1) Newspaper clippings are from the Prairie City News, around 02 Feb 1917.
2) I have no affiliation with any of the websites listed, and do not receive any benefits from them financially or in product. (FTC Disclosure.)
Please contact us if you would like higher resolution images.
Copyright 2013 by Heritage Ramblings Blog and pmm.
Real photo postcard (RPPC) of Sarah & Chouteau Ave. in St. Louis, Missouri. The “X” marks where the pharmacy was.Reverse of Lee drugstore location postcard. Ink inscription: “This is where I hangout about 14 hours a day.” Written by Lloyd Eugene Lee, RPh. (Printed info in pencil is from a family get together when we looked at all the old photos while most of the folks who knew what was in them were still with us.)
This sweet young girl’s portrait was in with photos from the Samuel Lee family in St. Louis, Missouri. It would have been taken after 1881.Reverse of sweet young girl’s portrait that was in with photos from the Samuel Lee family in St. Louis, Missouri.
Any ideas out there of who this may be?
Please contact us if you would like higher resolution images.
Copyright 2013 by Heritage Ramblings Blog and pmm.
