Occupations

Have you ever wondered if you descend from farmers, seaman, tailors, or even shoemakers? Studying the lives of your ancestors and how they earned their living can be exciting and rewarding. When I found out that my 4th Great Grandfather served in the British Navy under Admiral Nelson that was all I could talk about to my children or anyone who would listen. This grandfather left a history of the ships he served on and the famous battles such as Battle of the Nile that he fought in. I immediately started studying books on Admiral Nelson and that era of history. I even found a children’s book full of drawings on what life was like serving in the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. Livelihoods provide a great insight into how your ancestors lived, but they also are essential to your genealogical research.

Knowing your ancestor’s occupation can help you differentiate between two John Smiths that are the same age, living in the same location, and both have a wife named Mary. If one John Smith is a farmer and the other is a blacksmith, it will be easier to keep them separate. Many sons followed the occupation of their fathers so knowing the father’s occupation can help you sort children to the right parents.

Occupations also give us clues to what other records may exist for your ancestor. Farmers would have land records if they owned their land. Those who worked for the railroad could possibly have a pension that could give clues about their family. FamilySearch Wiki has a listing for occupations and will give you a list of records available for the different professions. A Google search for occupations will bring you sites for occupations from different countries and time periods.

FamilySearch also has a great blog about “How to Discover Your Ancestor’s Occupation.” In this blog is a list of records that specify occupations. Some examples the blog gives are:

· Census records

· European parish records

· Obituaries

· City directories

· World War I and II draft registration cards and pension records

· Passenger lists

· Death and probate records

Whether you had an ancestor who ran a flour mill and practiced dentistry on the side (without a license) or was a farmer, understanding your ancestor’s occupation can help bring them to life and can also point you to other records that may help you extend your line further back.

Google Books

There is one type of genealogy resource that helps us move beyond the names and dates of our ancestor's lives. This resource is a wonderful place to find wills, obituaries, family stories, land ownership records and much more. These resources are in old books found in Google Books.

Google Books has lots of county histories. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was a push for county histories and biographical compilations. These books have geographic, social, economic, political and religious notes about specific areas. In the second half of the books are biographical sketches about prominent people in the area and these sketches may include relevant dates, lists and information on family members, and stories about these people.

Google Books is a collection of digitized books and magazines from around the world. Many are out of copyright and in the public domain. Some books you may only have a snippet view of the book, but there are many books that you can view the entire book and even download them as a PDF. For those books that only allow a snippet view, Google does help you find places where you may purchase a copy or even find a copy in a library near you.

You can search Google Books by your ancestor’s name and town or county where they lived. There are even books on court records, patents, and military books from the area you are searching. There are books about churches and congregations that my list your ancestors as attending these churches. By clicking control and f, you can do a search in these books for specific names or information you are researching.

First, go to Google Books (books.google.com), and you can start with a narrow search for books with your family names. As an example, I always start my search out with the family surname I’m looking for and add genealogy (Brinkerhoff family genealogy). I might even include the state, county, or town where they lived. Then look for ‘Tools’ at the top of the page. Click on it and choose ‘Any books’ from the drop-down menu. Next click on ‘Any books’ and from that drop-down menu choose ‘Free Google Books’ to get the books that you can read its complete version.

Next time you are researching, be sure and give Google Books a try! These books are great for finding information that may not be elsewhere.

Newspapers

Newspapers contain a variety of information that is useful to genealogists. Often, they are the last item that we check when searching for our ancestors, but they should be what we check next when vital records do not give us the information we need. Family Trees need the details that are found in newspapers.

Obituaries give us death dates, burial locations, and often provide information about the family such as spouse, children, siblings, and parents. Obituaries may provide biographical information about the deceased.

Birth announcements may contain the name of baby, birth date, place of birth, and parent’s names. Many times, they included the names of grandparents and other children in the family.

Marriage and engagement announcements give the name of the bride and groom and the date of marriage. These announcements may contain information about the wedding day such as what family and friends attended the wedding. You may be fortunate to have a photo of the couple included in the announcement.

You can find legal records in the newspaper. Probate records and court cases contain information about the ancestor such as names, relatives, and places of residence.

Many passenger lists are in newspapers. Many times, if you cannot find a passenger list for the ship your ancestor arrived on, it will be in the newspaper.

Photographs of your ancestor may be in the newspaper. You may find obituaries, weddings, birthdays, and family reunion photos in newspapers.

Even the advertisements can be useful for genealogists. The advertisements give us a glimpse into the styles of the day, the type of appliances that were popular or new and other social information that will help us understand how our ancestors lived. We may find the advertisement for an ancestor’s place of business.

Chronicling America (chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) is a great free website from the Library of Congress. It has newspapers from 1789-1924.

The Ancestor Hunt List of Newspaper Research Links (theancestorhunt.com/newspaper-research-links.html) contains a list of links by state of free online historical newspapers.

Elephind.com allows you to search over three million newspapers across the country. They add collections regularly so if you don’t find what you need now check back later.

Searching for your ancestor in a newspaper can be overwhelming, but with the help of free websites like those listed above, your search can be more manageable. Don’t forget to search in newspapers when looking for information about your ancestors.

Family Trees on Ancestry.com

There are many resources out there to aid us in our search for our ancestors. One resource that many overlook is Family Trees on Ancestry.com. There are many ways to use Family Trees, but I will cover two important uses in this article.

First, there is a lot of research information that is available in these trees. When you start researching a name the first place to look is the Family Trees section on Ancestry. About 75% of all research is duplicate research. By searching for your particular research name or family in this section, you can see who is also researching those ancestors. This search also gives you names of those who may be researching the same line as you and you can contact them and hopefully work together and share information.

Not all Trees are alike. The valuable ones are the ones with sources attached to verify the information in their tree. These sources can save you lots of hours of research time because someone has taken the time to find them for you. Be sure and verify each source for accuracy though.

There are treasures in these trees too. I have found lots of photos, newspapers articles, and histories that are from private sources and only found in these trees. One great find was portraits painted of ancestors from the 1700s. People have been generous in sharing their information.

Another use for Ancestry Family Trees is to upload your tree onto Ancestry and let Ancestry research for you. Those shaky leaves are a significant help in locating documents and other information that will aid your research. Ancestry does link to Family Search, and you can upload your tree from FamilySearch into Ancestry. Ancestry only uploads four generations at a time, and so you will have to go to the end of the line and upload four more to get your bigger trees onto Ancestry.

The records you find on Ancestry can be sourced to your tree on FamilySearch through a free browser extension from recordseek.com. Recordseek has step-by-step instructions on how to attach your sources. This an excellent resource for those using both sites.

The first thing one should do when starting their research is to check to seek if someone else has also researched those same ancestors. Take advantage of all that Ancestry Family Trees has to offer. Have fun researching with those shaky leaves!

Audacity

Heraclitus’ statement “The only thing that is constant is change” is an excellent description of the world today. The world has changed so much in just the last fifty or so years. Remember the days when our music was played on vinyl records, then came the 8-track tapes. Cassette tapes were the big hit because not only could you play your music, you could also record your own stuff on them. Today everything has gone digital so what do we do with all our previous collections? Many of us have recorded family events and interviews with family members on cassette tapes. Are those memories going to be lost when there are no cassette players to play them on, or when the cassette tapes eventually break? Luckily, we have Audacity to help us out.

Audacity is free software used for audio editing downloaded from www.audacityteam.org/download/. You will find the manual on how to use Audacity at https://ometra.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/audacity-manual.pdf. You will need a cassette player, audio cable, and your computer then you will be all set to convert those cassettes into mp3’s. There are many YouTube videos on how to use Audacity, and I would highly recommend viewing several. These YouTubes will give you an excellent visual and understanding of how it works. A Google search of “convert cassette tapes to mp3 with Audacity YouTube” should bring you up pages of beginner videos to get you started.

When you turn your cassette tapes into an mp3, you can then upload your information onto FamilySearch. By converting those old cassette tapes, you will preserve your audio treasures for all to hear and enjoy. My husband has a cassette recording of his Grandmother speaking in church right before he left on his LDS mission. She passed away a few months later. Wouldn’t it be nice if this recording could be saved onto FamilySearch for her posterity to enjoy? Others have recordings of Grandparents telling stories about their lives. Imagine how nice that would be to listen to their stories in their own voice and have it saved for all to enjoy.

If you are lucky enough to have valuable recordings on cassette tapes, it is crucial for you to save them to a format that can be used by FamilySearch and archived for posterity’s sake. The challenge of this technology-rich world is to keep our information up-to-date and keep valuable information available for future generations.

Time Travel with the Wayback Machine

Have you ever been searching for information about an ancestor and came across a website that is no longer accessible? Just the other day the information I desperately needed was in RootsWeb, and Ancestry.com has locked up this valuable resource because of security reasons. I used the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org ) to find the information I needed. It was pretty slick. The Wayback Machine is time travel for genealogists!

The Wayback machine is great for recovering lost information from the internet and especially information locked up in RootsWeb. In the search bar on the Wayback Machine’s home page, you enter the URL or words related to a site’s homepage. The Wayback Machine has over 505 billion archived web pages dating back to 1996. This machine crawls through the web taking snapshots of websites every so often.

Internet archive is making it easier to access archived versions of dead web pages. It now has an add-on for the Google Chrome browser. If you land on a web page that gives you an error code such as “page not found” or “404,” this extension will query the Wayback Machine to check for anything in the archives.

The Wayback Machine can be a lifesaver if you have on an old web link that no longer works or “link rot” as many have put it. Link rot does not just happen to websites; it happens to our citations also. Our citations should lead us back to where we found our information and if we included the URL and it has changed then we have problems with our citations.

It is important to remember that the Web is not permanent. An article that you regularly refer to can suddenly vanish. If the item was valuable to your research, it is best to print it up or take a screenshot of your article and save it to your computer or the cloud or even share the article with other family members. Be sure to include the URL in case you need to access an archived version through the Wayback Machine.

If you come across the “page not found” message, be sure and try the Wayback Machine to find an archive of the page you need. If you don’t have the URL, you can still do a keyword search and find the information that you need. No more lost information!

Naming Patterns

Many times, during our genealogy research we come across the use of several names over and over making it difficult to keep the families separate. For instance, in England, you may find half the boys named John, William, or Thomas and half the girls named Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, or Ann. It is not uncommon to find ancestors with several grandchildren with the same name. Lucky are those whose ancestors used unusual names and passed those names down from generation to generation. It was the tradition in many families to give their children the names of other family members, usually in a specific order. This tradition is called naming patterns and is a significant help in our research.

British Naming Conventions from FamilySearch Wiki gives the following example for British naming patterns:

• The first son was named after the paternal grandfather
• The second son was named after the maternal grandfather
• The third son was named after the father
• The fourth son was named after the oldest paternal uncle
• The fifth was named after the second oldest paternal uncle or the oldest maternal uncle

• The first daughter was named after the maternal grandmother
• The second daughter was named after the paternal grandmother
• The third daughter was named after the mother
• The fourth daughter was named after the oldest maternal aunt
• The fifth was named after the second oldest maternal aunt or the oldest paternal aunt

If there was duplication (for example, the paternal grandfather and the father had the same name), then the family moved to the next position on the list.

Many other countries used naming patterns also. FamilySearch Wiki and Google are a good place to search for these lists. It was also common in many countries to use the name of a child that had died for the next child. At first glance, it would seem that the couple named two of their children the same name. When you see this pattern, it is a good heads-up to look at the death records for the death of the first child.

Naming patterns are not absolute. Many used these patterns but not all. Lucky is the researcher whose ancestors used these patterns. But be careful and use naming patterns as a guide because they are not a set of rules that all followed. Given names may be the clue you need to move back to the next generation.