Making new trees

A friend came over for dinner last night, with the promise that we'd look into her family history. I'm no professional genealogist, but enjoy delving into the documents that are available on Ancestry sites.

So we plugged in her data about her parents, knowing where and when they were born and died.  And then the little "hint leaves" started appearing.  That meant that Ancestry had found their data from some available data source.  The best information came from census reports.

Early census data just counted how many people were what age ranges

We saw such wonderful detail of family members that had lived in the early 20th century.  The census reports are available up until 1940. We wondered when 1950 would be available...is this a limitation from the federal government? Well, for now, the 1920 and 30 census data was great.

And just in case you didn't know, the data is not just a list of who lived in a household.  We got to see the actual census reports, hand written by the census takers on the date listed on the form.  It was like reading the interview with these ancestors.

My friend's family data from 1920 is somewhere on this census!

We learned how long they had been married, where they were born, what language they spoke, where their parents were born and the languages they spoke, and what their occupation was, and perhaps who they worked for.  And we learned about a person living in the household who was listed as a lodger, but turned out to be really the grandparent of the wife...but since she wasn't head of household, the census taker didn't have that category to use.  Thus this grandfather had an age given, which gave us his birthyear within a 2 year possibility based on whether he'd had his birthday for that year at the time of the census.

And then we got to see the actual draft registration cards for several of the men for WW I and WW II.  These told us how tall they were, their physical attributes like bald, color of hair and eyes, and general shape (slight, medium or stout).

So it was much better than looking at old scrapbooks.  In an hour we had looked at original documents that verified where her ancestors lived. We also were able to screen out people with same names and birth years who came from the wrong area of the country, or married the wrong name person.  That was the advantage of having my friend sitting there with me. If she hadn't been, I could have added a lot of data that was misleading.  She did have a few relatives with unusual names, and then one with a more common one.

So that was an entertaining evening, and I have her family tree started for her. It was like meeting Uncle Joseph and Aunt something-or-another at a family reunion, but we didn't have to smile and balance a plate of cake with a cup of coffee at the same time we shook hands!

Who says genealogy can't be fun!