Week 17: War (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – 2024 Version)

The theme for Week 17 is "War." One would be hard pressed to find someone whose family history was not touched by war. This week, consider someone in your family tree who was affected by war, whether as a soldier or a civilian. Click here to see all the 2024 prompts.

As the song goes, WAR, what is it good for, NOTHING. Actually, from a genealogy perspective, it can produce lots of genealogical records.

It was from Civil War pension files, that I was able to get more information about two of my ancestors. In fact, one of those ancestors gave testimony for the other’s pension. One was the son-in-law of the other, thus, it confirmed what my female’s maiden name was. These pension files shed light on what happened to my ancestor(s) during the war and afterwards.

I even found out that my female ancestor started collecting a death benefit on her “not so dead” husband. He was living in a Veterans Home in one state and she was living in the neighboring state. When he reached the age to start collecting a disability benefit, they found out she was collecting. They only gave her a slap on the hand, and just stopped paying her. It doesn’t appear they made her pay back any benefits. And then when he did die, she started collecting again. 

I have found other ancestors and relatives in draft card registrations. Even though they didn’t actually get drafted, they filled out a card. These cards sometimes give physical descriptions of my relative, along with their birth date and place, where they are living and who their “next of kin” might have been. I found a few who were married at the time of the draft that I never knew had married. 

If your relative did serve, perhaps a family member requested one of those special headstones for your relative. That generated another document, where it will give a birth and death date, a burial location and even date of service. My mother’s first husband died while she was married to him and the card has my mother’s signature on it. I just noticed that it was placed on the grave on the day my mother gave birth to my brother. She had just found out she was pregnant with her sixth child when her husband died from a tragic work-related accident.  

Don’t forget to explore the military paperwork that is associated with War.

Remember Just Do Genealogy!

Week 16: Step (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks)

The theme for Week 16 is "Step." When I wrote this theme, I thought about all of the "step" relationships in our family trees and how they are often overlooked. But there are numerous ways to interpret "step" -- steps in a house, long walks, steps in a process, etc. Feel free to be creative! Click here to see all of the 2024 prompts. 

When I think of Step, I do think of the steps in a process. Especially my steps during my research. Over the many years that I have been doing genealogy, my steps have changed. I could not afford or even justify the expense of having an Ancestry subscription because I didn’t do genealogy on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis to justify the expense. Thus, my research was done in spurts, I might set a weekend aside, usually when Ancestry was offering a free weekend and I would gather, collect and save all the documents I could find. Then I would sort through those saved documents and analysis if they were for my people. 

The problem, I rarely saved the source citation and thus inputting this information into my tree was lacking a very important part of the entire process, creating a source citation.

Thus, I decided to develop a process on how I would record information in my genealogy software. After, I analysis the data and determine it is for my person, I enter the information along with creating a citation. Then I will save the document to my computer in my genealogy folder, keeping it organized and giving the file a meaningful name. 

At first, this process, seemed daunting and cumbersome. I wasn’t familiar to all these new steps. However, in the long run, it actually saved me time, because I don’t have to guess where I found information. I can quickly find an image of a source document if I want to review it again. The process is so second nature, I do it without much thought.

Plus, my genealogy software package, Family Tree Maker, updated it’s features to allow me to copy the same citation to different facts and even different people. I used to have to retype the citation for every fact I wanted to associated it to. However, FTM now allows me to easily copy and link the citation to any fact I desire. Thus, if I click on a citation, I can easily see what other facts are found on the record.

Do you have process in place when you do your genealogy research? A process can assure that you aren’t missing an important step such as creating a citation. Trust me, unless you have an eidetic memory (which science has never found a single verifiable case), you won’t remember where you searched or where you found that piece of information. 

Remember to have fun and Just Do Genealogy!