May’s Theme and Week 18: Love and Marriage (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – 2024 Version)

The theme for Week 18 is "Love and Marriage." There are so many ways you could approach this theme! Ancestors who got married multiple times; elopement stories; ancestors who were married a long time; or even the surname of Love! Click here to check out all the Themes for 2024.

I use Family Tree Maker for maintaining my genealogy. My main tree which is for my ancestry, shows there are 7,838 marriages for 21,282 people. 

Next, I wondered if I could print a report showing all the marriages. I went to the Publish workspace and under Relationship Reports there is a Marriage Report. This report will list the husband’s name, the wife’s name, their marriage date and relationship, such as Spouse-Ongoing. This report is great to see who is missing a recorded marriage date, I hate to say this, but way too many people. I also noticed that I don’t always have complete names for their spouses either. Then I decided to see how someone who remarried their spouse would show, and it only shows the preferred marriage. There was no option to specify to show alternate marriages. This report ended up being 185 pages long.

Thus, I decided to look if there was any other report about marriages that might be interesting. Under Other, I found a Calendar Report. This report allows you to pick the beginning month and year and how many months you want the calendar for. You can include birthdays, marriages and deaths. Thus, I unchecked the birthdays and deaths and looked at the results. Since I didn’t see my parent’s marriage listed, I looked at people options and realized I need to uncheck “Include births & marriages only if still living.” 

Now my parent’s marriage is showing, however, I wondered if it was cutting some people off because of the font size. I changed the Event font to Extra Small. It appeared to add people to the calendar. I even noticed that there is a checkbox for “use married name for female marriages. However, if unchecked then it cuts people out because of space and I decided I better leave it checked.

As I scrolled through the months, I saw that there were no blank days. Plus, since this is a leap year, I even had one marriage on Feb 29th. I decided to check out 2023 and see what happened to that marriage. It didn’t skip the marriage, but instead added it to Feb 28th, with (Feb 29) placed before the couple’s name.  

This calendar allows you to select just Immediate Family, Extended Family, All Individuals (this is what I selected) and Selected Individuals. 

I decided to try the Selected Individuals and where the marriage date is after 12/31/1899, which stated there was 6348 marriages. There were 1160 marriages before 01/01/1900. Next, I tried marriages after 01/01/1500 and there were 7430. When I tried marriages before 01/01/1500, I had 58 and I noticed an error since I saw people who were included had birth dates of 1923, 1956, 1957, etc… This was because they had a marriage month and day but no year.  Thus, I might want to find an actual year for these individuals. 

I tried seeing how marriages occurred before today (04/26/2024) and it reported 7474. Remember, FTM told me there were 7838 marriages. Plus, the marriages after 12/31/1899 were 6348 and the marriage before 01/01/1900 were 1160 this adds up to 7508. So, I have three different totals. FTM grand total probably includes those with no marriage date, or for people who were married more than once to the same person, such as my great grandparents, which had their preferred marriage only showing on the calendar.

Perhaps the calendar only counts the preferred spouse marriage for those who were marred multiple times.  However, I could not verify this, my uncle’s daughters all were married more than once and I could not find any marriage for them on the calendar. Perhaps there wasn’t room to include them? This is 15 different marriage dates for four female cousins. However, when I selected “Immediate Family” all their marriages were showing on the calendar.

When I selected “Extended Family”, it included my uncle’s wife’s first marriage.

Looking back at the Marriage Report, I see that I have the same "Individuals to include" options and if I want to dive deeper into the the numbers I got when running the calendar, this might be a good report to assist in this process. 

Anyway, this was a very interesting project. I learned that I need to find more marriage dates for people. The Calendar option is fun, perhaps printing one for a family reunion would be cool, keeping in mind that if it is printing preferred marriages, to make sure that the living people have their current spouse as preferred. 

Remember to have fun and Just Do Genealogy!

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!

Week 15 – School Days (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – 2024 Version)

The theme for Week 15 is "School Days." Any teachers, principals, or school staff in your family tree? What about favorite stories of attending school or fun things you've found in school records or yearbooks? Click here to see all the prompts for 2024.

My mother was a teacher for a year. After graduating college from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, she went to work in the DePere, Wisconsin area as a PhyEd, Science and Math instructor. She met her first husband and were married within a year, thus she quit teaching once she was married.

Her sister, my Aunt Mary went to college in Oshkosh, Wisconsin and taught from graduation all the way through to retirement. Her first job was in my hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. She taught one year there and then was able to obtain a job in her hometown of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin where she taught 3rd grade, I believe at the same elementary school during her entire career. She retired in the late 1980’s and even had to learn how to use a PC during her final year(s) of teaching. My aunt Mary is who helped me with my genealogy. I didn’t realize she was interested in genealogy until a family reunion in the 1990’s. 

We collaborated together for the next year; I gave her a computer to input all the pages of a book we published. She was using an electric typewriter. She was hooked on computers when she realized she didn’t have to start from scratch, if she wanted to insert new something on a page. 

I ended up working for a Community College in Arizona as the Enrollment Services Specialist. Basically, I was in charge of registration, collecting registration fees and verifying online enrollment. My busiest months were January and August. However, they slowly were offering more and more classes that started almost anytime of the year and my job had more busy days than not.

My eldest son works for an Elementary School in Sheboygan, Wisconsin as the computer tech support/library aide. This job was critical during the Pandemic when students were be taught remotely. He had to track the Chromebooks that were lent to the students, help teachers who might have issues with their on-line classes. While instructors could teach at home, he had to come into school everyday and be available to support the technology needs of students and teachers alike. 

Remember to have fun and Just Do Genealogy!