Tips For Southern Research

 Right off the bat, I'll bet you're surprised to see the number of states included under the umbrella of "southern," as in Southern Genealogy Research. Surprise, indeed!

I attended the 2023 RootsTech and listened to a speaker (whose name I didn't scribble down) speak about Southern Research and giving some tips for same:

• Learn as much history on/from your family as you can! 
• Reason out the facts......... was it indeed a southern state?
• Brush up on your U.S. history from 1763 to 1775 for starters.
• Then progress to the Civil War time period. 
• Know that Georgia was only 1/2 British and was 1/2 Native American.
• Yes, while many courthouses were burned and records lost, not everything was lost. The documentation of the county's wealth and income was all important (how to levy taxes if you didn't know who owned what land?) and were reconstructed.
• Search the land records and deeds of target states.
• Attempt a time line for each family in your target location.
• Plot the family's migration into and then through the Southern states. 
• Check newspapers for that time and place.
• Correlate info from all available records: land, census, probate, court, military
• BE AWARE OF COUNTY BOUNDARY CHANGES!
• Use period maps.
• Watch for name changes or just misspellings.
• Southern "speech" often use "brother/cousin" when there was no relationship
• Each southern state has historical societies and archives as do many of the counties in those states. Many of these societies had many much of their holdings available online. 

Example: My hubby's great-grandfather, Seaborn Phillips, born 1844 in Georgia and died in 1906 in Texas. Why Texas? He was a Confederate soldier (was at the Battle of Gettysburg, he said) and after the war, Georgia was devastated and had no resources to pay pensions to veterans, so he moved his family west to Texas where pensions were to be had (Texas was not heavily impacted by the war). 

Filles du Roi

 Was your ancestral mother a filles du roi? If so, be proud. These women are known as the founding mothers of Canada.

Here's the history:

To secure his colonial claims in North America, King Louis XIV of France had to strengthen his settlements in New France (Nova Scotia). French officials recruited girls and women to migrate to New France to increase the population. They became known as the filles du roi, or King's Daughters.

From 1663 to 1673, nearly 1000 women came to New France. In exchange, the women received money, clothes and household items. Almost all of these women married and had children, doubling the population. 

From the perspective of the French Crown, the program was a success. However, little has been recorded of how these women viewed their experiences. 

The women were to be of child-bearing age and especially so, in good health. The women picked for this "adventure" were chosen by their age, health and physical strength, not necessarily for their looks. They had to be "in good health and strong enough for field work and have strong skills when it comes to domestic tasks..."

There are many Canada-based societies dedicated to preserving the memory, experiences and descendancy of these so-called King's Daughter. Also, YouTube offers several video-stories. 

So be proud if your great-x-time-grandmother was a Kings' Daughter!

Are You A Francophone?

 

A francophone, simply put, is one who speaks French primarily as a first language. We might guess that there are many French speaking people in Canada and Louisiana but I never would have guess that there are so many francophones in the rest of the world, especially Africa. 

According to an article in American Ancestors, Fall 2010, by Felix Lafrance:

Between 1840 and 1930, more than 900,000 French-Canadians left Canada for the U.S. This massive exodus was the result of many complex factors. In 19th century French Canada faced significant economic and socio-cultural changes as it transformed from a rural society to an industrial economy. ...... as economic development exploded, the lives of the working people became worse.... pricing, lack of farmland, poor quality of arable land, debt.. left many French Canadians without a home or a job.

So they came to the United States. But where? By 1900 there was a sizable French-speaking population in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Smaller groups were in New Hampshire, and Maine. And they did well in their new home. 

What attracted them to the U.S.? If lack of jobs, debts and poverty were the primary reasons why French-Canadians left their native land, the pull exerted by America was a factor.  By the end of the Civil War, American industry found itself with a shortage of workers in all sectors..... housing, construction, dam and canal building, installing and maintaining roads, sewage and aqueduct systems, farming, timber and especially industrial manufacturing. These industries experienced unprecedented growth due to the influx of French-Canadians eager to work.  

American life itself was a powerful attraction. American cities promised a new way of life and escape from agricultural work. "City delights" attracted the young. 

Bottom line, the "fever of departure" caused almost one million French-Canadians to immigrate to the U.S. between 1840 and 1930. Perhaps your ancestor was among them??

Do you still speak some French?? 

Are You Your Own Brickwall?

 

In genealogy, the term “brick wall” is often used to refer to tough research problems, apparent dead-ends that after many hours of searching still yield no answers. 

We all think we know about brick walls because most of us have them..... or have had them in our family history research. Am I right? Ever considered that you might be your own brickwall??

A handout from FamilySearch identifies some common genealogical mistakes and offers strategies for overcoming them:

• GETTING STARTED
• Talk to family!! Do not skip this step.
• Realize that there is information beyond the Internet.
• Realize that while online family trees are great CLUES, unless they are well documented, they are not to be taken as  gospel.
• Get over the "if it's not free, I don't/can't/want it." (There is a cost associated with creating and maintaining websites, obtaining and organizing records, etc)
• THE RESEARCH PROCESS
• Plan your research; don't succumb to SOS (Shiny Object Syndrome)
• Don't start at the wrong end.... meaning start with today, document your ancestry from today on back .... and you'll likely find clues to that end-of-line ancestor.
• Focus on one family at a time... NOT an individual. Not one man or woman was totally alone but was surrounded by family, friends and neighbors. (In those olden times of the 1800s, where did an ailing old widow go? To live with her children or grandchildren! There was no Social Security.)
• Be aware of spelling variations: Phillips, Philips, Phillipss, Filips, Flips, etc. are all the same surname (most likely, spoken by one who could not spell). 
• WORKING WITH RECORDS
• Aim to access the "real" or bottom-line source, not a derivative source. Ask: where did she get that information as shown on her online tree????? SHE is not a source for you! 
• Do you collect names and bits and pieces of likely-looking information in hopes of fitting the puzzle pieces together? Doesn't work well, does it, and soon you have desk overflowing with papers! Take the time..... make the time... to analyze your findings. Take time to spread it out on a table and think how it might or does fit. 
• It is most worthwhile to write up your idea, your analyzing, your thoughts. Just because you've gathered a bunch of facts about an individual or a family, do you have the right family and/or all the information? A school notebook is great; you're not writing a novel but just jotting ideas. 😐

There are dozens of websites offering "Overcoming Brickwalls" and many YouTube videos of the same. Instead of giving up, or quitting when all the low-hanging fruit is picked, or succumbing to SOS, give yourself a shake and learn how to NOT be your own brick wall!

Trivia..... No April Fooling!

 

Today dinner time often means sharing a pizza....... at the table or in front of the TV or computer. But it was NOT like that in the olden days.

An old Miss Manners newspaper column gives the courses, and the order of these courses, for a 19th century dinner....... all served with different and appropriate dishes, silverware and wine:

• Raw oysters
• Soup, often a cream soup
• Hors d'oeuvres
• Fish
• Entree... not what we think today but vegetables like asparagus, artichoke, corn
• Sorbet
• Hot roast
• Cold roast
• Game
• Salad
• Pudding
• Ice Cream
• Fruit
• Cheese

"Never fear, "Miss Manners touted "these were times when thinness was considered not chic, but pitiful. But even then, guests were not supposed to et everything. It was like an entire (menu) from which to pick and choose."

Keep in mind, that at these L-O-N-G dinners, you're wearing heavy, formal attire (corsets, full skirts, sleeves) and there was no AC in summer and it was considered bad manners to absent yourself from the table. If invited, would you attend???

Cajun & Creole

 (The above was snipped from The Historic New Orleans Collection; used with thanks. The map below was snipped from the website of the Laura Plantation; again with thanks. The bottom information was snipped from the website Explore Houma, Louisiana's Bayou Country; with thanks.)

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CAJUN & CREOLE

The term Creole can have many meanings, but during the early days of Louisiana, it meant that a person was born in the colony and was the descendant of French or Spanish parents. The term is a derivative of the word “criollo,” which means native or local, and was intended as a class distinction. In present Louisiana, Creole generally means a person or people of mixed colonial French, African American and Native American ancestry. The term Black Creole refers to freed slaves from Haiti and their descendants.

Still another class of Creole originates with the placage system in which white and creole men took on mixed-race mistresses in a lifelong arrangement, even if the men were married or married later. In this arrangement, the women had property, their children were educated and entitled to part of the man’s estate upon his death. In New Orleans, these people made up the artisan class and became wealthy and very influential.

“Cajun” is derived from “Acadian” which are the people the modern day Cajuns descend from. These were the French immigrants who were expelled from Nova Scotia, and eventually landed in Louisiana after decades of hardship and exile. Hearty folks from many backgrounds married into the culture, including Germans, Italians, Free People of Color, Cubans, Native Americans and Anglo-Americans. French or patois, a rural dialect, was always spoken. Due to the isolation of the group in the southern locations of Louisiana, they have retained a strong culture to this day.

ANY QUESTIONS? Ask Google!

Museums...... Best Places For Learning

 

Bet you had no clue that there was a museum in Spokane having over 19,000 articles from the fire fighting industry?? I did not! But I do want to go!

There are plenty of museums in the Eastern Washington area. Below is a copied bit from the Washington State Genealogical Society (www.wasgs.org) where you'll find a pages-long list of museums spread all around our Evergreen State! (The list was mostly compiled by EWGS member, Duane Beck.)

As that list on the state society webpage covers the entire state, even in your travels you might/could/should/ought to visit a museum and get some extra "larnin into your noggin."  (Speaker George Schweitzer used to say that.) 

There were these many listed for the Spokane area.....the entire list was PAGES long...... so there are plenty of museums in your area to learn from and visit!

P.S. The list was compiled some time ago. If you wish to visit a particular museum, I'd strongly advise you to check out their website and/or their Facebook page.