As the school year comes to a close, I think about how exciting it was to find the school enrollment records for ancestors. Knowing when each sibling attended school, if there was a discipline issue and what grade they received, provided for a better understanding of their earlier days.
The home addresses listed showed where the family moved to and which children grew up together. In most cases the parents were listed and that helped clarify a few loose ends of multiple children with the same first and last names.
Hidden Sources by Laura Szucs Pfeiffer discusses school records and their value in finding other genealogical record groups.
Reading old probate records has always been interesting for finding out whom was left what. Cows, pigs, and bed linens being passed along to the children helps in keeping track of which sons were still alive, and if lucky, seeing the married names of the daughters. The value of these estate items is also interesting when it is put into prospective of the time and place of the family.
The value amount became even more interesting after reading Estate Inventories: How to Use Them by Kenneth L. Smith. I learned how to convert the estate amounts into current currency. Reading newspaper advertisements for understanding the costs of day to day items during those times, and comparing that to the finances of the estate, brings together a better picture of how the family lived or how wealthy or not they might have been.
Kenneth’s book also has a great glossary of words that are found in estate inventories. I know now that dozen is not only 12 but also a coarse woolen cloth. That cleared up a lot of confusion in one particular probate record.
Today, when I think of the white pages, online directories are the first place I look. With the aid of digitization projects, I can view city directories from the time when my ancestors might have been listed.
I was very fortunate to find an ancestor’s death date listed under his widow’s entry in Sioux City, Iowa city directory. Not the type of information I had expected to find in a city directory.
City directories are similar to a census record in that they give a snap shot of a family in a particular location at a point in time. Following a family through the years (especially years without census records), can provide valuable information on residence, occupations, and possible family members.
I was recently working on a family tree which branched off into Massachusetts. Records found online at New England Historic Genealogical Society greatly helped finding the family in Essex County. Now I wanted to find more information, and hopefully the probate for a few family members.
Now as would happen when I am on a roll, the internet connection failed. This gave me the perfect opportunity to check out Diane Rapaport’s New England Court Records. I truly enjoy finding a book that makes finding information easy. I was able to quickly find where in Essex County, records can be found in print, microform, and digital copies.
Now to record in my research log possible research sources…
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