Staats Genealogical Services

In the course, of doing publicity for various genealogy events, I’ve run into this problem many times:

After compiling a distribution list of all the chapters in the area, I send an announcement about a particular event. Inevitably, several of them bounce as they are often older, inactive personal email addresses. Even some that do go through don’t get to the right person. Since officers change frequently, often the person I send the message to is no longer in the corresponding secretary position (or president, or whoever was listed as the contact), and they then have to forward the email to someone else, or ask me to resend it.

While I’m sure that some societies already do this, wouldn’t it make sense that each society have a one, set email address for each particular board or committee position? This address could then be configured to forward messages to the personal email addresses of whoever is currently in that position. Setting up that forwarding is pretty painless, and doesn’t require that you have a technical guru on staff.

For example, if I am trying to send something to the newsletter editor at the Anycounty Genealogical Society. Looking on their website or other online listings, I would see that the email address is “AGS_Newsletter@gmail.com”, and all the other offices have similar addresses (AGS_President@gmail.com, AGS_Programs@gmail.com, etc). If Jane Smith were the editor in September, and I sent her an article, it would go to the AGS_News address and be forwarded to her personal email address. When I want to send something else in February, unbeknownst to be, the new newsletter editor is John Jones. Since, the AGS folks were slightly tech-savy, and updated the forwarding address to John Jones’s personal email – the message I send to the AGS_News address automatically goes to the correct person.

I don’t need to update my contacts list. They don’t need to try and forward things or remember to pass on the message at the next meeting. No muss, no fuss – just easy-peasy.

I am definitely going to suggest this at the next round of society meetings I attend. Would this work for your society, too?

Benoni Staats would lose six children in the ten years between the 1850 and 1860 Washington County, Ohio censuses. How could this happen? Who did this? Poor Benoni, right? Not really. Unlike most whodunits, this one starts off with the answer: the 1850 enumerator did it.

Here is that 1850 entry¹:

We see that according to this entry, Benoni and his six children are enumerated in the household of Hezekiah Collins in Adams Twp, Washington, Ohio.

Let’s take a look at Benoni in 1860²:

Where did all the kids go? Benoni was married to the Rebecca listed here, Rebecca Addis, in Noble County, Ohio on 9 May 1851.³ You’d think that at least one of the children would still be there wouldn’t you? It would be surprising, especially since most of the children were a little older in 1850, that all of them would have succumbed to some terrible disease, wouldn’t it? Well, it would be surprising, and you’ll all be glad to know that the children were spared.

Let’s find Hezekiah Collins in the 1860 census⁴. Here he is, in a hard-to-read record that doesn’t list the whole first name – just initials, but look at the sequence and relative ages:

Comparing the 1850 “Staats” children and the ones here, we get a pretty good sense they are the same kids.The ages are a little off, and Mildred is not in the household, but she could have been already married, and it’s hard to argue against the fact that the rest of the sequence appears in order.
Wm=William
J=James
B=Ballard
M=Mary
T=Zachariah (T would turn out to be his middle initial)

Obviously, the 1850 census enumerator in Ohio wasn’t all that concerned with what name went with what people, nor did he seem to care all that much about correct ages. Notice that Benoni was the same age in 1860 as he was in 1850 – a pretty nifty trick. For further confirmation that the children in 1850 are actually children of Hezekiah Collins, not Benoni Staats, we can look at the 1870 Census for Hezekiah, and see that Zachariah is still in the household, and the family has moved on to Oregon⁵ :

While I have not completely followed up on the Collins family, we can find evidence of the other Collins children in Oregon as well. Here’s a 1914 city directory listing showing Ballard and Zachariah⁶:

While I have not followed up completely with the Collins family, it is clear that nothing terrible ever happened to the children of Benoni between 1850 and 1860 – he didn’t have any to lose.
The next mystery to solve with Benoni is what happened to his children between 1840 and 1850. Again, you ask? Yes. In 1840, there are six children in his household⁷.
Are they his? Are they someone else’s? That, my friends is a mystery for another day!

1. 1850 U.S. census, Washington, Ohio, population schedule, Adams Twp, p. 264 (handwritten), dwelling 151, family 155, Hezekiah Collins household; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com : accessed 21 Oct 2012); citing National Archives and Records Administration microfilm M432, roll 738. [↩]
2. 1860 U.S. census, Washington, Ohio, population schedule, Barlow Twp, p. 263 (stamped), dwelling 21, family 17, Benoni Staats household; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 21 Oct 2012); citing National Archives and Records Administration microfilm M653, roll 1049. [↩]
3. “Ohio, County Marriages 1790-1950,” digital images, FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org : accessed 21 Oct 2012), Staats to Addis (1851); original data: Noble County, Ohio Probate Court, Marriage Records 1:2. [↩]
4. 1860 U.S. census, Pike, Illinois, population schedule, Martinsburg, p. 542 (handwritten), dwelling 78, family 78, H. Collins household; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 21 Oct 2012); citing National Archives and Records Administration microfilm M653, roll 219. [↩]
5. 1870 U.S. census, Lane, Oregon, population schedule, Coast Fork, p. 515B (stamped), dwelling 40, family 40, Hez Collins household; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www/ancestry.com : accessed 21 Oct 2012); citing National Archives and Records Administration microfilm M593, roll 1286. [↩]
6. U.S. City Directories, 1821-1989 (Beta),” database and images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 21 Oct 2012), 1914 Eugene, Oregon city directory, p. 486, Ballard T. Collins and Zachariah T. Collins. [↩]
7. 1840 U.S. census, Harrison, OH, Moorefield Twp, p. 91, line 16, Benoni Staats household; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com : accessed 21 Oct 2012); citing National Archives and Records Administration microfilm M704, roll 409. [↩]

Yesterday, I decided to take a break from professional genealogy activities and actually do a little research on my own family. I wasn’t going to go hog-wild – just flesh out some collateral families descended from Elijah Staats, maybe see if I couldn’t find the name of a living person or two.

So that’s what I did. I went to Ancestry.com, and pulled up the census record for the first family. Then I went to FamilySearch’s Ohio County Marriages collection and found the marriage record for the husband and wife to get the maiden name. This marriage was recent enough that it gave me dates of birth, as well as parent’s names. So back to the census I went to gather info about these earlier folks. I was able to do that pretty easily for a couple of generations – one of the benefits of having Ohio families is that there’s lots of good stuff online, including probate court birth records. After I worked backwards for awhile, I went to the digitized books section of FamilySearch to compare what I had found against the mug book for that county. If I were seriously working on this family, I would have gone more in-depth, which might have required an in-person trip or ordering records from a distance, but for my purposes, this was fine.

The family eventually moved to Seattle, Washington. Washington births and marriages were online at Ancestry, and some deaths at FamilySearch, so I was able to keep working forward on the family. That got me enough information that I could jump over to GenealogyBank, where the Seattle Daily Times was online. I was able to find obituaries and marriage notices of the family. Some were in the SSDI, and I used some additional sources to piece together most of the family. To my surprise, the eldest daughter of this family happened to live to 99, passing away in 2010, and the obituary named all her children and grandchildren. Whenever I get a chance, I can go to Stevemorse.org and do some people searches for these folks.

By now you’re probably thinking “…..So what’s the big deal? We all do this everyday.” Well that was exactly what I thought was a big deal. Maybe it was the fact I was working on a family I hadn’t revisited since the “old days” of genealogy, but it struck me, rather pointedly, how genealogy has changed over the years I’ve been at this. We’ve started to take for granted that we can sit in our chairs and put together a family (in this case, spanning 1837 to 2010), document the research reasonably well using original sources, and do it all in a couple of hours.

I thought about how long what I did would have taken previously. First, I would have had to go to the WRHS library to use their census microfilm. If I wanted to get the marriage records to find a wife’s maiden name, I would either have had to send a request by mail, order microfilm, or go to southern Ohio to use the marriage books themselves, none of which happens quickly – possibly taking weeks or months. And all that is just for one couple. They had six kids who had kids. They came from families with lots of kids, and all their grandparents had lots of kids. Sure, I could have cheated a little and just followed the paternal lines through the censuses, making assumptions as I went, but that would 1) ignore half of the pedigree chart, and 2) be pretty shaky research. In short, it would have taken a really long time, and likely wouldn’t have been as well-documented.

I think I started genealogy at exactly the right time. In the late 1990s, which is when I started this madness, USGenWeb and other resources were out there that didn’t necessarily have much genealogical information, but they did have lots of information about where to find the information. Ancestry had census and other records, but I couldn’t afford the subscription, so I still worked primarily at the library. I didn’t use the internet much for actual research. I used it primarily as a guide for where I was supposed to go to do the research. I think that having had a several year window where most of my research was done at the courthouse or archives has really helped me sort through the online world of records, that while handy, might be a little confusing if you hadn’t had the opportunity to work with similar records in book form.

It brings to mind Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule from his book Outliers, which basically states that whatever the field, or whoever the practitioner, it takes about 10,000 hours to become an “expert” at something. So when the Beatles got their big break in America, they had played about 10,000 hours. When Bill Gates got his break - 10,000 hours. There were numerous other example given. I’m no Beatles or Bill gates (and I cringe at the word “expert”), but when the time arrived that I had access to all these wonderful records online, I’m pretty sure I was close to that 10,000 hour mark, and I was much more prepared to take advantage of them than if I had only started a year or two ago.

I can’t wait for the next 10,000 hours!

 

Sometimes, things just don’t go our way when we try to get our research done. Other times, not only are they not going our way, they’re definitely going against us. It’s easy to get frustrated when a clerk tells us that a particular record doesn’t exist when we know it does, when the one volume we drove half a day to use is “out being rebound”, or when we simply run into someone having a bad day and looking to pass it on to someone else. But it’s precisely those moments of adversity that allow us to make the best impression.

On one particular research trip, the man sitting at the next microfilm reader over from me was photographing the film. The rules clearly stated that you could take photos but you had to pay an additional (and rather ridiculous) fee to do so. He obviously hadn’t read them. The librarian came over to tell the man that he couldn’t take pictures unless he paid the fee. I can’t imagine while crossing the library to shut this guy down, that she thought it would go well. It didn’t. Have you ever seen Bill Cosby’s Himself – the part describing his wife having a conniption? That was this guy.

She got exactly the reaction she probably expected. In the end, everyone was aggravated  and each of their spouses probably got a lengthy, expletive-laced description of the encounter as soon as they got home. But what if – what if – in that moment when his free photographic world came crashing down around his ears, the guy apologized profusely and thanked her for pointing out the rules he forgot to read. You know she would not have expected THAT. He wouldn’t even have had to pay the fee – just apologize, thank her, and stop taking pictures. How much better of an opinion of genealogists would that librarian have than she probably does now? How much more likely would she be willing to help the next genealogist rather than simply endure him or her. While it’s not easy, and unfortunately, we all have our moments, I think it is important to bear in mind that we are all ambassadors of genealogy each time we walk though the library, courthouse, or archive doors.

I’m not trying to toot my own here, but I feel pretty strongly about representing the hobby and profession well. Recently I had to stop myself from creating one of “those moments.” In the past, I had gotten copies from a particular county recorder by ordering all the filmed deed indexes, and then getting copies of the deeds from the county recorder themselves once I had the volume/page references. It was cheaper and faster than ordering a zillion rolls of film. It cost me $1 per page and I had them within a week.

So this week, when I needed some more deeds from that county, I hopped on my email, fired off the list of deeds I needed, and waited breathlessly to find out how cheaply I was going to solve all my ancestral mysteries. The answer rather surprised me. If I wanted to pick the copies up in person, it was $28. The office was about 8 hours away, which made it a little unlikely I was going to jump in the car to do that. However they would mail them to me for an additional $28. As you might imagine my initial reaction was something like “ARE YOU KIDDING  #$%#$% ME? $28 TO PUT THEM IN AN  %^$%@! ENVELOPE?!

But I waited a day, until I was more calm, to respond. While I still felt (and still feel) that it is a ridiculous policy, it IS their policy. Me going gonzo in an email isn’t going to help that, and would probably have the opposite effect.  So I sucked it up. Here is the slightly edited, names-changed-to-protect-the-innocent-version. Though it probably doesn’t whether they were or not, the nice things I said are actually true:

“Thank you for your response. I am in Cleveland, Ohio, which would be kind of a long commute to pick them up
I don’t remember such a large charge for mailing, but it has probably been 5 or 6 years since I have gotten copies this way. If that’s correct, at $2/page, it would be less expensive to work from LDS microfilm.

I certainly appreciate you taking the time to look up the deeds for me, and hopefully I will get a chance to make another visit to [YOUR OFFICE] this summer. [YOUR] Recorder’s office is definitely one of the nicest county offices I’ve worked in, and I love going there!”

Here is the response I received back from this message:

“Mr. Staats,
It certainly would be a long commute, but we would be happy to have you! Our current charge is $2.00 per page for mail copies. Please visit us if you ever come to [OUR STATE].
I think our office is a nice office, as well. Thank you for the compliment. Have a great day and maybe our paths will cross one day.”

I think I made the right decision.

Looks like I better get to the FHC catalog and order some deed microfilm (DO YOU KNOW THOSE ^&#$%*#  FLIPPING THINGS WENT ALL THE WAY UP TO *#$&#$&!* $7.50??!!!)

Please comment below. I’d love for you to share how you were able to be a good genealogy ambassador.