Doing Genealogy

I get asked literally every day “How Do I Do Genealogy?” or “What is Best Way to Do Genealogy?”  What usually follows is an extended email or Facebook exchange that I do not mind doing as sharing is important to me. But sometimes the discussion gets into some technical details that may be best handled by posting some specific instructions.

Let me share how I got to where I am now.

I started an interest in family history when my great-grandmother died in the 1950s when I was a about 12. She was my Dad’s last living ancestor as his parents had died your. I asked my Dad about our family tree, and he shared a tree he had of our Lisle family that went back to my 4th great grandfather – John Lisle – who came to America from Ireland just before the American Revolution and became one of the first settlers of Franklin County, Ohio.

He had a lot of detail about his father’s family, but he knew little about his mother’s family that my great-grandmother had been part of. His father graduated from Ohio State University and headed to Texas to make his future. He started a business in Houston and hired Artemesia Davidson as his secretary. Although the business failed, he and Mesia didn’t and they married in Houston in 1910. He then headed back to Ohio where he and Mesia started another business and my Dad was born.

He wrote his mother’s sister who was still living in Texas to get information about his Davidson family. A few months later, she sent a history and genealogy of our Davidson family that was my roadmap 30 years later to sorting out my Davidson ancestry. My mother’s parents were living nearby so I got the bright idea to ask them about their families. I still have the scribbles I made then about the families.

The takeaway I share from this story is that, when you start out to trace your family history, start by interviewing all of your living ancestors. Before their memories pass away, learn as much as you can. You will find the memories faulty and not completely accurate, but these are the most important clues you will ever get.

Getting started with Genealogy

As I was going to school and starting my own family, I did not have much time for genealogy. As a person who worked with computer systems since the early 1960s, I found trying to keep my records organized required a lot of handwriting or typing. And whenever I added to the tree, I had to copy it all over again.

In the early 1980s, I bought an Osborne computer and tried to use it for genealogy. What I discovered was that trying to organize data in word processors or spreadsheets that were available at the time in that primitive CP/M operating system was just slightly less work that handwriting each change.

A bit later, I bought a Macintosh SE for the family to use and spent some real dollars on a real genealogy program. It so happened that the company that made the software was headquartered not too far away in Lexington, Massachusetts. The company is long gone, and I do not even remember its name. But I finally was able to organize my data in a way that made sense.

The takeaway I wish you to get from this is that I came to believe that it was imperative to organize your genealogy data using a computer program designed for genealogy. I should mention that about 1990, in the days before the Internet as we know it today, the most popular reason to get a home computer was reported to be for genealogy.

I also started to get some real education about how to find real records. A friend who had been doing some serious genealogy told me about being able to find census records on microfilm at the NARA office in Waltham, just a few miles away. At the time, my interest was only in documenting my Lisle ancestors and possibly finding some records to finally help me find out who John Lisle’s parents were.

At the time I got the bright idea to start to discover not just my own Lisle family for clues to John Lisle’s ancestors but also to use a “left-field” approach and look at all of my 3-great-grandfather James Lisle’s siblings. So, using the census I started a single name study of this family. This led me to joining the New England Historical Genealogical (NEHGS) in Boston and start tapping into their wealth of books and manuscripts. In doing so I discovered at article in a Franklin County, Ohio, county history about a grandson of John Lisle that mentioned that John had come to America with an older (but unnamed) brother.

I also contacted a 2nd cousin in Columbus who had been doing some family genealogy. Together I took the next step in my journey by organizing my data with enough documented proof to be able to join the Pioneers of Franklin County group, part of the Franklin County Genealogical Society. While visiting the society, I found reference to other people who were researching the Lisles and wrote actual letters to exchange information. (Yes, this was in the primitive times before email!)

Along the way, the company I was using for the software went out of business. I then decided to move my data to a DOS platform as a wealth of genealogy products were coming available for DOS: Brother’s Keeper, PAF, etc. And they all had a feature that my old software did not have and that was Gedcom. To move to another platform, I had to retype all of my data in again. Fortunately, at the time, I still had a manageable amount.

The takeaway here is that I discovered the value of using a program that would enable me to move my data from one program to another. Technology changes, and I did not wish to be bound by an old technology. I also learned when I moved my data to Family Tree Maker (FTM) and later to Legacy that, when you record data, make sure you are doing it in ways that transport with little or no data loss. One of the reasons that I did not move to The Master Genealogist (TMG) back in 2001/2002 was that TMG data was not fully transferable to another platform. One of the reasons that I stopped using Family Tree Maker was that a significant amount of the data in FTM was not exported in a Gedcom or was exported in a way that other programs could not access it.

I remember the first time I got on the World Wide Web and searched for some genealogy data. I found a primitive web site where someone had posted a tree of a Davidson family, and I recognized some of the names from my great aunt’s family history. That finally got me interested in documenting my Davidson family. After all, I had not made much progress in 30+ years in discovering John Lisle’s parents and had a fairly comprehensive single name study of my Lisle family and could not find any clues to who John’s brother might have been.

In the 1980s, my job took me to England for long regular visits. My mother had re-connected recently with her first cousin Ossie Ridsdale in Yorkshire. So, I would take the opportunity to visit him on the weekends I was “stuck” in England. I got a change to visit all of the places my Ridsdale family had lived and also to meet many of my Ridsdale relatives. Based on this, I started to better organize a tree of my Ridsdale family.

About this time, my wife and I sat down with her mother to sketch out my wife’s family. There were the Miethe and Ochs of her father’s family and the Steadman and MacMasters of her mother’s family. We drew out a pages and pages of charts. Carolyn’s mother had known everybody and remembered them. I remember that we posted the pages on a wall and they stretched for over 8 feet! and easily 75% of the pages represented the Steadman family.

So in the 1990s, my research started to get focused on three of our family lines: My Davidson and Ridsdale families and my wife’s Steadman family. In all cases, I gravitated to researching them as single name studies as in all cases there were brick walls I needed to break through.

With the Ridsdale family, the brick wall was that my grandfather had mis-remembered his grandmother’s name. He had confused her with his great-grandmother. I resolved this with parish record data that I worked through at the local LDS stake.

The Steadman family issues were different. Her grandfather was a Robert Steadman who lived in Nova Scotia. She had no idea who his parents were, but the family legend was that they had come from England and had married in England just before coming to America. Again the new toy the Internet came to the rescue. Someone had posted some census data online from Annapolis county, Nova Scotia. In it, I found several Steadmans including Robert Steadman. I knew it was the right person because the children were as my mother-in-law had them. I also was given a link to a Nova Scotia genealogy mailing list.

I quickly subscribed and posted a message about my Steadman family. Before too long, a gentleman replied that the Steadmans were all descended from a John Steadman who came to Nova Scotia after the French and Indian War from RHODE ISLAND! It seems that after the British kicked out the French Acadians from Nova Scotia, they went to New England and offered lots of cheap land to the English colonists if they agreed to settle in the frozen north. Many did because New England was starting to get crowded. (Remember, there was not much migration west into New York until after the Revolutionary War. Native Americans still controlled much of that territory.)

It took a bit of work (and even today I have some families who are not fully documented…) I was able to create a tree of my wife”s Steadman family back to Rhode Island and then with further research take them back to an immigrant ancestor who came from who knows where in Britain to Connecticut in later 1640s. Then I began to single name study the Stedman/Steadman family. Along the way, I discovered that (a) no one had done a comprehensive Stedman family genealogy as was done for the Halls of New England and (b) much of what was documented in other people’s trees could not be proven based on the records. Gradually, my single name study of Stedman family was expanded to all Stedmans in New England to all Stedmans in America to all Stedmans worldwide. When I find a Stedman record, I had to record it somewhere!

Now let me share my Davidson brick wall. My great aunt knew her father was Thomas O Davidson and grandfather was a John H Davidson. She did not know names further back. John H Davidson had died in the 1860s, probably in the Civil War. The name is so plentiful that I have not been able to identify to this day which John Davidson it was or even which side he fought on. (He was from middle Tennessee, and a lot of the folks in his area did join the Union forces. My Dad related to me that his parents had told him that his Grandfather Lisle fought in the War for the Union and Grandfather Davidson fought for the Confederacy. I cannot prove that to be true for John Davidson.)

I did not see my Davidson family on the genealogy charts for the Davidsons. But I did see a David Vance Davidson family who my grandmother named as first cousins. I could not find anyway to connect them. From the census, I was able to identify John’s mother as being an Eliza or Elizabeth. I found a note that Thomas had had a grandfather Hall. (Now you know where my interest in Halls comes from!) I had narrowed down my Davidson ancestry to a few Davidson brothers who were more like 2nd or 3rd cousins. Of course, by now, I was posting regularly on the RootsWeb Davidson list and Hall list.

Out of the blue, I got a message from a woman in Texas who had just purchased a copy of a book called the Hall Family History by a Mrs. T. L. Adams that had been published about 1950. She located that David Vance Davidson had married Sarah Caroline Hall, a daughter of Fergus Hall who was born in Iredell county, North Carolina and died in Coffee/Bedford county, Tennessee. Her sister Elizabeth Hall had married Abner Hall. Abner was one of the possible fathers that I had proposed and now I had some evidence. Further research uncovered that Abner had moved from Iredell county to Franklin county, Tennessee, in late 1820s after first having a son in North Carolina then twin sons in Tennessee, one of which was my 2nd-g-grandfather. He died before 1840 census and Eliza moved to Bedford county to be nearer her Hall family.

This taught me an important lesson. I call it look for “hidden cousins”. The children of Abner Davidson and David Vance Davidson were first cousins because their mother were sisters. Even though the fathers had the same surname, I had to think about who the mother were. That the mother were sisters would have been well known at the time, but the fog of time obscured that fact. That pushed me to always be looking for the names of spouses and who their parents were. And whenever I see the same name among the parents, continue to document the extended family. After all, these were the social networks of the time.

I got interested later in New England Halls through my hidden cousins research. As I was developing my Stedman research, I was running into a lot of Halls, mostly in Berkshire county and neighboring counties. One of the more prolific Hall researcher now had contacted me because she had an ancestor Mercy Stedman who had married a Luke Hall. Her question was who was Mercy Stedman. I think we finally answered that – it still is not entirely proven – but I used this as a means to ask her about her Hall family. She went on to do some great work on Luke’s ancestry and pointing it to George Hall of Taunton.

However, I also had a Luke Miner Hall in Tyringham whose daughter married a Stedman. I discovered that he was a half-third cousin the Luke Hall. But another of Luke Miner Hall’s daughter married a Jacob Hall in Tyringham. That Jacob Hall descends from John Hall of Rhode Island who are part of DNA Family 012.  As virtually everyone on 19th century Tyringham is closely related to a Stedman, I have extensively documented the Hall families who lived in Tyringham area, looking for the social networks there.

Subscription Pay Sites

Most of my ancestry is Scottish. I tend to be cheap. But early on I discovered that it was worth paying Ancestry a bunch of money every year to be able to access their records from the comfort of my home at 2 am. I have been a paid member there for now almost 20 years, since shortly after they opened their site up.

I have subscribe to many other sites now – FindMyPast, GenealogyBank, Newspapers.com, etc. I have been a member of NEHGS for over 25 years and use their site regularly. It has some important New England Hall records that I do not think anyone else has.

Of course, I also use a collection of free sites, especially FamilySearch.org, RootsWeb.com, GenWeb. etc.

And I now have an extensive library of books for reference, some hardcover, some softcover, some only in PDF form.

Genealogy is not an expensive hobby, but it is not free. But I know it is cheaper to collect ancestors than to collect stamps, coins, books, or baseball cards!

The DNA Era

As a Techie, I was an early adopter of the use of DNA – initially Y-DNA – testing to prove family relationships. I founded the Davidson project which is now over 400 people. I suggested that a Hall project be created which Nel Hatcher did and did an excellent job with. When she retired, I took it over and then passed primary responsibility to David Hall. David has registered the Hall surname with the Guild of One Name Studies so it was a natural extension of his research. He has done a great job with a large surname.

I will claim three contributions to DNA studies.

First,  we need to remember that DNA does not prove a specific relationship only that matching DNA says sometime in the past there is a common paternal ancestor. Non-matching DNA says there is no matching ancestor.

Second, we need to remember that a DNA result is just a jumble of numbers. The result is almost meaningless without an associated genealogy of the person being tested. And, for posterity, that genealogy must start with the person being tested. It absolutely amazes me that so many folks who spend big bucks for the tests refuse to give us even a rudimentary genealogy that we can use to build on.

Third, I introduced with the Davidson project, then moved it to the Hall project, the concept of biological families. The idea was most important with large surnames to use this as a means to chunk the family into small pieces. (Small is relative… My Davidson family tree for Davidson family 1 now runs about 30,000 names. I fully expect that many of the New England Hall biological families will run even larger.) The concept of a biological family allows a person who fits into one of those families to focus their research to find their ancestors by looking at trees identified as being part of that family. Arbitrarily, we normally require a at least two not closely related men to test and have “matching” YDNA Haplotypes. (I should mention that in order to get more participation from UK Halls, we are making a single UK Hall as a family. We want this participation because we are looking for possible matches for US Halls to find their roots in the UK.)

The huge personal discovery with DNA is that I got an almost perfect match of my Lisle YDNA with a man in Nevada who spelled his name Lyle. He descended from a Robert Lisle who lived in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, in later 1700s and early 1800s. Based on what I know of his history, he is the older brother who came to America with my John Lisle. I had expected his name to be Robert. I could be wrong as I have no proof, but this is the nearest I have come in 50 years to finding additional Lisle kin.

Over the last 3-4 years, I have begun to try to find good ways to use the Autosomal DNA testing offered by FamilyTreeDNA.com as the FamilyFinder test and by AncestryDNA.com. I will talk more about DNA in other Blog articles.

Publishing my Research

Another concern I had in the 1990s was how I was going to publish my research. I knew that any book that I published would be out of date hours after it went to press. I decided that I would use the World Wide Web to publish my research. I tried a couple of early Gedcom to HTML programs to create static web pages. I found that they had a serious problem in that they did not lend themselves to large genealogies.

There were a few early (pre-2000) programs that could create pages dynamically on request. I used IGM for several years. IGM was the basis for the pages created in RootsWeb’s WorldConnect trees. For someone with little or no technical skills, WorldConnect is a super way to publish genealogies.

About 2004, I started looking for a more advanced method of publishing. I discovered Darrin Lythgoe’s TNG program. I bought it and started using it and have been moving with it every year. The associated tree to this blog is using that software.

Might I someday write a book. Maybe. But I still have so much research to do and document …

One of my concerns now that my beard has turned gray is how am I going to preserve my electronic research files. My concept is that one an organization like the NEHGS could setup a service by which members could create web sites using TNG or other tools, and they would be preserved by the organization after the member had passed.

I joined the Guild of One Name Studies (London) several years ago. I have been active in encouraging the Guild to create a similar service. That service was started on a trial basis about 18 months ago and was made permanent this spring. ABout 100 members are already taking part. They have a simple approach to TNG sites that will allow them to be maintained at almost no effort.

Documenting my research

In the mid-1990s I decided that I wanted to move my genealogy data to a Windows based program. I felt that at the time the best choice was Family Tree Maker. However, I soon learned that FTM had serious limitations both in terms of creating usable Gedcoms for my web publishing but also in the way it documented facts.

In 2001 I started looking for a replacement. I had checked out several programs from the Web and then went to a big genealogy show in Boston where I got to meet the owners/developers for several of the programs I was looking at and got a chance to play with them and ask questions. The big three I looked at were The Master Genealogist (TMG), Roots Magic (RM), and Legacy Family Tree. There may have been some others, but those programs quickly died in the market place.

TMG was definitely the Cadillac in terms of functionality, but it was also one of the more awkward programs to use and it was painfully slow. Further, it did not allow its users to export in a Gedcom anything other than the standard Gedcom information so much of the extra feature data was locked into TMG.

Roots Magic was and is a good program, but it seemed to lack features and customizability. Today, it is a reasonable choice and it has a Mac version.

But my favorite was Legacy (www.getlegacy.info) as it had a philosophy of being open – it tried to support fully a Gedcom from any vendor and created Gedcoms that exported all of your data. Plus it had the right set of features and the owner/developers had the right vision for the future. I selected Legacy, and the owners invited me to participate in their Beta Test team which I still participate with. I will add some other pages to this blog on how to install and use Legacy to its maximum advantage.

Today

The focus of my research today is to extend and improve my Stedman, Ridsdale, and Davidson One Name Studies that I have registered with the Guild of One Name Studies. I will take on other research, like this New England Hall work, that interests me.

I continue to be a curmudgeon with the Guild and even with the Legacy management to push them to my vision.

I was appointed the Genealogist for Clan Davidson Society USA a few years ago so I get to help Clan members on their Davidson research.

I have continued to push the use of DNA testing in everyone’s research.

I try not to spend more than 12-14 hours a day on genealogy.

 

John B. Lisle, Nashua, New Hampshire USA

9 May 2016