My 2nd great aunt Dina Margareta Öman was born on 22 May 1904 to my 2nd great grandparents Albert Öman and Brita Johanna Strand in Håkansön near Piteå, Sweden. She died on 16 Mar 1907 (age 2). As was common in Sweden, Albert and Brita named their next daughter (born 4 months later) Dina Margareta.
Category: Genealogy
My family history, and the process of assembling it.
Family history practical use
I just had the first practical need for the family history information I’ve assembled. The heirs for aunt Babe’s estate are all nieces, nephews, and grand-nephews, since she never had children and outlived all her siblings. The lawyers for the estate needed to know when her siblings died to establish that they are, in fact, dead. None of the living relatives were even alive when Babe’s oldest sibling Joe died in 1931. I just saved the family a bunch of money to research all of that.
Albert Öman
My 2nd great grandfather Albert Öman was born on 16 May 1856 in Håkansön near Piteå, Sweden to Johan Öman and Maria Johansdotter. He was the 9th of 10 children. He married Brita Johanna Strand on 18 December 1886, and they had 10 children, 3 of whom died before age 20. The other seven children, including my great grandfather, all emigrated to western Washington. Albert and Brita remained in Sweden, where Albert died 21 June 1929 also in Håkansön.
Researching family in Madison
Monday I spent most of the day at the Wisconsin Historical Society looking through their microfilmed newspapers. Mostly I was looking for obituaries and a couple of marriage announcements that happened in Cassville and Glen Haven Wisconsin. They have a rather large collection of Wisconsin newspapers, as well as a few newspapers from elsewhere in the country.
The most important item I sought was an obituary for William Dennis Ryan, my 2nd great grandfather. I found his grave last year, so I knew he died in 1919. A brief mention of his death in a Colorado newspaper (where several children lived) narrowed the time frame to some time before the end of August. The nearest town with a newspaper was Bloomington. At the time, the Bloomington Record was a weekly newspaper. So I started at the last issue of August and worked backward. Found it. Which means I now have a date and location for his death.
I also found obituaries for Mary Weiss, Agnes Weiss, Peter Voigt, Gertrude Voigt, Alonzo Teasdale, Clara Teasdale, James Ryan, Elgie Ryan, Archie Ryan, Glenn Ryan and Martha Klaus.
On Wednesday, I stopped in at the Dane County Register of Deeds to pick up some vital records. I requested the death certificates for Alfred and Mae Sorenson as well as their marriage certificate and the birth certificate for their daughter Evelyn. They found the first three, but no birth certificate. I was hoping the death certificates would have information on Evelyn, but they did not. The marriage certificate gave me Mae’s maiden name, Gibbons. Though since she was a ward of the state as a child, I don’t know if that name is that of her parents or was given to her in some other manner.
Theoretically, everyone born in Dane County after 1907 should have a birth record on file. However, a fair number of births never were registered. I know Evelyn was born in 1914, but I don’t know the exact date. In Alfred and Mae’s obituaries, Evelyn was listed as living in California. She was on her 4th marriage at the time, but I haven’t found any reference to her after 1958. With an exact birth date, I could list everyone in the Social Security Death Index with her date of birth whose first name matches, and could figure out which one was her. There’s also an outside chance she’s still alive as well. Sadly none of the Sorensons born in 1914 matched her.
I found out one really nice thing about Dane County: I can actually search through their records myself. All I had to do is fill out a form, give them a piece of ID, and they let me peruse through the records without supervision. The Wisconsin Historical Society has pretty liberal access policies too. No ID needed. Just walk back among the microfilm stacks, pull out what you need, and start looking. The King County vital records office, by comparison, works behind a glass partition.
Alice V. “Allie” Ryan
My 2nd great aunt Alice Ryan was born the 10th of May 1865 in Glen Haven, Wisconsin. She was the first child of my 2nd great grandparents William Dennis Ryan and Mary Parker, farmers in Grant County of primarily Irish descent. Alice never married. Instead she worked as a dressmaker while living with her father (Mary Parker Ryan died young). She moved to nearby Bloomington shortly after the turn of the century where she operated a millinery until she died on the 6th of May 1953. Alice is buried in Saint John’s Cemetery in Patch Grove, Wisconsin with her parents.
This is the first in a series of posts I plan to write about people in my family tree on the anniversaries of their birth.
The 1940 Census
This morning the National Archives released the census schedules for the 1940 census. 72 years after each census, the government sends all that information into the wild. For a genealogist, this information is gold. Right now all it’s not searchable. In order to find someone in the census, a person has to know where they already are. Either that or stumble on them among the 132 million records released in image form. Which isn’t completely impossible. I ran into one relative while looking for another. But if you don’t know where they are, it’ll be a huge fishing expedition. Over the next few months, a few genealogy sites will be creating indexes and it will be searchable before too long.
Luckily, I know where a few people would have been in 1940.
Unfortunately, the main release of the records was a disaster. Archives.com is operating the official National Archives site, which is the only site that had all the records for the public, releasing them at 9 a.m. The site promptly fell over. It wasn’t until about midnight I could access any census schedules on it.
In the meantime, Ancestry.com, myheritage.com, and familysearch.org all got a hard dump of the images at 12:01 a.m. They’ve been putting them up since then, but it takes a bit of time to get them prepped and tagged by location. Ancestry loaded up Washington, D.C. first so they could tout that they found F.D.R.’s census record. Then they added a few territories and Nevada. I assume that’s because those places are sparsely populated and they could test their systems for classifying and loading the images. Then they added Indiana and Maine. Most of the family I’ve researched lived in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Washington in 1940. However, I did find a couple of distant relatives in the first couple of states. They are now working California, New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island.
FamilySearch is loading their states in a different order. I don’t remember what they’ve done, but when I first looked they had Colorado up. As a number of great great aunts and uncles in the Ryan branch moved to Colorado from Wisconsin. I was able to find all of the Colorado ones because either they lived in a small rural area that was easy to scan through, or they hadn’t moved since the 1930 census which gave me an address for them.
I haven’t yet looked at what MyHeritage.com has loaded up.
Around midnight, the official site got something working, and I could use it to access Washington records. I decided to look for Otto, Othelia, and Vera Hallin, my grandmother and her parents. I knew Gram grew up in Snoqualmie, and it’s not a huge place: two census districts comprising 44 images total. Pretty easy to scan through. I was slightly worried they hadn’t moved there by 1940. However, Gram was 11 by then, and she didn’t talk about spending a lot of time in their previous house in Skykomish, so my guess was they were already in Snoqualmie.
The first enumeration district I looked at (17-183) didn’t have them. It did have Otto’s brother Sivert Oman and his family though. I’m not surprised to find one of his family in the same town. They were all loggers mostly and Snoqualmie was a logging town.
Otto was on page 6 in the second enumeration district for Snoqualmie.
Did I learn anything new about my grandmother’s family? Not really. But I do get to fill in details of their lives. I didn’t know they’d lived at least briefly in Everett. One set of columnns asked where folks lived in 1935. I’d always assumed they went from Skykomish straight to Snoqualmie. Othelia’s occupation is owning and running a restaurant. I only vaguely recalled that. From his job at the lumber mill, Otto made $1,740 during 1939, which is about $27,000 in 2010 dollars. Othelia doesn’t report any wages for her business; presumably any profit didn’t count as wages. Otto was either sick or got some vacation or leave, as he only worked 48 weeks out of 52. Othelia worked all 52 weeks.
And now I need to lay off the genealogy for a couple of days, as I have stuff to do.
Alfred Edgar Burton
Usually when I stop at a cemetery to photograph the headstones for relatives, I will photograph a section or two around the one I’m looking for. Then I’ll catalog those graves with the photos on FindAGrave.com. I’ve found a number of relatives because other folks have taken the time to add listings that turned out to be related to me. Occasionally someone will find the listings I add and it will help them.
This grave is the first one I’ve run across where the person was semi-famous. It’s Alfred Edgar Burton, buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Portland, Maine. I snapped a photo of this one because his marker inscription said he was the first dean of M.I.T. Turns out he also accompanied Robert Peary on a couple of excursions to the North Pole and was also the father of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harold Hitz Burton.
Irish Genealogy Seminar
My great grandmother Frances Eugenia Ryan Weiss was of Irish descent. Neither of her parents were born in Ireland, but all four of her grandparents came from that island. I haven’t yet finished documenting her parents or grandparents, but I’m getting closer to the point where I’ll want to start digging into their Irish history instead of their time in Canada and the United States.
Last week, I came across a post in a genealogy message board advertising an Irish genealogy conference
to be held today at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard. Why not go, I thought? So today I got up a bit early (and even earlier when taking into account Daylight Savings Time) and headed over.
First, it wasn’t really a conference, but more of a seminar. In fact, most of the program materials used that word. But I was sort of expecting that. They had two speakers from Ireland. I’m not quite sure of their specialties. The first speaker spent an hour covering the various major repositories of records in Ireland today, both in Ulster and Dublin. His second talk went backward through time telling us what kinds of records were available for each time period. But that part of the talk only progressed to about the 1840s, which is just after my relatives left Ireland. Most people of Irish descent in America got here because of the potato famine of the 1840s and its aftermath. My families immigration predated that.
The second speaker was going to talk about the Scots-Irish and their immigration to the U.S. But man oh man was his talk a wreck. His accent was thicker, and he kept wandering away from the microphone. He also rambled all over without an outline and didn’t use any slides. He mentioned two really important books for researching Scots-Irish but couldn’t remember either of the titles, only that A.C. Myers wrote one of them. As in Arthur Charles, though I just made up those first names…
He actually said something like that. A quick search tells me he’s probably talking about a fellow named Albert Cook Myers based out of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He made it seem as if the books were written in the 1960s, but my Google search shows books published around 1900. Not that the books aren’t good. Anyhow, his presentation was a mess, so I started reading through the collections of flyers I’d grabbed from one of the tables.
After lunch, the first fellow returned and talked about the various kinds of church records available from the different denominations in Ireland. He jumped around again rather than cover them systematically. The other thing he did was spend a lot of time talking about all the information that could be had reading through annotations in the various records rather than the main records themselves. For instance, a baptismal register might have notations of later marriages as the registers were consulted to verify church membership for those marriages. That’s all well and good, but it is only secondarily useful. One needs to know to search for the baptismal register first. Basically, the talk felt like an excuse for the fellow to talk about a lot of the interesting anecdotes he’d dug up whole doing research for hire, rather than an overview of records available.
There was a break following that, and I left, skipping the last two sessions, both of which were planned to cover Ulster history and genealogy. As none of my family comes from Northern Ireland, I decided I’d be better off heading home.
I do feel a bit better about where to start though. There’s a ton of Irish genealogy web sites out there, but none of the guides I’d seen provided much of a guide as to what is important and what is not a good starting point. I at least have that from the first presentation. And a fair number of the flyers will give me information to browse over the next few months before I really dig in. I do think I’ll probably join the Seattle Genealogical Society for its Irish Interest Group. They also appear to be having an event related to Russian Germans later this month or next. Since that’s the background for my step-father, it’ll be of interest.
Mary (Murphy) Parker Found!
I’ve just had the most exciting genealogy breakthrough!
Here’s the first piece of background: My great great grandmother (one of them) was Mary Parker. She was born in Canada to Irish immigrants (both born about 1803) named Patrick Parker and Mary Murphy Parker in about 1841. The family came to Grant County Wisconsin and lived there at least from 1860 to 1870. She married William Dennis Ryan and died in 1874. That part part is all pretty established. But Patrick Parker and his wife Mary disappeared after that. I know of at least four other descendants of the Parkers who have been trying to find out what happened to them. Most of the children moved to Iowa between 1865 and 1875. We thought they might have dispersed after their parents died. One speculated that perhaps they moved back to Canada and that’s where they died. She even hired a genealogist to dig into cemetery records in the townships in Ontario where they were known to have lived. But no luck. (Some of the Parker grandchildren did emigrate to Canada.)
I’ve for sure found Mary (Murphy) Parker. I think I may have found Patrick Parker.
More background. This is somewhat involved. I describe it all because it shows the serendipitous trails these breakthrough take.
Since I will be doing the cross country road trip next month, I decided to flesh out my family tree some more so I could prioritize things to research when I go through Iowa. I’ve already have nearly complete trees for two of the children, Mary Parker Ryan and Stephen Parker. This spring I started on Patrick Parker’s son Patrick Parker. He married Carrie Ulrich of Eau Claire and they moved to Iowa where they had a number of children. I finished the basic portion of the tree Tuesday morning morning. It’s a big branch of the tree. I got about half of that done in 4 days, which was a lot of work.
I moved on to the next child, Alice Parker. Someone else already figured out she married a John Scallon. They moved to Iowa, then Chicago. Of course, I like to check everyone else’s work. One of the things I usually do is go look on Find a Grave which is attempting to catalog all graves using volunteers. Bingo! Alice Scallon’s grave is there, added and photographed just this August.
I looked at the photographer’s contributor page, and it has a link to a web site in which he has guides to several cemeteries in Franklin County Iowa area. One of them lists a Patrick Parker, died 28 Apr 1874, aged 72 years. Hmmm, I think. That’s an almost exact fit to what I know about my 3rd great grandfather.
But that’s a common name and there are probably four or five dozen Patrick Parkers that would match. Still, the presence of Alice Scallon in the same cemetery gives it some connection.
Next step is to see if any other site has information on the Patrick Parker buried there. FamilySearch.org does not. Neither does the W.P.A. grave catalog made in the 1930s. (To boost the economy during the depression, the feds paid people to transcribe all the cemeteries in Iowa.) And I checked the weekly Ackley World newspaper for the issues following 28 April 1874. Then I got the bright idea to see if I could find Mary Parker nearby in any of the census records.
Bingo! There’s a Mary Parker living in Osceola Township (Franklin County), Iowa in 1885, aged 83 and a widow. Again, it might not be her though. I added that record to my tree and tagged it speculative. Mary Parker is a common name.
So the next thing I did was go back to the guide that fellow made and look at Patrick Parker again, in case I missed something. Only this time I accidentally hit next
(when searching for Parker) twice, and lo and behold, there was another Parker in the cemetery: Elizabeth Parker Blake. And her birth date matched up with Elizabeth Parker, daughter of Patrick and Mary Murphy. So now there are two daughters of Patrick Parker buried in the cemetery, along with someone who could be my Patrick Parker.
But then I noticed something. Elizabeth Blake’s husband is Richard Smith Blake. And the family that Mary Parker is living with in the 1885 census is that of R.S. and Lizzie Blake.
That has to be my third great grandmother, Mary Parker) in the 1885 census. Got to be. Alive ten years after all the researchers thought her dead, and in a completely different location from where they’ve been looking (as far as I know).
I still don’t have confirmation that buried in the Saint Mary’s Cemetery is my third great grandfather. But it’s looking like a good possibility and worth researching. Hopefully I’ll be able to find something in the state archives when I visit Iowa.
Early photos of Joseph Peter Weiss and Frances Ryan Weiss
Joseph Peter Weiss is my great grandfather. He died in the 1960s, so I never met him. His wife was Frances Ryan. The Weisses are German, the Ryans Irish. When Anne Falconer sent me photos from Clara Weiss’ album a few months ago, a few of them were of Joseph and Frankie. Without ado, here they are:
Click on each photo to go to the page for each photo on my genealogy site where larger scans can be downloaded.
Most of the photos that Anne sent me were copies she had made. However, she sent me an original print of the photo above!
I don’t know for certain which child this is. It is likely either my great aunt Marie or my great uncle Joe Jr.