All My Ancestors

I’m distressed.

I have a password-protected family website.

Not many of my family members appear to be interested but I like having the info available but “safe” behind the password.  It includes info on the living–I can refer persons to it for info and it’s a nice place to store my pics and stories with the appropriate family groups.

Recently I was surfing Ancestry.com for some info about my family and was surprised to find some of the photos from my closed website attached to some records in the Family Trees section.  Initially I thought perhaps someone else in the family had shared these photos with the author, but the further I looked, the more sure I was that these photos came from my what I thought was secure website. There’s one of my sons, for example, as young boys with my grandparents that hasn’t been posted or shared anywhere else.

I have (politely) contacted the person who posted this family tree twice and have heard nothing.

I am fairly certain I know how this happened.  One person I gave access to shared his/her password with others in that branch.  How do I handle this?

I am a fairly generous person.  I am willing to share nearly all of what I have.  But that website has pictures on it that came to me from my grandmother and her siblings and their children.  I feel protective of them.  Had I been asked, I probably would have shared.  But this somehow rubs me the wrong way.  I’ve read a zillion posts like this and truthfully, sometimes think “What’s the big deal?  It’s all family.”

But this time, when it happens to me, am I wrong to feel wronged?

Help me out, here.  Or, as Rachel Maddow says, “Talk me down.”

Today I was to spend one hour talking at one of the local libraries about the databases available through the library system that are useful for genealogy.  I’d chosen to concentrate on AncestryLibrary.com, HeritageQuest, and the local newspaper which is available online back to about 1900.  The local paper is really more of a state newspaper, so in a small, young state like Oklahoma, that a real treasure to have free access to through the local library.

I was prepared.  I had a short PowerPoint presentation ready to go–on my jump drive as well as emailing it to myself in case the computer wouldn’t read my drive.  I’d even made copies of handouts.

The adventure started when I arrived at the library and the programmer I’d been working with was not there.  One of the circ clerks handed me the projector but indicated there was not a laptop.  I’d recalled that the programmer said the library had one, so I persisted.  I felt a little sorry for the circ clerk but we finally t on the same wavelength–she got out their lap top, and then, of course, we had trouble logging in.  We called IT for the library system, gratefully they were there on Saturday, and they walked us through.  THEN, of course, I couldn’t get the laptop to connect to the projector.

I only had about 7 students so we just pulled up chairs to the table where the laptop was, and we went through the powerpoint, starting only 10 minutes late.

Ahhhhhh, the adventures of speaking genealogically. 

One hour isn’t much time to cover such a broad topic, but I wanted the folks to know what good resources their library card entitled them to.  I spent some time educating them about PERSI on HeritageQuest–they knew about census and Rev War records, but PERSI is such a rich resource and many people don’t know of it.  Or they know about it, but since it is not full text, they aren’t sure how it might be useful to them.  We also discussed some of the other newspaper databases that are avaiable through EbscoHost and ProQuest–again, coverage varies by date, but it is a way to check newsstories in places where other family may live and work.  We also talked about WorldCat, a way to check to see if a genealogy has been published on a particular family or topic, to check bibliographical info, etc, etc.

It was a fun day–there’s never enough time but I was glad I had enough experience to be able to “punt” when we had the “technical difficulties.”

Questions from the “students” included what to do with photos with lots of people in them but not necessarily their family (DeadFred.com), where to access American Indian records (come to the library at the Oklahoma History Center), and one person said he was hoping I was going to talk about more websites for research (I offered to email him my handout from my Library Lock-In talk a couple of weeks ago).

Now, if I can just find my jump drive that somehow didn’t make it home in my pocket and the card of the man I promised the handout to.  I plan to write a note to the circ clerk’s supervisor–she saved my bacon today and I really appreciated her willingness to hang in there with me.

Saturday we had a customer who came in, thrilled to have found us because her husband was in town at a meeting and she needed a diversion.  She hadn’t brought her notes because she hadn’t known of our existence.   She knew of some American Indian history in her family and the main name she could recall was John Smith. 

Yikes.

We have challenges every day.  The majority of our customers believe they have American Indian ancestry and we assist them in their search for verification.   This customer was a little different in that she didn’t think her family had ever come west, on the Trail of Tears or other wise, so I wasn’t sure where to begin.  She had the name of one of the many rolls, which we checked.  What we had was a 20th century published version of the roll–she thought she remembered that her family had been rejected, so they would not be included.  She kept saying that she would just work on it another time, that she hadn’t come prepared, and that this was probably hopeless.

We kept talking and trying things.  Finally my much more knowledgeable colleague came back from lunch–we picked her brain for a while.  By this time the customer came up with a few more names.  My colleague went to yet another published roll and looked up one of the collateral names and said, “Well, here’s the XXX name and he was born in (place).”  The customer said, “Oh, my, that’s where my family was from.” 

So we pulled out the microfilm.  One of the first things I read while she was looking at other names in the index, was that this person was applying based on his great grandfather John Smith having been an Indian. It’s a common name, of course, but the story and the name were close enough, I told her about it.  She immediately wanted a copy and then she went through it more carefully.  The places were correct but she wasn’t certain about the names until we came to the name of one John Smith’s daughters–this applicant’s grandmother.  It was a distinctive name and we knew we had the right family.

She said she was going to be very hard to live with because she had found such a treasure.  She was so thrilled.

As I reflected on the experience, I thought about its lessons for the researcher looking for a person with a common name.  What helped with this search was the place and an uncommon first name.  John Smith was not listed in any of the indexes.  But the surname for the son-in-law of one of his daughters was listed.  Did you follow that?  Three generations away from John we found some of his descendants and verified the story that another descendant had heard.  The file said that applicant was applying based on his great-grandfather being an Indian.  He was rejected because John Smith’s name could not be found on any of the earlier tribal censuses.  All that matched the story our customer had heard. 

All in all, it was an interesting search and lesson.  We kept encouraging her not to give up–she was happy to be there and wanted to search but somewhat embarrassed that she had come so unprepared.  We, of course, saw her story as a challenge, and with each bit of information that we pulled out of her, we moved a bit closer to finding what she was looking for. 

The other personally interesting part of this story is that IF I have any American Indian heritage, the part of the country her family was from is the part where mine is from.  I told her that, she asked the name, and  when I told her, she knew many people by that name.  I wasn’t surprised as they appeared to be quite prolific and many with that name are still there.  I also told her that once my part of the family came to Oklahoma, one of them married a person of the same name as her rejected applicant. 

Collaterals, place, collaboration, and persistence seemed to be the keys to this successful search. 

Now, to find details on my own George Jones.  Who married Nancy Jones.  Honest.