The Gen Project

I honestly try not to let my frustrations with certain aspects of online genealogy bug me too much, but sometimes you just have to vent a bit. So,if you hate to see negative words spoken, you may want to give this post a pass. On the other hand, seeing my personal pet peeve list just might inspire a few folks to see what can be done about some of the items on my list. These peeves are in no particular order.

• Message boards with topics introduced but answers that might be useful to others are invariably exchanged offsite through emails. This one drives me around the bend - in nearly all cases, the persons being discussed are long gone, so it’s not like their privacy is being invaded if details about their lives are shared.
• Self-professed ‘experts’ who can’t seem to resist jumping onto forum posts, even when they’re out of their area of expertise.
• Scolds who insist on chastising any poor soul who fails to construct a query properly.
• Websites with no apparent form of navigation and/or no real organization to the data being presented.
• List owners who take a scorched earth policy to even the slightest hint of criticism. It’s rather hard to make improvements when such listowners seem to be overly fond of unsubbing and/or banning anyone who dares to challenge them in any way.
• Websites that are nothing but links to other sites, usually those that require payment to access the records wanted.

This list is likely to have additions made as more peeves come to mind.

Sometimes you come across records that just don’t make sense or that contradict other records that are known to be valid. This can be a very frustrating experience and is probably more common when looking at older families that often used the same names many times over the generations. As a case in point, I was recently working on my ex-husband’s lines as my daughter has begun to show an interest in her roots. Since he had told me years ago that his parents both died when he was in his twenties, I was quite surprised to see a record online that appeared to show a much later death date for his father. What made the record so convincing at first glance though was that burial site listed was the same Perry County cemetery as the rest of his family and the birth date fell within the right span of years. Who was this guy? As it turns out, once I was able to obtain the obituary for the man, it was clear that he was not the right guy, but rather his first cousin, which explained why he was buried in the same cemetery as  some of the others I knew about in the family. In this case, there were two brothers who lived in the Perry County area who both had sons named Robert Wayne, born several months apart, probably named after an uncle who died young. Between the census records for the brothers and the obituary, it was possible to determine who belonged to which family, but it certainly wasn’t clear at first glance! Had I not had a bit of personal knowledge of the family though, I would have accepted the record as it stood without question, highlighting the necessity for doing the additional research to really verify our data.

Sometimes you run across articles in the paper that just make you shake your head. Here’s one I found the other day:

WIFE SOUGHT TO PLEASE
Asked Ill Man His Choice of Undertaker

Pittsburgh, July 30. A decree of divorce was granted to Robert H. McConkey yesterday from Mrs. Mary McConkey.

McConkey alleged that last winter he was very ill and his progress toward recovery was materially retarded by his wife, who asked him every few minutes which undertaker he would prefer for his funeral. He says that in spite of his wife’s expectation he got well, but decided he needed a divorce. The court agreed with him.

McConkey is fifty-seven years old and his wife is several years his junior.

Invariably, when I go off on one of my day trips, I find myself wishing I had my records with me, especially when I see familiar names in the course of my travels. One easy solution to this issue is simply to carry a laptop with me with the data loaded, though there are some caveats to that approach. Since my primary research database is actually housed online, my local copy is rarely as updated as it should be, so I don’t necessarily want to make additions to the local copy and the upload to the main database, unless I have downloaded and updated that local copy first. Ideally, this happens on a regular basis.

Since my laptop is set up as a dual-booting machine machine with both Windows Vista and LinuxMint, I have a choice of programs in which to store the data. For my purposes, I am more likely to use a Linux-based program called GRAMPS to keep the data accessible, but I haven’t had a chance to play with that program much yet. If nothing else, I can always use a simple text editor to make notes of new data for uploading and updating once I’m back home.

One of my favorite photographic subjects recently has been the old Quaker meetinghouses in our area, and in the last few years, I’ve photographed quite a few of them, mostly in Chester County. One of the challenges involved with this pursuit is actually finding where the meetinghouses are located, since, in many cases, they are no longer active. While the active meetings are relatively easy to find, there is often little or no information available readily to help find the inactive meetings. Though I include information on many of my genealogy sites about the old meetings in each area, I an in the process of building a site that will concentrate just on the meetings, particularly the older ones that may not have an active membership any more.

For many years, I’ve wondered how to tell where various folks were buried when the record stated that they were buried at these older, inactive meeetings’ burial grounds. If, for example, they were buried at Brick Meetinghouse, the actual meeting is known as East Nottingham, and either designation may have been used. To make things more confusing, there is also a West Nottingham that was commonly called “Little Brick Meeting”. Neither of these is to be confused with the modern-day Nottingham meeting which is actually located in Oxford, PA, while both East and West Nottingham meetings are in Cecil County, MD. At one point in history, however, that particular part of Cecil county had been part of Pennsylvania. Does your head hurt yet?