By Daniel Hubbard | April 27, 2014
There is something special about those times when records don’t simply stop but fade. Times long enough ago that identity was seen differently. A man is not known by two names but by one name and the place where he lived. When his child was born, all that was recorded was the date, his given name and the place. No mother. No name for the child. Not even the child’s gender, just the date, the place and the father.
In more recent times the wonder of genealogy often comes from reconstructing lives and resurrecting stories. Out at the edge of what is possible, the wonder comes from being able to see through the fog of time just well enough to know a single mysterious name. So many people who will never have their lives reconstructed stand out there at the limit. A vast multitude like the masked chorus of an ancient Greek play. We hear them as one because we cannot hear them separately.
Connections are there but they hang by a thread, tenuously.Twitter It!
By Daniel Hubbard | April 21, 2014
The full Moon occurs when the Sun and the Moon are on opposite sides of our world. We see the full face of the Moon illuminated by the Sun because as we turn up our eyes to the Moon, the Sun is shining from below our feet, lighting up the far side of the Earth. This month we were treated to the most spectacular sort of full Moon. The Sun and the Moon were not just roughly in opposite directions, they were in exactly opposite directions. The Moon passed through the Earth’s shadow and grew darker and darker until it turned sunset red. That moment when the entire Moon seems to turn to blood is the time when it is most obvious that the moment of the full Moon has been reached.
The full Moon this month is also special because it is the one that defines when Easter is celebrated and it is problems with the calculation of Easter that gave us the modern (Gregorian) calendar. Every genealogist and historian who has researched in a time and place before the arrival of the modern calendar or in a culture where it is only one of the calendars in use, needs to learn to navigate the transitions from one way of looking at time to another.
So, how does the Moon help determine Easter’s date. Easter is defined as the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. Well, that is what is often said and it is approximately true but we need to make a few corrections.
The first correction, and it is perhaps a bit of nit picking is that “vernal” means spring and anyone living south of the equator might be justified in complaining that Easter takes place in the fall, not the spring. Either March equinox or Northern vernal equinox might be a better term.
Then what about the word “equinox”? The term means when day and night are equal. “Equinox” comes from Latin words meaning “equal night.” More accurately though, the equinox occurs at the particular moment when the sun is directly above a point on the Earth’s equator. The date that this moment occurs in any given year depends on where you are on the globe and can be one day different depending on your position. If that one day shift mattered, then people in some places might be celebrating Easter more than a month earlier than people in other locations. In the end though, that turns out not to happen. For purposes of computation the equinox isn’t actually used. Instead of the true equinox, which can occur on different dates in different years and on different dates depending on where you are on the Earth, the date March 21 is used. No need to observe the Sun, just use a calendar.
That calendar based solution works well as long as March 21 always occurs about when the equinox occurs. If your calendar drifts, you eventually have problems. The old Julian calendar drifted three days every 400 years. That might not seem like much but eventually Easter began to occur later and later in the year. At different times in different places, Pope Gregory’s calendar replaced the calendar of Julius Caesar. Days were dropped from years to bring the calendar back into synchronization with the Sun.
The second group of corrections has to do with the Moon. We think of the full Moon occurring on a specific day but of course, as we realized when thinking about lunar eclipses, the Moon is actually full at one precise moment. The problems with the full Moon are the same as the problems with the equinox. For the purpose of setting the date of Easter, the date of the full Moon is set by mathematical tables. The moment when the Moon is truly full may happen on the day given in the tables or a few days before or after.
Does it Make a Difference?
It certainly matters to the day you celebrate Easter. This year (2014) is special because Western churches (using updated calculations) and Orthodox churches (using original calculations) celebrate Easter on the same day. That last happened in 2011 and won’t happen again until 2017. As the Julian and Gregorian calendars drift apart it will happen less and less. April 24, 2698 will be the last time that the same date is used by both groups. Already now, the dates of Easter can be as much as 5 weeks apart.
To the genealogist and the historian, it makes a difference. The calendar is our map of time. Use the wrong map and we are lost, though we will think we know where, or rather when, we are. In different places, different cultures and different times, the calendar has been and still is different from what we expect. If you have ancestors from different Christian denominations, then what records with dates based on Easter, or any holy day related to Easter, can mean very different dates. In 1584, the second year after the new calendar began to be adopted, Catholics celebrated Easter on a date four weeks different than other groups. In some areas of Europe the changes made to the lunar tables were accepted decades after the change to the calendar, leading to still more dates for Easter.
There was no one map of time. There was, in fact, a giant atlas.
By Daniel Hubbard | April 14, 2014
David J. Hand, the author of the book The Improbability Principle has a list of items that go into his principle-
- The Law of Inevitability
- The Law of Truly Large Numbers
- The Law of Selection
- The Law of the Probability Lever
- The Law of Near Enough
In the book he describes events that seem like they should never happen and shows how those laws make those events not particularly surprising.
The Odds of Finding Something
This week as I’ve been tracing immigrants back to Sweden. That means trying to determine information in American records that will be useful in matching to Swedish records. That has put the Law of Near Enough on my mind. Put simply that law means that the odds of finding something increase as you loosen your criteria for what you consider to be a match. It is easy to see how that could contribute to our sense that a coincidence has occurred. If we think that two things happened at the same moment, we might find it interesting. We might still find it interesting if they occurred during the same hour. What if they happened during the same day? The same month? Somewhere, as we alter the amount of time, those occurrences go from interesting to boring if we stop and consider the span of time. If we don’t think about it, we can be fooled into thinking that something is wildly unlikely when it is actually rather probable.
Often we don’t even think about the fact that criteria exist but, like the time span above, they do and they affect our research. In genealogy we are always trying to determine if two records correspond to the same person. What criteria do we use? We can look at the opposite of the Law of Near Enough. We can restrict the criteria we use until we will never match records with each other. How about an obituary that claims that a person died at 4am and a death certificate with information that matches the obituary in every detail but one. It records the time of death as 3:56am? Clearly different people, right? Wrong, our allowable difference between the times is ridiculously small.
Where do we draw the line? If a document records a man’s age as 50 and the person we are looking for would have been 51 at the time, is that “near enough”? Now we need to start answering questions. How common was his name? How close was the record made to the expected place (another “near enough” question)? How likely is it that the man’s age was rounded down? How likely is a misunderstanding? Did anyone have a reason to lie? Might the person who made the statement not have known any better? Might the informant have given an accurate version of their uncertainty only to have the clerk right down something exact—could “about 50″ have been said to a clerk who “simplified” the answer to “50”?
An Old Story
An apparently old story, which I have to admit I never heard before, involves a traveler going down the road passed a barn. The side of the barn was peppered with arrows, each sitting dead center in a target. The traveler concluded that a master archer lived there until turning the corner to discover a man carefully painting targets around each one of a set of arrows. As genealogists, we are stuck (so to speak) with the arrows that were shot into the barn generations ago but we do need to think about the targets that we paint around them. Draw targets that are too small and no two arrows will sit in the same target. Draw targets that are too large and arrows that have nothing to do with each other will be in the same bullseye.
So how big do we draw the targets around our documents? How far out can a document be and still be a match for another document? Make the target large enough and we will find something but that something will very likely be a false positive—something we consider “near enough” when it really isn’t. When we thought a moment ago about how common a person’s name was, that was a false positive type of thing to worry about. A woman with a very strange and unusual name who was within a few years of the correct age and found in almost the right place is much less likely to be a false positive than is a man named James Smith in otherwise identical circumstances.
Then there is the question of confirmation. The obituary and the death certificate that differ by 4 minutes in the reported time of death don’t need confirmation in order to conclude that, with everything else matching, they record the same person. On the other hand, if we don’t find a match and expand our target, what kind of confirmation will we need to really show that the bigger target was justified? Expanding our target often means needing to find more arrows that hit it.Twitter It!
By Daniel Hubbard | April 6, 2014
In light of David Letterman’s impending retirement, here are the-
Top ten reasons to give up genealogy
10 Tired of the search result “Buy Ichabod Whittleby products on Amazon.com!”
9 Thought people were kidding about the 1890 census.
8 Upset by DNA match to Justin Bieber.
7 Discovered that someone has copied your idea to fill a hollowed out mountain with genealogy records.
6 Ancestral castle in Scotland turned out to be a White Castle® in Scottsburg.
5 Discovered great-grandma died in infancy.
4 Tired of accusations of plagiarism over your book, Roots.
3 That lying clerk’s insistence that the courthouse had burned when you were clearly standing inside it.
2 Your starring role in the local theater production of Who Do You Think You Are failed to land you a part on the TV show.
1 Realized that all the interesting ancestors are already taken.
If any of these reasons actually seem correct and reasonable to you, don’t give up, take a deep breath and forge on.Twitter It!
By Daniel Hubbard | March 30, 2014
When I studied ancient history in this university many years ago, I had as a special subject “Greece in the period of the Persian Wars.” I collected fifteen or twenty volumes on my shelves and took it for granted that there, recorded in these volumes, I had all the facts relating to my subject. Let us assume—it was very nearly true—that those volumes contained all the fact about it that were then known, or could be known. It never occurred to me to inquire by what accident or process of attrition that minute selection of facts, out of all the myriad facts that must once have been known to somebody, had survived to become the facts of history.
—historian E. H. Carr as quoted in The Improbability Principle
We don’t generally research events of quite the historical importance of the Persian Wars. It was a period of fifty years that involved hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians and left a deep imprint on the future of the world but even so, “fifteen or twenty volumes” could contain the sum total of the information about that half century of intermittent war. It makes one wonder about the “process of attrition” that has limited what we can learn about our own, more immediate, ancestors.
I’ve been researching a woman who applied for a Civil War widows pension. she was required to prove various things in order to be entered into the pension rolls. Obviously, her husband must have died. That she could prove. Equally obviously, the dead man must have been her husband. She had been married previously so she also needed to prove that her first husband had died. Those last two important events had occurred in Chicago in the years before the Great Fire of 1871 and she could not prove either of them. There was already attrition of facts in her past.
Records burn and memories fade. How often do we run into someone who consistently says that her father was from New York and her mother was from Ohio, only to find that her parents consistently said that they were from Germany and New Jersey? How often do we find the phrase “don’t know” written into the census or a death certificate?
As researchers we are often forced to rely on implications and reason to try to replace what had once been known, what had once been clearly documented. We painstakingly rebuild what attrition of facts has torn down. That, I think, is when searching for the personal past goes from interesting to sublime.
People who are interested in genealogy but not genealogists themselves are often amazed not just by what was found but by what can be found and pieced together. They are fascinated by the fact that it can be known. That amazement is something we ought to remember. We ought to take the time on occasion to sit back and ponder or perhaps “to inquire by what accident or process of attrition that minute selection of facts, out of all myriad facts that must once have been known to somebody, had survived to become the facts” of our family history.Twitter It!
By Daniel Hubbard | March 23, 2014
The other day I went to the library to pick up a book I had on hold. I found the book and a magazine on the shelf waiting for me. I checked them out and was casually flipping through the magazine while I waited for my daughter’s choir practice to wrap up. In the back of the magazine I saw a picture that would not have been familiar to me just an hour earlier. It was a picture of the book that I had just checked out along with the magazine. What a coincidence!
Well, it isn’t really a coincidence. I had the book on hold because I had heard an author interview and it sounded interesting. Authors usually do interviews about their books because the books have just been published. Recently published books are more likely to be found in full-page advertisements at the back of a magazine than are other books. It is also more likely for a person who is interested in a book to also be interested in a magazine whose subject matter means that it is a good place to run an ad for the book. My choice of that book and that magazine was not random. I do have to admit that it is amusing that the book in question is The Improbability Principle, a book about the nature of coincidences and why we should actually expect them.
What is a Coincidence?
What genealogist hasn’t run into what seems like a remarkable coincidence when researching their family? Some of the toughest things for genealogists to handle are those “coincidences.” Some coincidences are meaningless and we need to weed them out and disregard them or they will waste our time and even lead us to wrong conclusions. Other coincidences are meaningful and are major clues. How do you tell them apart?
The first thing to do is to define what we really mean by “coincidence.” The parts of the word simply indicate that something happened at roughly the same place and time as something else. That doesn’t really do it though. Coincidences need to have some sort of surprise factor. There can’t be a cause and effect relation. If you throw a rock at a window and then hear the sound of shattering glass, you would not call it a coincidence. If you threw the same rock at a tree and heard the sound of shattering glass just as you saw the rock hit the tree, that you would probably think of it as a coincidence—and a pretty strange one at that. A more genealogical example might be finding a man with a very unusual name in a small town and then finding a different man in the same town with the same name fifty years later. Coincidence or a child named for his grandfather?
Another set of occurrences that we shouldn’t really think of as coincidences are things that have the same cause. It isn’t a coincidence when the snow melts and the first plants start to come up in the spring. Both are brought on by the arrival of warmer weather.
Events that don’t have any apparent connection don’t qualify as a coincidences either. You would not think “Wow, what a coincidence!” if the dog two doors down starts to bark at the same moment you took a sip of tea.
Coincidence to Clue in Genealogy
If we find something that looks like a coincidence, what should we do? Can we immediately conclude that we have something meaningful and go on from there? No, given the number of people who have existed in the last few hundred years and the number of things they did that were recorded, there is plenty of room for chance to make things seem to be connected when they are not. In fact, it would be strange if chance did not make a few things seem to be connected when they are not. Lots of things happen and some of them will randomly seem to be related. Can we immediately conclude that our coincidence is meaningless? No, it might be that what looks like two unconnected random facts are actually connected by cause and effect. One may have caused the other, or they might be the results of a common cause or share some common factor.
One question that needs to be asked is, what is the chance that there is something behind this coincidence? Figuring that out means digging into the situation. If you just discovered that one of your ancestors was in the Civil War and you look at the names of the other men in his unit and see a name that looks familiar, is it random or meaningful? If the name is familiar because someone of that name lived in the same town that you suspect your ancestor lived in before the war, then it might be meaningful. Nevertheless, you could only conclude that after you learn that Civil War units were usually made up of men from the same area. You can also think about what is the chance that it is a random coincidence that two people with the same unusual last name are from the same place? Is the population of that place 50 or 50,000? Is the name unusual in general but common among an ethnic group that is numerous in that area? All of these things help to decide if the coincidence is worth pursuing.
The other question that you should ask is, “If this was more than a coincidence, how could these things be connected?” There might no way for them to be connected or there might be several. If there is no way, then it is time to go on. If there is a way or even several different ways, then you need to think about the next question—”What would a possible relationship between these things mean?” What kind of evidence might exist if any given possible connection was correct? Once you are able to ask that question, you have turned a coincidence into a clue and that is cause for a little celebration.Twitter It!
By Daniel Hubbard | March 16, 2014
Sure, we already have Family History Month in October but as my kids have pointed out to me lately, to be cool now, your activity needs to have a specific day with a funny connection to what it is supposed to celebrate. For example, earlier this month, grammarians celebrated grammar day on March 4. They are clearly required to celebrate as well. It is an imperative, literally. The day is March Fourth or as a clear order “March forth!” It is apparently a day for grammar gurus to take to the streets.
As I write this, my little math whizzes are coming down from a Pi Day induced sugar high. Clearly then, I am writing this paragraph on March 14, or rather 3/14, the first three digits of the famous mathematical constant Π (Pi, 3.14159…) In the rest of the world where people more sensibly put the month in the middle of the date rather than at the beginning, it needs to be explained to people why the 14th of March is Pi Day. Unfortunately, the more sensible ordering would put Pi Day on 31/4, the 31st of April. That would be a good candidate for “National Confused by the Calendar Day” but not for Pi Day. Pi Day has the plus side that “pi” sounds like “pie” which are appropriately round and also good at grabbing children’s interest, hence the Pi Day pie sugar highs.
In a month and a half my son will draw his light saber in celebration of Star Wars Day. It falls on May the 4th, as in “May the Fourth be with you.” If you don’t get the joke, you clearly have not spent much time with an elementary or middle schooler, or anyone sufficiently geeky.
Clearly to be cooler, genealogy needs a day like this. One problem is that where pi has a clear tie to pie, making Pi Day even more popular, genealogy has trees and the food that looks most like trees is broccoli. I like broccoli but my kids just spent the afternoon at the library doing pi based activities and eating pie. While the library would be a great place to celebrate Genealogy Day, eating broccoli at the library won’t get the kids out in quite the same numbers.
Perhaps we need to forget the food tie-in but what about a good day?
January 1 “First one” to remind people to start with themselves when researching but it’s already national hangover day. I don’t want to be on the road on New Year’s Day and I don’t want to see the trees that might be put online that day either.
February 2 is nice and binary like Ahnentafel numbers but “Two Two” sounds like it ought to be National Ballet Day.
The fifth of any month might be in remembrance of all our ancestors who seem to have “taken the fifth” instead of leaving any useful information behind. On the other hand, that is not likely to increase the popularity of genealogy.
We need a day to celebrate our past, our ancestors, our origins, our “august beginnings,” which of course, is the answer. August 1, the beginning of August it should be. Pi Day eat your hear out. Now if I can just get my kids to eat their Genealogy Day broccoli…
By Daniel Hubbard | March 9, 2014
The word “genealogy” is made of two parts meaning “origin” and “study.” It is, at its core, the study of our personal origins.
Genealogy is often broader than its own etymological origins because are naturally curious about those who share some of those origins. We want to know who descends from some of the same ancestors as we do. What experiences lie in their branch of the past that don’t lie in ours? What can they tells us? What mysteries of theirs can we solve?
I had a meeting this week with a man from Sweden who had wondered what became of a pair of brothers that branched off from his family a century and a half ago. They were born in Sweden in the 1860s and twenty years later they headed for North America. He had a few things that gave clues like a photograph taken in a small town in Michigan in the 1880s. He knew a bit about how their names had changed and who one had married but after that they just disappeared from what of his own branch of the family knew.
What had happened to those brothers? Do they have descendants in America? Are there relatives to contact and visit? Answering those questions is one thing but forming the connections is another. What is the best way to try to make them?
- A phone call?
- A letter?
- An email
- Sending a genealogical report?
Different people will react differently to different kinds of contact. They will react differently to any kind of contact. Some people are thrilled and will begin a flurry of communication and will want to meet you. Others will think it is fun but not be particularly interested in your genealogical pursuits Others will be disinterested in contact at first but warm later. Others will think that it is a scam and want nothing to do with it.
When you are really excited about finding a long lost branch of the family, it can be hard to give people their own space to get used to contact from a new relative. My meeting was full of tales of different reactions and needing to tread lightly here but having immediate daily contact there. So many different reactions. So many different speeds accepting that a new distant relative had appeared. So many different levels of interest. Everyone’s reaction was different. Everyone came into the contact with different pasts and different reactions based on their own stories. It was fascinating to hear how things had gone. Some contacts went very well indeed, otherwise he would not have traveled from Sweden to travel the U.S. and meet his distant relatives.
By Daniel Hubbard | March 2, 2014
Nearly all genealogy begins with memories—your memories, your cousins memories, your great aunt Gertrude’s memories. Someone’s family recollections peak someone else’s interest. Grandma gets interviewed. A notebook is filled with Uncle Ralph’s stories about his relatives when he was growing up and then when word gets out that you’re working on the family history, an envelope will arrive with forty-year-old, handwritten notes made by the mother of a distant cousin about what she knew.
You gather up everything from crystal clear memories to bizarre family lore and set about the task of corroborating it. You try to match the names in the memories to the names on an official page. Sometimes those memories will lead directly to records made decades and decades ago. Sometimes nothing will be found and little bits and possible falsehoods can be left out to see if they might have been the problem.
Often trying to match those memories to documented reality will guide us to frustration and nothingness. Then a funny thing happens. A record turns up, then another and another but nothing makes sense. Then comes the “Ah-ha.” What is appearing isn’t what was recollected. In ways it isn’t even close but yet it is recognizably what those remembrances were all about. Comparing the two is like looking into a funhouse mirror. Yes, that is you in the mirror and yet you’re not 4 feet tall and 5 feet wide with arms six feet long.
So often a family story is half-forgotten and distorted by the time it reaches the next person who realizes that it is worth committing to memory. Distorted as it is, that story and others like it are where family history begins. Keep the things that don’t help you find records in mind. They might just help you recognize what you do find. Also, remember to enjoy that look in the mirror. It is a funhouse mirror after all.Twitter It!
By Daniel Hubbard | February 23, 2014
When I was a kid there was a group of jokes that consisted of nothing more than the titles and authors of fictitious books. One of my favorites was Viewing the Grand Canyon by Eileen Dover. If you don’t get it, just say it out loud, you will.
Brick Walls and Cliffs
Sometimes in genealogy we reach the edge of a cliff. After following a nice level plain of documentation, suddenly we reach a time and place where the records simply stop and we lean over and look into the abyss. Somewhere down there is a new level of solid ground. Sometimes it is not actually so very far, sometimes “abyss” really feels like the right word.
Genealogist often talk of brick walls. They occur when we get stuck on a particular line but have a reasonable expectation of getting back farther. Being unable to find the parents of someone born in 1890 probably counts as a brick wall. Not being able to find the parents of someone born 1590 probably does not. What about the cliffs when there is a general break in the records, a discontinuity that does not just disrupt one line for one researcher? Sometimes these breaks are not so dangerous. I remember coming across the title of a presentation on American genealogy that was something like “You Can Get Back Before 1850.” You certainly can. There is, of course, a discontinuity there. Beyond that point the Federal census gives much less information but it is not a very long drop down to the base of that cliff. With other techniques research in America can realistically go back more than two centuries.
Its All Relative
What fascinates me about these cliffs is that they depend on so many things. If you are American and think of 1850 as a discontinuity in the census, then you are probably of European descent. If you were African-American you would think of the census discontinuity occurring in 1870. In fact 1870 is the beginning of a much larger cliff. Before the records of the Freedman’s Bank and Civil War records relating to the U.S. Colored Troops, contrabands and refugees, the African-American researcher faces a serious cliff in the terrain that they might not be able to descend. Other genealogists won’t need to peer over that edge at all. Irish researchers face a different set of cliffs—the earliest complete census (1901), the earliest civil registration (mid 19th century), the earliest surviving church records (often early 19th century). Who, where and when you research determines the cliffs that you might encounter.
I’ve found some of my English ancestors in parish records from the first half of the 16th century, back in the time when parish registers first started to be kept in England. There I must stare over that English cliff. Some lines can be traced past that point but it is a very different business. That cliff might indeed have no bottom for me to find. It is a strange feeling to lean over an edge and wonder if there is a possibility of donning a helmet, attaching a rope and repelling down the rock face to that next level. Of course, the only way to know is to try.
According to one of the myths of Hercules, he placed two pillars at the Straits of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean world comes to an end and the Atlantic begins. Later tradition held that they were inscribed with the words Non plus ultra, meaning “Nothing beyond.” They marked the end of the world and warned sailors to go no further. Of course, there was a great deal beyond. It just had to wait for people who would look.Twitter It!
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