Category: Genealogy

Louis Charles Couvrette m. Marie Philomène Chauvin

Family Tree from Ancestry.com

I came across the tree from Ancestry a few days back, while looking for information on some folks in my own tree. It can be entertaining to look at what other people have done, and you never know when you might find a source you didn’t discover on your own. But this tree? It is made of NOPE. The person who made it took a census record for a family with a similar name, added the kids from that record to their family, and made frankenfamilysoup. Seriously, does the name Walter seem likely? Marjorie? And no, Louis Charles did not have a second marriage, nor did he have phantom children named Ernstine and and Albertine. Total fantasy.

I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on the family now, based on scans of marriage, baptismal, and burial records, supplemented with a pretty robust run of census records for the US, Canada, and even state censuses from Minnesota. Everyone I’ve added left a paper trail behind. And it’s a paper trail that cross-checks itself. Marriage records list both parties’ parents’ names. Baptismal and burial records list both of the children’s parents names. The kids are in the census (unless they died), living with both parents. The parents are found in the Canadian census living with their parents, backing up the marriage record. I can track the family’s migration from Quebec to Minnesota, and I can even pin down their immigration date to between 1881 and 1885, thanks to census records.

I think I’ve got a pretty solid case. I don’t know what the person who made that tree was smoking, though. So be careful with what you take from public family trees. You could get lucky, but you could get led far astray, too.

Both of these snippets are from the 1861 Census of Canada. Both of them are for my great great grandparents, Louis Charles Couvrette and Philoméne Chauvin. I wasn’t even looking for the second one, because I’d already found them, presumably living with her parents. But then I found a record that had been indexed under the name Celia Couvrette. Who the hell is Celia? So I looked, and lo and behold, Celia is really Louis C.

I don’t know the specific dates each census page was taken, so it’s possible that a small amount of time elapsed between them. Maybe they were visiting her parents, were enumerated there first, went home, and were enumerated a second time? Or maybe they were actually living with her parents, were enumerated, then moved to their own home before that area was enumerated?

We’ll never know. But either of those scenarios would reasonably explain why they were double entered. It would also sadly explain why some people get missed. Move in the opposite direction, and you don’t get enumerated at all.

Oh, and I’m totally amused at the description of his occupation: Capt. de Steamboat. Holy creole, Batman!

Happy 2016! I’m starting the new year with a genealogy do-over. Since I had to migrate from Family Tree Maker to Legacy Family Tree, and since my sources and notes didn’t transfer as cleanly as I would have liked, I decided this was a good time to start over from scratch.

1930 United States Federal Census, entry for Louis C. Couvrette

I am forever grateful to the folks who transcribe old records. Without them, searching for genealogical information would be a nightmare. However, sometimes I have to wonder what they’re smoking. The above transcription at Ancestry.com indicates that Louis Charles was an assistant preacher at a theatre. Does that make even a tiny bit of sense? No. No, it does not. Treasurer assistant makes much more sense, yes?

The scan of the original census page at Ancestry.com is really light and difficult to read, so I understand why the transcriber had trouble. Luckily for us researchers, though, all of the big repositories have made their own individual US census scans, so we aren’t stuck with the crappy scan available at Ancestry.com. I checked Family Search and Find My Past. Family Search had the best of the three, so that’s the one I used here for my illustration.

Lesson 1: Don’t trust transcriptions. They are several times removed from reality.

Lesson 2: If the US census scan provided by the repository you’re searching is illegible, try a different repository.

Cumberland Family Tree seems to have been resurrected. Ira Lund stopped supporting it a few years back, which gave me serious sadcakes.

I’d been using CFT happily for a few years, then upgraded to a 64-bit version of Windows. And found that CFT was not 64-bit compatible. Ira had made a 64-bit version of CFT, but it had been released, and then he’d quit supporting or distributing it, before I’d upgraded my computer. So I was stuck. After much hunting, I found a kind soul who was hosting the 64-bit compatible version for download, and I snagged a copy of it, and it’s worked fine. But now, Ira is back to updating and distributing CFT. It’s a Christmas miracle, yo.

It’s a very Windows 3.1 feeling program. No frills. It’s not the program you are going to use to generate pretty books for your relatives or to create a gorgeous website. But what it does have, and what other programs I’ve tested lack, is a powerful global search and an easy, effective way to locate people who are in the same place at the same time, across your whole tree. That allows you to see connections you would miss if you’re using other programs.

I also like the way it handles source citations. Much sleeker and efficient than Family Tree Maker, and much easier to navigate than Legacy Family Tree. (The latter has a powerful and flexible sourcing module, but you could literally spend half your life learning it, and that seems excessive to me. The point of source citations is to lead others to the place where you found the information you are providing. If your source citation does that, then you’ve met your obligation as a researcher.)

I’m going to continue exploring Legacy Family Tree, because it does have all the bells and whistles. However, for my single name study on the Basquilles, I’m going to stick with Cumberland Family Tree.

Ancestry.com announced today that they are going to discontinue their stand-alone genealogy program, Family Tree Maker. Their theory is that most people want to use the web-only version. Well I don’t. I hate the web version with the heat of a thousand suns. Plus, I’ve put a huge amount of time and energy into researching this stuff. I want my research to be in my hands and under my control, not floating around up in the cloud.

So, I’ve been playing around with Legacy Family Tree. It’s not the answer to all my prayers. Not even close.

1. It stripped out the individual URLs from all of my source citations. Not cool!

2. It can’t seem to display ID numbers on the individual screen. You can see them on the family group screen, which is okay, but it’s not ideal. (It may actually have this capability, and I’m just not able to find it. It also may have that capability in the pay version. I don’t know if I want to take that chance, though, considering that I’m not in love with the program.)

3. The scroll wheel does not seem to work on the individual page. If you want to look at hidden items in a long list of events, you have to click on the slider bar. Clunky!

4. I can’t find an option to set a home person (usually yourself). I don’t mind if the program opens to the last person viewed, but I’d like a shortcut key to quickly navigate to my chosen home person. (Oh! Wait! It looks like there is an option to set a “startup family.” That might work.)

None of these are deal breakers. I just to find some time to sit down and really explore the program before I decide whether or not it will work for me. You’d think, with all the time off work I’ve taken to sit and stare at the damn dog, I could have been at least a little bit productive, but YOU WOULD BE WRONG. Staring at the dog is hard work, yo’.