Category: Genealogy

I need to stop trawling Reddit. This workflow strikes me as incredibly awkward and labor intensive. Maybe it’s because of my job, but my first quibble is with the naming convention. I organize by document type. Some people organize documents by surname, and that’s fine. But I try to keep file names as short as possible. The word “federal” is superfluous. There is no other kind of US census. Second, I’d use underscores to separate segments. I also prefer names in direct order, not reversed order, probably because my one name study documents are intermixed with my own family’s documents. It’s far easier to look for John Basquil than try to figure out which one of the 50+ variants of Basquill the document is filed under, then look for John. John is much less likely to have an alternate spelling. So in my system, that file name would be: Census_US1900_DavidSmith

Short and sweet, and it takes seconds to find what I’m looking for. If it were a state census, you’d obviously use the two letter state abbreviation with the census year: Census_MN1905_DavidSmith

But that highlighted bit is the part that made me break out in hives. I use Evernote for genealogy. As I download document images (full resolution images, not clips or screenshots*), I add them to Evernote with the link for the page I got them from. When I’ve finished adding the information to my database and have finished creating my citation, I copy the citation and add it to the note in Evernote. It adds maybe a few seconds to my workflow, and it’s time well spent. You could just as easily copy and paste the Ancestry/FamilySearch/etc. citation into the note, too.

Evernote is set up like my files are set up, by document type. I’m careful to format names in note titles consistently, so I can use quote marks to find all the documents related a person. But everything is keyword searchable (even the handwriting in documents), so it’s trivial to locate a given note. And best of all, all my documents are available anywhere I have an internet connection.

I can and do, of course, add other information to notes when it’s helpful. So if I want to add abstracts or transcriptions, I can.

I think OneNote has a lot of the same functionality, though I admit I don’t love it and only use it for managing citation templates. And I’m guessing there are other note management apps that might work better than a series of spreadsheets, screenshots, and text files. (I do use Excel for tracking and managing residential addresses from city directories, and it works okay for that. I keep that spreadsheet in Evernote, as well.)

* I would never recommend just screenshotting document images from Ancestry, specifically. Some of them are impossible to read, because they’ve compressed the screen view image so much. In order to even read them, you have to download them. But all their images are compressed to some degree in the screen viewer. Always download the full, best quality image available. If you want to crop a smaller section later, you can, but you can’t go backward if you’ve only saved a portion of a document image. And sometimes you realize later that there’s information in other parts of the document that is useful.

In the mid-1990s, when I was visiting my grandparents, grandma showed me a stack of letters that had belonged to her mother, Nell Basquill. They were written by Nell’s brother, William.

She sent me to the library with grandpa, to photocopy them, because she’d decided I would want them. I have no idea why she thought that.

I read them, and they didn’t make any sense to me. I put them away, and two moves later, I found them in a box of papers. That little stack of letters was what got me interested in genealogy.

I still don’t know who some of the people mentioned by William were. But every time I look at them, I figure out another little piece of the puzzle.

My most recent mystery was Hubert Martin Keane. I found him living with Mary Anne Baskwell in Boston in the 1940 census. I almost ignored him as just a random lodger, but since he was born in Ireland, I thought I’d try to find him in the civil birth register.

It turns out he was easy to pin down. He was born 9 Dec 1878 in Slaugar, County Mayo, and his parents were Michael Keane and Bridget Baskville.

It can’t have been a coincidence that the daughter of William Baskuil was living with the son of Bridget Baskville. I thought maybe they were first cousins, and that Bridget may have been an as yet unidentified daughter of Michael Basquil and Margaret Kelly, my great grandma Nell’s grandparents. (Mary Ann was the daughter of Walter’s brother, William, and Anne Gibbons. So Mary Anne and my great grandma Nell were first cousins.)

I thought there might be something in those old letters that could help, so I pulled them out. I hit the jackpot, but it wasn’t the one I wanted to hit.

“Mrs. O Hara a granddaughter of Uncle Dennis told me that Dad’s [Walter’s] only sister Aunt Margarett lived in Boston & was married to a man named Bourke, did you ever contact her.”

Walter only had one sister, Margaret Theresa Basquil, who did indeed marry a man named Thomas Burke. She came to the US in the mid-1870s and died in Boston. So Bridget Baskville is not one of Walter’s sisters, which means that Hubert Keane is not a first cousin to Mary Ann Baskwell.

I still think there was a relationship between Bridget Baskville and my Basquills. It’s just too much of a coincidence, otherwise.

My aunt and her husband are in Ireland. She asked me if there was anything I wanted her to look for while she was there. They were planning to visit the are my great grandma Nell came from, so I asked if she could look for Nell’s parents’ graves.

Bridget Bourke was Nell’s mother she was Walter Basquil’s second wife. They married in 1886. Walter died in 1925 and Bridget in 1938 (the date on the stone is incorrect).

I don’t know where Walter is buried, which is annoying. It isn’t like it’s an ancient grave, so he should be there. But at least I know where Bridget is.

Fun fact: Walter was a carpenter and moonlighted as a coffin maker.

I’m laughing so hard I gave myself asthma. This has to be my favorite example of bad OCR, from a newspaper obituary. How the hell did it get Potato from Patrick?

I kept running into “So Cath Cem” as a burial location in a death register for Fall River, Massachusetts. I spent way too much time trying to figure out where this cemetery was, or if it was even still in existence.

I tried searching FindAGrave for a bunch of the people buried there. I was hoping that if I could find just one, it would tell me the current name of the cemetery. I didn’t get any hits.

I scoured old city directories for Fall River. Often they have useful things like lists of parks and their locations, old city maps containing streets that are no longer in existence, and names and addresses of cemeteries. No luck.

I was starting to think maybe the land had been repurposed, which would have been sadcakes.

Oh, and Google was no help at all. Totally useless.

But then it occurred to me that I should search old Fall River newspapers. I was thinking, if the cemetery had been paved over, moved, or renamed, there might be an article in the paper. I hit the jackpot. I found a funeral notice for a priest buried there, and he has a FindAGrave memorial in St. Marys Cemetery. Another article mentioned South Catholic Cemetery being next to McMahon Street. McMahon Street runs along the west edge of St. Marys Cemetery.

I emailed FindAGrave this morning and requested they add an AKA, so that other people don’t spend hours chasing around in circles. They were fast! It’s already been added.

Tiny victories, y’all.