Clarisse Perry Lord 1878-1940
Category: Genealogy
Nell Basquill
My mom just got back from visiting my grandparents. While she was there, she scanned a few more photos. This one of my great grandma Nell was in a frame, hidden behind another photo.
Quote of the Day
“He was warm and comfortable when he entered into eternal life.”
Obviously, I’ve been cruising Basquill obituaries. Most obituaries are pretty blah, but this one was lovely and thoughtful. When it comes time to go, I hope I’m warm and comfortable.
Experience Bliss
I’ve wasted the entire weekend (where on earth did it go?!) working on Esther’s family tree. I was able to make some progress with one line. I also found a bunch of census and land purchase records for some of the Munros. In all the research I did this weekend, I came across a few really wonderful names:
Experience Bliss
Nataniel Toogood
Content Wales
Pelatiah Mason
They’re all good, but the first one is my favorite. She was born in 1649, in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Those wacky Puritans sure knew how to conjure up an awesome name.
[Addendum: And yes, this means that I got Cumberland Family Tree up and running with 64-bit Windoze. Yay!]
Sweet Success
You can file this under D for Duh.
I figured out the problem with Firefox and Ancestry.com’s image viewer. It was the stupid Norton toolbar that automagically installed itself with FF. I really don’t appreciate that Norton did that, without any instigation from me. I uninstalled its sorry ass, and now all is well in vital document viewing land. w00t! This means no more Internet Explorer BS, which makes the baby Shelly very, very happy.
Now, if the databases I exported from the earlier copy of CFT on the old machine will load properly with the new copy of CFT on this machine, all will be well. The first one is taking its sweet fancy time, and I am not the princess of patience.
Hallelujah!
I have spent the entire day playing around with Family Historian. It is Just Fine. I even ran a few reports, to see how the source citations looked, and they are Just Fine, too. But, it’s still not the program I love with all my heart, and it is going to cost me $60 when the free trial is over.
Sooooo. I tried one last time to track down the problem with Cumberland Family Tree and Vista. Apparently, it’s something to do with CFT changing file names and Vista being a big meanypants about it. I found a message board post from the guy who wrote the program, written in early 2008, saying that he’d released an updated version for Vista. Huzzah! Except, he’s taken down his website and is no longer selling the program. But, I now had a reason to think that there might be a version out there, somewhere, that’d work. A couple of hours of trolling through message boards and I found a saintly soul who was hosting the new version on his own website
I win!
It took me all damned weekend, but I now have CFT back up and running. I feel like a three year old who just found her security blanket. Now I just have to get the back-up databases off my other machine.
Oh! I did actually get something accomplished, though. I found a bunch of census records for Esther’s family (1900-1930). Apparently they were living in Ohio in 1910. I had no idea! Asa’s mother, Emma, was supposedly born in Ohio, so that might help narrow down the search. Or it could just be a coincidence. I also found Asa’s family in the 1860-1880 census, living in Massachusetts. Still no trace of Robert Cooper, because it’s such a common name, and I don’t have a starting point. I expect I could get info on him from Ball State’s archives, though. Surely they’d know something about him, since they named a building after him!
And now, I’m going to go watch mindless teevee, eat ice cream, and maybe even have an adult beverage, because my brain has turned to mush.
Family Historian
Alas, my beloved, horribly out-of-date, and no longer updated genealogy program just plain will not work with Vista. It is for to weep. I spent a good chunk of last week and most of the weekend trying to find a reasonable alternative. The two most promising, My Heritage Family Tree Builder and Legacy both ended up being hugely disappointing.
MHFTB is clunky, ugly as hell, and in my opinion does not handle sources very well. Legacy was even worse. It was horribly un-intuitive, and worse, it’s source input menus kept leading me around in circles, until I wanted to cry. It’s worse than user-unfriendly, it’s actually user hostile. Oh, and it popped up a nag notice every time you tried to use a feature that is only available in the for-pay version. Why not just grey those options out, instead of making me click multiple times? What a pain in the ass! And no, I will not be upgrading to the full-featured. Why the hell would I want to give you money for making me cry?
So, I decided to try Family Historian. It’s kind of pricey (around US$60, I think), but the trial is full-featured. I’d much prefer a time limit than a feature limit. And the 30 days they give you is more than enough to give the software a good trial run. Which I’m doing right now. So far, so good. It seems to handle sources pretty well. It can actually copy events from one individual to another (yay!), and best of all, it works the way I think it should work.
There’s an FH upgrade planned for sometime this spring, but they are promising that anyone who buys now will be able to upgrade for free.
The other thing that is making me cry was that Firefox now seems unable to work with Ancestry.com’s proprietary image viewer. Ancestry has a work-around, but that only managed to crash Firefox. So I’m stuck using IE, which makes me feel like stabbing things with sharp, pointy objects. It’s not just my natural aversion to all things IE, either. The damned browser has security settings that require it to throw warning messages at you every time you try to view an image. And, as if that weren’t enough, when you try to save an image to a specific folder, it (un)helpfully overrides your decision, and puts it in a security threat folder. WTF?! And if you try to add Ancestry.com to IE’s trusted website list—in order to stop the insanity—it then starts popping open a whole new browser window every single time you click a hot link. That’s just plain not reasonable, when you’re doing a lot of searching.
I am doomed to be frustrated.
Happy Damned December!
The month started with the usual Indiana rainy-snowy-icy crap and grey skies. O gross.
I didn’t get much accomplished last weekend, despite trying to motivate myself to do more research. On that front, I managed to connect a stray Basquill to our little branch, which was pretty cool. Even better, it was one I thought I’d never be able to connect to anyone, period, so I wasn’t even looking for a link.
Griffith’s Valuation
There was a post on soc.genealogy.ireland yesterday about Griffith’s Valuation. Various parts of Griffith’s have been minimally indexed online over the years, but this is the first time it’s been published in its entirety, for free. And it’s not just a transcription, either. It includes scans of the original pages, as well as the corresponding maps.
Why is this big news? The only extant censuses for Ireland are from 1901 onward. Pretty much everything before 1901 was destroyed accidentally by fire or flood or deliberately by government decree. The 1901 and 1911 censuses are all that are available to the public. There was no 1921 census, due to the civil war. The first census of the Irish Free State was taken in 1926. That will be the next available census, but because Irish privacy laws prohibit the publishing of census records for 100 years, it’s not yet available. The 1901 and 1911 censuses were released ahead of schedule, because of the dearth of Irish vital statistics. There is a push to do the same with the 1926 census, so hopefully it will be made public soon. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.
So, back to Griffith’s. The reason it’s such a valuable tool is that it is the only full, extant “census” of Ireland from the mid 1800s. It has its limitations, though. For a start, it only lists the name of the tenant, so names of spouses, children, and extended family are not available. It also lacks any sort of biographical information on the tenants, so you cannot use age, marital status, etc. to help determine whether or not you have a match. It does, however, list the name of the landlord, as well as mapping the tenant’s holding(s).
I haven’t had much time to dig into it, but I did a quick search and found at least one Basquill who was a tenant of the 3rd Earl of Lucan. I wrote a little bit about the famine here, which should give you some idea of what sort of major league sociopath the good earl was.
My problem now is figuring out how to cite the damned thing. You would think that the folks who’ve indexed and transcribed it would want to provide proper bibliographic information for it, wouldn’t you? Or have I been in Library La La Land for too long?
More Mysteries
One of the little puzzles I’ve been working on is, what happened to Mabel Meineke?
The 1900 US census lists a Mabel Meineke as the infant daughter of Henry and Maria. All other censuses, both federal and state, show a Matie who was born in the same year, but no Mabel. What happened to Mabel[1]? And why, if they were born in the same year, isn’t Matie listed in the 1900 census? Are Mabel and Matie the same person? The names are sufficiently similar, so that I think it’s possible that an enumerator might have heard Matie and assumed it was Mabel. (Remember, both parents were born in Germany, and so would have spoken with an accent that may have been difficult for an enumerator decipher.)
Another possibility is that she was simply known as Mabel when she was young, but was called Matie when she was older. After all, her brother was known as Fred, Cecil, and John.
I’m not really any closer to an answer. However! I talked to my mom this morning, and she had some more information from my grandpa. Mom said that one of grandpa’s uncles had married a Marge Soren. I couldn’t find any trace of her, and I think that’s because Matie was the one who married a Soren. Elmer Julius Soren, to be exact. I found him and Matie in the 1925 Iowa census, which oh so very helpfully lists Matie’s parents’ names, so I absolutely know she’s grandpa’s aunt.
I’ve found all the other available federal and state census records for Matie and Elmer, as well as Elmer’s SSDI record and Matie’s burial place (Evergreen Cemetery in Wright County, Iowa).
And guess what? One of their daughters was named Marjorie. So, there was a Marjorie Soren, just not where I was expecting to find her.
Something else that my mom mentioned is that Ada was also known as Henrietta. That, I’d actually figured out from the 1900 US census, where she was listed as Henrietta Meineke. And in another census, she was listed as Ada H. Meineke. None of that is as confusing as their grandmother, however. I’ve found her listed as Augusta, Henriette, Sophie, and Elsie. Aieee!
____________________________
1. Just to make things even more confusing, one of grandpa’s uncles married a woman named Mabel, so there’s more than one Mabel Meineke floating around.
red paper boat 