Category: Genealogy

I’ve often wondered why immigration records in the U.S. suddenly change. My great-grandfather’s record from 1904 was so detailed it listed his aunt’s name and address in Philadelphia. The 1846 ship-list that I think was for my 3^rd-great-grandfather just listed name, gender and age. And when my 2nd-great-grandparents moved from Quebec to Minnesota in the 1870s, there was no record at all.

On my wife’s side, I can find lists of her Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors when they and their fellow adult male passengers took an oath of loyalty in Philadelphia, but her Scots-Irish ancestors seem to appear magically in Virginia with no records at all.

Why? I did some research, and it turns out, there are three major periods in immigration law in the United States.

After 1882, you start seeing detailed immigration records that are consistent across the country.

Between 1819 and 1882, you’ll have ship manifests with very basic information, but nothing for land crossings.

And before 1819, its entirely up to the officials at the port of entry.

In 1891, Congress established a Bureau of Immigration, finishing a transfer of immigration control from states and cities to the federal government which began in 1882. Ellis Island was part of this legal period, and from 1882 on, you’ll find standardized, detailed immigration records regardless of the port of entry.

If you use ancestry.com, you’ll find that only the basics have been indexed—name, gender, etc. What hasn’t been indexed is gold, though: each entry notes where and with whom the immigrant will be staying. This is family: see this entry for my great-grandfather, Michael Devaney? He reported he would be staying with his aunt, and she was unknown to everyone, in the U.S. and Ireland, researching that part of the Devaney family.

Prior that the important law was the Steerage Act of 1819, which required that ship captains provide a detailed registry of passengers with name, sex, age, and occupation those data points. You might get a bit more depending on the ship or port, but don’t get your hopes up. What I found for my third great-grandfather George Haggerty, who came to the U.S. in 1848, is pretty typical.

There are three interesting things to note here: first, ship captains could face legal penalties if the lists were inaccurate, so you can expect some degree of validation.

Second, the requirement was only for ship captains debarking passengers at a port of entry. If, for example, you landed at St. John, took a ferry down the St. Lawrence to Montreal, and then walked south to Manhattan, there wouldn’t be any record of your arrival in the United States. Likewise, a captain could drop some or all of his passengers off on an isolated beach on Cape May before sailing up the Delaware to Philadelphia.

Now, both of those scenarios may sound ridiculous, but thousands of Irish did this during the Famine. Why? Well, Congress charged ship captains a head tax for Irish passengers during the Famine. The English, on the other hand, wanted to settlers in Canada, and subsidized the fare to St. John, including the free ferry trip to Montreal.

Before 1819, though, it was entirely up to local governments, and outside of naturalization, most of them did nothing.

Tracking the immigration of English Quakers to Colonial Pennsylvania, for example, is probably going to be through religious sources, not secular. Quakers would carry certificates of removal from their Monthly Meeting in England so they could easily join a new Monthly Meeting in Pennsylvania, and those certificates would be mentioned in those meeting records. But the colonial government didn’t care.

The Puritans also kept detailed records of the Great Migration to Massachusetts, but this wasn’t official government record keeping either.

Virginia, you’ll find next to nothing.

The only exception was naturalization during the colonial period: under English law, any real property owned by an alien would revert to the Crown upon that alien’s death, not to his heirs.

This is why you can find basic information about ethnic German immigrants to the colonies of Pennsylvania and New York: they were eager to swear loyalty to the Crown so that they could pass any farmland they acquired to their children. They weren’t ship lists, they were oaths of loyalty to the Crown given shortly after arriving in Philadelphia.

Several months ago, I got so fed up with Ancestry.com’s hint system that I did this. Yup, I disabled all hints on all of my trees.

No more little wiggly leafs showing up on profiles distracting me with icons of little angels or records dated decades before my ancestor was born, or after they died.

Did you see that? In the upper left corner? No?

How about now. See those little leafs pop up?

Yeah. So the only thing that ancestry.com’s “hint disabling” feature does is prevent the little leaf from appearing in the top right-hand corner here.

And in those intervening months, Ancestry.com served me up over a thousand of what I have to imagine are useless hints.

Now, I’ll be honest, I’m the one who is incapable of ignoring all of those hints. I know intellectually that maybe only one or two of those will tell me something new, and so I shouldn’t bother to look. I know that I’m the one that can’t control myself. I admit that.

But I also know that ancestry.com has a data analytics team, and I bet you that analytics team has shown that hints drive user engagement, and that continued user engagement is highly correlated with, and possibly causal of, subscription renewals. So ancestry.com knows that if it keeps showing me hints, I’ll have a reason to keep coming back and paying them money without them having to improve their service much.

I do data analytics for a living for a big tech company. This is the kind of thing we get paid to do.

So… I’m going to start looking at ancestry.com competitors. See what else is out there, see if I can find a service that doesn’t distract me, that helps me focus on the genealogy research I want to focus on.

Not that I’ll be able to drop ancestry.com: the service is designed to be sticky, to make it difficult to switch to a competitor because you can’t move your data easily.

It’s a design model that’s falling out of favor in the commercial space because companies hate getting locked-in. But there’s little to stop it in the consumer space.

Ancestry.com hints have become completely useless for me, and I have some ideas on how to improve them.

When I started using Ancestry.com nearly a decade ago the hint system was amazing, helping me turn some basic information from my wife’s aunts into a fleshed family tree.

But today, I would estimate that a third of the hints are for tertiary sources that I rarely use, another third are wildly and obviously wrong, and the remaining third are random images or copy/pastes from sites such as find-a-grave.

Moreover, nine of ten hints are for siblings of direct lines (and those siblings’ spouses) that won’t me get through brick walls and that I no longer care about.

In short, maybe one in five hundred hints tells me something new and useful about someone I care about.

Consider Charles Stanford. I know this fellow’s story: my father officiated Charles’ 1968 wedding to Jean O’Neill, my dad’s cousin. My father also delivered Charles’ and Jean’s eulogy after they were murdered by a drunk driver in 1987.

Now look at the hints ancestry.com recently offered about a family story I know.

This one hints that Charles married in 1919 decades before he was born. This one hints that he served in the Marines at the age of two. This one hints he died in Wales even though my profile clearly states he died in Pennsylvania.

Just about every day, Ancestry.com serves up useless hints like these. It’s like panning for gold, washing out pounds of mud in the hopes of finding a dust mote of gold.

Is this mess solvable? Yes. Here’s how.

1. Set some basic data rules. If the profile I create sets a birth & death year & place, don’t show me hints for other states and countries, let alone for records before that person was born, or after they died.
2. Even better, let me tune hint accuracy just like I can tune when running searches. At a minimum, let do this at the tree level, but I’d love to be able to adjust person by person.
3. Let me turn off hints from particular sources. I don’t want to see recommendations for summary genealogies such as North American Family Histories or Sons of the American Revolution. Ever.
4. Let me turn off hints person by person, even branch by branch. Most of the people in my tree are siblings and their spouses. Once I land the lineage and story for direct ancestors, I’m not going to learn anything else from siblings, cousins and their spouses. I don’t want to delete those people, but I don’t want to have my research distracted by hints about them.

But Ancestry.com should be able to go beyond those simple UI features. Many companies, including Microsoft, offer powerful, easy-to-configure artificial intelligence services that could really make ancestry.com hints useful.

1. Help me with images. Image classification services, including facial recognition ones, could easily be trained to let exclude hints for icons of immigrant ships, DNA, angels, country flags, gravestones and other random stuff that I don’t care about. And by easily, I mean point-and-click artificial intelligence. Click the card above to see a quick demo of this with Azure’s Custom Vision AI service.
2. Identify unique story contributions. Ancestry owns Find-a-grave, it can search the web, and it can use commercially available machine-learning services to exclude sources that were just copied from another site, and highlight sources that are unique and specially transcribed.
3. Rank the hints, and funnel unlikely hints directly to the “undecided” bucket. Or only notify me in the general user interface if a hint is likely to be a match, while hiding the unlikely hints within the profile.

Of course, I don’t expect to see such improvements. To continue growing, Ancestry.com needs to expand their user base, and that means creating new genealogists. Developing features for users like me who will keep paying regardless doesn’t make much business sense.

Unless Ancestry.com realized that I would pay more for this.

I just finished a 2011 book by Colin Woodward called American Nations. The book is largely focused on trying to understand how North American politics works today based on emigration and settlements of different pre-colonial cultural & religious groups.

That history has a real application to genealogy, at least, the part where we try to understand who our ancestors were, what the believed and how they lived their lives.

Quick summary:

1. It doesn’t matter where people came from, they become acculturated to the environment in which they live their lives.
2. People didn’t just migrate to places in the United States where friends and family already lived. They migrated West within their cultural groups.
3. Woodward has this really cool map of settlement patterns that can help you understand your ancestors’ culture, and
4. That map can help you make educated guesses about where to look for records as you move back in time.

It’s these last two that I find fascinating and that I think makes Woodward’s book a good purchase. If you want to avoid the modern politics, just skip the last four or five chapters on modern cultural clashes.

Woodward posits that North America has eleven distinct cultural groups or nations, with nine of them pre-dating the Revolution.

I won’t go through them all—read the book, but in my wife’s family, there were really just four:

1. Tidewater, an aristocratically inclined nation centered around the Chesapeake Bay
2. Midlands, a moderate, pluralistic, Pacifist nation with Philadelphia Quaker roots.
3. Yankeedom, a communitarian, utopian-inspired culture founded by New England Puritans.
4. Appalachian, a libertarian-inclined nation founded by Scots-Irish settlers in the colonial Backcountry.

What’s fascinating is that these borders actually match to different branches in her tree, and I can almost always point to a particular event that had them cross.

First, take a look at Ohio. Woodward has this state split between three nations, Yankeedom, Appalachia and Midlands.

My wife’s maternal line has a lot of Ohio in it. Some Midlands Pennsylvania Dutch, some Appalachian Scots-Irish. For a more than a century, both families moved West within these boundaries.

The Scots-Irish line moved from the Virginia backcountry—what is West Virginia today—through Appalachian Kentucky, then Appalachian Southern Ohio, and finally Appalachian Southern Indiana and Illinois.

The Pennsylvania Dutch family went west through Pennsylvania—but only the Midlands Pennsylvania counties—to Midlands Northern Ohio.

How did the two families cross? Well, one branch of the Scots-Irish line ended up in Illinois along what Woodward asserts was on the Appalachian/Midland border, and then went to Midland Iowa. There, they met up with a branch of that Midland family that went all over Midlands territory, from Kansas to Iowa to Nebraska.

But beyond that, my wife’s maternal line is only Midlands and Appalachia.

My wife’s paternal line? Until the 1840s, there were really six distinct lines: three were Yankee, one dating back to the Mayflower, and another two that were acculturated in existing Yankee communities in New Brunswick and western New York. The fourth was pure Appalachian. The last two were ethnic German, one 100% Pennsylvania Dutch from colonial times, the other Germans from Russia.

These six lines had absolutely no geographic overlap until the mid 1800s. What brought them together? The Oregon Trail. Between 1843 and 1900, each branch went overland

Ancestry.com recently introduced a new feature called DNA ThruLines. The idea is to merge DNA evidence and people’s family trees to help you break through brick walls.

It’s interesting, but I have three reservations about the execution:

1. The DNA ThruLines icon shows up even when there’s nothing there.
2. The “hints” are, ultimately, just other peoples’ family trees, which are typically just copies of copies lacking compelling evidence.
3. It doesn’t help me break through brick walls by proposing connections that aren’t already there.

First, the DNA ThruLines user interface tosses up what I would consider false positives. Take a glance at my wife’s family tree. See that little blue ThruLines icons above Oliver Raser? I takes me three clicks to discover that there are no DNA ThruLines matches here.

Don’t waste my time, Ancestry.com. Hide the icon when you don’t have information to share.

Second, DNA ThruLines relies on other people’s family trees, and that’s a garbage-in, garbage-out scenario. To me, it feels exactly like getting hints from other peoples’ family trees, with no distinction between a profile with dozens of sources and one with no evidence at all.

Take my mom’s 2^nd great-grandfather, James Brown. I’m confident in this lineage, but the DNA tests from our many distant cousins confirms we’ve got it right.

I have no idea who James Brown’s father was, however. But Ancestry.com has a suggestion: John Edward Brown. But there are no DNA matches from his other children, that is, via James Brown’s siblings—that’s the kind of proof I want to see from DNA.

And when I click through to John Edward Brown on “Steve’s Tree,” what do I get? A profile with no supporting evidence.

Really, how is this any different from family tree hints? DNA ThruLines, despite the cool the marketing language of DNA, is little different from the family tree hints they’ve offered for a decade.

And I hate using tertiary sources like this because they can be so unreliable. I am so reluctant to use them I even recorded a video about what I think is the only safe way.

My third point is that DNA ThruLines is missing the big opportunity here: helping us break through brick walls by identifying siblings and cousins, aunts and uncles. Researching relatives is one of my favorite ways to break through brick walls, as one you see in this video.

Here’s an interesting scenario from my mom’s DNA matches: her maternal line, the Posses, seemed to come to the United States without friends or family. It’s like Charles Poss magically appeared in Pennsylvania.

Now, there’s this really fascinating DNA match with two other members who document their descent from a Jacob Posz who was ten years older than our Charles, who was also a Catholic, and who came from Germany around the same time…

There’s a common ancestor there, but DNA ThruLines isn’t helping me make connections because the trees aren’t already matched together.

Here’s how I’d like it to work. This is also my favorite example of garbage-in, garbage out for DNA ThruLines.

Let’s take Thomas Chew. The consensus opinion is that his parents were Andrew Chew and Anna Mariah Barthist. And look here, Ancestry.com is suggesting Anna Barthist as a match based on similarities between my mother-in-law’s DNA and that of another member who descends through Thomas’ brother, Joseph Chew.

The evidence is pretty complicated, so I won’t present it all here. But the nut of it is that Joseph Chew’s wife was also a Chew, and I think that she was a descendant of Andrew Chew and Anna Mariah Barthist, while Thomas and Joseph Chew were from a completely different branch of the Chew family.

In fact, when I look at my mother-in-law’s DNA matches, she actually has two matches with people who descent from a completely different Chew branch.

Confused? Yeah, I can see why. Put it this way: DNA ThruLines is suggesting that my mother-in-law had two distinct lines of descent. And not because there’s some oddity in her DNA, but because two different genealogists have different views of the evidence and put different lineages in their trees.

What would I like to see? Well, it’s right here with that Chew example. I created a person in my tree named Wild Speculation Chew and connected him to Joseph and William Chew.

I want ancestry.com to take common surnames—like in my earlier Poss example and show me multiple potential lineages, with estimated degrees of separation, based on DNA matches with people’s whose lines of descent don’t appear to converge with my tree.

That’s the real opportunity here: giving me ideas on where and about whom I should research to break through a brick wall.

The Ellis Island immigration officer lazily changing your ancestor’s name is an American story so enshrined in our collective imagination about European immigration to the United States, it even makes an appearance in the Godfather II.

There are some truths in that clip.

Notice how the future Godfather Don Corleone was accompanied by an immigration officer who spoke Italian? And how the other immigration officer’s accent showed he was born in Ireland. The U.S. government deliberately hired immigrants who spoke languages other than English to make sure there were no communication challenges.

Also, remember the tag around Vito Andolini’s neck with his name and place of birth? Well, I don’t know if those tags were a thing, but ship captains were required to provide detailed and accurate passenger manifests, or their passenger might be turned away. And those captains didn’t want to waste cargo space on humans when American goods and resources were far more profitable for the return journey.

What is fiction is the idea that an immigration officer would change Vito Andolini’s surname to Corleone, the name of his village. Immigration officers were trained and paid to be accurate, and they had the linguistic resources to get it right.

So if your family has a story about an immigration officer at Ellis Island or Castlegarden unilaterally changing your ancestor’s name, it’s almost certainly fiction.

But surnames did change, and for four main reasons:

1. Other government clerks couldn’t manage the foreign name.
2. Literacy and government standardization formalized more flexible spelling.
3. Cultural pressures prompted your ancestors to anglicize their name.
4. Your ancestor changed their name for a reason.

The first two are tough to provide examples for, because the change can be gradual, and vary from place to place. My wife’s surname, Raser is a decent one: the original 1600s immigrant to Pennsylvania was a ship captain, and thus literate: he spelled his name Roeser. Over the course of the following centuries, though, his descendants ended with several different spellings, including Raser and Roser.

Regardless, the story is one of increased government record-keeping which began in the 1800s, and ended when governments provided social benefit programs and collected taxes on income.

The third, cultural pressures, are much easier to identify, and fall into two big groups.

The first group is that, in moments of nationalist fervor (and the bigotry that often came with it), people anglicized their names.

For example, around World War I, German-Americans were the targets of bigoted nationalist fervor in the U.S. You’ll see quite a few names such as Schmidt and Mueller change to Smith and Miller between 1910 and 1920.

The Revolution saw a similar shift: for example, the Dutch Van Vliet family, which first appeared in New Amsterdam in the 1600s, and had spread across New Jersey, New York Virginia and Ohio in the subsequent four or five generations. The entire extended family spontaneously changed their surname to VanFleet by 1800.

The second imposition of cultural pressures were more subtle: having a name that’s difficult to pronounce. I like the example of Jay Yantosh, my first cousin once removed. When his paternal line came to Pennsylvania in the late 1800s, they carried the Czech name of Yantoshik.

That may have been a mouthful, however, and one branch of the family dropped the final ik, while others retained the full name. I saw a similar pattern in the Zuckschwerdt family: one descendant of the immigrant changed his name to Sexworth while the rest kept it the same.

But in the end, the idea of personal renewal in America may have prompted your ancestor to change their name before they reached Ellis Island or a precursor.

Take Jim Bigej, a relative of ours: when his Bigej ancestor came to America from Bosnia, he wanted an American-sounding name, and decided to abandon whatever his family name, traveling as Bigej.

And the practice stretched back to the earliest days. I was fascinated by the surname of a co-worker, Dana Rambo. I had encountered it while researching an ethnic German surname in my wife’s tree.

I had assumed that Rambo was ethnic German as well, but when I looked it up, I was shocked to discover that the original Rambo arrived with the first Swedish colonists in what later became Pennsylvania. But Rambo wasn’t his surname: he’d made it up.

Maps change. It happens today, but it happens so slowly, we don’t really think too much of it unless the change was accompanied by headline grabbing events, such as the civil war that resulted in the disintegration of Yugoslavia into Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro & Kosovo.

Most changes are subtle, though: for example, if you were researching Sidney Kidd in Princeton, New Jersey, you wouldn’t be able to find his street address very easily on modern maps. Google maps points you to Jackson Avenue in nearby Rocky Hill, while Bing Maps would land you in the town of Nutley where Jackson street is a block over from Princeton Street.

Why can’t you find Jackson Street in Princeton, a town founded in the 1700s? Well, Jackson Street was renamed to Paul Robeson Place in 1976 after the famous African-American civil rights activist & thespian who was born in Princeton.

Of course, a change in street names doesn’t have much genealogical relevance, but changes in boundaries do, especially county boundaries.

In this video, I’ll cover four topics around map changes.

1. When county boundaries change, the records don’t move.
2. Use web resources such as mapofus.org to understand geographic boundary changes.
3. Remember that places can disappear as well.

First, and most basic: Court records remain in the original county courthouse. For example, if your ancestor bought land in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania before 1799 and died there in 1801, you would find property records in York County registers, but probate records in Adams County.

Why? In 1800, Adams County was carved out of York County but older records weren’t moved from the York County courthouse to the new one in Adams County. Remember that records were typically transcribed into large bound ledgers, so you couldn’t break the ledgers apart and easily separate records geographically. But even if the records were stored loose leaf, it would take a lot of effort to sort through the records for little reward.

How do you track county changes? I find Wikipedia the most convenient source: most entries will tell you when the county was formed and how in the summary.

If you want to visualize it, check out mapofus.org, which will show every county formation and boundary change for every state in the union.

You can also do an image search on bing or google for county maps for a particular year.

Of course, this isn’t much good if a place actually disappeared. Take a look at this old map of Oregon City, Oregon (above). Across the Willamette River is a town called Linn City. Look on a modern map, and Linn City doesn’t exist. There’s a West Linn, but no Linn. What happened? Well, in the fall of 1861, relentless heavy rainfall flooded the Willamette River and destroyed the town.

Again, Wikipedia is a great resource to research a place that you can’t find on a modern map.

Brick walls are frustrating. I’ve broken through dozens, but I have even more that I’ve been staring at for years. In this quick video, I’ll share one method of breaking through a brick wall and provide an illustrative example.

Quick version: if you run into a dead-end with your direct line, research their siblings, or even people you just suspect might be their siblings. Records associated with the sibling may help you make new connections.

If find this useful in a few different scenarios.

One is trying to determine an ancestor’s maiden name: sponsors or witnesses at baptisms tend to be family members, especially before the 1800s. If a surname crops up repeatedly, it’s a good guess that those are the mother’s siblings, aunts, uncles or even parents.

Another scenario is trying to bridge geographical gaps. It was the rare exception before 1900 that someone immigrated alone.

Ethnic Germans, for example, tended to immigrate to Colonial Pennsylvania in a group with others from their village. If you can’t trace your ancestor directly, their family in Pennsylvania may have a better trail back to Germany

Irish Catholics migrated in chains, so even if only a couple individuals were on a given ship, they already knew someone at their destination, whether it was a sibling or cousin or even a former neighbor.

Let me give you an example: a George Schlauch who died in Pelham, Ontario in early 1812. His will listed his children clearly, and a variety of evidence indicated that before moving to Canada, he lived in Berks County, Pennsylvania where he married a Catharina Gieg and started his family.

But George Schlauch was otherwise a brick wall. In 2015, one of George’s descendants, Liz Tice, asked me to help figure out who George’s parents were. There were quite a few hypotheses, and all of them could easily be disproved.

Trying to find a baptismal record for George was a pointless exercise. You can speculate that he was born between 1736 and 1740 by assuming he was in his mid- to late-twenties when he married in 1764. That also put him in his mid-70s when he died in Canada—a reasonable age for the time. But there were at least three men with that name born in Pennsylvania around then, even more in Germany.

Still, any birth year between 1720 and 1745 would fit those marriage and death years as well. And there were dozens of baptismal records for George Sloughs in Germany and Pennsylvania in that twenty-five year period.

Liz had a new hypothesis, though. That George was somehow related to a Michael Slough because of this property map which showed the two living close to each in Brecknock Township.

We couldn’t find any records tying George and Michael together, but there was a third person that seemed to connect the two: a Barbara Schlauch. When she married in 1761, her father was named as Michael Schlauch. When her son was baptized in 1783, the sponsors were the George and Catharine Schlauch we were researching.

Of course, there wasn’t much about Michael or Barbara to indicate who their parents were or where they were born either. Michael’s death in 1808 suggested he and George were of about the same age, but that was it.

But Liz had found a June 1808 record of Michael’s death and burial, which noted he was seventy-seven years and about eight months old. See the “etwa” there? That’s German for “about.” That put his birth in the fall of 1730, late October-ish.

And in the village of Gomaringen, near Tubingen, Germany, there was a record of a 2 November 1730 baptism of a Michael Schlauch born to Michael & Maria Schlauch. There were plenty of other baptismal records for Michael Schlauch in Germany, but none in the fall of 1730.

Michael’s father had several other children, including a George born in October of 1738, and a Barbara born in 1744.

Finally, in 1747, a Michael Schlauch immigrated with his family to Pennsylvania aboard the Restauration.

We couldn’t find a way to trace George’s ancestry, but by following the document trail of a potential brother, we could put the entire family story together.

Of the dozens of potential George’s, his brother led us to the right baptismal record in Germany, and broke us through that brick wall.

When you have a bunch of people with the same name living in the same state and you can’t figure out which records belong to which person, find all the records, associate them with people based on location, and then consider the reality of distance for the period.

Consider colonial Philadelphia and Manhattan: two major cities about 90 miles apart. Amtrak’s Acela train can make that trip in 90 minutes, a car can do it in two hours. But in colonial times, a horse was the more likely mode of intercity travel.

Now a horse walks at around four or five miles an hour, making the journey take about twenty hours if you canter now and again.

Ninety miles was a huge deal. In reality, before the automobile, your ancestors’ family, friends, associates and neighbors were probably all within a two-hour radius—six miles on foot, ten on horse. If you see records for what appears to be the same person in towns twenty or thirty miles apart at about the same time prior to 1850 or 1860, you can bet they are actually two different people.