If you’ve ever thought you might be a descendant of the nation’s first president, George Washington, think again.
He has no direct descendants left, just shirttail relatives.
That’s one of the interesting tidbits offered by Crista Cowan, known as The Barefoot Genealogist featured in hundreds of weekly YouTube videos. She spoke to nearly 700 people at the Greater Tacoma Convention Center during Ancestry Day Saturday.
Although I focus on recording the stories of live people, I joined my sister, our family genealogist, for the daylong seminar. I learned a lot about researching family histories and using the online family search program, Ancestry.com, to do it.
Ancestry.com features 18 billion records, including census reports for nearly every decade from 1790 through 1940, when 134 million Americans were counted. That’s the last one publicly available because of federal privacy laws. In the United States, federal census records can’t be made public for 70 years, so the 1950 records will be available in 2021.
However, no federal census records exist for 1890, when a fire devoured the records, and those that didn’t burn were destroyed by the water. Instead, for 1890 information, check city directories. Ancestry.com has 1.5 billion city directory records from 1822 to 1995. The Lewis County Historical Museum has local directories.
Major fraud abounded during the 1870 census, so a second enumeration took place, which means sometimes a person was listed twice.
At times you may wonder whether records even exist. Cowan offered a terrific resource to find out. Using Google, type in “burned counties.” A page pops up listing the states, and if you click on Washington, for example, you’ll see which courthouses experienced disasters that might have destroyed public records, such as the 1890 fire at the Clark County courthouse and jail. A 1974 fire destroyed 80 percent of the Army’s military personnel records, Cowan said.
Washington’s state archives include records for licensing barbers, nurses, early automobile owners as well as criminal records for state and federal prisons. Many contain photos.
Cowan loves narrowing search parameters using the “card catalog” of 32,720 databases, which I hadn’t ever explored. Before searching for a name, she types in the county, approximate years and types of records, narrowing the possibilities. Names were often misspelled.
She also noted that Ancestry’s “hints” are just that — possibilities, not certainties. She never clicks on the family trees first.
“When you look at other trees, you’re looking at their conclusions from their research,” she said. “I look at records first and draw my own conclusions.”
Looking at others’ trees, for example, you might add someone to your tree who isn’t actually related to you, based on someone’s faulty conclusions.
“If you have one weak link, you could be climbing somebody else’s family tree,” she said.
Cowan clicks on only the first page of proffered hints. Clicking onto a suggested record brings up a list at the right of other possible records to explore.
She recommended keeping your family tree both online and on your computer, so you can look at it without internet access.
People can change the tree’s setting from “private” to “public,” and Ancestry.com masks all information about living people. If somehow a living person’s information shows up in a family tree, Cowan suggested contacting the tree’s owner and, if that doesn’t work, Ancestry’s support team at 1-800-Ancestry.
Before you die, consider putting a directive in your will saying what happens to your family research. If you die with your tree listed as “private,” it stays private … forever.
Nobody owns the copyright to a family tree, but narratives you write are copyrighted.
Cowan urged genealogists to share their history in family stories.
“Stories are what spark people’s imaginations,” she said. “Stories are what people remember.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
