The half life of the past

kw: family history

In the course of researching ancestors, I happened upon a wonderful archive of telephone book transcripts from the late 1800s, at the Midwest Historical and Genealogical Society. My ancestor, a land examiner named Joe Lindsey, seems to have carried on a side trade similar to house flipping, where he would live somewhere a year while fixing it up, then sell it and move on. Starting in 1885, he lived at these addresses in central and east Wichita, Kansas:

• 110 W Lewis Street
• 418 So Lawrence Lane
• 212 Mathewson Street
• 1033 Laura Avenue – the family lived here four years
• 139 Ida Avenue – last residence in Wichita

I couldn't resist tracking down these addresses in Google Street View. Guess what? Three are entirely industrial now. Lawrence Lane is still residential, but all the houses are from the 1990s or later, judging by appearance alone. One whole side of Lawrence is taken up with the grounds of a church. The house numbers along this three-block street are in the 600-900 range, so the 400 block is entirely missing. The Mathewson Street location is partly industrialized. The only house standing on the 200 block is this one, at 204. It may be of the right period, but it is could be from the 1930s, built after older houses were torn down or burned down. Other houses across the street appear 1930-ish.

When I visited Malta Bend, Missouri, where my father grew up, although I found ten ancestors in the little graveyard, only one house that any of them lived in is still standing. My father told me that his old house burned down twice, his grandfather's house burned, and other older houses had all burned at one time or another.

I guess that in the course of one lifetime, about half the artifactual history around us vanishes, one way or another. Old neighborhoods are replaced with commercial or industrial complexes, or they are torn down and all new neighborhoods erected; things we own may burn in a fire or be ruined in a flood; we throw away stuff; people inherit heirlooms but don't appreciate them and send them to the Salvation Army store or throw them out. Considering how much "stuff" we bring into our homes every year, I guess it is good that most of it is done away with. Otherwise, we'd be buried in refuse (hoarders self-bury!).

I mourn the passing of old neighborhoods, though. A well-build house can last for many generations. But after 50-100 years, everything is so out of style, few people want to live there. A place gets neglected, then abandoned, maybe condemned, and if it doesn't burn down, it'll be torn down and replaced. A few "lucky" remaining structures may finally be put on a Register of Historic Homes. But, really, when I think back over the places I've lived, I can only think of one or two houses that really deserve preservation. The rest are, or were, middle-class ticky-tacky that may survive a few upgrades—replacement windows, upgraded kitchen and bathrooms, a few coats of paint, maybe new siding, and a new roof every ten or twenty years—but will eventually be cheaper to demolish than to refurbish. Sic transit gloria mundi!

Weaving with straw

kw: family history, genealogy, writing

If locating a new ancestor is like finding a needle in a haystack, genealogy as practiced by my mother and two other women to whom I am related is like weaving the haystack into a tapestry, and using it to display one's needle collection. First and foremost, I am thinking of a book I received very recently, Buckland Filleigh: A Continuous Thread by Madeline Jane Taylor.

There are thousands of books that recount the family history of one specific family, but a much smaller number that weave together the history of a region or place out of all the family stories to be found in it. When a place is small enough, it is possible in one volume to encompass all the family histories, and that appears to be what Mrs. Taylor has done for Buckland Filleigh, a parish in Devon, England that is one of twenty-six in the Shebbear Hundred.

A Hundred is an administrative unit, as set up by the Saxons, consisting of one hundred "hides", a hide being a land area that can support one family. It is not hard to determine that Buckland Filleigh, then, contains but a handful of hides. But in modern times, by which I mean since the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s, only a few families might live by farming, while the rest have "day jobs", so the chronicle of even this small place is rich with stories and is quite a challenge to compile.

I cannot yet review the book, as I am still reading it, and that right slowly. For the moment, it is quite amazing the amount of raw information from parish records, land office records, tax records and other sources that the author has compiled to produce the book. Was it Rumpelstiltskin who wove straw into gold? The nugget for which I obtained the book is the last appendix, an 8-generation descendancy chart for Stephen Vanstone, an ancestor of Mrs. Taylor's, and also one of mine. From noting where the line to her and the line to me branch, I reckon that we are eighth cousins.

Genealogy of the Lindsey Family, compiled by Emily Lindsey, is an unpublished manuscript that jump-started me and my mother in the genealogy obsession. We received in 1962 a typescript produced by my mother's cousin from the manuscript. This cousin had typed up the 1901 manuscript and added a few pages to bring it up to date to 1962. The total volume is but 30 pages of double-spaced typescript, containing the vital data for about 100 people, beginning with Thomas Macy, one of the original purchasers of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Miss Lindsey, my great-grandfather's sister, must have been about my age when she compiled the material, starting with the Lindsey family Bible.

The descendancy record from Thomas Macy to her generation occupies just five pages. The following twenty-one pages record other descendant families, Freelands, Pecks, Turners and others. My mother's cousin added Lusters, Wilcoxes, Vanstones and more, and one or two more recent generations of the other families, for a record of about 100 cousins through the fourth degree, most of whom I've never known.

Then there is my mother. She, my brothers and I figured out Miss Lindsey's system (by no means clear at first), and drew charts of the ten generations of our own family tree. Within a few years, my parents' nest emptied and my mother joined a genealogy club, among other pursuits. Then I found in a library The history of Nantucket: county, island, and town, including genealogies of first settlers by Alexander Starbuck. Mom told me, "At the genealogy club, we all have cake when someone finds one new ancestor. This book has about thirty, so we had quite a party!" That was in 1970, now forty years ago.

Just a few years ago, my brother sent all her genealogical records to me; she'd sent them to him when she could no longer continue to research and compile. He did quite a bit of research himself, in the years just before we all got computers. The core is a large, half-folio-size binder of pedigree pages, more than 100 of them. A box of photocopies from books, newspapers, and other sources rounds out the material. My brother did not add to the pedigree pages, but had gathered census records in both the US and England. Again, this was before computers: he photocopied microfilm records.

I think if she'd had time and energy, my mother would have written a book from all this. She is gone now six years. Since my brother sent me all the stuff, I've put it into Ancestry.com and the number of ancestors in the tree has grown to just over one thousand. The descendancy information on cousins I've chosen to track adds another hundred or so. That is quite a needle collection!

Is moving genetic?

kw: genealogy, family history

In answer to a friend's question, I said something like "all my ancestors come from different places." Then I looked into it and found it is true on two levels. Firstly, from four to fourteen generations back, I have lots of immigrants to and emigrants within the continental United States and Canada. Secondly, just picking the fourth generation, my eight great-grandparents each have a different birthplace from all the others.

Running down the Ahnentafel (ancestor table) from father's father's father to mother's mother's mother, the places of birth are England, Canada, Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Alabama, Illinois, and Indiana. The next generation prior, of sixteen people, twelve states or countries of birth are represented. None of the above was born in California, but I was, so every generation moved somewhere.

No wonder I have been a wanderer. I come from a long line (a dozen long lines) of people who moved multiple times in their lives. I find it astonishing that I've lived in the same place for fifteen years now. It is more than twice as long as I lived anywhere else. So, OK, I am slowing down. Not at a full stop, though, not yet!

One third Irish?

kw: genealogy, family history

A guy announces that he's one-third Irish, and a friend challenges him, "That's impossible? How can you figure you are one-third anything?" He answers, "It isn't hard at all. My Mom isn't Irish at all, and my Dad is two-thirds Irish!"

I happen to be blessed with many ancestors who were good record-keepers, so I know a lot about my family heritage. I recently began gathering together all the information I have about the ancestors who were immigrants to America. I know that, except for a line of Cherokees, all of my ancestry goes through immigrants, but I don't know who the actual immigrants were in all cases. I can determine about 2/3 of my heritage at the moment, and I think I'll be able to increase that with a little more study.

If I add up the influence of each immigrant I know about (there are 152), it totals about 62% of the total. It works this way. A great-grandparent (three generations ago) has a factor of 1/8, or 12.5%, while a great-great-great-grandparent (five generations back) has a factor of 1/32, or 3.125%. Some of those 152 are 12 generations back, a factor of 1/4096 or 0.0244%. It takes a bunch of them to equal a great-great-grandparent.

So here is the approximate breakdown. Of the 62% I know, 22% (just over one third of the 62%), is English, and 21% is Irish. Less than half the rest is Welsh, a bit less is Scottish, and I have one known Cherokee line and one known German line, far enough back to be about 2% each. If those proportions fairly represent my entire heritage, then I am about 1/3 English and 1/3 Irish (But only "about", not exactly 1/3!). And that surprises me. I'd gotten the impression from the prominence of one Scottish line that I was mostly Scottish, but it is closer to 8%. The largest contingent, by a small margin, is English.

Calculating with Ahnentafels

kw: family history, genealogy

A few days ago I wrote about Ahnentafel numbers, or "ancestry table" numbers. See the explanation there.

When I am confronted with an Ahnentafel number (AN) larger than about 32, I have to do some work to figure out where in the family tree this person fits. Converting the number base makes it simpler. I have a scientific calculator that can convert from base 10 to bases 2, 8 and 16. I use base 2 for smaller numbers, and an intermediate of base 8 for larger ones, for which I can pretty easily convert to base 2 (binary) for whatever next step I have in mind.

If you don't have a calculator that will do it for you, you can convert from base 10 to base 8 with pencil and paper, using successive division and keeping remainders. I'll do an example with the AN 10569:

10569/8 = 1321 with a remainder of 1; that is what the first two lines show. You keep dividing until you get a number smaller than 8, and that is your last remainder. Based on the calculation shown, the base 8 (octal) representation of 10569 is 24511.

For many needs, it is most convenient to know the binary representation. For example, if you have an AN of 19 for an ancestor, in binary it is 1011. The first 1 is always you, and after that zeroes represent males, and ones represent females, so this is your father's mother's mother. Your father's father's father has a binary representation of 1000, which is 16. Memorize the table that follows if you don't already know these:

These make it simple to turn 24511 (8) into binary: 010 100 101 001 001 or 10100101001001, discarding any leading zeroes. Now, you can read this off as "my father's mother's, etc." but it has a more practical use. I have for years kept family records according to which great-grandparent's line they were in (Great grandparents have AN's of 8-15, or in binary, 1000-1111). The first four binary digits in 10569 are 1010, which equals 10 in decimal. This works out to the line of my father's mother's father.

Also, the charts you can print from Ancestry.com have five generations. The root sheet thus has people with AN's from 1 (you) to 31. If, as I do, you print successive sheets starting with the people in the rightmost column (fifth generation, including you), you can figure out where 10569 is, such as which sheet she is on (odd AN's are for females). Take the number five bits at a time, but overlapping by one bit, and converting a leading zero to a one: 10100, (1)1010, (1)0100, (1)1. These four binary numbers represent 20, 26, 20, and 3.

I number sheets in the corner according to the AN of the root person for that sheet. The figuration here is a bit tricky:

• The root sheet is sheet 1.
• The second sheet with the line to 10569 is sheet 20.
• The third sheet is 20x16+10 = 330 (26 is 16+10).
  
• The fourth sheet is 330x16+4 = 5284.
• Person 10569 is in position 3 (mother of root person 5284).

I find these numerical tools for converting to octal and binary very useful. I have seen articles advocating the use of wholly octal AN's, and there are some benefits to doing so. With a bit of practice, you can just about read off the person's affiliation by scanning the AN. However, putting the AN's on the sheets, if you don't have software that does it for you, would be tricky: in octal, 200x2 = 400, but 217x2 = 436. It takes a lot of practice to do this comfortably.

Ahnentafel numbers

kw: family history, genealogy

Some years ago, I came up with a scheme to number ancestors, and thought it was quite original. It didn't take me long to find out it is very old, dating back to 1590, when the first Ahnentafel, or Ancestor Table, was published by Michaël Eytzinger with this numbering system, which is also known as the Eytzinger Method.

The concept of Ahnentafel Numbers is simple, and is based on the fact that each generation you go back, you have twice as many ancestors as in the prior one: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so forth. If you make a pedigree chart in the ordinary way, with the father shown on the line above the mother in each couple, then you number this way:

• Your number, as the root of the table, is 1.
• Your father's number is 2 and your mother's is 3.
• Your father's parents are numbered 4 and 5, while your mother's parents are numbered 6 and 7.
• The next generation gets numbered from 8 to 15; and so it goes.

The number goes with the position in the chart, whether or not you know who the person is. Thus your father's father's father's father's father's father (six generations back in male succession) is numbered 64. The male succession anchors the entire sequence, always having numbers that are powers of two: 2⁶=64.

Before reading further, click on the chart below (clipped from Ancestry.com) to see the full-size image, so you can more easily read the green numbers next to the names.


This is a small Ahnentafel for John D. McCown, an ancestor of mine. Note that two ancestors are not known. The numbers 12 and 13 belong to those two slots, so if some day I find out who they were, they get those numbers, which are reserved for them.

In my own Ahnentafel charts, John D. McKown is numbered 42, so the male succession of this chart continues 84 for James B., 168 for James, and 336 for Gilbert McKown. Priscilla Turner at the bottom right is then numbered 343. (She and her husband are descended from Mayflower families, so information about them has been easy to find.)

If you have a calculator that can convert decimal numbers to binary, you can determine the father-mother sequence that leads to an ancestor when you know the person's Ahnentafel Number. For John D. McKown, 42 is 32+8+2, or 101010. I am the first 1, my father is the second digit, a 0 (because it is even), his mother is next, then her father, then his mother, then the last father, John D. Or, to be short, John D. McKown is my father's mother's father's mother's father.

I have very few quibbles with Ancestry.com, but one of them is that I wish I could print a pedigree that included the Ahnentafel numbers. I've been adding them by hand to the pedigree sheets I print. Since I know one line of ancestors going back 24 generations, some of those numbers have eight digits! Though numbers that big are unwieldy, most of my pedigree has numbers of four digits and fewer. They are a great help for bookkeeping. See this Wikipedia article for a detailed explanation of Ahnentafel Numbers.

A lonely Thanksgiving

kw: family history, artifacts

My father never dreamed he'd spend Thanksgiving 1945 still in New Guinea. The war had ended in August, he'd mustered out many of his men, but the Army for a series of reasons he didn't understand kept many men and most of the officers in place. So in his letter home for November 22, 1945 he included this menu for the day.

Of the hundreds of letter he wrote to his intended (my mother), this is one of the most poignant. In a paragraph about the middle he wrote,

"I've decided to resign to my fate again and plug along till my number comes to go home. All day and way into the nite each day all you hear is griping about points, when I'll go home, etc. Many guys almost drive themselves nuts, worrying about it. There must be thousands, but in the last month I haven't talked to anyone who has been overseas longer than me."

Dad had one brief visit home in mid-1943; thereafter he didn't return until late February 1946. He and my mother married in early March 1946.

I've just finished initial curating of my parents' wartime letters for WWII. It has taken months. I have yet to read more than little bits here and there as I put each sheet, or pair of sheets whenever only one side was used, into clear jackets. Our next generation is just getting into their college years (my brothers and I all had children quite late), so it may be left to a younger family historian to read all the letters and then, who knows what?

Here is a closeup of the Thanksgiving Dinner Dad and the rest enjoyed that warm day in the tropics. Quite a spread. I dunno; seems to me that turkey noodle soup isn't quite the same as roast turkey, but when it is a warm, rainy day, the spirit of the season isn't quite the same anyway. Soup is easier to transport half across the planet than frozen turkeys, anyway.

This bottom section of the page has the ration for the two holidays, per 100 men. Multiply this by twenty or so, for the men who were still deployed that Thanksgiving weekend, and you can see why military cooks need large staffs! The biggest single item, 170 pounds of potatoes per 100 (probably 1.5+ tons for the whole bunch)…that is a lot of peeling.

Back to Dad: he didn't write every day, but I still have ten binders full of his letters. Most of Mom's letters were lost, I only have the first year, but that is four binders because she did write every day, for four years. Is it any surprise they were married 58 years? I've been lucky; my own courtship lasted less than a year, yet in a few months we'll have had 35 years of marriage. We both come of long-lived stock, so we could last another thirty years or more. That suits me.

A personal relic

kw: artifacts, family history

I was ten when I learned that there are more than one kind of Magic Square. This one I constructed in 1958 has a reduced magic number of 16. The magic number for an order-4 square is normally 34. The standard magic number M_s is found from order N thus:

M_s = ½N(N² + 1)

This produces the series 1, 5, 15, 34, 65… A magic square with M <>s has a reduced magic number, and one with M > M_s has an augmented magic number. Only if M ≥ M_s can all the cells contain a unique number, and then only where N > 2. The only other requirement is that M ≥ N, though where M = N the result is trivial.

Of course I didn't know all that fifty years ago. I just knew that magic squares added up to a constant, both rows, columns and diagonals. When I showed this to a teacher, she was kind enough to thank me and ask if I knew how to make one with every number different. At age ten, I couldn't, but I found an answer in the encyclopedia.

a hairy heirloom

kw: family history, photography

A few years ago my father sent me this old horse blanket that had belonged to his grandmother. As a matter of family history, it is thrilling to have it. It is a tapestry woven from horse hair, as the best ones of the time were made, because it doesn't irritate the horse. The artistry is equally amazing.

To photograph it, I first laid it out on the driveway and took a picture from a ladder. That picture is very keystoned, however, and I wanted one that was more straight. I decided to take several pictures, shooting straight down, and try to find panorama stitching software, but nothing was available at a cost I was willing to pay.

Recently, the price became right for the stitcher that comes with Windows Live Photo Gallery: free. I am becoming quite a fan of this program, even besides its panorama tool. I used it for a few "straight line" panoramas, but I wondered how it handles multi-line image sets. This horse blanket was the perfect subject; the four shots I took have a large overlap with the center of the blanket. The stitcher worked quite well. The overlap error seen at top center and left middle are because of my missing the angle on one of the "vertical" shots. I may take the blanket out of mothballs someday and re-shoot.

The original for the stitched image is about 12 Mpx. It contains an amazing amount of detail. This crop shows the blanket stitches for one of the roses and the edging. (Note: The image you get by clicking the first pic is a 1Mpx reduction, while this one is being shown full size, 400x300.)

Handling larger images is showing up the deficiencies of my current computer. It takes about eight seconds for Irfanview to open the 12 Mpx image. I needed to see if this scales with image size, so I went to a nearby library and photographed the building in two ways. First, I took four images with the camera horizontally oriented, then eight with it set vertically. It took MLPG about five minutes to produce a panorama with the set of four, and ten minutes with the set of eight.

The latter panoramic image is nearly 50 Mpx, and takes almost a minute for Irfanview to open, even though the file is an 8 Mbyte JPEG. I noticed some time ago that a 7 Mbyte JPEG of a much smaller number of Mpx (10, I think), opened quite a bit quicker than that, so it is the uncorking large numbers of pixels that takes the time, not the reading of the bytes off the disk. Makes sense.

The upshot? I need more computer! I am waiting for Windows 7 to get out; then I'll get one. The XP/Vista/W7 saga is another story entirely. Suffice for now, I just don't want Vista.