Olivia Dorsey Peacock

Taking Advantage of Free Access to Pay-wall Resources: Newspapers.com

2022-02-21T11:57:59-06:00

Every so often, genealogy websites will offer free access to their materials. These typically happen around the holidays (like Newspapers.com’s recent free access offer for President’s Day), but may happen more regularly too (such as accessing Ancestry for free from your public library). While you should definitely take advantage of these opportunities, in order to make the most out of them, it pays to be prepared.

If you want to find some treasures to help you with the next steps in your research, make sure you have well-defined research goals before jumping in. Keeping your research goals organized keeps you focused. Sure, you can always type in ancestors’ names and important dates. Sometimes, you will find something relevant. But what if you could increase the chances of finding something important?

I’ll show you what I mean by showing you how I search Newspapers.com.

Finding Newspapers on Steave Green

Lately, I’ve been piecing together the life of my great-grandfather, Steave Green. I had already gathered some newspaper articles containing his obituary. However, there were still other events and topics relating to him and his family that I could find in newspapers.

I previously created a timeline of Steave’s life to keep track of his life events. I reviewed this timeline in order to find events that would be likely to be in newspapers. Then I put them in an Excel spreadsheet to create a list of things to search for. I call it, my “Newspaper Log”:

A screenshot of my newspapers log, containing columns for “Event/Topic,” “Possible Date(s),” “Event Location(s),” “Person(s),” “Additional Notes,” “Possible Newspapers,” “Possible Keywords,” and “Relevant Sources.”

Each spreadsheet page has information relating to a specific family branch. I could even separate each page by individual instead if I needed to.

A screenshot of the Family Name tabs at the bottom of my newspaper log.

Creating the Newspaper Log

Using the following columns helps me keep my details straight and identify which newspapers to look for:

Event/Topic: A few words that describe the event or topic I’d like to research.
Possible Date(s): Either the date or range of possible dates that the event happened or that the topic was likely to be mentioned.
Event Location(s): The possible locations where the event may have happened.
Person(s): The individual(s) who may have been involved or may be mentioned.
Additional Notes: Any extra research notes that may be helpful for my search.
Possible Newspapers: A list of newspapers to start searching.
Possible Keywords: Any search keywords I could use to help narrow my search.
Relevant Sources: Other sources that verify that the event happened or that the topic existed.

Finding Newspapers

If you don’t know which newspapers to search first, I recommend checking out the Library of Congress’s collection, Directory of US Newspapers in American Libraries. I’ve found it to be super helpful for figuring out what locations and time periods newspapers have covered.

An example of a newspaper from the Library of Congress’s “Directory of Newspapers in American Libraries” collection.

And if you scroll down further, it tells you which libraries have a copy of the newspaper and what format they have it in: A screenshot showing the “Libraries That Have It” section of the newspaper page from the Library of Congress’s “Directory of Newspapers in American Libraries” collection.

Searching for Newspapers

So with my log in hand, I can start searching for newspapers! I know that I want to find information about the history of Steave’s employer, Dennings Point Brockway Brick Works, and the work-related accident that caused his death. Learning more about his employer could lead to more records and provide more information about the nature of his work.

Unfortunately, a quick location search on Newspapers.com told me that they do not have any newspapers based in Beacon, New York. I would have to check with local public libraries and archives for Beacon newspapers. But Newspapers.com does have newspapers from the Poughkeepsie Journal and the Poughkeepsie Eagle-News.

Newspapers.com results for two Poughkeepsie, New York newspapers.

Google Maps told me that Poughkeepsie isn’t too far away from Beacon, should their newspapers could be a good place to start.

A map showing the distance between Poughkeepsie, New York

What Did I Find?

My initial searches of “Dennings Point Brickworks” and “Steave Green” and “January 1959” didn’t lead to articles that referenced Steave’s accident (which occurred sometime in late January 1959). However, by expanding my search to include the 1950s and the 1960s, I found some pretty interesting articles related to his employer.

In 1950, employees at the brickyard were on strike. As many as 700 workers between Beacon and Albany were involved. It’s possible Steave was part of it too!

I wonder: when and how did the strike end?

In 1962, the Dennings Point Brockway Brickworks site was slated for demolition. Apartments would go up in their place. This confirmed the location of the brickyard: "off Route 9D, a half mile north of Beacon." And this told me that the original buildings do not exist at this site anymore.

I also found other articles that spanned from folks stealing copper from the site in 1934, to two other accidents at the brickyard (unfortunately, not my great-grandfather's). By exploring articles from the early 2000s, I found stories that reflected on the brickyard's history.

The Search Continues!

Although I didn't find articles that mentioned Steave specifically, the articles I did find added depth to what I already knew about his community and his employer. Now I can use this information to put together a timeline of his community's history see where he fits into it.

These articles also give me other leads for identifying potential records or contacting local historians. If I want to continue searching for articles about Steave's accident, I would probably need to access Beacon newspapers. Luckily, now I know exactly what libraries I need to contact to do that!

By keeping your research goals focused, you can maximize the time you spend searching for records and find records that are more likely to help you build upon your research.

Upgrading Digital Black History: Wrangling Data the Hard Way

2022-01-03T13:22:59-06:00

I recently added new features to Digital Black History that allow users to perform more advanced searches on projects in the directory. Previously, you could only search by keyword. Now, you can also search based on a location (city, state, country) and time period (a range of years)! This makes it even easier to narrow your search to find digital Black history projects.

Identifying Locations: What I did

On Digital Black History, a project’s location refers to the location(s) that a project focuses on. This can be a city, state, or country.

I wanted people to be able to search for a state or country using dropdown menus. So first, I needed to create database tables that listed all countries and all of states within the United States. These tables populate those dropdown menus.

It’s often better not to reinvent the wheel, so I got the data for countries from a public GitHub repository. At the moment, states only include those of the United States.

A screenshot showing some of the countries in the “locations” table on Digital Black History. Each country and each state have their own unique IDs.

To ensure that a relevant project would show up whenever you searched for specific country or state, I had to associate each project with each relevant country and/or state. Every state and country has their own unique identifiers, which are connected to each project’s unique identifiers.

Each project can be associated with multiple locations and each location can be associated with multiple projects. In “database-speak,” this called a “many-to-many” relationship. To illustrate this further, there’s a database table for locations (which include all possible countries and states), a table for projects (including all of the projects), and a table for locations_projects (which connects the projects to the locations).

A screenshot showing how locations and projects are connected in the “locations_projects” table on Digital Black History. Each project and each location have a unique ID.

Usually, finding each project’s location information wasn’t too difficult because it was often clear from the title or summary located on the project website.

Sometimes it’s quite easy to identify a project’s location and the time period it covers! A screenshot of the “Race Riots and Chicago in 1919” project.

Time Periods: What I Did

In order to document the time period each project’s content covered, I manually reviewed each website for clues. This was painstaking, as not every website had a neat timeline or information that clearly indicated the time period. So, I had to make some decisions based on the information available.

For projects that only included information for one year, I made that year the “from” date and the “to” date. For example, if a project focused solely on the year 1919, then 1919 was the first date and the last date of its time range.

A screenshot of the “Time Period (Range)” feature on Digital Black History.

If the years ranges weren’t easy to identify, I took one of the following approaches:

If the project was a digital archive or exhibit, I looked for the oldest and the newest records. Then I used the year for the oldest record and the newest record as the first and last year of the project’s date range.
For projects that focused on historical events, I used the universally agreed upon years that that historical event occurred. For example: if the project was about Reconstruction, then I assigned the project’s year range as 1865 to 1877.
For archives that were being continually updated with content from the present, I added the first year based on the earliest record, but kept the last year of the date range empty.
If I was unsure, then I did not assign any years to the project.

For projects with a time period explicitly mentioned, I simply set those years as the first year and last year of the time range. For example, if a project covered the 1950s to the 1970s, that project was tagged with starting in 1950 and ending in 1979.

Reflections

Gathering metadata (ie. data about the project) from Digital Humanities projects is challenging! Not all projects are built the same, so it can be tricky to find information that describes the project accurately. Even though I would seek out and review “About” pages for metadata, it wasn’t guaranteed to be there. Occasionally, it was even difficult for me to identify the project creator(s)!

Would it even be possible for Digital Humanities projects to be developed in a standardized way? Often, these projects are created by academic institutions who are bound by institutional technologies and infrastructures.

I also haven’t identified a great way of updating project entries yet. What if a project’s scope is updated, extending either the locations or time period covered? Right now, I would only know by reviewing each project on a consistent basis or by a user informing me so that I can update the data.

Despite these considerations and challenges, I am hopeful that this data will help provide a starting point for making these projects more accessible to all users.

Finding Steave

2021-05-10T16:57:59-05:00

It’s funny how the smallest, almost mundane things can bring you the greatest discoveries. But I finally did it. I found my great-grandfather’s parents.

He Ran Away

For years, my grandmother and her siblings didn’t know who their paternal grandparents were. Family lore says their father, Steave Green, ran away from home in Lake City, Florida and moved to Fishkill, New York. He took his old Ford and drove straight up to New York for work and a better life. No one knows why he ran away– he didn’t talk about home or his childhood.

In 1929, he moved into a boarding house with the couple who would become his in-laws. Inevitably, he met his wife shortly thereafter. Three years later, they married in Beacon and then lived in Dennings Point for some time. After they started building their family, they moved permanently to Beacon.

Steave in a household with his future in-laws (United States Census, 1930)

We didn’t really know where to start with Steave. Most events in his life, from 1929 until his death in 1959, were firmly accounted for. We knew that he worked at Dennings Point Brick Works, Brockway as a brick setter. He was a church-going man, attending Springfield Baptist Church on Beekman Street. He had a few cars. Steave was friendly, much more boisterous than his more reserved wife. His amicable nature probably helped him get odd jobs around town in-between shifts at Brockway. Everyone knew him.

The earliest stages of his life were a mystery. Except for the fact that he might have had a sister.

Origins of a Unique Spelling

Despite an inability to read or write, Steave could write his name and often spelled it with an “a.” Perhaps he had wanted to stand out from a sea of other “Steve Greens.” Despite this, his name was often recorded using a variety of “Steve” spellings, including “Stephen,” “Steve,” and “Steave.”

Placing Steave

Each census record from the 1930 to 1940 confirmed both his and his parents’ birthplaces: Florida. According to his World War II Draft Registration Card, his birthplace was Lake City, Florida.

The front of Steave’s draft registration card, with his place of birth highlighted. (1942; Draft Registration Cards for New York State, 10/16/1940 - 3/31/1947)

So I started with his death certificate. If his wife (who would likely be the informant) knew anything about his previous life, she would have put his parents’ names on the document, right?

I submitted my request and waited a grueling year to finally receive the document from the New York State Department of Health’s Office of Vital Statistics. Still no parents to be found. But it did confirm his birth place of Lake City, Florida.

A snippet of Steave’s Death Certificate (1959)

His children were right, he didn’t talk about his parents with anyone. This record and his obituary showed that his wife, Susie, didn’t know who they were either.

When in Doubt, Create a Timeline

I decided to create a timeline, working backwards from his death in 1959 to confirm what I already knew and identify what was missing. City directories, census records, death records, obituaries, and oral histories helped me piece together nearly 30 years of his life.

The Social Security Claims Index Record that was the key! (U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007)

But it was an index record to a claim on his Social Security that helped me take a step closer to his early life. Once I had his Social Security number, I could create a FOIA request for his original Social Security Application, also known as his SS-5 form. Finding this form can be crucial for verifying a birth date and place, full name, employer, and most importantly for me, the names of parents.

The Social Security Administration was formed as a part of the Social Security Act of 1935 and applications were accepted in the years after. For more about Social Security records, I recommend this post.

FOIA Requests

FOIA stands for “Freedom of Information Act.” To submit a FOIA request, go to FOIAOnline.gov and click “Create a Request,” then select “Social Security Administration” as the agency. From there, follow the prompts to request your SS-5. You’ll need your ancestor’s name, date of birth, and social security number. Any additional relevant information is helpful too!

As of this post, the fee is $21 for a copy of your ancestor’s SS-5 application. Mine arrived a few weeks after I requested it.

Steave’s SS-5

And then, there it was:

Father’s Full Name: Robert Green

Mother’s Full Maiden Name: Lizzie Brighton

What was curious was that he had listed his birthplace as “Charlotte, North Carolina.” I hadn’t seen North Carolina mentioned in any of his records before. But I knew this was him. The birth date, employer, his current city, and his signature matched all of the other records I had found.

Steave’s signature on his SS-5 form. Notice how it looks similar to the signature on his WWII Draft Registration Card!

What’s Next

With this information in hand, I have what I need to start building Steave’s household in Lake City, Florida. I also had the clue that he could have had a sister. Since I now have his mother’s maiden name, I can also look for other Brightons in the area.

If I came up empty in Florida, I could also scour Charlotte, North Carolina’s records. What if he had lied about Florida being his home?

Regardless of where this discovery takes me, I can finally tell Steave’s children who their paternal grandparents were.

GenTech 2021: Technology tutorials for family historians

2021-03-05T13:57:59-06:00

GenTech is well underway this Spring! I started the YouTube series in Spring 2020 to try my hand at providing technology tutorials. But not just ANY technology tutorials. These are meant to show how you can use a variety of technology tools to share, organize, and collaborate on your family history research.

Basically, the point is to make you a better “Gen Techie.” Because you know, Genealogy + Tech.

Why tech tutorials?

I feel like sometimes there’s this misconception that genealogy should only be done in libraries and archives and that you can only output your research in the form of analog materials (ie. books). While it’s true that your should always do your research in those places and books are pretty fantastic, I don’t think you should stop there.

We should be creative with our findings, especially if we want to reach the relatives who yawn at the sight of our research binders.

There’s some tools out there that can make it easier (not to mention, more fun!) to share your research. I wanted to share what I’ve learned and hopefully make tech a little less scary and a lot more accessible.

GenTech 2021 Schedule

The 2021 episodes are still pre-recorded, but they’re released every other Sunday afternoon (for the most part!).

Here’s the 2021 schedule:

Although the episodes are pre-recorded, feel free to reach out if you have questions about how to use these tools.

And to stay up to date on the latest GenTech happenings, check the page here.

Have you used something that you’ve learned from a GenTech episode? Let me know in the comments below.

Genealogy as Self-Care

2018-11-07T18:53:00-06:00

When I reflect on my ancestors, I think about how they would like to be remembered and how they would feel if their descendants didn’t know who they were. I do genealogy research to revere them and their trials. I spend so much time doing it because I find it crucial to make their memories last. They mattered.

But I’d also be lying if I said that that was the only reason. There’s a very selfish aspect to it as well. The research is part of my self-care routine. Research helps you relax? Well, it’s not as crazy as you might think.

You see, my favorite definition of self-care defines it as such:¹

Any necessary human regulatory function which is under individual control, deliberate and self-initiated.

Self-care provides you with the opportunity to control at least one thing in what might otherwise be a stressful day or busy afternoon. You choose something personal to focus on your precious energy on. The act is necessary to ground yourself and calm your mind. Self-care doesn’t have to be a hobby– it can just as easily be something simple, like drinking tea before bedtime. It’s something important enough that you purposely dedicate time to it.

When the world isn’t making any sense, I retreat into the past and find comfort in the stories that I discover and the ones that I have yet to unearth. I lose myself in the research in the same way that you lose yourself when you’re binge-watching a great show. And somewhere along the way, I find comfort in knowing that no matter how crazy the world might be, it’s nothing compared to my ancestors’ own struggles. It makes me feel grateful, humble, and regal even when the world may not see the same thing. Each new document I find fills me with warmth. The act of reaching out into the past centers my spirit and caresses my brow. And if I get stuck or can’t figure something out? It’s okay. It gives me the freedom to truly explore and dig deep into something I’m passionate about.

It’s also my act of rebellion in a couple of different ways. I refuse the mindset of a society that dismisses the history of African Americans. By the time I’m done, my ancestors’ names will be known and future generations of my family will be able to rattle off names and stories like it was second nature. But I also rebel against the present: I refuse to be broken down by that same society that tells me that reaching for your dreams is impractical.

Audre Lorde said it best:

Caring for myself is not self-indulgent, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.

It is a self-care activity that gives me something to look forward to and envelopes me in peace. It excites me in just the right way, as I wonder– what will I learn today? What other mysteries have I missed? Who is left out there to remember?

1. Alexander Segall and Jay Goldstein (1998). “Exploring the Correlates of Self Provided Health Care Behaviour”. In Coburn, David; D’Arcy, Alex; Torrance, George Murray. Health and Canadian Society: Sociological Perspectives. University of Toronto Press. pp. 279–280. ISBN 0802080529. Retrieved 7 November 2018.

After We Die, Our Descendants Will Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

2018-10-13T17:52:00-05:00

What impact will your digital life have on your legacy?

Social media makes it easy for users to post all kinds of information about their lives online. Pleasant interfaces make users willing to reveal personal information, which become a product for social media companies and a small part of a user’s larger digital footprint.

But what does this mean for descendants who become interested in the life you led?

We Have… Technology

Every device and online application that you use retains information about you, whether you give it up knowingly or not. In other words, not only is Facebook publishing your status update and counting how many people “liked” your post, but it’s also tracking how many times you’ve logged in and who you chat with most often. Mobile apps like Uber are keeping track of places you travel back and forth from the most. Online bank accounts track where you’re making your purchases. Email contains a wealth of personal and professional information.

It doesn’t seem so far-fetched that family historians could be digitally “thumbing” through your inbox when Google already lets developers scan the contents of your email.

We should all come to terms with the fact that the information we post online today will be accessed by researchers tomorrow.

There’s already been some discussion about what happens to the social media profiles of the dead (Forbes). Facebook and Google have even started offering the ability to manage your “digital afterlife” and assign a proxy who can maintain your digital assets once you pass on. Still others have acknowledged their digital information and passed it on to their descendants in wills. But how viable is it for individuals to continuously pass their information down to each subsequent descendant?

Think about all of the online accounts that you maintain. It’s likely that your heirs will be unable to decipher all of your digital assets (Unless you provide them with explicit documentation, of course. But who has the time for that?). How would they manage it and pass it down once they die? There is no doubt that pieces of your identity will get lost in the process.

No matter how intimidating the massive pile that is your digital legacy looks, future genealogists and family historians will need to have the patience to dig through it all.

I Predict…

In the near future, genealogists and family historians will be able to access this information for research purposes. Genealogists will further specialize, as is necessitated by the diverse array of digital information that will be available to mine from. Much like today, professionals and family historians alike will need to have an understanding of where specific information is located. But instead of thumbing through family photo albums, they may be looking through your Facebook photos.

The Future of Historical Documents

Future genealogists will be able to dig deeper into family stories than ever before. Census records will still be a necessary research document, but in the future, they won’t be handwritten anymore, which means that your descendant will know exactly how to spell your unique name. Whether or not a question is answered will be completely on the enumerated and never again on the enumerator. There will be a much wider breadth of options to choose from in many categories, including race and ethnicity, and we will have defined them for ourselves, offering our descendants the opportunity to put our responses in a societal context.

The tools we use today will provide an abundance of document types for future researchers to explore!

Facebook profiles will make it easier to verify family and friend relationships. Future family historians will know what schools we attended, what items we were selling, and who wished us a Happy Birthday. On a scarier note, profiles will also make it easier for them to learn who you dated, how long you were in a complicated relationship, or even the cringey poetry that you wrote online as a teenager. NextDoor profiles will detail neighborly squabbles and LinkedIn profiles will list our workplaces, skills, and connections. Google Docs will showcase unfinished projects and school assignments. Usernames to various accounts may provide clues to birth years and maiden names. Just imagine the connections and new research leads that these genealogists will make!

The Life You Sell

There will be plenty of opportunity to trip up your descendants, however. The lives that people lead on social media are often only the idealistic versions of their reality. We could be very well be providing enough false information that no one will trust the content of our posts and tweets. Conflicting information from family members, friends, and social media profiles will certainly make research on your life much harder.

Would Researchers Pay Someone For All That Information?

They could, and they might also not have any other choice. Social media networks have been able to evolve over the past three decades, but who knows what the future holds? With all of the data that they’ve collected, they could easily become the next Ancestry.com for ancestors in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Some social media companies are already aware of the possibility of retrospective features; consider Facebook’s somewhat controversial “x years ago today” posts. Just don’t be surprised when these social media networks become genealogy companies that sell our information back to our families.