Book Review: Evidence Explained, Fourth Edition

It is difficult to tackle a review of such a definitive classic tome, but this newest edition does warrant the work involved in such an undertaking. Elizabeth Shown Mills has certainly invested the time to document what can be a daunting process to many, and to eliminate confusion about the topic with clear explanations.

New technology means more and different sources to cite, and the book has been expanded to conquer them all. It is difficult to imagine how this magic has been done, given that the page count of the book has been reduced from the 892 pages of the Third Edition (Revised) to 739 pages. Ms. Mills has accomplished this seeming legerdemain, not with a slight of hand, but through the use of templates.

The Fourth Edition now contains 14 templates, which are more general and concise than the Quickcheck Models of the previous edition. In each template, there is a first reference note, followed by construction notes explaining each part of the citation. These templates allow a user to build up their citation in a way that makes sense for their source, and for other sources that may not even exist yet.

While other reviewers have shared their views about the undeniable strengths of the evidence analysis process presented in this book, this engineer proposes to evaluate it under actual use conditions. For a book like the newest edition Evidence Explained, the best way to review it is to spend a little time using it.

The first thing I did was make sure I could still locate the straightforward information about which part of ships’ names are and are not italicized. For some reason, this is something I always need to double check. This small piece has remained the same between versions.

On a couple of recent occasions, I needed citation support that was beyond other sources, so I had good opportunities to work with the newer elements of the book.

I found myself needing to cite a college newsletter and yearbook for a very brief project. Wanting to make a good impression on the recipient, I needed Ms. Mills help, and her book did not disappoint me. Undoubtedly investing time in reading the book from cover to cover will yield a good return, but prior to completing that task I searched in the index for help.

Although I first thought to cite the yearbook and school newsletters, it was clear that this approach was flawed. The items requiring citations were in an online virtual archive, which is a Digital Collection. Using Section 4.15 and its examples within Online Images: Empasis on Document was the help I needed. This led me to more help offered by Template 10, Online Image (No Named Database), which was immediately bookmarked (with a sticky note).

Another case was the need to cite a private message sent to me via Facebook. Messages like this are interesting sources. Of course, they do not have the benefit of peer review or public review. They are unrecoverable by a reader. In this case, I needed to use a quote from the private message, and it was clear from the context and the subject area that it contained subjective data.  

Checking the index for social media led me to explore the complexities of citing social media posts, but that was not what I needed for this citation. So, I located correspondence, personal in the index and investigated. This led me to Section 4.41 about Email & Instant Messages. One of the examples was for a Facebook direct message, which was exactly what I needed. Even though the example was sufficient for me to build the citation, this whole section sent me to Template 7 Private Holdings (Artifact or Manuscript Document) where further explanation could be found.

Citations accomplished!

I recommend checking out Section 2.10 for the Symbols & Terms that are used to flag citations. The symbols are good flags for the types of citations that I often use, and knowing where to start can be confusing without a reference. As we learn in the footnote, there are fewer examples for type CD-ROM, which makes sense because we are using them far less than we might have in the past in favor of their online replacements.

The sticky notes that were accrued in the Third Edition during my ProGen days have now been migrated to the Fourth Edition, and new sticky notes have joined them. I often return to my most used templates and the chapters that I seem to be needing a lot lately, Archives & Artifacts and Business & Institutional Records.

The Templates are a very useful update for this classic work, and the section about Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) is one more way that Ms. Mills demonstrates that this reference does support you from artifacts all the way to cyberspace.

The book is available at Genealogical.com and other booksellers.

Notes: A review copy of the book was provided by the publisher. Like many other genealogists, I am a fan of Ms. Mills and recognize her service to the genealogical community.

The Postmaster Finder

The Postmaster Finder is a useful database if you are researching U.S. Postmasters or Post Offices. You can look up a Postmaster by city or search the database by Postmaster name. This database has entries from 1971 or in some cases, earlier. Another interesting part of this website is links to other useful resources for researching the postal service at the National Archives.

The Postmaster Finder database can be found at: https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/

To find the Postmaster in a city, select the link Postmasters by City

I searched for New York, New York.

And was rewarded with 96 entries (on 5 pages of results), going back to 1775.

If you know the name of the Postmaster and not where their Post Office was, you find out where they served by selecting the link Where Served to search for Postmasters by name.

The link for County and the link for State will let you search for Post Offices in those locations. Be sure to read the notes to the right of the search fields because they give helpful hints about how to search and what may not be included.

Another feature allows searching for locations by a range of ZIP Codes. To search by ZIP Code use the first 3 digits of the from ZIP Code and to ZIP Code. In the example below, I searched using the first three digits of a ZIP Code where I had lived in both the From and To fields.

The FAQ is worth exploring for suggestions to learn additional information about Post Offices, such as the origin of their name or their original locations. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/postmaster-finder-faq.htm

One answer has a reference to the paper ” What’s in a (Post Office) Name?” found at:

https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/pdf/post-office-names.pdf

“Sources of Historical Information on Post Offices, Postal Employees, Mail Routes, and Mail Contractors” can be found at: https://about.usps.com/publications/pub119.pdf

Enjoy researching your Postmaster ancestors!

Finding Single Irish Women Immigrants to New York City

In our extended family, a group of cousins work together to bring the stories of our shared Irish immigrant family, as well as the families they left behind in Ireland, back to life. In the chain migration of a family unit, the older siblings often come first, with others following. In the family unit from which most of us descend, the oldest siblings traveled to the US first, followed by the widowed mother and all the younger siblings, traveling after the death of their father. A shared goal is to bring the stories of our shared Irish immigrant family back to life.

Ships’ manifests are great records, but the older they are, the less helpful they are. This is where other records are needed to confirm an identity that appears on the manifest. Several censuses collected information about immigration, but these may be estimates or the best recollection of the person who gave the enumerator the information. Some vital records may list the number of years a person was in the US, but these might be filled out by a decedent’s child who did not have firsthand knowledge of the event. Naturalization records can help by sharing a date, but depending on the timeframe, women would derive their citizenship from their husband and not seek citizenship on their own.

For the 300,000 young unmarried Irish women who traveled to the US, it may be difficult to pinpoint their arrival date and ship. The repetition of names within an Irish family can compound this difficulty. If your unmarried Irish female ancestor came to New York City between 1883-1954, the records of the Irish Mission at Watson House might help. For us, this database confirmed the ship of one of those older siblings, a single female, who arrived alone as a link in that chain of immigration.

Multiple members of our group had searched for Delia’s arrival, and we converged on the most probably being the one shown below. Delia is a nickname for Bridget, so we had searched using both names. In the manifest below, there is a Bridget McMahon and a Delia McMahon, but our McMahon is known to come from Kilrush. The date of this manifest fit into the timeline for her life events; we knew that she was no longer with her family in Kilrush, Clare, Ireland at the time of the 1901 Irish Census.

Manifest of the Germanic, arriving 10 Mar 1901 (lines 12 through 16, columns 1 through 9)

Column 16 of the manifest is “Whether going to join a relative, and if so, what relative, their name and address.” Bridget McMahon shown in line 12 was going to meet her Uncle D. McMahon. We did know that siblings arrived ahead of her, but not recognize the address from our previous work.

Manifest of the Germanic, arriving 10 Mar 1901 (Column 16)

The Irish Mission at Watson House helped over 100,000 of these women who arrived in New York City. The ledgers are dated between 1883-1954, and on the search page we are told to check back, as there will be more additions to the website. I learned about this database from a great webinar given at The Genealogy Center, reviewed at: https://aweekofgenealogy.com/webinar-review-irish-immigrant-women-in-the-us/

The home page gives the history and the context for the Mission, so it is worth browsing. From the home page you select Digital Archives, or you can search or browse from: https://archives.irishmissionatwatsonhouse.org

(I could have selected SEARCH from the menu at the top of the screen to use the search page.)

The first result was our ancestor.

From the search result you can viewer the ledger, its transcription, and download a pdf of the page.

There was a ledger entry for Bridget McMahon, from County Clare, who came in on the Germanic on that date. (The entry on the Passenger Manifest gave Kilrush as the place of origin.)

Ledger entry (left) for Bridget McMahon

In that entry it showed that she was meeting Denis McMahon. Although the avenue name was misindexed, it is an abbreviation for “Broadway.” There was a Denis McMahon on Broadway in our research, but the address had conflicted with what we knew about Delia’s brother, Denis. Now we know the connection between Delia and Denis McMahon of Broadway, extended our chain of migration and our understanding of the family structure back to another generation.

Ledger entry (right) for Bridget McMahon

You can also browse the collection from the Digital Archives page. Be flexible when you browse this way. When I browsed by county it appeared that the spelling of the counties was taken from the records. For example, when browsing for entries for County Clare, there were entries for: Calre, Clare, Co. Clare, Clara and “Clare.”

If you research any of the young women who traveled alone from Ireland to New York City between 1883-1954, try searching this database. It may provide the clue you have been needing. Let me know how you do with this database!

Webinar Review: Irish Immigrant Women in the US

As you know, this blog reviews. It is probably time to review webinars! Or at least one webinar that I found incredibly interesting which shared very insightful resources. The webinar was “A Lonely Voyage: Finding Irish Immigrant Women in the United States” given by Elizabeth Hodges, an expert in Irish and Irish American Studies.

Elizabeth Hodges is a Senior Genealogy Library at the Allen County Public Library, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is the home of The Genealogy Center. You can read about her and the other librarians who are genealogists at: https://www.genealogy.acpl.lib.in.us/about-genealogy-center. She has an amazing combination of skills as historian, genealogist and educator.

In this webinar, Ms. Hodges provides an insightful social history about the women who traveled alone from Ireland to the United States, sharing the reasons for immigration and the challenges they faced at all steps of this journey. She explains the history and context of why so many Irish women traveled alone to the United States. Additionally, she outlines how they traveled, which ports were common departure and arrival ports, and how US laws influenced their immigration experience. She also describes what life and work were like in the US after their arrival. By looking at combined experiences of the time, we can definitely see life through the eyes of our Irish female immigrant ancestors.

As a bonus, wonderful resources were shared. One that was especially useful in my research was The Irish Mission at Watson House website, which will be featured in this blog soon.

“A Lonely Voyage: Finding Irish Immigrant Women in the United States” is now on the YouTube channel for The Genealogy Center at Allen County Public Library https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8AE558B5D8661B31

While you are at the YouTube Channel, you can look for other presentations by Ms. Hodges, additional Irish presentations, and hundreds of other presentations in their playlist.

Learning About AI

Have you wanted to learn more about Artificial Intelligence?

Recently I gave a talk about Using AI for Genealogy, and shared some of my sources for education about AI. You can find out more about the talk  and if you want to learn from a genealogist who is a professor with a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, you might consider having your group book it.

There are many resources available to learn how to get started with generative AI, and some ideas for using it in genealogy. Among them are posts on this blog .

NOTE: DO NOT put any sensitive information into any AI tool.

The first recommendation is a paper that you can download. Genealogists need to learn about prompt engineering to use AI tools effectively. A great paper that offers a catalog of prompt patterns is a good place to start. These prompts presented in the paper are general in nature, but they can be applied to genealogy. The paper is “A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT.” It is an academic paper, and they can look intimidating, but they do not have to be! You can copy-and-paste parts of it into ChatGPT (or another text-to-text AI tool) and ask it to create a summary or explain it. My specific advice is to look at the tables labeled “Contextual Statements” to learn the patterns. I actually copied text from these tables, and combined information about the patterns offered by a generative AI to create a personal cheat sheet.

If you want to dig deeper and understand more, you may want to look beyond genealogical applications and learn about the technology. Understanding what the tools are and how they work might help you be more comfortable with using them and applying them in genealogy.

In its “AI Ready” commitment, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has set a goal to train 2 million people. As part of this commitment, AWS offers free courses about AI. These courses are written for all different levels of knowledge. From the AWS webpage describing the commitment, scroll down to the section “Courses for business and nontechnical audiences” where you can follow the links to register for the courses. A free account is needed. “Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence” is a good starting point, with simple and understandable explanations and no formal assessments. (That means no tests!)

If you want to learn in a more structured way, there are online classes available. These are more formal, with structured lessons and activities that you have to turn in. That should not intimidate you, as these courses are designed for beginners who have little or no technical background. The beginner aspect should not dissuade people with more experience, as there is always something to learn in courses like these. I enjoyed the first and simplest course on the list, as well as courses in the series “Generative AU Learning Planning for Decision Makers” and the “Foundations of Prompt Engineering.”

Coursera

Coursera offers “Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT.” It is taught by the professor who wrote the article that I recommended. If you take this course for free, be sure to allocate time for it each week because the course materials are only available to paying participants after the end of the class. I found this to be a very enjoyable course, with the assignments being as simple as using ChatGPT 3.5 to try the patterns from lessons and submitting the prompt and response via a text box.

GALE Courses

Another course that I have begun is “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” on GALE Courses (formerly known as Learn4Life). GALE Courses may be available from your local library website, or from a neighboring county for free by using a library card they issue. For those in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, you will find GALE Courses offered by the Howard County Public Library, so get a library card from them. (At Howard County Public Library this is the link to the description https://education.gale.com/l-howardmain/online-courses/introduction-to-artificial-intelligence/?tab=detail). These are 6-week courses, organized into two lessons per week, and there are discussion boards and ungraded quizzes. In order to obtain a certificate for this course, you have to pass a final containing multiple choice questions that appears to be based on the ungraded, optional quizzes for each lesson. Check on your library’s website for an alphabetical listing of online resources or contact a librarian.

This is a technology course about the science of how a computer can perform tasks that usually require human intelligence. It covers the forms of AI, how AIs learn, AI applications and ethics. It will not be something that you can use immediately for genealogy, but it will give a foundation as we go forward seeing more and more AIs.

No matter how you decide to learn, keep learning!

Let me know how you are learning about AI.

NOTE: I have no affiliation with any of the courses or services in this post.