As of today, A Week of Genealogy’s blog is one of the newest Geneabloggers!
You can read about it here:
http://www.geneabloggers.com/new-genealogy-blogs-7-may-2016/#more-39406
Thanks to Thomas MacEntee for including us!
When you are looking for records, you have to play to your strengths. State diagrams are important in my field of Computer Science and Engineer. They show the state that a computer can be in, and how it moves from one to another via a transition. State diagrams are merely roadmaps showing how to move through a computer system in time. For football fans, John Madden uses something similar to show how plays are made.
While I was trying to formulate how to continue searching for records of a married ancestor, I enumerated all the possible variations of her marital status that there could be. She might remain separated, divorce, remarry or die. It occurred to me that this path through life could be captured in a state diagram! So I got out my tablet and did some drawing.
When a person is born, she is single. She might die single or marry during her lifetime. If she marries, then she is a married person. You can follow the arrows from her single state to either of these. A married person can be separated, divorced, widowed, or dead. As you can see by following the arrows, a separated, divorced or widowed person can marry again. Then her status would go back to married. For a woman, this probably means a change in surname, and that is where your search becomes more complicated.
If you might want capture more information, by adding another status like “engaged” or “it’s complicated”.
This really helped me to focus my searches for the ancestor in one particular geographic area. It reminded me to check the available marriage and death records.
This particular diagram only captures changes in marital status. If you still cannot find a person, keep in mind that people also move or migrate.
Did you tear up when the episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?” took us to a workhouse? Does your stomach tighten at the thought of families enduring this hardship, and your heart ache at the thought of the very young children being taken away from their parents?
Imagine how it feels when you see records from the workhouse that contain your ancestors’ names.
My Great Grandmother never spoke of her family. The only thing that her Grandchildren knew was that she was born in England. In fact, she rarely spoke to her Grandchildren at all. Researching her has been challenging. Recently I had some help finding her census records, and in one, she, her mother and her siblings, are in the workhouse.
Here are three things to check if you find your ancestors in the Workhouse. Make sure you are ready to go forward and take these three steps.
1) Where are they in the next census?
Search for family members in the next census after you find them in the Workhouse. This can be done with an international subscription to Ancestry.com, FamilySearch or on The Workhouse website (described below). Be advised that the census records on The Workhouse website are transcribed, and that family members entries may appear out of order. You will want to locate the actual image of the original census page.
2) When you are ready to face bad news, check for family members’ death records for the registry district.
Use a Birth/Marriage/Death index such as FreeBMD. Indexing of the BMD records for the UK is ongoing and may not be complete, but it is worth checking. It is possible that some of the family members may have died while there.
3) Find the resource that hold the records to verify that this is your family. The best records would be the admission and discharge.
There is a very informative website about the The Workhouse. (Watch out for the numerous ads!) The website includes the history of each Workhouse and what repositories may be available. The webpage for the Bolton Workhouse contains links for the staff and inmates in the censuses of 1841-1891. It also has a link to the Bolton Archives and Local Studies Service.
From the page of Archives Indexes, I selected Workhouse registers.
The Workhouse registers webpage showed which records are available at their Research Centre. From 1839 onwards, the people admitted to the Bolton Union Workhouse were from the townships of: Bradshaw, Breightmet, Darcy Lever, Edgworth, Entwistle, Farnworth, Great Bolton, Great Lever, Halliwell, Harwood, Heaton, Horwich, Kearsley, Little Bolton, Little Hulton, Little Lever, Longworth, Lostock, Middle Hulton, Over Hulton, Quarlton, Rumworth, Sharples, Tonge-with-Haulgh, Turton and Westhoughton
From the information on The Workhouse website about the Bolton Workhouse, the were records that would have my family are:
Fishpool Admissions 1861-1880 Microfilm D9:27-31
Admissions 1880-1948 Original GBO/9*
Discharges 1880-1948 Original GBO/9*
I did check to see if FamilySearch held these filmstrips. They do, but the filmstrips have not been digitized.
There are quite a few filmstrips I would have to check, and I was not sure when the family would have been discharged. So I investigated another option to learn more.
I contacted the Bolton History Centre. My assumption was that the staff there are more familiar with the records than I, and that they have indexes. They will do free research (for twenty minutes) and provide copies of the records at a reasonable fee. I sent them an e-mail requesting the information for the four members of the family, and a transcription of family’s information from the 1881 Census. They e-mailed a transcription of the admission and discharge records. To get copies of the original records required a call during their business hours and a credit card.
The story continues past the Workhouse for my family. They left the Workhouse a year later at the Mother’s request. There’s more work to be done to find out the rest of their story. So far, I only know the fate of one child.
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Anchor’s Aweigh: Getting the 51st Pioneer Infantry to France and Back
The history of the 51st Pioneer Infantry included information about the ships that brought Joseph McMahon to France and back home again. Gathering images and more information about these ships fleshes out the details of his WWI service.
From U.S. to Brest, France
On 29 July 1918 the 51st Pioneer Infantry left Camp Merritt, NJ, and marched to Alpine Landing. From there they were placed on ferries to Hoboken, NJ. Then they boarded the steamer USS Kroonland. On 8 Aug 1918 the U.S.S. Kroonland arrived in Brest, France in the rain.
The U.S.S. Kroonland brought troops to France six times. She also made postwar trips, then was returned to International Mercantile Marine Company.
The journal of Gordon Van Kleeck, a private in Company F of the U.S. 51st Pioneer Infantry, includes the story of the crossing. The soldiers wore overalls rather than uniforms, and sat in the lifeboats during the early morning until sunrise in case there was a submarine attack. You can read Pvt. Van Kleeck’s journal at: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~treebz65/momside/vankleeck/gordonvk/gvkjournal/gvkjournalindex.html
Brest was the location of the American Naval Headquarters in France. More than 30 destroyers and multiple yachts escorted troop and supply convoys were based at Brest.
While the Kroonland sailed past St. Mathieu lighthouse through LeGoulet Channel into Bay of Brest, French and British airplanes flew low looking for submarines. Several lighter-than-air blimp ships flew low in front of the convoy.
The image below shows the U.S.S. Kroonland at the New York Navy Yard, on 24 July 1918, just before its trip to bring the 51st to France. It is painted in “dazzle” camouflage.
Below, an airship escorts a convoy into Brest Harbor in 1918.
This picture shows a landing at Brest, France, 8 August 1919.
From St. Nazaire, France to the United States
On 23 June 1919 the 51st Pioneer Infantry sailed from St. Nazaire on the U.S.S. Wilhelmina. On 3 July 1919 they arrived in New York harbor After the Armistice she made 7 round trips returning the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) troops from France. She was decommissioned on or after 6 Aug 1919 and on 16 Aug 1919 she was returned to the Matson Navigation Company. She was originally bought to carry passengers and cargo between the west coast of the US and Hawaii. She purchased by a British shipping company was sunk by a U-boat in 1940 while in a convoy between Nova Scotia and Liverpool.
The USS Wilhelmina is shown in front of a coaling facility at the New York Navy Yard on 1 May 1918, painted in dazzle camouflage.
Dazzle ships
The dazzle camoflauge patterns were painted on the ships in grey, black and blue. They were effective at distorting a ship’s silhouette and making it harder for the enemy to estimate a ship’s type, size, speed, and heading. You can read more about the dazzle ships at The Vintage News.
To learn more about ships in your ancestor’s history I recommend visiting the websites for the Naval History and Heritage Command Photography Collection, Nav Source Naval History and Wikipedia.
