NARA II, College Park Visit – Day 2

Day 2

I went directly to the Research Consultation room, and got help to order the RG120 boxes to find the ones for the 51st Pioneer Infantry.

Since there are limits on the number of boxes, from a number of areas, I went back to the RG120 boxes to copy the interesting documents. This required a stop at the copying desk for them to approve the copies. Those documents required declassification markings when copying and photographing.

The records will be held for three days, unless you sign to return them. I returned those five boxes.

 

 

Then I asked for help ordering the next box in the RG165 series. Hopefully, that box would contain folders with information about the 51st Pioneer Infantry.

It was time for lunch while waiting for the document pull.

The first box we checked was the RG165 box.

 

 

There were twenty folders about 51st Pioneer Infantry. One of them was the history of the 51st Pioneer Infantry. That was a great document. I copied it and photographed it with my digital camera. One page highlighted the activities of Company B.

Another interesting folder contained the Station Lists for Headquarters, Supply and each Company of the 51st Pioneer Infantry.

There’s still more records in RG120 to view!

NARA II, College Park Visit – Day 1

You have to have a clear idea what you are researching. I went in with the topic of the 51st Pioneer Infantry, and brought my homework with me.

An important number to know before you go is the Record Group. You need to know that the topic numbers do not correspond with the identifying information for the boxes.

A Specialist at the Consultation Room will help you locate the correct binder containing the finding aid for the Record Group.

When you discuss your research interest with the specialist, you may receive suggestions about other record groups of interest. ALWAYS listen.

I went to the Archives in search of RG120. The Specialist recommended that I consider RG165, which is the “Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs”, and showed me the finding aid for that record group.

 

 

The Specialist helped me fill out the pull slips. Each pull slip requires the initials of a Specialist before the records can be pulled.

The Specialist also suggested that we go up to the 5th Floor to see if there might be any photographs of the 51st Pioneer Infantry.

While we were waiting for the boxes to come up to the Research Room, we did go up to the 5th floor. That room uses an old fashioned card catalog. We asked for and received help to find the one photo related to the 51st Pioneer Infantry. We filled out a pull slip for that photo.

We looked at the five (5) boxes from RG120. They contained correspondence of the 51st Infantry Regiment. We went through the correspondence and documents. There were some interesting documents, like the price list at YMCA canteens and the rules for soldiers riding trains. The infantry had concerns about equipment and building barns for their horses.

Then it was time to head up to see the photograph. You are given white cotton gloves to wear when you handle a photograph. It was taken on 3/29/19 and was a group of officers who had attended an Arts & Science Course at the University of Edinburgh. One officer, Capt. F. M. Elliott, was from the 51^st Pioneer Infantry.

 

 

Back at the Research Room on the second floor, we looked at the one box from RG165. The box had some folders with information about the Pioneer Infantry. It also had folders for the 1st Pioneer Infantry, but the last folders in the box were for the 6th Pioneer Infantry. We will need some help to find the box with folders for the 51st Pioneer Infantry.

 

Day 1 at Home

At home, I did a little research. In “Brief Histories of the Divisions, U.S. Army 1917-1918” on page 30, the 26th Division Contained the 51st Infantry Brigade.

 

 

The RG120 boxes we had been looking at were of the 51st Infantry Brigade, not the 51st Pioneer Infantry.

So we will need help finding the correct boxes in RG120, too.

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NARA II, College Park Visit – Homework

In this coming series of posts, I will be discussing my latest visits to NARA to view WWI military records.

If you live close enough to the National Archives at College Park, and they are holding records about your ancestors, get out your GPS and go!

The steps of you visit are outlined in my Informal Guide to visiting NARA II at College Park (coming soon).

Homework

I did my homework before the visit by searching the NARA website for documents relating to the 51st Pioneer Infantry. My search terms were “51st pioneer”.

 

 

The description had a section that included 1st-816th Pioneer Infantry Regiments, 1917-9.

 

 

One important thing I did was to create a cheat sheet with important dates in Joseph McMahon’s WWI service as well as important dates for the 51st Pioneer Infantry. This sheet proved helpful as I sorted through the correspondence in the boxes. That sheet can be found here.

Next time…Day 1.

3 Things to Do at Graduation Time

Graduations are a great time to celebrate! They are a time for families to gather, and when families gather they share memories. Thinking about graduations made me recall that Mrs. Lindsey, wife of New York City’s Major John Lindsey, attended my graduation from preschool. My Brother recalled that author Frank McChort spoke at my PhD graduation.

1. Capture the memories. Have the graduate write, or record, about his or her favorite memories about the school experience.
2. Capture others’ memories. While you are remembering, list the graduations you attended.
3. Scan the ephemera. There may be programs, awards, certificates and notes generated for the event. Be sure to scan them, and use descriptive file names. Store the important ones, like the programs, using archival materials.

One of the things I like to do is capture the data that I wish I had about past generations. Start capturing graduation memories for your children, grandchildren and yourself! This Graduation Memory Worksheet and School Memory Worksheet can help you to capture the stories.

It’s Complicated: Marital Status State Diagrams

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.

Found Ancestors in the Workhouse?

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.