Platting Through My Summer Vacation

I wrote back in April that I’d finished looking through Deed books W and X.  With summer vacation having ended here in the DC metro area since school started, I’m offering readers a look at how I spent my summer vacation.

In May, I purchased DeedMapper 4.2 from Direct Line Software.  I had no problems installing it and have found it to be helpful with what’s evolved into a mass platting project.  The software has made creating the plats so much faster and easier than using graph paper and a protractor and put an end to the Geometry class flashbacks/nightmares.

I’ve spent nearly every Saturday afternoon at my local Family History Center this summer reading through deed books page by page and scanning records that I believe to be relevant to my platting project.  My vacation was even spent there reading through a deed book.

At first with DeedMapper, I was putting the plats where I believed they were supposed to be on the map I’m using to place the tracts.  This became too problematic when other plats didn’t appear to jive with tracts that I felt surer of their probable location.  This was resolved by moving the questionably placed tracts out of the area until I had more information to suggest where they were located.

So the end all is that I concentrated on plats that mentioned creeks, rivers, and roads that I could readily identify on the map I’m using.  As I worked I felt a sense of accomplishment when in reading some deeds more closely that specifically mentioned relationships between the parties involved where an ancestor was parsing out pieces of their land to their grandchild or child.  Unfortunately, these records don’t completely apply to the line I’m researching, but I felt it was good to see.  One record was helpful as it concerned the son-in-law of my ancestor John Washington Womble and coupled with some other records I’ve found on the son-in-law it added more pieces to the jigsaw as why my ancestor moved to Hardeman County, Tennessee in the first place.

The deed books that I’ve read through at this writing are:

Vol. W January 1870-October 1871

Vol. X October 1871-November 1872

Vol. Y November 1872-February 1874

Vol. Z February 1874-January 1876

Vol. V September 1, 1868-January 29, 1870

Vol. U April 1867-September 11, 1868

Currently, I’m reading through Vol. T Oct. 30, 1866-April 29, 1867.

Another event in my research was reading a book on Reconstruction.  At first I checked out a book titled, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 by Eric Foner.  The copy they had at my local library was published in 1988.  As my due date for returning the book got closer, I tried to renew it, but couldn’t.  I wound up purchasing an updated version kindle edition that was written by the same author and published in 2014.  This is a fantastic book in my opinion and gave me more insight into the time period that John Washington Womble lived in while he was in Nashville during the Civil War and why he and his family relocated to Hardeman County.

Unfortunately, it didn’t give me insight as to why they left briefly returning to live in Nashville for about a year or so and then returning to Hardeman County, but I likely need to read about the Panic of 1873 or do more research on the family as to their motivations.

After reading the book it sort of made me wonder why that point in history wasn’t covered in much detail in my American History class in high school.

I feel that in my research I’m reaching the end of what’s available deed wise just after the Civil War.  There appears to be a gap with either what the LDS church filmed of the deed books during the Civil War years or the recording of the records was interrupted because of the war.  My thought was to order the vols. AA-BB 1876-1879 next and then to move on to the older records before making a trip out to the Bolivar Courthouse to see what I’m missing.

It was interesting reading the Reconstruction book while reading through the deed books from the same era because I found items recorded that showed many people having financial problems as a result of the end of their way of life prior to the Civil War.  An interesting sight, were records recorded about events that happened before the war and the parties involved were now attempting to resolve their issues now that the fighting had ended.  One record was about a woman who purchased slaves before the war as part of an estate sale.  She had apparently purchased the people on credit and hadn’t paid what was owed on the slaves.  No mention was made in the record that the slaves were now free--only that she was past due on her debts.

Blogger vs. Wordpress

Please note:  this post has nothing to do about genealogy or any of my other hobbies.  It is merely my personal comparison of blogger and wordpress.  It is not meant as a slam or praise for or against either blogging platform.

I’ve had this blog since March 2011 and in it I’ve tried to recount what I’ve discovered while doing genealogy and activities in my other hobbies.  My reason for beginning it was to let those who were interested know what progress I’d made with my genealogy.  Also, I’d hoped that it might be a way to communicate with others researching the same family line(s).

My reason for why I chose blogger was because it appeared to be the most simplistic and straightforward.  I considered using wordpress, but didn’t mainly because it seemed too complex for me.  While I consider myself to be somewhat tech savvy, I’m by no means an advanced user of tech or fantastic at HTML coding.  

Since going with blogger for my blog, I’ve become a bit annoyed at some of the functionality of it.  Mainly the function of adding pictures to my posts has become problematic for me.  At first, I believed that it was the browser I was using, since I used Opera and knew that not everything worked well or rendered as it should with that browser.  Since switching over to Firefox, this wonkiness when adding pictures hasn’t improved.  What I’ve had happen to me when adding photos is that I upload photos from my computer that I want to include in my post and then click on “one” of the uploaded images to insert it in a specific place in the post.  This has resulted in all of the photos that I’ve uploaded for my post being added instead of just the one image.

The work around that I came up with was to first upload the images I wanted to use for a post into Google+/Picasa and then inserted them from there instead of uploading them from my pc.  This worked okay for this post.  However, I did encounter an interesting hiccup with this system.

Recently, I looked more closely at wordpress and am strongly considering switching the location of my blog over to that platform.  I found in tinkering around with wordpress that I could easily add photos to my posts and this was extremely pleasing to me.  However, my one gripe with wordpress is having rather frequent reminders that the platform seems to operate as a “for pay” platform.  So, any customization of my blog requires one to pay a fee or fees in order to alter the appearance or have access to more features.

I understand that there’s nothing wrong in companies making money.  And I’m familiar with the mantra of “you get what you pay for,” but it’s rather tiresome when one is attempting to familiarize themselves with a new service or platform and is told that what one wants to do can’t be done with out paying.

In order to truly understand what wordpress has to offer me for free, I got a book on it from my local library.  After a cursory look at it today, it hasn't shown me at the time of writing this post a way to circumvent the wordpress pay wall.  The book did seem to allude to the fact that not everything in wordpress is free and even hinted that only a portion of the platform's offerings are free. 

If it turns out that there’s no way to circumvent the pay wall, then I can always continue to use blogger and since I’ve been able to tinker with the appearance more, are able to include CSS for free, and this is where my readers can find me then perhaps my blog’s home will remain on blogger.

I found that adding photos with wordpress wasn't quite as easy as I'd thought it would be.  As I mentioned, I first uploaded the images into Google+/Picasa before inserting them into my post.  Wordpress didn't have any access to Google+/Picasa, so I had to find another way to obtain my photos that were stuck in almost a bizarre purgatory manifested as Google+/Picasa.  I was able to retrieve the images by downloading them from there and saving them to a folder on my pc and then adding them to my wordpress post.  So this wasn't exactly the convenience and ease I was hoping for.

Womble Property Search Happenings

I mentioned in my previous post, Census Research Update, about my plans for searching for the land that John Washington Womble lived on in Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10^th Surveyor’s District.  I’ve been searching through deed books W and X for records pertaining to land located in that specific area and have made copies of whatever documents I’ve found located in that area.  I’ve created some plats of the various tracts I’ve found and tried assembling them into what I think is the proper orientation.  So far, I’ve only been able to match up a couple of tracts with their correct neighbors, while other tracts end up being matchless and thus far have become random pieces of land that seem to fall within the vast space of Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10^th Surveyor’s District.

As I worked through what’s become a bit mind numbing a   I started toying with the idea of taking a research trip out to Bolivar in Hardeman County, Tennessee and visiting their courthouse and looking at plat maps which would likely tell me the orientation of the various plats of land I’ve found and where the land that John Washington Womble lived on was located.
Thinking about the project, my thoughts turned to how I could make this go faster or go about getting the information I want more easily.

The thought occurred to me to contact the courthouse myself and see if plat maps of Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10^th Surveyor’s District were available.  I own a book, County Courthouse Book by Elizabeth Petty Bentley that I haven’t used much since receiving it as a Christmas gift many years ago.  I wasn’t sure if the information about the Hardeman County courthouse officials would be accurate, so I googled the courthouse and found their website.  The information on webpage about the Registrar’s office correlated with the information found in Bentley’s book an email address.  I sent an email to the registrar asking about plat maps for the area I’m researching and was told that they had some old copies of records that might be useful to me. 

I was elated at the news and gave the registrar my address so copies could be mailed to me.  About a week or so later, I received an envelope from the courthouse and opened it.  Inside were some maps, but they didn’t show individual plats for the area I’m researching.  One of the maps was nearly identical to one I already owned and had photocopied from a library book.  This one however contained notations on various roads or streams and other areas that I had read about in the various court records, road work orders, and deeds I’ve looked at.  Needless to say I was disappointed by what was sent to me.  It’s still not clear to me if the courthouse has plat books with the information I’m seeking.  However, I appreciate the registrar with providing me with these maps, because in its way there’s now more of an impetus to travel to Bolivar to seek out the information I want to find.

I’ve finished searching for deeds in the Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10^th Surveyor’s District in books W and X and plan to move on to searching for land in Civil District 11, range 1, section 2 of the 10^th Surveyor’s District.  While reviewing the copies received from the courthouse, I did determine a factor in my searching.  That is that the location of the property I’m looking for is located near the Bolivar road.  I’ve seen this mentioned in a few other documents and know that some of the collateral Womble kin to my ancestor were assigned in the past to do repairs on this road.  I’ve collected a lot of deeds that follow the Hatchie River, but based on one of the maps sent to me the road is pretty much directly west of this river, so any properties I see that mention the river likely aren’t in the immediate vicinity of where John Washington Womble lived.

I likely realized this bit of geography when beginning this quest.  My thought probably was that if I platted all of the various land tracts within that specific region that I would be able to create the layout of what the neighborhood looked like.  Some research methods in National Genealogical Society Quarterly articles that I’ve read appear to demonstrate that the author has tried to focus on the land owning neighbors of an ancestor and using the census and deed records to build or recreate the neighborhood that way.  I’ve been attempting to do this, and am finding it challenging due to the fact that the names of the neighbors sometimes change over the years and it has appear nearly impossible to try to pin down when person X lived near person Y.  It almost seems that whoever is recording the deeds is going by their own memory or that of the person whose deed they’re recording.  Since there appears to be no check and balances in the accuracy of the names of the people being mentioned in the deeds how can one determine where these properties are really located within a specific county?  It seems surprising that a county government would have such a relaxed approach to recording their property records in the past.

Newspaper search for Womble family

I’ve used newspapers in my genealogical research in the past.  These searches have mostly taken place when I’ve done on site research in the town where my Womble ancestors have lived so it’s basically been limited to looking at microfilmed newspapers.  At times, I’ve been fortunate enough to find the “local” newspapers of my ancestors on microfilm at the Library of Congress.

Digitization of documents is becoming more pervasive and more easily accessible to the public.  Newspapers along with other records used in genealogical research are being digitized as well.  Sites such as the Library of Congress offers free access to a selection of digitized newspapers.  This collection seems limited to those newspapers published before the early 1920’s, which has put a limit to what I can find about some of my Womble ancestors. 

I’ve tried other means of locating the information I’ve been looking for such as obituaries of my great grandfather, Albert Womble’s siblings.  One of my successes involved finding an obit that had been put on the site Photobucket and there I was able to make contact with a distant cousin who had posted several pictures and articles about the Womble family.

While I was at RootsTech this year, I considered the possibility of using the site Newspapers.com to search for news articles from the Savannah Courier a newspaper published Savannah, Tennessee which is the county seat of Hardin County, Tennessee.  Previously, at the Family History Library I had found the book by Tony Hays, No Man’s Land: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Hardin County.  The preface stated that the book is a compilation of articles that were originally published in Savannah Courier.  The book mentioned a lot of events and accounts of happenings in Hardin County before and after the Civil War.  However, I wasn’t sure what to do with the information since the author didn’t include more detailed sources other than that the information came from the Savannah Courier.  I talked with another genealogist while in Salt Lake City about my findings in Tony Hays’ book and what searching I could do to verify or if I should verify the information in his book.  I was encouraged to attempt to verify the information and told that what needed to be done was to attempt to track down issues of the Savannah Courier and read them to correlate the information in Hays’ book with the articles in the newspaper. 

This led me to talk to the folks at the Newspapers.com booth and see if the Savannah Courier was a newspaper that they had in their collection.  Unfortunately it wasn’t, however this didn’t cause me to completely disregard the usefulness of the website. 

Sometimes research ideas come to me indirectly.  I happened to be looking through my newsfeed on Facebook, where I’ve joined a few genealogy groups.  One of these the Tennessee GenealogicalSociety posted an article about finding maiden names for ancestors.  The article brought up searching newspapers for maiden names and someone commented on searching for digitized records on the site Missouri Digital Heritage.  This set off the thought in my mind to search for digitized California newspapers for the obituary of Albert Womble’s brother, Thomas J. Womble.  I had tried to find San Bernardino, California newspapers available at various universities, but had always come up empty handed.

This new idea of searching for digitized San Bernardino, California newspapers led me to the site, California Digital Newspaper Collection.  They didn’t have what I was looking for so I wound up googling “digitized San Bernardino Sun” and came across this newspaper available on the Newspapers.com site.

 I was able to search the site to see if the time period I was interested in was available and it was.  Previous research I’d done on Thomas had given me a clue as to his death date.   

My goal was to obtain a death certificate for him, but I’m sure that this won’t be available to me due to California’s strict privacy laws.  Also, I was hoping that an obituary would give me more information about his life and the Womble family. 

I signed up for the free 7 day trial and was able to find Thomas’ obituary in the San Bernardino Sun.  The clipping tool was fairly straightforward to use and I could then download and/or print the image.  After downloading it, I saved the image to my computer and for those of you who are regular readers of my blog, yes, I entered the search into my research log and wrote a citation for the obit—so I’m following my new system.

I considered going ahead and becoming a regular subscriber to Newspapers.com, but eventually decided against it.  The reason being while I loved the clipping, downloading, and saving features on the site, the functionality of these worked great for me and were better than what’s available on the Library of Congress’ digitized newspapers area, ‘Chronicling America.’ The truth is you can’t beat the cost of free stuff.  Also, I didn’t find the search feature to be any better or worse than the Library of Congress.  Yes, there is the limitation of not being able to search more recent newspapers on their site, but my focus is on mainly on older newspapers.  Perhaps, I will become a subscriber of Newspapers.com in the future if their collection comes to include more newspapers from Hardin County, Tennessee; Massac County, Illinois (specifically the Metropolis Planet); and a greater variety of Nashville newspapers. 

My free trial of the service did cause me to locate some real gems.  Such as the court case, Womble vs. Womble listed in an 1874 Nashville paper, delinquent tax lists from 1910 that listed my great grandfather, Albert Womble.  Finding him listed on these lists gave me more insight into his life as single father in Paducah and it wasn’t surprising to find him in such a list.  However, it was surprising to see the extent of his struggle with single parenthood after the death of his wife and how this seeped into other areas of his life.

Attempting to Take Control of my Genealogical Research

Earlier this year I considered making a list of New Year’s resolutions; however, I decided not to do this.  The reason being is that they’re essentially goals that you set for yourself.  My husband had recently read a book by Scott Adams and in the book Scott said that “goals are for losers and systems are for winners.”  This outlook of Scott Adams changed my viewpoint on goals and resolutions so I decided to try to go about planning and organizing my life or at least one aspect of my life differently.

So instead of creating actual resolutions for myself I made a list of Genealogy Goals for 2015.  Yes, I know, goals are for losers; however, I did include an item about how I can try to take control of my research.  Basically, I want to have a system for how I deal with the stuff that I find when I’m researching.

The taking control of my research idea is from the January 2015 issue of the Greater Omaha Genealogical Society’s newsletter, Westward Into Nebraska.  They had an article by Lisa Alzo that was taken from her blog.  I read the article and was inspired to “take control of my research!” This is what got me thinking of how to create a system for how I process the information I find after searching for it. 

It did take me some time because it’s now March and I haven’t really implemented my new found system.  I’ve taken some steps to organize it and manage it, such as I came up with the idea to add a source citation column to my research log.  Another column I created was one for Source Analysis.  These are two of the steps I took to get control of it, because Lisa’s article got me thinking about what bad habits I have in regards to my research.  As I sat and thought about it, I realized that my bad genealogy habits are not writing down the source citations right away for the things I find.  I do put the information almost immediately into my research log, and will mention where I found the stuff.  But after I’ve finished that task, no formal citation is ever written for the source of the information I’ve perhaps spent weeks, months, or years thinking about how to find, searching for it, and then perhaps finding a small piece to the puzzle.  The other bad habit I have with my research is never stopping to analyze the source and writing about my research findings formally, instead of just writing about some of the happenings in this blog.

Once I realized what these bad habits were, I needed to come up with a way to deal with them and stop my bad habits.  Yes, I’ve included source citations in my genealogy software program for the different life events of my ancestors, and some of these sources are duplicated on my WeRelate page.  However, I didn’t have anything written down in one central place for all of my sources.  So that’s what led me to create columns for citations and analysis in my research log, so that everything would be in one place and that I wouldn’t be able to walk away once I’d entered in finding a particular piece of information or having visited a website and coming up empty.  The fact that I needed to cite the source would be staring me at in the face, so I would likely feel compelled to write a citation for the information or lack thereof.

While I was at the RootsTech/FGS conference I overheard some people near my booth talking about the Evidentia program.  It’s for managing the sources that you’ve accumulated.  I was intrigued by it, but as it was extremely busy in the exhibit hall I didn’t have much time to go in search of their booth and find out more. 

However, soon after hearing about the software, the guy from the company stopped by my booth early one morning before the hall opened to ask me a question about something in regards to the conference.  I saw that he was with the Evidentia company and asked him about the program.  He gave me some information and later when one of my colleagues watched the booth, I went over to learn more.  I did buy the software and have begun using it, but still want to finish my project of sourcing everything that’s in my research log.  I’ll write more about what progress I’m making with citing my sources, how my system is working out for me, and perhaps how the Evidentia program is working out for me.

Census Research Update

Back in August I wrote about extracting census data in an effort to learn more about my great, great grandfather, John Washington Womble.  As a correction to the previous post, the Civil Districts I extracted the census data from were the 12th and 13th from the 1870 census and then the 11th Civil District from the 1880 census.  I’m curious to learn where exactly in Hardeman County, Tennessee he lived and anything else this information can tell me about his life there.

This has been a long process and I’m not finished yet, and probably haven’t even reached the tip of the iceberg.  I spent the fall going through deed indices; yes some may say that wasn’t truly a great starting point because indices don’t always contain a thorough listing of everyone in a particular book.  However, I needed a place to start and knew going in that I would need to consult the deed books themselves to truly cover all of my bases.

I even ordered a roll of microfilm of surveys for Hardeman and made several copies of surveys that were located either entirely or partially in Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10th Surveyor’s District.  This was the limit I set for what I would search in an effort to learn where his land was located, and yes I know I’m leaving out the 13th Civil District—I will cover that.

After collecting this information, which I knew wasn’t enough, I began to plat out the surveys I’d copied.  I tried using a free online program and considered purchasing an expensive program to help me plat all of these surveys.  Instead, I took the hard road and platted them by hand using graph paper, ruler, pencil, and at times a protractor when necessary.

This was time consuming, but interesting because I became drawn into what I believe may be the terrain of his neighborhood.  My thought is that John Washington Womble likely lived in the vicinity of the Hatchie River.  I could be wrong; as I haven’t finished platting all of the surveys I collected and haven’t finished my search of the properties that surrounded his.

I tried comparing my plats to the present day Hardeman County, Tennessee on Googlemaps, but still could never completely connect them enough to tie the plats with the images I found online.

While creating the plats, I found mention of a property that always seemed to be referred to in similar with sometimes varying terms:  Entry No. 953, for 2000 acres, in the name of Thomas Claiborn & others.  I first noticed this description in a land transfer from Aby Grantham to John J Womble.

The last name Claiborne is significant because it may be connected to John Washington Womble’s 2nd wife Rhoda Caroline Richardson.  Additionally, some of the property description of the land purchased by John J Womble seemed to mirror a neighboring property that coincidentally was owned by John Washington Womble, who I believe, was John J. Womble’s uncle.

I had the opportunity to visit the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah this past February when I worked the NGS booth at the RootsTech/FGS conference.  There I did a page by page search through deed book W looking for land transactions that were in the area I’d cordoned off in my mind-Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10th Surveyor’s District.  Again I saw mentioned in various deeds the infamous, Entry No. 953, for 2000 acres, in the name of Thomas Claiborn & others and made copies of those.  Hopefully, I can use that plat as an anchor in which to join all the other “puzzle pieces” of plats that I’ve already created or will create and be able to fit John Washington Womble’s plat in amongst them.

Upon returning to Virginia, I’ve ordered microfilm from the FHL of deed books W and X and once it arrives plan to continue my page by page search for properties within Civil District 12, range 1, section 2 of the 10th Surveyor’s District.

My plan is that once I’ve gathered together those plats for the Civil District 12 that I’ll then work on locating plats for the 13th Civil District and then be able to put John Washington Womble’s 1870’s neighborhood together.