In-person research - so fun!

 

In January I've been doing some in-person research (which doesn't always happen since so many historical records relevant to genealogy research are digitized), but here we are - nothing like handling old volumes (with care), and imagining the hands that touched them back in the day. These volumes are from the 1880s and 1890s - city directories. Well, it's now February, so on to my next post soon - Black History Month. 

Acadian Remembrance Day

 

Yesterday was Acadian Remembrance Day (December 13), and I have been reading these books, to really drill down into the history of the Acadians and their expulsion and diaspora. It is such a complicated and tragic story (and I've posted about this history in an earlier post about writing my family history). I only recently realized that I have Acadian roots, but that perhaps explains why I have always been fascinated by it and by the "Cajun" culture of Louisiana... it's one of the many diaspora communities of Acadians. Many tried to and did return to the Maritime provinces of Canada which were/are the Acadian homeland (for those who don't know, that's New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and even a bit of southwestern Newfoundland). Just thinking about the lost history, the planned forgetting and the more recent attempt to recover the history and genealogy of the Acadian people. One great website is Acadiann, another is acadian.org. I recommend diving into these if you are interested. If you have a French sounding last name in your family tree, it is possible that you have Acadian roots. It's not the same culture as "French Canadian" or Quebecois, but a separate history and culture that developed on the maritime edge of northeastern North America in the 1600s and 1700s. Happy reading! Vive les Acadiens!

Native American ancestors in the family... let's talk!

 

Hello there! It's November - which is Native American heritage month, so I thought I would bring up a topic that is a little touchy... so many Americans have stories in their family histories that there is a Native American ancestor. Often it's a woman (but not always) and often Cherokee, often even more specifically a "Cherokee princess." Maybe you know where this is going... but just let me say I have had this happen in my own family - with the story that we have a Mohawk ancestor (not Cherokee, since this part of my family is from upstate New York, on Mohawk ancestral land, in fact). The Cherokee stories seem to be (obviously) family lines from the southern US. I have had a number of clients hire me to do genealogy projects, tracing back a family line, with a hope that they will find a Native American ancestor. Each time, I searched high and low (and way beyond the hours that they contracted with me, just to be sure), and I always have come up with no Native American ancestors. 

Why do people have these family stories? For one thing, geographic proximity to a tribal homeland usually tracks, or in the case of the Cherokee, it could be post-removal / post-Trail of Tears when the Cherokee were removed from Georgia/ North Carolina to what is now northeast Oklahoma. What usually ends up happening is that the ancestors lived close by some tribal folk, but were clearly white settlers, not indigenous people. I think there are factors such as stories changing over time, from "we lived next to some ____ (fill in the blank, tribal group)" to ancestors seeking credentials as "native" to a place, and throw in a little romantic imagination, and it becomes this kind of story. 

Also, sometimes in the past, people of Black ancestry claimed Native ancestry, as a way of being a more "acceptable" minority and a way to explain darker skin/hair etc. But of course the Cherokee and the other 4 associated tribes from the Southeast actually owned Black slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries, so there were Black "freedmen" (and women) from those tribes, the Cherokee, Creek, Chicasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole. These people are/ can be recognized as tribal members and if you are Black and have a family story of being from one of these tribes, it may actually be true! 

When clients ask me to find out if they have a certain tribal identity, sometimes they want to file a claim for tribal citizenship for the benefits associated with that. However, tribal citizenship requirements, while varying from one group to another, usually demand a direct line and only two generations distant, and there has to be paper proof, so someone on a tribal roll, or on the Indian Census rolls that the federal US government took over the years of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and then proving a direct descendence from that person listed on a roll. Also, there is an idea in mainstream American society that tribal members get cash payments, but this is almost never true. (Again it varies by tribe.) I usually ask the client if they are involved with the tribe in any way - even attending powwows or other events open to the public. And to be ethical, I would encourage the client to think of how they would contribute to their tribal community if they were to achieve citizenship. Benefits such as healthcare and education for Native Americans of federally recognized tribes are not all they might be imagined - the Indian Health Service's clinics are woefully underfunded by the US federal government, and same for educational facilities.

But learning about the culture (in a variety of ways including reading books - so many!), even possibly trying to learn some of the language, and engaging in public events put on by a tribe such as powwows would be a great place to start if you are thinking about the possibility of Native American ancestry in your family line. I've written other posts on Native American topics - feel free to peruse back through my posts to find others. I think I am safely putting to rest the family lore in my maternal side that we had a Mohawk ancestor ... I certainly did not inherit the lack of vertigo, for sure! 

I didn't mention DNA evidence of Native American ancestry, mainly because so few tribal people do the DNA tests (they know who they are!) that there isn't enough of a data basis in most DNA testing sites. Of course this is a gross generalization; it's much more complicated, but suffice it to say that DNA isn't usually a helpful venue for looking for Native American ancestry. Happy November!

Celebrating Latino/ Hispanic heritage this month...

 

Every part of the globe has great resources for studying genealogy, so no matter where in the world you are from, there are ways to shake your family tree! This publication (above), Herencia, the quarterly journal of the Hispanic Genealogical Research Center of New Mexico, is just one resource available in English to help people research their roots in Spanish-speaking areas, this one notably focused on New Mexico. Did you know that NM is one of the oldest settled regions of the US? Ever since the 1610s, there have been Spanish-speaking folks there, co-existing with the Pueblo Native people, neighbors along the rivers of New Mexico. I've been looking into this area myself, researching a friend's family roots there. It will be fun to see how many centuries her family goes back. 

The National Genealogical Society has posted this great list of resources on its website:

• Hispanic Family History Resources page on the FamilySearch Wiki
• Documentary Relations of the Southwest from the University of Arizona Institutional Repository
• HOGAR de Dallas (Hispanic Organization for Genealogy and Research)
• Early California Population Project by the Huntington Library
• LLILAS Benson Digital Collections and Content of the University of Texas Libraries
• Research Resources from the New Mexico Genealogical Society
• Texas Colonial Period Subject Guide by the Briscoe Center for American History
• Diccionario geográfico-estadístico-histórico de España y sus posesiones de Ultramar by Pascual Madoz
• Guia de los Archivos de la Iglesia de España by the Diocesan Archive of Barcelona for the Association of Church Archivists in Spain with the collaboration of the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports
• Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES) / Spanish Archives Portal
• Diccionario geográfico, histórico y biográfico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos by Antonio García Cubas
• Guadalajara Dispensas includes names from the archives of the Catholic Diocese of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
• Valladolid Dispensas with indexes to the FamilySearch microfilms related to the "Antiguo Obispado Catolico de Michoacan"
• Mexican Genealogy Resources by Moises Garza
• Resources and Links from the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami, Fl., Inc.
• Great New Mexico Pedigree Database from the Hispanic Genealogical Research Center of New Mexico

Planning my writing project - Acadian history in my family...

 

OK folks - a longer post than most! 😊

I've been very busy with client projects, a number of repeat customers who just can't get enough of shaking their family tree... projects based in the American Midwest - Kansas, Missouri and further east such as Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, the typical routes of migration (in reverse). I had a fun project that traced a family from Scotland to Philadelphia, southwestern Ontario and adjacent Michigan where the border was just a short hop across the St. Clair river, and then down to Virginia. This family moved a lot! 

 I've had a number of Native American projects, tracing family history in tribal rolls, etc. And now some that involve Mexico and El Salvador - glad my Spanish comes in handy. But I've also had a lot of projects tracing Canadian ancestry, specifically French Canadian in Quebec and Acadia (roughly what is now the Maritime provinces of Canada), putting my French to good use. So many migrated for work in the second half of the 1800s from French-speaking Canada to New England and New York. I've been doing a lot of projects focused on that specific kind of migration, so tracing back across the border into Canada on behalf of clients. 

This has reminded me that I need to get back to my own family research - I have deep roots in French-speaking Canada, and only recently became aware that that includes some Acadian ancestors - for those who don't know, the Acadians - French-speaking settlers of what is now Maritime Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, a bit of Newfoundland) and also far eastern Quebec and also northern Maine see map above! - were expelled (a word that doesn't really do justice to what happened) by the British in the 1740s, 1750s, and 1760s, and even later some were kicked out again. This expulsion resulted in a diaspora of a unique cultural group and also populated much of rural Louisiana (the Cajuns are really Acadians - an English elision of the name)... some people know about this, some don't. The Acadians were sent to New England, other ports along the eastern seaboard/ American colonies, places in the Caribbean, and Louisiana as well as England and France, and even the Falkland Islands in the southern hemisphere. CRAZY. This happened some 270-ish years ago, but some people are just now realizing that they have Acadian roots (me included!). Many Acadians tried to return to their homeland; some did, but often Anglicized their names and spoke English instead of French to try to fit in with the Anglo dominant community in eastern Canada.  It was really an attempt at genocide, at least cultural if not actual. I don't use that term lightly but read up and you will see what I mean. John Mack Faragher's A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland is a good place to start, or even quicker - just listen to the beautiful song by The Band "Acadian Driftwood" which encapsulates the heartbreaking story so well. I have LOVED that song for decades!

Anyway, I recently watched an amazing video of a meeting of Acadian genealogists and historians, and learned about the work they are doing. I also realized how I need to work on my own genealogy and start writing about my own family history and my discovery of a hidden history. I recently discovered that my great-grandparents had a child who died just a month old of pneumonia, in the winter of 1905 in Boston. No one alive in my family knew that. I found his birth and death certificates, and his name was Basil. His father, my great-grandfather, was Harry Clifford Fowler, who was born and raised in a small town in Kings County, New Brunswick  Canada, but had moved to Boston and married a woman he met there in 1904, my great-grandmother, Marie Louise Pillard. Marie Louise was from Troy NY, but her family actually came from Varennes, Quebec in the mid-1800s. 

Harry was an Anglophone (English-speaking) Baptist young man, and Marie Louise was a Francophone (French-speaking) Catholic - her first language was French, despite being born in Hudson NY and growing up mainly in Troy NY. The Catholic parish her family attended was predominantly French-Canadian, and masses were held in French. Her parents wrote down the births of their children in their family Bible en Français. I didn't even know that this great-grandmother, who died about 4 years before I was born, spoke French and was Catholic until I was an adult. (Of course as an adult she spoke mainly English.) But more recently, while researching her family line - Pillards and Poiriers in Quebec - I found an ancestor named Jean-Basile Mignault (most often called Basile Mignault). He was Acadian! Born in what is now Nova Scotia, and moved as a young child to St. Denis on the Richelieu River south of Montreal in Quebec (part of the Acadian expulsion), and he fought in the Revolutionary War on the American side, I presume because of his antipathy toward the British who had exiled his family from their homeland. 

When I first saw that my great-grandparents had a baby named Basil, I thought of it as an English name - that Harry had suggested the name - he came from UEL stock - meaning (for those who don't know Canadian history) United Empire Loyalists - meaning those in the American colonies who had remained loyal to the British during the American Revolutionary War, and many of whom were given land grants in Canada after the war to populate Canada with English-speaking monarchist loyalists... so Harry's ancestors would have been on the opposite side from his wife's ancestor Basil in that war. But also, now knowing about her Acadian ancestor, Basil, I believe the baby who, sadly, only lived a month at the dawn of the twentieth century in Boston, was likely named after an Acadian hero. I would love to know whether that is true, and also if it was, what was the conversation that took place between Harry and Marie Louise?  

Acadian flag

Yesterday I attended a great workshop given by Sunny Jane Morton at the Midwest Genealogy Center on writing our ancestors' stories. I am now determined to not just flesh out more details of this branch of my family tree, but to write about it so that my family can discover this as well. I hope more family members will be inspired to take an interest in our genealogy, our family history that has many twists and turns... stay tuned! 

How many ways do we have to express family relationships?

 

I recently read the book Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas. It's a great fun, funny read, heartwarming and poignant, and the genealogist in me was struck by something she wrote in the chapter entitled "It's all relatives" - cute pun. She says that there are 4 different words for uncle in Farsi (aka Persian), the predominant language of Iran. And there are 8 different words for cousin in Farsi, depending on the exact relationship of each cousin (whether related on mom or dad's side, and more specifically than that). In English, we have a bare-bones vocabulary for family relationships by comparison... sometimes when I am explaining family relationships to my family members, I find myself having to go beyond "he's your second cousin once removed" to saying more specifically "he is your grandmother Sarah's first cousin's son" or something like that.  This got me wondering how these family relationships are handled in other languages (ALERT: convergence of my geeking out - languages and genealogy!!!) and I resolve to look into this, although the languages I have studied formally (French, German, Spanish) I'm pretty sure don't have a level of specificity much beyond gender distinctions for cousins (which we don't have in English). I am knee deep in genealogy projects right now, but stay tuned in case I ever get back to this and share an updated post. LOL!!! Keep it cute, cousins!

"Dual citizenship" or applying for another country's citizenship... Canada is a common one for Americans.

 

I have had a number of inquiries lately about researching people's ancestry or family history to see if they have a Canadian ancestor in order to apply for Canadian citizenship. This can be done; I've been doing more of these lately. You need to have a grandparent whose ancestry can be linked (proven) to you, and the question of when they arrived in the US and when / if they applied for US naturalization, when they actually naturalized (the process can take 5-10 years) are ones that a Canadian immigration attorney can consult on, once the genealogy/ ancestry link to you is proven. I can research and write those reports for an immigration attorney. Just email me at gretchencdn@gmail.com to get started!