Ben Crowder

Yesterday after home teaching, I came up here to the lab where I work to prepare my FHE lesson and do some research on my genealogy (as mentioned in yesterday’s post). When I got close, I noticed that there was a BYU police car in front of the building (the JFSB). Having an overactive imagination, I pictured a drug bust going on downstairs, or perhaps the policeman was stopping a gang from stealing computers from the sociology lab on the second floor or something. Or, not quite as exciting, he was probably just on his beat, checking all the buildings. But didn’t they have security do that?

I entered the building. The lights were off in the lab, but as I was typing in the access code to get in, I noticed a man sitting at one of the computers inside. And as I opened the door, his uniform became visible. Yup, there was a policeman sitting in our lab at the TA computer, in the dark.

Luckily my weirded-out circuits were malfunctioning, so I said hi and pretended like it was all the most natural thing in the world.

“Are you having lessons tonight?” he asked as I walked past him into the employee area where my computer is and turned on the lights.

“No,” I said, “I’m just working on my genealogy,” and sat down at my computer.

He then asked if I’d heard about the new database Ancestry released last week, something to do with the census, and whether the Church’s efforts overlapped with Ancestry’s. Had a nice little chat about that. And after fifteen minutes or so he stood up and left with a “have a good one!”

The whole time I was thinking to myself, “Wow, I’ve got to blog about this.” :) Last summer I was here in the lab alone on a Saturday afternoon and President Hinckley showed up. No joke. But that’s a story for another time. :)

[tags]BYU, Gordon B. Hinckley[/tags]

I’m drooling.

Maybe that’s not the most elegant way to start off a post, nor is it literally true, but I sure feel like I’m drooling. See, I’ve been checking out Ancestry’s OneWorldTree, just to see what research other people have done on my lines, and I’ve hit a gold mine. It may end up being fool’s gold, but it’s a motherlode nonetheless. I’ve written about it over at Footprints from the Past.

The best part is that I’ve finally found some Welsh ancestors! There are some problems with the pedigree on OWT (like the fact that Charles Thomas was born quite a while after Philip Thomas died), but I have a gut feeling that it’s basically on the right track. Which means I’m from Glamorganshire and Carmarthenshire and all those wonderful places I’ve been in love with since I was a kid. Reading the Time and Mr. Bass series and The Dark Is Rising and all those kinds of books is probably what did it. Speaking of The Dark Is Rising, I also found a few ancestors from Cornwall. This is soooooo cool. :)

Granted, it could all be erroneous, but “Thomas” is a Welsh last name and it’s verified that it belongs to my ancestors, so there definitely is Welsh blood in me. And I’m proud of it! I need to learn Welsh…

Anyway, the four FHE groups in my ward are coming in to our lab at work (two tomorrow night and two next week), and I’ve been assigned to train them for an hour on beginning genealogy. (Our stake has a goal to have every member find two names and take them to the temple by August 4.) So I’d better prepare all that. I’m really glad I don’t have any homework for the next two months. :) My new task is collecting all the information on my lines (from OWT) and entering it into Beyond (once Beyond’s working) so that I can start sorting it into fact and fiction.

P.S. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is a city in Wales. I have a suspicion your browser is going to have a heyday trying to fit it in. If it messes up the sidebar, so be it. :)

[tags]genealogy, OneWorldTree, Wales, The Dark Is Rising, Cornwall[/tags]

I’m preparing a lesson on how to do genealogy for my ward (they’re having me train the FHE groups, two tomorrow and two next week, because our stake has a goal to have every member find two names and take them to the temple before August 4), and I randomly decided to look up Abram W. Houchins and Martha Sneed on Ancestry’s OneWorldTree. And holy toledo, there’s a ton. Hundreds if not thousands of names for their ancestors. How far? Back to, oh, 90 A.D. Yes, that’s not a typo. Now, I don’t know how much I trust it all — that’s 50+ generations and could all be completely made up — but it’s exciting to think that it just might be real. There’s royalty (King Aethelbert and King Egbert, for example), and all sorts of stuff. Towards the end of the line you get bogus information, though, like the “Sicambrian King of Canada” and Helen of Troy. Yes, that Helen, the daughter of Priam. Somehow I don’t quite think she fits in. :)

Anyway, it’s a ton of information. I wish Ancestry would let you download a GEDCOM, because otherwise it’s going to mean slowly typing it all in by hand so that I have it in my file, which will then allow me to verify it all. Beyond’s going to become really handy as far as that goes — it’ll automatically grey out any unverified information (information without a source attached), so I can throw in all of this potential material and see at a glance that it’s not verified. And then the work of going through it all will begin. But it’s exciting to see where our ancestors may have come from, in the different parts of England. There’s the de Aldithley family from Heleigh Castle (in Audley, Staffordshire, England), for example, and one of them was named Lynulphus. How cool is that? :) And there’s Margaret Downes, born in 1446 in Pott Shrigley (Prestbury, Cheshire, England). The royal lines come out of France and Germany and such. (Or “Austrasia” as it was called.)

So, where I thought we had no information on Abram W. Houchins and Martha Sneed’s parents, we have a mountain. A huge, veritable, larger-than-life mountain.

Here’s the OneWorldTree pedigree once you get back to the 1000s:

But of course the pedigree spreads out tremendously when you’re back that far. It would be really nice to be able to print an overview of it all, just to get a feel where the lines are, but PAF doesn’t let you do that (to my knowledge). And I haven’t entered all the information in yet. I’m thinking Beyond will have to be able to make supercharts.

So anyway, I’m wondering how much other information on our other lines is in OneWorldTree. No sense in reproducing work that’s already been done. (And for the research that has been done, it doesn’t hurt to verify it all and make sure we have valid sources, lest we seal ourselves to the wrong families.) I think I’ll start going through OneWorldTree and see what I can find. (I know, for example, that there’s a lot of info on Asberry Bailey and Mary Pauline Haire, on Broadus’s line.)

But at the moment I’m going to sit back and revel in the fact that I’m related to King Aethelbert, whoever he was. ;)

[tags]genealogy, Houchins, Sneed[/tags]

Yesterday I spent some time on EllisIsland.org trying to figure out which of the Domenico Iorios listed is my great-great grandfather. My mom’s maternal grandfather was Joseph Iorio, born in 1902 in New Jersey. In the birth certificate, his parents are listed as Domenico Iorio and Teresa Cirelli, ages 22 and 20, respectively. So Domenico was born around 1880, and Teresa around 1882. And they had to arrived in the States before 1902.

Out of the ten Domenico Iorios listed on Ellis Island, there’s only one born in 1880 (the rest are either before 1865 or after 1888). He’s from Morrone Sais and first arrived in 1899 at the age of 18, single. He then came back again (still from Morrone) in 1904, married. And again in 1907. He was also headed for Jersey City, which fits in perfectly. All the evidence looks like it’s him, but there’s still no conclusive evidence. And I don’t even know for sure that he came through Ellis Island. (But where else would he have come through?)

As for Teresa Cirelli, there are two close in age. One, from Moissana, arrived in 1903, so I doubt it’s her. The other came from Terininis in 1902 at age 19, which is close enough. But again, there’s nothing solid to say she’s actually Joseph’s mother. (Oh, she went by Maria or Marie later in life, apparently.)

There’s no Domenico Iorio in the 1900, 1910, or 1920 censuses, unfortunately. I wonder if he went back to Italy… (He certainly has a history of doing that.) According to the 1899 ship manifest, Domenico was going to stay with his brother Gabriele at 395 3rd St. in Jersey City. And, interestingly, there’s a WWI draft registration card for a Domenico Iorio, living at 377 Monmouth Rd., Jersey City, New Jersey (and Joseph Iorio was born in Jersey City, mind you), age 43, born 24 Apr 1875. Interesting. His nearest relative was listed as Gabriel Iorio. (And he worked on Broadway. Cool. :))

There’s also a draft card for a Nicola Domenico Iorio, born 30 Dec 1877, also residing in Jersey City.

Maybe I should try working from the bottom up. Joseph Iorio shows up in the 1930 census with his wife Anna and his son Anthony as lodgers in the household of James V. Keane. (They were married 22 Nov 1925.) But Joseph doesn’t show up in the 1920 or 1910 census. Hmm…

[tags]Iorio[/tags]

Yup, another blog. :) It’s called Footprints from the Past, and it’s going to be the record of my genealogical research. (I figured that I need a place to put that stuff, since Google is pretty adept at finding it, and there are too many categories on here already.) If there’s anything particularly neat that I find, I’ll blog about it here, but for the most part I’ll keep ‘em separate. (It’ll also be good motivation to work on Beyond and to actually do genealogy so that I’ll have something to write about. :))

[tags]genealogy[/tags]

Decided to typeset the will of my ancestor Robert Shanks so I could have a nice PDF version to put in my files. Also did the legislative petition he and his brother William signed in 1820 to request the land of their deceased uncle William. And that was all I was intending to do, but I got addicted, and I’ve found some cool bits of information.

First, I went back to the Library of Virginia catalog to copy the relevant catalog entries (there are the Shanks family papers, and the Baxter family papers, both of which are quite relevant to my lines). Under the Baxter family papers I found this biographical note: “William Henry Baxter was born 30 March 1830 in Havana, Cuba, to Thomas Baxter and his first wife. William Baxter became a machinist, a businessman and a property owner in Petersburg. He eventually became superintendent of a gas works. He married Matilda Shanks (ca. 1829-1886) in July 1853, and they had at least 3 children. Baxter died 5 July 1915 in Petersburg.”

Havana?!? What were they doing in Havana? It’s kind of ironic because my mom’s dad was Cuban and was born in Havana, too. Small world. :)

In the University of Virginia Library catalog entry for the business records of William H. Baxter, Robert’s son-in-law (he married Robert and Elizabeth’s daughter Matilda), I found that Robert Shanks and his brother William D. Shanks were apparently partners in the Blandford and Mansfield Mill Companies.

Another extremely interesting entry was this: “Correspondence of Robert Shanks and William H. Baxter incident to the founding and operation of the Petersburg Gas Co.” First, any letters are like a gold mine — I’ll finally get to see more of his personality. (Some of it’s evident in his will, but a will is a legal document and because of the formality you can’t see much of the person behind it.) And he helped found the Petersburg Gas Company? I had no idea…

My favorite is this one, also from the Library of Virginia: “Covenant of F.B. Stainback and R.S. Birchett to abstain from card playing for five years or pay $5,000 to the Petersburg Orphan Asylum, also two Dinwiddie County land tax receipts, of Robert Shanks, Sr. and Jr.” My, have times changed! :) (Admittedly the part Robert plays in this isn’t as funny, but still…)

[tags]Petersburg, Shanks, Baxter, genealogy[/tags]

Early this morning I decided to take the 6:50 bus to the Provo temple. On my walk up to campus (I left at 6:30), I only saw three people. Three! I guess it was 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday. :) Anyway, I got to the bus stop, sat down, and started reading from the Book of Mormon. When 6:50 rolled around, I walked over to the schedule to make sure the bus was coming. And it turns out that the earliest bus on Saturdays (for that route) comes at 7:55. I knew I should’ve checked the schedule first. ~sigh~ I contemplated going to work for an hour and then taking the bus, since it’d be another 20-25 minutes of walking and that seemed like a long time, but then I realized that people all over the world travel for hours, days, and sometimes even weeks to get to the temple. Walking 40 minutes is nothing. So I shut up and walked, and it was great. :)

In other good news, I discovered my long-lost Shanks genealogy folder while decluttering my room. I’d tried to find it several times before but couldn’t, and now I know why: it was buried at the very bottom of one of my two mission boxes. I’m really glad I didn’t lose it, because there were lots of copies of records (like the legislative petition Robert Shanks signed back in 1817) that would be a pain to get again. I really ought to start scanning in stuff like that…

[tags]LDS, Mormon[/tags]