I was just at my parents and ran into someone that traced their line WAY back…. And to admit it I have a tree that has that too. I know what I need to do to my tree and what’s wrong with it….. It needs SOURCES! and in reality to go back that far the odds of finding sources are pretty near impossible. Though how far really is that back, how many generations? If you think that each generation probably got married younger as you go farther back – up to a point – my grandmother Richter got married at 14 I think…. But I would say an average of 20 to 25 years old. So taking the year 2000 minus the year 600 and an average mother’s age of 25…. You get 56 generations back! Looking at the chart below I suppose by the time you get that far back you pretty much have most of a country (or all of a country) in your family tree….. My tree does go back and I know I need to work on my sources. I have a few places that I need to shore up my documentation definitely.
What do you use for documentation once you get back a certain number of generations? The census and other government records are great here in the US to document back to 1850, but going beyond that you run into what to use? For one side of my family we have a family bible. Family bibles can be a great source of information! There are also newspapers that have some information, church records, and military records. I’ve found probate records for wills that have also helped.
Going back beyond the 1800s though becomes tougher. For some members of my family that are well known there are books that I can find where others have taken the time to trace the tree. I’ve collected all I can find as these books get harder to find as time passes. For regular family lines it gets almost impossible though. Add to that the records being oversees and frequently not in English and the search gets tougher. I’ve slowly been working through my records to add sources, but wondered about everyone else’s trees. I’m also ordering the DNA kit. I thought I may as well give it a try.
I think the biggest mess in family trees on ancestry comes from the family tree merge…. I know when I first started out and saw it…. I made that rookie mistake and am still trying to clean it up. Ancestry allows you to merge other peoples trees to your tree. I also started tracking my family tree when I was about 14… Commodore 64 and paper time, and was just questioning relatives. I didn’t document anything and relied on my memory for some. I do have the paper copies of what I wrote, but my wonderful relatives from the time are all gone. Between family member sources that aren’t documented and merged trees with unreliable sources, I am now using my tree as a source of hints that need researched. I don’t have my tree set to public knowing there is information out there that shouldn’t be relied on. I do have a lot of great information and I have documented almost all of my direct line as well as a lot of other great pictures and documentation, but ughhh! cleaning up a tree with thousands of people is a mess. I never merge family trees now. I will turn on that feature and look when I want new hints, but I won’t link the information…..
What do you use for hints? Sources? How far back does your tree go?
Last weekend I visited home. I thought it would be nice to drive through the town that Edward Corbly help create and take a couple pictures. The school I attended from K – 4, the post office/store where I would stop and get a candy bar when walking from school to the church, the church that I attended vacation bible school (not even my religion, but a lot of my family goes there, so I went each summer and even sang in the choir sometimes).
As I drove through town, I did see a town that is still really small. Population 200 according to one of the signs I’ve found. One of the homes has a sign that says “Drive like your kids live here” (love that)…. I took a few pictures quickly with my cell phone thinking I would come back. Driving through with my mother driving. This was in my mother’s car, a car that has driven through town many times in the past…
I won’t post the rest of the story as this apparently caused quite an uproar. I will say I drove through Belgiumtown w
ith mom (outside Westville) and didn’t have anywhere near the reaction…. So my question or pondering really comes down to, what is the proper way to record memories and history. Downloading and using others pictures really should not be used for anything you will publish – even on a blog. For anything to be published you should take your own pictures. For historic records you must have permission to publish the pictures unless they are within certain constraints (not a lawyer, don’t know what they are).
There are SO many things from history that I wish had been recorded, both people and places! Many were before pictures were easy to take like they are now, but pictures are such a great way to bring back memories and record history – I try to take them when I can. I even try to throw in video once in a while. When going on trips I try to include people in the pictures also. There are many family members that I miss immensely and seeing them in places at certain times brings it all back.
So what’s appropriate? Do you feel that pictures of your house by former residents are inappropriate? Pictures of public places? What about in a small town? And what about if it’s a house that was a public building in the past? – It’s gone now, but friends lived in the one room schoolhouse that my father went to school in. To top it off the larger school (Fithian Grade School) that I went to school in was being converted to a home the last time I heard anything about it…. So pictures?
Keep in mind what I’m talking about involves standing or being in a car and taking pictures from a public location. Pictures that are all of things that can be seen from a public place. I’m not talking about taking a drone and flying up to take a picture in a second floor window… that would be creeeeeepyyyyyy!
Some tips that I try to stick to:
- If anyone asks, speak to them and explain what you are doing – they may have stories.
- If you share the pictures, be respectful. Remember it may have been your location once, but someone else cares about it now…. Just because it’s different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong
- Try to avoid getting people in pictures of private locations if you going to use the pictures later.
- Don’t trespass on private property (get permission)
- There will always be some people that are overzealous about privacy and may not understand your desire to document your history. Additionally some areas may have turned into the ‘bad’ area of town. Be vigilant.
- Join the local history groups for your home towns. I was able to post and ask questions to find out some great information. Additionally I met some great people that knew my grandmother, mother, and great grandmother – and even family I hadn’t met before!
I have to admit I wasn’t the one that posted the picture that got the negative comments, but I did take it and I did send it to a friend that had asked for it. It took a while because I came in late to the game to even figure out which picture had caused trouble… When I found out, it turned out it was a picture I had taken of a foundation for me to research later what had been at that location. I’ve been looking for the train depot in town and a foundation seemed like something to look into….
For taking pictures I have my cell phone and I have a nice Cannon camera. I usually will take any quick pics with my phone and anything that I want to keep for good I take with my good Cannon camera. I have a Wifi connector for my camera making it easy to transfer the pictures and an eyefi card also.
So thoughts?
I’m hoping to come up to see dad this week… As I’ve mentioned my dad has dementia and has had many strokes….
Holidays like father’s day are a little hard, wondering how much he is aware of what day it is? I feel bad for my friends that have lost their fathers, and I also envy the friends that can spend the day with their fathers, and I am so glad my boys have a good relationship with their dad…. but I have to say be
ing in the in between time….seeing your dad suffer through, you are happy you still have your father, but you are sad that your father is in so much pain and confusion. And you (and no one else) can’t make it easier.
My father is actually really young, only going to be 76 next week! In my dad’s lifetime he has really done a lot and had a lot of funny stories, though he hasn’t been a huge number of places. My dad did join the reserves in the 60s during one of the wars (or was that a military action)? He was in California for 6 months for that, and I remember hearing about a trip to New Orleans, but other than that the only other trip I ever remember hearing about was my parents honeymoon – and that was the story of my father of my father talking his way out of a ticket in Georgia and inviting the police office up to their farm to go fishing!
While growing up, I remember the short trips when we were younger to places like Louisville (I got dropped off to stay with friends), Kentucky to pick up a dog named Waldo (we brought back Tobacco leaves to show for show and tell) and St Louis to visit cousins. My dad also took day trips a few times to pick up cars and animals.
Most of my dad’s stories though involved highjacks he and friends had been involved in at one time or another, or things that had happened while farming. My dad had an ability to tell a story that everyone loved to hear. He had stories about everything from building a rock dam across the stream that is now by our house and flooding out the road to driving a tractor with wagon and having a semi try to pass him on a curvy road and lose control.
Dad also was always willing to help anyone that showed up at the door. People would show up at all hours of the day and night stuck on the road and dad would grab the tractor and pull them out of the snow or mud. Presents would be dropped off, usually a bottle of alcohol – that my dad rarely drank, but sometimes we would end up with an odd thing like a Datsun once with the clutch ripped out.
Growing up dad would hear about or try something and think, oh I need to try that, and off he would go! With that he built a still once – I’ve heard stories about people lined up and even laying under the spicot! Dad also heard about a man selling off animals and ran off and bought a Fallow deer at one point. Several years later dad tried a Beefalo burger and decided to try to recreate them. He and a friend drove across the state and bought two bison! Each family got one.
My dad lost his mother, my grandmother, in his early teens. She suffered for a while at home from cancer, and I know it affected him a lot. My dad would avoid hospitals, saying people die there. The story he once today, and that’s one he didn’t tell normally was that my grandfather brought in preachers to pray over my grandmother to try to get her better, but nothing worked. Dad also wasn’t a church going person. “If you just believe enough”. All through the eyes of a child, it was hard on him losing my grandmother.
He went on to wreck a motorcycle in his teens and have massive head trauma. My Uncle Tom was working in a nearby field and noticed, rushing him to the hospital. My dad was lucky to have survived and had to go stay with my Aunt Dorothy for a while after to take care of him and recuperate. Yet my dad did still manage to finish school high school.
He then went on to farming, starting with farming others land and working up to buying his own land with my mother after being discharged from the military.
Growing up my dad used every chance he could to play at the same time. He was extremely inventive with farm machinery too…. I’ve always said we were lucky to survive childhood! At two my dad made a go cart for me using a drill that was plugged in for a motor. He would put us on sleds (as toddlers) and pull us behind lawn mowers through the snow, put us in the scoop of the tractor and turn it into a fair ride going up and down while spinning in a circle, and I’ll never forget the nails and things I ran through my foot running around the barn yard. (The barn had a huge supply of food in it, ie. collection of bunnies)
My dad now only answers questions asked of him sometimes, speaking is difficult for him, and it’s hard to tell what he is really aware of. He’s in an assisted living facility, which I’m sure to him is just like a hospital that he so hated. The last time he was in the hospital and fully aware, he removed his own iv and tried to call for a ‘breakout’ ending up in someone else’s room.
So what do you do when you are in the middle ground? The ground where no one understands except those that are there with you in the same journey? And like them, everyone’s journey is different – dementia takes every person at a different rate and if a different way. With some you still see glimpses of the person that they once were, and with others you see nothing. Do they know you? Some like my dad have a body that is fighting them also. My dad now won’t use one side of his body due to strokes. That side of his body is atrophying. Family may say, I want to remember him as he was, but they also would be the first to be upset if you voice an opinion that he might now want to live in the condition he’s in? And what to do with the guilt many have allowing the thoughts to creep in that your parent might be better if they give up? It not politically correct to ever voice those feelings…. and no one understands, those that have lost their parents to some quick illness or accident, especially don’t understand.
How do you explain that what you are really voicing is the fear that your parent is going through torture and your job has become trying to figure out the best way to increase quality of life and not increase quantity of life without them suffering?
Recently I noticed that a woman was caught petting a buffalo at Yellowstone National Park. I found this interesting because growing up our family had a pet buffalo. My brother and I had named her Buffy and she shared a pen with our deer, goats and other animals. Friends and family would come over and take pictures, but it wasn’t unusual for us to go in the pen to pet and feed her. Thinking back, I want to guess that we got her when I was in my early to mid teens. I have a picture of my mother in the pen feeding the chickens right in front of Buffy, but none of us petting her.
She was a huge animal and the one time she escaped from the pen, it took several men to get her back in. She had been scared through the fence by an owl that had tried to go into our chicken coop (an old converted corn cob silo). The owl had folded it’s wings to fit down through the hole at the top and then couldn’t fly back out. As the owl fought to try to get out, it’s flapping scared the buffalo and it went straight through the fence. – Really meaning the fence was just there as a suggestion that Buffy normally followed.
My parents found nothing unusual about sending my brother or I into the pen to get eggs and feed the animals and we would stop and pet whatever we felt like along the way. To be honest my brother’s horse was probably meaner. Personally I was scared the most of geese. Geese still scare me, and their bite really hurts. Geese will chase you down and attack….
Now having three boys and not living on a farm 100% of the time, I can’t picture telling my boys to go into a pen with a buffalo – even if I thought (or knew) it was tame. We don’t even have a dog of our own. That is through my husband’s choice, not mine – but still the boys all have not been near animals bigger than a chinchilla for any length of time.
I clearly don’t understand someone approaching and petting a wild animal in a national park, but then again thinking back I’m unclear on why it was considered safe for my brother and I to do half the things we did as kids. My mother pointed out that the time that was really something was when my dad and two other guys tried to put Buffy in a trailer to move her.
When my dad bought Buffy, he went with a friend who bought her brother also. Her brother was living a few miles away near a fairgrounds. After I left for college my dad decided it was time for Buffy to mate, so he and friends loaded her up and took her over to be with the other Buffalo….
As I’ve said before, I’m still amazed we survived childhood…
Robbie with Rosy the Goat
Growing up, our first ‘house’ was really a trailer in my Aunt’s yard. When I reached second grade my parents bought a historic home that had history that included my family. The Abraham Illk house. It was currently owned by Ralph Goodrich. At the time my parents bought it with most of the contents included.
The house had over time been added to and changed. The original house was made from bricks made in the nearby woods, and hadn’t included electricity or even a regular kitchen.
The house by the time we owned it, had electricity added, plumbing for the kitchen and one bathroom was stuck onto the side of the house. The window in the picture is where the door to the lean to was. My parents added a bathroom upstairs and a half bath downstairs, then took the lean to of the house and replaced all the windows.
Over time they also added an attached garage to the house and redid most of the inside. My brother now has taken over the house and has been working on it room by room.
The history of the house starts with the house being built by Abraham Illk. It’s in the Lakeshore School District in Oakwood Illinois. Abraham lived from 1835 to 1916 and was from Germany – married to Catherine Ford. As far as my family, Abraham and Catherine’s daughter Frannie married my grandfather’s twin brother, Lesley. I’ve mentioned the house and Catherine’s history before.
Growing up I’ll always remember though how strong the house seemed. Inside the house nothing could be heard from outside. My father would say that the house has been standing for 100 years and will be standing for 100 years more. Ralph Goodrich was related to the family also through the daughter Catherine who married a Goodrich.
Tried to e-mail you, Jeff but didn’t go through. – just happened to find your post on Uncle Samuel Illk – don’t know much about him, but do have some records that I got from Ralph Goodrich – whose mother was Catherine Illk, daughter of Abraham Illk of Vermillion County, Illinois. She married George Goodrich, and lived s.west of Oakwood on the Illk farms. My mother, Ethel Illk Oakwood was the daughter of Frederick Illk and Mary Watson Illk – my grandfather Fred was a brother to Abraham, the first Illk brother to come to America. So Aunt Kate, as my mother called her was a first cousin to my grandfather; and Ralph and my mom and uncle, Glenn Illk were second cousins. We were very close to Uncle Ralph as we called him. …. –from ancestry boards
The house was not huge, but to me as a child it looked huge! Now going back, I’m surprised at how much smaller it was than I though it was. The house originally had four bedrooms upstairs that, three that we used and one that my dad turned into a hodge podge of rooms that included a full bathroom, a closet, a gun shell loading room, and a hallway. The area included a window that looked out over one of my parents fields. The house wasn’t built with closets originally – when the house was built houses were taxed based on the number of rooms and closets counted as rooms, so my parents paneled every bedroom adding a closet at one end and drop ceilings to lower the ceilings to a more normal height.
My brother and I had a great time with the drop ceilings using them to play hide and seek. The main rule was that you had to stay on the cross beams holding up the tiles. One wrong step and you would be in the room below. There were at least a couple tiles stapled up to fix missteps. We would climb up the shelves in our closets and disappear. The top of my brother’s closet was huge and became a hang out for a while. There are probably still little odds and ends up on the ceilings in some of the rooms.
To add conventional heat my parents used the vent work that was in the house as much as possible. The old house had some vents in place for coal in the basement in order to circulate air, but they were few and far between. My parents put in vents up the side of rooms in the downstairs under the paneling going up to the upstairs and added heat. Later they included an air conditioner when they found my hay fever was too much for them to bare living with. After a few years they added an option for a wood burning furnace. – We split our own wood and added a wood burning stove to the kitchen also.
The house was always in a state of flux. To finish off the upstairs, my parents wanted a better way to reach the attic. The original house had a little square in the ceiling with a metal ladder that was in the hallway at the top of the stairs. I never saw in the attic myself. My dad though came up with the idea to build a set of stairs up to the attic out of their bedroom closet. – My parents had the one room upstairs that was built with a closet originally. So my dad removed one side of the closet and put in plywood over the stairs at a slant. I think each project started during the winter and came to an end at harvest season. This was one that never started up again. So the plywood slant over the stairs became a place to store clothes and things for my parents.
Downstairs, my parents, added a wood burning stove in the kitchen, redid the kitchen, and I remember them frequently moving where the doorway was for the living room. It reminds me a little of the Winchester House when I think of my childhood and my parents never finishing our house. My brother now is redoing the house. He is doing a beautiful job and hopefully will finish in his lifetime.
On the wood burning stove I remember my mother making deer jersey and even maple syrup from the trees in our yard. We even had a few instances of my mother raising chickens in our kitchen. I’ll also never forget the day my mother caught the house on fire with dry wood in the fireplace. My mother was burning wood that was really dry and the fire got extremely hot. The supports under the bricks in front of the fireplace caught on fire and the fire department was called. My dad had already gotten the fire out, but all the firemen had to trek through the house and check.
There is also the day that my mother got a new dryer. My dad let my brother and I disassemble the old one… and play with all the parts. When the new one arrived, the turn to the basement was 2 inches to small. The delivery person said he couldn’t get it down the stair without the 2 inches…. So my mother got a hammer. I think the delivery person about panicked, when my mother said are you sure you just need 2 inches? and then proceeded to make 2 inches more out of the wall (with the hammer!).
The basement was another great place to play in the house. I think my brother now uses it for haunted houses but for us kids it was pretty cool. There were three rooms, one that contained the hot water heater – we just never seemed to enter, one that we played school in with some old school desks mom found (and we kept our hamsters there for a while), and the laundry room which included a furnace that took up half the room. The stairs were old rickety wooden stairs that seemed fine as a child, but looking back…. My mother stored old lunchboxes and things under the stairs. To the right of the bottom of the stairs was an open door that went to dirt steps going up to the floor of the kitchen.
I remember my cat having kittens under the kitchen and having to climb up every so often to check on them. The steps originally went out of the house and out to the old summer kitchen which was long gone by the time we got there. There were a few other places that the foundation was open to the dirt. With a shovel, I don’t think you could ever get completely trapped in the basement – which probably explains the mice that were always getting in the house throughout my childhood.
Many years ago – sometime in the 70s I think, some of my cousins came with little cannons they had built. I remember seeing a little cannon one had. My dad – as was common with him – said I can do that, and I can do it bigger. So he ordered two barrels special cast.
Then my dad built a couple big cannons, and not just decorative! He built working cannons to shoot every year. We would load one up and take it to the family fourth of July party to shoot off, at my cousin Kristi’s every year.
When friends would come over I would love to ask “Do we have gunpowder?”, “Can we shoot it?”. My dad made sure I know exactly how to load it too. I still remember the instructions include a dixie cup of gunpowder mixed with flour – it was years later that a chemist friend explained to me why the flour was added. My dad somehow knew….. (Flour when put out into the air like that is explosive – don’t ever put flour on a fire)
At my cousins especially we would then search for anything we could find to ‘load’ into the cannon after the paper was tamped in. I remember everything from sand to even a frog once. As kids we would run around searching just grabbing anything we could find. I’ve seen the little holes that sand put through all the tree leaves and I could swear I remember a story about something someone else loaded putting a hole through something once.
As kids we would laugh at all the people who had too much to drink weaving as they were trying to light the fuse, and I’m amazed that no one was hurt as it would jump back several feet in recoil when the cannon would go off.
After shooting the cannon people would drop by from miles away to find out what had exploded. I think my dad enjoyed shooting it as much as we as kids enjoyed showing it off. It’s one of the things we can say my dad built himself. I’m sure whoever took it either had no idea how much it meant to us or didn’t care. They also are not aware of the history of the cannon.
The cannon itself was in my mother’s yard away from the road. It weighs a lot, so whoever took it had to have come up her driveway and taken it down the driveway to the road and gotten it into their truck. It would take at least a couple people.
The cannon does have wheels and a bolt area to allow for it to be towed, but it hadn’t moved in years. I think the last time I remember my dad shooting it was when my in laws visited almost 15 years ago.
Of course the other thing I see when I look at this camera is how amazing my dad was with just a high school diploma. My dad could engineer most things given the desire. He would see them and put them together, the house we grew up in was in a continual state of remodel as doorways moved and relocated as my parents changed their mind.
My dad would also change his mind about where a stocked pond was and decide to move it.. I still remember waking to find our swimming pool filled with bass and catfish one morning (and dirty pond water). He would clear areas to turn them into fields – including railroad…. So many stories that I’m sure he could tell.
How to get our cannon back though…
