Documents found on Kansas Trip

On my trip to Jewell County, Kansas I found the time to visit the County Clerks office. Unfortunately, the time I found was not nearly enough to examine all the documents I wanted to, but I did still find some interesting ones I thought I would share today.

Transcribed Autobiography of Frances Elsie Caroline Gustafson

Frances Gustafson (my great grandmother) wrote an autobiography before passing away. I decided to transcribe it to make it easier to read, here is the autobiography in full. It seems to be incomplete and drops off in the middle of a sentence but it is still an incredible window into what it was like to live through the great depression, the dust bowl, and other historical events.

Picture of Frances Gustafson

Tip: Finding how many times an ancestor married with census notes

When an ancestor marries multiple times there can often be a lot of confusion if you are unaware of more than one marriage. When tracing the lineage of a female ancestor it can mean the difference between finding her real maiden name and running into a brick wall. Census Notes were small notations census takers made to make counting various statistics later easier. Most of these are pretty useless, but occasionally there are notes that provide valuable information. I have been noticing on several different censuses that sometimes the census taker would note down the number of marriages the person has had. This isn't true for all censuses of course but it's certainly something to look out for.

The way the number of marriages is notated is a number after the "M" (standing for 'married') in the census sections about whether a person is single, married, widowed, or divorced. Here are some examples:

My trip to Kansas: Things I did and saw

I am currently on an almost 2 week-long trip to Mcpherson Kansas to see my grandpa Tim Wesselowski and to do some genealogical research. Thus far it has been an extremely successful and eventful trip, one that has provided the answer to a 100-year-old mystery (although that part of the trip warrants its own post). In this post I will simply write about the things I saw, what I did, and the best parts of the trip.

I'll start off by listing off the genealogy related things I did, although I won't go into detail here, the post would be far too long!

1. Scanned in over 500 (as of today) family photos in my grandpa's possession
2. Recorded about 3 hours of an interview (done over several sessions) with my Grandpa Tim about his childhood, his parents, and his grandparents.
3. Visited the Couch Cemetery and the Jewell City Cemetery and took pictures of the graves and visited with deceased relatives.
4. Visited the Court House in Mankato and found a lot of records on the family.

You can look forward to more detailed descriptions of all those things in future posts- this one will be about my sightseeing excursions and miscellaneous activities I partook in.

I'll start with today and go backward:

Today my mom, my grandpa Tim, and I journeyed to the border of Kansas and Nebraska, finding ourselves in the rolling hills and expansive plains that constitute the rural county of Jewell. The trip was specifically planned to coincide with the solar eclipse. We imagined watching the sky turn an inky black, the moon blotting out the sun so, for a fleeting couple of minutes, a million stars could paint the sky deep hues of blue and purple.

Unfortunately, that did not happen. We went up to Couch Cemetery to watch and the sky got slightly dim at best. The clouds that decided to roll in about 3 minutes before 1:01 (the time the eclipse was supposed to peak) also did a pretty great job of making it impossible to see anything interesting. It was still pretty darn cool though and the dim lighting made for perfect picture taking weather. Here are some snapshots from the evening.

Couch Cemetery Mid Eclipse

Me, looking through my phone at the sun (All the stores were out of eclipse glasses)

Writing Master Source Names in Legacy Family Tree

I recently realized that I really needed to start getting my Master sources straight. The Source Writer is the main reason why I love Legacy Family tree. It makes writing high quality sources super easy and fast. However, family files will very quickly accumulate a large number of master sources in a very short amount of time. That's why organizing them and coming up with naming conventions is so important, which is what I will show you how to do today.

This is what my sources look like currently. As you can see they are not really organized and the naming conventions vary from source to source. You'll notice that none of my sources are person-specific. That is just personal preference; I use each master source dozens of times for multiple people to save time.

The first thing I will do is come up with naming conventions. The exact format I prefer is: "Date RecordType State/Country County Website". After renaming all of my master sources for the 1910 census, this is what it looks like:

As you can see I have used star signs, dash marks, and parenthesis to separate the record type, location, and source website from each other. I think this increases readability and makes it easier to immediately spot the one you are looking for.

This format organizes the master sources in a very specific way:

1. It sorts your sources by date
2. It then organizes further by the type of record
3. Next it sorts by either the state or country it is in. You want the state first so that all the Master Sources for that state and date stay by each other. Otherwise it will organize alphabetically by the county
4. It organizes alphabetically based on the original website the master source is for.

Let me know in the comments how you organize your sources, or tell me how this method works out for you!