Military Monday: "Going to School" With Albert

One of my genealogy resolutions for 2013 was to do a better job of citing my sources, and a personal resolution was to actually go through several drawers in an attic file cabinet to see what was there.  A few unscheduled days recently provided the time to get started doing just that.  This became the time, to quote one of my grandchildren, "to go to school" as I sorted through the military records that had belonged to my uncle, Albert Thomas Vaughan, Jr.

Lt. Albert T. Vaughan, Jr.

Albert loved to talk about being in the Army during World War II, but we were never sure exactly what he did, where he had been stationed, and whether he had always been an officer or had first been an enlisted man.  The answers to these questions surfaced as I spent several days going through close to three inches of military files.

As soon as I started looking through the files, I was hesitant about what to do with all of this stuff.  Denise May Levenick had earlier written a really helpful article on FamilyTreeMagazine.com about What to Keep and What to Toss.  It gave me just the direction I was needing.

Her simple guidelines gave three options to consider "save ... skim then trash ... [or]  trash".  As I removed each item from a folder to read, I made one of the three choices.  Some of his papers contained multiple copies, as many as 10, of a single letter or order so it was easy to select the copy in best condition and trash the rest.  I kept those papers and forms that documented where he had been stationed, his rank at the time, and what he did.  A number of brittle, crumbling newspaper articles were scanned and then trashed.

Using the saved documents, now in a slim folder, I was able to construct a timeline for Albert's military service.  My husband, a former Marine, was interested in reading the documents and shedding light on what was happening, my own personal military consultant.  What resulted was a clearer picture of Albert's time in the Army Air Force between 1942 and 1946.

Albert first enlisted in the Army in June, 1942, and was immediately sent to Texas for training as a glider pilot.  When he was determined to be slightly color blind, he was given an honorable discharge in August, 1942, only to be allowed to reenlist several weeks later.  He spent the next months being trained and was assigned as an aircraft armorer, all in the United States.

Soon Albert was selected to attend Officer Candidate School.  After finishing OCS, he was discharged from being an enlisted man and granted a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in August of 1943.  As a new lieutenant he served as a personnel officer at Randolph Field, Texas, before finally getting into the position about which we had heard so many stories.  By July 1944, Albert was put in charge of a Mobile Training Unit, traveling from one Army Air Field to another, assigned at each base for about six weeks.  His unit was charged with training pilots and maintenance personnel on the changes being made with the B-17 bombers.  His papers also included some great 8x10 glossy photos of the cockpit and engine mock-ups that were used in the training process.  Many of the newspaper articles I scanned were interviews from base newspapers telling about the Training Unit's visit and its purpose, all front page articles with quotes from Albert.

B-17 Mobile Training Unit No. 14, ca 1944

Denise May Levenick's article had been the first part of my schooling using Albert's papers.  Next, there was a lot of military and personal information in his records that I wanted to document in my research.  The second part of my schooling came as I dug repeatedly into Evidence Explained to get an understanding as to how to correctly cite privately held military records.  After lots of reading, writing, rewriting, and even a post to the Evidence Explained Forum followed by their prompt answer (Thanks, EE), I think I've finally learned how to correctly write this type of citation.  Practice does make perfect when you write 14 of them!

In the end, I've learned a lot about Albert, how to correctly cite one type of source, and more about stateside military service during World War II.  All of this was thanks to a stack of dusty, crumbling military records, the Levenick article, Evidence Explained, and my husband.

The Day the Circus Was in Town

Like so many, I was excited by the release of the 1940 US Federal Census in April 2012.  Even before any indexes were available, I did some browsing on my own.  One of the first places I looked was the census for my husband's home town, Sugar Valley, Georgia.  The census records for Sugar Valley were only 24 pages long and would be easy to browse.   I was certain I would find family listed, but nothing prepared me for the additional information I found.  

Fotokannan at Malayalam Wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0
 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

As I browsed through the first 21 pages of the Enumeration District, I found the Nelson family, some relatives, and familiar names of family friends.  Page 22 was blank, but I was in for a surprise as I continued on to the next page.  There on page 23 was a listing of 39 circus performers from the Bailey Brothers Circus!  Yes, the same circus that (according to Wikipedia) eventually became part of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus.  You can see the page for yourself here.  

Reading all the lines give a interesting snapshot of life in the circus.  Columns 2 and 3 showed the letter T for both House number and Number of Household.  According to the Instructions to Enumerators the T meant "tourist or trailer camp in which households reside in separate dwelling units (cabins, trailers, etc.)".  Besides the way in which the circus people were recorded as living, it was also interesting to see the numbers of families for whom the circus was their way of life.

The section listing Residence in 1935 was very informative.  Some people had been "traveling with [the] circus" for at least five years, while others had lived elsewhere.  The teacher in me hoped that some of the younger circus people had been living at home and attending school in 1935.  Maybe some of these same people really had run away to join the circus. 

It was also interesting to note the number of hours worked in a week (column 21).  Hours ranged from working 48 hours a week for the Foreman to 12 hours for those doing odd jobs.  Another note indicated that they were paid on a percentage basis, a good crowd meant good pay, sparse attendance, less money.

My favorite part, though, was the Occupation (column 28).  I kept remembering Water For Elephants as well as the circus I attended as a child when I read their occupations - trapeze performer, musician, chorus girl, concessions, animal trainer, cook, boss canvasman, carpenter, aerial performer, dance girl, salesman [of] novelties, mechanic.  Just about  everyone you needed to put on a show was listed on that census sheet.  Only clowns and ringmaster were not listed as an occupation.

The researcher in me wanted to know how long the circus was in town, had any of our family attended, where were the circus tents pitched in this small North Georgia town, or had they just stopped on their way to somewhere else?  My father-in-law was a world class storyteller, but none of us remember his ever relating a tale about the circus.  Perhaps the archives of the local newspaper can yield some additional information.  Something else on my Georgia To-Do-List.  

This is what I love about researching our family history.  Sometimes, I finally find that elusive fact about an ancestor or encounter a relative I never knew before, sometimes I find nothing, and sometimes I literally stumble onto something totally unrelated but fascinating, like the circus.  I'm glad the census enumerator was there on April 8, 1940 to document the day a circus was in town.  I'm also glad I went past a blank page and found this interesting record.  The whole experience just puts a smile on my face.

Presenting ... The Top 100

Each new year brings a number of those "Best of ..." lists.  In my e-mail the other day I received a link to a new list, The Top 100 Genealogy Web Sites in 2013 as compiled by GenealogyInTime Magazine.  Their list is based on the Alexa traffic rankings which track the number of page views and the time spent on the site.

To no one's surprise Ancestry.com was their number one web site.  The list also included 13 other web sites that are under the Ancestry / Permira umbrella including Family Tree Maker Software, Fold3, and Genealogy.com.   As I scanned the list, I saw a number of sites I visit regularly and picked out a few new ones to check into this week.  I was especially pleased to see Arkiwerket Digitalarkivet,  the Norwegian Digital Archives, listed.  This is a site I discovered through last year's Family Tree Magazine list of top sites.  I'll be posting about what I learned there soon.

From the GenealogyInTime list, you can tell at a glance what type of information is available on a web site - records, family tree, cemetery, forum, newspapers, DNA testing, blog, articles, ethnic heritage, etc. The list also indicates if the site is free or pay as well as the primary country featured on that site.  Finally, a link to each web site is included in the list.  All pretty helpful, and definitely worth bookmarking a link to the whole list.

My research goals now include finding a number of newspaper articles I want to read in their entirety.  I'll be using their Top 100 list to visit some of the newspaper sites, do a free trial or two, and decide if I want to spend some subscription money.

You can learn more about GenealogyInTime and its free subscription here.

Now, I'm looking forward to the posting of Family Tree Magazine's list for 2013.

Maybe There's Another Way ...

Flag of Canada (Creative Commons)

My mother was born in Canada, and through the years, her family lived in several places in the province of Manitoba.  Two years ago I had found the 1911 Canadian census which listed my Myren grandparents and my uncle using the free online databases of the Library and Archives of Canada.  I had found some good information about where they lived in 1911, but now I was wanting to know more about their life after 1911.

Information from the 1916 Canadian Census of the Provinces was proving more difficult to find. I have an US subscription to Ancestry.com, but all I could find through Ancestry was that the family was living in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1916, nothing more without purchasing a World Explorer subscription which would include Canadian databases.

Next stop was back online at the Library and Archives of Canada.  By this time, the 1916 Census had been fully digitized but had no index  The listings for Winnipeg, Manitoba showed 33 sub-districts, most with 30-40 pages per sub-district and 50 names per page.  Finding my family among my estimate of nearly 60,000 names seemed almost impossible.  (It reminded me of looking at the 1940 US census when the digital images were first released in early April 2012.)

On a whim, I simply googled the term "1916 Canada Census" and quickly found a link to that 1916 census on FamilySearch.org.  Using FamilySearch's web site, I find they had indexed the 1916 Census but had no images of those census records.  Using the Winnipeg district and sub-district numbers from the FamilySearch.org index, I was able to locate the exact census page on the Library and Archives of Canada web site, print it out, and finally learn more about my grandparents, uncle, and mother.  Putting the index from FamilySearch.org and the digitized images from the Library and Archives of Canada together, I finally found more information.

There are times that it seems as if we will never be able to find what we're looking for.  Maybe we just need to take another approach.  For me, thinking like the middle school students I worked with for years, led me to simply google the research question I had.  I was reminded by googling that there were other web sites that just might have the information I was seeking. 

If all else had failed, I could have added "check 1916 Canada Census" to my research goals and waited until I finally broke down and purchased that World Explorer subscription to Ancestry.  Or, I could have checked at my public library to see if the 1916 Canadian Census of the Provinces was included in their Ancestry Library Version.  Or stopped by our local Family History Center to look through their resources.  Or ...

As my dad used to say, "There's always another way to skin a cat."