Visiting The Digital State Archives

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

It turns out that my husband's family and my family have many ancestors who lived in the same Georgia county, Cherokee County.  We even joke that our relatives surely must have passed each other in town or gone swimming in the creek together in times past.  I regularly use the same great online resources about Georgia regardless of the family I'm researching.  Georgia's Virtual Vault and The Digital Library of Georgia are right up there on my virtual speed dial.

When I'm looking for similar resources for researching people in other states, I find myself stumbling around trying to find online collections about an unfamiliar area.  Along comes a wonderful web site, The Digital State Archives.  The website has so far gathered links to the digital resources of 36 states.  The link for the state of Georgia, for example, provides a detailed listing of resources available with an active link to each collection.  (note: The Georgia Virtual Vault link on the Georgia Digital State Archives page has changed in 2013, use http://cdm.sos.state.ga.us:8888/ instead.)

I've used the state links from The Digital State Archives to find new digital collections on a number of occasions, most recently when I was looking for information pertaining to Alabama, Florida, and Texas.  It is always helpful to have an informative starting place when seeking additional online resources.  The Digital State Archives is definitely worth adding to your Favorites list.

Thankful Thursday: Cruising Along With Google Drive

Two blog posts I read this past week reminded me just how much I rely on Google Drive in researching my family history and how thankful I am to have it readily available.  If you haven't used Google Drive, it is essentially cloud storage for documents, accessible through tablet apps or Google itself.

Michael John Neill's Genealogy Tip of the Day reminded us to take the information we have scribbled on scraps of paper and put it in a format so that we can locate it and use it.  Keeping information recorded in documents on Google Drive lets me do just that.  

In her later years my mother would jot down bits of family information as she thought of them - names, dates, lineage, etc.  She kept all those scraps of paper together and gave them to me some years ago.  Now I have transcribed all those notes and saved it as a document on Google Drive, easy for me to locate when I'm trying to search for or verify information.  Maybe someday I will finally learn the name of that aunt with whom my Grandmother Myren lived in Minnesota when she met my Grandfather around 1908.  Mother's notes are there to guide me in that quest.

Dear Myrtle, in a recent post, remarked that "spreadsheets aren't just for research logs anymore".  How true.  Recently I posted about my experiences going through my uncle's military records.  Making a spreadsheet (sampled below) and saving it on Google Drive helped me make sense of all the material there.

  
As I found new information, I added it to the database, sorted, and ended up with an index to all of those papers, much easier that the "dining room table method" Myrtle and many of us have used in the past.

My documents and spreadsheets stored on Google Drive still include research logs.  In addition to these two documents, I also have Geographical To-Do-Lists, Surname To-Do-Lists, Daily and Topic Blogging Prompts, and Ideas for Future Blogs, all easy to access wherever I am, whenever I need them.  All just one more way to organize my family research.

Amanuensis Monday: Miriam and Her "Variety Book"

Miriam F. Vaughan, ca 1900

Imagine being 17 and suddenly have to move over 700 miles, just because your father got a new job.  It isn't that unusual today, but in 1898, it was much less common.  Miriam Frances Vaughan was 17 years old when her father, my Great Grandfather Albert Bell Vaughan, left Canton, Georgia, to become the minister of the Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas.  The family moved to Texas and lived in Nacogdoches from July 28, 1898, to Nov. 26, 1899, after which they returned to Georgia.  From Miriam's vantage point, it turned out to be interesting time.

During those 16 months in Nacogdoches, Miriam kept a diary of sorts, penning her first entry the morning after they arrived in Nacogdoches and her final entry being written their last night in Texas.  Perhaps the book had been given to her as a farewell gift by family or a Georgia friend.  Her "Variety Book" is filled with quotes from literature, song lyrics, pressed flowers carefully attached to pages, and details of daily life.  Scattered throughout the 200 page book were also sermon topics, lines from hymns, and scripture - after all she was the preacher's daughter.   For me, her small book gave a personal and interesting look at being a young lady in the late 1890s.

The 4x6 inch faux leather book was given to me about 14 years ago by an elderly cousin.  For years, I had kept it just sitting on a table with a few other family heirlooms.  Recently I took the time to transcribe the book, and by doing so I started getting to know my Great Aunt Miriam.

The first thing that was apparent was how well educated Miriam was.  Her vocabulary was extensive, and running my 36 page transcription through a spell checker showed only ONE word which she had spelled incorrectly!  Even more impressive were her personal reading lists written in several parts of her Variety book.  Miriam had attended college in Georgia prior to their move but did not while in Texas.  On her own, between late September and early July she read four plays by Shakespeare, Vanity Fair by Thackeray, David Copperfield, Lorna Doone, works by George Eliot, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and popular writers of the day, plus my favorite on her list, Little Women.  Miriam obviously loved to read, sometimes receiving books and magazines as gifts from others.

Being an 18 year-old, single female in 1898-1899 was quite different from life today.  Her social activities were almost always planned by ladies of the community - picnics, parties, watermelon cuttings, simple activities.   Perhaps because her mother was looking after seven younger children, Miriam also spent a lot of time "calling on" ladies of the church.  For other entertainment Miriam also wrote of seeing a traveling minstrel show that was in Nacogdoches, a theater production of Christopher Colt, Jr., a popular play of the time, and attending band concerts at the local college.

Whenever Miriam and any of the eligible young men of Nacogdoches kept company, they were always with others.  Even an invitation for a buggy ride was to a public area and sometimes accompanied by friends.   Since her father was the minister, It wasn't surprising to see the number of gentleman who asked to accompany her to church services.  One Sunday evening, a dinner invitation prevented her from being able to attend the evening church service.  Her entry for that night showed how torn she had been between having fun with friends and doing what she knew was expected of her.  The other suitable escort for social activities turned out to be her 16-year old brother who was apparently willing to exercise this task so he could talk with some of the other young ladies present.

Miriam seemed to have made friends easily in Texas and wrote often about spending time with a close group of girls.  Early on Miriam was invited to be a member of the newly formed Pierian Chataque Circle, a literary and social club for young ladies.  This same group of friends spent the night at each other's homes, wrote notes to each other, went for walks, laughed, shared "confidences" (Miriam's term), and yes, even had some spats, all complete with emotional highs and lows. Sound familiar?

Before carefully reading and transcribing the Variety book, Miriam had been a rather shadowy figure to me.  I never met her, had only heard of her as being the oldest sibling in my Grandmother Perkinson's family, and had only the one picture of her.  Now she is much more real to me, thanks to her Variety book. 

Those Places Thursday: Images of ... Woodstock

I am a huge fan of the Images of America series of books by Arcadia Publishers.  If you aren't familiar with this series, it highlights local and regional history, primarily featuring old photographs with informative captions, usually written by someone with local ties.  Their website lists over 8000 titles in this series.

A while back I added to my Images of America collection when I purchased the book about my father's hometown of Woodstock, Georgia.  I thought it would be a nice souvenir of spending some time at the Visitor's Center in Woodstock, but it turned out to be so much more.  

Whitemore, Felicia S.  Woodstock 1860-1970.  Images of America.  Charleston,  SC: Arcadia Publishers, 2009.

For starters, the front cover featured a photo of Dean's Store which was owned by a cousin also pictured on the cover.  Inside the book I found several pictures of the church where my Great Grandfather A. B. Vaughan had been the minister for many years and a shot of the elementary school where my Grandmother Perkinson had taught.  There were also more pictures inside Dean's Store where I remember my Grandfather Perkinson taking me for a Coke during family outings to Woodstock.  Finally I found photographs of the old family home and as well as houses belonging to various cousins.  All places I remembered visiting as a child.  

As I browsed through the book, I started spying names that were scattered on branches of my family tree, so I slowed down and when back to reading every caption.  I found invaluable snippets of information about cousins through the captions.  Later, because the books in this series are not indexed, I made my own index of family names and locations in the book.  This has made it easier to locate information using the index I've tucked into the back of the book.

My favorite moment came as I studied a picture of "Woodstock Residents at President Wilson's Inauguration, March 4, 1913".  There in the backseat of a sightseeing car was my Grandfather Perkinson!  The caption went on to relate how "the driver made a wrong turn and got in front of the presidential inauguration parade and could not turn off the road because of exits filled with spectators.  The four guys from Woodstock and other spectators in the car led the parade unexpectedly."(1)  Love this story!  Plus Google Books just happened to include a picture of page 110 in their preview of the book.

What I thought would be just a souvenir turned out to be a helpful resource in my research.  Sure, I had memories of people and places in Woodstock, Georgia, but this book turned out to be a real gem.  Maybe you will have a similar experience reading one of their books about a town or area that is part of your family's story.

(1) Felicia S. Whitemore. Woodstock 1860-1970. Images of America. (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia, 2009), 110.