(Part 2) Top products from r/Genealogy

I don’t know if this is relevant, but I just bought Professional Genealogy: Preparation, Practice & Standards and love it. My dad and I are starting a new genetic genealogy business and I personally have found it to be good resource. Not only for the “professional “ part but also for the resources covered and best practices. Hope it helps! :)

The style outlined in Evidence Explained and Evidence! are the standard for genealogy (at least in the United States) if you are a professional or publishing. That said, the goal in citing your sources is to make sure someone else can find them later with little effort. This Genealogy Source Citations Quick Reference by Thomas MacEntee also has a good overview of genealogical citations in general.


I also use these two Quicksheets all the time. They are easy and help build good citations (they are by ESM again, so in the EE style):
Quicksheet Citing Ancestry.com Databases & Images
Quicksheet Citing Online Historical Resources
(I got a deal on them from a vendor at a genealogy conference less than what they cost on Amazon) I also bought Evidence Explained used which saved some money.

This 1994 book has a chapter about the author's struggles in getting locals to open up about the city's past and their experiences: Between East and West - Across the Borderlands of Europe (Holy crap that's expensive... find it at a library! WorldCat.org is your friend!) The rest of the book is interesting as well, though Kaliningrad/Koenigsburg is only mentioned in it's own chapter.

And here are some cool old maps of the city!
1887
1906
1911

I'd love to visit too! Sadly it follows the Russian rules of needing a tourist visa. If only they made it as easy as just hopping on a train from Poland or Lithuania... maybe someday.

Last but not least, here's a link to FamilySearch/LDS' holdings that reference Kaliningrad: Family Search - Kaliningrad Records. The holdings look like they're mainly in German and a few in Polish. There's only 1 census (from 1939), but the older taxation and church records might be useful for you.

I try to stay neutral about most people I'm researching.

As /u/nosleeptilwhiterun said in a different thread:
> I always say if you are going to be "proud" of your ancestors accomplishments, I hope you then feel shame for their misdeeds. I feel neither.

I agree with that.

Some people I'll find more interesting than others - because they're more active (newspapers) or because you can see them accomplishing or overcoming things in their lives or helping to change/improve their towns or cities where they live. I'm not sure I'd call that pride per se, but more like you're happy to watch them improve.

Quick example, a woman I was researching was the first woman elected to the town's board of education in 1889. She was a suffragette, very involved in local affairs and beat her opponent with nearly double the vote. Good for her.

***
I added this in the other thread, but I think it fits here too.

In The Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy by Val Greenwood, he writes:

> "If you are scared of skeletons then stay out of closets. And if you are ashamed of ancestors who do not meet your own social standards then stay away from genealogy." (pg 12) ...

> "Regardless of what you find, your first responsibility is to the truth." (pg. 12)

Fantastic website update--you're definitely moving in the right direction.

Some other off the cuff suggestions I have:

be even more transparent about the resources you have access to, or essentially, what makes you unique? From how you present yourself, it sounds like the bulk of your available research is on Ancestry or Familysearch (which is fine!). If so, why should a client choose you rather than just doing it herself? (This would be a good time to emphasize that history degree).

Have you given thought to how you will provide clients with citations/images of documents? If you're using online sources, you will need to consider their TOS.

For repository lists, also consider area colleges/universities, historical societies, genealogy societies, and even public libraries.

And while you're waiting for clients, purchase or ILL this book, as it is a helpful resource to understanding how a professional genealogist operates.

I just stumbled over these two sources:

• Pennsylvania German Pioneers Passenger Lists; Directory of Online Transcriptions of Palatine Passenger Lists; Palatine German Immigrant Ships to Philadelphia 1727-1808
  
• and Don Yoder - Pennsylvania German Immigrants, 1709-1786 Lists Consolidated from Yearbooks
  
  Haven't checked them, but they look somewhat promising.
  
  On Amazon.com there's the following comment about the latter one:
  
  > This is an awesome book! But only if you have ancestors from Wuerttemberg, County of Wertheim, or Zweibruecken in the Palatinate, Germany, or the Canton of Schaffhausen, Switzerland. So, if you know your ancestors are from, say, Hesse, this book would not include them!"

Not sure if you know this, but there is an Images of America book for Cabell County. I though of it because I've purchased one for Upshur County in WV where my ancestors are from. It was pretty neat to look through even though I didn't find any info on direct ancestors.

The book Albion's seed. Spending time at Plimoth Plantation (relatives landed there). The Boston Tea Party Museum in Boston (relative participated). Spending time at Sturbridge Village. Reading Midwife's tale. (My something great grandfather founded Eastport,
Maine with 16 other families). Good wives. (Reminds me of how lucky I am in many ways!)
One side of the family is all Governors and fancy folk-while there is lots of info about them I am not to interested. I am REALLY into how the regular people lived and try to learn about that.

While it's not my relatives, I loved the NYC tenement museum.

Kind of like how a dark skinned Spaniard could easily get results for Iberian Peninsula or North Africa or possibly even the Middle East. Still a Spaniard, though, and European-white by an American definition in the 1900s.

Whenever I read stories like this I always think of the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man that I read when I was a kid. The author’s subject is described as having caramel colored skin. Raised in a different home, it really could have gone a different way.

Yeah, my entire reason for getting into genealogy was to learn about new relationships, and it would be hard for me to justify destroying one because I found out someone else's painful truth.

This book may interest you, I just started reading it:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Sheep-Kissing-Cousins-Stories/dp/076580588X

Oh man, I think the best thing we can do for binders is to make them visually appealing (like you are) and digital as well, so they don't just disappear. Email them to other family members... and perhaps even get a copy self published.

You might want to check out A Pickpocket's Tale. I read it years ago, and didn't adore it, but found the approach interesting. They obviously didn't have a huge amount of information on the titular character, so they would find a record that mentioned him being arrested in a specific bar, then fill the pages with newspaper accounts of other things that had happened in that bar around that time period to really flesh out what it was like there, other people he likely knew or encountered, etc... I've often thought it was a good way of painting a picture without a ton of info.

The people from nowhere: an illustrated history of Carpatho - Rusyns.

​

Carpathian Rus': A Historical Atlas

​

With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus' and Carpatho-Rusyns

​

and I cannot forget all the meetings, associations and documents that I have purchased over 30 years of this crazy hobby.

This is supposed to be the holy grail for info to start with.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0717150240/

It looks like except for a company J that was formed near the end of the war and has a roster of 24 men, most accounts of this regiment only survive in contemporaneous newspaper reports of their movements and battles, and retrospective accounts of surviving officers and soldiers.

Your ancestor appears to be mentioned (as Wakefield, J.W.) on a roster on page 180 of this book:

• https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Tennessee-Infantry-Regiment-Regimental/dp/1522974172
  
  Here's his index card matching that, with no company specified:
  
  
• https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FZ7X-PJ2
  
  And here's another that actually specifies company I:
  
  
• https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FST8-G3P
  
  Here's a muster card that seems to mention his discharge, but I don't have a fold3 subscription so I can't quite make out the details:
  
  
• https://www.fold3.com/document/68885003/
  
  I wonder if he's the same John J. W. Wakefield mentioned as a part of Company E of the 41st Tennessee Infantry:
  
  
• https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F9KV-JN5

Another possibility is that his birth could have been registered but not indexed. I'm not sure if this is possible in England, but if his birth wasn't indexed, a search of the local registrar's books would have to be carried out. Maybe, you could contact a local history/ heritage centre if Norwich has one and ask them for advice regarding this.

I also have a copy of this book: http://www.amazon.com/Tracing-Your-Family-Kathy-Chater/dp/0754819868/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464457976&sr=1-7#customerReviews . And in its section on BMD records of the General Register Office, it says this: 'In the first ten years or so following the introduction of national registration, parents were not obliged to notify the registrar of a child's birth, and if a child was not registered within six months, it could not be included in the records. There seems also to have been some confusion about whether it was necessary to register a child if it had also been baptized. In 1874, fines were introduced for non-notification by the parents, which improved the situation.

This lack of registration, combined with the bureacracy involved in copying entries as they were passed from level to level in the system, means that a number of events are missing from the indexes, especially in the earlier period. There may be as many as 15 percent of the births missing for 1837-47, and as many as 1 in 40 marriages missing for 1837-99. There are also the difficulties caused by copying errors and by dealing with illiterate people who did not know how their names were written, and who probably had strong regional accents . Registrars had, in many cases, to guess at the name and how it was spelled.'

Warning: Brick wall incoming. Joana in particular is one of my favorite misunderstood heroines and I could talk for hours about her.

That story in particular is the primary one used to prove her insanity, but it's rather complicated and can be explained as both a misinterpretation of her actions and straight up lies.

The following information comes directly from this biography.

Almost everything we read about Joana comes as part of a biography of someone else - her mother, her sister Catherine, her niece, Mary - but almost never herself. There are no primary sources from Joana herself, so she was never able to directly explain her actions. She lived in an extremely patriarchal time when the idea of a woman ruling on her own was considered partially insane, which is a bit ironic considering the fact that her mother did a wonderful job.

But because we have no primary sources from her point of view, all of her actions were interpreted either by people who simply didn't understand her, or by people with their own political agenda. And it's the latter we have to be most critical of.

Yes, Joana delayed the burial of her husband for several years, and carted it around with her. But rather than interpret it as insanity, it's possible this was a brilliant political move intended to introduce the Spanish people to their new monarch. Joana and Philip were never supposed to rule. She was the third born child and her marriage to a Hapsburg was meant as a political alliance but she was meant to go to Germany and not come back. Three separate people and an unborn child had to die in order for them to become the heirs to Spain. So by carting around Philip's corpse, Joana may have simply been trying to get the Spanish people comfortable with the idea of a Hapsburg dynasty.

A particular morbid part of the tale that still fascinates people today, and really convinces them that Joana was nuts, is that at one point, Joana somehow either became convinced that Philip wasn't dead, or was so obsessed with her husband that she opened his coffin to stare at his dead body. A fantastic historical fiction book about Joana, The Last Queen, one that portrays her in mostly a positive light, even includes this scene.

But the truth is, the first mention of it shows up several decades after Joana died, and a primary witness to the journey where Joana supposedly opened his coffin never reported it.

Yes, Joana had some quirks that to a modern audience may seem a little weird. When family members showed up in the convent she had been locked away in, they found her emaciated and dressed in what was essentially peasant clothing. She was supposedly starving herself. But further research shows that it was shortly after she lost close family members and typical Spanish mourning included dressing simply and fasting. Mary Tudor and Katherine of Aragon were known to do the same thing.

One report has her banging and screaming on the doors, but further research shows that her husband had locked her in her rooms and refused to let her out.

Shortly before her mother died, Isabella wrote a special part of her will that specifically named Joana (NOT her husband Philip) as her heir and gave her the ability to rule alone. Isabella obviously believed that Joana was capable of doing so. Mere months after Isabella died, Ferdinand was declaring Joana insane and unfit to rule.

Years after Joana had been locked away in a nunnery, onlookers claimed that she was paranoid and was blaming the nuns for stealing her jewelry. Turns out - her family was actually breaking open her coffers and stealing her jewelry.

The truth is, Joana was tortured, gaslit, and finally locked away by her family all so they could rule through her. At one point she was given the opportunity by her people to rule alone, and she passed it up because it might mean her son would lose the ability to rule. She voluntarily put herself back into the nunnery to preserve her family's right to rule. She sacrificed herself. If anything, that might prove her insanity for sticking up for the very people who tortured her.