Don, Gary, Nancy and Marina Templeton mountain climbing in Massachusetts.
Well, the airline non-rev gods smiled upon me and I was able to get back East and then home on exactly the flights I’d hoped. They had four chances to strand me at the gate, and each time I squeaked through to a seat.
Don, Gary, Nancy and Marina Templeton mountain climbing in Massachusetts.
The Massachusetts Templetons didn’t want to drive all the way up to Templeton, the burg, saying that there’s really nothing there to see or do, so we contented ourselves with hiking up a “mountain” and down a trail near Amherst and strolling around Northampton’s downtown. We did catch a flower show at Smith College.
No genealogy accomplished at either MA or Philly. I’ll have to get in touch with the Scotch-Irish Society and dedicate a trip back just for that, I guess.
As always, it’s going to be at the mercies of “available space” good fortune, but I’m hopeful. A trip to Massachusetts with, perhaps, a stop in Philly to check in on the Scotch-Irish Society.
That Society courtesy visit is very “iffy,” but I do hope to get a drive-by of Templeton, MA, in order to take a picture of the city limits sign, or something.
You know? It’s nights like this that I pine for the good old days of Cyndi’s List and the original RootsWeb discussion threads — I miss the days when we genealogist sleuths shared the scarcity of laboriously discovered and put up online good, documented-at-the-courthouse, information and commiserated in our poverty to make the work easier.
Sure, now I know why that valuable biographical collection wasn’t available through the LDS’s “full-on” subscription to Ancestry.com. The American Genealogical Biographical Index looks to be a fabulous first step in any genealogical researchers quest. According to the description, the AGBI sorts names by birth date when it’s available, it is also an valuable research tool when the the same given name appears many times during a surname search. The AGBI also sorts by geographical location within a surname, giving researches another invaluable tool to sort out ancestors.
And, I’ve just come across this notice from yet another organization, in my quest:
The following announcement was written by the Godfrey Library:
Godfrey Library publishes the American Genealogical Biographical Index (AGBI). The AGBI is a 226 volume every name index of hundreds of genealogies, including unindexed and partially indexed genealogies. The AGBI also indexes the Boston Transcript genealogical column that appeared from 1896 to 1941, the 1790 census, parts of the Pennsylvania Archives and various vital, church and military records. About 300 large libraries, in addition to the Godfrey Library, have print copies.
The only online addition appears on Ancestry.com. That is about to change. Beginning in January 2009 the AGBI will no longer be part of Ancestry.com. Instead the AGBI will be part of Godfrey Library’s paid subscription service, Godfrey Scholar, and will also be part of World Vital Record’s database offerings.
Godfrey Library now owns all the material indexed in the AGBI. And, they want you to pay for the privilege of looking at what they’ve gathered.
Well, everyone’s gotta earn a living I guess.
It was refreshing to discover there are a couple or three researchers that have turned up Allie Monteith in their family tree pursuits and to finally see data besides that found in my own Ancestry.com GEDCOM.
Unfortunately, Allie’s vitals — birth year and marriage date — are not supported with documentary references attached on any of the posted trees, and the dates given are so exactly those I’ve extrapolated by myself that I suspect that they may be derived from my speculations (unfortunately) included in that darned GEDCOM I uploaded years ago and can’t get to in order to correct. However, the McMahon-Rabatsky family tree posted by “mcrabat” I found there does refer to the American Genealogical-Biographical Index for Daniel Monteith’s DOB and birthplace, and even lists a “John” and “Jennet” as Daniel’s (and Allie’s, by extension) parents.
Whoopie. New Information!
Just what vitals and possible other family are found in that reference work I can’t tell from Ancestry.com’s site. There was another reference work that has already proved a precious vein of biographical info and possible confirmation of the Monteith brood’s parentage — History of Cumberland and Adams counties, Pennsylvania. Containing history of the counties, etc., etc. (There’ll be more from this source and whatever else turns up fairly soon.)
The Daniel Monteith entry in the McMahon-Rabatsky tree includes an obvious mistake: It lists Allie as his daughter, apparently born to Daniel at age 7 with his wife, Sarah Leakey, when she was just 5 years old. One of the other two family tree authors say Allie is William Templeton (Sr)’s second wife, after apparently leaving a daughter and wife he married at age 16 in Lanarkshire, Scotland. That seems implausible to me, given the certain religious fiber of the man. It all makes me cautious of accepting any of the data at face value.
One way or the other, it was a fruitful trip to the library. I’ve got new leads on the Monteiths to follow up, including their family’s jump across The Pond from Dundee, and even came up with a name for William Templeton Jr’s wife’s grandmother.
Well, whoot! Someone’s finally gone and done it.
A few minutes of down time at work; a news story about a U.K. archeology dig and a Google Map search to see where; a whim to check out Templeton Burn on my new pen pal’s recommendation; piddling, I find a Templeton Court in Glasgow that one Monteith Row dead ends into. I wonder, “See if anything’s turned up on Allie Monteith?” And The Google came up with the above in the first couple of results!
Now, see, I’d been searching online all around Allie only a few weeks ago — following her brothers, cousins, “Woodward” and the lot — to see if I could discover who her parents were, or maybe some indication as to when she moved where, or anything! (Oh, gosh, now that I’m linking to a blog entry about one such person, I see it was 11 months ago. How could it have been that long?!)
Of course I’d scoured the free precincts of Ancestry.com at the time, but not a lot turned up that I wasn’t finding otherwise. (I don’t subscribe anymore.)
Sheesh! So there she is, now: tantalizing me with possible info on her parents. Maybe dates or places of marriages?
I’ve known for years that there was one gedcom at Ancestry that mentions her, but I haven’t been able to get any particulars — even when I was a subscriber — and the researcher has never responded to messaging.
I need to look before I buy … it’s only such a little info I need …
It looks like I’m going to have to get by the LDS Genealogy Library and use their free access to Ancestry tomorrow, just to make sure.
Got an email from a very, very — very distant “cousin” in Scotland. It’s exciting to hear from folks that reach out. Doubly so from someone living within 3 miles of Templeton Burn (a little creek).
2012.01.23 UPDATE: Well, the good news is I haven’t heard from my Ayrshire correspondent since my reply. The first time I wrote back, my email was returned undelivered. It had gotten caught in his spam filter and bounced back. This time, I wrote from the same “@templeton.net” Webmail, and it apparently got through.
Father Christmas holding court.
Shame that I was too distracted & busy to take advantage of the freebie one- or three-day offers from Ancestry.com to mine their databases. But I did get a cool turntable-to-USB device that’ll let me listen to my old 33 1/3 LP albums once again. Yusef Lateef, it’s been too long!
Sunday with genealogy and the laptop.
I’ve scanned the LDS collection of the 1890 Census of Union Veterans and Widows of the Civil War for three or four counties of Wisconsin and three counties of Ohio so far this weekend. It’s almost like spending time accomplishing something.
Actually, I found myself wondering if this page after page of scanning for a familiar surname, the rote copying of the soldier’s record onto a pad and fitfully considering how I’m going to compile this record in a way that might be useful, was a real, actual, productive use of my genealogy research time.
Shortly after wondering that, I realized that my wandering mind was a quiet murmur of disconnected ideas, memories, mental pictures … kind of like I used to experience while mowing Dorothy Wooden’s lawn for clothes money when I was 14 years old. It’s not really a meditative state. I feel no closer to cosmic realization for having indulged fifteen hours of my life flipping through hundreds of grainy, grey images of 120-year old handwriting. But it is a comforting routine that holds the promise of some fine nugget of historical gold, though this weekend’s exercise yielded no new riches.
I thought I was getting a sense of the national-origin mix of the upper Midwest at the end of the 19th century. It seemed to me that more English (versus Scotch-Irish and German) were in the stew by the fin de siècle. The English, and other northern European, Welsh, and what-not. That the melting pot of America (and perhaps a more mobile, railroad-enabled populace) was well on its way to working its “assimilation” magic by 1890 seemed evident. Of course, that’s just anecdotal. I just have the earliest rosters of property owners in and around old Trumbull County from before 1820 to compare.
The whole question of whether taking a mental break from life in order to “browse” census scans is a good use of my time, much less productive, is for a later day. Right now I have “fun with spreadsheets” to get into and make me think I’m being “creative”. (Ha-ha.)
This screen in front of me can quickly become the flickering lights and ringing bells of an arcade game — a stream-of-consciousness carom from thought to link to link to thought, then trailing down to a flipper with a whip back up into another zig-zag through the bumpers of data points scattered around the Internet. It was a photo of a headstone in a discussion thread notification that got me started. The name on the marker, “Rhoda Templeton Wright,” didn’t pan out to have any connection to my family though all three names appear in my database. But the search turned up a reference to Hiram C. Templeton, who it turns out has a Civil War record to be found.
This surprised me a little bit, since I had thought most of the Ohio Templeton men were either too old or too young to have seen service in that conflict. That is, with the notable exception of Robert H Templeton, who fought with the 26th Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry at Chancellorsville and at Gettysburg, only to lose his life after Chattanooga as Sherman advanced on Atlanta.
Turns out, even Michael Templeton has a “Draft Registration” or some-such record, scanned and in an Ancestry.com database.
Bouncing around the search engines, there appears to be another couple of Ohio Templetons, more Wisconsiners and perhaps a trail from Ohio to Michigan. I may have even found a whiff of a trail to my long-suspected Indiana Templeton kin. But, since I’m not an Ancestry subscriber anymore, it’s looking like a couple of trips to the LDS Genealogy Library is in order.
This just might be the opening of that pandora’s box of the Civil War I’ve been putting off all this time.
“Austintown” cover.
It was Friday that I discovered that I was called out in the “Acknowledgements” of a 2007 history of Austintown, Ohio, written by Joyce Pogany. I recall Ms. Pogany’s research assistant emailing me, asking for references to our Templeton ancestors being among the first settlers of the valley in eastern Ohio, back before 1798 or whenever I asserted in my bio of William Templeton. I think I might have even talked to her on the phone, but my memory is pretty fuzzy going back six- or seven years. I provided the bibliographic references and links on the Internet she could reach immediately, and followed up with downloaded text files of the more-or-less oral history from a reunion weekend of folks that knew the early settlers. Come to find out, the info I provided comprise the first paragraph of Ms. Pogany’s book, near as I can tell.
The origins, y’know.
It’s nice to be asked about what I’ve learned.
