I am moving to a new blog

I am slowly in the process of moving the family pages over to my new genealogy blog using Google’s Blogger service.

The material on this blog will still be here, but I won’t be updating it.

My new blog is All The Old Stories. Feel free to come on over.

New Hegarty photo: my great-grandparents

Margaret (Deasy) and John Hegarty. Probably taken for their 50th wedding anniversary, at which time they renewed their vows.

I’m back, and I’ve tried Ancestry.com’s Facebook app

OK, I could not stay away for very long and this blog is functional again. I don’t guarantee how often I’ll update though, as I haven’t had as much genealogy time as I’d like.

I had a few days off work due to Hurricane Sandy, though, so I spent some time playing with Ancestry.com’s Facebook app. I had been hesitant to try it for fear it would be creepy, but it wasn’t that bad. At least it didn’t post random things to my facebook page.

First it identified me, and then it rifled through my facebook friends and suggested connections. Confirming them was a little tricky as there was an intricate panel of dropdown menus for specifying relationships. For example, that cousin is my father’s brother’s son. Some distant relations required workarounds in that I had to specify how they were related to other relatives (chosen from another dropdown menu) to get them to connect. I ran into a few instances of confusion about where to assign children in cases of multiple marriages. (People on Facebook don’t generally specify “step” when they name their relatives because it doesn’t sound warm. Also, subsequent spouses often adopt children of previous marriages.)

As I connected people, their Ancestry entries were updated with their facebook profile pictures and often some personal information, such as a birthday if they had that available on their Facebook profile. If they had other relatives listed who had not been in my Ancestry tree, they were also added.

I found the app useful. I discovered relatives on Facebook and realized I could not properly place them: they were someone’s kid but whose? The process inspired me to sit down and add all my cousins to my Ancestry tree — putting a lot of trust in Ancestry’s privacy safeguards for living people. Once they were in Ancestry, though, all their records popped up right away, so now there are obituaries attached to late cousins, etc.

Working through it made me realize that I am getting older. I started my genealogy project more than ten years ago. At that time, I only included people from my grandparents’ generation and earlier in order to respect people’s privacy. Now most of my grandparents’ generation has died, and I am just one generation down from the elders. It used to be easy to keep my cousins’ families in my head, because they were young people with only a few children. Now they have grandchildren of their own, and I need to make a little chart.

So what about the privacy issues? My personal offline database includes information on everyone, but that is never uploaded anywhere, and I carefully scrub reports it generates so as not to expose anyone. You will never see living people’s personal information here on this blog, for example. However, I am putting everyone on Ancestry and trusting Ancestry’s privacy safeguards. Although I hesitated about this, the app is only importing information people have themselves posted to Facebook. And Ancestry is password protected and their personal information is hidden if they are alive. So I feel like it wasn’t that creepy after all.

Have other people tried it? What was your experience?

Love that dirty water . . . Millers River, Cambridge

I was doing some data entry the other day and paused over the sad fate of Richard Black, who drowned when he was just 7 years old in 1903 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (He is related to me through the Gaule family.)

Death record for Richard Black

But I had never heard of Miller’s River. Turns out I had never heard of it because the river had been filled in as industry in Cambridge waned. Millers River is now just a small waterway between Cambridge and Charlestown, around the Zakim Bridge. Mark Jaquith at Cambridge Community Television has a great article and slideshow about Millers River.

Prior to being filled in, Millers River was heavily polluted by local industry, particularly by the Squires slaughterhouse where some of my relatives worked. The pollution and smell were so bad that it is supposed to have inspired some early Massachusetts waterway regulations. I wonder if poor Richard fell in or if it was so hot in August that he went swimming in the polluted water.

quick link

Canada finds new market for seal products in China. Look out, baby seals.

Wordless Wednesday: old photo of my grandmother Agnes Murphy

Small updates to Clare, Gaule, and Hegarty pages

I’ve been too busy at work to really delve into my genealogy hobby, but a few new things have come to my attention and I’d like to share them. I’ve made small updates to the following pages:

Clare research

I found a civil death register at Newfoundland Grand Banks that included the death of my great-great-grandfather John Clare in Harbour Grace in 1892. The register also gave his age which allowed me to figure his birth date as about 1836. Best of all, the register included his place of birth as ENGLAND. I don’t know where in England, but at least I have traced another Newfoundland ancestor back to Europe. I remember my grandmother telling me that her grandfather had come from England. Often family stories end up as just stories, so I was pleased to see that one work out.

Gaule research

Another researcher contacted me on Ancestry.com to insist that my great-grandmother Anastasia Gaule had a sister named Anne Gaule who also emigrated to Cambridge, MA. I had heard this rumor before, I think back in my days on AOL, but I had dismissed it because the names seemed too similar and I thought my father would have heard of a whole group of relatives living so close. However, this researcher had lots of matching info about Anastasia’s parents whom she claimed were also Anne’s parents. I managed to find a marriage record for Anne on AmericanAncestors.org that gave her parents’ names, which matched, so now I’m convinced. I added Anne into the Gaule family.

Hegarty research

There was a family story that my great-grandfather John James Hegarty served in the British Army before emigrating to Massachusetts in 1890. He was supposed to have served in the Boer War with the Royal Munster Fusiliers, but the dates that the RMF were in South Africa didn’t work with John’s age and emigration dates. Recently, though, Ancestry.com turned up a record for a Private J. Heggarty serving with the Royal Malta Artillery in the Sudan, with dates that actually work. I am supposing this is him, since it’s a Royal M-word regiment and it’s in Africa. If I find better or different evidence going forward, I’ll revise. Meanwhile, here is a photo from Wikipedia of the campaign medals John would have received after the Suakin Expedition, though his medals would likely not have had a date.