Wikipedia distraction

 

Last year at this time, I was trying to make sure I had everything ready for a two week long family history foray. It had been a daunting task trying to get everything together. I've reached the point in my research where I've gone beyond the easier initial steps of filling in family knowledge. Now it's a case of picking some particular family branches to find out more about. That in-depth research requires more time and thought but, with the advances that have been made in what is available online, so much more history can come to light. Often that's where the stories hide.

I was in search of those stories when I sat in front of a computer at the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City. As I had prepared, I started with the research I'd planned. I was disciplined at first, taking various family lines further into the past but then, as so often happens, I got sidetracked. I stumbled on a line of ancestors who had Wikipedia pages! Oh, I know I could have done that research at home instead of spending my precious hours at the library leaping from page to page on Wikipedia but the hunt was on!

I did get back to my research plan eventually, but finding those stories written about people who were connected to my family tree was a thrill. Finding information written about my various Hinton connections felt almost like discovering a gateway ancestor to the past similar to attaching a family line to noble or royal lines whose histories were recorded. Although finding a real gateway ancestor would probably open up more doors into written histories. If only I could get back that far!

Stories to bring our history to life

 

Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to be a writer. Maybe that's because I was an avid reader from the time I first held a book. The different ideas and scenarios I found in the pages helped me make sense of the world even if they were found in an Agatha Christie mystery.

Mysteries are my preferred reading material. I enjoy the investigation and eventual solution. Maybe it was those reads that showed me how to put facts together to come to a solution, much like the sleuthing done while hunting for facts about the lives of family who lived in the past. In those narratives too, a reader also sees the value of background information, the relationship between people, the usual habits of the deceased and what the larger part of society was into at the time, all have a bearing on the case.

Sometimes though, I read to find out more information about an historic era or events. Recently I picked up a book from my own overburdened shelves to find out more about one of those turning points in history, the plague. It's a time out of the realm of the ancestor hunt for the most part but my ancestors would have survived that time and probably yours did too. It was a horrendous long lasting event that shaped the human psyche.

The author of The Black Death: A Personal History, made an interesting choice in telling the story of the Black Death. Although an expert in the history of the medieval period, he chose to fictionalize his narrative to give the reader a better understanding of the slow creep of the news and how the villagers of a particular place in England reacted. Reading it gives me a more immediate understanding of events and how it felt to the people waiting for this particular calamity to fall. It's masterfully done and a way to bring dusty old documents to life. Would that I could translate the dusty documents I've uncovered in my own research into such a compelling narrative. 

Sources:

The Black Death: A Personal History, by John Hatcher, Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2008 

Think before you post

 

It was a while ago, a matter of decades rather than years, when I first subscribed to Ancestry and was able to build my own family tree on there. That tree grew slowly. It's still very much a work in progress. Initially I'd hope that having a tree and information visible would be similar to those far away days of collaboration on genealogy message boards. But contact and collaboration on the Ancestry website were minimal at best. The rate of communication hasn't changed much since DNA testing and matching came along.

Something that I heard someone say in one of my genealogy groups along the way provided a possible clue as to why I wasn't getting any feedback on my tree. I'm not sure of her exact words but the gist of it remains. She indicated that she didn't look at family trees on the website unless there were a lot of photos and records attached to the tree because the lack of attachments meant the research of the tree's owner was suspect.

That may be one way of thinking of family trees that are bare of pictures and records but I have another. I didn't want to post the pictures and documents I'd found over the years because I didn't want them to be grabbed and copied ad infinitum. Besides some of the information in my family history files had been obtained under fair use (actually fair dealing in Canada), which I interpret to mean that the pictures or records I kept would be okay for personal use but not for publication. How then could they be placed on my family tree on a family history site to be fair game for any user to copy and publish on their own tree? As it was, I'd been unpleasantly surprised to see some of the information I'd sent to others back in the day now showing up attached to online family trees. Those items had been sent in the far off heady days of collaborating on the same family lines by snail mail and Rootsweb. When sending those items, I'd imagined them filling the recipients own family binders, never dreaming of how the online sites would expand and the possibilities they'd present.

So, if you see a bare family tree on a genealogy website like Ancestry, it doesn't necessarily mean that the owner's research is lacking. It might just mean that they are aware of the limitation mandated by copyright law. 

Research and mysteries

 

                                                Google map of the expanding area of my research in Cape Breton, NS

Even now when most research is done online, it can be a daunting and time consuming task. That's why it's good to have a goal in mind. That's why those searching for their family's history are advised to come up with research questions; something to shape their queries, something to tell them when they've reached their goal. Because you can't get there if you don't know where "there" is.

It's good advice but something I rarely do, although I probably should. I'm more likely to head in a general direction then get distracted along the way. Perhaps that's not the best practice for uncovering information about my ancestors' pasts but it can lead to some interesting discoveries. Many of those treasures being found by following those tantalizing facts just out of reach occasioned by intriguing finds that sent me off on a tangent to find out more about some event, place or person.

But perhaps I do follow the advice about setting a question in a way. Because I usually have a mystery that I want to solve when I embark on a new line of discovery. When I think about my current Acadian research, there are a few mysteries that I would like to solve. The main one, of course, is how the families I am interested in ended up back in Nova Scotia after the mass deportation in 1755. But there is another. How did the family of French Acadians that I'm interested in end up with the very Scottish sounding name McPhee?  

Exploring background for Acadian research

                                                   Some of the buildings at Louisberg in Nova Scotia

My focus lately has been on the Acadian family lines I married into so I'm searching for things related to French Canada. The other day I watched a webinar about New France called Epic Tales From New France: Dawn and Carol's Greatest Hits. While entertained by the two speakers and the stories they had uncovered in their extensive research into their family history in Quebec, I was struck by how when we talk about New France, the reference is usually to Quebec. Not that I have anything against that province but the family I'm researching wasn't in that part of the country. I want to find information about the Acadians, particularly about the family lines linked to my own family tree.

While Acadia was part of New France, at least according to Google, the contrast between the treatment of the two colonies was stark once the British took over. Perhaps that was also the case under French rule, maybe my research will uncover that fact or not. Their different treatment had a lot to do with the placement of the colonies and perhaps with their alliances too. So it looks like history and geography will come up in my research.

The contrast in how the French colonies were treated also affected the records available for research now. The speakers in that recent webinar were able to take the family trees they were researching far back into the past, to 8th and 9th great grandparents. They gave a brief overview of the extensive records they had access to. Too bad records like those aren't the norm for Acadian research.

A jump start on Acadian lines

 

                                                 Google map showing Isle Madame the site of my Acadian interest

At the end of 2025, I was getting ahead of myself on the planning front. At that time my aim for 2026 was to concentrate on North American roots in the family tree, concentrating both on my own ancestors who link back to America's colonial past by establishing the closer lines that eventually lead back to those more distant relatives as well as working on the Acadian lines of the family that I married into.

The Acadian lines came to the fore much sooner than I anticipated. A post on Gail Dever's blog, Genealogy à la carte, carried the news about a free virtual presentation, "The History of the Acadians: Through Tranquility, Turmoil and Tenacity". I registered right away and sat through Nicole Gallant-Nune's talk as she took the viewers through the saga of the Acadians including the great derangement. I've always wondered what the McPhees and related families went through before they ended up on Isle Madame.

Ms. Gallant-Nunes's advice was to look at the Acadian project on Wiki Tree. So I've gone back to that site adding to the miniscule tree that I started there. This time I'm adding the links that will take me back to the Acadians that I'm interested in. I'm also starting to pull from my shelves the books on Acadia that I've gathered over the years. It looks like it might be time to access the information inside. 

Sources:

Genealogy à la carte – https://genealogyalacarte.ca/ 

Wiki Tree - https://www.wikitree.com/

The year in review - looking back at 2025

 

In previous years, well at least the ones when I did a review of my blog for the year, that review happened in December. So I'm out of sync but then the latter half of 2025 was like that. As I wrote last week, I didn't cover any big continuing stories last year but I was able to group the topics I covered into various categories.

The following list contains the categories and the dates on which they were covered. A link is provided to the first post for each topic.

DNA       February 15        DNA Update

   September 13     Ancestry’s Origins

   October 11          DNA Update

Link to February 15 post

https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2025/02/dna-update.html

 

Family Finds & General Musings

                March 29             A Strange connection

                April 5                 The joys of meeting in person

                June 20                More connections for the Hunters and Gilchrists?

                June 28                Hunter/Gilchrist connection on Islay

                July 26                Writing down the family story

                August 2              A genealogical path to history

                August 16            Remembering the weather

                September 6        Family pride of place

                October 4            Family moves

                November 1       Stymied by a mystery

                November 8       Adding descendants and more mysteries

Link to March 29 post

https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-strange-connection.html

Family Trees

                February 22        Clues in an overlooked family tree?

                March 1              Further documents to help prove a family tree

                May 17               Adding descendants to my family tree

                September 27     Tempting links to take a tree back

                October 18          Looking at family history from a different perspective

Link to February 22 post

https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2025/02/clues-in-overlooked-family-tree.html

Hints and Other Resources

                January 11           Previously untapped research hints

                February 8          Adding to a family’s history through books

                May 24               Tackling a genealogy article backlog

                May 31                Looking for links to Cromwell’s army

                June 14                The Hunter family of Glenegedale

                July 5                   Finds in boxes

                July 19                 Catching up with items saved “for later”

                August 23            What records will we leave?

                August 30            Even genealogy information gets dated

                November 22      Overwhelming hints

                December 6         A possible link to gateway ancestors

Link to January 11 post

https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2025/01/previously-untapped-research-hints.html

Research plans, results, etc.

                January 18           Records of questionable behaviour

                January 25           Sorting through past research

                February 1           Families on both sides of the law

                March 8               A further will to add more Strange information

                March 15             A RootsTech visit

                March 22             An adaptable research plan

                April 12               Census information can raise many questions   

                April 19               Occupation – engraver

                April 26               Getting a list of military ancestors together

                May 3                  Earlier military ancestors from my research

                May 20                Some of the more recent military ancestors from my research

                June 7                  Looking back at old research

                July 12                 Memories and genealogy field trips

               August 9              Trying to break an Irish brickwall

               September 20       Chipping away at a brickwall

               October 25          The lure of RootsTech

               November 15       Census problems in research

               November 29       Records with mixed messages

               December 13       End of the year planning

Link to January 18 post

https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2025/01/records-of-questionable-behaviour.html