More Information Freely Available Online - JSTOR Early Journal Content

I used to read because I enjoyed it. Anya Seton, Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Herman Wouk, Ken Follett, Nelson DeMille—teenage favorites and some I learned to love later in life.

As I became more obsessed with genealogy and family history my favorite authors became David McCullough, David Hackett Fischer, Jean A. Stuntz, Lawrence Friedman, and pretty much anyone published by Heritage Books or Genealogical Publishing.

Then I discovered the information in scholarly journals—often focused on a specific location where my ancestors had lived or on a topic directly related to some event in an ancestor's life. These are the details needed to add "meat to the bones" of my family tree. When I learned I could access JSTOR through the Houston Public Library system I spent hoursperusing what was available and wishing there were more hours in the day to study.

JSTOR provides access to scholarly journals through universities and institutions like large libraries. This is great if you are attending classes at a school that provides access or have access through a local library. As Google began to index the content of journals in JSTOR it could be a frustrating experience to see a link to an article that contained exactly the information you needed, only to find out it was behind a pay wall and you couldn't read the article. Some of those frustrations will disappear now.

JSTOR recently announced open access to material in their collection that is out of copyright. There are some terms and conditions for use so check the full text in the FAQ and the documents it links to.

PDF files listing the included journals by title and by discipline are available. These are just a few of the journals anyone can now access by going to jstor.org and clicking on the link for "Early Journal Content":

• The Journal of African American History — 1916–1922
  
• The Illustrated Wood Worker — 1879–1879
  
• California History — 1922–1922
  
• Indiana Magazine of History — 1905–1922
  
• The Georgia Historical Quarterly — 1917–1922
  
• The Journal of American History — 1914–1922
  
• The South Carolina Historical Magazine — 1900–1922
  
• The Southwestern Historical Quarterly — 1897–1922
  
• The William and Mary Quarterly — 1892–1922
  
• The Hispanic American Historical Review — 1918–1922
  
• California Law Review — 1912–1922
  
• Columbia Law Review — 1901–1922
  
• Harvard Law Review — 1887–1922
  
• Virginia Law Review — 1913–1922
  
• The Journal of Religion — 1882–1922
  

For more information see this Chronicle.com article by Jennifer Howard and the announcement from JSTOR.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

9/11 Memorials Remind Us of Earlier Records of Memories

Like many Americans, I spent too much time yesterday watching TV memorials of 9/11. Even though I know what is about to happen, it is hard to pull myself away from the video. No matter how many times I see it, there is an involuntary, rushing intake of breath when I see the towers begin to fall.

Last night I saw, what was to me, a new take on the events of 9/11: a documentary with candid video taken of firefighters in the months leading up to, during, and after the horrific events of 9/11. Seeing the unscripted stories of those caught up in monumental history gives more personal meaning to the feelings we have from that day. If you didn't see 9/11: Ten Years Later on CBS last night, check out the citation below for links to view the documentary.¹

Films like this and audio recordings can be a great boon to future genealogists, providing personal details about an ancestor's life, thoughts, and physical characteristics. Most of us are more easily moved by images and sound than by words on paper. Remember how you felt when watching the Ken Burns Civil War series on PBS? I wondered if there are other historical images and documentaries out there that might be useful to genealogists. A few internet searches with terms like "historic documentaries" turned up some interesting possibilities. Even if your ancestor wasn't interviewed I'll bet you can find an interview of someone with similar experiences you can draw on to speculate about your ancestor's life.

Archive.org is one of my favorite sites for finding old books. It also has audio and video items I've never explored. Their blog post Then and Now has links to some videos made during the Depression, the Great Depression in the 1920s and 1930s, not the current one. Browsing the "Ephemeral Films collection" I found Shaping San Francisco with footage from 1906, 1917, 1934, and more modern times. The "Vintage Educational Films" include And So They Lived showing the strong family bonds of "poorly educated mountain people" of the Appalachians, Valley Town - A Study of Machines and Men showing workers in the 1920s and 1930s mill towns being displaced by automation, and Wildcat "follows two Oklahoma wildcatters" in Garfield County. There are others on the site.

The East Texas Research Center (ETRC) at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) in Nacodgoches has as oral history collection covering East Texas and the effects of world-wide events on those in the area. Many of these interviews were made by Dr. Bobby H. Johnson, a well-known Texas historian and former professor at SFASU. The ETRC is digitizing the interviews and adding them to the Digital Archives as time allows. Many of the interviews cover life in the lumber industry and oil fields of Texas.

The Panola College (Carthage, Texas) Oral Histories collection includes interviews about living through the Great Depression and the first two World Wars as well as local history and family reminiscences. Death customs, home brew, sharecropping, flour sack clothes, and working for the WPA and the CCC are described. Some of the interviews are online as MP3 files and are "[f]ree for use by anyone for any purpose without restriction." Many interviews of elderly African Americans in East Texas are included as PDF transcripts, not audio files. The usage rights are stated as "[c]opying and or printing of this publication is allowed for non-commercial use as long as acknowledgement or due credit is provided for its use." Be sure you check the rights and use the information appropriately.

Baylor University, Institute for Oral History has transcribed and made PDFs available for many of the 1,800 oral history interviews in the collection. You can browse or search the collection by subject, category, or project. Subjects are the traditional ones used by libraries to catalog items. Categories include Family Life and Community History, Texas Baptist Project, Waco Tornado 1953, and more. Projects include African American Women, German Texans Between World Wars, South Texas Children's Home, Texas Cotton Farmers, and more. Apparently you can only access the PDF files directly if you are in the Baylor Library or have a login to their system. But there is a request form that can be submitted to request access to the PDF transcripts. It isn't clear if they consider family history an acceptable use or if they restrict access to academic scholars.

Historic Video Archives has a collection of "Vintage and Historic Documentaries – Too Original or Unique to Classify." They have color newsreels with science, technology and new products of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; black-and-white newsreels from 1929 through 1959; a 1926 silent film on sight-seeing in Newark, New Jersey; and more. Even if your ancestors aren't shown in the film, the information may show how your ancestors were living. Especially intriguing to a Southerner is a film that is said to include home movies from the 1920s and 1930s with scenes from Asheville, North Carolina; Athens, Georgia; Nanctucket, Massachusetts; with scenes of picking cotton and a chain gang. I'm tempted to order this just to see whose home movies these are.

TexasHistory.com has a video called Pioneer Life in Texas: A Recreation showing "family life in a log cabin to farming, plowing, blacksmithing, hunting and working with cattle." A two-volume set is titled The Home front: Life in Texas During the Civil War. The marketing blurb indicates the documentary, "features historical re-enactments, present-day footage of historical sites, as well as thousands of pictures, paintings, maps, drawings, documents and graphics from archives across the state. Key analysis of events and insight are provided by the top Civil War experts in Texas: Ralph Wooster, Jerry Don Thompson, Mike Campbell, Charles Spurlin, Danny Sessums and Robert Schaadt, among others."

A search in your own area will likely turn up treasures at local universities and historical societies. Don't overlook these resources.

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1.
de Niro, Robert, host. 9/11: Ten Years Later. Jules Naudet, Gédéon Naudet, James Hanlon, executive producers and directors. N.p.: Goldfish Pictures, Inc., 2011. Broadcast on CBS Television, September 11, 2011. Available on iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/9-11-the-filmmakers-commemorative/id461900937) and CBS.com (http://www.cbs.com/shows/ten_years_later/): both accessed 12 September 2011.


© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

Saving Private Ryan ... and Parker and Johnson and ...

"The fire is moving this way. You have 30 minutes to evacuate." What does a genealogist grab to take with you as you run out the door? Probably the same things a non-genealogist grabs.

Let me quickly assure my friends we are not in this position, at least not yet and hopefully not ever. But many Texans have been these last weeks, more will be in the coming weeks. Some have lost their homes, some have lost their lives. My heart aches as I listen to news reporters interview the newly homeless and grieving. Some of these live less than ten miles from our house. They just live south of the place where the fire started and we live north. Wind direction and velocity have a major impact on the path of a fire.

I've often watched news footage of wild fires in far away desert locations like Arizona and California and West Texas, worrying about those who live near the fire. Now it's happening here in the heavy pine forests of East Texas. Now it hits harder as I watch the smoke drifts lingering above the trees a few miles away. And the smell of smoke seeps in even where the fire doesn't.

The extended drought has left the forests so dry it doesn't take much to start a fire. I saw a cigarette butt in the road near my mailbox a few days ago. How can anyone be so stupid as to toss a cigarette butt out of a car window anytime, much less in these dangerous, dry conditions?

Some people, without understanding this rural environment, make suggestions on how to stop the fire. I saw one blog comment telling people just to water their lawns so the grass was less likely to catch fire. This isn't the big city. This is an area where we don't really have lawns; we have the same stuff growing in the "yard" as what grows in the pasture on the other side of the fence. We don't have city water coming up the street in a pipe; in our back yards we have wells with pumps. Some of those wells have already gone dry due to the drought. Its hard to truck in enough water from Kroger and Walmart to keep several acres from going up in flames if the fire moves toward it. And if you do pump that much water out of the ground you may be causing another neighbor's well to go dry so they have no drinking water.

So I watch the leaves falling from the trees looking like it is months further into autumn than it is now. I watch my beautiful Southern Magnolia start to look more like a weeping willow. I look at my bedding plants and think I may be starting all over next spring - or the next spring where rain finally falls.

What do I grab to take with me in case we do have to evacuate quickly? Well, yesterday I staged boxes with the irreplaceable photographs (including Ryan, Parker, Johnson, and Richards men who served in twentieth century wars), my grandmother's wedding rings, the rhinestone watch my father gave my mother on the day I was born (the one that hasn't kept time for over fifty years and is missing stones, but still makes my eyes water when I see it), and a few of my husband's favorite trinkets (because he won't think of anything except life-saving essentials). He did pack his medicines. My laptop and one backup disk are packed in my briefcase ready to grab. My phone and charger are in my purse along with cash and credit cards. Two suitcases are conveniently located so they can be filled with clothes if there is enough time, otherwise we can shop for clothes later. The car's gas tank is full. We know where we will meet if we get separated during an evacuation. I walk through the house with a camera taking photographs of possessions for the insurance claim, if that becomes necessary. (I did this about six years ago, but possessions have changed since then. We need new photos.)

What gets left behind? Have you ever stood and stared at your belongings and asked yourself, "what can be replaced and what can't? What can be loaded up in one or two trips to the car?" Some of my favorite photos get left behind because family members have copies. I stare at the shelves of books I love. Even if I had enough boxes to pack them up, they'd take way too much time to load. They are replaceable, even the treasured copy of Professional Genealogy with signatures of both Elizabeth Shown Mills and Helen F. M. Leary. There's just no way to justify packing and moving the dishes given me by my grandmother or my mother-in-law or the Christmas decorations the kids have made over the years.

I've been careful about scanning most of my research for the last four or five years so that is on my backup disk. But the file cabinets have lots of older stuff not digitized yet. Why hasn't that moved higher up in my priority list before now, along with scanning all the old photos and snapshots? Its been on my to-do someday list for years. It just moved closer to the top of the list.

I'm torn between thinking I am worrying for nothing if we don't have to evacuate and thinking how sorry I will be if the fire comes this way. I convince myself that as long as Jim and I get out with our lives the rest doesn't really matter. I've been hearing that all week now from those who made it out and were able to talk to the journalists.

The genealogical takeaway from this: you probably know what you should do to preserve your research and artifacts. Make yourself do it now. When it's too late, it's too late.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

Educational Opportunities in Houston in November: TSGS Annual Conference and FTDNA Project Administrator's Conference

I hate it when two events I really want to attend happen at the same time. But two great conferences will be held in Houston during the first weekend of November. The Texas State Genealogical Society (TSGS) Annual Conference and the Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) Project Administrator's Conference.

The TSGS conference starts on Thursday, November 3, with a writing workshop by Paula Stuart-Warren, CG^SM, sessions at Clayton Library on using FamilySearch.org, and an ice cream social. Free to the public, the vendor hall will be open on Thursday evening with many booths of interest to genealogists and historians: book vendors like Maia's Books, the Texas General Land Office, and many others. Three different tracks of sessions are offered on Friday covering many topics, including one I will present on DNA and genetic genealogy. It will cover basics of Y-DNA, mtDNA, and autosomal DNA testing. Other sessions on Friday include Civil War, Hispanic research, African American research, school records, the Texas General Land Office, artifacts, foreign records, immigration, and special collections of the Houston Public Library system including Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research.

Paula Stuart-Warren, CG^SM, is the featured speaker on Saturday covering WPA records, Southern deeds, railroad records, and finding and using manuscripts. Paula is the author of Your Guide to the Family History Library, Minnesota Genealogical Reference Guide, Paula's Genealogical Eclectica blog, and the FGS Conference News Blog. She specializes in Midwestern research, unique resources, major United States repositories, and Midwest and Plains Indians

The Lone Star Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) will be offering free one-on-one consultations on Friday to help solve your genealogical problems. You can come prepared for a consultation by reading about the process and bringing a form with you, or get a form at the Lone Star Chapter of APG booth after you arrive. Appointments are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.

Online registration for the TSGS conference is available at txsgs.org and a PDF copy of the brochure can be found at the main TSGS website.

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The Family Tree DNA Project Administrator's Conference begins with a reception on Friday evening. Topics are not published yet, but the featured speakers on Saturday and Sunday include:

• Spencer Wells, PhD (author of The Journey of Man and featured in the PBS series of the same name, geneticist for the National Genographic Project )
• Stephen P. Morse, PhD (known to genealogists as the author of the One-Step Webpages by Stephen P. Morse and to technologists as the father of the Intel 8086 microprocessor)
• Bruce Durie, PhD (founder of the Genealogical Studies program at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, and a member of APG)
• Michael Hammer, PhD (FTDNA's Chief Scientist, and member of the Scientific Advisory Board)
• Bruce Walsh, PhD (FTDNA's Chief Population Geneticist and member of the Scientific Advisory Board)
• Doron Behar, MD, PhD (FTDNA's Chief mtDNA Scientist and member of the Scientific Advisory Board)
• Jessica L. Roberts, JD (University of Houston Law Center, Health Law and Policy Institute

The FTDNA conference is open to project administrators and guests. The registration page is available through the Group Administrator Pages.

Certified Genealogist (CG) is a registered Service Mark^SM conferred by the Board for Certification of Genealogists® to associates who meet rigorous ethical and competency standards in accord with peer-reviewed evaluations every five years. The Board was founded in 1964 to promote excellence in genealogical research, teaching, writing, publishing, and librarianship. http://www.bcgcertification.org/

Full disclosure: I am the DNA project administrator of the TSGS TXStateGS project at FTDNA and the president of the Lone Star Chapter of APG. Some expenses related to the TSGS conference may be reimbursed by TSGS or Lone Star Chapter of APG.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

Another Good Reason to be in Boston

In addition to the Boston University, Certificate Program in Genealogical Research, here's another great reason to appreciate living near Boston. The Boston Early American History Seminar is open to the public and free (unless you pay the reasonable fee of $25 to receive advance copies of the papers to be discussed and to support the buffet supper served after meetings). This forum for early American history has several sessions of particular interest to genealogists. Also notable is the interest of these professors in both history and genealogy.

6 December 2011, 5:15 p.m.
Abigail Chandler, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and Ruth Wallis Herndon, Bowling Green State University
Panel Discussion on Colonial Family Law
Comment: Cornelia Hughes Dayton, University of Connecticut

Chandler's faculty page has bare details, but her thesis is online and looks very interesting:

• "At The Magistrate's Discretion: Sexual Crime And New England Law, 1637-1718"

Herndon's faculty page lists several interesting books and projects:

• Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)
• Children Bound to Labor: Pauper Apprenticeship in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2009), co-edited with John E. Murray
• "collaborating with Dr. Ella Wilcox Sekatau, medicine woman, ethnohistorian and genealogist of the Narragansett Tribe, on a project to re-tell New England history using both Euro-American and Narragansett sources"
• "Children of Misfortune: The Fates of Boston’s Poor Apprentices," a study that traces the lives of children bound out from the Boston almshouse in the eighteenth century

6 March 2012, 5:15 p.m.
Karin Wulf, College of William and Mary
Ancestry as Social Practice in Eighteenth-Century New England: The Origins of Early Republic Genealogical Vogue
Comment: Laurel Ulrich, Harvard University

Wulf's faculty page lists several interesting books and projects:

• Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (Penn State, 1997), with Catherine Blecki
• The Diary of Hannah Callender, 1758-1788 (forthcoming), with Susan Klepp
• Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Cornell University Press, 2000)
• a study of the relationship between genealogical practices and political culture: “Lineage: The Politics and Poetics of Genealogy in British America, 1680-1820”

Thanks to Legal History Blog for a heads up on the seminar

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

Texas Genealogy Event, 21 October 2011

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) will host a Genealogy After Dark event on Friday, October 21, from 6:30 p.m. until 12:00 a.m. At the same time, the West Waco Library Genealogy Lock-In will be held. Attendees in Waco will have access to resources in the state library and those in Austin will have access to resources in Waco. The Lone Star Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) will be providing free consultations during the event. A test is now being performed to see if the professional genealogists in one location can offer consultations to attendees in the other location using tools like Skype. It should be an interesting event.

According to this Central Texas Genealogical Society page the event there will include "the traditional training and informational resources of past years. All the computers in the library will access the genealogical sites and there will be ample help from volunteers and staff for research all evening."

You can sign up for e-mail notifications from the Texas State Library at this page to learn about events even before the forms are posted on their website. I attended the Genealogy After Dark event in February and it was wonderful to have access to all of the library and archive resources with one-on-one help available from the librarians and archivists who stayed after hours just to serve the patrons.

For more information on the Lone Star Chapter of APG and chapter events such as the Ancestor Roadshow consultations see this page. The chapter provides the free consultations as a community outreach program to assist researchers in furthering genealogical research.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

Law and Kinship: 1211 vs. 2011

History-Net has a review by Arlene Sindelar (University of British Columbia) of
Sam Worby, Law and Kinship in Thirteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 2010); 198 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-86193-305-1.
The Amazon link is here. A Google search on the book title turns up some other interesting reviews and comments. And I am very thankful for previews on Google Books.

My first response was that this was pricey for my personal library since I haven't traced any ancestors back to medieval England yet. But the reviews and the preview on Google Books make it very enticing. The nearest library with a copy, according to WorldCat, is 120 miles away in a location where I don't have anything else to do. My recent studies have focused on Spanish influences in historical Texas laws. Hmm, maybe reward points will bring this down to a price I can justify because I need to learn more about canon and English common law.

Any book that discusses kinship in this way will likely be useful to genealogists:

Kinship is many-layered. This book will descend through layers from the formal and written to the practised (p. 3)
...
an informal pattern of kinship knowledge existed beneath the laws (p. 4)
...
a way of thinking about and narrating bonds between people in terms of a recognised biological connection or analogy with biological connection. The term 'recognised' is used here because, for example, not all children are biologically related to both of their 'parents' (p. 5)
...
A particularly dangerous term in any exploration of medieval kinship is the word cousin since it can be used both specifically and vaguely to encompass a general sense of relatedness ... Cousin could be used as a word for almost any kinsman, but could also be a term of art (p. 6).

Its sounds like the theories and analysis presented in the book apply to kinship research today as well as in the thirteenth century and all the times in between. Aside from the introduction, conclusion, and a ten page bibliography that will probably cause more items to be added to my book wish list, the chapter and appendix titles are:

Chapter 1: Canon Law Kinship Structures
• Chapter 2: Common Law Kinship Structures
• Chapter 3: The Dominance of Canon Law Kinship Ideas
• Chapter 4: Kinship Laws in Practice
• Chapter 5: Trends Underlying Legal Kinship Structures
• Appendix 1: Raymón of Penyafort's Quia tractare intendimus
• Appendix 2: The historical introduction to Sciendum est
• Appendix 3: Common law adaptations of canon law treatises Quibus modis
• Appendix 4: Common law adaptations of canon law treatises Triplex est

Maybe I'll write a review from a genealogist's point of view after I read the book.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

Lone Star Chapter of APG Meeting, May 6

We have an active chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists here in Texas—named the Lone Star Chapter for reasons obvious to any Texan. Despite the name, our membership includes those in surrounding states where there is no local chapter.

We have several exciting events planned for 2011. Most of our events and meetings are open to guests and visitors. (One event is for chapter members only. Members should get some benefit not available to guests, right?) Our meeting topics and speakers are usually aimed at those who have genealogical businesses or wish to transition to doing research as a professional. Some topics may be of interest to advanced level researchers who aren't interested in starting a business.

Our first public event this year presents Paula Stuart-Warren, CG, and Pat Oxley, President of the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS), discussing "Writing a Winning National Conference Speaker Proposal." This topic is interesting to anyone who might wish to speak at the national level. See our chapter events page for details on this event and other upcoming events.

We encourage everyone who enjoys this presentation, or has an interest in American history, to contribute to a project that is near and dear to the hearts of Paula and Pat. The National Archives and FGS have teamed up on a project to "Preserve the Pensions, War of 1812." Check out the sample pension files on the FGS site. The bicentennial of this war is quickly approaching. With your help the goal of digitizing all the pension files by 1815 can be achieved.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

Texas Tax Rolls - Online Access

Don't you love tax records? Don't you love it when original records are available online? Don't you think you should contribute to the genealogical community by making it easier to find those original records?

Why do I love tax records so much? Taxes were collected every year. Where they still exist, the story of your ancestor's life becomes much more defined than by the facts collected every ten years on a census. Farmers who didn't meet the criteria to be recorded on an agricultural census will probably be listed in the tax rolls. If a courthouse fire burned the deed records, the tax roll may indicate how much land your ancestor owned and its general location. If there's no cemetery or death record for your ancestor, an approximate date of death can sometimes be calculated based on what is and what isn't found in the tax rolls. These are only a few of the ways tax records contribute to understanding our ancestors.

The Texas State Genealogical Society (TSGS) is partnering with FamilySearch to index the "Texas County Tax Rolls, 1837–1910." TSGS's own Scott Fitzgerald is administering the project for FamilySearch Indexing. Project information is available at this shortened URL http://tinyurl.com/3b4ksdr which links to this full URL https://indexing.familysearch.org/projtab/viewProject.jsf?url=USTexas-CountyTaxRolls1837-1910PartA/ProjectHelp1.html. There's even a YouTube video on this project at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm-BHjS1Pg0.

Many of the more than four million images in this project are already available in a browse mode. Browse by going to http://familysearch.org/. Scroll down to "Browse by Location" and click on "USA, Canada, and Mexico." Scroll down to "Texas County Tax Rolls, 1846–1910" and click on "Browse." (Different years are displayed in the two links.) You'll see a list of counties for which the images are online. If the county or page of interest isn't available yet, check back. It is amazing how many new images have been added within the last three weeks.

It's easy to contribute to the project by indexing a few pages each week (or each day). You can sign up as an indexer at http://indexing.familysearch.org/. I did my first batch in less than an hour and this included pages with faded ink that was difficult to read. A small investment of time now will reap big rewards later.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

Educational Sources for Historical Context

You still hear some genealogists bragging about the number of names in their database. It happens less frequently now than a few years ago. Good genealogists are more interested in learning the life story of ancestors than in adding more names to a database with nothing more than birth, marriage, and death dates.

Good genealogists are historians. We focus on history in the micro. Instead of studying history's big picture and bigwigs we want to know about the activities of the little man or woman. What was daily life like for a poor farm family in rural East Texas? What was the work day like for those in the East Texas lumber industry and sawmills? How did a young man meet and marry a young woman who lived more than fifty miles away in the days before he could jump in his Chevy pickup and be at her house in less than an hour?

Knowing more about history in the macro can help us answer those questions. But what if we weren't interested in history all those years ago when we were in school? You might be surprised how the information schoolteachers use today can add life to our family history. In addition to providing fun for students the lesson plans and school field trips might lead to just the information we need to spice up a family narrative. Here are a few examples of places to find that information to bring your family story to life.

Living history museums not only offer exhibits, many demonstrate activities with hands-on participation. In Nacogdoches, Texas, Millard's Crossing offers tours of many period buildings. In addition to seeing the buildings and furnishings, the tourist washes laundry on a scrub board and runs it through a hand-powered wringer before pinning it up on a clothesline, uses a push plow to create a furrow in the soil and plant seeds, shells (not shucks) corn, and writes with a quill pen. Just comparing the trip up the stairs in an 1840s cabin to the stairs in a modern home can bring insight into the daily life of the woman cleaning that cabin or caring for a sick child in the upstairs bedroom.

Books written for the public or children often have photos and give a good overview of a scholarly topic. The Early Settler Life Series: Early Loggers and the Sawmill by Peter Adams (Toronto and New York: Crabtree Publishing Co., 1992) shows how the men worked in the forests and sawmills, how the fallen trees were moved through the forest and down the river, the importance of the support staff that kept the loggers fed, and how both families and single men lived in the logging camps. Historic Communities: Tools and Gadgets by Bobbie Kalman (Toronto and New York: Crabtree Publishing Co., 1992) illustrates tools used by the farmer, his wife, the doctor, the miller, and even the toys the children played with.

Lesson plans written to help teachers can help family historians, too. Government and private projects make this information freely available online, often through universities and state archives. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission has a new online project, Texas in Transition: Railroads, Oil, and the Rise of Urban Texas. In addition to links to historical facts, there are links to great maps.

Need an 1874 map of Texas railroads to see how that young man traveled to meet his future wife? See "Texas New Yorker's Railroad Map of Texas," published 1874; Texas State Archives Map Number 0945, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin; digital image, Texas State Archives Map Collection ( http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/exhibits/railroad/beginnings/map0945-display.html : accessed 12 April 2011).

Need an 1891 map of Dallas to determine the distance between the homes of two ancestors? How about this one linked from the section about the growth of Dallas: Theodore Schauseil, cartographer, "Revised Edition of Murphy and Bolanz Official Map of the City of Dallas and Suburbs/1891" (Publisher: J.P. Murphy and Charles Bolanz, Real Estate Brokers and Investment Bankers, Dallas, 1891); Texas State Archives Map Number 2346, Texas State Library and Archives Commission; Texas State Archives Map Collection ( http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/cgibin/aris/maps/maplookup.php?mapnum=2346 : accessed 12 April 2011).

These are only a few of the resources to help understand the lives of our ancestors. Be creative when looking for information. It isn't just the scholarly publications by learned historians that can give you what you need to write a great story.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved