Using Your Senses along with the Census

24 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by My Blooming Family Tree in Genealogy

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1850 US census, Booth family history, family tree, Thomas John Baber

US Census information in general provides basic data points useful for tracing an ancestor, but the 1850 census is particularly beloved in genealogy land. Before 1850, the head of the household was the only name recorded in the census. The other household members were counted and reported as total numbers of males and females in different categories, such as Free White Persons, Slaves, and Free Colored Persons [Figure 1].

In 1850, the veil is pulled back to reveal more names, including wives, children, laborers, and boarders. Slaves, however, were moved to separate Slave Schedules and, sadly, remained nameless [Figure 2].

Using the 1840 and 1850 censuses as my primary sources, I traced my 3rd great-grandfather Thomas John Baber. Many researchers, myself included, had mistaken him for another person with a similar name—Thomas G Baber, but the census will prove their separateness and help reveal their relationship to each other.

Thomas John in the 1840 census

We find Thomas Baber in the 1840 census in Scott, Montgomery County, Indiana with the number of people in his household tallied as follows:

ThomasBaber-in-1840Census

Figure 1 Thomas Baber in the 1840 US Census

Trying to identify the household members if they aren’t listed in the census is a chore on its own. If you succeed at that, it takes even more effort to see if the household members you’ve found line up with the categories tallied in the census.

Thomas John in the 1850 US census

See the difference in information available for Thomas John just ten years later in the 1850 census:

Thomas Baber in 1850 census

Figure 2 Thomas Baber in the 1850 US Census

Connecting Thomas John in the 1840 and the 1850 censuses

With the information about Thomas John from the 1850 census, I could analyze the 1840 census to see if the two censuses make sense together. Note that between 1840 and 1850 the Baber household had a net loss of one daughter, Emily, due to marriage and net gain of one son, William, born in 1843.

For the analysis, I created a table in which the first two columns contain the tallies from the 1840 census. In the third column, I recorded each person who would have been living in the Baber household in 1840, placing each one in the appropriate category. I was relieved to find that I had accounted for everyone and had the right number of people in each category.

1840 US Census		Household members in each category
Name	Thomas Baber
Home in 1840 (City, County, State)	Scott, Montgomery, Indiana
Free White Persons – Males – Under 5	1	John T
Free White Persons – Males – 5 thru 9	1	Burgess
Free White Persons – Males – 30 thru 39	1	Thomas John (father)
Free White Persons – Females – Under 5	1	Susan Elizabeth
Free White Persons – Females –5 thru 9	1	Sophia Ann
Free White Persons – Females –10 thru 14	1	Emily
Free White Persons – Females –20 thru 29	1	Elizabeth (mother)
Persons Employed in Agriculture	1
No. White Persons over 20 Who Cannot Read and Write	1
Free White Persons Under 20	5
Free White Persons 20 thru 49	2
Total Free White Persons	7
Total All Persons – Free White, Free Colored, Slaves	7

Feeling sure about my Thomas

When I found my Thomas John in the 1850 census, I felt confident I had the right guy for several reasons.

Thomas John was born in Kentucky in 1810 (1806 according to his grave marker).
He lived in Montgomery County, Indiana in 1850, a plausible migration route for a man who died in Polk County, Iowa six years later. (Thomas G lived in western Missouri in 1850.)
He lived with his wife Elizabeth (Rogers) whom he had married in Clark County, Kentucky in 1828.
The five children living with Thomas John and Elizabeth included Susan Elizabeth Baber—my 2^nd great-grandmother!!

What about Thomas G Baber, then?

Thomas G is more elusive than Thomas John, but he is in the 1850 census and other records.

Thomas G was born in Kentucky in 1819.
He lived in Platte County, Missouri in 1850.
In 1850 he lived with Isham Baber, his father, who had purchased property in Clinton County, Missouri as early as 1820. (Platte and Clinton counties share a small border in the northeast corner of Platte and SW corner of Clinton.)
His mother Elizabeth Gordon was not in the census, although an Elizabeth in the correct age range is in the 1860 census with Isham
A 7-year old girl named Margaretta (Marietta?) was listed in the household. I later verified that she was Thomas G’s daughter. Further, his wife was not listed because his marriage to Faith Ann Martin ended in divorce when she abandoned the family around 1848.

Making connections

Clearly, I had followed the wrong census when I added Thomas John to my tree as the son of Isham. But if not Isham, who was Thomas John’s father?

The sum of my research from the census and other sources revealed that even though Thomas John and Thomas G were different people, they were related. They were 1^st cousins once removed! They both descended from Thomas W Baber (1720-1778) and Elizabeth Lawson (1719-1778) as thus:

Thomas John Baber Ancestry Match blog minimal with dates

Filling in their backgrounds, Thomas W Baber and Elizabeth Lawson were born in Old Rappahannock/Richmond County, Virginia and moved to Fluvanna County, Virginia sometime after 1740. Four of their sons—Thomas, Stanley, Obadiah, and John moved around 1786 to a part of Virginia that later became the state of Kentucky.

My 4^th great-grandfather, the father of Thomas John, was Stanley Baber!
Obadiah had a son Isham who was the father of Thomas G Baber.
Stanley and Obadiah both died in Kentucky.

Details, details

I have saved many records in my family tree for anyone with interest in all the details, but my focus here was primarily about using the census to make the most of your valuable research time. It’s also fine to take advantage of research others are willing to share, but it pays to verify source information before you charge off adding people to your tree who may or may not belong there.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

My mother had a favorite saying about politicians. You’ve probably heard it before: One guy lies and another swears to it. It can work that way in genealogy, but not usually with malicious intent. Doing genealogy is a process of learning that continues as long as you continue to work at it. Correcting my old mistakes is now part of my process.

I also want to mention the wonderful Baber Family Tree website for its detailed descendant lists of so many Babers and for the additional documents and details they provide.

What’s next?

Now, as if it wasn’t bad enough to have had been so wrong about Thomas John, I could hardly believe it when I realized I had also gotten his wife, Elizabeth Rogers, my 3^rd great-grandmother, quite wrong as well. If you take another peek at the 1850 census for Thomas, you will find a son named Burgess. He will be helpful when I talk about Elizabeth in my next post.

These aren’t the Babers you’re looking for

13 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by My Blooming Family Tree in Genealogy, Uncategorized

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Baber, Booth family history, Chew Magna, Sir Edward Baber, Susan Elizabeth Baber

How many Babers have you met in your life? I can’t think of a single one. Very odd considering that Babers were among the earliest settlers of this country. Their progeny thrived and migrated with so many others from Kentucky and Virginia to the fertile farm lands of the Midwest. As it turns out, the farms surrounding Des Moines, Iowa where I grew up abounded with Babers.

And so it came as a surprise that my 2^nd great-grandmother was a Baber. Susan Elizabeth Baber was my dad’s mother’s mother’s mother.

2016-04-12_16-30-02

Susan was born in Indiana in 1840. She married David Morgan Ballard in Indiana in October of 1857, and by 1860 they had already relocated to Marion County, Iowa. They weren’t the only ones. The decade ending in 1860 was a time of explosive growth in Iowa’s population averaging an increase of 48,000 immigrants per year[1].

The paper trail for Susan goes back as far as my 5^th great–grandparents, Thomas W Baber and Elizabeth Lawson from Old Rappahannock County in Virginia. But where did they come from?

Many researchers believed that the progenitor of all the colonial Babers was Robert Baber[2], familiarly known as “Robert the Immigrant.” Robert was 28 years old in 1679 when he arrived in Virginia from Somerset, England. Robert’s line has been traced to the Babers of Chew Magna[3], a village in Somerset, England, where Sir Edward Baber, Robert’s great grandfather, is entombed in St. Andrew’s Churchyard[4].

Many of the trees on Ancestry.com connect their colonial Babers to Robert the Immigrant. Until very recently, mine did as well. Recent DNA testing, however, has proven it is not true.

One type of DNA test identifies the direct male ancestral line by analyzing just the Y chromosome[5]. Only males have the Y chromosome. It’s what makes them males. The convenient thing about the Y chromosome is that it doesn’t often mutate so it’s reliable for many generations.

Thanks to the male Baber descendants who were tested, we now know the DNA markers that identify descendants of Robert the immigrant and know that they tie those descendants to the Chew Magna Babers. We also know that other Babers who were tested, including the Babers in my line, do not match Robert. Their origin is still unknown.

I wasn’t all that shocked that Robert was not the Baber I was looking for. I’ve created a couple other lineages based on other trees on Ancestry.com that did not hold up to scrutiny, either. At least I had not carried this line back to the Middle Ages like I have others. Oh, the agony of delete.

But it serves as a good reminder to check the Y DNA tests for ancestors other than your direct paternal line. If it’s your lucky day, you’ll get an answer that will either extend your line or keep you from wasting time on it.

The bigger surprise came when a strange clue added to a nagging doubt about Susan’s parents, my 3^rd great grandparents, Thomas John Baber and Elizabeth Rogers. Now it looks as if their paper trails lead in different directions than the ones that I, and the majority of Ancestry trees, had given them. Now I’ve sorted it out, and I will write about that next.

[1] THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF IOWA: 1833 to 1860

[2] Descendants of John Baber, England

[3] Edward Baber’s London Home. 1611

[4] Sir Edward Baber

[5] Richard Hill’s Guide to DNA Testing (p 15)

Trust me

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by My Blooming Family Tree in Genealogy

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Ancestry.com, Booth family history, Genealogy, genetic genealogy, NPE

I know the competition for your attention is fierce. How many Facebook notifications came in even as you read this sentence? Should you keep reading or return to the familiar world of cat videos and political memes? To get you to hang with me, I need to convince you that I have some amount of cred.

First off, I am not a professional genealogist. I am an amateur although a serious one. Since my early days of freely copying ancestors from other trees, I’ve learned the value of starting from a well-documented base and working back from it. I now understand the relative importance that different types of evidence provide. And painfully, I know that using DNA to find your ancestors is not usually the easy breezy task that Ancestry.com makes it appear in its commercials.

Symmetry

Paper trails are absolutely wonderful, but few trees are perfectly documented generation-by-generation back to antiquity. And even then, the perfect paper trail may not reflect the actual genetic trail. For just about forever now humans have been ineptly practicing monogamy and celibacy before marriage. Those human activities can result in non-paternity events (NPEs). Some of these NPEs are known ahead of time, but others come as surprises.

Genetic testing has made NPEs more apparent while providing tools for resolving them. For me, the fun starts here. Some tools are quite sophisticated. One of the most basic, known as fishing, is about baiting your tree to catch ancestors in your DNA matches net. Sometimes the right fish takes the bait, but beware the scrod when you were casting for cod.

While this preliminary talk may sound dull and boring, it will become more lively in following topics as the research yields surprises, validates some ancestors, but releases impostors back to await the lure of another researcher’s hook.

My general disclaimer is that I am as accurate as I can be at any moment given the amount of information available and the knowledge I have to analyze it. I reserve the right to modify my conclusions due to changes in either of those variables.

So that’s my pitch for your attention. If it worked, please be sure to click the Follow button to be notified of updates to My Blooming Family Tree.

Are you related to…?

19 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by My Blooming Family Tree in Genealogy, Uncategorized

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Booth family history, family tree, Genealogy, James Ami Booth

Being asked, “Are you related to that guy?” so often in my childhood surely sparked my initial interest in genealogy. But answering the most logical follow-up question has been even more challenging: If I’m not related through him, then who were my paternal ancestors?

My dad’s family line always carried an air of mystery and uncertainty about our surname. There were the rumors and theories, the various versions of family lore discussed within the extended family about “the problem” with my dad’s lineage. The storyline as I remember it went like this: At some unspecified previous generation, specifically in Alsace-Lorraine, a paternal ancestor had been adopted. At which point, we would have had a switch of surnames.

As it turns out, the possible break in our family line hit a lot closer to home. My great grandfather James Ami was born in Iowa on April 2, 1855. His mother, Sarah Berry, was single and remained single for four more years. In 1859 she married the man who provided a surname for James and his prolific progeny, including me. But is that all he contributed?

GrandmaAndGrandpaUnreadable-with-BoothDaleWendellAndHazel-2-MBFT-story2

My grandma Hazel, dad Wendell, grandpa Dale, great grandma Elizabeth, Lelia, and great grandpa James Ami Booth

Descendants of James Ami are divided about whether Benjamin Franklin Booth (BF) was actually James’ father. Some insist that BF visited his brother who had relocated to Iowa, met Sarah while there, and that thing that makes babies happened between them. Other’s are equally convinced that BF was not James’ father, and they have their reasons, too. My family group is among the latter.

With the information and tools available last century, that was it. We had a short paper trail that didn’t yield an indisputable answer, so we accepted that we would never know how far back our surname was valid.

As to answering the are-you-related-to question, during my school years I learned that famous, even infamous, people have biographies. I found the answer. But back in the 1960s, when questions of legitimacy were only whispered about, my bold and honest response to that question would often produce a shocked look on the face of my school-aged inquisitors: “No, I am not related to him unless it was illegitimately because he was never married and had no known children.” No apologies.

Thus, I could finally deny any link to the assassin who took the life of President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater on April 15, 1865. The assassin’s name is well known; I need not mention it.

The answer to the second question still remains elusive despite much research and countless hours analyzing and comparing DNA tests. I continue to search, and I hope that DNA tests will eventually provide the unequivocal truth. Whether it is someone on the current suspect list, including Sarah’s husband BF, or someone as yet unknown, I remain open. I just want to know the truth if it is possible to find it.