Eureka - I think I found it! Part II

In part one, I reviewed what I thought I knew about Harry Hughes and described my renewed effort to find out more about him. I grumbled that the answers I was finding were creating more questions. I resolved to review the information I had in my files.

Harry Hughes draft card 1918²

The first evidence that he was in Minnesota came from the I.O.O.F. Grand Lodge of Minnesota in St. Paul in the form of a letter included in his railroad retirement file. The letter was dated 22 Nov 1944 but indicated that he was inducted into the I.O.O.F. at Breckenridge, MN on 21 May 1906.1

In Harry's 1918 WWI draft registration card he gave his name as Harry Hughes with the middle name field blank. He gave his age as 43, born Dec 31, 1874, in England (Chester). He was a declared alien. His wife was Anna Hughes and he was a laborer at the [illegible] Bros Mfg Co. on 10th Ave SE. His physical description on the backside of the card is as follows:

Height: Tall
Build: Stout
Color of Eyes: Brown
Color of Hair: Dark

Harry Hughes Alien Registration 1940 ³

Harry's 1940 Alien Registration form reveals similar information.

His name is Harry [None] Hughes and he entered the United States as Harry Hughes. He was born 31 Dec 1874 at Chester, Chester [sic], England. He is a citizen of Great Britain. He entered the United States on 1 July 1892 at Niagara Falls, NY on foot.

I only show a partial record at left. But it goes on to state that Harry had been in the United States for 48 years and expected to remain permanently. He was a freight handler for the Soo Line Railroad. He was a member of the Brotherhood of Railroad Clerks. He had a wife and four children in the United States but no parents. He had not been arrested in the previous five years and he had not affiliated with any organization that furthered the political or public policy of a foreign government. His signature looks almost identical to the one on the draft registration above.

Railroad Employee Statement 1944⁴

Harry's Railroad Retirement Board Employee's State of Compensated Service had similar information. Harry gave his name as Harry [None] Hughes. He was born on 31 December 1874 in Chester, Cheshire, England. His father's name was Samuel Hughes and his mother's name was unknown. He was a freight handler for the Soo Railroad from July 1920 to October 1944. He give his wife's name as Anna [none] Kline. Only a small section of the file is shown at right.

Harry Hughes death certificate 1957⁵

Also included in the Railroad Retirement file was Harry's death certificate. The informant was Mrs. Howard Tenney who state that the deceased's name was Harry P. Hughes, he was born 31 Dec 1874 in England and was still a citizen of England.

His father's name was Samuel Hughes and his mother's name was unknown. His spouse's name was Anna Kline Hughes.

He was a resident of Valley View Rest Home when he died and had been there for 46 days. My husband remembers visiting him there but also remembers visiting him at an I.O.O.F. home near Northfield, MN.

Harry Hughes obituary ⁶

The obituary for Harry Hughes doesn't give any additional information about the past life of Harry Hughes. Like his death certificate, his name is listed as Harry P. Hughes. It lists his four children and mentions he has 7 grandchildren.



Questions to follow up on:
Does the I.O.O.F. have records available that would give more information about Harry's whereabouts before he married in 1916?
Would the I.O.O.F. have information about his time in the rest home in Northfield, MN?
Would his marriage license give more information about his life before marriage?
Does the Brotherhood of Railroad Clerks have archival information that would give additional information?
Why didn't Harry use a middle name when his daughter insisted he had one: "Percy"?
Where was Harry before he entered the United States in July of 1892?
Where in the U.S. was Harry between 1892 and 1916 when he married his wife, Anna Kline?

Do you see what I mean about more questions!

1.  Hughes, Harry. Pension file. Social Security no. 701-05-4003, 1944. Records of the Railroad Retirement Board, Chicago, IL.

2. "United States World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-818N-4YL?cc=1968530&wc=9FZ7-4WL%3A928311201%2C928497801 : accessed 19 Mar 2020), card for Harry Hughes, Minnesota > Hennepin County; D-V > image 1757 of 6042; citing NARA microfilm publication M1509 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.).

3. Hughes, Harry. Pension file. Social Security no. 701-05-4003, 1944. Records of the Railroad Retirement Board, Chicago, IL.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid; Minnesota Department of Vital Statistics, death certificate no. 006344 (1957), Harry P. Hughes; Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul.

6. Obituary of Harry P Hughes (d. 15 Jan 1957), Minneapolis (Minnesota) Star, 16 Jan 1957, p. 7D. Cp;/ 1; image copy, Newspapers.com (https://mewspapers.com: downloaded 13 Jun 2019).

Eureka - I think I found it! Part I

Eureka! I think I found the answer! But sometimes the answers leave you with more questions. My 30-year-old brick wall is a case in point:

Harry Hughes

Harry Hughes was born 31 Dec 1874 in Chester, Cheshire, England. His father’s name was Samuel. When Harry was still young, he left England with his father and went to Canada. Harry crossed the border to the U.S. at Niagara on foot in July 1891 or 1892. I’m not sure how much time was spent in Canada nor am I positive he traveled with Samuel. But the rest of the above information is fairly consistent across records including alien registrations, WWI draft registration, IOOF membership, railroad pension documents, and death certificate.

The first census record I can find for him is in 1920 in Hennepin County, Minnesota, after he married my husband’s grandmother, Anna Kline. I can’t find any record of a Harry with father Samuel in England. The Harry Hughes(es) that I have found online had different fathers and seemed to have stayed in England.

Harry's father, Samuel

I queried my mother-in-law extensively prior to her death several years ago and she claimed to not know very much. She said that she was named for him (Harriet Priscilla) and that his name was Harry Percy Hughes. But he always entered “None” in the middle name field or left it blank when he filled out forms. She also said he was either born in England or Wales. I can see that Chester is very close to Wales. She also thought he might have worked “out east” for some years.

His father, Samuel’s death certificate has no helpful information, nor does his own. Harry’s mother’s name isn’t even on Harry's death certificate. So who the heck is this guy and where is he from?

Harry's wife, Anna Kline

I turned to DNA for some help. One of my husband's first cousins tested so I started with their shared match list. I then needed to eliminate all the matches that were related through Anna Kline's line. This was relatively easy as Anna Kline was 100% Icelandic, born just a couple of years after her parents arrived in Minnesota from Iceland. Anna Kline may not sound like an Icelandic name but the entire family adopted the last name Kline after arriving in Minnesota and she used Anna instead of her birth name.

Just to give an idea of the number of matches I was working with, my husband has over 50,000 matches on Ancestry. He shared only 54 4th-cousin or closer matches with his first cousin. Of those, only 7 could be identified as probably coming from the Harry Hughes line.

Using the shared matches feature with those 7, I was able to add some more distant matches to the group which I colored coded using Ancestry's group system. Once I added matches to the group, I chose just that group from the Group drop-down menu to limit my view to just those matches. At that point, the URL showed the group number as the last four characters of the URL.

I then used geneticaffairs.com auto-clustering and chose to use the group number from Ancestry. I extended the clusters and also asked for family trees, using cM thresholds of 250 cM and 9 cM. A total number of 24 matches were identified that were used for an AutoCluster analysis.

My Q & D Match Trees

The results were interesting. As it turned out, geneticaffairs.com tree feature wasn't helpful in this case as not many of the matches had enough information for the program to create a shared tree. So I created trees manually. There were several matches with individual online trees, some very small, but enough to start building a quick and dirty (Q&D) tree. I created a tree called Hughes Research Tree and using Ancestry I used their hints to build those trees back into the mid-18th century. I added siblings and others when possible as they might be the actual link I need.

Ancestry doesn't make it easy to create separate trees in one research tree but it is possible. I wanted them in one place so I could look at the combined list of all people. I could examine the list for duplicate people or surnames that pop up in more than one tree. I also printed the trees out and hung them up so that I could look at them all at once.

One thing I noticed with Ancestry's tree printing is that it prints the birth, marriage and death dates AND locations for everyone. This was very helpful for me. When viewing the online tree you don't see the locations unless you click on each person. I highlighted the people on the printed trees who had locations of Cheshire or Lancashire, England.

Interestingly, the matches that were the most helpful came from Australia. One tree looked quite promising but it was private. I reached out to the tree owner and she was very helpful in quickly giving me the information I needed to construct that part of the tree.

I had a few surnames that matched across a couple of trees but the names weren't yet meaningful to me. The name Hughes popped up on two trees but it is such a common name in that area that I didn't want to put too much weight on that.

So nothing jumped out at me yet but I felt like I was getting closer and now at least I had names in front of me. What to do next? I could spend more time working on the match trees. I could revisit the searches I made in the past at Ancestry.com, Findmypast.com, and FamilySearch.org. But I opted to step back and review my file of "Possible Hughes Connections."

There's something to be said for reviewing information in your files. You never know what might jump out at you when you have new information. What could possibly be in those files that might shed new light on this old problem?




Photos in collection of author.

Preparing for SLIG 2020: Part 4

In the previous posts of this "Preparing for SLIG 2020" series,  I discussed finding resources to help me develop a base knowledge for the course I am taking at SLIG: Early U.S. Church Records,  coordinated by Rev. David McDonald, DMin, CG. I have been fairly successful in finding print resources on many topics related to religion in the early United States. You can see my previous post here.

Last June I prepared for an Advanced DNA course at GRIP by reviewing many videos and webinars on DNA topics and tools. You can see the links to those blog posts and the results of my preparations here. I have not been as successful in finding videos and webinars on religion and church records. However, I did find several.

Ancestry Academy has a variety of videos on genealogical research. In one video, the SLIG 2020 course coordinator, Rev. David McDonald, DMin, CG, discusses "Church & Religious Records: Their Use in Genealogical Research." A search for the term "church" at Ancestry Academy results in a list of 40+ other videos that discuss church records as part of a larger topic. For example, a video on vital records is in the results, which makes sense since church records can provide a great substitute for local and state vital records. Ancestry Academy is free with an Ancestry login; I don't believe you need to have a paid membership, just a login.

One of my favorite webinar resources, FamilyTreeWebinars, now has over 1000 webinars on genealogical topics. There is an annual fee of $49.95, discounts are available most weeks with codes made available from the free live webinars. Most webinars are free for 7 days after their live debut so discount codes can be seen on most recent videos.

Using the search terms, "church" and "register" separately, I found 12 webinars. Since all webinars are older than 7 days, you will need a subscription to view them but the links allow you to read about them and see a preview.
Finding Your Roots in Catholic Records, presented by Lisa Toth Salinas

Foundations of Irish Genealogy 4 of 6: The Major Records III, Church Records, presented by John Grenham 

England and Wales - Rummaging in the Parish Chests, presented by Kirsty Gray

Zigzagging through German Church Records, presented by James Beidler

Using Church Records to Identify Ancestors, presented by Mary Hill, AG

The Three Cs of Irish Research: Civil Registration, Church Records, and Census, present by Judith Eccles Wight, AG

Online Resources for French Genealogy part I: Compiled Records, Church Records and Civil Registration, presented by Paul Woodbury

Ohio and the Early Gathering of the LDS Church, presented by Peggy Clemens Lauritzen, AG

Locating and Accessing Eastern European Church Records, presented by Lisa Alzo

Irish Church and Civil Registration, presented by Maurice Gleeson

Introduction to the Swedish Church Books, presented by Kathy Meade

Quebec Civil and Parish Registers, presented by Micheal J. Leclerc, CG

You'll note that several of the above webinars do not seem to pertain to US records. The reason that I included them is that I found the Norwegian parish registers that were online before their American Lutheran counterparts, were very similar to the U.S. versions. In fact, most of the late 19th century and early 20th century U.S. church records that I found for my Norwegian ancestors, were in their mother tongue. I am assuming that similarities also follow for other country and religious origins.

From RootsTech videos - free online:

Finally! German Church Records and How to Use Them on FamilySearch, presented by Trish Melander

Unlocking Roman Catholic Records: presented by Brian Donovan

Cross the Atlantic with Religious Records, presented by Jen Baldwin

From FamilySearch.org - Many videos free online with free registration and login
Links to videos available with search term, "church records."

Many state and national genealogical societies also host their own webinars. These are a few I found at societies where I have a membership. Webinar links are not included as membership is a requirement. I have included links to the societies' homepages.

Illinois State Genealogical Society

Online German Church Registers, Duplicates and Substitutes, presented by James M. Beidler

Southern California Genealogical Society

Translating Latin Records of German (and other) Catholic Churches, presented by Jean Wilcox Hibben, PhD, MA

Faith of Our Fathers: United States Church Records, presented by Peggy Clemens Lauritzen, AG

Another source for finding vidoes is YouTube. Here is a link to the results when searching for "genealogy and church records." When choosing a YouTube video, pay attention to the speaker's name or organization presenting the webinar. Choose those with names that are recognized as reputable speakers and organizations.

A wonderful source to review for upcoming webinars is GeneaWebinars. Our "friend in genealogy," Dear Myrtle, has created this calendar for speakers and organizations to contribute information regarding their future webinars.

While creating this list, I realized there are many more webinars and videos available than I thought. I have a lot of webinar viewing to do ahead of me! If you know of other can't-miss webinars on early U.S. church records, please provide the information and link in the comments section below.

Preparing for SLIG 2020: Part 3

Having determined that I need to expand my base knowledge of religion in early America in order to get the most of my SLIG 2020 class, "Early US Church Records", I started exploring what resources might be available to me.

When I followed this approach for my Advanced DNA class last summer, I was very successful in finding a number of resources. There were many videos, books, blogs, and tools available.  You can see my blogging on that topic here. (Click on the links within the blog to see the earlier postings with links.) While the topic of "Early American Religion" seems very broad, there were far fewer resources that were obviously available. It's quite possible my search terms are lacking but I don't see many videos, blogs or tools. I am able to find a large number of books.

A listing of the books available in the
"Religion in American Life" series.

Archive.org has books online which, even though still under copyright, can be checked out for free. You do need to create an account. I found a series called "Religion in American Life,"1 which has several books, each concentrating on a specific religion. I decided to concentrate on the religions I knew were followed by my ancestors and the general topics of "religion in colonial America" and "religion in 19th century America." I found a review of the series in a theological journal online which gave me some assurance that the series would be helpful.2

Because I am always trying to build my home library, I found a number of these books online at abebooks.com and purchased them to add to my library. They were very inexpensive with free shipping and will help me build my base knowledge.

Very recently released was a new book by Harold A. Henderson, CG and Sunny Jane Morton entitled, "How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records: A Genealogist's Guide: With Specific Resources for Major Christian Denominations before 1900."3 It is available at Amazon and other markets.

I now have quite a bit of reading material to help me grow my basic understanding of the religions in early America. It's a good thing I love reading!

¹Butler, Jon and Harry S. Stout, editors, Religion in American Life, 17 vols. (New York: Oxford. 2000).

³Luke L. Keefer, Jr., “American Religion: A Review Article of the Series Religion in American Life,” Ashland Theological Journal 35 (2003): 87-96; image copy, biblicalstudies.org.uk. (https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/ashland_theological_journal/35-1_087.pdf : accessed 24 September 2015).

³Morton, Sunny Jane, and Harold A. Henderson. 2019. How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records: A Genealogist's Guide ( n.p., Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc. 2019)

Preparing for SLIG 2020: Part 2

SLIG 2020! ¹

As I started planning my preparations as a learner in the Early US Church Records course at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG) next January, I took a step back and started thinking about what kinds of records I might already be familiar with.

I quickly realized my knowledge of religious record types is very limited. I am somewhat familiar with the Norwegian Lutheran church records from the early settlements in the states of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Iowa. I have found hundreds of baptismal, confirmation, marriage and death records from churches in those areas.

Two sources have been especially helpful for me in finding the churches where my Norwegian Lutheran ancestors may have attended.

Map of church congregation growth in Brookings Co., South Dakota ²

The first source is a two-volume set called, "Norske Lutherske Menigheter i Amerika, 1843-1916."3 It is a listing of Norwegian Lutheran churches by state and county. It is in Norwegian but it is possible to glean a lot of information from it. For example, there is often a map drawing showing when churches split it two, perhaps due to size and location, and when they merged, for probably the same reasons.

Lake Sinai, Brookings Co, SD ⁴

Frequently, the description of each church includes the pastors and dates they served, the building date, any rebuilds due to fire or other destruction, founding members, and a photo of the church. The entry for the Lake Sinai church at right includes the founding members, among them is my great-grandfather, Ole Eken.

The two volumes are available as free digital downloads.  I found Volume 1 at Archive.org and Volume 2 at Google Books.

The second source is a book of Norwegian Lutheran ministers, "Norsk Lutherske Prester i Amerika, 1843-1915."5 If you know the minister's name, perhaps from a marriage license or signed certificate, you could look him up in this book to see where he might have served. It was quite common for a minister to have served in several churches at once which can complicate look-ups. But often, the same record book was used for all churches served and the church name was indicated in each record or record-set.

Anders Nilsen Stover ⁶

This book can also be found at Google Books here.

I was lucky enough to find a photo of my great-great-grandfather's brother, Anders Nilsen Stover (listed in the index as Nilsen, Anders), who served in several churches in eastern South Dakota. The information included indicates he was born 13 Sept. 1842 to Niels Olsen and Kari Knudsen, was ordained in 1883 and served in Watertown, SD from 1883 - 1892. He died 25 Nov. 1892. His wife was Magnild Olsen.

I've learned in going through some of the early Norwegian Lutheran Church records that in addition to baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and deaths, the church sometimes took a "census" of church members. If you can find one with your ancestors, you are really in luck. I found two with my great-great-grandfather's family, Knud Nilsen Stover and his wife, Guri Kristoffersdottir.

The information included in the "census" can contain birth and baptism dates and locations, confirmation date, date the family transferred to another church,  and even the maiden name of the wife. The record below shows my great-great-grandfather, Knud Nilson Stover, his wife Guri Kristoffersdatter, and their children Nicolai, Kari, Kjersti, Anna, Karl, Maria, and Mina. The first column with dates is the birth date for that person, the next column is birth location: either Norway or America, the next column with dates is the baptismal dates of two of the younger children and the last column shows when they left the church to join a new church closer to home.

Church family census information for Knud Nilsen Stover7

Knowing which church your ancestors attended can be very helpful when searching for the records. Many record sets are online at Ancestry.com and can be found here. The title of the collection is "U.S., Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Church Records, 1781-1969."8 While it doesn't contain all Lutheran Church records, I've found hundreds of records for my extended family.  The two-volume set previously mentioned can help you find the state and county the church was in. Ancestry allows you to search the set globally for your ancestor or to browse the set by searching for the church by state and county. Once I have found the correct church, I personally prefer to browse to the church and to page through the book online rather than search globally. The records are handwritten and so the indexing isn't perfect.

You can tell I like the resources that I use for my Norwegian Lutheran ancestry. And that's why I need to learn about other resources from other religions. I have identified the religious preferences of many of my other ancestors. I've found Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Latter-Day Saints, and others. I need to find out what types of records may have been created and where I might be able to find them.

1. Facebook SLIG Attendee Group image, used with permission. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php fbid=10214455937699943&set=oa.2100166473624041&type=3&theater&ifg=1. Accessed 30 August 2019.

2. Norlie, Olaf Morgan, et al. Norske Lutherske Menigheter i Amerika, 1843-1916. Augsburg, 1918. Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/norskelutherske00tologoog/. Accessed 30 August 2019.

3. Ibid., p. 926. 

4. Ibid., p. 930.

5. Norlie, Olaf Morgan, et al. Norske Lutherske prester i Amerika, 1843-1913. Augsburg, 1915. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=7VhHAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Norsk+Lutherske+Prester+i+Amerika&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_tpbK8arkAhXBY98KHbS-Dv4Q6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=nilsen&f=false. Accessed 30 August 2019.

6. Ibid., p. 197.

7. Singsaas Lutheran Church (Lincoln, Minnesota). Church Registers, 1874 - 1923, page 79, Knut Nilsen Stover and Guri Christoffersdatter; digital images. ancestry.com: U.S., Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Church Records, 1781-1969: accessed 30 August 2019.

8. Ancestry.com: U.S., Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Church Records, 1781-1969: accessed 30 August 2019.

Preparing for SLIG 2020: Part 1

I had great success by strategically preparing for the Advanced DNA Evidence course at Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP) in June 2019, coordinated by Blaine Bettinger. You can read about it by checking out my last blog post of the series here. I spent a lot of time, not only reviewing books and webinars but also searching for other resources recommended by Blaine and other prominent speakers in the genetic genealogy field. I also practiced using the DNA tools available. Many tools were new in early 2019. I feel that preparing in this way helped me to get the most out of the class.

I have now signed up for the 2020 Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG) course called Early US Church Records, coordinated by Rev. David McDonald, DMin, CG. And I am thinking that I should create a similar process to prepare myself for this SLIG course. I have done a lot of researching in Lutheran church records, both in Norway and in the US, but I'm not very practiced in any other religion records types. Which is why I need to take this course! I like to have a base knowledge before I take a class as it allows me to gather and retain more information than if I went into it cold.

I will be posting links to videos available online that I hope will help me get more understanding out of this course. I will also post links to books and articles that I find useful. Hopefully, I will have the same success using this process for SLIG 2020 as I did for GRIP 2019.

It might seem a little early to start preparing for a class that doesn't start until January of 2020 but I am taking two other online courses in the interim. I'm going to need to spread out my preparation time over many months to get it done. If you are aware of other resources that might be helpful in preparing for Early US Church Records, I would love to hear about it!

GRIP 2019! I Did It! (And a Big Thank You to AncestryProGenealogists!)

The week of June 23 - June 28 at the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP) absolutely flew by. The course I attended, Advanced DNA Evidence, was coordinated by Blaine Bettinger, Ph.D., J.D., and instructed by Blaine, Angie Bush and Karen Stanbary, CG. 

There were some prerequisites for this course: a prior week-long DNA course from an institute, a multiple week online course with homework, AND/OR familiarity with DNA evidence combined with experience with multiple testing companies,  study of the books The Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy and Genetic Genealogy in Practice (Blaine T. Bettinger and Debbie Parker Wayne) as well as completion of the exercises in Genetic Genealogy in Practice.

If you've looked at my recent posts, you know that I spent considerable time preparing for the course. The links to the posts are below and each describes videos, books, and tools I used to review and to prepare myself for the course.

Oh My Gosh, I Won a Scholarship!

Preparing for GRIP 2019: Part 1

Preparing for GRIP 2019: Part 2

Preparing for GRIP 2019: Part 3

Preparing for GRIP 2019: Part 4

Preparing for GRIP 2019: Part 5

Preparing for GRIP 2019: Part 6

GRIP 2019 is Almost Here!

So, did all my preparation and review pay off? I'm very happy to report that it did! The course description gives a list of lecture topics which covered:

• Y-DNA
• mtDNA
• X-DNA
• Autosomal DNA
• DNA company tools
• DNA 3rd-party tools
• Evaluating a genealogical conclusion using DNA evidence
• Using Shared Matching
• Chromosome mapping and painting
• Advanced chromosome mapping
• Visual phasing
• Literature review of DNA evidence in case studies
• Ethical and legal considerations
• Future of genetic genealogy

Each day ended in with a case study and optional homework, each day's information building on the last. The final day, we went over the case study to see how we fared with our homework.

I need to express my sincere thanks to AncestryProGenealogists who selected me as the scholarship winner for the GRIP Institute. It was an absolutely wonderful experience. I learned from some of the best in the field. My classmates had a variety of genealogical talents and experiences and I learned from them as well. Thank you, AncestryProGenealogists!