Elevenses with Lisa Episode 20 Video and Show Notes
Live show air date: August 13, 2020
Join me for Elevenses with Lisa, the online video series where we take a break, visit and learn about genealogy and family history. (Please note: the sound temporarily goes silent at the end when I discuss the cross stitch picture. It is not your computer. See the story below at the end of the show notes.)
How to Find the History of a House
Researching the history of a house takes a special combination of records and we’ll cover them in this case study.
Whether you want to learn the history of your own home, research for a friend, or find out everything you can about your ancestor’s home, this episode is for you.
Home is where the heart is, and each home has a history waiting to be discovered. Watch the video and follow along with these show notes.
My Guest: Kathy Nielsen
Kathy Nielsen is a reference librarian and an educator. She has a masters degree in History and in Library Science. Kathy is currently a popular genealogy speaker on California’s Monterey Peninsula. She incorporates her skills as an historian, a storyteller and a librarian in her search for her family’s history.
Reasons for Researching the History of Houses and Land
Every home where your ancestors lived has a story.
Every home where you lived has a story.
This is where your family lived, loved, laughed, cried, and maybe even died.
These homes left their mark on your family and perhaps on you.
And you and your family left your mark on that house or that land.
Learning about the house and land can give you insights into the daily lives of your ancestors.
What prompted Kathy to research her great grandparents land? “As a child I visited Prunedale and Castroville and the dairy farm of my aunt and uncle frequently. I heard stories of the ranch house down the road…even visited it between renters….played an important role in my mother and aunt’s lives and their story.”
Questions to Ask When Researching Your House
When was the house built?
What is the architectural style of the house?
Who was the architect? The builder?
Who was the original owner?
Who else owned and lived in the house?
How has the house changed over the years?
How does the house fit into the history of the area? Of the time?
Architectural Styles of Houses
Identifying the house style can help you narrow time location and time frame.
A timeline can help you identify the gaps in your knowledge and pinpoint research tasks.
The Prunedale Family Timeline
c1874 Marriage, Helen Georgina Ross and George Kemsley
1891 Divorce
1891 Trip West
1891 Marriage
1892 Purchase of Prunedale property
1931 Construction of Highway 101
1931 Death of Great-Grandfather
1941 Death of Great-Grandmother
1967 Death of Grandmother
1960-1980 Accident on Highway 101
1982 Sale of Prunedale property
1986 Division of property into two lots
Research Log
Click here to download Kathy’s simple yet useful research log for land deeds.
The Prunedale Property History:
Purchased from Hiram C. Tuttle and his wife Rebecca, July 11, 1892
Hiram was an upholsterer and had nine children
Land purchased for $3000 in gold coins
Tuttles originally had 138 acres and they sold 50 acres to the Collins family
Tuttles remained neighbors
The property was part of the original Rancho Bolsa Nueva Y Moro Cojo land grant:
31,00 acre Mexican Land Grant given to Maria Antonia Pico de Castro
Mexican Land Grant extended from Moss Landing to Prunedale and south to Castroville
Finding and Reading House Deeds
The deed that Kathy found described the Metes and Bounds. Learn more about metes and bounds here at the FamilySearch Wiki.
Check the county courthouse website for access information and to see if perhaps they are digitized and available online.
The Prunedale House
The house in Prunedale was a of the Folk House National Style:
Gable-Front-and-Wing Family Home
A shed-roofed porch placed within the L made by the two wings
Small windows in the attic
Common in rural areas
With the development of the railroads…abundant lumber and balloon framing
Kathy used the book Monterey County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary by Donald Thomas Clark. Check www.WorldCat.org, Google Books, or your local library to see if a similar book is available for your county.
Excerpt from 1893: [Carl] Bates grandfather came to Prunedale in 1893 and ‘this place was orchard at that time,’ he says. ‘There was no prominent person to name if after, or any prominent features; so they just called it Prunedale.’
Using Census Records to Research a House
Kathy traced the home through the U.S. Federal Census:
1900 census – no address, but we see the neighbors
1910 census – more neighborhood changes
1920 census – the street name is written in the margin.
1930 census – The family owns their farm and a radio. The street name is written in the margin.
Census research tip: Always look at the page before and after the page of interest.
Record: Voter Registrations
Found at the Monterey County Historical Society:
1900 – John F. Collins
1904 – John F. Collins listed
Record: Telephone Directory
Directories can often be found at the public library or online. Kathy found the 1906 Telephone Directory found at the Monterey Public Library. J F Collins is listed but no address.
Find Photos of the House
Check with your local library reference librarian to see if they have local area photo collections.
Collins family sold the Right of Way, 2 and1/2 acres, to the State of California
March 6,1931
Received $2000
Deed of sale Monterey County Recorder’s Office, Salinas
Newspaper Obituary: John F. Collins passed away June 3, 1931
Record: Death Certificate: Helen Collins passed away December 1, 1941. The address is listed: 171 Prunedale Road (Prunedale District.)
The Property was Inherited by Kathy’s Grandmother and Great Uncle
Kathy’s aunt, Helen Lyons, managed the rental property because her grandmother and her brother lived in Tacoma.
In 1950 Helen Lyons married James Lyons. His family had a dairy ranch on Blackie Road. So it was convenient for her to look after the Prunedale Ranch.
Found in the Home During a Return Visit
Many years later upon returning to the house for a visit, Kathy found a book from the Grand Union Tea Company, New York, 1889!
1967: Kathy’s Grandmother Dies
The property then went to Kathy’s aunt, her mother and cousins (the children of her grandmother’s brother, Ray).
They continued to rent out the property until the accident on Highway 101
Find the Property Title
Address listed: 9575 Prunedale Road South, Salinas, CA 93907
Virtually visit locations by searching the addresses you find in Google Earth (free software.) There may also be Street View available. Click and drag the yellow peg man icon in the upper right corner of the screen over to the location on the map. Wait a moment to see if blue “Street View” lines appear. If they do, then Street View is available. Drop the Street View icon on the blue line and you will be able to look at the location from the street level.
Return to the Timeline – 1986: The Property was Divided into two properties: 9575 Prunedale Road South and 9585 Prunedale Road South.
Survey & Tax Rate Area Maps
Check with the County Recorders and Assessors Office. You can also get the history of permits on your own home.
ReadTracing the History of Your Monterey House (Monterey Public Library, California History Room.) Although it’s focused on houses in Monterey, it includes many ideas and strategies applicable to all homes.
“Facts get recorded. Stories get remembered. So, what’s your home’s story?” Kathy Nielsen
The History that I Discovered About My Old House
From Lisa: This is a cross-stitch I did of an old 1905 home that Bill and I renovated in the 1980s in Tacoma, Washington.
Cross Stitch by Lisa Louise Cooke
To learn more about the house, I went to the public library and asked if they had any resources. They handed me a manilla folder marked “unidentified homes” to go through. In it I found a photo of the house taken soon after it was built!
In the basement of the home was a long wall of very shallow and short bookshelves. We were told by the realtor that it was owned previously by a Col. Andrus and that he had been involved in the Nuremburg trials after World War II. He had taken copious notes in small bound books which he later stored on those shelves in the house.
Now years later, thanks to some quick googling I’ve been able to learn much more. Burton C. Andrus was the Commandant of the Nuremberg Prison which housed the accused during the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. (Source: Wikipedia)
My realtor was taken with the framed cross-stitch, and soon hired me to create them for her to present to her clients as housewarming gifts. I enjoyed creating them for a few years while my children were young.
Free Webinar by Lisa Louise Cooke
How to Use Photo Discoveries, Photo Enhancement and Colorization at MyHeritage by Lisa Louise Cooke. Watch it here on the Genealogy Gems YouTube channel.
Artificial Intelligence and Genealogy Elevenses with Lisa Episode 32
In this episode we tackle a few small geeky tech questions about artificial intelligence, better known as AI, that may have a pretty big impact on your genealogy life. Questions like:
Is artificial intelligence the same thing as machine learning?
And if not how are they related?
And am I using AI, maybe without even being aware of it?
And what impact is AI really having on our lives? Is it all good, or are there some pitfalls we need to know about?
We’re going to approach these with a focus on family history, but pretty quickly I think we’ll discover it’s a much more far-reaching subject. And that means this episode is for everyone.
Watch the free video below.
While I’ve done my own homework on this subject and written about it in my book The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox, I’m smart enough to call in an expert in the field. So, my special guest is Benjamin Lee. He is the developer of the Newspaper Navigator, the new free tool that uses artificial intelligence to help you find and extract images from the free historical newspaper collection at The Library of Congress’ Chronicling America. I covered Newspaper Navigator extensively in Elevenses with Lisa episode 26.
Ben is a 2020 Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress, as well as a third year Ph.D. Student in the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he studies human-AI interaction with his advisor, Professor Daniel Weld.
He graduated from Harvard College in 2017 and has served as the inaugural Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as a Visiting Fellow in Harvard’s History Department. And currently he’s a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
Thank you so much to Ben Lee for a really interesting discussion and for making Newspaper Navigator available to researchers. I am really looking forward to hearing from him about his future updates and improvements.
Artificial Intelligence and Genealogy
Covering technology and its application to genealogy is always a bit of a double-edged sword. It can be exciting and helpful, and also problematic in its invasiveness.
Tools like family tree hints, the Newspaper Navigator and Google Lens (learn more about that in Elevenses with Lisa episode 27) all have a lot to offer our genealogy research. But on a personal level, you may be concerned about the long reaching effects of artificial intelligence on the future, and most importantly your descendants. In today’s deeply concerning cancel culture and online censorship, AI can seriously impact our privacy, security and even our freedom.
As I did my research for this episode I discovered a few things. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning is having the same kind of massive and disrupting impact that DNA has had on genealogy, with almost none of the same publicity. (For background on DNA data usage, listen to Genealogy Gems Podcast episode 217. That episode covers the use of DNA in criminal cases and how our data potentially has wide-reaching appeal to many other entities and industries.)
A quick search of artificial intelligence ancestry.com in Google Patents reveals that work continues on ways to apply AI to DNA and genealogy. (See image below)
Patent search result: a pending patent involving AI and DNA by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
AI now makes our genealogical research and family tree data just as valuable to others outside of genealogy.
This begs the question, who else might be interested in our family tree research and data?
Who Is Interested in Your Genealogy Data
One answer to this question is academic researchers. During my research on this subject The Record Linking Lab at Brigham Young University surfaced as just one example. It’s run by a BYU Economics Professor who published a research paper on their work called Combining Family History and Machine Learning to Link Historical Records. The paper was co-authored with a Notre Dame Economics and Women’s Studies professor.
In this example, their goals are driven by economic, social, and political issues rather than genealogy. Their published paper does offer an eye-opening look at the value that those outside the genealogy community place on all of the personal data we’re collecting and the genealogical records we are linking. Our work is about our ancestors, and therefore it is about ourselves. Even if living people are not named on our tree, they are named in the records we are linking to it. We are making it all publicly available.
In the past, historical records like birth and death, military and the census have been available to these researchers, but on an individual basis. This made them difficult to work with. Academic (and industry) researchers couldn’t easily follow these records for individual people, families, and generations of families through time in order to draw meaningful conclusions. But for the first-time machine learning is being applied to online genealogy research data making it possible to link these records to living and deceased individuals and their families.
It’s a lot to think about, but it’s important because it is our family history data. We need to understand how our data is being used inside and outside the genealogy sandbox.
Answers to Your Live Chat Questions About AI
One of the advantages of tuning into the live broadcast of each Elevenses with Lisa show is participating in the Live Chat and asking your questions.
www.GenealogyGems.com/Elevenses
From Linda J: What about all the “people search” sites (not genealogy) that have all, or a lot of, our personal date? Lisa’s Answer: My understanding is that much of the information provided on many of the “people search” websites comes from public information. So while the information is much easier to access these days, it’s been publicly available for years. That information isn’t as accessible to projects like the one discussed in this episode because those websites don’t make their Application Programming Interface (known as API) publicly available like FamilySearch does.
From Doug H: Wouldn’t that potentially find errors in our trees? Lisa’s Answer: Yes.
From Sheryl T: Do these academic researchers have access to the living people on the trees? Or are those protected from them as it is to the public? Lisa’s Answer: They have access to all information attached to people marked as “Living Person.” Therefore, if the attached record names them, their identity would then be known. Click a hint on your tree at Ancestry for example, and the found records clearly spell out the name of the person they believe is your “Living” person.
From Nancy M: How long do the show notes stay available? am looking for Google Books two weeks ago and last week’s Allen Co Library. Lisa’s Answer: The show notes remain available until the episode is archived in Premium Membership. You can find all of the currently available free Elevenses with Lisa episodes on our website in the menu under VIDEOS click Elevenses with Lisa.
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VIDEO & SHOW NOTES: Video #2 of our 25 Websites for Genealogy Playlist. In this video, my guest presenter Gena Philibert-Ortega covers top genealogy finding aids and society websites that are must-have for family history research. Even though some sound specific to a certain area, don’t be fooled. They have resources available for all genealogists.
Websites 5 through 12 of our 25 Websites for Genealogy
I’m Gina Philibert Ortega, and welcome to 25 Websites for Genealogy, What I’d like to do is talk to you about websites that are must-haves for your genealogical research.
Some of these websites will be new to you, and others are going to be very familiar to you. In talking about the familiar websites, I want to get you thinking about them differently, explain a little bit more about what you can do at these websites, and how to get the most out of them.
In this series of 25 Websites for Genealogy, we’re going to be looking at websites in different categories. Our second category is the Finding Aids & Society Websites (#5 through 12).
Linkpendium provides links to free and subscription websites that can help you with your genealogical research. The directory includes 10,000,000+ links to information about families around the world as well as helpful information about U.S. states and counties. The site emphasizes free resources provided by libraries, government agencies, genealogical and historical societies, and individuals.
ConferenceKeeper.org is the most complete genealogy calendar of events anywhere! Here you will find thousands of genealogy webinars, seminars, conferences, workshops, podcasts and more, from genealogy societies, libraries, and other organizations all around the world.
Website #8: New England Historic Genealogical Society (American Ancestors)
AmericanAncestors.org databases include 1.4+ billion records for the United States, the British Isles, and continental Europe. And according to the website it also features:
one of the most extensive online collections of early American genealogical records,
the largest searchable collection of published genealogical research journals and magazines,
and the only online source for records from Boston’s Catholic Archdiocese.
Founded in 1869, the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society provides access to genealogical records, journals, periodicals, special collections, digital books and other free resources. In addition, they host educational events.
The Foundation for East European Family History Studies is an international organization that provides education and resources to support Eastern and Central European genealogical research.
