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.
AUDIO PODCAST SHOW NOTES: In episode #290 of the Genealogy Gems podcast, Lisa Louise Cooke covers 5 of the top gems that came out of 2024. Use these to boost your family history now!
Watch the Video
Listen to the Podcast Episode featuring 5 Genealogy Gems
Get all the basic details on LiveMemory on the show notes page for Genealogy Gems Podcast episode #289.
Since the launch MyHeritage has added a set of 10 custom animation options. Now you can choose the action and resulting emotion for more fun. You can choose from emotional gestures such as hugging. laughing, kissing, dancing, and singing. You can also go more playful with zero gravity, underwater, rain, balloons, and even add a T-Rex to the scene!
With the newest update your videos will now be stored in your MyHeritage account. This makes them easily available through the app gallery. Photos with a LiveMemory™ have a play icon on the bottom. Tap the photo, then tap “LiveMemory” to play your video. You can also download the video to your device.
It’s now easy to share your videos with friends and family directly from the app to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Bluesky, WhatsApp, and other social media. Tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen, then select the social media platform of your choice.
Tips from MyHeritage for Best Results:
Make sure you have the latest updated version of the MyHeritage mobile app installed.
MyHeritage recommends that you upload “an iconic family photo with interesting content. If you upload an ordinary selfie or a photo showing two people standing, there is no scene to speak of and the output video may look boring, unless you use one of the custom animations.
The results can vary depending on the resolution of the original photo and the angle of a person’s face. If you aren’t satisfied with the results, try uploading higher-resolution photos or photos with larger, more visible faces.”
Ancestry added loads of new records in 2024. The best way to quickly find and review them is in the Card Catalog: 1. Go to https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/catalog/ 2. From the Sort by drop-down menu select Date Added 3. Records will be listed starting with the most recently added. They will be marked New.
#3 FamilySearch new records updates
FamilySearch also added millions of new records. Most were added to existing collections, expanding them even further. FamilySearch also used AI to generate indexes for many of their existing collections making them much more usable. This all means it’s worth revisiting collections where you came up empty in the past. If you’re looking for free international records, FamilySearch is hard to beat! It includes,
Chronicling America is a huge collection of free digitized old newspapers from the United States. However, in the past it did not include all of the newspapers available through the Library of Congress website. Now all digitized newspapers have come under one search umbrella with the new Chronicling America website.
Chronicling America is in the process of transitioning from the legacy Chronicling America interface to a new Chronicling America interface and back-end search infrastructure. Read more about it.
Search the 4,000+ newspaper title with the Advanced Search at Chronicling America.
Use the interactive map at Chronicling America to search for family history in old newspapers.
#5 AI Increased Use in Genealogy
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here and will be with us in 2025 and many years to come. AI has been incorporated into genealogy websites for quite some time. However, in 2024 we saw a real uptick in genealogists using stand alone AI sites like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others to assist with their research.
If you’re going to start using these AI sites, keep a couple of key things in mind.
1) It’s not a person. No matter how realistic it sounds, or how many times it refers to itself as “I”, it’s not a real person. This is important to remember as you’re interacting with it. When AI talks to you like it’s a person, and you work with it for a period of time, you can start to have the impression or the feeling that it knows what it’s talking about. It can come across as authoritative. You can get the impression that it understood what you asked for, and that’s just not the case. It’s a language tool, and it’s trying to put together what it thinks makes sense based on what it has already “learned”.
This means you must be in the driver’s seat and stay in the driver’s seat. Continually analyze what you’re getting from AI. Think about what it is “saying: Go check it out and verify the information and get more evidence to back it up.
2) It’s not a stand-alone search engine. At this point AI isn’t ready to be used as a stand-alone search Q and A tool. However, it does have strengths we can use today for such activities as: • Translating typed text, • Summarizing large documents, • Reassembling information into desired formats, • Finding information buried within a document. • Quickly determining if particular items appear in a document.
It can do much of the legwork, thereby speeding up the research and writing process.
If I had to predict, I would say we’re going to see AI and search merge more and more. In fact, over at Google’s Gemini, we’re noticing that it sometimes provides users with a check this at Google button. For now though, be aware that Google’s search results are not fully represented in Gemini’s responses. Go search it separately on Google, and then review the results provided. Make sure you can actually find sources for yourself that verify everything that AI tells you.
Learn more about AI and Genealogy with Genealogy Gems:
The latest tech news from Google Earth, FamilySearch and MyHeritage
Alice’s Story – genealogy research with blogger Julianne Mangin
Cemeteries – both for ancestors and their pets
Please take our quick PODCAST SURVEY which will take less than 1 minute. Thank you!
NEWS:
Google Earth News
Jennifer in California sent me a fascinating item recently , and she says “Thought you might get a kick out today’s blurb from Google, where they pat themselves on the back for what can be done with Google Earth. No argument from me; it’s amazing!”
So, what can be done with Google Earth besides all the family history projects that I teach here on the podcast and in the Premium videos? Well, Peter Welch and Weekend Wanderers in the UK are using Google Earth to find treasure!
FamilySearch.org, the free and massive genealogy website from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has added a new way for you to add more memories to your tree.
In addition to photos you can now add audio both at the websiteand the FamilySearch FamilyTree and Memories apps which you can download from your mobile device’s app store.
So now as you’re selecting and uploading family photos to familysearch, you can also gather and record the stories that go with those photos. It’s sort of like being able to write on the back on the photograph, but in an even more personal way.
Your voice, and the voices of your relatives can now be part of your family’s history.
From the FamilySearch website: “Photos and audio attached to deceased ancestors can be viewed by other users on the FamilySearch Family Tree. To protect privacy, photos and audio attached to living people can be seen only by the person who added the memory unless that person shares the memory or album with another user.”
MyHeritage App update
Among the newly introduced features are Family Timelines, the ability to view family trees that you’re matched with, the ability to choose which information you extract from Smart Matches™, an improved research page, and more. Read all about it here
From Craig: “After finding my Paternal grandfather and great-grandfather, I looked for my Paternal GG Grandfather in the same area. No luck. I went to the R.B. Hayes library in Tiffin, Ohio and started looking at every page in the burial listing for the township I thought he would be in. And there he was – last name misspelled! (The “A” was changed to a “K”.) I was able to drive over to the cemetery and located his stone – still readable after his burial in 1885. I plan to go back to the area this summer to look for his wife, who was buried elsewhere (they were separated.) I wish I could get someone to update the lists with the correct spelling, to match the gravestone and census papers, but that seems impossible to do.”
From Ann:
“My brother Ray says we have visited more dead relatives than live ones. Trying now to visit the relatives above ground!”
From LeRoy:
Spent many hours walking, crawling, pushing through brush brambles and briers just to find and take pictures of tombstones. I regret only one such adventure. If I may. My sweetheart and I went to a small cemetery in New Jersey to gather family names and pictures for Billion Graves and our personal records. While I was taking pictures, my wife was clipping brush and bushes from the stone that identified her families plot.
We had a great day. I filled two clips of pictures and my sweetheart did a magnificent job on that stone. It was only a few hours later, when she started itching that I really “looked” at the pictures and realized that the brush that she cleared from that stone was poison ivy. Wouldn’t have been so bad, but when she found that I’m not affected by poison oak, ivy or sumac. She was not happy.
From Shirley:
I have recently started doing ancestry research and have been astounded at what I have found. No creepy tree stories. However, it is nice to know that some ancestors took special care to by buy family plots even though they knew eventually the girls might marry and want to be buried with their husband. I found it interesting that both my grandfather and my grandmother are both buried with their individual parents.
From Patsy:
Shirley’s story jogged my memory. My mother died in 1934 when I was 4 years old. She is buried in her father’s plot rather than my paternal grandfather’s plot. I have wondered for years why the burial was arranged that way and imagine all sorts of situations. Were the families feuding? Was one family more financially able to foot the bill. Did my paternal grandfather not like my father? Hmmmm………
From Sharon:
I checked out this book from the local library about a month ago. Decided I needed my own copy. All genealogist should read it. It is very informative & entertaining.
From Marinell:
About 5 years ago I found the farm on which my gr great grandparents were buried. The tall granite marker with the parents’ names had been knocked over, the foot stones stacked and several large rocks were around the monument and it was in the middle of a field that was being planted and harvested. We made contact with the owner and received permission to have it raised.
In the meantime, I found an obituary for a son who was buried on the family farm. I also found an article about a woman who did dowsing, contacted her and she agreed to come perform the dowsing. I was videoing it when my phone went totally dead! I had never had that happen and it was charged. Thirty minutes later it came back on mysteriously!
She found 2 adult women, 2 adult men and three toddlers. After further search I found another obituary for a grown daughter buried there and 3 toddler grandchildren who died in 1882. She said that the large rocks would have marked the graves. Sadly, they had totally desecrated the family cemetery. But I was excited to learn all I did and was startled by the phone totally dying.
We first talked to Julianne last year in Genealogy Gems Podcast episode 219. In that episode we explored the tragic story of Julianne’s ancestors, the Metthe family. It was a riveting case study of the twists and turns that genealogy can take us on.GEM: Checking in with Julianne Mangin
Julianne had originally been a bit of a reluctant genealogist. But after a 30 year career in library science, including 14 years as a librarian and website developer for the Library of Congress in Washington DC, she could couldn’t help but try to find the truther in the piecemeal stories that she was told by her mother.
Julianne has continued to research and write at her Julianne Mangin blog, and I thought it would fun to check back in with her and see what she’s been up to.
Her latest blog series is called Alice’s Story. It follows the path of discovery she followed to uncover the story of a previously unknown aunt.
The research began where most good genealogical research begins: at the end of Alice’s life and her death certificate.
Institutional Records – But with few records and no first-hand interviews available, Julianne turned to researching the institutions themselves to dig deeper into Alice’s experience. Resource: Genealogy Gems Premium Video: Institutional Records (membership required)
State Census Records can help fill in the gaps between the federal census enumerations. Search for “state census” in the card catalog:
“Copies of many state censuses are on microfilm at the Family History Library. The Family History Library’s most complete collections of state censuses are for Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. However, censuses exist for the following states also:
Old Postcards are a great resource for images. Resources: Genealogy Gems Premium Podcast episode 16 and episode 76 feature strategies for finding family history on ebay. (Genealogy Gems Premium Membershiprequired)
Become a Genealogy Gems Premium eLearning Member Gain access to the complete Premium podcast archive of over 150 episodes and more than 50 video webinars, including Lisa Louise Cooke’s newest video The Big Picture in Little Details. Learn more here
Institutional Annual Reports – Julianne searched for annual reports to the Legislature for more details on the various institutions where Alice resided. Resources: Library of Congress Catalog WorldCat.org Google Books
You may recall from our recent DNA discussion on the Genealogy Gems podcast (Episode 168) that Ancestry.com recently discontinued their mtDNA and YDNA tests (the two that trace our direct maternal and direct paternal lines) to focus on autosomal DNA (which delivers information about both your mother’s and your father’s side of your ancestral tree).
Well, recently I attended an all-day meeting hosted by Ancestry.com: a summit to talk about current trends and accomplishments at Ancestry DNA, and ideas about the future of DNA testing at Ancestry.com.
The meeting included a diverse group of Ancestry representatives, from CEO Tim Sullivan to members of the marketing, scientific, communications, and even computer science departments, as well as some of the top voices in genetic genealogy. It was an open and lively discussion, and I walked away with a few gems I want to share with you today.
More Powerful DNA Hints Coming
In AncestryDNA, the ‘shaky leaf” hints are meant to help you find a common ancestor between you and your DNA matches. The computer code behind the old hints was not very efficient. Lazy, in fact. It started at the bottom of your tree—and the bottom of your match’s tree—and slapped on a shaky leaf at the first sign of a shared common ancestor.
While this method worked for a large number of cases, it was leaving a lot of stones unturned. But the IT guys at Ancestry have beefed up the computer power, allowing them to cover a much greater distance through our trees and the trees of our matches before making a judgment about the best place to assign that shaky leaf.
The result? Better hints about how you and your match COULD be related. Remember, the leaf is still just a SUGGESTION on how you and your match might be related. It is not a crystal ball.
Did You Know?
Ancestry DOES store your DNA samples in a secure location.
Ancestry spent months designing their own DNA collection kit.
Ancestry was able to attract some of the brightest scientists in the field of population genetics because of YOU. You with your documented pedigree charts and your willingness to help move this science of discovering our ancestors forward.
Looking Ahead
There is no question that the genetic genealogy industry is rapidly advancing, and our discussion with Ancestry certainly didn’t disappoint. While I will be sharing with you in future posts about some of the exciting changes, I do want you to be ready for one that buy anxiety medication online uk will be coming online fairly soon.
It has to do with your matches. If you have been tested by AncestryDNA, you may have been initially excited, then nearly immediately overwhelmed, by the number of individuals listed in your match page, all claiming to have some kind of connection to you and your family tree.
All three major genetic genealogy testing companies (AncestryDNA, Family Tree DNA, and 23andMe) are using basically the same laboratory methods to glean information from your DNA. What differs is how they use that data to draw conclusions about your ethnic heritage and about your relationships to other individuals. As it turns out, AncestryDNA has been reporting far more individuals as your relatives than it should have.
You can think of it like this: You have sent out tickets, in the form of your genetic code, to an exclusive party where you (of course!) are the star. However, you have lost the guest list and you are counting on the testing company to check the ticket of each guest before they enter your party to be sure they were really invited.
AncestryDNA was relatively new in the role of party bouncer, and in the interest of not turning away any VIP guests, they initially allowed guests into your party who had (gasp!) forged tickets!! But as AncestryDNA admits more guests, the experience it’s gained in party monitoring is starting to show.
You see, each of the forged tickets has some unique qualities that have started to send up red flags to the team of scientists at AncestryDNA. They are now in the process of carefully documenting what each forged ticket looks like and tossing those unwanted guests out on their ear.
The short of it: in the near future your match list at Ancestry will be much shorter. Which is good news to you, as it means only those invited genetic cousins will be around eating hors d’ oeuvres and ready to talk about your shared common ancestry.
Each testing company has its strengths and weaknesses. It was good to have a bit of insight into this one company and come to a greater understanding about why it is they do what they do. It is a great time to be in this young genetic genealogy industry, with so much room to grow and change. I will let you know when I find the next genetic gem.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!
Ancestry.com and FamilySearch International, the two largest online providers of genealogy data, just announced an agreement that’s expected to put a billion more historical records from around the world within reach online.
FamilySearch and Ancestry: Billion Record Deal
A billion is a LOT of records. If you wanted to count to a billion, it would take you 95 years.
According to an Ancestry.com press release, the organizations will partner “with the archive community over the next five years to digitize, index and publish these records from the FamilySearch vault.”
“The access to the global collection of records marks a major investment in international content as Ancestry.com continues to invest in expanding family history interest in its current markets and worldwide,” continues the release. “Ancestry.com expects to invest more than $60 million over the next five years in the project alongside thousands of hours of volunteer efforts facilitated by FamilySearch.”
This kind of collaboration (rather than competition) between these two enormous organizations will likely mean fabulous fruits for the genealogist. I love that the emphasis is on worldwide records, too. Though people in certain international markets may be the ones using their records, the ancestors of those folks have come from all parts of the world. As always, stay tuned to Genealogy Gems to hear news like this and for updates as these records start becoming available.
GEM: Genealogy Research with Julianne Mangin
You can think of it like this: You have sent out tickets, in the form of your genetic code, to an exclusive party where you (of course!) are the star. However, you have lost the guest list and you are counting on the testing company to check the ticket of each guest before they enter your party to be sure they were really invited.
