You may be doing some “home archiving” without even realizing it, if you’re the keeper of any family photos, documents, heirlooms, or artifacts. Professional archivist and genealogist Melissa Barker offers these tips for the family historian and keeper of the family archive.
I have always said that “home archiving” is something genealogists do, perhaps without ever calling it that. So family historians can definitely benefit from learning how archivists work. Here are five ways to think like an archivist.
5 Home Archiving Tips for Family Historians
1. Learn to preserve family artifacts.
Archivists are always educating themselves on how to preserve certain items that have come to their archives. Genealogists inherit family heirlooms all the time. Learning how to preserve them is thinking like an archivist.
Tip: Preserving an item means keeping it from further deterioration. This may mean putting it in special storage materials, keeping it out of strong light, and storing it in a place that isn’t too hot, cold, or humid. Click here to read an article on humidity and your family archive.
2. Organize your “collection.”
A very important job for archivists is keeping their records collections organized so they know what they have and can pull them efficiently. Genealogists, as home archivists, would also benefit from keeping their genealogical records organized.
Archivists are always careful to use special materials such as archival file folders and boxes to put records and artifacts into for preservation. Genealogists should use archival materials to preserve and store their records just like archivists do.
Tip: Click here to read my article on how to archive family history documents. It’s packed with great tips and recommended products to store your items safely.
4. Keep the stories that go with your artifacts.
Telling the stories of the people that have come before us is also something that archivist try to do with the records they have in their care. Archivists do this by sharing their records collections with the public through displays, exhibits, and open houses. Genealogists should tell their ancestor’s stories by sharing their family histories with their families and passing down their ancestor’s stories to the next generation.
Tip: Create a meaningful display of artifacts in your own home. Group together items that tell a story, preferably unique, eye-catching items. Add framed copies of documents and photos (keep originals safely tucked away). Click here for some fantastic ideas from Lisa Louise Cooke on sharing your family history with the non-genealogists in your family.
5. Archive your own mementos.
Archivists collect today for tomorrow! Many archivists collect documents and artifacts that are produced today so they can be preserved for tomorrow. They collect items such as the high school graduation program, digitizing the local newspaper, and that local diner menu.
Genealogists do the same thing in their “home archiving” by collecting and preserving a funeral card, digital photographs they took at the grandbaby’s birthday, and the marriage invitation you received for your niece’s wedding.
Home Archiving, National Archiving: It’s all in the Genealogy Gems Podcast
Did you know I’m on Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems Podcast now? I chime in frequently with that “offline” archival perspective that’s so important in our research. Click here to see the list of recent episodes. In Episode 211, publishing this week, I report on a fascinating way you can help make collections from the National Archives more accessible to everyone. Why not listen in? It’s free!
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!
Show Notes: Finding female ancestors poses unique challenges that can throw roadblocks in your way. And the reason for that is simple. The women in our family tree assume the surname of their husbands when they marry. In genealogy, we’re researching backward through time, and that means we encounter a woman’s married surname first. However, it’s critical that we eventually locate the records that mention the woman’s maiden name so that we can find her parents and continue to climb her family tree. Professional genealogist Shelley Bishop has come to the rescue in her new Family Tree Magazine article. It’s called Ladies in Waiting. In that article, she covers 12 resources for discovering maiden names.
Lisa: This is a great article. I think it’s going to help many people bust through the maiden name roadblock. And it really is a kind of roadblock, isn’t it?
Shelley: It really can be a real challenge. Whether you’ve done a little bit of genealogy or a lot of research, it can definitely be a stumbling block for you.
12 Places to Look for Maiden Names
Lisa: Well, I love that you’ve got 12 places for us to look for maiden names. Take us to the first location. What’s your first resource for finding maiden names?
Strategy #1: Marriage Records
Shelley: The first thing you’re going to probably want to do is see if you can find a marriage record. I think that’s probably the natural place to begin. Marriage records don’t exist for all times and all places. So, as you go back further in time, you may find that there aren’t really marriage records. But if there are, that is going to definitely be the first place you want to look.
Most marriage records could have been created at the local level. More recent ones can often be found at the state level. And they will usually say the woman’s maiden name. And there can be other clues if it doesn’t state it.
Strategy #2: Family Records
Lisa: That’s a great point. And closely related to that is family records, right? These are records collected over the years. You might even find them in your own drawers and around your house.
Shelley: Absolutely. Family sources can be amazing. You might find mention of a woman in a diary or letters. Letters might expose relationships and names that you weren’t aware of, or places that you weren’t aware of.
It’s also important to talk to some family members who might know a little more or who might have some of these family materials and keepsakes that you could look at. Ask them if they’d be willing to talk with you and maybe you can copy some of their things. That’s a great way to get started.
Strategy #3: Church Records
Lisa: So, you’ve got the family sources, and the civil marriage records. What about religious records? I think you had that as number three.
Shelley: I did, yes. When there isn’t a record of a civil record of a marriage, there could still be a religious record of a marriage. Check church records. See what church records existed for that time and place and determine where they might be held. That can change over time. There’s a lot of different places.
You might look at the baptism records of children, because those will often state the mother’s maiden name. Again, these are church records. So, there’s a variety of church records that can help you.
Lisa: And church records often go a lot farther back than the civil records, don’t they?
Shelley: Definitely, if you’re lucky, they can go quite far back.
In the Pioneer days, sometimes a traveling preacher would keep his or her own records, and some of those little journals have been discovered and published. So, you can even find those!
Strategy #4: Children’s Vital Records
Now you have your children’s vital records as number four. What are we looking for there?
Shelley: Yes, children’s vital records can be great. We’re looking for birth records of children to see if they exist. The marriage records of children sometimes will state the mother’s maiden name, which is a real find. And the death records of a child may also state the maiden name. Those things are really worth checking out.
Be sure to look for records of all of the woman’s children, not just the one that you’re descended from. You want to look at all of the children that she had, even if they are by a different husband, because you just never know what you might find there. And if she had a child who died young, which is a sad situation, that record may give the mother’s maiden name.
You mentioned looking at all the different children. I know for me and some of my families, I find that different children, whether they were born earlier or later in the woman’s life, sometimes that surname kind of looks a little different on some of those. The reason to look at all of them is the possible variations in the spelling of the surname. Sometimes the children weren’t exactly sure how this surname was pronounced or spelled. They just knew it was sort of like something so you will get variations. When you find those, just compare them between the different records and be generous in your search and try different variations when you’re conducting searches.
Lisa: Yeah, I know, even with my grandmother, she would say Mickolowski with an M, but it was actually Nikolowski with an N. So, checking everyone else’s records really helps find which is the most regularly used spelling.
Strategy #5: Death Records
Shelley: The fifth resource would be death records. And that would be both the death record of the woman herself, of course, but also, death records of the children, and death records of her husband or husbands. They could provide her maiden name.
And you might find someone else who is associated with her. I can’t overstate the importance of doing whole family research, because women relied on other people in their lives. They relied on men, especially. So that could be her brothers-in-law, her husband(s), her father while he was alive, and so forth. Those death records are something you’re going to want to explore for everybody that you think she might have been associated with, or that might have been related to her.
Lisa: That’s a great point. What you’re describing is cluster research.
When we get to the point of finding her death record, that’s a much later record. She’s not standing right there making sure the name gets written down correctly. So, if we can find earlier death records of associated people, they might be more accurate.
Shelley: Yes, that’s true. Unfortunately, a lot of times, especially if a woman lived to enjoy ripe old age, they didn’t even know her maiden name! You’ll find unknown written on the line where it should be.
Lisa: Exactly, and that’s why this article is great. You’re going to help us get past the unknown.
Strategy #6: Cemetery Sources
I see that number six is cemetery sources.
Shelley: Yes. Gravestones don’t give you a whole lot of information, just usually dates. But I find that you can even find cemetery records about who purchased the family plots, where she’s buried and who she is she buried with. You can get great clues from seeing who is buried with a woman. It might be her parents or others with her maiden name. And sometimes, that’s not apparent when you’re just looking at a single gravestone record online.
So, if you can, I always recommend trying to go to the cemetery in person. See how those graves are positioned and see who she’s buried with.
You might also find a published transcription that’s been done by a society where the graves have not been put in alphabetical order. They’ve just been put in the order in which they were encountered when they were read. That can also be another source of clues. So, you can sometimes find a young child who’s buried with his or her maternal grandparents. I had a big breakthrough that way, and that was the source of the maiden name. I knew this couple had a child. Unfortunately, she died young. She was buried with her mother’s parents.
Lisa: Gosh, it’s amazing how many different ways you can stumble into things like that.
Strategy #7: Census Records
For number seven you have census records.
Shelley: Census records can help in a lot of ways. Especially if the woman is widowed. Later in life, she might be living with an adult son or adult daughter in the home of a son-in-law. That is a great way to find somebody. If you find a woman living in old age in with a man whose name you don’t recognize, and then some another person that could be a daughter, that’s really worth investigating.
Likewise, if the woman herself died young, her children may have been taken in by her parents or her sister or someone like that. You may find if she died at age 36, you may find her children living with her parents in another census record.
Lisa: I’ve even seen by looking through the census records – and you were talking about the cluster research of looking at all the different family members – seeing a name of a child, either in her family or her sister’s family. And that name really sounds like a surname. That could be a mother’s maiden name being used as the child’s first name.
Shelley: Yes, that does happen. Maiden names were used as first names. That was a pretty popular practice in some areas. It can be a clue to the mother’s maiden name. It can also be a clue, believe it or not, to the grandmother’s maiden name. Sometimes they would take it back a generation farther. I had someone named Greenman as a first name. Well, that’s a surname, right? So, I had to get work back to find the Greenmen. And it ended up being, two generations back, a surname.
Strategy #8: Newspapers
Lisa: One of my favorite record sources is newspapers, and you have that as #8 in good places to find maiden names.
Shelley: Oh, my gosh, that is a fantastic place! Again, depending on the time period and the locality that you work in, you’ll want to look for marriages and announcements, which can vary anywhere from just a short little social note to long, elaborate marriage announcements. Those will almost always say the full name of the bride.
You can also look for Golden Anniversary announcements. If they’ve been married a long time and had a 50th anniversary, a lot of times, they’ll give a whole rundown of when and where they married and their parents. Sometimes they’ll even name their parents. And they’ll talk about people who attended the anniversary party, which could be her siblings with the maiden name.
And the other things are social notices. If they went out of town to visit relatives with the maiden name or something like that, you might find that.
And of course, there are obituaries. It may include not only of the woman and her husband, but also their children. Anyone mentioned that you think might have been related is worth looking into.
And I know you’ve done a lot of work on newspapers. Your book is a great guide to using newspapers.
Lisa: I just love them. And like you said, there’s so many different types of articles that can have that information. What’s number nine?
Strategy #9: Published Sources
Shelley: Number nine is published sources. Those would include things like old county and town histories where they might talk about the early settlers of a region, and the first members of the early churches. A lot of times you’ll find women’s names in there. You’ll also sometimes find a biographical sketch could be of her husband, her son or her grandson, and that could be in a far distant city and state than where she lived.
Published family histories are another place to look. A lot of times they will give the maiden names of women who married into the family.
You also have online family trees, which have to be taken with a little grain of salt because they’re not always as well documented as we’d like them to be. We have to be kind of careful about just accepting what they say. But that’s true for all published resources. We also have to verify that information. You will definitely want to do additional research to either confirm or refute the information.
Lisa: Very good point. Number 10 is court records.
Strategy #10: Court Records
Shelley: A woman’s status when she was married historically, she was a feme covert. She was literally covered by her husband’s care. And she could not make any court decisions or any financial arrangements, or anything like that, in her own name. Her husband was in charge of all of that for her.
When she was widowed, then she could take care of her own affairs. So, you might want to look at estate records of her possible father, and those will usually name both her husband and her in these estate records. Did they receive property? Were they named in a will? And so forth, like that. You will often see a woman named with her husband in estate records.
Guardianship records could have been created if the woman died while her children were still young. Guardianship was done to protect the property of the children against other people who might come later and try to claim that property, including a woman’s future husbands.
Divorce records may be found if the woman got divorced. You will often find her maiden name there because they will go back to the original marriage.
Strategy #11: Deeds
Lisa: Number 11 is Deeds. We can find maiden names in deeds?
Shelley: You can occasionally find maiden names and deeds. And sometimes if you can’t find the maiden name, at least you can find good clues there.
Again, if her she had a father or widowed mother who died and left property, sometimes there’s not a will. And sometimes there’s not a probate or an estate file. In that case, you want to check the deeds, because if they own property, it might have just passed down to the children without going through the courts. And if that’s the case, then the children had to decide how to divide up the property or they had to liquidate it. And so often, some of them would sell their shares to another one. Or they might also sell their shares to a third party. So, you want to look in the deeds, and these are called Quitclaim deeds, because the person is quitting, basically giving up their claim to their fair share of the property. So, if you find a deed that has that word, Quitclaim in it, that’s a good indication that that there are other people who are invested in that property, who also have interest in it. You might be able then to find those people and find out how they’re related. And then, who owned the property that they are now dealing with.
Lisa: Terrific strategies! There are so many different creative ways to deal with this problem of trying to find maiden names.
Strategy #12: Military Pension Records
And the last one is one I would imagine a lot of people haven’t thought of, but I agree with you. I think it’s a great resource. Number 12 is military pension records.
Shelley: So, if your mystery woman was married to someone who served in the Revolutionary War, war of 1812, or the Civil War, you want to check to see if either the soldier or his widow applied for a pension after the fact. Those pension records can be a goldmine! You can learn so much from them. They’re really interesting to read!
There are indexes to those, and I talk about where to find those in the article. And you can look for them. You can order the entire file from the National Archives, or sometimes those files now have been digitized. Look through them and see what you can find. In some cases, they will lay out exactly the woman’s maiden name, when she was married, the names of her children and their ages.
Lisa: Well, we have really learned a lot from you. Shelley, I think you’ve kind of smashed the idea that we just have to be stuck by not knowing a woman’s maiden name. There are so many other places to go and look. And with a little bit of diligent effort, I think we have a really good chance of success.
About Genealogist Shelley Bishop
We’ve been talking about Shelley’s 12 strategies for finding maiden names. She goes into all of this in detail in her article called Ladies in Waiting in the March / April 2023 issue of Family Tree Magazine. And you can find Shelly Bishop at Buckeye family trees.com. It’s been so fun to catch up with you and talk about this topic. Thank you, Shelly!
Shelley: Thank you, Lisa. I really appreciate you having me. And I just want to tell everybody, keep at it keep, keep searching. Best of luck with finding those maiden names!
AUDIO PODCAST SHOW NOTES: Discover more than 100,000 old family photos on Dead Fred. Founder Joe Bott explains how to find photos of your relatives on this free website, as well as how to post your unidentified photos. Who knows, someone else may spot your photo and have the answers.
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It’s common to hear of long-lost relatives who rediscover each other online or through DNA tests. But nearly 100 years ago, another new technology–the radio–united a pair of long-lost siblings 40 years after one ran away.
This newspaper article reports that Alonso Jones’ children were sitting around one day in 1926 listening to the radio. Then they heard the announcer say, “Alonso Jones, wherever you are, listen…Your sister wants to see you at Worthington, Ohio. She has not seen or heard from you in forty years. You were born at Antiquity, Meigs County, Ohio, at the time of the Civil War….”
“You were reared by Captain William Roberts, an Ohio River flat boat man. You went with him on a produce boat when you were a boy and ran away while the boat was lying at the bank in Arkansas.” The article reports that the man telegraphed his sister and arranged to meet her. What a great story! And what a great family history find for anyone researching Alonso Jones or his sister, Mrs. Robert Eakin, or his guardian, William Roberts!
Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1926, p. 1. Digitized at Ancestry.com.
This article illustrates two fantastic tips for newspaper searching.
FIRST, I originally found this article in the Salt Lake Tribune, digitized at Ancestry. I was struck because the story was about people from Ohio and Arkansas–not Salt Lake. As we still see today, local news stories of the past were often reported in other cities. When searching digitized newspapers, don’t automatically discount search results that otherwise seem right but appear in out-of-town papers.
SECOND, curious about this story, I used Lisa’s search strategies from her book, The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox to search for more information about the people mentioned in the article. I got a hit on a possible match for the riverboat caption. I also found that the Google News Archive had this same article in The Evening Independent in St. Petersburg, Florida (shown above). The copy above is much clearer to read and slightly different. For these reasons, it can sometimes be worth looking for duplicates of news articles and/or obituaries for your relatives.
Want to learn more?Genealogy Gems Premium memberscan also listen to Premium podcast episodes GGP 36 and 3GGP 37 about newspaper searching (Lisa talks about Google News Archive in episode 37). Or get the ultimate scoop in How to Find Your Family History in Newspapers! It’s packed with inspiring family history finds in the newspaper and all the tools you need (online and offline) for finding your own.
A new Genealogists’ Declaration of Rights was announced before a crowd of more than 2,500 genealogists at the NGS 2014 Family History Conference in Richmond, Virginia recently. Jordan Jones, President of the National Genealogical Society (NGS), a sponsoring member of the Records Preservation and Access Committee (RPAC).
According to the NGS Press Release, “The Declaration of Rights is a statement advocating open access to federal, state, and local public records. The Declaration affirms America’s long history of open public records, which has been threatened the last few years over concerns about identity theft and privacy. The Records Preservation and Access Committee has worked with state and federal legislators as well as local public officials for more than twenty years in support of legislation and regulations that achieve a balance between access and privacy. The Declaration of Rights has been approved by the board of directors of the three sponsoring organizations: The National Genealogical Society (NGS), the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS), and the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS).”
Genealogists from all over the U.S. signed the Declaration at NGS, and will continue to do so in the coming months at the IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Salt Lake City, Utah (27 July–1 August) and the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference in San Antonio, Texas (27–30 August). You can click here to sign it electronically if you would like to (though you can’t do it in person.)
The press release further states, “Genealogists advocate the right of access to records held by government agencies including but not limited to vital records (births, marriages, deaths, divorces); land conveyances and mortgages; tax assessments; guardianships; probates of estates; criminal proceedings; suits of law and equity; immigration; military service and pensions; and acts of governmental entities. Genealogists further advocate that they need to be allowed access to original records when photocopies, microfilm, digital images, or other formats are insufficient to establish clear text, context, or completeness of the record. The rights of genealogists specified in the Declaration object to numerous barriers created to deny them access to records.
“Thousands of professional genealogists do research every day on behalf of clients, government agencies, and attorneys. Of particular note are the many forensic genealogists who assist the Department of Defense in locating heirs for the repatriation of remains from previous wars; assist county coroners in the identification of unclaimed persons; work with attorneys in locating missing and unknown heirs involving estates, trusts, real estate quiet title actions, oil and gas and mineral rights, and other similar legal transactions; trace and track heritable medical conditions where finding distant cousins can facilitate early treatment and possibly prevent a premature death; research stolen art and artifacts for repatriation; and identify American Indians, Native Alaskans, and Native Hawaiians to determine eligibility for tribal benefits.”
1. Learn to preserve family artifacts.
2. Organize your “collection.”
3. Store your treasures carefully.
Telling the stories of the people that have come before us is also something that archivist try to do with the records they have in their care. Archivists do this by sharing their records collections with the public through displays, exhibits, and open houses. Genealogists should tell their ancestor’s stories by sharing their family histories with their families and passing down their ancestor’s stories to the next generation.
Home Archiving, National Archiving: It’s all in the Genealogy Gems Podcast
