dianaschnuth

According to my Research Log — which, incidentally, I nearly forgot even existed — I haven’t sent out any research requests since September of 2006. That’s over three years that my genealogy research has been sitting dormant.

I spent the evening going though our distant cousin’s research, comparing it to the census records I’d found online last night (and previously), and inputting some (but not all) of the information on the descendant report he sent. I hesitate to include another researcher’s information in my database without proof of documentation, since not all information sources are created equal. Still, when the data dovetails well enough with something I’ve already found elsewhere, I have no problem with including it… although I do make it my goal to get primary documentation for all of my dates and places and whatnot.

Tonight, I wrote a check to the Social Security Administration to get copies of the Social Security applications for Aaron’s Grandpa and Grandma Schnuth, and his Uncle Tom. I probably don’t really need Tom’s info, but I figured that the info was available, and I was requesting it for other family members, anyway, so I may as well pony up the extra cash to make my research more complete.

(The SS-5 includes a good amount of juicy details for the genealogist, including the individual’s name at the time of application, maiden name, mailing address, date and place of birth, father’s and mother’s names, race, gender, and employer — all written down by the person him/herself. It’s hard to get much more of a primary source than straight from the horse’s mouth.)

My goal is to fill in all the blanks in my research, now that I’ve gotten back one more generation via census records (and the research of others). I’m very close to making another generational connection, but it’s around the missing 1890 census… so I’ll focus on completeness before I try grasping at straws to get back one more generation.

My right hand is recovering from that peculiar hand cramp that comes from writing the word “Pennsylvania” about 20 times in a row — under “Place of birth of this person,” “Place of birth of Father of this person,” and “Place of birth of Mother of this person” for a family of eight in the 1900 U.S. Census. I could use ditto marks or arrows, sure, but that would make me a lax researcher, and we can’t have that.

I’m just now really digging into the data we received from a distant cousin of Aaron’s, back in January. If I thought that researching a relatively common name like Cook was bad (which it really isn’t, until people disappear and elope), I had no idea how challenging Schnuth research could be. Schnuth is such an uncommon name that there’s a good side and a bad side to researching it. The good: If two Schnuth families are living close to each other, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that they’re related. The bad: “Schnuth” gets misinterpreted as “Smith” (or misspelled as “Snuth”) so often that it totally offsets the awesome digital advances of the last 20 years of genealogy research (i.e. sitting at home, searching census indices in my jammies, versus spending an afternoon at the county library).

I’ve only just started double-checking the connection between Peter SCHNUTH (b. 1861) and Aaron’s great-grandfather James (b. ca. 1890/91), and I’ve found other branches of the family living in Pennsylvania that I just couldn’t resist documenting right away, before I forgot about them.

I get so caught up in research — connecting the dots, fitting the pieces together, drawing correlations — that it’s easy to let time slip by. Alas, I have training to attend at work tomorrow, so I need to get to bed so I can be fresh-faced and ready to go tomorrow morning. No marathon internet genealogy sessions like I used to do in my dorm room, years ago. Sigh.

I’d forgotten that, since I moved my blog over to the same web host as my portfolio site, I’d never reinstalled Retrospect, the GEDCOM database reader. So, although I haven’t done much research lately, or even added the data from the last time I did research, my genealogy database is once again available.

Expect to see my research updated in the relatively near future. I have some data from my husband’s side of the family yet to add, as well as some of my own.

(By the way, all you living family members, I’ve intentionally left out your information for privacy’s sake. No one needs to know that you’re umpty-ump years old…)

I’m always so bummed when I forget to wear my seasonal accoutrements on the one day in the year when they’re appropriate. My Mom had this pin back in the ’80s (and probably earlier), and I managed to appropriate it for my own sometime around high school, and not lose it in all this time.

Truth is, I don’t have any solid proof that I’m Irish. Family lore says I am, and the McLaughlin surname that entered into my lineage around 1844 is the most likely source. Other McLaughlins have done more thorough research than I, and have postulated that this McLaughlin line does indeed trace back to Northern Ireland, and that they came to the New World in the 1730s or ’40s.

Hence, since I could be an entire one-hundredth of a percent Irish, being that my 8x-Great Grandfather was most likely Irish, I felt OK not wearing green today to make myself “more Irish.” (Although, since Wikipedia doesn’t mention anything about this aspect of “the wearing of the green,” I’m now more dubious about whether that’s really why people wear green on St. Paddy’s Day.)

The focus of this year’s Halloween Family History Devotional was uploading to Flickr a good part of the genealogy photos I’ve accumulated over the years. There are some others I have in my collection, but they’re more cousins and indirect lines rather than my direct ancestry.

This photo, however, is of my Granny.

I count myself extremely lucky that I got to live in Florida from age 8 to age 11, so I got to spend some quality time with my Granny. By that time, she was 75 years old, with a puckered, happy face and leathery, saggy skin from working in the fields for most of her life. Her hair was long and thin and nearly white, and she would pin it up in half a dozen small, flat curls under her straw hat.

I love this picture for so many reasons. I can see the family resemblance much easier in this younger version of Granny, and not just the patterns of aging in the womenfolk of our family. I also love the fact that she’s barefoot, with a dog barking at her heels.

And, no, she’s not pregnant. She had that peculiar firm-fat belly decades later, and her daughter (my Memaw) inherited the same belly. Granny tended to wear her pants unnaturally high, up over her quasi-beer-gut, with her shirt tucked in, as great-grandparents are wont to do.

She used to tell fantastic voodoo stories, too, most of which I never heard or remembered. The one story I remember, as best as I can remember it, involved a feud between two women in town. The voodoo practitioner in question obtained a piece of her enemy’s hair, put it into a glass bottle (a milk bottle, perhaps?), then peed in the bottle, said her voodoo witchery spell, and put the sealed jar in the oven. When the bottle finally burst in the oven, the other woman started pissing, and couldn’t stop pissing all over herself. The woman ran to the voodoo woman’s house, pissing all the while, and asked her forgiveness so the curse would be lifted.

I know my family tends to take these stories with a grain of salt, being that no one really practices voodoo or believes in witchcraft. Me, I don’t suppose there’s any harm in imagining that it really could have happened. But, really, you’d have to hate someone a whole hell of a lot to make your house smell like burning piss.

But I digress. Granny was always a hardworking woman who cared for her kids. She even faked Memaw’s birthdate by one year when she went into school so she looked old enough to go to school along with her slower older brother, to beat up the kids who would pick on him. Memaw kept that falsified birthdate for her entire life, since she had no birth certificate, and school records were the only proof she had of her age.

I know my aunt and my mom know more of Granny’s stories. I keep hoping that I’ll be able to get one or both of them to write down what they remember. I just know that there was so much more to her than I ever got to see myself.