Close to Home - 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 4

The subject of my post for close to home is a no-brainer for me because my longest-standing brick wall is very close to home. In fact, it may even be in my home town, better yet, I may even live now on land that once belonged to a relative! But I'm really getting ahead of myself, I am researching Smiths after all.

Orlando Chauncey Smith, Charlotte Elizabeth Smith, George Robert Smith, William Henry Smith
Benjamin Smith, Emma Amelia Smith, Mary Ann Codner
This photo was likely taken in Newark, New Jersey.

My mother was born in Quebec, my father in Chicago and we lived in the Chicago suburbs until my father enrolled at Adelphi University on Long Island in 1971. We had no known family here and it wasn't until 2008, about a year into researching my family history, that I learned from an obituary that Benjamin Smith, my second great-grandfather, was born on Long Island.  Back then I was only researching sporadically, but somewhere in my daily life living in Rockville Centre, I learned that the village was named for Mordechai "Rock" Smith. Now, we all know how common a surname Smith is, but once in a while my mother and I would joke about being descended from the founders and of course we were curious, but given that Benjamin's exact place of birth was unknown, we didn't really take it seriously.

Then, sometime around 2011, I was stuck at work waiting for a delivery and decided to kill some time looking at the hints in my Ancestry tree. A hint for my 2nd great-uncle, William Smith, a son of Benjamin, led me to his 1920s passport application. The form asked for William's father's place of birth, his answer was Rockville Centre, NY! I almost could not believe my eyes.

In the nine years since this discovery, I have not researched Benjamin very much at all, but that is changing now. Benjamin's wife, Mary Ann Codner, was the granddaughter and great-grandaughter of two Revolutionary War patriots, Phineas Chidester and Japhet Byram, and one of her daughters, Charlotte Smith Fisk, was accepted into the Daughters of the American Revolution.  Now, I'm working to prove my own lineage and I'll have to prove Benjamin's birth to do so.

I've learned so much about genealogy research, methodology and sources since I read Benjamin's obituary twelve years ago and, of course, online records access has exploded, so it's like researching in a whole new world.  Who knows? Maybe I'll even get one of my male Smith cousins to spit in a tube one of these days.

One of the newest tools in my personal kit is the locality guide.  Locality research is essential to a research plan.  To make a research plan, you have to know what records are available and where to look for them. A guide is simply a place to put all of this information. And as you become more familiar with an area or with researching at a particular institution you can add more information like contacts you have made at an archive.

You can make a locality guide any way you like, but I chose to use the guides of those who have done this before as a template and this has "forced" me to seek out specific information that I might not have otherwise.

A Google search for locality guides led me to some blogs including Collecting Cousins who had a link to an archived page of the ProGen Study Group site. This page has links to more than two dozen examples. I also found a template at Family Locket, the blog of the authors of Research Like a Pro, which I used as my primary template.

My first guide, still-in-progress, is for Nassau and Queens counties in New York. Why both? Because Nassau was created out of Queens county, because Benjamin is believed to have lived in what is now Nassau but was Queens when he was born, and because some records, like probate, are still held in Queens.  I knew this before I started the guide because of my earlier research, but if I was coming at this brand new, this is something I likely would have learned by making this guide.  And that is the value of laying a foundation of knowledge on which to build your research.

So, here are just two of the things I discovered while making this guide:

1. The Rockville Centre Historical Society has a collection of materials including Sunday school records for the Methodist church in Rockville Centre during Benjamin's childhood (I don't know if Benjamin was born into a Methodist family but he was married in a Methodist church and helped found the Methodist church in Basking Ridge, NJ.) Inconveniently for me, these materials are now held at the New York State Archive in Albany which is a good three-hour drive. I'm hoping to get there by spring.

2. A 1870s property map of Rockville Centre shows a few landowners named Smith and while I know the name is beyond common, what I found on the map really blew my mind.

The David Rumsey Map Collection not only has this 1870s map, but it also has a tool called a Georeferencer that lays your historical map over a current one and allows you to control the opacity so that you can see either map or both at the same time.

When I zeroed in on properties owned by Smiths, what I found was astounding. The apartment building I live in sits on property that was owned by a John Smith (it would be John) when the map was made.

I know that as my research moves forward I may find that I am not related to this man at all, but this is still a fun find!

No matter how well we think we know a place we are researching, or how long we have lived there ourselves, a locality guide is a great tool to help us know it as researchers.

I really hope that this locality guide and other methodologies I have learned in the last nine years will help me to smash the Smith brick wall this year. In any case, this is a tool I plan to use whenever I research in a new geographic area, whether it is across the globe or right under my feet.