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.

The Hunt

There are many reasons to love genealogy, but for me, the addictive part, the part that keeps me up way too late on occasion, gives my dust bunnies the upper hand and makes Donald a genealogy widower, is the hunt. That is what really got me hooked, I think, researching my family history. That is what turned it from an interest into an obsession passion.

And my first hunt ever, beginning nine years ago when I knew nothing about anything, was for the burials of two of my maternal grandfather's brothers who died in infancy. I knew where my grandfather was buried and his six other siblings, but I could not find little Benjamin or little Norman. Although I had a strong suspicion that I knew the answer, I had no proof at all.

Benjamin and Norman Parker died in Quebec in 1889 and 1903 respectively. From my home on Long Island, NY I searched whatever records I could find. I contacted family, I looked through family records, I manually combed the Quebec Vital and Church records (Drouin Collection) on Ancestry, I searched online cemetery listings and online newspapers.

Nine years and many hours of research later, yesterday I finally found my answer. In the online collections of the National Library and Archives of Quebec, I found the burial record of Norman Parker Smith. Reading the record breaks my heart but finding the record made me want to shout from the rooftops!

Norman Parker was the 7th live-born child of George Robert Smith and Isabella Frances Parker. He died at three months and twenty-two days and was the second of George and Isabella's nine children to die in infancy. The births and deaths of both babies were listed in the family bible, the only record I had of their existence when I began my genealogy journey.

A few years ago, Ancestry matched me with Norman's baptismal record. I never would have found it on my own in a manual search; he was baptized somewhere unexpected and only eight days before his death. I hoped that it would lead me to his burial record, but a manual search of the same church's records came up empty as did related cemetery and newspaper searches.

I strongly suspected that Norman was buried with his brother, Benjamin and that both brothers were buried in a cemetery in Buckingham (now merged into Ville de Gatineau), Quebec. George and Isabella began their married life and family there with Isabella's father and very early in my research I found an index of burials in a Presbyterian cemetery there that included members of Isabella's family, including her parents, but not the babies.

The Drouin collection on Ancestry is wonderful, but incomplete. The fact that it holds no records from the Presbyterian Church in Buckingham is one example but there are others in my Quebec families. Those records do exist in other places however, and yesterday's find was one of them. Unfortunately this record set did not include anything before 1900 which is the majority of the Smith and Parker records, but at least I know I'm headed in the right direction.

Baby Norman was baptized in Montreal just eight days before his death, and was buried in Buckingham two days later. The fact that in 1903 he was taken 125 miles away from Montreal or 272 miles from their home in Thetford Mines for burial leads me to strongly suspect that both he and Benjamin are buried in this cemetery with their maternal grandmother who died in 1881. Of course I will continue to search for records, but I think at last I have my answer.

Wednesday's Child - Benjamin and Norman Parker Smith

Since this is my first time participating in this prompt, I just want to let you know up front that I'm going a bit "outside the box" because this post is about a search for headstones, rather than the finding.

Benjamin and Norman Parker were the first and fifth born son's, respectively, of my great-grandparents, George Robert and Isabella Frances Parker Smith.

Benjamin was born in 1889 and Norman in 1903, both died in the same year they were born.

When Benjamin (named, as was the convention of the time, after his paternal grandfather) was born, George and Isabella had lost a stillborn son and had a daughter who was almost two years old.  They were living in Buckingham, Quebec with Isabella's parents.

When Norman was born the growing family, which now consisted of two girls and three boys, was living on the other side of Quebec in Thetford Mines.  I wonder how hard it was for my great-grandmother to leave her baby's grave so far away.

I only know of Benjamin and Norman through some old photocopies from the family bible.  I don't know how they died or where they are buried.  Benjamin is not buried with his grandparents in Buckingham, and Norman is not buried in Thetford Mines, that I can find, nor is he buried with his parents in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

I know that many children were buried without headstones at the time that these babies died, but I would dearly love to find Benjamin and Norman if at all possible.  This little mystery is really the thing that pushed me from just cataloguing what I know into doing my own research.

Perhaps someday the cemeteries where they rest will be catalogued by a fellow family historian and I will find them on Find A Grave, Interment.net, BillionGraves or some site as yet unknown to me.  Perhaps I will stumble on them myself while cataloguing headstones on a trip north.

In any case, Benjamin and Norman have not been forgotten.  I think of them often in the course of my research.

Sunday's Obituary - Benjamin Smith (1822-1908)

I have lived on Long Island since my family moved here from the Chicago suburbs when I was two and a half.  I even went to college here, at Hofstra University in the Village of Hempstead.

We didn't move here because of any family collection - we came because my father was accepted into the Psych program at Adelphi University.  My father was born in Chicago, my mother in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.  Most of my father's family lived in New England when I was little and most of my mother's was then in Quebec.  I always felt more at home in those places, and that feeling only grew as I got older.  I even referred to my trips to Canada as going home.

So imagine my surprise upon reading this obituary of my 2nd great-grandfather on my mother's side, that he was born "at Hempstead, Long Island."

We already knew that he was a politician and grocery owner in Newark, New Jersey.  My great-grandfather, his youngest son, was born and raised there before emigrating to Canada.  But we had no idea that there was any connection to New York at all, much less only miles away from my home and possibly very near the campus where I attended college.  It was almost surreal and it felt like I was...Tripping Over My Roots.

The article tells us he was born at Hempstead, Long Island and died in Newark, New Jersey.  While we are sure about where he died, I have not yet found any confirmation of his birth here on Long Island.  We know from a very short wedding announcement in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that he and his wife were married in Brooklyn, and lived there at the time, but so far that hasn't led us to an actual marriage record.

I have been blessed to "inherit" a great deal of information about most branches of my family tree.  But beyond that and the documents found on Ancestry.com, very few of the over 700 people on my tree were added through my own research.  I feel like I've been amassing information about my family for a long time, but I'm really very new at this.

So, where was Benjamin really born?  Long Island has changed a lot in the last 200 years.  If he was born in Hempstead in 1822, would that exact place still be considered Hempstead today?  What were his parents' names?  Are they buried nearby?  What  is the best place for me to start looking?

I've been in touch with the cemetery where Benjamin and his wife should be burried because my mother and I want to take a trip there sometime in the next few months.  I've also left a message at the church he may have helped to found (according to the obituary) because it is across the road from the cemetery, but I haven't heard back from either place yet.

Since we know where he died, I guess my next best bet is to follow the advice of Bill Dollarhide, and get copies of Benjamin and his wife Mary Ann's death certificates, which I so hope will give me their parents' names.

In the meantime, if anyone out there has any advice or guidance to share, I will gladly take it!