My Development of the Irish Matriarch

The creation of this blog was based on items that I had on hand, and the exploration of various themes that they suggested to me. I began with a collection of photographs I had inherited from my mother, some of which had a little information scribbled on the back, while others did not. The information may have included a name, address or the nature of that person's relationship to someone in the family. This was the basis of my exploration, and the story developed through different discoveries I made along the way.

The first and most valuable information was found in the U. S. Census records, available for free through local libraries. These censuses were taken every ten years, and each has information that is particular to that decade, as different questions are asked, and answered. By going to http://www.prattlibrary.org/, I could click on the "find answers" tab and follow the prompts that would allow me to visit http://www.heritagequestonline.com/hqoweb/library/do/index. With the basic information I had from my pictures, I could type in the names of the people I was researching. This was not always easy, as typographical errors by me, the census taker or the transcriptionist could result in a " no one found" response by the site. Sometimes I had to look at similarly spelled last names or the names of other family members in order to find the person I was searching for. An example of this would be the 1870 Census. The Burgans that I was looking for were listed by the census taker as "Bergen". I knew this was true because the ages and names of the family members matched up to other records I had come across in other censuses. There were also times when the address or neighbors that I knew of would lead me to a record that would have otherwise been undecipherable. An important part of analyzing the different censuses was seeing what information they provided that other ones did not, such as addresses, how many years married, and other questions. The site was very helpful, and is available to anyone who has a Pratt Library card and internet access.

A second excellent site to visit was http://www.ancestry.com/. This is also available at libraries in Baltimore City and County, but you must go into the library itself to use it. There are many different databases linked to this site, and information is easily available there. Slight spelling variations are allowed , and the results are listed by how close they are to the spelling you have input. On Ancestry you can look up anyone, while the Heritage Quest site tends to list more by the heads of family. Some information can be very easily found on one web site, and very difficult on the other. For example, the 1850 census is available through Ancestry. A small detail like this can open up a whole new field of research possibilities. For example, this was the first census to include children's names, and a new generation of ancestors was discovered as a result.