Finding the Patriot: Spanish American War and Records

• Spanish American War (1898) History
• Spanish American War Genealogy

The Spanish American War which resulted in the United States' base in Guantanamo Bay Cuba and the Philippines becoming an American Territory up until 1946.

In genealogy, besides censuses and obituaries, few things are as useful as military records to genealogy.

Given that the 1890 census burned in 1921(interesting article!) , and that many many of your recruits and draftees for a military campaign are between the ages of 16 (if they tell the truth about their age) and mid-thirties, military records of the Spanish American war - newspaper announcements, draft records, discharge papers, company movement announcements, stories of valor, etc., - will have a lot of men and families in them who were recorded on the burned 1890 census who are otherwise missing!

While war is a terrible enterprise in terms of cost (though oftentimes the cost of not going to war or losing is even higher) it provides a lot of records for genealogy, the Spanish American War is another instance!

LOST ANCESTOR! FOUND ANCESTOR! Asking for Help on the Web

One of the amazing resources I've found is Rootsweb online.  Rootsweb allows you to not only connect with mailing lists but also allows you to post questions that will often be seen by others working on the same line and get you some answers pretty quickly.

Rootsweb is free.

If you go to the Rootsweb Message Boards and go to the localities and categories towards the bottom - you can navigate your way through say the categories such as United States > States > Oregon > (unknown categories) Unknown > Begin New Thread and post a question that will usually get an answer.

I've had some amazing success this way, sometimes with more information than I can shake a stick at coming back at me from other genealogists.

One of the keys is to post a "well informed" query (Some guidelines and FAQ's here).   i.e. "Help me find my aunt!" isn't going to be of any use to anyone.

Here's a query I posted recently:
Delmar H Millican & Marie Sears Wedding? (1918)

I see in various censuses that Delmar H. Millican was married to his wife Marie (Millican) but am not able to find a marriage certification with her maiden name.

I have found both of them in the Oregon Marriage Index on the same date but not able to find their names together on a document.

Delmar H. Millican B~1897, Tillamook, Tillamook, OR
Marie (Sears?) Millican b~21 Nov 1901, California
Marriage 3 Aug 1918, Portland, Multnomah, Oregon

I've attached the Oregon Marriage Index for both names and the 1920 census, though that's pretty close for this work, if anyone has any more info on an actual wedding I'd be much obliged.

I immediately got a response from someone who had a better search of the Oregonian than I did:

Oregonian August 6, 1918 Page 16

DAILY CITY STATISTICS
MARRIAGE LICENSES

Millican-Sears - Delmar Millican 21, 499 North Twenty-First Street and Marie Sears, 18, 505 North Twenty-First Street

NOTE IN ALL THIS THE CITING OF SOURCES (I included a census so they can see the dates, locations and such) and they cited dates and pages and sources.

Now from here I might use this info to go find their headstones!  I could've found their headstones first or visa versa but always use one bit of research to find your next!

Document document document document document!  Genealogy without sources or documentation is mythology!

Another resource is to connect with people via Facebook and Ancestry and Family Search and Findagrave and any way that you can! I use facebook primarily for social networking and make sure that what I post is professional-enough to be shared with the world.  I've connected with 5th cousins who still have my last name and who are now members of the church and work on opposite ends of the family tree together.

 Use social networks!

To see an example of a "Well informed Querry" on Rootsweb, there's this link - here:

http://boards.ancestry.com/localities.northam.usa.states.california.unknown/13419.1/mb.ashx

You'll notice not only is the post "well informed" (anyone can look at it and know just about exactly what is going on or where to start looking) but I also attached copies of the documents I obtained my information from in both screen shots and file-saves (See this entry on screen shots and file saving formats).

The key in this case anyone can download a high-resolution picture of the files I uploaded, check my work, verify it for themselves, and in one case I was told I read the document wrong!  Had I not had a high-resolution image and a copy of the original, I might not have gotten that info!

Some genealogy is like this....always verify people know what they are talking about..

Coats of Arms, Heraldry & Family History

Heraldry is the profession, study, or art of creating, granting, and blazoning arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms. Heraldry comes from Anglo-Norman herald, from the Germanic compound harja-waldaz, "army commander". The word, in its most general sense, encompasses all matters relating to the duties and responsibilities of officers of arms.To most, though, heraldry is the practice of designing, displaying, describing, and recording coats of arms and heraldic badges (To continue the article on this topic visit Wikipedia.)


Briefly, a "coat of arms" refers to a design on a shield or covering or coat over armor that identified you in battle - while you were in "arms" or ready for war. The European art of heraldry is nearly a thousand years old but is still practiced today in Europe.

According to England's College of Arms, there is no such thing as a coat of arms for a surname. The College of Arms states that unrelated families with the same surname will be entitled to completely different coats of arms and many will be entitled to no coat of arms. For any person to have a right to a coat of arms, they must either have had it granted to them or be descended in the legitimate male line from a person to whom arms were granted or confirmed in the past.

England's King Henry passed laws prohibiting the free design and wearing of armorial bearings, or personal coats of arms. In 1483, King Edward IV established the College of Arms--or Heralds' College--to "oversee and regulate the granting of coats of arms."

However, a coat of arms can provide some insight into some of your family history research and tell you a bit about where you came from. Remember your ancestry didn't end or begin with your coat of arms, and you're related to many more than just one name and the coat of arms may have been from a lineage you aren't descended from.

If you happen to find your particular ancestry's coat of arms you may be able to find some sweet memorabilia related to it at House of Names.

Some other resources can provide a bit of insight into the meanings on the coats of arms.

Have fun with this fascinating aspect of family history!

Genealogy By Nation - Working in Other Countries

Just a bit of diversity...

Every country and culture has its own unique rules and contexts for doing genealogy in.  Even in the United States of America, different cultures are going to present different research issues in general (and specific individuals will present specific research issues within the general framework context), as are different geographical areas.  For example, Native Americans are different from White Americans in culture, meanwhile, you're making a mistake if you assume all White Americans share the same culture, language, views, history or practices.  Similarly with Native Americans.  African Americans aren't all from Africa.  African American is actually a "pop culture" phrase that isn't always accurate because there are many Blacks who are from the Carribean (i.e. Haiti) and even South America who aren't from Africa but are identified as such, similarly, Egyptians are litarally from Africa but may not be considered "African American" here in America.  This is just our modern age, never mind what you're working with going back in time!


The Church has put out a training website on many individual countries with links to lessons for working within those countries. 

Also, Cyndi's List has an alphabetized list of links, training and resources for a lot of countries.  If you're looking to work within Italy, for example, go down and click on "I" on her webpage and see the Italian links.

Remember, not all countries are going to have a lot of work done or going on in them depending on history or current world conditions (e.g. Democratic Republic of Congo), this is why I stick to the "low hanging fuit" and work primarily in the United States of America presently so I can accomplish more in less time with less effort and set aside more difficult stuff for a time when more is readily available.  But if you wish to head back overseas in your family tree?  Know before you go! 

Paying for Genealogy Websites?

Genealogy is the number one use for the internet.  Surprised?  I would have thought it was Facebook or Youtube but actually in terms of a general purpose, more genealogy is done online than any other hobby or pastime.

At some point in your genealogical journeys you're going to come across websites that want you to pay for access to their services (Ancestry.com for example).

Some websites are completely worth paying for (Ancestry.com for example). (Before you spend the full money on Ancestry, check out the Oregon Genealogy Forum where with membership you get an Ancestry subscription for a fraction of the cost)

Others?  Well, it depends.

On what, you ask?

Well it depends on your focus, your needs and your purposes.

My genealogy?  I'm primarily interested in getting enough documentation to submit names to the temples and just document a family tree while focusing on the low-hanging-fruit, while stories and photos are optional bonuses for me.  That means I find a lot of readily available info through obituaries, censuses and headstones that are publicly available and don't require me to become a Genealogy-Jedi specializing in Scottish-Clan-History.

For all of this, in terms of paid subscriptions I get along very well with an Ancestry.com and Archives.com subscriptions, use my Multnomah County Library Card for newspaper archive access online, and my free account at Findagrave and a bunch of other websites (at the right of the page) and I'm good to go.  I don't use Archives very much or get too much from it, but it was a fairly cheap subscription for a year and I've gotten a few things from it.

If you want actual copies of documents such as death certificates, you're usually going to have to pay for those from the State Archives, though you can go in person to the Capitol here in Oregon in the Archives and just pay for the copies - cheaper than ordering them online - more work but worth it.

Here's the guidelines I use on investments (or other endeavors) to determine whether it's a good investment and this works for genealogy as well.  It's called the NUDE model (it could be called the DUNE model so as not to offend sensibilities, but in my business line we tend to assess novelty before dependability because then we know what we're talking about first so we can decide if its useful next - the order is a progressive order this way).

To subscribe or not to subscribe, that's the question

• N = Novelty - how unique is what I'm paying for?  If you can get it somewhere else for free (New Family Search?) why pay for it?  Is their stuff so rare you can't get it anywhere else and do you NEED it?

• U=Utility - how useful is it?  It might be cool for genealogy but is it going to help you?  It might be rare but is it useful?

• D=Dependability - does it do what it says it will for what you need?

• E=Economy - do you get what you pay for?

Remember again, there are tens-of-millions of genealogy websites.  If you're going to pay for something, make sure you're going to use it, need it and can't get the stuff anywhere else for less.
I.E. don't pay $100 for a website that has only one document you're going to use unless you need to.

When you're brand new it might be tempting to throw money at every website that comes along (or be overwhelmed because you can't afford to) to find what you need, but as your experience increases you'll learn more what you absolutely need and what you do not.

Who's Who an' Where? Ancestral Distribution in the USA

Here's a map I snagged from Wikipedia about ancestral population distribution.  Interestingly, German is the largest ancestral heritage in the United States, Irish is another major one, though you have to remember population density in this map.  Some of the most heavily populated areas in the United States are predominantly Irish even though geographically they don't cover as much area. (Click the image to enlarge it).

Marriage & Searching For Women Ancestors

As was talked about in the entry on the censuses(eses) finding women ancestors can be difficult.

In future years working with women will be easier as more documentation is released in our modern society, but for the time-frame we generally deal with in genealogy (born +110 years ago) women weren't allowed to vote or own property for the majority of the world's existence and across the majority of the world's geography.  Additionally, their names changed with their marriages.  So on your family research fully one-half of your research is going to involve searching for people whose names changed at some point and there isn't always a record of when or where it happened or what it got changed to. This makes finding women particularly difficult in many instances.

Make sure you get my mustache in the center....

Historically, marriage was more than just a religious institution or a matter of love but a means for economic and temporal survival.  Even more often, marriage was a means of conveying land, preserving titles and family lines and this varied from culture to culture.  Marriage was very often a matter of function more than love.

The marriage of a younger woman to an older man was the norm in an age gone by as by then the man would have established himself and have a means to provide for his new wife and her youthfulness made her physically able to bear children and care for him in his older age.  It wasn't uncommon for an ailing veteran in his very last years to marry a girl of fifteen or so in order to give her his pension for the remainder of her life in order for him to be cared for in his dying days.  She would then re-marry and bring the pension with her into a new marriage.

Further complicating things is the issue that women married more than once very often.  Two and three marriages aren't unusual with harsh frontier lives.  Meanwhile death in childbirth would often leave men widowers with children later with step-mothers and the husband married multiple times.

Meanwhile, many censuses wouldn't record the names of anyone but the head of the household or there may have been a common-law marriage in various frontiers and so there may not have been a record of the marriage with relatives seemingly "coming from nowhere."  As a bit of trivia the youngest marriage contracted in the Oregon Territory was at 3 years of age (Fact I learned at the Oregon Trail visitor's center).

In your genealogical research you'll find eras in world marriage history that make the 1980's look like eras of marital stability.

But what to do and how to find your women ancestors when their marriages aren't listed on censuses with their maiden names? 

One trick I've came up with works pretty well.  I knew for example that the marriage took place in Multnomah County, Oregon.  So I did a search of the Oregon Marriage index which doesn't always  list the groom and the bride together, but searched for just the bride under her maiden name and found the date she was married. 

Then I searched the index for *all* marriages on just that date in the same place (Multnomah County) and pulled out all the grooms names for that date and location.

Actually this couple almost looks happy

Then I searched for husband / wife combos under the married name until I found a document with the bride's first name and *a* husband off that list who was married that date.  I would correlate other info that I knew about the wife to see if that was indeed them, and would come up with *the* match I was looking for.

Previously what had been a dead-end was suddenly turning up names left and right and yielding a lot of fruit.

Later I found the bride marrying again under her married name and was able to find a second marriage which led me to the death of the first husband, and then her headstone with this info and then her obituary off the headstone info and used that to find other family marriages and married names.

It's all about using info that will lead you to other sources of info.

Other documents that will yield marriages are death certificates short of a marriage certificate, and newspapers often carried weddings depending on the era that you are working in, there are also wills, letters and stories if you can find them.  If you're working backwards, obituaries carry a lot of info.  Cemeteries and headstones will often have a maiden name in them for you to try searching by.

Additionally, middle-names can yield clues as to a matriarchal lineage as daughters often would be named after their grandmother or have their mothers first name as a middle name.

Becoming proficient at this will yield a lot of results but the key is to not get too hung up on a difficult line, keep learning, and be persistent and patient.  Don't forget to pray!

For more info on how to research women in genealogy - click here.