Religion and Politics: A Korean Family’s Journey to Hawaii

Cindy Kim Thomson shares this story of her Korean missionary ancestors

In 1904 my second-great-grandparents, Chang Sung and Chu No (Rebecca) Kim, immigrated to Hawaii from Hamhung in northeast Korea.  Accompanying them aboard the SS Gaelic was their only child, my great-grandmother Nak Kull Yee, with her husband and two small children. Nak Kull’s stories have been passed down in my family for generations: how her parents were converted by American Christian missionaries in Korea, how – during seasonal lulls in activity on their farm – they trekked hundreds of miles north (even crossing a frozen river) to proselytize in Manchuria, and how fearful they were of encountering tigers along the way. 

Hamhung and Manchuria are on opposite sides of the mountain ranges that run down the spine of the Korean peninsula. Considering the topography, was it even possible for Chang Sung and Rebecca to make that trek to Manchuria?  How could they proselytize in Manchuria when they couldn’t even speak Chinese? And did tigers really live in Korea?  I looked to histories of Korea and biographies and memoirs of the missionaries for answers to these questions.

Korean print depicting a tiger
(National Museum of Korea, Seoul)

According to early Korean church records in Honolulu, Chang Sung and Rebecca were baptized in Korea by the Reverend William Arthur Noble. Noble had arrived in Korea in 1891 and in 1896 took charge of the Northern Presbyterian Mission based in Pyongyang (then known as the “Jerusalem of the East”), now the capital of North Korea.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s (Chang Sung and Rebecca’s last years in their homeland), the mountains of northern Korea were prime tiger habitat. So great was the fear of these animals that some villages hired tiger hunters for protection. Tiger skins were the insignia of high office and also used on carrying chairs of the nobility, their teeth and claws used for ornaments, and ground-up bones for medicine. The tiger (now extinct in Korea) remains an iconic figure in Korean folklore.

The Yalu and Tumen rivers comprise the northern border between Korea and China. To escape famine and economic and political oppression, Koreans sometimes crossed these rivers (which froze over for months in the harsh weather) to find work in Manchuria or Siberia. In the late 1800s, about 70,000 Koreans were living in Manchuria. Chang Sung and Rebecca were likely preaching to fellow Koreans rather than to Chinese in Manchuria. 

In the spring of 1891, Presbyterian missionaries James Gale and Samuel Moffett, accompanied by an early convert named So Sangyun, left Seoul for a three-month, 1400-mile journey that included territory covered by the Northern Presbyterian Mission. Details of their journey are recounted in Richard Rutt’s A Biography of James Scarth Gale and His History of the Korean People (1972). Of particular interest to me was the portion of their trip where they visited Korean Christian villages in Tonghua, Manchuria, then crossed the Yalu River and stopped in the Korean towns of Chasong, Changjin and Hamhung. This route took them through the “immense Yalu forests” (suggestive to me of tiger habitat), the Yalu valley where “there were still seven or eight feet of ice in the ravines,” and the “fertile rice valleys” around Hamhung. I don’t know if Chang Sung and Rebecca followed the missionaries’ route, but I am no longer skeptical of Nak Kull’s stories of their travels between Hamhung and Manchuria.    

Korean immigration to Hawaii peaked during 1903-1905. Many Christian missionaries encouraged their congregants to find a better life and proselytize in Hawaii. Every ship departing from Korea included at least one minister who uplifted the Christians and reportedly annoyed some of the non-Christians. It’s no wonder that Christians were disproportionately represented among the Korean sugar plantation workers in Hawaii. Because the Presbyterians did not have a presence in Hawaii, Chang Sung worked for the Methodist Hawaiian Mission ministering to the Koreans at Pahala Plantation. He died in 1916, and Rebecca died in 1923.

Photo of Nak Kull, about 1952

Nak Kull raised eight children and outlived three husbands and a beloved son who died at age 24.  In 1950, just before the outbreak of the Korean War, she received word that her cousins in Korea had fled to the south from their home in now-Communist Hamhung. In 1952, when fighting on the battlefield had diminished, Nak Kull left for Korea to find her cousins at a squalid refugee camp in Busan. Her children, who had futilely objected to her departure, sent her money and goods to sell on the black market. Nak Kull died in South Korea. In 1957, her ashes were shipped to Honolulu (presumably by her cousins) and scattered at Koko Head after a service at the Korean Christian Church.

Cindy Thomson’s interest in genealogy began with family stories about her immigrant ancestors in Hawaii and evolved into an obsession over the past 15 years. After retiring as a Commerce Department economist, she moved to Oakland and started taking classes at CGS.  She also volunteers as a CGS Library and event assistant, and teaches a class on “Immigrant Sugar Plantation Workers in Hawaii: A Multi-ethnic Approach to Genealogy.” 

 

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

The A-Files: a rich source of information

Guest contributor Marisa Louie Lee offers a look at the genealogical riches available in A-Files at the National Archives. NOTE: Lee will lead a webinar on "20th Century Immigration and Naturalization Records" Saturday, May 30.

The majority of Asian Pacific Americans today have family connections to the period following  the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. For decades prior to this, immigration visas had been given largely to European immigrants with only a very small quota for immigrants of Asian descent. These quotas were abolished in 1965, and visas were issued preferentially to relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents in order to reunite families. By 1980, 58.6% of Asian Pacific Americans were counted as having been born outside of the United States, an almost two-fold increase from the 1960 census.

Where, then, can historians discover more about these twentieth-century immigrants? And what about the stories of the pioneers who preceded and paved the way for their families, while living under laws and circumstances that tried to exclude them?

Since 1944, the federal government has maintained information about individual immigrants and alien residents of the United States in what are known as Alien Files, or A-Files. As of late 2019, over 1.3 million A-Files are publicly available through the National Archives at San Francisco and the National Archives at Kansas City. Currently, the A-Files in NARA’s holdings are for individuals born in 1918 and before. To search these holdings, use NARA’s online catalog.

The breadth of what can be found in an A-File is astonishing. No two A-Files are guaranteed to be alike. They can range from a single document to hundreds of pages. The extent and complexity of an A-File depends on an immigrant’s history and interactions with the federal government. The following examples give a glimpse into the diversity of these files.

Hazura Singh Mahaesar's photograph from his A-File

Hazura Singh Mahaesar was born in 1908 in Ganeshpur, Punjab State, India, and came to the United States in 1976. His two grown children had previously immigrated to the United States and were living in California.

In Mr. Mahaesar’s A-File, we discover more about his reason for coming to the United States. His wife had died not long before, and he was left with no immediate family in India. He decided to visit his adult children living in the United States, who in turn filed paperwork for him to remain with them and eventually become a permanent resident. His A-File has copies of his wife’s death certificate from India and his own teaching credential to teach Punjabi.

Vietnamese refugee Ky Thi Hong
applied for permanent residency in 1978

Ky Thi Hong was among the tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who immigrated to the United States during the Vietnam War. Born in Baclieu, Vietnam, she arrived at Camp Pendleton on April 30, 1975–the date of the fall of Saigon.

Three years after arriving in the United States, Mrs. Hong applied to become a permanent resident. Her A-File contains her Application for Status As Permanent Resident (INS Form I-485). Documents in her A-File also relate to her efforts to keep track of relatives in refugee camps in the years following.

Canuto Salaver's application for a permit to re-enter the U.S. in 1947,
for a planned trip to visit family in the Philippines

Canuto Salaver, who came to the United States from the Philippines in 1927, has an A-File that begins when he registers under the requirements of the Alien Registration Act in 1940. His A-File follows twenty years of his life, until he petitions to become a naturalized citizen in 1960. At the time of Mr. Salaver’s immigration to the United States in 1927, he was considered a United States national; this changed in 1934 when the Philippines was put on a path to independence and all Filipinos were re-classified as aliens. His A-File includes his Alien Registration Form (INS Form AR-2) from 1940, which shares that he was a musician working for a traveling band, and an Application for a Re-entry Permit in 1947 (INS Form I-131).

The A-Files are a limitless, rich source of stories about twentieth-century immigrants and the lives they built in the United States. To learn more about the A-Files maintained by the National Archives, visit the A-Files webpage on the National Archives website or read the article “The A-Files: Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors,” from the Spring 2013 issue of Prologue magazine.

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 Marisa Louie Lee is a freelance researcher and workshop speaker who specializes in federal government records and Asian American history and genealogy. She previously worked for the National Archives at San Francisco and the Chinese Historical Society of America. Marisa is a proud alumna of the “Friends of Roots” program. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two young children, and serves on the board of her daughter's co-op preschool.

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Quarantine Quests: Quaker Connections

This Quarantine Quests story comes from CGS member Sandy Fryer, who used DNA and records from the Society of Friends to home in on an elusive ancestor.

Those of us whose ancestors had distinctive surnames have it much easier than those who struggle with a Smith, Murphy, Lee, or Jones. Sandy Fryer has to contend with a third-great-grandfather named Elverton Jones. Thank heavens he has an unusual first name. The only thing Sandy knows about this elusive ancestor’s birth is that he was born in Virginia about 1800.

Sandy created this table to help her keep track of yDNA connections

Traditional research methods have not enabled her to expand beyond these basic facts, so Sandy decided to submit a yDNA sample from her brother in hopes of finding new leads and paths to follow. Sandy joined the Jones DNA project and used FamilyTree DNA to identify other Joneses within a genetic distance of 3. These individuals have a 78% chance of having a common ancestor within six generations. Since Sandy lacks sufficient information to identify Elverton’s parents her strategy is to look at other Jones families in hopes of finding a common ancestor.

She started by looking at R.A. Jones, but fairly quickly proved that his family tree was only accurate to his third-great-grandfather.  Next, she focused on R.L. Jones, who had identified his Jones line back to a Richard Jones born about 1704.  Notably, this family line were Quakers and it was fairly easy to verify R. L. Jones’s work. Needless to say, doing this work is a painstaking effort requiring good record keeping–an ideal diversion while confined to one’s home during the pandemic.

A third lead is C.D. Jones, for whom Sandy has been able to document multiple generations. More importantly, she again confirmed a Quaker connection and documentation that Nathan Jones, C.D.’s fifth great grandfather served during the American Revolution–for which he was expelled from the Quakers.

One of the records Sandy found for Nathan Jones in a Roster of
Revolutionary Soldiers in Georgia

This Quaker theme seems like a strong lead. The Quakers kept good records so Sandy’s next research steps will focus on Quaker connections. She asks, “If any of our members have experience researching Quakers, particularly in Virginia, please get in touch with me to share what you know.” Sandy can be reached at sfryer@californiaancestors.org.

The member-posted family trees on Ancestry.com have aided Sandy in her search. Knowing that one cannot rely upon these trees as being accurate, Sandy has instead used the trees to find documentation that supports their claims and sometimes offers clues to other places where she can look for further documentation. Ancestry has pretty good Quaker records, which is also helping her make progress.

One of the Quaker sources Sandy found mentions Nathan Jones and
two of his brothers

Sandy created a table to help her keep track of the names and facts she is finding for each Jones candidate. Her table enables her to easily compare each individual by generation and associations. Sandy also created a family tree using her Legacy genealogy program for her yDNA connections. She uses this tree, which is separate from her primary tree, to keep each piece of information she finds along with her sources. She also uses Legacy to create reports that help her analyze her data.

Since using Ancestry Family Trees has helped Sandy make progress on her conundrum she admits to feeling a little guilty for not having shared her research on Ancestry. Now, she is reconsidering that decision and may share some portion of her tree publicly. 

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Online Genealogy: Week of May 18-24

Here are some online genealogy events offered this week. Most are free. See our post “Genealogy Learning in the Time of Coronavirus,” for links to archived classes at Ancestry, FamilySearch, RootsTech, and more. The National Genealogical Society also offers some free resources online.

American Ancestors offers these free online presentations:

May 20: The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are by Libby Copeland

May 21: Creating a Research Plan for Cluster Research by Lindsay Fulton

May 22: Lords, Ladies & Mummies: The Story of Highclere Castle by Curt DiCamillo

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society continues its series of free webinars.

May 19: Live Genealogy Q&A with D. Joshua Taylor and Susan R. Miller

May 19: Introducing the NYG&B's Online Records Platform with Frederick Wertz

May 21: The Impact of Andrew Carnegie on the Building and Shaping of New York by John Kinnear

Legacy Family Tree and MyHeritage offer these webinars:

May 19 & 20: Discover the Holdings of German Archives by Teresa Steinkamp McMillin

May 20: Timesaving Apps for Busy Genealogists by Lisa Alzo

May 22: Fridays in May: Your Questions Answered LIVE—More DNA with Diahan by Diahan Southard

Also, Legacy Family Tree continues to unlock one archived webinar per day through the month of May. The classes follow a 7-day rotating theme:

Sundays - Methodology

Mondays - DNA

Tuesdays - Ethnic Genealogy

Wednesdays - TechZone

Thursdays - Around the Globe

Fridays - Beginners

Saturdays - Technology

This week's unlocked webinars:

May 18 - DNA Rights and Wrongs: The Ethical Side of Testing by Judy Russell

May 19: Military Resources for the Beginning Genealogist, with Tina Beaird 

May 19: Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man's Successes and What He Learned On the Journey by Israel Pickholtz

May 20: The Best Built-in Windows 10 Storage Hack by Marian Pierre-Louis

May 21: Emigration via Hamburg by Andrea Bentschneider

May 22: Getting Started in Family History: Census Records by Cheri Hudson Passey

May 23: Seven Steps to Manage Digital Files - Denise Levenick

May 24: Quality, Time and Completion: Developing a Research Plan (Part One) by J. Mark Lowe

Conference Keeper lists many of the above, as well as these events:

May 18: Chinese Collections and Resources in FamilySearch (for beginners)

May 19: Restoring Old Photos and Documents with Rick Voight

May 19: Who Needed It, Anyway? Researching Around the Missing 1890 Census by Sara Cochran

May 19: Inheritance, Estate Settlements & Wills: Who Got What & Why by Tom Rice

May 19: Conviction Integrity Units and Innocence Networks by Bode Technology

May 22: Implementing a Forensic Genealogy Program by Bode Technology

May 22: Photo Organization with Maureen Taylor

Stay safe, be well, and happy learning!

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Lost at sea: a discovery in a Japanese koseki

As we observe Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we share this story by guest contributor Gordon Hamachi, based on research into his Japanese heritage.

"That’s got to be a mistake," I muttered, as I puzzled over my freshly received koseki tohon.  Koseki tohon are official Japanese government records that identify all family members in a household.  According to the translation, my maternal grandparents' only child was a male named Yojiro Nishikawa, born 21 April 1930.

Family members all disagreed.  My mom is one of seven children, all born in California, starting with Hatsuko (“Grace”) in 1925.  Even if there was some unknown Japanese custom regarding the oldest son, that would be Katsumi, who was born in 1926. Phone calls confirmed what I already knew: nobody had heard of a family member named Yojiro. 

This would not be the first time a government bureaucracy had erred.  When I originally requested my family records from Japan, I was required to attach a copy of my mother’s U.S. birth certificate.  Her birth certificate is a sloppy mess, with multiple typographic errors in both her first and last names. To avoid unnecessary confusion, I silently corrected these errors with Photoshop before transmitting the birth certificate.

Because Yojiro couldn’t possibly be a relative, I promptly forgot about him as I gleefully mined the Japanese government records to add four generations of ancestors to my family tree.  It was months later when I revisited the matter of Yojiro.  This time I noticed something odd that I had missed: according to the koseki, Yojiro was "born above Pacific ocean between Honolulu, Hawaii and San Francisco, U.S." He couldn’t have been born on an airplane, as Pan American’s China Clipper didn’t begin service until 1935.  In 1930 people traveled across the Pacific by boat.

My maternal grandparents, Haruji and Tsuruye Nishikawa, from their Alien Registration cards

Fortunately, steamship records are freely available on FamilySearch.org.  I was delighted to find a couple of matches for my grandmother.  One was from 17 April 1924 when—just after she married in Japan at age 18—she traveled to San Francisco on the Korea Maru.  The other was dated 11 April 1930, when my grandmother sailed on the Tenyo Maru from Yokohama, Japan to San Pedro, California with children ages five, three, and one. Presumably she had taken them to Japan to visit family. Out of curiosity I also searched for the mysterious Yojiro Nishikawa.  This led to a tragic discovery. A separate page of the passenger manifest of the Tenyo Maru recorded that my grandmother gave birth to a son, Yojiro, on 21 April 1930, about 400 miles northwest of Honolulu, followed by his death a few days later of pneumonia, not far from San Pedro.  Imagine the hardship of traveling while pregnant in a tiny third-class cabin with three small children, giving birth on the ship, and then losing the child.

Yojiro was a late addition to the passenger manifest

Only births and deaths reported to the Japanese Consulate in the U.S. make their way into the official Japanese records.  My grandparents never bothered to inform the consulate, but the steamship company doubtlessly reported births and deaths that happened at sea.  This is why Yojiro was recorded as their only child.

That is the story of how I discovered an uncle that nobody knew.

Gordon Hamachi was born in Southern California, moved to the Bay Area to study computer science, and then worked in the tech industry.  Now retired in Mountain View, he has been working on genealogy for the past five years and repairing books at CGS.  Bicycles and computers are some other things that he likes to repair: years ago he was on the board of Berkeley Neighborhood Computers, and more recently he served on the board of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange.

 

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

A Message from CGS President Jim Sorenson

As various governing bodies take actions to phase in a reopening our economy, CGS is monitoring those decisions to see when we might be able to re-open our library and resume classes at the library. Even after it appears that we can open, CGS will need to determine what measures are needed to ensure compliance with County restrictions as well as to provide for the continued safety of our patrons and volunteers. At this point, I do not expect us to open until mid-summer. Before we re-open, we will publish our new operating procedures in the blog and provide notice of them on our website. Among our "new normal" procedures under discussion are:

• Library access by reservation only.
• Social distancing and the wearing of masks while at the library.
• Rules for the cleaning of touch surfaces.
• Limitations on the size of classes, SIGs and committee meetings at the library.

These measures are expected to remain in place for several months. Some of our committees and SIGs have already started having meetings using remote conferencing and we are taking steps to enable the presentation of many of our classes using that technology. Those classes will be announced on our website as well as on our blog and elsewhere. As a follow-up on a previous blog posting, I’m continuing to write sketches of each of my grandparents as I remain at home. The following is just a brief summary from that work:

My paternal grandparents were married, but not to each other. She was 19, he was 43 and her family doctor. The specific circumstances of the encounter which led to the birth of my father will never be known. The doctor died three years later in 1921 of what he thought was the flu. Months later, the public health service determined that he had died of typhus fever at the front end of an epidemic within the Navaho community in New Mexico where he was supervising the construction of a hospital for these often-neglected people. He may have been the worst of my grandparents but also the most noble.

We will have plenty of time to learn more about our ancestors. We will have time to tell the stories of our ancestors. But right now, our ancestors would want us to stay safe so that we will be able to do those things in the future.   

James Sorenson, President

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Chinese Couplets: A daughter's long search for her immigrant mother's past

On Mother's Day, we are pleased to share this story by guest contributor Felicia Lowe.

I didn’t really know my mother.
She spent most of her life hiding who she was.
Lying about where she came from, how she got here.
What secrets were so dark that the truth had to be concealed?

These are the opening lines to my documentary “Chinese Couplets,” which explores the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943) on four generations of women—my maternal grandmother, my mother, Lettie Kam, my daughter, Alana, and me. The story is shaped by my quest to unravel the mystery surrounding my mother’s origins, the revelation of her illegal immigration to America during the period of Chinese exclusion, and the resulting web of secrecy and shame underlying her assimilation and achievement of the American Dream. The journey takes us from contemporary San Francisco to 1930s rural China, across the world to pre-revolutionary Cuba, post-Mao rural China and again to California, a place on the cusp of its own revolution in multiculturalism.

Felicia Lowe's mother (center) as a baby,
with her mother and older sister.

The research was complicated and messy.  There was not a single source to gather the information I needed to formulate a picture of my mother’s journey to America. For one, she was a “paper daughter,” meaning she had assumed the identity of a child of a citizen, one of the few exempt classes allowed to enter the United States in 1937. For me, the intrigue began when I was three years old and my mom instructed, “If anyone asks where I come from, say Hawaii.”  I knew from my aunt, her older sister, that they were born in China so it was very confusing.

My mother maintained her “born in Hawaii” persona most of her life and refused to offer any explanation as to why her maiden surname was Kam (Kam Sau Quon) while her sister’s last name was Louie.  At the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Kam Sau Quon’s files revealed the story of a family with three young children who left Hawaii for China in 1924, then chose to return in 1937 as war was escalating in China. To learn of my mother’s early life, I read my aunt’s immigration transcripts.  She left China in 1931 in an arranged marriage so there was no subterfuge in her interrogation answers.

An ally in my investigation was my daughter, Alana.  She was able to break through her grandmother’s shell of secrecy by interviewing her for a school assignment. Out of it emerged a huge revelation.  My mother did not meet her father until he returned from Cuba when she was 15.  He’d left his pregnant wife and five-year-old daughter to find work there.  Chinese in Cuba?  That was new news to us.

Trips to Cuba and China followed in search of answers.  The most precious was a visit with my mother to Dutou, the village she’d left six decades earlier.  Like the Chinese couplet, a traditional poem consisting of two lines of verse held in contradictory and complementary balance, my family’s cross-generational tale encompasses a series of interlocked pairings: my mother’s secretive relationship to the past and the mother she left behind when she emigrated to America… my own fraught relationship with my mother… and my daughter Alana’s less-burdened curiosity about her Chinese ancestry and the bright hope it offers for healing the immigrant cycle of rupture, abandonment, denial and shame.

The turbulent times in which my mother came of age, the powerful challenges that all immigrants face, and the strength of the women, both my grandmother and mother, define my daughter and me.  It is their gift and our legacy–secrets and all.

Felicia Lowe is an award winning television producer, director, and writer with 40 years of production experience.  Her films “Chinese Couplets,” “Carved in Silence,” “Chinatown,” and “China: Land of My Father” have been broadcast on PBS and are used in classrooms across the country.  She’s long been associated with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation through her films and activism. www.lowedownproductions.com

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Online genealogy: Week of May 11-18

Here are some of this coming week's online genealogy events. Most of them are free. See our post “Genealogy Learning in the Time of Coronavirus,” for links to archived classes at Ancestry, FamilySearch, RootsTech, and more.

Asian Americans, a five-hour film event, premieres May 11 & 12 on PBS. "Told through intimate personal stories, the series will cast a new lens on U.S. history and the ongoing role that Asian Americans have played."

The National Genealogical Society's Virtual Family History Conference begins May 20. Visit the NGS website for details.

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society continues its series of free webinars.

May 12: Identifying and Examining DNA Outliers by Blaine Bettinger.

May 13: Unlock the Mysteries of the Nonpopulation Schedules by Nancy Waters

May 18: The Impact of Andrew Carnegie on the Building and Shaping of New York by John Kinnear

Legacy Family Tree and MyHeritage offer these webinars: 

May 12: Leveraging MyHeritage's German Resources Effectively by James M. Beidler

May 13 & 14: The Ultimate Family History Interview by Nicka Smith

May 15: Fridays in May: DNA with Diahan by Diahan Southard

Also, Legacy Family Tree continues to unlock one archived webinar per day for free viewing. The classes are based on a 7-day rotating theme:

• Sundays - Methodology
• Mondays - DNA
• Tuesdays - Ethnic Genealogy
• Wednesdays - TechZone
• Thursdays - Around the Globe
• Fridays - Beginners
• Saturdays - Technology

This week:
May 11: Foundations in DNA 1 of 5: Genealogy and DNA by Blaine Bettinger
May 12: Full Circle: Tracing the Descendants of a Slaveholding Ancestor by Nicka Smith
May 13: 3 Ways to Use Gmail Smarter by Marian Pierre-Louis
May 14: How to trace your UK ancestry by Kirsty Gray
May 15: Time and Place - Using Genealogy's Cross-Hairs by Jim Beidler
May 16: Advanced Googling for Your Grandma by Cyndi Ingle
May 17: 50 Records that Document Female Ancestors by Gena Philibert-Ortega
May 18: DNA Rights and Wrongs: The Ethical Side of Testing by Judy Russell

Conference Keeper lists many of the above, as well as these events:

May 12: How to Interview Military Veterans with Kayleen Reusser

May 13: Quhat's in a Nayme? by Maureen Brady

May 13: Finding Military Records by the Genealogy Zoom Chat Series: An Illinois Multi-Library Event

May 14: Acadia with Mark Labine, hosted by the Minnesota Genealogical Society

May 14: Legalese for Genealogists by the Genealogy Center

May 15: Your Next Step: Write Your Family History with Stephen Szabados

May 16: Meet the Pilgrims! by Pinellas (Florida) Genealogy Society

Stay safe, be well, and happy learning!

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Online genealogy: Week of May 4-10

Here are some of this coming week's online genealogy events. Most of them are free. See our post “Genealogy Learning in the Time of Coronavirus,” for links to archived classes at Ancestry, FamilySearch, RootsTech, and more.

NOTE: The National Genealogical Society's Virtual Family History Conference begins May 20. Visit their website for details.

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society continues its series of free webinars.

May 4: "Using Third-Party Tools to Analyze Your Autosomal DNA" by Blaine Bettinger 

May 6: "Discover Unique Family Connections to Southerners Living in New York" with J. Mark Lowe 

May 9: "New York City Municipal Archives: Lesser-known Collections" with Susan R. Miller

Legacy Family Tree and MyHeritage have an ongoing series, including a series of "Fridays in May" live Q&As with a different expert each week. This week:

May 5 & 6: "Smarter Search Strategies for Genealogy" by Thomas MacEntee 
May 6:  "Crème de la crème: Targeted Autosomal DNA Testing to Isolate Pertinent Genetic Cousins" by Paul Woodbury
May 8: "Fridays in May: Tech with Thomas" kicks off with a live Q&A with Thomas MacEntee
 
Conference Keeper lists many of the above, as well as these events:

May 5: "Learn to Build an Online Family Photo and Video Collection With Collectionaire"
May 6: "Ancestry Library Edition" presented by the Genealogy Zoom Chat Series: An Illinois Multi-Library Event
May 6: "Jewish Genealogy and Home DNA Testing: A Virtual Discussion," hosted by Gordon Center for Performing Arts
May 6: "3 Steps to Prepare for a German Heritage Tour" by Family Tree Tours
May 8: "Pandemic 1918! Combating the Influenza Epidemic During the Great War" with Tina Beaird


Stay safe, be well, and happy learning!

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Quarantine Quests: A Genealogist's Fairytale Come True

Chris Pattillo is collecting "Quarantine Quests," stories of genealogical projects and discoveries made by our members while sheltering at home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This story is from CGS Member Ron Madson.

Ron Madson’s Quarantine Quests story began in the Summer of 2019 when he traveled to France and Switzerland to attend the Women’s Soccer World Cup. While there he visited a cousin, Claire Daams, who is an attorney in Bern and happens to be conversant in seven languages, including Old German. Recognizing an opportunity, Ron asked Claire if she might help him with his second-great-grandfather Niklaus Glaüs. Ron had attempted to read the records that are available online at the Bern StateArchives but with little success.

Claire agreed and within minutes had identified Ron’s second- and third-great-grandparents. Even better, she gave Ron a personalized lesson in how to read Old German. Ron refers to the script as nothing more than "squiggles" but with Claire’s help, he quickly began to be able to decode the information contained in the documents. These records typically include the basics – birth, death, and marriage. Marriage records sometimes include the bride and groom's places of origin, the names of their parents, and sometimes the dates that the parents were married. Some death records include the date and place of birth. Some do not include date of birth, but include exact age at death: years, months, and days. But many of the older death records do not contain this vital information, although they may have "extras" added by the priest or officiant. "I try very hard to read this 'extra stuff,'" Ron says. "And it kills me that ninety percent of the time I can’t, while knowing that beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is 'good stuff' there."

After his lesson, Claire asked if Ron would like to visit the village where his ancestors were from – “a genealogist’s fairy tale come true,” he says. Ron’s ancestors lived in a small village in the foothills of the Alps in the Interlaken District of Bern. While there is no way to know the exact home or farm where his ancestors lived, Ron did recount the pleasure of eating lunch in a local restaurant right on the lake. He ordered fish that had been caught in the lake and knew that his ancestors had fished in that same lake generations before.

Fast-forward nearly a year and now while Ron is quarantined at home he is working feverishly to find, decipher, and document new ancestors and more records. Ron reports that he has added hundreds of new ancestors since he learned to decode the Old German text. Each time he thinks he has found a new ancestor he says “I look for other records to shed light on the found record, to prove or disprove that this is the correct record. Depending on the circumstances, the names, area, year(s), record information, what, and where I look varies.”

For each new person he tries to find birth, marriage and death records. He then enters the data into his Family Tree Maker genealogy program. Like most of us, he makes copies of every document he finds. He then imports the digital file into Adobe Photoshop and extends the page at the bottom and top to add research notes. At the top he includes the name of the document and a summary of what it says. At the bottom, he adds his source information.

Ron has identified the two oldest living people on this line: Florine (Lee) Glaus, now 93 and living in South Dakota, and Clare Leone Glaus, who is 102 years old and lives in Seattle. He was able to interview both of them and has fifteen hours of recorded interviews plus stories, documents and photographs.

When I asked, “Have you established a particular routine for doing this work during the shutdown?” Ron explained, “my wife and I have dinner, then we watch a movie, after which I spend several hours each day – sometimes into the wee hours – working on my genealogy.” Ron is also planning to listen to a podcast to learn more about how to read Old German so he can continue his research on a different family line.

Have you made any big discoveries while you have been staying at home? Let us know and we will share your story. You can reach me at cpattillo@californiaancestors.org

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Message from the President

CGS President James Sorenson

Greetings,

I hope you are all weathering the COVID-19 storm. These continue to be extraordinary and unprecedented times for all of us. I know most of us want to return to “normal." For CGS, normal would be resuming our classes at the library. Although we closed our library and canceled classes before it was required, our continued closure is a function of county health mandates. We will not be able to open our library or resume classes at the library until some time after there is some relaxing of general restrictions. Phase One of relaxed restrictions will still prohibit gatherings of people greater than some number (say 10) people. I have not heard anyone say when Phase One will start in Alameda County, and certainly no one can say when the later phases will occur. 

We have decided to cancel classes which were scheduled as part of a series, if the front end of that series has already been canceled. That doesn’t mean those classes will not take place this year but they will not take place as currently scheduled.

CGS has been working with remote-access technology and we had our first remote-access class on April 9. We are working on having other remote-access classes and they will be posted on our website and in our blog as they are developed and scheduled. This is new territory for CGS and we are working diligently to bring these classes to our CGS membership and other members of the genealogy community who look to CGS for guidance and instruction. 

James Sorenson, President

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Online Genealogy: Week of April 27-May 3

 

Each week we will share news of upcoming online genealogy events. Most of them are free. Check our previous post, “Genealogy Learning in theTime of Coronavirus,” for a list of archived classes at Ancestry, FamilySearch, RootsTech, and more.

Heads up: The National Genealogical Society will hold a Virtual Family History Conference this year, beginning May 20. Visit their website for details.

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society continues its series of webinars. Next up is a presentation by CGS member Grant Din!

April 28: "The Joys and Challenges of Chinese American Research" by Grant Din
April 29: "German Records Online" by James M. Beidlar
May 4: "Using Third-Party Tools to Analyze Your Autosomal DNA" by Blaine Bettinger

Legacy Family Tree and MyHeritage continue their ongoing series. This week:

April 28: "Working with DNA segments on MyHeritage" by Ran Snir

April 29: "Road Crews and Jury Selection: How to Find Where Our Ancestors Lived and Their Neighbors" by J. Mark Lowe

May 1: "The Future is Still in the Past: An Introduction to Online Parish Clerks in the United Kingdom" by Wayne Shepheard

Conference Keeper lists most of the above, as well as these webinars:

April 27: "Jersey Roots Genealogy" presented by Michelle Tucker Chubenko
April 29: "Break Down Brick Walls" a Zoom chat with Illinois librarians
May 1: “Getting Done Your Family History Projects” a four-part class by Heirloom Films
May 2:  "First World War Internment Camps" with Hannah Bell via the BYU Family History Library (link takes you to the list of classes; you can click to enter the class at time specified)

Stay safe, and happy learning!

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

DNA Day test kit sales!

the famous double helix

Saturday, April 25, is National DNA Day, commemorating the day in 1953 when molecular biologists James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and chemist Rosalind Franklin and colleagues published papers describing the double-helix structure of DNA. Many DNA testing companies lower their prices for "DNA Day" sales every year. Ancestry DNA, the most popular test with the largest database, does not appear to be participating at this time (watch them for discounts around the holidays), but many other leading companies are offering deep discounts on their test kits this weekend; some are extending their sales into next week. Here's a partial listing:

Living DNA is selling its ancestry and health kits at a discount of up to 30 percent.

23 and Me offers discounts of 20 to 25 percent off their ancestral DNA and genetic health test kits through April 26.

Family Tree DNA has discounts up to 30 percent on their Y-DNA, autosomal, and mtDNA tests through April 26.

MyHeritage's ethnic DNA and health test kits are half off through April 29.

Confused about which test is right for you? You may want to check the DNA Testing Guide website, which offers detailed information about and comparisons of the best DNA tests on the market today. The site's blog is full of information about the basics of DNA and covers topics including Asian ancestry, African American ancestry, Native American ancestry and much more.

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society