Clues in Correspondence: Using California Letters to Reconstruct a Family

One of the common misconceptions about the CGS is that the library and society are "only about California." In fact, the library holds resources from all fifty states and members' ancestors come from all over the world. Members have published articles about far-flung family in the NGS Magazine and in state genealogical journals in Louisiana and Missouri. Now Jane Hufft tells how a cache of letters revealed an ancestor's roots in North Carolina.

"Clues in Correspondence: Using California Letters to Reconstruct an Edwards Family in Polk and Rutherford Counties in North Carolina" by Jane Hufft is the first article in the May 2010 issue of the North Carolina Genealogical Society Journal.

Jane outlines the information found in eight letters written between 1860 and 1877 to Joseph Green Edwards (1825-1906) who left his native North Carolina for Georgia and eventually California when he answered the call of the Gold Rush. The letters were carefully secured in the Edwards family bible and provide "the only evidence for the North Carolina ancestry of Joseph Green Edwards."


Edwards was the son of Smith and Mira (Green) Edwards, both natives of North Carolina. The earliest surviving letter was written by them in 1860. The other letters were written by Joseph's siblings and all are lengthy missives full of news of the family he had left behind. Hufft quotes liberally from the letters and provides biographical information about each of the letter writers and how they relate to Joseph. The letters also include details of how the Civil War years impacted the family.

Hufft concludes, "Researchers should always make sure that their prospecting is persistent and thorough, in case there is a similar mine of evidence in any branch of their own family." We should all be so lucky!

Jane Hufft is the editor of the California Nugget and serves on the Publications/ Marketing Committee. She has thirty-six years of experience in education as a teacher, project manager and administrator.

"Clues in Correspondence: Using California Letters to Reconstruct an Edwards Family in Polk and Rutherford Counties in North Carolina" by Jane Hufft.   
North Carolina Genealogical Society Journal 36 (May 2010): 101-118.


Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

Member Book - Letters From the Storm: Civil War Letters of Lt. J.A.H. Foster

One of the member authors who will be with us at our upcoming Autumn Book Launch is Linda Foster Arden. Arden recently published Letters from the Storm: The Intimate Civil War Letters of Lt. J.A.H. Foster, 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers about her great-great grandparents, Mary Jane Strain and John Alexander Hastings Foster. Married in 1858, they lived in Rural Valley, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania.

The book features one hundred transcribed letters written from 1862 through 1865 by Lieutenant Foster, mostly to his wife Mary Jane, set against the background of all the major Civil War battles involving the Army of the Potomac, 5th Corp.

Skillfully interspersed with Linda Arden's commentary about the events and situations of the era, these letters are a time capsule of the mid-nineteenth century. In many respects, Foster's letters mirror the comments made by soldiers on both sides: their efforts to seek comfort with news from home, their litany of complaints about the rigors of camp and battle, and their descriptions of men and events on the front lines.

Linda Foster Arden holds a B.S. and M.S. in mathematics from Eastern Michigan University and California State University-Hayward. For thirty-five years, Ms. Arden worked for major corporations as an information technology consultant, responsible for project management and acquisition negotiations. She lives with her husband, Ted Arden, a retired American history teacher, who helped her conceive the idea for this book. While doing much of the research and writing, they lived for two summers on a 150-year-old farm in Western Pennsylvania. Currently she lives in Clayton, California, at the foot of Mt. Diablo, where she enjoys reading, camping, working on family history and genealogy, and being a grandmother to Samantha. 

Letters from the Storm: The Intimate Civil War Letters of Lt. J.A.H. Foster, 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers
2010 by Linda Foster Arden; Edited by Dr. Walter L. Powell.  
Indexed, 53 illustrations and photos 365 pages, 7 x 10 soft cover
Price: $29.95


Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

San Francisco Bay Area Genealogy Calendar: September 2010 Published

September 2010 events have been published on the San Francisco Bay Area Genealogy Calendar – a collection of local genealogical society classes, workshops and meetings within a 75 mile radius of San Francisco.

The monthly list of Bay Area genealogy programs continues to grow as more societies submit their items to the calendar. The September calendar lists 35 events and classes to help you further your family history research.

If you would like your group's events added to the calendar, please email the information by the 20th of each month for publication on the 25th. (Please put "SFBA Calendar" in the subject line.)


Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

Wordless Wednesday

 Thursday Evening Discussion: NewEnglandAncestors.org

Tom Gesner, Facilitator

July 29, 2010

Photographs courtesy of Tim Cox, Oakland, California.


Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

San Francisco Deaths 1865-1905: Abstracts from Surviving Civil Records

The California Genealogical Society is pleased to announce publication of a new four-volume set: San Francisco Deaths 1865 - 1905: Abstracts from Surviving Civil Records. Now, for the first time, an index is available to all San Francisco civil death records known to have survived the 1906 earthquake and fire. The index was compiled by a team of member volunteers lead by Barbara Close and Vernon A. Deubler.

Research Director Nancy Peterson provides some background in Raking the Ashes: Genealogical Strategies for Pre-1906 San Francisco Research (2006):

While most of the vital records that were created by the city and county of San Francisco were destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906, a few volumes of death records and indexes, six months of death certificates, a coroner's register and an index to a little under two years of marriage records somehow survived.

Access by the public to the original records has been restricted. Fortunately, the Genealogical Society of Utah filmed most of the records that did survive. Using their films, the California Genealogical Society (CGS) extracted enough information to build an index of these death records. CGS was able to film the several indexes that had not been previously filmed.

Most records contain a wealth of genealogical information: sex, age (often in years, months and days), occupation, place of birth (sometimes very specific information, including, for instance, county of birth in Ireland), marital condition (married, single, widow or widower), date and cause of death, residence at time of death, place of burial, physician, undertaker and additional remarks. This collection includes records for many who were not necessarily San Francisco residents, including the
following:

• those who died in San Francisco
• those who died at sea for whom San Francisco was the next port of call
• military personnel who died in the Spanish-American War and whose bodies were returned
  to the Port of San Francisco
• those who died abroad and whose bodies were returned to San Francisco 
• those whose bodies were to be re-interred
• those whose bodies were sent to San Francisco for forensic or other investigation

San Francisco Deaths 1865 - 1905: Abstracts from Surviving Civil Records is available for purchase at our Lulu bookstore.

Many members of the society contributed to this effort. Barbara Close and Vernon A. Deubler, long
time members of CGS, led the project and contributed innumerable hours working with other volunteers in doing research and in extracting and digitizing information from all the pertinent records they could find. The result is this unique and invaluable four volume set of death indexes arranged alphabetically by surname.

The California Genealogical Society acknowledges with gratitude the many people who contributed to this publication. They include Kay Arnold, Bob Bly, John Callan, Barbara Close, Verne Deubler, Joyce Dye, George Field, Wil Frye, Tom Gesner, Marjorie Kelt, Judy Kettwig, Bette Kot, Lynne Fisher, Lisa Lee, Esther Mott, Mark Pierce, Michelle Reeder, Bev Schroder, Phil Seelinger, Nancy Servin, Rick Sherman, Marilyn Tanner, Shirley Thomson, Terry Toomey, Judy Velardi, Lorna Wallace, Marjorie Wyatt, Sharon Yost, and Judy Zelver. Special thanks goes to Cathy Paris who designed the covers and shepherded the digitization project from start to finish.

San Francisco Deaths 1865 - 1905: Abstracts from Surviving Civil Records
Softbound, 8 1/2 x 11" format
481 pp., vol. I, A-D
475 pp., vol. II, E-K
477 pp., vol. III, L-P
481 pp., vol. IV, Q-Z
Library of Congress Control Number 2009940489
ISBN (4-vol. set) 978-0-9785694-1-9
Published by the California Genealogical Society


Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library.