Those were the days

I bought version 9 of the Legacy genealogy program today. I have access to all of its wonderful tools (though I’m not sure I’ll be doing much DNA tracking). I can finally designate same-sex couples as actually being same-sex. Version 8 insisted one of a couple had to be a man and the other had to be a woman. So I used the free basic program, which allowed me to enter data and not much else.

One of the things I inherited was the Legacy database that Mom and Dad had put together. Mom got interested in preserving family history in the 1970s, once most of us kids had moved out of the house. Soon she had three thick binders and I think 1200 names. I don’t know what she used for documentation – at least in all of the family stuff I took from their house I haven’t seen much yet. I do have posters she drew for family reunions.

Dad, who worked for IBM, soon had a PC and some kind of database program for Mom to use. And, yes, she used it – at least for this. Over the years Dad migrated to one or two other programs before landing on Legacy. By the time I inherited the database a couple years ago Dad had over 1600 names. Since then I’ve added about 200 more.

In getting to know the new version of the program I saw that for this week Legacy users have free access to census records through My Heritage. Here is is already Thursday and I leave town tomorrow. So I spent much of the afternoon trying to trace some of the more mysterious ancestors, such as one of my great-grandfathers. Through the census records I found where his parents were born (Germany) and that he had several siblings.

I checked on a great-great-grandfather. And I found the limits of genealogy data. In the 1880 census a son is listed at 16 years old – which seemed rather strange since Mom listed him as being married in 1875. In the 1870 census this son is listed as 18 years old, corresponding to the data I had.

When the My Heritage site pulled up the data it also showed the actual page from the census record. These appear to be pages from a book and, of course, all hand-written. So, there were at times legibility issues. Then there may be issues of the census-taker not understanding what is being said. In once case the record showed the husband coming to America in 1868 and the wife in 1886, yet she is giving birth to children in America between those years. I think someone flipped a couple digits. In another case the census record lists a daughter as “Phillis C.” and my Mom’s data lists “Felicity.”

I added a few names and other details to my database. And I also learned a few things about the reliability of genealogy source data.