SGS2026: Scandal!

Nebraska, 1900 Federal Census: Soundex and Population Schedules.
Soundex: S421/424 Ralph thru S513 (NARA Series T1057, Roll 89).

For the second SGS Write All About It! writing prompt, I chose SCANDAL. I didn't have a particular scandal in mind, but the more I thought about it, the more I was drawn back to the first ancestral scandal I discovered years ago, when I was just starting my genealogical journey, and one that remains unparalleled in the family secrets I have unearthed.

Back in yesteryear, the best entrée to the U.S. census was the Soundex. For genealogists, the creation of the Soundex was a transformative project conducted by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Beginning with the 1880 census, indexers used the Soundex phonetic indexing system to group individuals with similar-sounding surnames, enabling officials to efficiently locate those who needed proof of age in order to apply for newly established Social Security benefits. In addition to the 1880 census, the 1900, 1910, and 1920 censuses were also later indexed. For anyone doing genealogy before 1990, you know how critical these indexes were to your research.

Years ago, when I enrolled in an introductory genealogy course, the instructor opened her first lecture with the announcement, “If you can’t live with the knowledge your great-grandfather was a horse thief, leave now!” My first inkling that my great-great-great-grandfather, Cuyler Shultz, might fall into this dubious category of ancestors came while searching the Soundex for the 1900 Census, when I discovered that Cuyler was an inmate at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln. Questions and rampant speculations immediately began racing through my mind about how he got there and what followed in the years until his death.

But first, before I could answer those questions, I needed to start at the beginning. I had been researching my paternal Shultz ancestors, Cuyler and Eliza, who originated in Wisconsin, later moved to Iowa, before settling in Nebraska in the 1880s. I was able to trace them relatively easily in the census using the printed indexes to the 1850, 1860, and 1870 censuses, using the process of elimination and winding and rewinding many microfilm reels. 

When I got to 1900, however, I noted that Cuyler was not enumerated with his large family in Grand Island, Nebraska. The enumerator indicated that his wife, Eliza, was married and not widowed, so I set out to find out whether he was living elsewhere or had been excluded for some reason. As I browsed the Soundex, I found Cuyler, but was surprised to learn he was living in Lancaster County, Nebraska, home of the state capital, Lincoln. As I read further down the card, I almost fell out of my chair when I read the words "Nebraska State Penitentiary"! Cuyler was 69 years old at the time, so I didn't know how long he had been incarcerated. Fortunately, Nebraska is one of the states for which the 1890 Veterans' census survived, and he was enumerated in Grand Island, where I expected to find him, so I was able to narrow down my search for his crime(s) to 1890-1900.

So, what happened and when, and how'd he end up in the Pen?

History of Hall County, Nebraska,
by A.F. Buechler and R.J. Barr, 1920.

On a research trip to the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, I located a history of Hall County that provided a few scant details and a date. There were no online newspapers to consult at the time, so I wrote to a local genealogical society and paid for a researcher to check area newspapers for me. 

After a few months, I received a tantalizingly large envelope in the mail with a treasure trove of articles about the trial. To say it was the talk of the town is an understatement. In a nutshell, in a fit of rage, Cuyler shot his neighbor, J.P. Farr, over long-standing disagreements unprovoked and without remorse. During the course of the trial, which centered around an insanity defense that Cuyler himself rejected, it was revealed that, as a result of injuries received during the Civil War battle of Shiloh, Cuyler had shrapnel in his head. He had a history of erratic behavior after the war and was violent and a heavy drinker as a way to manage his ongoing pain.

Omaha Daily Bee, March 21, 1892, Page  1.

Regardless, he was convicted and sentenced to hang. At some point, his sentence was reduced to life without parole. After nearly 10 years in prison, the Shultz family petitioned the governor of Nebraska, Ezra P. Savage, for clemency for Cuyler, citing his advanced age and the family's pledge to manage his activities. Clemency was granted, and Cuyler was released in 1901. After their youngest daughter, Ida, was married in 1910, Cuyler moved to the Nebraska Soldiers and Sailors Home in Grand Island, where he lived until he died on June 10, 1917. 

Curiously, his obituary makes no mention of his murder conviction, but does make note of his Civil War service. His daughter, Christina, left behind an 80-page manuscript with many minute details of her life, and also neglects to mention anything about his murder conviction, although she does speak very candidly about his alcohol consumption, how her mother had to sell eggs and butter to provide food for the family when her husband didn't, and his violence towards his family. 

I have since located other direct ancestors with less-than-stellar histories, as well as nefarious activities of extended family members, but Cuyler holds the prize for being the most notorious of them all!

Copyright 2026 by Lisa A. Oberg, GeneaGator: Vignettes of Yesteryear. All Rights Reserved.

SGS Write All About It! — Outfit

Army Nurse Corps
Uniform, 1917

I agreed to coordinate a yearlong writing program for the Seattle Genealogical Society. While I don't have everything plotted out for the entire year yet, I do know I want to offer writing prompts for those who are interested. I am a big fan of Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks guided writing practice and wanted to do something similar on a smaller scale. Our group will meet ten times in 2026, so I picked ten topics at random as writing prompts. Very random!

The first prompt, OUTFIT, is inspired by the book Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Ilene Beckerman. Do you have memories of an outfit you wore to an event? Do you have a wedding dress, baby clothes, or other heirlooms passed down in your family? Rather than write about something from my family, I am going to take this topic in a different direction!

I have been researching the history of Base Hospital 50, a World War I hospital unit, since 2016, in particular the stories of the unit's 104 nurses, many of whom were from the Pacific Northwest. Through a Facebook group I am a member of, Army Nurse Corps, 1917-1919, I connected with a collector who purchased the uniform of one of those nurses, Minnie Andrews West. In the course of our conversation about Minnie and her uniform, we connected with a member of the American Society of Military Insignia Collectors (ASMIC) who recognized that the shoulder patch on Minnie's uniform was particularly rare.

Base Hospital 50 was organized by the University of Washington (UW) in 1917, and largely staffed by physicians, nurses, and enlisted men from the Pacific Northwest. Shoulder insignia, or unit patches, didn't come into use until World War I, and there was an approval process for designs to be authorized. The purple and gold insignia for Base Hospital 50 (BH50), echoing the colors of the UW and its iconic W, was never officially authorized, and the patches weren't distributed until after the war ended. As a result, there are few photos of BH50 personnel with the patch on their left sleeve. Most of the nurses had photos taken in uniform before embarking to serve abroad. Bringing together the three threads, I was fortunate to collaborate with the two collectors and publish an article about Minnie and her uniform in the Trading Post, the collector's magazine published by ASMIC. 

The article goes into Minnie's life story, but for this post, I wanted to focus a bit more on the uniforms worn by members of the Army Nurse Corps. Although there were enlisted nurses in the U.S. Army by 1917, the large numbers of nurses needed during World War I were organized under the auspices of the Red Cross, which provided specific uniform regulations. 

The regular uniform of the American-trained nurse consisted of: 

High-necked serge dress worn
by Chief Nurse Julia Stimson.

• Dark blue Norfolk suit, black buttons 
• Dark blue high-necked serge dress 
• Long dark blue double-breasted coat, black buttons 
• Dark blue silk blouse, high-necked
• White silk and cotton blouses, high-necked 
• Dark blue velour hat for winter 
• Black straw hat for summer 
• Nurses who have the long dark blue capes are permitted to wear them, but they are not to be thrown open in order to show the red lining.

Insignia: 

• On the lapel of the coat, “U.S.” and a caduceus with a small red cross. 
• Red Cross Nurse badge pin

As pictured above, a Norfolk suit was a long, fitted jacket with patch pockets and a gored skirt. Underneath, most women wore a white blouse or "shirtwaist" with lace-up boots. Abercrombie & Fitch, then an upscale sporting goods store provided uniforms for many women who served during WWI. 

How Minnie's uniform ended up in the hands of a collector in Canada, to be sold to another Army nurse enthusiast and historian half a world away, is unknown, but it is so exciting that her uniform survived, with the unexpected bonus of her BH50 shoulder sleeve insignia! 

Copyright 2026 by Lisa A. Oberg, GeneaGator: Vignettes of Yesteryear. All Rights Reserved.

10 'Easy' Things About Genealogy

I am fortunate to have several like-minded genealogy friends and we get together regularly to share our successes and crowdsource ideas for working through brick walls. So this week's #52Ancestors prompt "Easy" got me to thinking. The suggestion was to write about an ancestral line that had been easier to research than others, but my mind went in a different direction. There are many mistakes my friends and I have discussed over the years that are all too easy to make when researching your family history, as well. Here are just a few that come to mind.

It is easy to:

1. Stick to the mainline and forget to research your FAN club (Friends, Acquaintances, and Neighbors.) Follow collateral lines, e.g. siblings, particularly for obituaries and death certificates. 
2. Romanticize your ancestor's motives or overlay current values onto the lives of our ancestors. Our ancestors were criminals, slaveholders, bigots, bigamists, and all manner of other things, which can be disturbing to learn. Gather your facts and read more about the viewpoints people held at that time to broaden your perspective of the influences that shaped their lives. 
3. Assume because you have a few facts you have the full story. Just because your ancestor is in the same location in 1900 and 1910 doesn't mean they stayed in the same place the entire decade. Back up your assumptions with facts. 
4. Get so caught up in researching you forget to document your findings. Have you ever had to retrace your steps in pursuit of a record you found previously and can't find again? Then you understand the importance of taking the time to document your sources. 
5. Limit your research to what is easily obtainable online. Ah, the allure of armchair genealogy! Yes, we all want to lounge around in our pajamas and gather as many records that way as we can. But, eventually, if you want to do a thorough search you have to venture beyond what is available online. 
6. Forget now fluid spelling can be. Search engines have gotten smarter and smarter at being able to make connections between similarly sounding names. You still have to do your homework, however, and come up with a list of alternative spellings as well as leverage other details to make locate records when the name is completely wrong or poorly transcribed. 
7. Assume that all of the children enumerated in the census have the same parents. 
8. Assume any of the details at all in the census are correct. They are a great guidepost, but can you corroborate each fact with other records? 
9. Assume any of the information found on an uncited online family tree is correct. Online trees can be incredibly useful, but undocumented research should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. 
10. But most of all, it is so, so easy to get so caught up in researching you find yourself tumbling down the proverbial "rabbit hole" staying up way past your bedtime, allowing dust bunnies to accumulate and ignoring other household chores! But, unlike the other things on this list, is that really such a bad thing?

Copyright 2019 by Lisa A. Oberg, GeneaGator: Vignettes of Yesteryear. All Rights Reserved.