Be it resolved...

"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." – Rainier Maria Rilke

I am a list maker... there I've admitted it. I love lists. I love making them and I love crossing things off. That's one of the big reasons I love New Year's. I look forward to making resolutions because a) it involves a list and b) mine are generally things I really want to do, not things I should do, if you know what I mean. The past couple of years have been a bit hectic so I wanted to sit down and really think about what I would like to accomplish this year and make it so!

So what do I hope to do this year, genealogically-speaking?

I am going to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City next month, my first visit in over 6 years. I am busy making lists (more lists!) of what I want to research while I am there. Keeping that momentum going is first on my list!

I made a major leap over a brick wall last summer with the discovery of the court record documenting my great-great-great-great grandparents' divorce in 1846. I want to continue to explore leads relating to Mariam Williams Kirkendoll and her daughter, Caroline Kirkendoll, who seem to have disappeared following the divorce.

A project I've long wanted to get to and now have the necessary technology to accomplish is to scan and transcribe the typewritten memoirs of my great-great grandmother, Christina Belle Shultz Younker. Her recollections are rich with detail, exaggeration, omission and all the elements of a great story and I'd like to make it accessible on the web for others to read.  

Related to Miriam above, it's time to reexamine my other brick walls, write up what I currently know and develop a research plan. One which may involve turning certain aspects over to a professional.

My stalwart website dedicated to Luxembourg-American Genealogy Research, FamiLux, is long overdue for an overhaul and to be brought into the 21st century. Now that so much information is so easily accessible through web searching, refining my scope and focusing more on research strategies is something I am looking forward to far more than checking dead links, which has been taking up most of my web site time up until now.

On the topic of sharing more of my successes, I am also looking forward to blogging about more of my research in short vignettes to pass information along to distant cousins but also as a means to reconnect with what I know, how I know it and what I wish I knew.

Finally, a couple of eminently practical tasks I want to tackle this year:

It's time to review all of my backup schedules, clean up my Dropbox, Google Docs, and other cloud files. I want to spend some time refining my naming conventions for files and getting my digital genealogy organized, labeled and accessible.

A surprise end-of-the-year announcement from Ancestry means that I will also need to spend some time exploring alternatives to Family Tree Maker this year. Back in the olden days, I loved PAF. FTM has been a serviceable program through the years, but now it's time to up the ante and seek out a more robust program better equipped for where I want to take my research in the future.

There are a myriad of posts about making genealogy resolutions just like mine and I read through quite a few for inspiration as well as reality checks. A couple that stand out are Organizing Your Genealogy Research for its pragmatic suggestions. And I enjoyed two from Colonial Roots, Five Resolutions for Genealogy and Five More Genealogy Resolutions for their reminders to get back to applying your best practices to your research.

What's on your list this year?

Determining the Dash

Gertrude Vef (l) and Catharine Younker (r), circa 1900.

Living the dash, the idea that the most important details of the story of someone's life are encompassed in the dash between their birth and death dates, e.g. 1850-1936, is an important part of what motivates family historians. (Read Linda Ellis' The Dash, if you're not familiar with it!)

But sometimes determining those anchoring dates for our ancestors can be challenging! Catharine "Katie" Thomas Kibel Younker's headstone includes her date of birth, 18 September 1834, but no death date and trying to narrow it down to a range of years was a project that took years!¹

At the turn of the 20th century, twice-widowed Katie can be found living with her younger sister, Gertrude, also widowed, in Logan County, Illinois, where Catharine moved with her first husband, John Kibel, about 1864.² Kibel died in 1868 and two years later she married my great-great-great grandfather John Hubertus Younker in Logan County on September 8, 1870 and they were enumerated there in the 1880 census.³

Atlanta Argus (Atlanta, Illinois), 
31 May 1912, pg. 1.

Katie and John moved to Nebraska in the mid-1880's and John died there in 1886.⁴ Eventually Katie moved back to Illinois but the loss of the 1890 census makes determining exactly when difficult. John Younker was a veteran of the Civil War (Co. B, 5th Illinois Cavalry), but Katie does not appear in Nebraska's veterans census and the corresponding Illinois schedule was lost. As mentioned, by 1900 Katie is living in Illinois again with her younger sister Gertrude. A decade later 75-year-old Katie is living with a married daughter in Oklahoma.⁵ The discovery of "deceased" written on a returned pension check postmarked in 1912 in Katie's widow's pension file finally helped pinpoint an approximate date of death since pension checks were mailed quarterly.⁶

A distant cousin posted a transcription of Katie's obituary which appeared in an Illinois newspaper but it didn't include a date or the name of the newspaper. On a hunch, I borrowed the Atlanta Argus through interlibrary loan and began a page-by-page search beginning in January of 1912. Finally an obituary exactly matching the transcript was located at the end of May.

Despite several requests, an Oklahoma death certificate has not been located nor has searching available Oklahoma newspapers added any clues. But after years of not knowing when Katie died finally knowing mid-May 1912, feels like a major accomplishment!

                                                     

1. Catharine Thomas Kibel Younker. Find A Grave Memorial 7525363.
2. Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900. Eminence, Logan, Illinois; NARA T623- 311; Enumeration District: 32, Page: 2A, Line: 10; ---- Junker, sister.
3. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880. Eminence, Logan, Illinois; NARA T9- 227; Enumeration District: 48, Page: 240C, Line: 35; John H. Yonker.
4. John Hubertus Younker. Find A Grave Memorial 40315565.
5. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910. Earlsboro, Pottawatomie, Oklahoma; NARA T624-1271; Enumeration District: 209, Page: 10A, Line: 20; Catharine Junker, mother-in-law.
6. Catharine Younker, widow's pension application no. 468,000; service of John H. Younker (Blacksmith., Co. B, 5th Illinois Cavalry, Civil War); Civil War Widows and Other Dependents Pension Files, 1861-1934. Department of Veterans Affairs, Record Group 15; National Archives, Washington D.C.