Samford University IGHR
4th day of Course 2 – Intermediate Genealogy and Historical Studies
Topics for today were:
Lineage Societies
Westward Expansion
Guides to Manuscript Collections
All topics were taught by Lloyd Bockstruck. Guides to Manuscript Collections was to be taught by Luebking, but she became ill earlier in the year, so Lloyd Bockstruck taught the class.
Hereditary Societies was not my favorite topic. Maybe it’s because I don’t have anyone who came over on the Mayflower etc. I do have ancestors who were Revolutionary War Soldiers, and their lineage has been proven by some member of the DAR, but I haven’t done the work yet for myself. I am descended from a brother of two of the women hanged for being witches at Salem, but I don’t think there’s a society for those. There are societies for military, ethnic, colonial, regional, occupational and other groups of people.
I did learn some things though.
The DAR is good way to have your lineage preserved. If it’s written up, proven and submitted to them, it’s likely to survive for your descendants.
Collateral ancestors are the siblings of your ancestors.
Even if it’s been submitted to the DAR, do your own research. Reprove your line. Those sources are secondary to you until you prove them.
When applying to these societies, follow their instructions exactly.
Only one Jamestown person has present day descendants (through male to male to male lines).
The hereditary society community has a web site.
More interesting to me was the discussion of migration. If you have the chance to take a course on this with Lloyd deWitt Bockstruck teaching it, take the course. We floated through his melodious telling of the history of our country, through wars, through different migrations. I took six pages of greatly abbreviated notes on just this topic – and I write in small type! The only wish I would have for a change to the course is that more of the notes for the lectures would be provided (as Rose and Colletta did). Bockstruck showed so many interesting maps, and they were great for illustration, but I would have loved to have had those in my materials to refer to later in my research. A few of the things that I learned today:
Historians look at mass movements of people.
You need to understand local history.
Climatic zones – can plant same crops, affected where someone migrated to.
People generally migrated with family.
People often migrated for various reasons, including religion.
In the south, colonies were along waterways. In the north they lived in towns and villages.
The fall line is the old continental shelf – waterfalls; as far as ships could go, so that’s where the towns are located.
From the fall line to the mountains is called the piedmont.
From the coast to the fall line is called the tidewater.
He went through several years of migrations, telling when and how far inland the settlers moved.
More children survived in the north than the south – due to illness etc.
He went through several interesting stories on names changing.
He talked about the economics of migration and the crops planted here and shipped back to England and how that affected migration.
He talked about the three main routes through the mountains from the east coast to the interior of our country.
We learned about the change from indentured servants to slavery and what the landowners got for bringing over indentured servants.
Men often looked for a wife “down river”.
He discussed where the various ethnic groups (Swedes, Germans, etc) settled in this country and why.
I learned about Braddock’s Road.
I learned about Acadians.
He says the term: “I’ll be there tomorrow if the Creek don’t rise….” Doesn’t mean the water in the creek. He said it means if the Creek Indians don’t rise up against us. Early settlers in this country were deathly afraid of the Creek Indians.
A long discussion on roads, settlement of Missouri, and mail routes and the building of roads.
The final discussion was on Manuscript Collections and where they are located.
The following site will help with that:
http://www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc
He also talked about PERSI – the index to genealogical magazine articles.
Well, I’m off to the Thursday night banquet and the talk by Paul Milner on “What were my ancestors really like?”
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