The National Archives is on Bishop Street, a fair walk across Dublin from my hotel. I first went with other members of the research group, but the last time I went by myself. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I can hardly find my way around my own house. Let’s just say that our fearless leader, Donna Moughty, kept a watch for my return and was mighty relieved when I made it safely.

One of the many cool things about the National Archives of Ireland is that it doesn’t open until 10AM. I realize that this may be seen as a drawback to some, but I appreciated the time to eat a sit-down breakfast (oh! Those croissants and butter!), organize my materials, and walk leisurely there. When you arrive, you’ll sign in at the desk and find the lockers beyond that in the room on the right. They are the same lovely glass lockers I showed in my post about the National Library. Everything except your laptop, camera, and research materials stays in a locker.

Take the elevators up to the 5th floor. (Before the doors open or close, a protective fatherly Irish voice says, “Please mind the door.” I thought this was so sweet until about the 999th time I heard it in the research room.) When you exit the elevator, the sign above greets you.

This is the view as you enter the main reading room. The only reading room, actually. (Kristin, is that you at the table? And Bill walking toward you?) It looks like we had the whole place to ourselves that day, but there really were a few other folks there. To the left is a wall with pocket containers holding information, including the slips to request manuscript material. The main desk is just after that. The folks there are friendly and helpful, so don’t be afraid to ask for help. This is where you will submit your reader’s tickets and pick up the documents you order for research.

Ah, now you can see the main desk in the background and the entry doors. This photo was taken from the opposite side of the room as the first photo. As you can see, there was no shortage of microfilm readers that day.

Down at this end of the room were a lot of old books. I wish I had time to explore them all further. These were labeled “Prison Correspondence.” Someone’s family’s genealogical treasures are hidden in there.

There is a professional genealogist on duty daily from 10AM until 1:30PM. This consultation service is free of charge, just like at the National Library. Here’s another idea I’d love the U.S. to import.

Moving back down to the end of the reading room where you first enter, there is a reference area. Yes, those are pillows you see on top of all the book shelves. No, they do not allow naps. When you remove a book from the shelf, you lay it on a pillow before opening it. This cradles and protects the spine of the book.

See that door in the back right corner of this photograph? That’s the room where you go to have a photocopy made of a document.  When I was there a few months ago I think the price was 20 Euro cents per copy. For 2013, the rates increased to 50 cents/copy. You purchase a copy card with a minimum of 2 Euros on it, and refill as needed. Microfilm is also located in this room. You may sign out one film at a time.

In this area of the reading room you will also find the Will and Administration Indexes, among other books and finding aids. Before you get too excited, remember that the pre-1922 wills and administrations themselves did not survive the Four Courts Fire. We make do with the indexes. Researching Irish genealogy is a lesson in gratitude.

And am I ever grateful that the National Archives preserved so many documents. In the U.S., our National Archives preserves important documents produced by our government. The definition is a bit more broad in Ireland, and includes private and local records.  NAI, thank you for preserving some landlord estate records for me.  I am just drooling looking at the box in this photo. I want to go back and spend some more time with this box.

Hope you enjoyed this tour of the National Archives of Ireland!

As if I wasn’t overwhelmed enough by just being in Ireland, entering the most beautiful library I have ever been in put me over the top. I love this place. If I didn’t have to find food eventually, I might never leave. Well, not for a long time anyway.

Doesn’t the beauty of this place say something about the value the Irish place on learning and preserving knowledge and history?

Just look at this door!

First stop: lockers. Everything except your work materials goes in here. I had no problem fitting my wheeled work bag into the larger lockers. You can set your own combination, so there are no keys to worry about. With the glass doors, you don’t even need to remember your locker number. Wish they had these at the repositories I visit in the U.S.! Next to these lockers is a cafeteria. I never actually ate at this cafeteria, or at anyplace else for lunch for that matter. I mean, who has time to eat lunch when there are all these documents to be discovered? I figured that I could always eat lunch next week.

After passing through the metal detectors (a sad necessity everywhere), and climbing the stairs, the room on the left has a genealogist on duty, basic genealogical references, and a couple of rows of computers. If you are new to Irish research, or need some pointers, this will be your first stop. Across the hall to the right of the stairs is the room that contains the parish records microfilms and microfilm readers.

Continuing up the stairs you’ll come to the main reading room.

Yes, please do stop, look up, and allow it to take your breath away. It is a research cathedral.

The first task on the agenda is to obtain a reader’s card. You can do this in the small room on the right. I’m the proud owner of several library cards, but this one is now my favorite. Here’s a great tip I learned from Donna Moughty. Wear a badge holder from a genealogy conference. You aren’t allowed to carry a purse, so it’s the perfect place to tuck your reader’s card and several two-Euro coins for copying.

On the left in the reading room are several computers where you can submit a readers ticket to obtain microfilm or manuscripts. You can also submit your reader’s ticket from your computer in your hotel room the previous evening, and find your materials waiting for you when you arrive in the morning. Where has this system been all my research life? If you requested an item like newspaper microfilm, it will arrive at the main desk in this room. There is a microfilm reading room at the opposite end of this room. If you want to print, you’ll need to bring the film to the room where you obtained your reader’s card and place on a reader-printer in that room. The printers use copy cards which you can buy in either one or two Euro denominations. Your only option is to print on 11×16 paper.

If you requested manuscript material, it will arrive in the manuscript reading room which is down the street a short ways at the other end of the block. They’ll allow you to take one folder or item at a time. Non-flash photographs are allowed. I spent many hours here looking at documents created by my ancestor’s landlord.

OK, now tell the truth. Where else but on my blog are you going to see what the bathrooms at the National Library of Ireland looks like?! I took this so you could see that even the bathrooms are lovely here. Now you can fantasize about hiding in a stall at closing time so you can spend the night here. Of course, I would never imagine such a thing. Right.

If you could spend a day (or all night!) here, what is the first thing you’d want to find?

The day that stands out most in my mind was the day that my new-found Irish cousins, Ann and her brother Peter, took my husband and I out to Moycullen, a parish in County Galway, northwest of Galway City. My great-grandmother’s brother, Stephen Burke, married a Moycullen girl named Margaret Barrett. Margaret’s younger brother was Ann’s great-grandfather, Nicholas Barrett. That Ann and I found each other and wove the wandering threads of our families back together is a miracle that Internet communication made possible, but that’s another story.

Margaret and Nicholas grew up in a cluster of cottages that made up the Townland of Islandmore. It was an exquisite day when we set off to find this place. In a land of soft days filled with misty rain, this day was crystalline clear and warm, under a dazzling blue sky. Ann stopped the car along the side of a vine-covered stone wall. We pulled aside the vegetation that had overgrown the engraving in the stone that told us we had come home to Islandmore.

Ann drove down a dirt lane just wide enough for two tire tracks, and pulled up to a small farm house.

The owner graciously led us back, climbing through piles of hay bales, and pointed out the ruins of the original stone cottages. The thatched roofs were long gone, only scraps of corrugated tin that replaced them remained. Some of the stone had been replaced by cement blocks during the years that the structures had been used as barns and outbuildings. Vines and bushes had been hard at work reclaiming the former homes, but parts of the walls survived.

We pulled the branches aside, ducked our heads under the low doorway, and crossed the threshold into what the elderly property owner pointed out as being the former Barrett cottage.

The vines and discarded remnants of more recent days vanished in my mind’s eye.¹

Instead, my could see the kitchen in the center of the house, Margaret and her mother busily cutting potatoes and stirring soup. I imagined my great-granduncle Stephen arriving at the door, a blushing 20 year old, come to court Margaret.

Like they must have done so many years ago, we left the house to walk the land together. We climbed a narrow ladder over a waist-high stone wall into the open fields. We eventually realized that the seemingly random stone walls formed a huge circle, apparently a place to bring the cows in at night, or to keep them from wandering by day.

We hiked down to where the property ended as it met Ross Lake. It was wild and unspoiled, without signs of human progress. The cows in the distant fields observed us. Yet, it was not desolate. It was full of remembered ancient laughter, voices calling out and answering, families beginning, and families growing old.

While hiking we picked wild blackberries, perhaps from the same bushes as Margaret and Stephen ate from during their courting walks. I thought about the possibility that during the famine those blackberry bushes, and the fish in the lake, helped sustain Margaret and Nicholas and their siblings, then just small children. 

The lake was beautiful beyond description. The water lapped at the stones on the beach as it had done for centuries, boring holes in the soft limestone before Margaret and Stephen were there, and long after we will be gone.

There was a memory cairn by the water’s edge, built by someone who also came to this place to remember. I climbed out to it and  balanced another stone on top, making it mine as well.

This day was life-altering, heart-filling, and wild.  I had studied the church register, valuation records, and maps of Moycullen. But as of that day, Moycullen is no longer a place on paper. It’s a place in my memory, in my life, in my heart. I met them there.

Usually, CrossOver costs about $30-$60, depending on the level of support desired, with annual upgrades required for continued support. This Wednesday, 31 October 2012, from midnight to 11:59 PM central time, CodeWeavers is offering CrossOver for FREE, with 12 months of support and product upgrades. You can read the company’s humorous press release here. Since I am due for an upgrade, this is the best treat in my Halloween bag! Codeweavers even offers an instructional video showing how to install RootsMagic on a Mac using CrossOver.

If you are a Mac user who prefers the Windows-based genealogy software, grab a copy of CrossOver on Wednesday, assuming you haven’t lost power due to hurricane Sandy. Stay safe, everyone.

If you are not familiar with how to navigate to these records, go to the Family Search homepage. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on United States. Then scroll down to the bottom of the left side of this page and click on Vermont. You’ll see the two groups of vital records images near the bottom of the list.

The first group is titled, Vermont Vital Records, 1760-1954. There are 1,868,775 images, and the notes still say that the collection is not yet complete for records prior to 1871. This database and set of images hasn’t been updated since last January, despite all the stars I have been wishing on. My understanding is that the surnames at the very end of the alphabet have not yet been indexed. I hope that this will be finished up soon.

The new images are titled, Vermont Vital Records, 1760-2003. Whoa. That’s a big time span there. Despite the title, the records seem to be from the 1955-2003 time span. There are 1,162,117 images in this group. There is no searchable index yet, but there are indexes available if you browse the images. Some of the images are arranged alphabetically. In addition to the usual birth, marriage and death records, there are also divorce records and amended and delayed registrations of vital records. The newest records, from 1980-2003, have a note at the top that the images are courtesy of Ancestry.com.

I’m fortunate to live and research in an open records state. And now we are all fortunate to be able to research more Vermont ancestors any day or time, even in our jammies and bunny slippers. Thank you Family Search! Now about the rest of that searchable index for the earliest Vermont Vitals….

I was researching a client’s ancestress born in 1798 in Windsor County, Vermont. Despite knowing her maiden name and her stated town of birth, I was struggling to link her to a set of parents. It occurred to me that she was born during the same year that the federal government authorized a tax to raise money to pay for a military buildup in anticipation of a possible war with France (Act of 14 July 1798 (1 Stat. 597)).¹ I’ve used these 1798 Federal Direct Tax records in Pennsylvania and they are rich with detail about the dwellings in which the families lived, providing not only the dimensions of the dwelling but also the number of panes of glass in each window, and the dimensions of barns, sheds and blacksmith shops. I thought it might be handy to use these to determine if there were any additional men with her surname in town during the year she was born who might not appear in the deed books or the 1800 census. “Hmmm. I wonder where those Vermont 1798 direct tax lists are?” With this thought, I promptly tumbled down a particularly interesting rabbit hole.

I started by learning some background information about this tax. Before the government could collect the tax, real property had to be valuated and slaves enumerated (Act of 9 July 1798 (1 Stat. 580)).² Vermont was designated to contain five divisions for the purposes of this tax³  The Surveryor General’s Papers in Vermont contain the commission papers, signed by President John Adams, appointing five men as commissioners of these divisions: Jonathan Hunt, Elijah Dewey, James Whitelaw, Jonathan Spafford, and Ebenezer Crafts.⁴

This 1798 tax assessment resulted in the creation of at least three types of documents. “Particular Lists” consisted of a description of each dwelling house and out building valued at more than $100 on lots not exceeding two acres. The second detailed land, including dwelling houses valued under $100. The third list enumerated slaves. Able-bodied slaves between the ages of 12-50 were taxed at 50 cents each.⁵ In 1798 Vermont was a frontier state, and its commissioners found that the rules devised for more populated areas didn’t fit well here. Houses worth over $100 were a minority. Much of Vermont’s land was undeveloped, and in many counties the majority of landowners were nonresidents whose whereabouts were often unknown. Many of these properties were later auctioned for lack of payment of the Direct Tax. These tax sales produced large numbers of land transactions that provide valuable information to family historians, among other researchers.⁶

I discovered that none of the 1798 direct tax records for Vermont are known to survive at the federal level, but a few remnants do remain in Vermont. The most exciting find was one made last year by Kathy Wendling who discovered a 1798 tax ledger in her Woodstock, Vermont, home. Fortunately, Kathy is an historian and she donated it to the Woodstock HIstory Center. The book contains “footprints of all of the buildings, cellar holes, sawmills and tanneries for Woodstock, Pomfret, Sharon, Norwich, Royalton, Harford, Bethel, Stockbridge, Barnard, Hartland, Bridgewater and Rochester. The last known owner of the book was Nichols Balyies, Surveyor of Revenue.⁷ In 1938-40, the WPA Historic Records survey identified this book as present in the Woodstock town clerk’s office, but its location was unknown in 1983.⁸ Digital scans of this ledger can be viewed at the Woodstock History Center in Woodstock, Vermont.

Additional papers pertaining to this tax are tucked away in other Vermont archives. The James Whitelaw papers at the Vermont Historical Society (VHS) contain fragments of records created for this assessment. The entry in the VHS catalog states that the Whitelaw papers include assessments pertaining to houses owned or occupied in Ryegate and Groton, as well as a list of lands owned by residents of Peacham but lying outside the town. The locations of these lands owned by Peacham residents include the Vermont towns of Orange, Billymead (Sutton), Westmore, Brighton, Walden, Wheelock, Treemsbro, Danville, Cabot, Elmore, New Haven, Groton, Barnet, Belton, Barre as well as towns in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Virginia and Pennsylvania. If you descend from a 1798 Peacham resident, knowing where else your ancestor owned property could be key to documenting migration and kinship ties.

The Stevens Family Papers and the Crafts Papers at the University of Vermont’s Bailey-Howe Library hold more fragments of the 1798 assessment. Enos Stevens was an assistant assessor for Orange and Caldonia Counties. Ebenezer Crafts and his son Samuel were charged with the counties of Franklin, Orleans and Essex. I haven’t personally viewed these papers and published information leaves the exact contents somewhat unclear. An oversize sheet, 32 by 22 inches, among the Stevens Papers is the “Particular List” for the town of Barnet. The column headings include occupant, owner, property description, and evaluation. The Crafts papers (and to a lesser extent, the Whitelaw papers) contain summaries of the average value of land per acre and the number of houses in each town valued at more than and less than $100.⁹ These records provide valuable contextual information for any family historian.

There is still reason to hope that more federal or local copies may be found. In 2004, some “Particular List” valuation slips describing the dwelling houses and property and the tax collection lists for CT towns of Kent and Warren were found at NARA Northeast Region in Waltham, Massachusetts, among the custom’s records for the port of New Haven. A look at the resolution of this tax makes it understandable why these records ended up in seemingly odd places. An 1801 statute directed the surveyors to send their records related to this tax to the top treasury official in each state and an 1803 statute allowed for any remaining responsibilities of the supervisors of the tax to be transferred to “any other officer of the government of the United States.” “The Treasury Department never required that the 1798 direct tax records be sent to Washington.” process was recommended in 1803 but the directive was never issued. If it had been, they would likely have been destroyed in the treasury building fire of 1833. Because of this, the supervisor’s official papers may exist among the records of almost any branch of government.¹⁰ Nathaniel Brush, Vermont’s Supervisor of Revenue, wrote a letter in 1801 directing the surveyors to mail him their documents pertaining to the Direct Tax. Bandel tells us that a search by Bennington Museum staff and other failed to locate any of these records.¹¹ In Vermont, the responsibility for collecting the tax was transferred to the U.S. marshals.¹² Thus, it is not impossible that the 1798 tax records for Vermont may still be hidden under vague titles such as “court records” or “marshals records” among various record groups at NARA Northeast. Watson identifies several possibilities. Local copies or working papers might be among the manuscript collections of any the small, local Vermont historical societies or museums, or even waiting for discovery in someone’s attic. If you are associated with a local repository in Vermont, can you take a look next time you visit? Please post a comment here to let us know what you find.

Are you a descendant of a 1798 tax payer? Have you ever used these direct tax records? For what state? What did you discover?

(Photo by Alan Cleaver, used under Creative Commons License.)

• Many adults living in Vermont during the earliest decades of the 1800s were born outside of Vermont, and documenting their specific place of birth can be key to determining who their parents were.
• The dates of admission and discharge on the prison records can be important to locating other records pertaining to the case – court records and legislative petitions for pardon come to mind.
• Some of the records include physical descriptions of the inmate, and records after 1917 may include a photograph.

I know some of you are thinking, “My ancestor might have caused a little trouble, but nothing serious enough to land himself in a state prison.” You might want to rethink that. Last week I researched a client’s ancestor who found himself in the state prison for stealing oxen. His accomplice, a 12-year-old boy, was also imprisoned. The prison records led to the original legislative petitions for pardon. Those netted an original signature of the client’s imprisoned ancestor and a signature of the boy’s father. He identified himself as the father when he signed, offering proof of kinship to a man who was of age to have fought in the Revolutionary War. It doesn’t often get better than that.

If you want to search these records, the Archives staff will do limited look ups for you. For more in-depth research, you’ll need to visit the VSARA personally or hire a researcher to go for you. Below are screenshots for entries from a series database search on the VSARA website for the records in this record set:

If you don’t find your wayward ancestor in the state prison records, VSARA also has prison registers from Grand Isle County and Rutland County prisons, beginning in 1877. Aren’t black sheep ancestors fun? Do you have a story to tell about yours?

How many faces do you see?

I’ve had a few days now to recover from GRIP. Attendees of genealogical institutes will know what I mean when I say that it takes a while to come down from the high of spending an intense week isolated with fellow genealogists, immersed in learning new genealogical research techniques.

On occasion I have joked that I could learn something from Dr. Tom Jones if he was reading a cereal box, and I bet it’s true. Many instructors teach about the records – what they are and where to find them. Tom Jones teaches you how to use them: analyze them, extract clues from them and correlate them with other records to see patterns. This was particularly true during out last class on Friday, which focused on correlating research findings.

Do you see a crone or maiden? Keep looking.

Have you ever looked at optical illusion drawings? You know the ones I am talking about — those puzzles where it looks like craggy old crone until you squint at it long enough for a beautiful maiden to appear, or the tree where you can see about a dozen faces if you look long enough. That experience of seeing the hidden pictures appear feels a little bit like how I experienced some “ah-ha” moments in this class. Tom Jones can take what looks like a mess of disparate bits of information and arrange them so skillfully that ancestors appear. But unlike the illusionist, Tom invites us behind the black drape and guides us steb-by-step to perform the same feat and coax our own ancestors to pop out of the records.

I could spend an entire course practicing the techniques I learned in this last class. (Hint, hint, to the powers that create institute courses…here is an idea for another advanced class.) If you have a chance to take Dr. Tom Jones’s Advanced Research class, grab it. (Or GRIPitt? )

Thank you Deb Lichtner Deal, Elissa Scalise Powell, Dr. Tom Jones, and all the other GRIP instructors for providing such a great learning opportunity.

Do I sound exhausted? There’s a reason for that. It’s called homework. Homework to end all homework. My eyes are crossed and my brain is fried. Dr. Jones gave us information from personal tax records for 10 men, census records, 12 deeds, wills, bonds, marriage register entries, order book entries, land tax books, and a Revolutionary War pension file. We are to analyze, interpret, and correlate all that to determine which of the nine zillion men named is the father of a particular man, about whom we know very little. After four or five hours of this I have made some progress. But then the little warning light came on that said my battery was low and my brain would shut down in three minutes.

In case you are thinking that this all sounds so serious and not much fun, please refer to my FaceBook page. (Send me a friend request if we aren’t friends yet.) Summer camp for genealogists is in full swing.

Lunch at GRIP, Day 2

Wow, my head is spinning. This is intense, but I love it. I love being challenged this way. It’s 9 pm and I have been in class or doing homework since 8:15 am.

The morning began with a lecture from Dr. Tom Jones on “Transcribing, Abstracting, Extracting, Quoting, and Documenting Sources” (except we never got to the part about documenting sources). This was scheduled for 1 pm yesterday but we are running a bit behind. Tom promises that we will catch up by the end of the week. We practiced with some really difficult early English and American handwriting that made the BCG documents given for transcription as part of the application portfolio look like a walk in the park. The writing was so difficult that it looked at first glance like old gothic German script to me.

Next up was the wonderful Claire Bettag speaking on “Archival Research at the National Archives and Other Repositories.” I have heard Claire speak on this topic before at NIGR but I learned many new things. If I hear it 95 more times I might understand it all. Actually, I think much of this lecture made more sense to me now that I have had some experience researching at NARA than it did the first time I heard it quite a few years ago. There are a lot of improvements to the NARA website that didn’t exist back then. OPA, or Online Public Access is still under development, but will eventually combine the ARC (Archival Research Catalog) database, other databases, and scanned (PDF format) materials. They’ve also inserted a topic approach to searching the NARA website, so you don’t need to know the Record Group (RG) before you begin your search. The topic search will lead you to the RG finding aids so you can identify the Series number and other identifiers you need in order to request your record.

Another great feature is the button on the Forms, Tools, and Aids page that allows you to click on “Records Digitized by Partners.” This gives a hyperlinked NARA micro publication title (as opposed to the title that Ancestry.com gives it) that leads to the digital images. The lists starts with microfilm that has been scanned. Keep scrolling down and you will see original records that have been scanned. Ooooh, Ahhhhh.

Another trick that Claire added to our toolbox was showing us how to find those all-important DPs, or Descriptive Pamphlets. These are scanned as PDF files, and are a bit tricky to find on the NARA website. Go to the page that says “Order Reproductions.” (I agree that this makes little sense, but bear with me.) Click on “Microfilm.” (I know. We want to look at a free DP, not order microfilm. I said to bear with me.) Type in the microfilm number for the corresponding DP that you want to view. Then click on “View Important Publication Details.” This brings up the scanned DP. Government simplicity at its finest. Apparently putting a button that says “View Descriptive Pamphlet” was too easy.

One final tidbit from Claire rocked my research world. She told us not to hesitate to email and/or call the archivists at NARA with questions! The email is inquiries@nara.gov. Cool!

All this, and it is only lunch time! After a quick salad with chicken on it, I browsed Maia’s Books in the lobby by the cafeteria. Maia’s Books and GRIP are allowing us to save personal book stacks so we can browse and add books to our stacks and “check out” later. I love this.

The afternoon started off with a dynamic lecture by Rick Sayre on “Military and Pension Record Strategies: Analysis, Interpretation, and Correlation.” He kept us all focused intently for an hour and a quarter, no small feat considering this lecture followed lunch. He illustrated his research techniques with a case study of his research to find out how the owner of a family heirloom Civil War rifle was related to his family. My favorite “Wow moment” was when he showed us the final check issued to the soldier’s stepdaughter, complete with her signature on the back endorsing it. This is the only copy of her signature that he has. NARA saved stuff like this! And now I know how to find it.

I didn’t think there was any room left in my brain, but somehow I fired up a few more neurons for Claire Bettag’s lecture on Gov Docs. She focused on the American State Papers and U.S. Serial Set. It was exciting to see how much information on private individuals can be found in government documents. Claire is such a good teacher that she made it actually look do-able. And after completing our homework assignment tonight to research a specified individual in the Serial Set I can attest that this is do-able!

Like they say on the infomercials: Wait! There’s more! After dinner, Rick Sayre and Pam Boyer Sayre gave an amazing two-hour lecture on “Google Earth for Genealogists.” I. am. impressed. There are so many possibilities! I only need to find the time to try all the ideas I thought of during this presentation.

Just think. This is only Day 2. I can’t wait for tomorrow!

All lectures mentioned above are part of the course Advanced Research Methods, Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh, 24 July 2012.