Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: January Highlights

This weekend, Randy wants us to comment on what genealogy fun we've had in January, what happenings do we consider the highlights of January, 2026? 

One highlight for me in January was playing around with FamilySearch's "Simple Search."  That gave me hours of fun, as it presented me with a huge fountain of sources for my ancestors.  And I'm not done yet.

Oh, sure, there have been some searches that turned up nothing or next to it, and there have been searches that have turned out to be an exercise in Finagle's Law ("Any port my ship enters is someone else's home port, not mine").  But overall, I have found a huge number of sources to run down, investigate, analyze, and evaluate.  This has brought some of my family lines forward by leaps and bounds.

Another highlight shed a blanket of comfort over a sad occasion:  One of my dearest friends, who has been more a sister to me than my own sister for forty years, died on 4 January.  It was rather sudden, but not truly unexpected.  But I miss her!  The blanket of comfort: she was not just a friend.  It turns out she was kin, my 16th cousin once removed.  So now I have a whole passel of new kin to research.  I'm in contact with this new cousin's sister, another cousin.  We're exchanging genealogical information.  

In light of January having been a particularly tough month for my family, these highlights have been a welcome reservoir of joy to me.

 

That Which Survives

 I was directed to a post on Substack in which this quotation appears:

"One reason I started as far back in the family tree as I did in the 17th and 18th centuries is that no one is left alive who has a personal stake in what I might uncover. That gives me emotional distance, and the freedom to follow the evidence where it leads without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings." -- Arik Hesseldahl, "Turn Every Page," Arik Hesseldahl's Advice on Digging Deep into your Family History, quoted in "The Writethrough," on Substack.

Hesseldahl is a journalist, and recommends digging into family history as a journalist would, to find the facts.  Like journalism or history, he tells us, what we find depends on "what has been saved," the documents and books and diaries and everything else that has managed to survive war, fire, other natural disasters, and retention policies.  It's the same in genealogy.

The quotation does get one thing backwards, though.   In genealogy, we don't start far back, we start with ourselves and work backwards.  For us, a step backwards is progress.  But I do agree that the farther back we go, the more we can reveal, because anyone affected is long dead, and beyond being upset about things.  The emotional distance assists objectivity.  

So, what survives?  I have found that most medical records might survive five to ten years.  The local hospital where my family tends to be treated keeps records only five years.  I can't go back and find, at 78, record of the tonsillectomy I had when I was 18, which had me in the hospital four days right after high school graduation.  Some graduation present.

Government agencies, local, state, and federal, have retention policies that dictate what will be kept, what won't, and where it goes when it goes somewhere else -- such as the state or national archives.  Not everything makes it into the archives.  They're vast, but they're not infinite.  Someone, somewhere, is making decisions on what will be kept and what won't.

Even government archives, stolid as some of their buildings may appear, are not immune to losses.  The fire in 1973 at the National Personnel Records Center that destroyed a large chunk of U.S. military records, is a case in point.  Wherever it's housed, paper has one disadvantage -- it burns.

 These days, a lot of information is being preserved on electronic media.  One problem there is "feature creep," or the advancements in technologies that render older preservation methods and materials obsolete.  And these days, some technologies become obsolete just a few years after being born.  Floppy disks, anyone?  Another problem is that electronic media can be compromised or destroyed by the very thing that gives them life -- electricity.  A random spike or worse can scramble data.  Electronic storage is also subject to attacks by vicious little worms of people who should meet frequently with someone's horsewhip.  I'll volunteer mine.

 So we ferret out that which survives from any period of time.  Having a field of data to do that surviving is another part of the equation.  How good was a particular society at a particular time at record-keeping?  How good was a particular society at indexing, cataloging, or otherwise maintaining records?  I've found, in my study of Spanish colonial Florida between 1513 and 1821 that the Spanish were absolutely anal retentive about creating and keeping records, bless them.  Indiana had marvelously informative marriage license applications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Illinois didn't even record the names of the parents of brides and grooms until 1872.  And, of course, my paternal great-grandparents got married in Illinois in 1871!

 Search on, dear hearts!  Record your searches, document those facts, and write the stories of your family.

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, Week 4: A Theory in Progress

This week, for Amy Johnson Crow's  52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, we are to talk about a genealogical theory we are working on.  This one is not pleasant, but it's been nagging at me.

In the obituary for my granduncle Edmund McKee Reed (1893-1921), who died in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, there is mention of Edmund's brother, my grandfather Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed, who also died in Detroit.(1)

Frank died 20 October 1917, when he was hit by a yard engine in the Wabash Railroad yard in Detroit.(2)

 His death certificate states the cause of death as "crushing injuries to head, run over by steam engine."(3)  The mention of Frank's death in Edmund's obituary states, "It will be remembered that a brother of [the] deceased, Frank Reed, was decapitated in an accident in Detroit about two years ago."

This raises some questions . . . 

Frank Reed was married to Ruth Nave.  They wed 25 November 1913.  Their first child, a son named Donald Francis Reed, was born 19 May 1913.  A tad early.  Donald was followed in making his entry into the world by sisters Margaret Elizabeth in 1914 and Martha Shideler, my mother, in 1916.  There is no way of knowing for sure what their home life was like.  The only photograph I have of my grandmother Ruth is one taken about 1920, with her and Donald and Margaret, Martha having already been taken from Ruth by the Reed family and placed with Frank's oldest brother Perry and his wife Mary LeSourd after Frank's death.  In that photo, Ruth has a very slight smile, but to me her eyes hold a sadness.  My Aunt Margaret, Ruth's other daughter, told me that Ruth had lived a sad life.  There might have been stress in the marriage caused by the rapid arrival of three children, close in age, and all the exhaustion and tension involved in child care.  The possibly unhappy couple had not begun their marriage with time alone to explore their relationship and engage in any family planning. 

 I just wonder if Frank saw no other way out of a stressful and possibly deteriorating situation except suicide.

Is it possible to be partially or totally decapitated when hit by a railroad yard engine while standing up, walking, or running?  Did he cross in front of the engine, badly underestimating its speed and/or distance from him?  Or did he, in a moment of despair and psychic pain, lay his head down on a rail with the engine bearing down on him?

 I want to find out if any records of the Wabash Railroad exist, and if, in those records, there is a report on the incident.  Would the Detroit police department have had any cause to investigate the death?  Where would a report issued by that department on the incident be housed, if it exists?  

I just would like to know.

(1)  "Obit of Edmund M. Reed" Newspapers.com, database with images, The Pharos-Tribune (Logansport, Indiana, United States) 28 Jan 1921, page 6, Imaged: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-pharos-tribune-obit-of-edmund-m-ree/189449669/ (accessed 21 January 2026).

(2) "Engine Kills a Switchman," Newspapers.com, database with images.  The Pharos-Tribune (Logansport, Indiana, United States) 22 October 1917, page 3.  Imaged: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-pharos-tribune-death-notice/95893929/ (Accessed last 26 January 2026).

(3)  State of Michigan, Department of State, Division of Vital Statistics, Transcript of Certificate of Death, Benjamin Franklin Reed.  Verified by Glenn Copeland, State Registrar, Michigan Department of Community Health, Lansing, Michigan, 3 April 2009.  Registered no. 10695. 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2026, Week 1: An Ancestor I Admire

Starting a new Year with Amy Johnson Crow's  52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, she asks us to talk about an ancestor we admire.

I'm going to choose my maternal great-great grandmother Sarah Ann (Sunderland) McKee Rogers (1842-1922).

Sarah was the daughter of Benjamin Sunderland (1813-1890) and Margaret Emeline Weller (1814-1810). She was born in Ohio and died in Allen County, Indiana.  She married my great-great grandfather Nelson Reed McKee (1838-1908) 8 April 1859 in Allen County, Indiana.  They had three children, Florence Elizabeth (1862-1943, my great-grandmother), Benjamin Franklin, called Frank, (1865-1890), and Charles Preston (born in 1873; death date not yet discovered).

 As related in my blog post "The Mystery of Nelson Reed McKee" (https://karenaboutgenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/05/blacksheep-sunday-mystery-of-nelson.html), the family's life changed when Nelson disappeared on the night of 31 May 1879, never to be seen again in Indiana.  The town turned out to search for him.

He turned up later in Beloit, Rock County, Wisconsin.  In Indiana, he had been a jeweler and watch repairman.  He took up the same occupation in Beloit, first under the name Nels R. McCuren, then later under his true name, Nelson R. McKee.  He married Ida Josephine Colby 1 August 1880.  There was a slight problem with that: he was still married to Sarah Ann.  

Here's where her story begins, though not as richly documented as Nelson's.  I see Sarah as holding out hope for a while that Nelson would return or be found.  That hope must have eventually faded, and Sarah sought a divorce from Nelson, which was granted in mid-November of 1882.  The divorce was uncontested, and Sarah was awarded custody of the children.  She was left to raise her three children by herself.  Her 16-year-old daughter, on the cusp of 17 years, went to work as a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse to help support herself and her mother and brothers.  For the same reason, by the 1880 U.S. federal census, Frank, then 15, was earning a living as a wagon driver.

Sarah obtained the divorce to enable her to marry again, which she did 29 October 1884, to a man named Luke Rogers.  She faced the grief and shock of her husband Nelson's disappearance, and later the knowledge that he had abandoned the family.  She had to endure six years of being a single mother, and the strain of seeing two of her three children having to go to work at early ages to help support the family.  One did what one must.

Luke Rogers died in 1915.  I have not found out much about him.  I hope he was a decent man who treated my great-great grandma and her children well.  I hope they had a happy life together.  Sarah deserved it.