Book Review - Hiding the Past by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to read and give a review on the first book in Morton Farrier genealogical crime mystery series: Hiding the Past by Nathan Dylan Goodwin. This is the first time I am reading a book by this particular author. I am always looking for something new to read relating to genealogy research. Something that I can relax with and lose myself in when I take a break from my own research. I was excited that this series fell into my lap. So below is my review of The Forensic Genealogist book #1: Hiding the Past. 

Cover 

Right away, the title grabs my attention. Mostly from my own genealogical research. My family has tried their best to hide the past. I am also a fan of crime mysteries, so this definitely has my interest. The picture of what appears to be an abandoned house makes you question, "What does this have to do with the story?" and "What is inside?"

Plot

Forensic Genealogist, Morton Farrier, is hired by Peter Coldrick to find out the truth behind his family, specifically the identity of his grandparents. Right away, Morton learns this isn't going to be a typical job. It has now become known as the "Coldrick Case" and he must navigate his way through secrets, lies, and missing documents to find what he is seeking. He keeps running into people that will stop at nothing to hide the truth, even to the point of murder. Soon his safety is threatened along with his long-time girlfriend, Juliette. He is also involving other people from his life, worried he is also putting them at risk. He must decide if the truth is really worth all that he is going through. In the end, he learns more than he ever thought he would and finds the answer he did not expect. Not to mention during all this, he is dealing with his own personal history that he knows nothing about and the man he calls father. He will have to face some truths from his own past that he was not prepared to learn.

Were Characters Relatable

I was able to relate to Morton in the sense that his past was shrouded in mystery. What he thought was truth was shattered by one revelation when he was younger, then again as he became an adult. Doing my own research, I've learned many truths about my family that has almost shattered my world. His reactions made perfect sense for someone who felt like they were in limbo and had no family to connect with.

Kept my attention

The story kept me guessing what was going to happen next. Whom could he trust? If I would have had the time, I would have read the whole book in one sitting. It was always hard trying to find a stopping place when I needed to continue on with adulting for the day. So yes, it definitely kept my attention. You would definitely call this "A Page Turner".

Easy To Understand and Follow

Nathan writes in a way that is definitely easy to understand and follow. A couple times I had to go back and clarify what I had read to understand what was going on, but that's only because sometimes I get ahead of myself. I am dying to know what happens next.

What I Didn't Like

The only thing I had trouble with the most in the book was understanding locations. The story takes place in the UK, and I am from the United States. It feels like he writes with the understanding that the reader knows or is at least familiar with the towns he is referring to in the UK. If anything, it just shows I really need to expand my knowledge of the UK. Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It isn't hindering enough to keep me from enjoying the book and reading the rest of the series.

Would I Recommend the Book/Series

I absolutely would recommend this book and the Morton Farrier genealogical crime mystery series. I'm actually going to be picking up the rest of the books myself to add to my personal collection. I'm hooked! If you are looking for an excellent crime mystery series with a bonus of dealing with genealogy, then this series is definitely for you!

There you have it. As you can see, I would absolutely recommend reading this book and the series it goes with. If the rest of Nathan's books are this engaging and enjoyable, he is quickly going to become my new favorite author. But don't take my word for it. Pick up the book today and give your own review!

Get it from Amazon today!

New Family - Descendants of Mary Amelia Rickards

     I just got the most wonderful email today. Let me start by saying, the whole reason I started this blog was to not only get stories out about my family but to hopefully get in touch with long lost family. And that is exactly what has happened. The email was from a descendant of Mary Amelia Louis nee Rickards, daughter of Capt. Joseph Henry Rickards. This is the first contact we have had with them. I've been in contact with other descendants, but everyone always asked the same thing. Has anyone been in touch with the Louis family? Now we have!
     I can not tell you how excited I am. I actually scared my husband when I received the email. I screamed and flailed my arms around. He looked at me like I was crazy and asked if I was ok. Then he mimicked how I looked when I received the email. I'm glad he wasn't video tapping haha! Once I explained the reason for my excitement, he completely understood. He knows how much I pour into my research and how long I've been trying to get in touch with family.
     So now from here we get to compare notes, share info and introduce ourselves to all of our new extended family. Every day the world is getting smaller and smaller and our family keeps growing bigger and bigger. This keeps up, I may need to plan a reunion in the future. Oh, gracious... that's quite a daunting thought. One thing at a time.
     So I want to encourage you all. If you are considering writing your own blog about your family history, do it! Absolutely do it! You never know who you might get in touch with. My blog has been active for a few years now, but now family is starting to come out of the woodwork. So do it! Get your stories out there! You just might find long-lost cousins!

Week 39: Map It Out

     Do you have a family that moved around a lot? Have you ever wondered how close in proximity your family lines lived to each other? Are you trying to locate what possible church they would have attended? These are questions I have asked myself when it came to my family. And the only way to answer them was to "Map It Out". That is this week's prompt for the 52 Ancestors Challenge.
     My family's roots are deep in St. Louis. I've traced the majority of the lines back to the time they immigrated. On my mom's side of the family, we have the Ilg Family, Buer Family, and the Helfrich Family. They all lived in the same area of St. Louis, the Carondelet area, from around the 1890s-1945. Some of them moved quite a bit but still remained in the Carondelet area. When I started documenting the addresses for all the families, I started noticing familiar names. So I started comparing the addresses on the maps and lo and behold, they were all within a few streets of each other for years. For some of them, I was having a hard time locating records, so I wanted to look at the churches they went to. Thanks to the advice from my Aunt Patty Fuchs, she told me if I knew their religion, look for the closest church to their residence that was the same religion. That led me to St. Boniface Catholic Church. Even though the church is closed, the St. Louis County Library headquarters had many records from them. I was able to find baptismal records, birth records, death records, and marriage records.
     As you can see from my examples, mapping out the addresses helped me answer the questions at the beginning of this post and many more. I learned a lot more about my family than I ever knew before. I even took the time to drive the area that they used to live in. Most of it has been redeveloped over the years, but there were some that were still original.
     I still wanted to take a map and plot the different addresses all together so I could actually visualize all the different residences along with places of employment, churches, and other important addresses. It was during this time, I came across a video put out by Family History Fanatics featuring Melissa Finley from Boundless Genealogy. She explained how you could use Google Maps to place points on the map to represent the different addresses. See the videos below:



Thanks to Melissa, I was able to create my own map. This was exactly what I was looking for. Now I have a visual to go with my research. Even though the area has changed, I was able to look at old maps to pinpoint the exact location. After going through all the addresses I had, verifying through census records and city directories along with other sources, I created my own map. It's not done yet, but here is the work in progress.

So have you taken the steps to map out your family's residences?

Week 38: Cousins

A cousin is a relative with whom a person shares one or more common ancestors. In the general sense, cousins are two or more generations away from any common ancestor, thus distinguishing a cousin from an ancestor, descendant, sibling, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew. - Definition from ISOGG Wiki.

     I am a little behind on posting for my 52 Ancestors prompts. I've been working on something really big with a few other genealogists called Project Genealogy. It is a YouTube series brought to you by genealogists discussing different topics as they relate to genealogy research. It will be released on October 4th. So if you haven't yet, subscribe to my YouTube Channel so you don't miss it.

     So as you could have guessed from the above definition, this week's prompt was Cousins. They are usually the first friends we have in our lives. On my dad's side of the family, I grew up with lots of cousins. My dad is the oldest of nine kids, so yeah the family started growing very quickly. From my Papa, we are up to five generations of the Fuchs family. Wow! That's a lot of cousins! Sometimes it's hard to keep track of who is related to whom. I just know, they are my cousin haha!
     With the growing popularity of DNA and many tracing their family lines, people are learning they have more cousins than they ever thought possible. Figuring out who you are related two is more tricky though than just saying 1st cousin, 2nd cousin, etc, which is what I've been saying all my life. Apparently, that's wrong! Oops!
     Thanks to many genealogists, there are tons of charts and explanations out there describing the correct relationships when it comes to our cousins. Thanks to the International Society of Genetic Genealogy Wiki website, we have a better understanding of cousins and how we are related to them. The chart below is from their page and can be used to help us better understand how we are connected to our cousins. Click on the image to make it bigger

According to their page, there is actually a mathematical way to determine the relationship between you and your cousins. I can hear my daughter groaning now, "No, not math!" haha! Here are some examples taken right from their page:

Example 1: If person one's great-great-great-grandfather is person two's grandfather, then person one's "number" is 4 (great + great + great + grand = 4) and person two's "number" is 1 (grand = 1). The smaller of the two numbers is the degree of cousinship. The two people in this example are first cousins. The difference between the two people's "numbers" is the degree of removal. In this case, the two people are thrice (4 − 1 = 3) removed, making them first cousins three times removed.

Example 2: If someone's great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + grand = 4) is another person's great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + grand = 4), then the two people are 4th cousins. There is no degree of removal because they are on the same generational level (4 − 4 = 0).

Example 3: If one person's great-grandparent (great + grand = 2) is a second person's great-great-great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + great + great + grand = 6), then the two are second cousins four times removed. The first person's "number" (2) is the lower, making them second cousins. The difference between the two numbers is 4 (6 − 2 = 4), which is the degree of removal (generational difference). ISOGG Wiki

As much as I love math, I think I will just stick to using the chart. For more information on the different cousin relationships, please visit their webpage: isogg.org/wiki/Cousin
I will close this blog post with a most recent picture of all of my Fuchs cousins. This was taken at Christmas last year (2018). And we are still growing...

Week: 37: Mistake

     "Oops!" Something said quite often when we make a mistake. We've all done it. Mistakes happen most often when you are doing something new: a new job, a new position, a new hobby, a new lesson, etc. And if you're like me, you've made your fair share of mistakes when it comes to your research. Especially in the beginning. The more you work on it though, the better you get and the fewer mistakes you make. Although you may become an expert in your field, there are still mistakes that happen. We don't mean to do it, but that's why they call it mistakes.
     Thinking over my own research, I think about the mistakes I personally made. I've attached wrong people to my tree, added a source that didn't below, made an incorrect assumption, just to name a few. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make in your life, as long as you learn from them. Here are a few mistakes I've made and the lessons I have learned from them.
     When I began my research in 2012, I assumed most trees on Ancestry were correct and treated them as reliable sources. I would add information without even checking whether it was accurate. I can hear some of you now. "What?! Are you insane?!" Yes, I was. Naive and insane. And as you could have guessed, it caused a lot of trouble in the beginning. I have since sorted out most of the mess. I still run across a couple I missed now and then. Just the other day, I found one. I had attached a spouse to someone that didn't belong. I attached it because others had it attached. Many in fact. So since "many" people had it, I assumed it was correct. Yeah, no. So I have since removed that spouse. Others have yet another spouse attached, but I have yet to find any proof, so I have not added that spouse. I have learned to check my sources first.
     Another mistake I made was attaching a source to my ancestor that actually did not fit. It was suggested as a hint, and I did look over it and saw the ancestor's name, so I assumed it was correct. Once again, nope. I had gone back over my research later and determined it did not match my ancestor. The years did not match up. I wouldn't have found that out without reading the source word for word and looking at the dates. That particular source was a will and written about 50 years before the birth of my ancestor. So now when I get a hint for a source, I read every word of that source and check it against the data I know is correct. (I know you are probably thinking rookie, but hey I'm learning.)
     The last mistake I will discuss (although not the last I will ever make) is making assumptions. That has come back to bite me in the butt many times. I make assumptions from my own personal point of view and forget to consider what my ancestors may have been going through. I forget to consider the time period. I forget to consider history. I forget that my ancestor is human. I forget that my ancestors also make mistakes. So when tracing their lives and trying to find records, I was going by what I personally thought should be the truth. That wasn't always the case. Once I stopped limiting myself by my own thoughts and feelings, I started finding more answers to questions I had. Their lives were their lives, just like my life is my life. Mistakes I make today will probably make some of my descendants scratch their heads, but they were mine to make based on my life experiences.
     Like I said, these aren't the only mistakes I have made, nor will they be the last ones. I just hope to continue to learn from them. Remember that when you come across someone else's tree that has mistakes. They are only human and are probably learning as they go as well. What are some mistakes you have made in your research?

Week 36: School Days

     Most everyone in the genealogy community knew about Ancestry making their Yearbook collection available for free this past Labor Day Weekend. People were sharing their photos, relatives photos, random photos, etc. It was great to see!
     I decided to see if I could track down parents & their siblings' yearbooks to save their Senior (or last year they were in school) year pictures. On my side of the family, it was definitely helpful that almost everyone went to the same school: Northwest High School (NHS) in House Springs, Missouri. Only a couple of spouses went to different schools. I was also in luck that NHS had so many yearbooks uploaded. Even to the point, I could find my cousins!
     So I started with my dad's side of the family. Including him, there are nine children and then seven spouses. Dad is the oldest, graduating in 1961 and it goes from there. I found all the siblings & almost all the spouses. After that, I looked for my mom's side. Including her, there are four children. She is the only one to graduate high school, so locating my Uncles was near impossible. Uncle Jerry dropped out his senior year, so I was able to find his junior year photo & his first wife's photo. Uncle Les barely attended high school so I couldn't find one for him & Uncle Howard dropped out in eighth grade.

     It was so fascinating going through my family's yearbooks & getting a glimpse into their lives; their past. It was especially fun finding their photos. I've grown up knowing my Uncles looking a certain way, whether beards, mustaches, hair on their head, etc. So it is fascinating seeing them look so different. Below are all the photos I found of my family. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Whose pictures did you find??

Project Genealogy Collaboration - Coming Soon!

     So I've been working on a surprise project with some wonderful genealogists over the past few months. A collection of YouTube videos all about genealogy but pertaining to particular topics. Can't share any more than that right now. I hope you will all tune in when it's released. Check back often on all my social media accounts to keep updated on the progress. Won't be long!

#ProjectGenealogy

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AuntieJensFamilyTrees/?sub_confirmation=1
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jrickards82 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/auntiejenstrees/ 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/auntiejen82/

Week 35: At Work

   What did your ancestors do for work? Did they have a specialized skill or were they just a jack of all trades? Did they struggle to keep a job or were they employed at the same place for most of their life? Did they love their job or were they in it just for a paycheck? These are all questions you should ask yourself when researching your ancestor's occupations. Some you may not ever find answers to, but some might open your eyes to who your ancestor was and fill in more details about their character.
     As a society, we seem to go through shifts when it comes to employment. I've been researching the time period my ancestors immigrated to America; learning more about the culture, customs, and the struggles immigrants went through. This includes their occupations; what was available, did they appear to have any specialized skills, how long did they go between jobs, and even where they lived. The location of their residence will let you know if they were well off, if they were renting, if they were in a lower-class area, etc.
     Researching Frank Ilg, my 2nd great-grandfather, I learned about the many jobs he held once he came to the United States. He was a Laborer, Bookkeeper, and a Shoemaker during his short time here in the United States. I say "short" time because he died in 1901, only 13 years after he arrived, from a "supposed" work-related accident. He worked for the Provident Chemical Company at that time, which manufactured medicines. During his life, he and his family moved around a lot to different houses, and they always rented. I have learned that the location of the room they rented determined if they had money or not. They always lived in the "rear" of the building, the cheaper rooms available for rent, which indicated that they were poor. The rear rooms did not have proper sanitation or light making them more affordable than the more desired rooms in front. I studied the conditions of the city during this time from this book here: Housing conditions in St. Louis. After he died, Pauline washed clothes to earn a living, which barely brought in any money.
     Years later, her son, Joseph Ilg, after also bouncing around from job to job as a laborer and tool grinder, got a job at the local newspaper: The St. Louis Post Dispatch. He started working in 1923 on a German imported roller press, the first of its kind west of the Mississippi and worked there until he retired in 1964. He had a specialized job and made a life long career out of it. They were able to afford to live in better neighborhoods and have a better life. My grandpa, Les Wheeler, also worked at the St. Louis Post Dispatch as well until he retired. It wasn't his dream position, but it helped his family afford the basic necessities. His love was cars, so on the side, he had his own used car lot along with a garage. See the pictures below.

Les Wheeler working

St. Louis Post Dispatch

Les Wheeler Auto Sales

     During my grandfather's and great-grandfather's lives, the economy was focused on finding a good career to have job security and then be able to afford the finer things in life. The American Dream. Through the last 10-15 years it seems, we are going through a shift once again. Most people are not staying in their job for all of their lives. Whether it be from quitting to do something else, finding another job that pays more money or being laid off, we don't have the job security like our ancestors had. College used to guarantee you would get a good job, and keep it for a long time. That just doesn't exist anymore. More people are now skipping college and going more into the trades.
     Now I'm not an economist nor do I understand the politics behind it all, but I do see a huge paradigm shift in our economy and am curious to see what the next 50-75 years (if I live that long) bring. For now, I will focus on the employment of my ancestors. What kind of work did your ancestors do?