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Subject: [AZ-AVONDALEUG] Don’t Forget the Women
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:48:06 EDT

Genealogy Today, by Betty Malesky
Don’t Forget the Women
March is Women’s History Month. First celebrated in California in March 1978
as Women’s History Week, it went national in 1981. Congress voted in 1987 to
expand the national celebration to encompass the entire month of March. Today
Women’s History celebrations have sparked a new interest in uncovering women’
s forgotten heritage.
For too long, women were the forgotten links in our ancestry, recognized only
as the mother of a man’s children. Traditional genealogies followed only the
male line. If a man had no sons the family was said to have "daughtered out"
and the line was dropped at that point. As genealogists today, we owe it to
our female ancestors to try to learn as much about their lives as possible.
Women are difficult to research. Prior to the twentieth century we had few
rights. We couldn’t vote, seldom owned property, couldn’t testify in court,
didn’t pay taxes, seldom left wills, weren’t employed, and left few records
normally relied upon by genealogists. Land records are one of the few sources
where a woman’s name appears. A man could buy property without his wife’s
permission, but law required her permission before he could sell. If she
inherited property she couldn’t dispose of it without her husband’s permission.
As families began migrating west away from the early coastal settlements,
births were seldom officially recorded. In the absence of birth records, the
only link to a woman’s family and her maiden name may be her father’s will or
estate settlement. Without her maiden name, however, it is impossible to find
her father’s probate records.
Marriages were usually recorded even in frontier settlements, but the record
may have belonged to a circuit rider or justice of the peace. A family Bible
might contain clues to a woman’s maiden name, but locating the family member
who owns the Bible today may be impossible. Research every name you find in a
family’s census entry; that strange surname may belong to a brother or other
relative and can help identify your female ancestor.
To enliven a female ancestor’s story, background material is available in
books such as: The American Family in the Colonial Period by Arthur W. Calhoun,
Dale Taylor’s Everyday Life in Colonial America From 1697-1783, Jack Larkin’
s The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840 and Everyday Life in the 1800s by
Marc McCutcheon. Become familiar with major events in American history and
consider your female ancestor in light of her times. Don’t judge her by today’
s standards but by those of her era.
When a woman remarried within months of her husband’s death we may question
her haste, but she probably had little choice. Women were often left with
several small children when a husband died suddenly. Few early American women
had experience handling money or conducting business. Widows were easy targets
for the unscrupulous that preyed on them as they tried to keep the family
together, raise children, work the farm and do all the household tasks.
Consider the women in your ancestry and determine to learn more about their
lives. Study the history of areas in which your families lived and become
familiar with all the available records that may help identify a woman’s origin.
While finding her ancestry may be difficult, what genealogist can resist
another challenge?
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