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From: <>
Subject: [WILLEY] Maternal Lines -- final post
Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 12:09:37 EDT

Good Morning,
Thank you for the kind comments on this series of articles. We spend most of
our time following our surnames back one generation after another, so it was
good to stop for a while and consider the Mothers in our Family Tree. It has
encouraged me to revisit several maternal lines I had put on the back
burner...hope it has done the same for you!
Have a great day,
LaRae

Seven Steps for Researching Female Ancestors
by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, CGRS, FUGA

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Seven Steps for Researching Female Ancestors

1. Start your search by focusing on the woman herself, obtaining all the
records you can which she created or which were created about her.

2. Next, broaden your research scope to her immediate family.

3. Now broaden your research even more and look at her neighbors, friends,
and relatives. Look carefully at records created by relatives and friends.
Women of the past generally spent more time in the company of other women
than with men. Perhaps a female friend or relative left information about
your female ancestor in a surviving letter or diary.

4. Also look at her husband's associates: classmates, business partners,
friends. Some of these people could be your female ancestor's relatives.

5. Leave no record unturned. Check all possible types of records for the
time and place of your female ancestor. You never know which record will
reveal a clue or piece of information.

6. Traditional genealogical records will only take you so far. Expand your
horizons and read women's social histories -- these fill in the gaps left by
genealogical documents and help you augment the data. Social historians
research many of the same record sources as genealogists -- wills, court
records, land and tax records -- but historians focus on an entire community
rather than on specific individuals. This research yields information about
the typical daily life in a given community. You can find social histories
in public libraries, university libraries, and new and used bookstores. Here
are a couple of examples:

Nancy (Donnally) Bane (1819-1903) was institutionalized in a state insane
asylum in Ohio during the 1860s. I learned this information from census
records and a special census enumeration. To learn what this experience must
have been like for Nancy, I read a social history called Women of the Asylum:
Voices from Behind the Walls, 1840-1945. It had firsthand accounts of women
like Nancy who were committed to asylums.

Lucy (Stuart) Shough (1817-1887) was a housewife in Virginia. Genealogical
records on her are scarce. Just about everything I know about Lucy came from
census records, where her occupation is "keeping house." To learn about her
probable daily activities, I consulted a social history entitled Never Done:
A History of American Housework. This book details typical household chores
of the nineteenth century.

Placing your female ancestors into historical perspective by reading social
histories of the time and circumstances can add a whole new dimension to your
research. There are social histories for nearly every type of woman (rich,
poor, white, black, Native American) and every time period conceivable.

Women's periodicals from yesteryear are also worth investigating. Godey's
Lady's Book, a monthly women's magazine, was started in 1837 and had a
national circulation of 150,000 by 1860. Godey's featured articles on
fashion, homemaking, and health, as well as presenting fiction, poetry, and
recipes. The more emancipated woman of the 1860s might well have read the
weekly newsletter Revolution, which covered fashion, food, health, work,
unions, women in trades and professions, and notable women.

7. Don't get discouraged. Researching women takes time, patience, and
creativity. Every woman's life is important to research, document, and write
about. Your female ancestors wait silently for you to discover their
stories. By listening to their histories and the records, they will tell you
who they were and where to find them!

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A Recipe for Family History
by Alyssa Hickman Grove

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Writer and historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes about the idea of tracing
"female inheritance through recipes." Its an interesting thought, although
she finds it has its flaws, as you'll see when you read her story, "Danish
Pancakes." However, family recipes certainly have a connection to family
history. A simple (and often-told) story about pot roast started me thinking
about this connection. In the story, a young bride is preparing pot roast
for dinner. Her husband watches as she carefully cuts each end off the roast
before putting it in the roasting pan and placing it in the oven.

"Why did you cut the ends off the roast?" he asks.

"I don't know," she replies, "that's just the way my mother taught me." The
next time the young woman talks to her mother, she asks about trimming the
ends off the pot roast.

"I don't know why," her mother answers, "but that's how your grandmother
always did it." On a visit to her grandmother, the young woman asks about
the pot roast.

"Oh," replies the grandmother, "I had to do that simply because my roasting
pan was too small to fit an entire roast."

Grandma's answer explains the mysterious "cut off the ends" tradition. It
also raises the question, Why didn't Grandma have a larger pan? The answer
is probably simple enough -- perhaps she just never bothered to buy a larger
one. On the other hand, a family historian with an active imagination might
indulge in a slew of fanciful questions: Were Grandma and her husband too
poor to afford new pots and pans? Could they only afford a small home with a
tiny kitchen and scanty cupboard space? Had they been forced to jettison a
lot of household goods to travel to America or across the plains?

Granted, these questions take a sizable leap from the starting point of the
pot roast story. But they do illustrate how details of a family's history
can be linked to what, and how, a family cooks.

>From Cookbook to Novel
Handed-down recipes in a family often have stories associated with them which
add richness to a family history. These recipes and stories can make your
family history more vivid. Just ask Janice Woods Windle, the author of True
Women, a historical novel based on the lives of her ancestors. Windle
started out with the intention of compiling family recipes as a wedding gift
for her son and his bride-to-be in 1985. But as she pored over piles of
recipes, letters, and diaries, she pieced together a fascinating story. Not
long after presenting her son with the recipe book, she borrowed it from him
so she could use it while writing True Women, a novel chronicling the lives
of three generations of her family in Texas, from the fall of the Alamo to
the Second World War.

Initially, Windle thought that her mother, a former schoolteacher and
historian, would be more involved in writing the family story. But her
mother kept urging her to write episodes, "And over the course of six years,
it just kind of escalated." Windle says she eventually chose the historical
novel format, rather than a traditional family history, so that she could
write dialogue and "capture the melody of the women's voices."

Runaway Wedding Cake
True Women was published in 1993. Twelve years after getting the idea to
compile the recipe book, Windle finally had time to produce the True Women
Cookbook, published this year. The Cookbook is full of stories about Texas
history and about Windle's family and forebears, and features such recipes as
"Reverend Potter's Hellfire and Brimstone Chili," "Every-Sunday-After-Church
Chicken," and "Runaway Wedding Cake" (a cake prepared for an ancestor's
elopement). Windle says she discovered a lot about her relatives by looking
at their recipes: "Women write around the margins of a recipe, making notes,
mentioning events where the dish was served -- baptisms, family reunions, and
so forth -- so you can really track a woman's life through her recipes."
While she was researching her ancestors' cookbooks, Windle was struck by the
way the women had taken responsibility for their families' well-being. She
found notations such as "Peter is allergic to pecans" and "this soup
sustained Bettie through her long illness."

When asked what advice she would give others who are interested in compiling
a family history or recipe book, Windle says she feels its important to
involve children in the process, to teach them about their lineage. She also
recommends recording stories that you've heard, then recording interviews
with family members. Taking along old photographs, Windle says, may help jog
an older relative's foggy memory.

Bathtub Gravy
There are those who haven't felt compelled to pen a sweeping historical novel
inspired by the lives of their forebears, but simply wanted to preserve
family recipes for posterity; this is what my mother and her sister decided
to do. They conceived of compiling a family recipe book to give to each of
their families as a Christmas present. Thus began the arduous task of going
over their own recipes, as well as the recipes that my grandmother, who
passed away a few years ago, had left behind. The long and involved process
produced a welcome gift: Our families now have a cookbook that includes all
the family favorites, many of which have been handed down from my
great-grandmother to my grandmother, to my mother and aunt.

My family's English heritage is evident in such recipes as Yorkshire pudding,
plum pudding, and mustard pickles. My great-grandmother passed along her
recipes for homemade bread, roast beef, and gravy (the gravy was always a
favorite, and the family joke was that it was made in the bathtub to make
sure there would be enough to meet the demand).

My great-grandmother's parents were early settlers in Utah, and the necessity
of laying in provisions for the winter was reflected in Great-Grandma
Carrie's penchant for canning and preserving. My mother remembers the
delights contained in Carrie's fruit room: jars and jars of peaches,
cherries, and raspberries. Today my mother and aunt still use Carrie's
recipes for making home-canned peaches and chili sauce.

An Heirloom in the Making
sometimes a family recipe book doesn't necessarily contain handed-down
recipes, but recipes that will be handed down to future generations. Ken and
Connie Bean married later in life, combining their families from their
previous marriages. When they created a family cookbook, they included
recipes that both sets of children had learned to love, and then personalized
the book with inspirational thoughts and quotations for their children to
pass down through the family.

There are as many ways to preserve a collection of family recipes and
traditions as there are families. If you want to create an heirloom recipe
book, think about including these elements in it:

--Original handwritten recipe cards
--Stories telling how certain recipes came into the family
--Anecdotes about which recipes were family favorites
--Photographs of ancestors
--Stories about ancestors

Janice Woods Windle cherishes a steamed pudding recipe given to her by her
beloved grandmother-in-law, and talks about families becoming close through
the sharing of recipes. My mother puts it this way: "Food, what we eat,
what we cook, is the core in so many families."

====================================



>From the Ancestry.com Newsletter....

ARTICLES FOR TRACING THE MOMS IN YOUR FAMILY TREE

"One Crimson Petticoat: Female Lines and Real Lives," by Yvonne P. Divak
Part 1 -- http://www.ancestry.com/library/view/news/articles/600.asp
Part 2 -- http://www.ancestry.com/library/view/news/articles/623.asp
Part 3 -- http://www.ancestry.com/library/view/news/articles/650.asp
Part 4 -- http://www.ancestry.com/library/view/news/articles/744.asp

Seven Steps for Researching Female Ancestors
by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, CGRS, FUGA
http://www.ancestry.com/library/view/ancmag/756.asp

"A Recipe for Family History," by Alyssa Hickman Grove
http://www.ancestry.com/library/view/ancmag/712.asp

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