What's In a Name?

     I once heard a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson:

"I won't trust a man who can't spell his name at least three different ways."

     I guess that kind of sums up most of the problems in genealogy and not being able to find our ancestors. I hear so many people claim that their family was "missed" on the census. I guess they never head this quote!

     In going through the Dawes Rolls Creek packets, I came across an interesting transcript. One of the "chiefs" of a village gave an explanation, under oath, of how names were dealt with. Children were given their father's name if they lived in the father's village and mother's name if in her village. To complicate things more, there were separate rules if the husband or wife was Cherokee living in the Creek nation or vice/versa.

     The most interesting statement I read was the "chief's" identification of a child's father. He gave the father's name he was known by. And then he also gave the dad's Creek name. AND he went on to identify the man's Warrior name. So each Creek male had a "White" name, a "Creek" name, and a "Warrior" name. A genealogist unaware of this naming system is doomed!

     Perhaps the Creeks took Thomas Jefferson's supposed quote too seriously :)

Duplication of Records???...So What!!!

     My purpose for the Pre-1920 Oklahoma Death Index database is to accumulate as many references to pre-1920 Oklahoma deaths as I can find. I have been chastised for having duplicate entries, for wasting my time, etc. One person thought it was "stupid" to extract information from a published cemetery book and then go walk the cemetery, including deaths from both sources, most being duplicates. What that person doesn't realize is that although many of the entries are duplicates, many entries have slightly different name spellings or death dates. Often I see new stones for previously unmarked graves and the published book has old stones that have disappeared or become unreadable over time. In Tyner's "Our People and Where They Rest" 12 volume set, most entries have only birth and death year. A reading of the actual tombstone will often add month and day to those years.

     To illustrate what I see as the great value to my database, here are two entries. One entry was added last year from a findagrave.com. The other is from a newspaper article extract:

Hughes, George Vaughan  32 years  buried Coalgate Cemetery (no death date on old stone)

Hughes, George V.  died Saturday at Weston TX. Buried Coalgate Cemetery  [from the Wayne OK Gazette 26 Nov 1909 p1 c6]

     Neither source provides the same information. from the tombstone we have an age with no reference point since there is no death date or death year. From the death notice, we have a death date (I would need to look up the paper and see the publication date to determine the death day), death location and burial location. Combine the two and we now have a good idea of the life span of George V. Hughes and a better idea of what records would available on him and which ones to search.

     With my alphabetical death index, I can easily find and match multiple references for one individual. The more sources, the more information and better the information is substantiated.

     I just added 14,249 new records:

- 1200 death notices/obits from the Beaver Herald
     (still have 1910 through 1919 to extract)

- 1400 death notices/obits from the Daily Ardmoreite
     (still have 1903 through 1919 to extract)

- 6000+ deaths from Creek by Blood Dawes Enrollment cards
     (still have 1100 cards to go through)

- 4000+ deaths from Creek Freedmen Dawes Enrollment cards
     (still have 100 cards to go through)

-1000+ deaths from Chaney Funeral Home of McAlester OK books
     (still have vols 1-3, 9B and 10 to go through)


These are my current ongoing projects. As smaller sources become available, I take time off to do through those sources.

After I finish the Creek records, I will still have Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee card to go through.

*** Current Total:  353,507  pre-1920 Oklahoma deaths!! ***

Here's an update of "projects" I'm currently working on:

Beaver Herald (from Chronicling America)
 - currently at July 1908 (over 1000 entries so far)

Daily Ardmoreite (from Chronicling America)
 - currently at May 1902 (over 1300 entries so far)

Gardens of Stone: Cemeteries of Harper County OK
 - have T through Z to finish

Dawes Commission Enrollment Cards
 - working on Creek Indians...have finished Creeks by Blood and am now working in Creek Freedmen. (over 4000 entries so far)
 - finished Seminole Indians...all records on Fold3 checked.

Rose Hill Burial Park in OKC
- going through sexton's card file...finished through surnames starting with J.

 Soon I will have some comments on Indian records created by the Dawes Cimmission. And I won't make you wait five months for the next post!

Checking "Unusual" Sources

I often hear genealogists say they never check books in a certain area because "my families never lived anywhere near there."

I was at the Belle Isle Library in Oklahoma City recently and looked at what was available at his small local library in its 929 (genealogy) section. I saw an interesting book: Over My Dead Body! The Story of Hillside Cemetery © 1996 by Freda Carley Peterson. Since cemeteries are just about my favorite places to visit, I thought I'd visit this one in Silverton CO via the book.

Now I have never had family that lived in this area. But for nearly 20 years I did publish the Beckwith Newspetter which covered all the US. I found an unlikely entry for one of the Beckwiths:

Beckwith, Alicia Phulura temporary marker- June 23, 1907-May 17, 1908- Age 11 Months- On a Sunday at Oschner hospital in Durango, Alice, the baby girl of Bart (Barzilla) and Ethel Beckwith, was called away from earth by the angel of death. She had suffered intensely from bronchial pneumonia. Alice was born in Silverton, was the second Beckwith child to died before reaching the age of a year. Fred Carter officiated at Alice's funeral, held in the home of her grandparents in Silverton, William J. and Elizabeth Redda Pearce,a nd burial was at Hillside Cemetery.

Years ago I found this family in Silverton, San Juan Co. CO, but that was before this book was published. Who would think to check the very small genealogy collection in a satellite library of a metropolitan library system. But there the information is! and look at all that is provided in the short entry: complete name of child and parents, birth and death date and burial place of child, names of mom's parents and where they lived. A gold mine of information!

Don't forget to check the 929.1 through 929.3 section of your local library. You may just find a gem like I did!

Death Synonyms

In searching through various on-line scanned newspapers, I run into the problem of time. Do I look trough each page of each issue (like I do with microfilm)? Or do I use the search engine? Well...I have been using the search engine. BUT...I have found that in order to access the most death entries possible, I must use multiple searches. The following are most of the terms and phrases I have searched by:

buried
casualty
casualty list
cemetery
deceased
death
death report
demise
died
drowned
eternal rest
funeral
funeral home
grim reaper
interred
killed
life eternal
mortuary
murdered
obituary
passed away
probate
report of deaths
suicide
undertaker

Works in Progress....

Current total of the database is just over 268,000 entries.

Current extraction "projects":

Beaver Herald (Beaver Co. OK) 1895-1919.
- Currently in late 1902.

Durant Weekly News (Bryan Co. OK) 1904-1919.
- Currently in mid-1914.

Wapanucka Press (Johnston Co. OK) 1902-1907.
- Currently in Aug 1904

Our People and Where They Rest ©1970s 12 volumes by Tyner.
- currently near end of volume 4.

All these projects are slow going. But I'm still averaging over 1000 entries per week. My goal for the year was to average 5000 per month, or 1250 per week. I have surpassed the "yearly amount" in 7 months, so hope to hit 300,000 entries by the end of the year.