Cool Cousin: Chauncey Norman Noteware

Chauncey Norman Noteware was born to Jacob Noteware and Aruba Olmstead on the 13th of January, 1825 in Owego, Tioga County, New York.

In 1844 he and his family moved to Galesburg, Knox County, Illinois, where he attended Knox College, apparently studying medicine, as he later would list himself as a physician.

He crossed the plains in 1850 to make his fortune in the California Gold Rush. He mined for three years in northern California, and in early January of 1853 he became an agent for Wells Fargo Bank in Diamond Springs, El Dorado, California. There he met Sarah Lyons and the two were married on the 4th of March, 1854 in the same town. They had two sons Myron and Warren and a daughter Mary Elizabeth.



After three more years of working for the bank in California he moved his family to Genoa Station, which was then part of the Utah Territory. I don't know much about his activity there until Nevada became a separate territory in 1861, when he was appointed Probate Judge for Douglas County, Nevada Territory. The following year he became a land agent appointed by President Lincoln.



The population of Nevada Territory was growing due to Comstock Lode silver boom in nearby Virginia City. As state-hood grew near, Chauncey was a member of the first constitutional convention, with one newspaper saying that he "presided" at the convention. So eager where the Nevadans to become a state that they sent their entire Constitution via telegram at a modern cost of over $62,000!

When Nevada became a state in October 1861, Chauncey was appointed as the state's first Secretary of State. He served as an appointee for two years, then ran for the office and was elected for a four-year term. He also served concurrently as a State Senator for Ormsby County. In 1872 he was appointed coiner for the US Mint in Carson City by President Grant.

During his life he was also the Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge and Grand Chapter of Nevada for the Masons. His wife Sarah passed in August of 1867. Chauncey then married Mary Ann Gee. All of his children left his beloved Nevada, and he died at his home in Carson City, Nevada on the 22nd of October, 1910 a few months shy of his 86th birthday.

His Home in Carson City.

What an amazing life he would have lead!

Yarre Noteware > Jacob Noteware > Chauncey Noteware
Yarre Noteware > John Noteware > Cyrus Noteware > John Harmon Noteware > George Harmon Noteware > Virginia Mae Noteware > David A Earl > me

Awesome Ancestor: Sarah Jane Scrivener-Somervell

Sarah Jane Scrivener was born in a well-off plantation owning family in southern Anne Arundel County Maryland in September of 1823. Her parents, John and Eliza Scrivener, both came from wealthy slave-owning families. Sarah was the 2nd of 12 children, and the oldest daughter. Her father was a War of 1812 soldier, and two of his slaves were captured by the British during that war. He was compensated $560 for the loss of his slaves. He also posted rewards for several other run away slaves in the local newspapers. Sarah married John Howe Somervell, who also came from a well respected slave-owning family from nearby Calvert County on November 6th, 1841.

Sarah's father, John Scrivener, died in 1849, at the time of his death Sarah's husband owed her father's estate $838.37 (over $26,000 in today's money) and had to mortgage 9 of his slaves, over 80 head of livestock, and much of his personal property in order to settle the debt. Sarah and John had 7 children together, two daughters and three sons and two that died as infants. John died in 1854, leaving Sarah to raise their children alone. The oldest was 8, and the youngest (twin boys) were around a year old.

Shortly after the death of her husband, Sarah moved her 5 living children to Washington, DC. There, she purchased a home near the corner of 11th and Pennsylvania Avenue, just blocks from the White House and the nearly complete Capitol Building. The city directory listed her as running a boarding house, which means she would have been host to a variety of out of town visitors, one of which, a War Department Clerk, Augustus McCafferty, the son of the married her oldest daughter Mary.

The Somervell children would have grown up during the Civil War, so Washington would have been a bustling place. They might have seen President and Mrs. Lincoln as they rode through town. They would have seen union soldiers as they marched through on their way to or from a major battle. They might have seen General Grant as he returned after Lee's surrender. Or even seen a play at Ford's Theatre, which was only a block from their home. They may have even seen the famous actor John Wilkes Booth skulking about town in April of 1865.

Sarah lived in Washington for the rest of her life. She lived in the footsteps of every US President from James Buchanan to Theodore Roosevelt. She would have lived through the assassination of three of those Presidents. She saw to it that her sons received an education, one son worked as an administrator for the US Postal Service, another was an accountant for the Department of Treasury, and another moved to Denver and owned a grocery store.

Sarah died at the Women's Christian Home in DC on May 1st, 1904 and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Washington, DC. Having outlived her husband and five of her seven children. She lived during one of the greatest periods of turmoil in our Nation's history, and she lived at the center of it all in Washington, DC. What an exciting life!

Sarah Jane Scrivener-Somervell > William Scrivener Somervell > Sarah Louisa Somervell-McMahon > Raymond Joseph McMahon > Irene Caroline McMahon-Earl > Daniel A Earl

Billion Graves

There dozens of cemeteries in your county, and thousands of cemeteries in your state. Hundreds of thousands of cemeteries in the country, and millions of cemeteries across the world. This means that there there are billions of graves. Each one representing a real person, who lived their life, they loved their family, and their family loved them. Then they died.

As a family historian there is much to be gained from visiting a cemetery. Often headstones contain valuable information on birth and death dates. The position within a cemetery can reveal family relationships. You can even find relatives you didn't know existed because their lives fell between censuses, and there is no other record of their short life. But getting to each cemetery where your ancestors are deposited can be a logistical and monetary nightmare.

That is where BillionGraves.com comes in. There are people who live near where your ancestors are buried. People who have smart phones and iPhones, and Androids, and well, whatever they are called. BillionGraves.com has developed an app for your phone that allows you to snap a quick picture of a headstone and then upload it (along with the GPS coordinates) for others (or yourself) to transcribe. It then becomes searchable through their website (http://www.billiongraves.com) and through FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org)

Recently some of the scouts from our church's troop did a service project and mapped half of an older country cemetery in about 2.5 hours. There were four of us, and it was numbingly cold outside (so cold the screen stopped recognizing our fingers as fingers!)

So how can you help yourself and others? Log on to BillionGraves.com, create an account, then download the app if you have one of those fancy-new-fangled phones, or your can transcribe headstone images that others upload.

There are headstones from everywhere from Europe to Utah, Florida to Newfoundland. So get online and get working!

Family History FANatic

Family History is clearly a passion of mine. But I am also a big FAN of using a fan chart.

A fan chart is a way to look at your family history that allows you to see where research opportunities are. The closer those research opportunities are to you, the more apparent they become.

BEHOLD THE FAN CHART! ALL MUST QUAKE IN MUTED REVERENCE BEFORE THE MIGHTY CHART...sorry I got carried away.

If you picture the fan chart as being a baseball diamond. You are standing at home plate, your father's family is along the 3rd base line, your father's mother's family is in left-center field, your mother's father's family is in right-center field, and your mother's mother's line is along the first base line.

So you can see from the image above, there is some gaps, or blank areas where there is no data present. This is a beginning spot to do research.

To create a fan chart you can go to createfan.com  in addition, you need to have a familysearch.org account with user data in it in order to pull something up.

So check it out and fan the flames of family history in your life!

Storing Your Family History Online

Storing family history information can be tricky. There is a lot of information out there, and storing it all in a way to collaborate with others can be difficult.

For those who use Family Search, you can use SourceBox, which allows you to pin family history data to documents, thus proving that annoying guy wrong that keeps changing great grandma's birthday on your records.

For those who don't, I stumbled across a great FREE resource for storing family history data: Dropbox.

Dropbox is a external storage center that allows you to store your family history data on an external drive, so if your computer crashes, catches on fire, gets broken by your two year old, or is eaten by your dog, your hard earned family history data is safe.

Simply go to http://db.tt/1g02b50E and download Dropbox on your desktop, and drag your family history or other files into that folder. Viola! Your information is safe and secure.

The second best part (right behind the FREE part) is that you can share a folder with someone and they can share data to that folder. So I have shared my family history folder with my dad so he can keep up with what I upload. Anytime he or I uploads information, pictures, etc. to that folder, we both have instant access to the new document.

Family History Myth-tory #1: The Lies Your Grandma Tells You

Once a month I will post a Family History Myth-tory. A post that will feature a commonly held myth about family history which I will lampoon.

She may look sweet and innocent, she may bake the best cookies, she might shuffle around and seem harmless, but your grandmother is a liar. A stone cold fibber. She lies through her false teeth. So why this unprovoked attack on your granny? Because, in part at least, it is true. There are some things that grandma (or your family's FH guru) has told you that might be less than correct.

The Lies Your Grandma Told You:

1. All of the research has been done.

 Granny will tell you this for a number of reasons, mostly because she believes it's true. What she should really say is that when SHE last researched that particular line, there was no additional information to find. When it comes to family history, retracing someone else's work can be fun and enlightening. You will find all the things they missed, the things they got wrong, and it will help you from making the same mistakes so You can be confident lying to your grandchildren.

2. We are descendants of Charlemagne, Pope Pius XI, William Wallace, and Louis the XIV.

Ever notice how your grandma tells you about all the famous people you are related too? Chances are, you are not actually related to them. The further back in time you get, the sparser records become, so when your grandma, or great-grandma, or whatever well meaning family member stumbled across an older record that had the vaguest link to your actually family, they pounced on it like a hobo on a ham sandwich. Since you (and me) are probably related to a host of unrecorded and historically less important peasants, we may never know our exact origins until we meet them after we die. As an alternative try finding cool stories about relatives that lived a little more recently. Ancestors who lived in the dark days of the depression can be just as cool as the kings of ancient Europe.

3. All of your ancestors were wonderful people who paid their taxes and never talked at the movies.

While most of your ancestors were probably noble people, don't forget that they were people, and therefore imperfect. There is no need the turn them into a mythic being who couldn't be slain by the rebel horde during the Civil War. While I am definitely not a proponent of the 'warts-and-all' history (where you go hunting for something bad in order to tear down a historical figure), I don't believe we need to gloss over mistakes as if they didn't happen, because we can learn from mistakes and every cloud has a silver lining. For example, I had one ancestor who cheated on his wife when he was in his late 60s and fathered a child out of wedlock. Now we aren't getting that printed on t-shirts, we are not having monuments built, but that is part of our story for better or for worse, and what a wonderful story of forgiveness that his wife stayed with him for another 4 years until his death.

Well there you have it. Three lies your grandma told you. They may not have been famous, they might have been scalawags, but they are YOUR unknown scalawags and there is still plenty of research to do on them, so go out there and find them. And once you do, don't forget to tell your grandchildren about them.

Using the Text Archive: How Jerry Garcia Helped Me With My Family History

 I have noticed that for some, they feel that since Grandma has done all of the work finding the names and dates that there is nothing for them to do, so rather than get immersed in the work of family history, they sit on the sidelines and wait. What they don't realize is that someday THEY will be the grandma, and they will have nothing with which to lull their grandchildren in to such a false sense of comfort.

So what do you do if the "work has all been done"? One place to turn is to the history books. Once you know where and when your ancestors lived, it is not a difficult leap to locating a local historical association which may have a boon of information.

Since most US counties have historical associations, to find one, a simple Google search should find it. For example if your family lived in Omigosh County, you could do search for "Omigosh County Historical Association" and that should find it for you. If not, write your senator.

In today's high-fangled new-tech digital age, many large libraries containing county histories are being digitized. Meaning they are taking the old books, many of which are rare with only a few extant copies, and scanning each page and making them available online. I found one page particularly useful for finding this information.

As a closet Grateful Dead fan (no family history related pun intended) I routinely visit the Live Music Archive for free streaming Dead concerts and shows of other great bands. One day while grooving to some Dead I noticed a link at the top for the Text Archive. So I clicked on it and did some searching. I was able to locate very old local histories containing information on my ancestors in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Thank you Jerry!

To use the Text Archive simply follow the link in the Links Section on the right and then type in the county or state you are looking for (remember county boundaries change, so what might be Omigosh county today was once Slackjaw County). Then you can search through the various documents that come up to find which ones are most germane to your search.

The texts are typically old, rare, and out of print. You can download them in a variety of formats, including PDF, Daisy, Kindle, or you can just read online, and best of all they are FREE!

Hint: Downloading the books in PDF allows you to search the entire ebook for certain terms, like your ancestor's last name, to see when and if it comes up. This is a valuable time saver.