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 - ------------------------------------------------------------------ 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! ================================= A Recipe for Family History by Alyssa Hickman Grove - ---------------------------------------------------------------- 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 - -------------------------------------------------------------------------