Mentally Ill Folks Harder To Research

Mentally Ill Folks Harder To Research

By Sharon Tate Moody, Tampa Tribune Coorespondent, 18 January 2009

I think Sharon was lucky to find the information she did about someone who was institutionalized. This has come up more than once in my own research and quite often seems to be a dead end--so many records for asylums are not available or extant. But you can never assume there is no information; often, as happened to Sharon, researchers are able to find some records on an "insane" person.

Also it helps to remember that the meaning of "insane" was different before modern times. A person who was committed until the middle of the 20th century could be retarded or have Alzheimers or post-partum depression, or be an alcoholic . . . or like my own great-grandfather, have pellegra, which often results in its victims having delusions. I also get the impression that someone, especially a female, who just didn't "act right" (according to her family or husband) might be labeled "insane."

So, as Sharon writes, these people are harder to research, not impossible.

Know your family's medical history, know your risk

OrlandoSentinel.com:
Linda Shrieves, Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer, December 9, 2008

Read entire article at link.

Excerpt: "The notion is so popular that the government has even gotten into the act. The U.S. Surgeon's General's Office has set up a Web site -- familyhistory.hhs.gov -- that helps people create their own medical family tree and put it in a format (a pedigree chart) that doctors can use."

Your Family. Myths and Legends in Genealogy

Your Family. Myths and Legends in Genealogy at Ancestor.com.

Last Updated: August 20th, 2008
Every family has the age old myth or the legend of the grandmother who was a “full blooded Indian princess”. In fact, the Native American tribes didn’t sport many “Indian Princesses, but almost every family has some degree of native American blood and all of them, by and large due to prejudices that used to, and in some cases, still do exist in this country, want that Native American blood to be something that is a bit more acceptable than just a “Native American woman who was part of the family”.

Admit it, Indian Princess sounds so much more acceptable and so much more romanticized than simply saying that great grandfather married a Navaho woman. In days past, having Native American blood in your family wasn’t quite as acceptable as it is in today’s society, so it was by and large hidden. The family may never had been told exactly what tribe the great grandmother came from, or if in fact she was Native.

Many families who believed their family to have native blood, particularly in areas such as Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginian are finding instead that the blood was of a race determined to be Melungeon, not the Native American they thought it was originally.

Some family legends aren’t truth at all, while others are in some cases, completely factual. Only research is going to help you determine which is which, but paying attention to them only makes sense. In most cases, legend or an old family tale has a grain of some kind of truth to it .

Legends about family history don’t normally get invented from no basis and aren’t usually completely invented from thin air. There will be somewhere in that legend a single grain of truth that you have to sift out of the dune of sand to get the real story for your family.
Some family legends you will hear as you work through your genealogy will be red flags to you however to dig a bit deeper and see if there is a grain of sand, or truth to the family legend or if it is in fact fallacy.

The more common things you might hear that should raise a flag for you will be:

• The Indian Princess Myth. Usually you’re going to hear Cherokee Indian Princess, but it may manifest itself as a Mayan Princess or any other tribe. Rest assured that it may be that there is Native American blood in the family, but Indian Princesses by and large don’t exist. In point of fact there were no tribes who actively made use of the feudal type system that was by and large a Caucasian invention, so the title Indian princess would not have been used. For the most part you’re going to find that this is always a myth, but do pay attention to it and dig around a bit to search for Native blood in your family history. Usually you are going to find it with this kind of legend in the family’s history. . . .

[Click link to read the rest of this post.]
Copyright © 2008 Ancestor.com
NOTE that this entire site has a great deal of valuable information for genealogists. At this point, I could not determine the name of the administrator for the site, however.

Wallace State professor Bob Davis helps trace Indian ancestors

Wallace State professor Bob Davis helps trace Indian ancestors

Friday, August 08, 2008
BILL PLOTTNews staff writer

Bob Davis said he can almost guarantee who will show up for one of his Native American genealogy workshops.

"I get a lot of people who have a family story about a Cherokee princess," he said. "I believe most Southern black and white families have some Native American heritage, even if they don't have family stories about a Cherokee princess."

Davis is director of the Family and Regional History Program at Wallace State-Hanceville"It's purely mathematics," Davis said of his theory about Indian heritage. "Take Pocahontas. She had one grandchild who lived to adulthood, yet today more than 1 million people are descendants of hers. The genealogy's been thoroughly done on that."

Consequently, it's likely most Southerners whose ancestors were around before the United States forcibly moved Indians from their lands in the early to mid-1800s have some Indian heritage. . . .

[My favorite part] "People try to put the cart before the horse. Put Pocahontas back in the box until you've done your basic genealogical research. You've got to know who you're looking for because the Indian records are all indexed by personal names," he said.

[Follow link for entire article]

Louisiana Genealogical Journals

The Advocate and Channel 2 WBRZ News at 2theadvocat.com (Baton Rouge, Louisiana); 2theadvocate.com:

Louisiana’s genealogy magazines outstanding
By DAMON VEACH
Special to Magazine; Published: Jun 22, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.


"Louisiana has long been noted for some of the finest genealogical societies in the country, and these groups, in turn, each have outstanding publications that are included with membership fees. This is not only characteristically true for the larger groups, but even the smaller societies are coming up with some excellent and previously unpublished materials." . . .

A listing of journals and examples of articles from those journals are contained in the remainder of this article.

Wantabes and Outalucks: Searching for Indian Ancestors in Federal Records

Article on Native American Research:
by Kent Carter Director, National Archives-Fort Worth Branch

This very in-depth article is a step-by-step explanation of how to research your Native American roots, complete with helpful links.

In Search of Unknown Generations

• Genealogy Conference
  Angelina College (Lufkin, Texas); Thursday–Saturday, July 19–21, 2007
  
  Lufkin is the hub of the East Texas region, located in the beautiful Piney Woods, on Hwy. 59 South, just two miles south of Loop 187.
  
  Featured Speakers include:
  
  CAROLYN EARLE BILLINGSLEY has a B.A. in history, with minors in Arkansas Studies and German, from UALR (University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She then studied at the university in Graz, Austria, for two years on a Fulbright Scholarship. Upon leaving Austria, she enrolled as a graduate student at Rice University in Houston, where she earned her M.A., then her Ph.D. in Southern History (with a field in Anthropological Kinship Theory) in 2001. Billingsley is the Coordinator for Course 3: Research in the South, at Samford University's Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research in Birmingham, Alabama; she teaches classes in genealogy and southern history at UALR; and she lectures locally and nationally. Billingsley's Ph.D. dissertation was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2004, and is titled Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier; the book won the Booker Worthen Literary Prize in 2005. She is also the author and compiler of many other books and articles, both genealogical and historical. Billingsley currently serves on the Arkansas Genealogical Society Board of Directors and is the co-editor of the monthly AGS E-zine.
  
  Lectures:
  
• The Formation of Kinship Groups in the South: The South was settled by kinship groups rather than individuals. But these kinship groups took time to develop, beginning with immigration to the South in the 1600s. This lecture provides understanding of how kinship groups form and operate enhance genealogist’s abilities to research their family groups.
• Kinship Theory: A Case Study: Understanding the basics of kinship is key to genealogical research. This lecture demonstrates how kinship theory advances skills in the areas of marriage, politics, economics, migration, and settlement patterns.
• Racial Mixtures in the South: In the Old South, individuals were either white or they weren't . . . and those who weren't (or those who were considered not white by neighbors) faced special problems. Their difficulties introduce problems for researchers trying to trace black, mulatto, dark-skinned, or Native American ancestors. This lecture sheds light on the background of such groups in the South, including Melungeons, Red-Bones*, and other tri-racial isolate groups. * (Lufkin is very near Louisiana Redbone territory.)
• The Real Story on Tracing Your Indian Ancestors in the South: So many southern families had Native American ancestors, but few of those ancestors signed up on the Indian Rolls. This lecture explains that the vast majority are not on those official rolls and how you can dig out the facts about your Native American ancestors when there are no official records recording them as Indian.
  
  
  DESMOND WALLS ALLEN has taught genealogy classes all over the United States, and brings 20 years of teaching experience to the classroom. She holds a B.S.E. in education and her Master's degree is in history. She appeared in Public Television's Ancestor series as a guest expert, and moderated AETN's special on genealogy in Arkansas. She's the owner of Arkansas Research, Inc., a publishing company devoted to making historical information about Arkansas available to researchers. The author/compiler of more than 250 books, she's still a down-to-earth teacher interested in helping students learn.
  
  Lectures:
• Confederate military research - "Which Henry Cook?" Researching men of the same or similar names is difficult enough with traditional genealogical sources, but in Confederate records, it can be especially frustrating. This lecture presents a case study applied to the research technique of keeping a subject with a known group of associates.
• How to get the most out of death certificates. Anyone can read a document, but learning to hear documents speak is a learned skill. We'll learn how to do that using death certificates, a source common to all genealogists.
• Arkansas! Arkansas problems can make you feel like a rat eating a red onion! This lecture will help promote awareness of Arkansas records and repositories.
• Targeting cousins to learn about *your* DNA. Confused about DNA? We'll leave the scientific details to others and talk about why you want to pursue your living cousins, keeping an eye to the future of DNA testing. (This lecture is by the woman who said 15 years ago that we'd be core-sampling grandpa for his DNA sample.)