The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Web allows genealogists to conduct research from home
This story was published March 28, 1999
It seems impossible that the World Wide Web, that wonderful global network of digital information, is less than 10 years old, yet already is transforming our society.
The Web, which operates via the Internet, was instituted in 1991. Inventor Tim Berners-Lee first conjured the concept as a means to do computer searches on associations between random words in any of his vast array of personal notes.
He wrote software that functioned so well he soon proposed a worldwide, well, a web of computer users who would allow everyone else on the web to search their computer files for documents containing information they might want.
Thus was born the World Wide Web.
Genealogists have been among the chief beneficiaries of this epic technological development. They've posted tens of thousands of Web pages with information on family histories. All can be visited at the searcher's convenience, 24 hours a day, from their own home. No need even to get dressed and drive to the nearest library.
Cyndi Howells has put together a Web site that helps direct genealogists to these resources. Computerized genealogists have clicked onto various pages on "Cyndi's List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet" about 7.2 million times since March 1996, seeking direction to good genealogy pages.
Cyndi's list contains links to 41,600 genealogical Web pages. They are organized into 100 categories and cross referenced. All the visitor has to do is use his "mouse" to click on one of the listings and presto, he's at the linked site.
These Web sites are like libraries. You visit them and look for information of value. It may be a pedigree chart (family tree), someone else who is doing research on the same family, or it may be historical, geographical or other information essential to genealogy.
The Web puts information at your finger tips that you couldn't access any other way. It also delivers to your home, more or less instantly, a great deal of information that is in libraries that are hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
One of my family history projects is writing a book on my great grandfather, Theodore Barber Day, who fought in the Civil War. I'm currently researching his postwar, Kansas years.
What a delight it was recently to get on the Web and cruise to Kansas in search of the historical and geographic background that helps put flesh on the skeleton of vital data.
Let me share a little of what I found, to illustrate the ease of research from your home. The most valuable thing discovered on my digital expedition was a copy of William G. Cutler's History of the State of Kansas, first published in 1883 by A.T. Andreas, Chicago.
This remarkably valuable book has chapters on most Kansas counties. The chapters for Reno County, where Ted Day settled with his family about 1872, and neighboring Riley County, where Ted's sister Jemima and her family settled some time before Feb. 22, 1872, are particularly good.
Day family oral history only briefly mentioned the family's Kansas years, which were tough times. But Cutler's history reveals memorable events swirling through Reno and neighboring counties during the time my grandfather lived there as a young boy.
Indian troubles still haunted Reno County in the early 1870s. Buffalo herds still roamed Kansas nearby. Ted's family arrived about the same time the railroad reached Hutchinson, the town nearest to where they settled in Little River Township.
And, just 120 miles and three counties west of Hutchinson was a tiny settlement about to become famous as Dodge City. There, during my grandfather's childhood, the Masterson brothers (Bat, Jim and Ed) and Wyatt Earp were lawmen. Bat, Wyatt and a deputy were involved in a notorious barroom shooting in 1880. It occurred while an Eastern medical lecturer was attempting to speak on venereal diseases.
Dodge then was home to 14 saloons and 47 known prostitutes. Saloon patrons kept interrupting the lecturer and the lawmen sought to ensure his First Amendment rights by threatening to shoot anyone who interrupted him. Lead soon flew, and the lecturer was smuggled out of town on the next eastbound freight.
Rumors had it that if the lecturer attempted to speak again the next day, 10 pounds of gunpowder would blow him up. Like Dodge City, Hutchinson was a town on the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, where range and farming met, often with a great deal of excitement.
If you are a Kansas researcher and are connected to the Internet, you might want to do some research in Cutler, by pointing your browser at www.ukans.edu/carrie/kancoll/books/cutler/
This is but one of several dozen great Kansas genealogy and history resources on the Web.