Genealogy and Local History Blog

Is There A Doctor in the Camp? A Look at Revolutionary War Medicine

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Is There A Doctor in the Camp? A Look at Revolutionary War Medicine

In today’s blog we will discuss Revolutionary War medicine and the important medical records genealogists can use to identify Revolutionary War ancestors. Images of this war often focus on muskets, cannons, and battlefield heroics, but more soldiers in Continental Army and state militias died from disease than from enemy bullets or bayonets. Over eight years, deadly scourges regularly threatened soldiers’ lives because germ theory had not yet been established, and so physicians and caregivers did not understand how microorganisms caused disease or how infections spread. Early Medical Theories and Treatments Medical treatments in the eighteenth century fit the prevailing humoral theory of medicine dating back to the ancient Greeks. Disease was believed to be caused by an imbalance in humors, so sweating, bleeding, or other purging would remove excess and restore health. Humoral theory (or humorism) was an ancient medical system first advanced by Hippocrates, then by Galen, a Greek...

Local History

History of Grapevine Public Library, 1991-2001

Grapevine’s population grew to 31,836 in 1991. Library material holdings grew to 92,797 and annual circulation to 357,855. In February, Mrs. Marie Canning started part-time in Circulation. She eventually became full-time Acquisitions Assistant. In April, Grapevine Public Library’s automation system was upgraded from OCR labels and wands to bar code labels and laser guns. The re-labeling of over sixty thousand library materials and preparation of 30,000 borrower cards was accomplished in sixteen weeks with the help of eighty valued volunteers without closing the library. The Friends of the Library donated a Xerox plain-paper fax/copier, a Magazine Article Summaries (MAS) CD-ROM index to replace InfoTrac, and a plain-paper Minolta RP 605Z microfilm reader/printer from the proceeds of the annual Christmas ornament sale. Skaggs Alpha Beta cash register receipts worth two-hundred seventy-three thousand dollars collected by the public enabled the purchase of a MacIntosh computer and software. Due to community support and...

Genealogy / Local History

How Did Your Ancestor Pay For That? A Brief History of Colonial Currency

If you have colonial ancestors in your family tree, no doubt you’ve found records of purchases throughout their lives, whether it’s land, livestock, food, or various other items, as well as payments of taxes or services, and estimated property values in estate inventories. But what do those numbers mean, and what do they tell us where our ancestors were on the scale of wealth? Today’s blog will offer some explanations and resources to help you determine approximately how much colonial goods and services were worth, as well as approximate wage earnings of laborers and artisans. How to Determine Value First, we have to put ourselves within the frame of reference in existence at the time and place, because monetary values were relative to different colonies/states. We need some knowledge of currencies of the time and their equivalents in different colonies and states, and we have to understand that values were...

Genealogy / Local History / Transportation

The Cotton Belt Railroad Comes to Grapevine

To most Americans in the late nineteenth century, the railroads looked like the key to prosperity and progress. Without the market access the railroads provided, there would have been little point in raising cotton in small-town Grapevine. Wagon freight rates averaged one dollar per 100 pounds per 100 miles. After 1879, rail freight rates were never more than one-half that expensive. Since Grapevine was not too far from major economic centers, it seemed destined to have a railroad. In 1888, the St. Louis, Arkansas, and Texas Railway (SLA&T) built its Cotton Belt line through Grapevine, thus allowing Grapevine to thrive as an agricultural trade center supplying goods to area farmers and serving as a shipping point for their produce. The SLA&T originated in Tyler, Texas in 1870. Influential Grapevine businessmen urged the railroad company to build what became known as the Cotton Belt Route through Grapevine in 1887, inaugurating service...

Genealogy

Substitutes for the (Mostly) Lost 1890 Federal Census

Census records are one of genealogists’ basic tools. They can provide valuable information as well as clues for additional searching. Some states took off-year censuses as well. But what if there’s no census when there should be one? Most of the 1890 federal population schedules were severely damaged when a fire broke out in the basement of the U.S. Department of Commerce building in Washington, DC, on January 10, 1921. Fire, smoke, and firefighting water ruined the records, which had been stored outside a fireproof vault. The catastrophe compounded earlier losses: an 1896 fire had already damaged many of the census’s special schedules. Although fragments of the population schedules and substantial portions of the Civil War veterans’ and widows’ schedule survived, most remaining damaged population records were later disposed of by the federal government in the 1930s. The result is a major documentary gap between the relatively complete 1880 and...

Genealogy

Brick Wall or Genealogical Challenge: Rethinking Your Approach to Genealogical Research

Cyndi Ingle of Cyndi’s List wrote a great article in the October-November-December 2013 issue of NGS Magazine about taking a new approach to genealogical research. She talked about what it takes to shake off old or non-productive ways of doing things and re-wire our brains in order to be more successful. Renowned genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills talked about the importance of using evidence creatively in order to attain new ideas for working with records we already have. Over time, other genealogical writers have stressed the necessity of changing strategies when the old ways aren’t working. The idea behind all of them is to be open to new or alternate ways of finding and identifying ancestors. It’s easy to think we’ve exhausted the resources, but it’s also possible that something else is out there that we didn’t know existed, especially today with new electronic/digitized resources, or that our search focus was too...

Genealogy

Researching Indentured Servants

Introduction Indentured servitude was a major contract labor system in early colonial America, especially in the Chesapeake, before declining in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as African slavery expanded. Servants worked for a fixed term in exchange for passage, food, shelter, and freedom dues. The system was common in English North American colonies from the early seventeenth century. It was not slavery, but a form of unfree labor that limited autonomy and tied labor to debt repayment and migration costs. Indentured servitude developed because the colonies needed labor, and passage to America was expensive. English promoters saw colonies as a solution to social and economic problems at home. The labor shortage after settlement, especially in Virginia, made indentured labor attractive to planters and colonial companies. In 1717, the British Parliament adopted a policy of transportation which banished convicts to the American colonies, usually for seven years. This policy allowed...

Genealogy

The History of Ship Passenger Lists

In today’s blog we trace the history of ship passenger lists from the earliest colonial era (1607) to the mid-twentieth century (1954). We’ll see how ship records changed over time and why genealogists rely on them. The big picture is the shift from scattered arrival references to standardized federal manifests with increasing genealogical value. Why Ship Passenger List History Matters Passenger lists are core immigration sources. They link arrival, identity, and family history as well as reflect the social and political attitudes of the time. As is true for all records of genealogical value, the important things to consider for any record are the agency who created the records, and for what purpose records were created. In order to get the most of out of records not created for genealogists (and that’s ALL of them), we have to know which entity created them and for what purpose. This helps to...

Genealogy / Local History

Going Local: Local History in the Grapevine Public Library

In today’s blog, we’ll look at the different local history resources the Grapevine Public Library has available for research. Local history materials are in the Frances Pittman Malcolm Genealogy Room and the Grapevine Area History Room. The Library has a robust genealogy collection, as well as a significant collection of materials on the history of Grapevine and the surrounding areas. Grapevine is one of the oldest communities in Tarrant County, first settled on the Grape Vine Prairie in 1844 by a group known as the Missouri Colony. The settlement encompassed the present city of Southlake, known for decades as “the area west of Grapevine” until 1956, when Southlake was incorporated. Books In 1979, the Grapevine Historical Society published the book Grapevine Area History, edited by Charles H. Young (Fig.1). It is comprised primarily of family histories, many of whom are descendants of the earliest families, but includes valuable information on...

Genealogy

Researching Quaker Ancestors

Who were the Quakers? Quakers, or Friends, are a Christian group formally known as the Religious Society of Friends or Friends Church. It was founded in England in 1647 by George Fox. The first recorded Quakers in the New World arrived in Barbados about 1655 and from thence went to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where they faced harsh repression, including imprisonment and the destruction of their writings. Because of Puritan intolerance, Quakers eventually left Massachusetts and resettled in Rhode Island, and also established communities along the Delaware River, including a settlement at Salem, New Jersey, in 1675. In 1681, King Charles II granted Quaker William Penn (Fig. 1) a charter for the territory that became Pennsylvania, where Penn promised religious tolerance to Quakers and other persecuted believers. The densest Quaker settlements in Pennsylvania were in Bucks, Chester, and Philadelphia counties. Other major Quaker centers included New York, Virginia and North...

Genealogy

Census Humor: Behind the Statistics

In a previous blog post, we looked at what it took to be a US census taker. In today’s blog we’re going to have a little fun with the census by looking at some actual enumerator experiences, plus some humorous information that some of them were asked to record. Most examples were found using one of Grapevine Library’s subscription databases, Newspapers.com. 1840 In 1840 New Orleans, one census taker had a hard time finding any women who would admit to being over 30. One wonders if this clipping from the June 20, 1840 issue of the Baton Rouge Gazette had anything to do with it: 1870 In Chicago, one census taker encountered a vicious dog that broke its rope and would have “pinned him by the throat to the floor had he not beat a swift retreat from this den of wild beasts.” This was likely not humorous to the...