Somerset County Maine
This is a little project of mine which grew to ridiculous proportions. It is now online in tree form. While doing my wife's Bean line it seemed to me that everyone in this area of Caratunk Maine was related in some way. I looked at every U.S. census from 1790 and on for Caratunk (or what it used to be called) and discovered that, mostly, this was true. As the project went along it was clear to me that not all people in Caratunk were born there, stayed there, and died there. By necessity, I was looking at the censuses for the surrounding towns and, in some cases, far away places. So I started adding towns to the north and south of Caratunk like The Forks and Moscow and I had the same issue, people didn't stay put. Eventually I decided to put some sort of bounds on the project (even those I broke) and pretty much stuck to all the towns in Somerset County from the Dead River south to New Portland, Embden, and Solon.
I reviewed just about all of the censuses. What I found was that:
a) you could create a pretty good tree for a small section of the USA using mainly the censuses.
b) the people of such an "isolated" area intermarried out of necessity.
c) families often stuck together.
d) children were usually named for SOMEONE or SOMETHING - relative - famous person - place.
e) people got divorced and remarried much more often that I would have expected way back when.
f) Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California were popular migration states by the mid 1850's.
There were other things but those are the ones that come to mind.
Now, I must back up and say that the censuses were not the only things I consulted. It just so happens that Maine has many resources for the genealogist and I used them where I could find them. At Ancestry.com there was access to the censuses; Maine births, deaths, and marriages; and the occasional military record or social security database. I tried to steer clear of out and out nabbing information from the MANY online trees (occasionally I did - sorry) but I tended to let them point me in the right direction if some particularly difficult problem popped up. Many earlier records were found at Familysearch.org. The problem with that data was that there seemed to be conflicting info which I had to sort through. Another was that many times the marriage record would only list the last name the bride had been using and not necessarily her maiden name. It took me a while to realize this little doozy of a confuser. Also, I didn't necessarily get the birthdates of everyone in the tree even if it might be available on Familysearch and that is why many people have births like "circa 1849". Of great interest to researchers from this area would be the Old Canada Road Historical Society site. There are many good tidbits there but the main thing, genealogically speaking, is its links to the various Somerset County cemeteries. Quite a while back, maybe 10 years ago, I took the liberty of downloading the cemetery information and putting it into spreadsheets for ease of access. Other cemetery resources included the online database of Franklin County Maine cemeteries and the Find-A-Grave community. There are other sites too numerous to mention but the list on my Genealogy page likely covers 95% of them. Finally, there is a book called "Embden Town of Yore" which was written in 1929 by Ernest George Walker which gives the history of the town and which has much genealogical info to boot. I decided that it was worth my time to mine this resource since it was available online and my efforts for Embden and Solon in terms of census review just kind of petered out at 1850. It is a good history and its mistakes are few. For my tree it added some names and identified parentage for people already in the tree and it gave some years for their deaths.
There are going to be errors. There are always errors. Errors in dates, errors in who married whom, people having the same name errors, place errors, duplicate people in the online tree, names spelled incorrectly (in my defense it seems to me some people didn't know how to spell their name), marriage intentions used as marriage dates, etc... I did my best. If you find something in the tree glaringly wrong then let me know at ednmich%aol.com only the % should be replaced with the usual @ sign. Finally, a note on my convention. If the last time I found someone living was in the 1880 census, say, then for a death date I would put "after 1880". Now, this may not be true if the person actually died in 1880 after the census was taken and I imagine this was occasi0nally the case. Still, the terminology has served me through the years and it's a bit difficult to change it now in a database of 50,000 people.
I reviewed just about all of the censuses. What I found was that:
a) you could create a pretty good tree for a small section of the USA using mainly the censuses.
b) the people of such an "isolated" area intermarried out of necessity.
c) families often stuck together.
d) children were usually named for SOMEONE or SOMETHING - relative - famous person - place.
e) people got divorced and remarried much more often that I would have expected way back when.
f) Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California were popular migration states by the mid 1850's.
There were other things but those are the ones that come to mind.
Now, I must back up and say that the censuses were not the only things I consulted. It just so happens that Maine has many resources for the genealogist and I used them where I could find them. At Ancestry.com there was access to the censuses; Maine births, deaths, and marriages; and the occasional military record or social security database. I tried to steer clear of out and out nabbing information from the MANY online trees (occasionally I did - sorry) but I tended to let them point me in the right direction if some particularly difficult problem popped up. Many earlier records were found at Familysearch.org. The problem with that data was that there seemed to be conflicting info which I had to sort through. Another was that many times the marriage record would only list the last name the bride had been using and not necessarily her maiden name. It took me a while to realize this little doozy of a confuser. Also, I didn't necessarily get the birthdates of everyone in the tree even if it might be available on Familysearch and that is why many people have births like "circa 1849". Of great interest to researchers from this area would be the Old Canada Road Historical Society site. There are many good tidbits there but the main thing, genealogically speaking, is its links to the various Somerset County cemeteries. Quite a while back, maybe 10 years ago, I took the liberty of downloading the cemetery information and putting it into spreadsheets for ease of access. Other cemetery resources included the online database of Franklin County Maine cemeteries and the Find-A-Grave community. There are other sites too numerous to mention but the list on my Genealogy page likely covers 95% of them. Finally, there is a book called "Embden Town of Yore" which was written in 1929 by Ernest George Walker which gives the history of the town and which has much genealogical info to boot. I decided that it was worth my time to mine this resource since it was available online and my efforts for Embden and Solon in terms of census review just kind of petered out at 1850. It is a good history and its mistakes are few. For my tree it added some names and identified parentage for people already in the tree and it gave some years for their deaths.
There are going to be errors. There are always errors. Errors in dates, errors in who married whom, people having the same name errors, place errors, duplicate people in the online tree, names spelled incorrectly (in my defense it seems to me some people didn't know how to spell their name), marriage intentions used as marriage dates, etc... I did my best. If you find something in the tree glaringly wrong then let me know at ednmich%aol.com only the % should be replaced with the usual @ sign. Finally, a note on my convention. If the last time I found someone living was in the 1880 census, say, then for a death date I would put "after 1880". Now, this may not be true if the person actually died in 1880 after the census was taken and I imagine this was occasi0nally the case. Still, the terminology has served me through the years and it's a bit difficult to change it now in a database of 50,000 people.