Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about Diana’s road trip to Oklahoma to visit sites relevant to her great-grandparents, William Huston Shults and Dora Algie Royston. She shares her experiences finding cemeteries, visiting small towns, and reading her ancestors’ stories as they drove around. She also shares a few tips for preparing for a family history road trip, including bringing a map and printing out the histories of your ancestors before you go.
Transcript
Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like A Pro, episode 231 Family History Road Trip. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.
Nicole (41s):
Hi everyone and Welcome to Research Like a Pro.
Diana (44s):
Hi Nicole. How. are you doing today?
Nicole (46s):
Really great. How about you?
Diana (48s):
I’m doing well. We had snow last night, our first significant snow storm and so everything is very lovely and I’m hoping the snow melts on the driveway. So, we don’t have to do a lot of shoveling,
Nicole (59s):
Please.
Diana (1m 1s):
What have you been working on?
Nicole (1m 3s):
I have been working on my report from the study group and I have put in all the land flat drawings, so those are going well. And then the last thing I’m gonna do to wrap up this report is to put in all of the people with the west surname that I found in the Courtman abstracts for FA Year County. As I wrote the report, I kind of am leaning toward a hypothesis that John West maybe was an immigrant or came over during the Revolutionary War in state. He just kind of appears out of nowhere and doesn’t have any friends, associates, or neighbors besides his in-laws. So I’m just trying to see if that’s a possibility. And there’s a bunch of other people with the west surname, but he’s not associated with them, so
Diana (1m 45s):
Ooh, how interesting. One of those guys appears out of the blue.
Nicole (1m 50s):
Oh, and I do need to add the Chancery court record I found for him too, which mentions he was a millwright. So that was interesting to find out his occupation.
Diana (1m 60s):
So for all the people that you want to add, are you putting them in as part of his fan club? Are you giving them their own rows in the research log?
Nicole (2m 7s):
Yeah, they get their own rows.
Diana (2m 9s):
Great. Well, I’ve been working on a presentation for a group of students at Brigham Young University. They’re in their capstone class, which is advanced and professional family history, Genealogy. And so that’s been fun. Going to go talk to them about some of the things to think about when you’re considering a career in professional Genealogy.
Nicole (2m 34s):
So that’s it. Brigham Young University,
Diana (2m 36s):
That is, I’m going down in person 30 minute drive from where I live, as you well know.
Nicole (2m 43s):
Well BYU is interesting because they have one of the only bachelor’s degrees in family history, so it’s cool.
Diana (2m 50s):
It is cool. And the students get to choose different tracks so that they want to specialize in a certain language or you know, country or something like that. They can, they can do a bit of specialization. I don’t know a ton about the program, but I’ve worked with a lot of people who’ve been through it, so it makes me wish that I maybe would’ve chosen that path back in the day. but I don’t even know when I was there if they had that program. I don’t think they did. I could be wrong though. I know they had it when you were there though.
Nicole (3m 20s):
Yeah, I thought about studying that and I should have done that, but I ended up doing history teaching and taught middle school social studies. Right. You never know. Yeah, where your career path will Thank you.
Diana (3m 33s):
That’s exactly right.
Nicole (3m 35s):
Well, for announcements we have our next research Like, a Pro, a DNA study group on February 1st through May 10th. Registration is ongoing at the moment and if you’re interested in helping as a peer group leader, please let us know. And also Roots Tech is open for Registration and the conference will be in person and virtual this year, 2023. So if you’re not able to come to Salt Lake City, don’t worry, they’re still gonna have the full virtual conference experience and that will be free. The in-person conference will be 98 US dollars, they’re going to have over 180 in-person class sessions. And then on the virtual side of it, they’ll have over 200 new on-demand class sessions and classes.
Nicole (4m 17s):
And that’s free, like I said. So you can still experience Roots Tech on the internet if you are not going to be there in person.
Diana (4m 26s):
That’s so great. Roots Tech has always had a virtual option and I love how they just keep expanding and adding more ways for people to learn about how to do their family history better. So that’s great. I’m excited to be there in person this year.
Nicole (4m 42s):
Me too.
Diana (4m 43s):
Well, let’s get to our topic today. We are going to talk about taking a Family History Road Trip five Tips for Success. And I was so lucky that I got to do a Family History Road Trip in October and I learned so much. you know, you always hear about people doing these kind of trips, visiting all the locations of their ancestors, but it’s fun to do it and find some new places. I grew up in an area where my grandparents had homesteaded and lived and, and I knew all their locations up in Idaho. And then when we would visit Utah, we would go visit locations here in Utah, but this was in Oklahoma, which was a location I’d never been And.
Diana (5m 25s):
it was brand new to me. So it was pretty fun.
Nicole (5m 28s):
Hey,
Diana (5m 29s):
Yeah, so just a little bit of a background. I ended up visiting mainly the locations for my great-grandparents, So. we have all of my dad’s paternal ancestors were in Oklahoma, but you know, for just a one day driving trip, I couldn’t go to all of them. So, we ended up focusing on the locations for Dora, algae, Royston and William Houston Schultz. and they married on 11 December, 1898 in Paul’s Valley, Chickasaw Nation Indian territory. So Indian territory would become Oklahoma in 1907. So a lot of the records and a lot of the locations were Indian territory.
Diana (6m 11s):
Dora was born in 1882 in Texas to Robert Sne, Royston, and Isabel Weatherford and William was also born in Texas in 1877. So he was five years older than her and both of their families moved North Chickasaw Nation sometime between 1880 and their marriage in 1898 And, it is really hard to pinpoint a specific time because of the loss of that 1890 census. So, you know, I just know they moved up there sometime. And as I’ve, you know, talked about before when I first started researching, I just didn’t know much about Indian territory and what it was like and why it was even a thing.
Diana (6m 54s):
And so I’ve since learned quite a bit more about maybe why they would wanna move from Texas up into that area.
Nicole (7m 2s):
Right, yes. It’s so interesting all that you’ve learned about that. And also the fact that they’re moving into a territory makes it so hard to track them when there’s not, you know, set records like taxes being collected all the time and things are just kind of new and getting set up. It’s the wild West. So let’s talk about the background of Indian territory. The concept of Indian territory or Indian country began in 1763 with the British Indian Reserve. At the time, the term referred to land set aside for the relocation of Native Americans, and originally consisted of the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.
Nicole (7m 42s):
But after the American Revolution, new policies of the United States government resulted in Native Americans being pushed further and further west. And treaties and laws resulted in the eventual removal in the 1830s of the five civilized tribes from the southeast United States to an area in present day Oklahoma that we called Indian territory. So these tribes were named civilized based on some tribal members adoption of practices such as Christianity, written constitutions, centralized governments, literacy plantations, slavery practices, and intermarriage with white Americans. The tribes tended to maintain stable political relations with the European colonial powers and then with the US government, these five civilized tribes were the Choctaw Creek Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminole.
Nicole (8m 31s):
Once the tribes had relocated to Indian territory, the United States government promised the lands would be free from white settlement. But as often happened, white intruders or non-citizens began entering Indian territory from the very beginning, generally being allowed to perform a service needed by the tribes. Major immigration started in 1889 with the opening of unassigned lands to non-Indian settlers and also the five tribes brought their African American slaves west to Indian territory. After the Civil War, this group became known as freedmen, emancipated slaves from adjoining states began moving into Indian territory and lived together in all black towns.
Nicole (9m 16s):
By 1907, Indian territory ceased to exist when Oklahoma became a state, and that incorporated Oklahoma and Indian territories all as one with the opening of the unassigned lands. People not only from Texas but other states as well were drawn to Indian territory. What was the land like to pull these settlers to leave established homes? And start over. We can learn a little bit about what the land was like from a Gair, which was published in 1902 to 1905 And. it gives this description of the area with an area a little greater than that of the state of Indiana with a climate whose health giving breezes are nowhere excelled with an altitude invigorating and inspiring geographically of the south, but politically of the north with a mixture of northern push and energy with southern comfort and hospitality, with scenery of rugged mountain and valley, far stretching prairie and wooded hill with soil as fertile as the valley of the Nile with rainfall and other climate conditions favorable to the successful growing of all the crops of the temporary zone, here is the ideal location for a home and the opportunity for agricultural and commercial enterprise.
Nicole (10m 27s):
So that Gair was really trying to sell the Oklahoma territory, the Indian territory as a wonderful place, had everything you might want.
Diana (10m 38s):
Yeah, it was, and I’ve used that so many times in presentations to talk about Indian territory. So it was really fun to actually go there and see for myself what it was like. So just to kind of orient everyone listening to where Chickasaw Nation was within Indian territory, it was in the south central part of Oklahoma And. It’s right on the Texas border. So you know, you have to go look at at the map on the blog post to see how it is divided up. But basically they took Indian territory and divided it into sections for those five civilized tribes. And so the Chickasaw Nation had a specific location where, you know, that was where they were supposed to live.
Diana (11m 24s):
And so that is where my ancestors all went, And, it was just over the Texas border. So I guess that makes sense. But it was fun to start driving around and I had some interesting things to go from. My grandfather and my great Aunt Lorraine had both written histories all about growing up in this area and they had all sorts of interesting details. And so when I went on this little road trip, I just took both of their histories with me and I printed out a map and you know, felt like I was really ready to go. So my Aunt Lorraine, she wrote a lot of details about day-to-day life, which was really interesting.
Diana (12m 8s):
And she wasn’t born until 1913, so she actually was born and only lived in it when it was Oklahoma. but I think she just was one of those people who remembered every little detail and every little story because she had really, really rich details and specific things about the family. She was the seventh of Dora’s 10 children. My grandfather was the third and he was actually born in Indian territory in 1904. And he left, left a history, but he didn’t talk about the early housekeeping of farming. He, his history was all about the stories. So it was really fun to have the combination of the two, the stories and the details to put together what it would’ve been like for my great grandparents in their early years.
Nicole (12m 56s):
That is really great that you had the stories along with you to be able to just kind of read those and, and think about what was going on for them.
Diana (13m 5s):
It was really fun, especially since, you know, my husband was driving and so I could read and tell him the stories as we were going along. So that was fun. So let’s talk about the early years and their marriage. What I ended up doing was hitting key locations that were mentioned in these histories and Aunt Lorraine started her history by describing her parents’ marriage in early years. and they were married in Paul’s Valley in 1898, but they had lived in Elmore City Oklahoma on a farm on WildHorse Creek. So this is what Lorraine said when they left Elmore, they moved to Maxwell Oklahoma and lived in a double log house with a breezeway in between one room for cooking the other about 12 by 12 for sleeping.
Diana (13m 53s):
It was there that Robert and Leonard and Leslie were born. Robert and Leonard died there and were buried at McGee one mile north of Stratford. They were three and five years old, they died of members’ crew, both were buried in the same grave with a double tombstone. They then moved to another farm where Della and Lola were born on. Sam Thera kills place who delivered Della Lola. And Scrub. Scrub was born on Mack McGuire’s place. These were all within a few miles of each other. So that was a pretty fun little snippet of history and I’ve often wondered about that double log house with a breezeway in between and two rooms only. Yeah, So interesting.
Diana (14m 36s):
Well I wanted to correlate Elmore with Paul’s Valley because the marriage record does state that that Dora and William were of Elmore and that they were married in Paul’s Valley. So I had looked at this so many, many times on Google Maps and I saw that they were about 20 miles apart. And you know on Google Maps where you can see how long it would take you to walk, to go by bicycle to go buy a car, you know all the different forms of, of transportation. Well I saw that the drive would be, you know, only about 30 minutes or under and they didn’t have one for a horse and wagon. Can you imagine that on Google?
Diana (15m 16s):
So, but when I did some other research, I found that a horse and a wagon trip for 20 miles could take up to five hours.
Nicole (15m 24s):
That’s a long time.
Diana (15m 25s):
It’s a long time. So when we arrived in Elmore City, we found it to be pretty small. Just had a few businesses and they had a little main street that had a small museum that was closed on the day we visited, which was Saturday afternoon. We had found Wild Horse Creek on the map, but it was, it was just impossible to tell where they would’ve lived on that area. And I couldn’t even really find it driving around. It was there, but it was difficult to find. So, you know, I couldn’t ever find the specific place where they would’ve lived, but I’m sure they were on that main street in Elmer City many, many times. And I imagine that the rolling hills and the trees hadn’t changed much in 120 plus years.
Diana (16m 9s):
It was really beautiful.
Nicole (16m 12s):
Hmm, that’s interesting. Was it kind of more green or more brown?
Diana (16m 16s):
Well, it was October and so the trees were turning colors, so you know, it was the beautiful autumn colors, but lots of trees. It was quite lovely.
Nicole (16m 25s):
Nice. I like your pictures on the blog of Elmore City, you and dad next to the Elmore City sign with just a field in the background and some trees. So it’s pretty rural.
Diana (16m 37s):
Oh yeah, very rural. It was really peaceful. It was super pretty. I liked it. It was really fun to visit and see and imagine them driving the horse and wagon.
Nicole (16m 46s):
Yeah, so Dora and William went to Paul’s Valley for their marriage because it was a federally appointed court seat in the southern district of Indian territory. So before it was Oklahoma, the federal government was overseeing these marriages and things. So before 1907 when Oklahoma became a state, the white citizens would go to recording districts of the United States Federal Court for their marriages. And the southern district included the following Chickasaw Nation court seats, Ardmore Purcell, Paul’s Valley, Ryan, and Chickasha. So then when Oklahoma became a state of 1907, Indian territory was divided into counties and Paul’s Valley became the county seat of Garvin County.
Nicole (17m 33s):
The current courthouse is built in 1918, but Dora and William had moved northeast to OK Omaha by then and likely didn’t transact any business there in Garvin County.
Diana (17m 46s):
Right. So, we went to Paul’s Valley and I didn’t know if there would be anything from the time when they got married in 1898 and really there wasn’t. The county courthouse was built long after. And so, you know, we walked around the courthouse and took pictures and that was really fun. but I was puzzled for so long with that whole thing about the Southern district as the jurisdiction on their marriage record. And so it took some learning about the Locality and the jurisdiction to figure that out, which I did a few years ago. Finally got that Southern district figured out. But it was fun to go to Paul’s Valley and imagine Dora and William are arriving there after their long wagon trip.
Diana (18m 29s):
And unfortunately the marriage record doesn’t give any witnesses And. it doesn’t really add to the story, but in thinking about it, which is funny that I’d never done that until I was actually standing there was thinking, well Dora probably came with her parents, Robert and Isabel Royston, they had been there in Indian territory according to Isabel’s pension application since the early 1880s, which I only have her word for that, but they’d been there for a while and Dora had pretty much grown up there and she was only 16 when she got married so, so young. Yeah. So I’m sure they would’ve all come as a group. And I’m even imagining in the day that it was probably a pretty big deal and maybe there were several family members, several wagon teams that came, I’d love to know.
Diana (19m 17s):
But William’s father had died in 1884 and his mother had remarried, but she had died earlier in 1898. So he was pretty much, you know, an orphan. He was age 20. So I don’t know if he just went by himself or if he traveled with the Royston family. He did have some siblings that were there in the area and half siblings from his mother’s second marriage. It was just interesting to think about how they eventually got themselves to Paul’s Valley and they got their marriage license on December 7th and then they got married on December 11th. So sounds like they arrived there, received their marriage license and then didn’t marry for four days.
Diana (20m 2s):
So perhaps they were using that time to stock up on supplies or perhaps celebrations, I don’t know. Hmm. But they did go back to Elmer City, took that drive back as a married couple and in 1900 they were living right next door to Dora’s parents, Robert Isabella Royston. And that census reported that they had been married one year and that Dora had no children. But this is one of those situations where their oldest child had been born, but it was after the census date of June 1st, 1900. And so you know, when the enumerator visited their home in July, the baby would’ve been a few weeks old but they weren’t to report him.
Diana (20m 46s):
So you know, it’s always, always interesting when you see those little differences just because of that specific census date.
Nicole (20m 53s):
Right. They only wanted to know what the household was like as of June 1st.
Diana (20m 57s):
Yeah,
Nicole (20m 58s):
It’s always interesting. So Aunt Lorraine’s history, you mentioned the two little boys who died of member’s CRO and were buried in the same grave with a double headstone. So were you able to find their graves?
Diana (21m 10s):
Oh, I was so hoping to find those graves and I found the McGee Cemetery near Stratford and the cemetery was pretty large but it didn’t have a plats map. Sometimes cemeteries will have a map somewhere and you can see where everyone is, but this didn’t have it So, we drove around and found what looked like to be the oldest part of the cemetery and got out and walked around for quite a bit and we found a lot of old headstones from this era, but a lot of them had worn down so much and the day we were there was just howling wind so windy. And I imagine that that wind had over the years really eroded the headstones because many of them did not have lettering anymore on them at all.
Diana (21m 56s):
And some of them was getting really hard to read. And I had a feeling that this could have happened because my dad had hired a researcher in 1966 so long ago to find the headstone. And I have the letter where the researcher reported that the lettering on it is getting just a little dim. It was a double marker. And this is the information I wrote down from it, Robert G. Schultz and w Leonard Schultz of w H and Da and the boys, she wrote down the specific dates Robert was born July 12th, 1900 died March 10th, 1905.
Diana (22m 37s):
And Leonard was born December 8th, 1901 and died March 10th, 1905. So, so sad that they both died on the same day just like Aunt Lorraine noted in her history. So that’s the best source we have is that 1966 reading of that, no pictures, just the reading of it, just the letter.
Nicole (22m 54s):
I was so lucky that grandpa sent a researcher to go look at that And. it really shows that these headstones don’t always last.
Diana (23m 3s):
I know And, it was good being in the context of the cemetery to understand that yeah, there’s many of them in the same state. Now if I’d had more time, maybe I could have found something that looked like theirs because a double headstone, you know, I should be able to find the double marker. But we just had other places to visit So. we took some pictures of the cemetery and just stood there. you know, I just thinking about Dora and William and how awful that would’ve been to have had both their little boys die on the same day. And I had to do a little research because Aunt Lorraine remembered their cause of death as members croup, which we’ve heard of croup, but I never heard of members croup.
Diana (23m 45s):
And when I looked that up I saw that it’s actually would’ve been membranes croup or diptheria is what it is now known And. it was really a terrible illness, which is why they developed a vaccine and now you know the babies and children are all get that is part of that, that D p t shot.
Nicole (24m 7s):
So Dora and William left Oklahoma briefly in 1907 when they made a trip west to Melrose, New Mexico to try home studying of all things. And their son Charles Leslie, wrote about how the family lived with Dora’s parents in town and proceeded to dig a Dugout on the land they hoped to patent. We have several ancestors who lived in dugouts and some of them were in dugouts in Utah when they first arrived as pioneers. I am having a hard time imagining living in a Dugout myself, but I’m imagining that it’s kind of like a, a cave and a hill that you would dig out.
Diana (24m 44s):
That’s how I would imagine it.
Nicole (24m 47s):
So that’s quite Pioneering of them. Dora had typhoid fever though and William decided to move his family back to Oklahoma. So he put Dora and her new baby Della on the train, which took them all the way to Ada Oklahoma and William and Charles Leslie drove the wagon and team back to Ada where they lived for several more years.
Diana (25m 7s):
So I am pretty sure the planes of New Mexico are pretty barren compared to the trees and the hills of Oklahoma. So I could just imagine how that just wasn’t gonna be what they wanted to do. But it does make me think that I have never really searched for a land patent application for William. but I, I’m guessing he probably never got anything. I don’t know. I wonder if he’d be in the track books though. If you go do the initial survey or what have you say, I’m gonna patent this land. I think you are entered in the track books. So that would be a fun avenue of research to find that.
Diana (25m 47s):
I do have the land patent applications though for Dora’s father Robert Royston, I ordered that and her sister who patented land as a female and they lived in dugouts too, did not sound very funny. Lovely.
Nicole (26m 4s):
So if it was kind of more of a plains area, there must have still been some little hills to create your Dugout in or can you just dig? I mean, I don’t know, I thought a Dugout had to be on the side of a hill.
Diana (26m 14s):
Yeah, they must have had some kind of a hill. Yeah, that would be another fun place to go try to locate. And I know that Dora’s parents had a hotel in town and so I think that they lived in town and then, you know, they were patenting this land and they had to go out there and live in The Dugout for a period of time or had to show that they were living on the land or doing something with the land to patent it. but I mom probably spent more of the time in town in the hotel, which is what I would do if I had a Dugout as a second helm. I thought it was really neat though that Dora and the baby got to ride on the train because that would be a much more comfortable trip back to Oklahoma than the wagon team and especially if she was ill with typhoid fever.
Diana (26m 57s):
That sounds scary. So our next stop was to go to Ada Oklahoma and this is where my grandpa talked a lot. In fact, he always talked about being born in Ada even though he really wasn’t. but I think it’s what he remembered as a child. That’s where he lived for several years. So it’s kind of funny how when you move around a lot, how sometimes you’ll just let on one place as being where you were born even though when we actually figured it out, it wasn’t really born there. But in Ada we found the railroad that runs straight through Ada and I could really imagine Dora being so happy that she could take the train. And after they moved back to Oklahoma, they continued to move throughout Oklahoma and finally they moved back to Texas where sadly Dora died in 1925 giving birth to her 10th child and So, we couldn’t make our way down to Texas to visit her grave.
Diana (27m 51s):
But we were in the area where her father was buried, Robert sis, Royston And. it wanted to have one successful cemetery visit where we actually found the headstone And. it turned out that this last stop was an adventure. We had used our GPS the entire time to guide us to the small towns and the Mickey Cemetery without any problem, you know, just got there just fine. And we knew that Robert was buried in the park cemetery in Stevens County and I had seen pictures of his grave next to that of his son and grandson. But the GPS seemed to lead us to the middle of nowhere and we went up and down the road several times, And it kept saying you’ve arrived at your destination.
Diana (28m 33s):
And finally I noticed this gravel road that was very overgrown with grass So. we off roaded when it was gravel road and there it was the big sign that I’d seen the pictures that it was Park Cemetery and we saw a woman who was out in the cemetery and the grass was about two feet tall, it was all dried up, you know, it was October end of the growing season and she was using a weed eater to cut down the grass with the hess would be visible. So my word was such an adventure and we went over and talked to her and we discovered that her family had been taking care of the cemetery for many years. She’d had a couple other family members there earlier in the day doing the trimming back of the grass.
Diana (29m 17s):
And so there was about half of the cemetery cleared and then she was working on the other half and I just really hope that the headstones for Robert Royston and his sons would be cleared. And so, you know, without any idea, we just started walking around and I found them they had been cleared And. it was so neat to see the actual headstones. I was pretty sure Roberts had been been erected many years after his death in 1915 because it was very nice And. it actually looked newer than that of his son. And so, you know, I’m pretty sure they just did it years later. But it has the mason symbol at the top and I thought that was neat because when Isabel applied for her widows pension, she talked about how he had been a member of the masons there in the area.
Diana (30m 8s):
So that’s another avenue for research. I’d love to see if I could find some mason records or learn more about that at the time.
Nicole (30m 14s):
Yeah,
Diana (30m 15s):
So I just imagined that Dora and William would’ve been present at the burial of of her father and maybe the cemetery was a place where many family members gathered to pay their last respects to their father and grandfather. So it was neat to be able to stand there and imagine the family there. And over a hundred years later I was able to visit and think about the life of this great-great-grandfather. He, he is one I had researched so much yet I still feel like there’s so much more to learn about him. So it was really neat to spend that whole day, several hours on the road, several miles visiting the important locations in Dora and Williams lives.
Diana (30m 57s):
We found the location at their marriage, their first home, the cemetery where their oldest boys were buried and the cemetery where Dora’s father was buried and the railroad, they did take the railroad a few more times to new locations while William and my grandfather would follow with the horses and wagons. So that was kind of fun too. I always just imagined the whole family going in the wagon, but man it would be so much nicer if you could just part of you take the train. That was fun to learn about.
Nicole (31m 28s):
Absolutely. I was thinking about dugouts and so I had to look that up and I did find a picture, there’s a photographer who did some photographs of a homesteader in New Mexico who was homesteading in a Dugout in about 1940. So a little bit later, it’s kind of hard to tell, but it looks like he just dug a hole in the ground and and has like three logs and a roof above it. So
Diana (31m 55s):
Oh really?
Nicole (31m 56s):
It’s kind of like a cabin that’s in the ground.
Diana (31m 59s):
Wow, that’s super interesting.
Nicole (32m 2s):
I’m gonna put the picture in the link to the show notes, but it’s a, a library of Congress photo now.
Diana (32m 8s):
Nice.
Nicole (32m 9s):
But it is just really interesting to see the photos and if you think about it when you’re first moving to a new place and you’re brand new and there’s nothing really there, this would be the easiest type of home to create. And especially if you’re in a place with high temperatures or really cold temperatures, the ground can really insulate easily. So it makes sense that you would wanna put your home kind of down in there until you get things figured out.
Diana (32m 31s):
Especially if there are not a lot of trees. Exactly.
Nicole (32m 34s):
A lot of shade or anything. Well, so what are some of the tips that you would give somebody else who wants to do a, a Family History Road Trip?
Diana (32m 42s):
Well, I wanted to prepare ahead of time, so I made a simple timeline of the ancestors lives with the year and event Locality. And I had several Oklahoma ancestors, so I wasn’t sure how much we’d be able to see. And so I made a table for each couple and then used that to guide our path. So I would just do that timeline maybe in a table and then also keep a note of what research you could do. you know, if there’s a repository or a library or historical society you could visit. There wasn’t really anything that I could visit in any of those little localities that I went to, but you know, you might be visiting a place that has some wonderful records or some things that you could use for your family history research.
Diana (33m 30s):
So make a timeline and then print out a map. I love gps but as we were driving it was really nice to have a printed map throughout the day so I could kind of get my bearings about where we were and discover the best routes on the back roads. you know, sometimes GPS wants to take you always on the freeways and I wanted to go more on the back roads, so it was really nice to have a printed map. And then third, you know, this is when I’m sure everybody would do take a lot of photos but also keep a record of each photo in a notebook. If you’re like me, you sometimes get home and you can’t quite remember all the things that you thought about when you were in that location.
Diana (34m 14s):
And so at the end of the day or as you’re driving, record some notes and then number four, find histories. Print them out and read them as you travel. So if you’re lucky like me to have some histories, you could read those stories as you visit the locations. And if you don’t have histories of your own ancestors, perhaps you could find some histories of others who lived in the same area and were there at the same time. And just to get an idea of what it was like back when your ancestors lived there. And then finally write about the trip. You wanna be able to share your experiences with other family members. So not everyone can travel, but if you write the story and share the pictures and your discoveries, then it might be a fun way to interest others in your family’s history.
Diana (34m 60s):
Those
Nicole (35m 0s):
Are great tips and bringing a map is really a good idea to be able to look on the map and see where things are instead of relying on your computer gps. Wow. You just never know.
Diana (35m 10s):
That’s so true and I think we rely so much on our phones now and being able to Google everything and use Google Maps, but sometimes you just need a printed map that can really help and I was so grateful that I had done that. In fact, we didn’t even use our phone gps. We brought our old GPS and that was great because then I could use my phone for lots of other things. So that was a good tip too.
Nicole (35m 39s):
Yeah, sometimes you’re using your phone to look up other things, so it’s nice to have your GPS be separate from
Diana (35m 45s):
That. Right. And we were in a rental car So, we didn’t know if the car would have, you know, the associated gps And. it didn’t So. we were glad we had brought our own.
Nicole (35m 52s):
Well thanks for sharing those tips, And. it was really great to hear about my grandparents as you were talking all about them and and imagining them living there in Oklahoma Indian territory.
Diana (36m 3s):
Yeah, so fun. We did see lots of signs of it being Indian territory, And. it still is part of the Chickasaw tribe there. Like one of the places was the Chickasaw headquarters and So. we saw signs of that all throughout the area. So I could just imagine that things really didn’t look that different when they were living there.
Nicole (36m 24s):
Great. Well I hope everyone listening will let us know if you’ve had any fun experiences doing a Family History Road Trip and leave a comment for us. We always enjoy getting your comments and your reviews and your questions and we try to read those sometimes on the podcast So, we welcome them. All
Diana (36m 41s):
Right everyone, have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.
Nicole (36m 46s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.
Links
Taking a Family History Road Trip: 5 Tips for Success – https://familylocket.com/taking-a-family-history-road-trip-5-tips-for-success/
Dugout photo – https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179145892/in/photostream/
The Dugout: Pioneering Frontier Homes By Victor A. Croley – https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/frontier-homes-dugout-zmaz70sozgoe/
Research Like a Pro Resources
Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com – https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d
Research Like a Pro eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/
RLP Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/
Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources
Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist’s Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin – https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx
Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/
RLP with DNA Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/
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