Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about our ancestor, Selina (Beddoes) Kelsey. Selina lived until age 97, and was regularly featured in Utah newspapers due to being one of the last pioneers to arrive in Utah by wagon (before the railroad). Selina was only 4 years old when she crossed from Nebraska to Salt Lake City by covered wagon. Diana organized the newspaper clippings into a timeline in Airtable to keep track of the clippings.
Transcript
Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 283, Selina Beddoes Kelsey Utah Pioneer in the News 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 genealogist Professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot 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.
Nicole (43s):
Let’s go the sponsor of today’s episode of Research Like a Pro Is newspapers.com, the largest online newspaper archive. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro
Diana (57s):
Hi Nicole. how are you today?
Nicole (59s):
I am Doing great and I’m loving my research right now. I’ve been looking up some of the laws and different historical and legal context for a project I’m doing. And I was looking in a syllabus by Judy Russell, where she talks about a lot of resources for helping you understand the laws. And the two main ones I’ve been using a lot are Black’s Law Dictionary, the one that was published in the 1890s and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the law. And that’s such a great resource for learning about common law, which is the basis for 49 of the 50 states.
Nicole (1m 41s):
And Louisiana You know is the only one that does civil law. And so it’s been really helpful to just do a deep dive kind of into legal context. And if you haven’t ever looked up words in Black’s law dictionary and make sure you’re using the right edition, because the later editions after the 1890s, they got rid of a lot of obsolete words, which are the ones that were like trying to look up, but take for example, like a deeded, and then every word that you’re not really sure what it means, you can look that up in Black Law dictionary and holy cow, it just opened my mind to really understand the deeded so much better. And there were so many clues in there that I didn’t understand because I hadn’t fully understood the words.
Nicole (2m 26s):
so it was really cool to just do that exercise and look up almost every word in the law dictionary.
Diana (2m 32s):
And that’s online, right? Is that where you’re looking
Nicole (2m 34s):
At it? Yes. Yeah, both of those are in Google Books.
Diana (2m 39s):
Oh, that’s fabulous.
Nicole (2m 40s):
Yeah. Well, today’s announcements are that our next case study for the Research Like, a Pro Webinar series is December 19th with K Richer, and it’s titled, proving the Mother of Cornelia Roberson Hickerson A DNA case study. So join us for that. It’s about Tennessee and Texas and finding a biological relationship. And our next Research Like, a Pro with DNA study group begins February, 2024. And we’re just always so excited to work on our next phase of one of our research projects. It’s fun for us to do our own research. We hope you’ll join us as well, and you can work on your own research. You can make progress on a case that you’ve been kind of working on off and on, but now you’re finally ready to commit to working on it and to writing up a research report.
Nicole (3m 28s):
So it’s really just so gratifying when you finish this study group and you have a written report to show what you’ve done, and often it launches you into the next phase of research, which can help you come up with a new hypothesis or find more evidence to support or reject your hypothesis. And you can really make progress to be a peer group leader. Just reach out and let us know that you’re interested and we’d love to see one of your DNA reports, and that’s how we’ll choose our peer group leaders. If you want to receive our newsletter every Monday that comes out in email form and you can get our coupons and notices of our new blog post and podcast episode for the week.
Diana (4m 9s):
Well, today we are talking about one of our Ancestors, and this is Selina Beddoes Kelsey. She is my great-grandmother, and she was born in 1864 and died in 1962. So she lived to be 98 years old or holy
Nicole (4m 28s):
Cow, she died the same year that you were born.
Diana (4m 32s):
She did, but I didn’t quite meet her. She died before I was born. She is such an interesting character, and this was one of my 52 ancestor blog posts. And I titled it Utah Pioneer in the News because she was in the news a lot. And You know we love newspapers. We know they are so valuable to our research, but back in the day before we had Google photos and FamilySearch memories and ancestry trees, we would actually clip those newspaper articles out and put them in scrapbooks. And I did that. And I learned it from my mother and my grandmother. So when my grandmother, Florence Career Kelsie passed away, I inherited her scrapbook and she was a wonderful keeper of news articles.
Diana (5m 18s):
Her scrapbooks are just full of these news clippings, and she had a lot about this great-grandmother, Selina Beddoes Kelsie and You know looking through those. The reason why is because in 1962, at the time right before she died, she, there were only five people left who had crossed the Plains mountains and rivers to settle in Utah territory. And she had immigrated as a young child. She was only four years old when she came across with her parents. And because she lived until that old age of 97, she was consistently named in all the leading Salt Lake newspapers from 1954 to 1962 as a surviving Pioneer.
Diana (6m 3s):
So once I started doing more of this family history preservation work, I scanned all the clippings from my grandmother’s scrapbook and put them in my digital file. But when I was preparing to write this blog post, I wondered if it was complete You know, had my grandmother found all of the different clippings, did she get everything saved? And so I went and found all the original sources of the clippings, and then I found even more that she didn’t have. And so when I was thinking about how I would organize all this data, I decided to start a timeline for Selina in Airtable And I created an entry for each newspaper clipping with the complete source citation, a link to it, the details, and then an attachment, a clipping or an image of the clipping.
Diana (6m 54s):
And then I was able to sort by date, and then I had a really good view of the different articles. so it was key to get all of those put into Airtable so I could feel organized about my research on this.
Nicole (7m 7s):
What a fun project to put that all into a timeline and get all those clippings. It’s so enjoyable when you’re looking up newspaper articles for your Ancestors and you actually find some, so often we’re looking on at difficult people to research far back in time and will check for newspaper articles and we can’t find any. So it’s fun when you’re doing research for somebody who actually has newspaper articles. I love that.
Diana (7m 32s):
Right.
Nicole (7m 33s):
So when you were talking about your grandma Kelsey keeping the scrapbook, I was thinking, oh, what was her relationship to Selina? And it’s her mother-in-Law. That’s so fun that she was clipping articles about her mother-in-Law.
Diana (7m 45s):
Yeah, my grandma was very into the Pioneer heritage of both herself and her husband. You know the career line and the Kelpie line, and she was a member of the Daughters of the Utah pioneers and they had their monthly meetings. And so anything about the Pioneer ancestry, she was very, very cognizant of and wanted to keep that So You know. It also helps me understand a little bit more about her seeing what she kept.
Nicole (8m 14s):
Absolutely. Well, let’s talk more about Selina and her kind of biographical details, her birth and her Pioneer journey and stuff. So Selina was born December 31st, 1864. Well, that’s kind of a fun birthday too, if you think about, it’s New Year’s Eve,
Diana (8m 29s):
Right?
Nicole (8m 30s):
She was born in Willenhall, which is in West Midlands, England. And her parents’ names were William Meadows and Mariah Brockhouse. So after her parents joined the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Saints, they made the decision to leave England and immigrate to Utah territory. Selina was only four years old at the time, and her grandparents were not keen on losing their granddaughter. And this story about Selena’s family’s immigration is one that we’ve talked about a lot in our family. It’s so crazy to think about it. And you wrote about it in your blog post about Mariah Beddoes,
Diana (9m 10s):
Right? And the story is that the grandparents didn’t want little Selina to leave with her parents. And so the grandpa took her for a walk there at the boat docks hoping that they would wouldn’t leave without her, but they found them and and they left, which was sad. So yes, I did write all about that research, that story as well. It seems like there’s always two sides to every story. And what I discovered was that this poor couple, they had lost a lot of their children and this was one of their only living children who was now immigrating across the ocean, and they probably never see them again. So I guess they were justified being sad about little Selina leaving.
Nicole (9m 55s):
Right? Well, when Mariah and William and their young daughters Selina and Matilda crossed the Atlantic Ocean, they were crowded on a ship with over 400 other latter-Day Saints. And the name of their ship was the Colorado. And they sailed from Liverpool, England and arrived in New York City on July 4th, 1868. They traveled it steerage and they were very sick for the six week voyage from New York. They traveled by train to North Platte. Nebraska then made the journey across the plains using an ox team.
Nicole (10m 35s):
Selena’s younger sister Eliza, wrote Selina can well remember being put with her sister Matilda in the wagon with their few belongings. Her father walked most of the way. Her mother walked behind holding to the wagon to be near the children. Their teamster’s name was Robert Davis. Her memory is very keen to things that happened on this journey. One of the scouts shot himself accidentally while walking down the tongue of the wagon one day, and he died. Her father was scouting ahead when he came upon a fresh camp loaded with provisions, the man was dead. The Indians had scalped him and taken his team, leaving the wagon and provisions the captain would not allow them to bother the things because other may, others may suspect that they had killed him for the food.
Nicole (11m 26s):
Wow. Can you imagine a four or 5-year-old girl going through this wagon experience and remembering all of these crazy things that happened on the way?
Diana (11m 37s):
Yeah, I think that too. When I was four or five, you don’t remember many things unless they were really big events. And so this would’ve been a big deal, and I’m sure there were other things as well.
Nicole (11m 49s):
Yeah, and they probably talked about it a lot after they arrived. You know, like remember on our journey when this happened, and You know it was probably something that the family talked about later too. And so I think often a child’s memory is molded by what the family ends up remembering over the years and talking about and repeating. Yeah.
Diana (12m 10s):
It makes you wonder what the family stories were about that journey.
Nicole (12m 14s):
So true. Well, our sponsor today is newspapers.com. newspapers.com is your ultimate resource for discovering your family’s history. Explore more than 800 million newspaper pages in their vast collections spanning three centuries. newspapers.com is your gateway to exploring the past with newspapers from the us, uk, Canada, Australia, and and beyond. Trace your family’s journey and uncover the extraordinary tales of your Ancestors through newspaper stories, birth and marriage announcements, obituaries, photos, and much more. For listeners of today’s show, newspapers.com is extending a discount of 20% off on a publisher, extra subscription.
Nicole (12m 56s):
Just use the code family Locket at checkout. Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity.
Diana (13m 2s):
Well, let’s talk a little bit more about why Selina was in the newspaper so much as the surviving Pioneer Utah celebrates Pioneer Day on July 24th each year with a big parade in Salt Lake City, fireworks and other commemorations of the pioneers who first arrived in 1847 and continued to cross the planes by handcart or wagon until the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869. So you’re only considered a Pioneer if you crossed before the railroad. And during the 1950s and 1960s, only a handful of these pioneers still were living, and Selina was one of those.
Diana (13m 43s):
There are two newspapers in Salt Lake City, the Salt Lake Tribune and the DT News, Salt Lake Telegram. And every single year I found they would run an article around July 24th describing the festivities, and they always noted which pioneers still survived. And they generally honored these pioneers with a lunch at the Hotel Utah, which was the swanky hotel, and still is very beautiful, right downtown Salt Lake City. So the first time I found Selina in the news was in 1954, and at age 90, she was one of 17 remaining pioneers.
Diana (14m 23s):
And it’s fun to see the pictures. They tried to have pictures of them every year. And the newspaper article said, 17 men and women, snowy, haired and bent with years were remembering the achievements of their youth. Saturday as tribute was paid to them at the annual days of 47 luncheon honoring Utah’s remaining pioneers. And it’s fun just to read what they wrote. And as I said, occasionally there were photos. Not always, but often there were photos. Then in 1959, Selina was pictured with another Pioneer, Minnie Peterson Brown. And this time the newspaper article said All of these are now in their nineties, but were mere infants ranging from a few months to four years of age when they arrived in the valley.
Diana (15m 11s):
They remember little, if anything, of the Pioneer journey from firsthand to of the hardy non Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Kelsie are still taking note of the fast changing world that has become so different since they entered the valley in wagons. So if you think of 1962, You know we’ve got airplanes and electricity. I mean, there’s so many things. Wow. I mean, we’re talking very early 1850s. So fun to think about how things have changed.
Nicole (15m 41s):
Yeah. Crossing the planes in a wagon versus flying in an airplane. So much change. While the final news articles naming Selina were obituaries that appeared in several newspapers, one stated the following, Springville, Mrs. Selina Beddoes Kelsey 97 died Wednesday evening of natural causes in a Springville nursing home. Born December 31st, 1864, Willingham Staffordshire, England to William and Raya Brockhouse Beddoes married William Kelsey, 1883 Springville. He died 1918, came to United States at three years.
Nicole (16m 22s):
Family converts of Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter-Day Saints settled first at Salem, excellent seamstress, diligent reader, known for gardening, worked with flowers till past 90. Sounds like you mom.
Diana (16m 38s):
I do love flowers. Maybe I got that from Selina. That’s neat.
Nicole (16m 44s):
Well, it’s no wonder that Grandma Florence saved as many articles as she could about her mother-in-law. Selina. The yearly luncheons and honors must have been anticipated eagerly by the family and Selina, although her memory page on FamilySearch contains many histories and photos, the news articles add an extra dimension to her life. So great job for finding those and putting them up.
Diana (17m 6s):
Yeah, I’ve loved writing these little blog posts that are more focused on a specific part about a person’s life, because obviously she lived 97 years. There’s so many pieces of her life we could talk about. so it was fun to just talk about this honoring of her And. I like to think that those last years of her life were really blessed by that honor You know everybody wants to be remembered, and especially as you’re older, it’s nice to be remembered.
Nicole (17m 33s):
Well Thank you, and we look forward to talking to you guys again next week. Bye.
Diana (17m 39s):
All right, bye-Bye everyone.
Nicole (17m 41s):
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 at DA on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family Locket dot com slash 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 family Locket dot com slash 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
Selina (Beddoes) Kelsey (1864-1962): Utah Pioneer in the News – https://familylocket.com/back-to-the-basics-with-marriage-records-part-4-civil-marriage-records/
Mariah (Brockhouse) Beddoes (1842-1926), English Emigrant and Pioneer – https://familylocket.com/mariah-brockhouse-beddoes-1842-1926-english-emigrant-and-pioneer/
Selina’s memories page on FamilySearch –https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/memories/G913-WL6
Sponsor – Newspapers.com
For listeners of this podcast, Newspapers.com is offering new subscribers 20% off a Publisher Extra subscription so you can start exploring today. Just use the code “FamilyLocket” at checkout.
Research Like a Pro Resources
Airtable Research Logs Quick Reference – by Nicole Dyer – https://familylocket.com/product/airtable-research-logs-for-genealogy-quick-reference/
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 Webinar Series 2023 – monthly case study webinars including documentary evidence and many with DNA evidence – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-webinar-series-2023/
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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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