RLP 295: Review of The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 293, Review of The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century. 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 (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, your go-to resource for unlocking the stories of your ancestors. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro and Hi Mom.

Diana (54s):
Hi. Nicole. How are you?

Nicole (57s):
I’m great. When we’re recording, we’re getting ready for Roots Tech. So just very busy getting everything ready and making some new things

Diana (1m 3s):
And we are excited. It’s always sad when it’s over with, but always kind of a relief because then we can get onto the next thing. There’s always something coming up.

Nicole (1m 12s):
How’s your client project going?

Diana (1m 15s):
It is going well. I have had so much fun with the last assignment, which was adding matches to my Airtable base. So I have this cluster from a GFI network graph all figured out for the clients and I’ve been going through and picking out the people that have pretty robust trees because they’re going to be more likely to have an actual connection that I can map out in my diagram. And in doing that, I came across an Al Angeline Klein who I was very interested in because in my family tree I have an Angeline who was a daughter of Clumsy Klein, not an Al Jaine, but we have never been able to figure out what happened to Angeline.

Diana (1m 60s):
So when I saw Al Angeline, I looked at her and I thought, oh my goodness, this is who that woman is. And the other really fun thing is that I called and told you about right away our ancestor, Dora Algae, I think was named after her Aunt Al Jaline. We’ve always wondered where that name algae comes from. Oh

Nicole (2m 19s):
Yes. It’s such a unique name. I love it so much. This is so exciting.

Diana (2m 25s):
It is. It is so fun. And that would never have popped into my head to go search this random tree. And if I had even seen Alga, I probably would’ve thought it wasn’t even connected. You know, sometimes you just don’t make the connection, but because this person was in that cluster and through DNA connects to all of these people who are coming through the Klein lines, I’m pretty sure this is who we were looking for all along. It wasn’t Angeline, it was Angeline. So just a great benefit of doing DNA work.

Nicole (2m 57s):
It is finding those siblings of your ancestor and then being able to trace them forward in time. There have been several times where I haven’t been able to trace an ancestor’s sibling forward in time. They just seem to get lost. It’s hard to find a marriage. You don’t know what happened to them. They probably started going by a middle name or in this case it seems like she was Angeline in one census, but it was probably supposed to be Al Jaine.

Diana (3m 21s):
Right. I’m sure the census enumerator just thought it was Anine You know Al Jaine. I’ve never heard that anywhere else.

Nicole (3m 30s):
It must have come from somewhere, but that’s cool. And I really just think that using DNA evidence to help build down our descendancy lines You know siblings of our ancestors is kind of an untapped superpower of DNA evidence.

Diana (3m 44s):
Oh, I totally agree. And that really came home to me as I was working on this because I found information about several of the siblings of Isabella. There were just all sorts of things that I had never been able to figure out. And it was right there in other people’s trees. So it’s really neat. It’s so fun. I’m excited to go onto the next part, which we’ll be working on the timeline. And I already have a timeline for Clumsy Klein and John C. Klein, my hypothesized father. But I think I’m going to work on adding some of these matches from DNA and getting them into my timeline. You know I’ve discovered a few new things. So I think that will be my focus for the timeline, just adding to it from what I’ve discovered so far.

Nicole (4m 28s):
Great.

Diana (4m 29s):
Well let’s do our announcements. We’re excited for our next Research Like Pro Webinar. And this one will be Saturday, March 16th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. The title is using Research Like, a Pro to Trace an African American ancestor back through enslavement. And our presenter is Allison Kotter. She is one of our research team and she is fabulous with African American research. So the description of this is that Martin Fabro was born in slavery around 1838 in South Carolina. He died on 17 February, 1910 in Dalton, Whitfield, Georgia. His wife was named Francis Collier.

Diana (5m 9s):
The family knew very little of his life before he came to Dalton around 1880. This case study goes through the process of following the clues left by Martin to trace him back to when he was enslaved and to extend his ancestry. So some of the topics Allison will be discussing will be, of course Georgia slavery, African American wheels and estates, land deeds and newspapers, So I. Hope you can join us for that. It will be a really good case study. Upcoming conferences. We have the Ohio Genealogical Society Conference in April. That will be 10 April through 13th, April. And this is held in person in Sandusky, Ohio.

Diana (5m 51s):
And I am going out to Ohio for the first time to participate in this conference. It will be so fun. And I have five lectures and a through lines workshop. So if you’re anywhere in that area, it would be fun to have you join us there. And then we are excited. Nicole and I are both presenting virtually for the National Genealogical Society Conference, and that is May 17th and May Eighteenth. And we each will have a session there. And we’re excited. I’ll be talking about illuminating Ancestors lives in small bites through focus themes and engaging narratives. And that will be live streamed. So I will be there live and you could come and watch and then ask questions.

Diana (6m 32s):
It’ll be fun. And then Nicole is doing a case study organizing fan club research with Airtable who was John West. So these are both brand new lectures for us and we’re excited to share some neat things with everyone. And then as always, join our newsletter for all of our latest podcasts, blog posts, YouTube videos, and any coupons or sales we might have going on.

Nicole (6m 55s):
Yeah, it will be fun at NGS. And that’s neat that yours is gonna be live streamed. Mine will be prerecorded, so that’ll be fun too. But then I think I am gonna be there for a live question and answer after I

Diana (7m 6s):
Think so.

Nicole (7m 7s):
So that’ll be neat as well.

Diana (7m 8s):
Yes. ’cause I’m sure people will have questions about the fan club and tracking that with Airtable. That’s such a fascinating thing to be able to do.

Nicole (7m 16s):
Yeah, it has been amazing. I remember the first time that I started using Airtable to track fans and it was I think a podcast listener who sent us a message and said, how can you track fans? What’s a good way to do that? And I had started using it already for DNA matches, and it just seemed the logical next step that yes, of course you should totally just do a linked record field from the research log over to a fan club table to keep track of all those people.

Diana (7m 43s):
Absolutely. It’s so fun and it just makes it so much easier and faster doing the data entry when you do that.

Nicole (7m 50s):
All right, well, we do have a listener spotlight today, which is fun. This one is from Jessica. She says, hello, I’ve been really enjoying your podcast. It’s very helpful. You’ve talked in a number of episodes about sorting through conflicting information of various types, but for the most part it seems like it’s either due to an honest mistake or a little white lie. For example, people shaving off a few years on some records. I want to suggest that you discuss some strategies for dealing with Ancestors who deliberately lied. My great-grandfather is proving extremely difficult to track down on every record we have since this is marriage’s death, passport, military, et cetera, as well as in the stories his relatives remember him telling.

Nicole (8m 31s):
I don’t think he gave the same information twice. He variously claimed to have been born in Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Canada, Ireland or Scotland. He gave different birth dates day, month, and year. Every time he was asked, he had different numbers, genders, names of siblings, his parents had different names and origins and on and on and on. The only thing he was consistent about was his name, although not the spelling of the surname, I get the feeling he was deliberately leaving behind or hiding from something even. So he would’ve had to have been born between about 1870 and 1890, given the most generous estimates of his possible age. And it seems like there should be some records somewhere.

Nicole (9m 15s):
I just don’t know how to figure out what to check next. Randomly searching isn’t the best use of my time, but I’m blanking on a good next step. Obviously, I don’t know if you’d have much to say on the topic, but I know I’m not the only one with a less than truthful ancestor out there.

Diana (9m 30s):
That is such a fun question and such a fun thought that I don’t know if it’s fun, but it’s so interesting. These are the type of projects that we get really interested in trying to track these people down. And I immediately thought of two or three projects that I’ve been involved with that did have something very similar to this. One was A DNA case, and I believe it was for a DNA practicum where the ancestor had a complete change of identity. And it was only through DNA that we proved his initial birth family with who he had become and found pictures that showed You know that this was the same man. So that was one, and that was just through DNA.

Diana (10m 12s):
But the other one I am thinking about is one that we actually have some blog posts on, and that was the Johnson Alford project. And we had a podcast episode or two with Michelle Mickelson who was the researcher on that. And these, these people, this man had to change his name and identity because of You know it was in Texas and they, There was some conflict after the Civil War. And so Michelle had some really good techniques that she talked about, and I think she has those in her blog posts where she did timelines, really detailed timelines for the first identity and then for the second identity and tried to match those up.

Diana (10m 56s):
So my first thought would be to just do a timeline and put in whether wherever he said he was born and his different dates, and maybe you’ll start to see some patterns. I mean obviously he’s giving very different information and with the parent names and on and on. So You know maybe there’s going to be some little date that kind of pops through. We just had a client project we just finished up where kind of the same situation, the client’s ancestor, she just couldn’t be found beyond her husband’s death. And so we found her living out in California. We thought maybe she died in Illinois in Chicago where the husband died.

Diana (11m 40s):
But she ended up going out to California, followed a daughter, completely changed her name on her second marriage. She gave her parents names sort of the same, but she flip flopped their their surnames or they were just a little different. And she gave her birth date the same but her birth year differently. So obviously she was doing something similar, but in her obituary, it named her children from her first marriage. So it was very obvious that this was the woman. So it’s really funny when you see things like this and you have no idea why they are giving deliberately different information or maybe he was just paranoid about the government, didn’t wanna give his information out to anybody. But my biggest piece of advice would be just to do that timeline.

Diana (12m 24s):
And it may be that You know you’re not going to get a lot of help from that, but maybe you start tracking his fan club just like we’ve been talking about. Maybe he associated with some of the same people and that could help to You know, put him in different places and try to figure out exactly what’s going on. Do you have any ideas on this Nicole?

Nicole (12m 48s):
Well, using DNA, I mean that’s gonna be your biggest help, is trying to connect back to his family of origin through DNA matches, going back to great-great grandparents. So hopefully there are some matches you can use. And then the other thing is just to kind of focus on the earliest record that you have of him that You know is him. And trying to really suss out any additional clues from that time and place that could give you some details. Another thing is newspaper articles. And sometimes you can find little tidbits here and there about where he’s lived and maybe what he was involved in.

Nicole (13m 31s):
And if There was something he was trying to escape from, you can sometimes find evidence of that in the newspaper.

Diana (13m 38s):
Oh, that’s a great idea. And You know, sometimes we find some evidence in an obituary where family members show up and they maybe have different last names. They, they still come to the funeral or they’re listed in the obituary. And so sometimes that can help too, the very end of life to see who’s associated there.

Nicole (14m 0s):
Right, yeah. Yeah. And sometimes at the end of a person’s life, that’s when the secrets come out. So maybe just talking to people who were there with the ancestor when they died and if any secrets were told.

Diana (14m 13s):
That’s right. So Thank you so much Jessica for sending in that question. That’s really a fun one to think about and interesting to consider how we would tackle that. I would say definitely doing a complete project, starting with the Research Like, a Pro process of the objective and then the timeline doing more research, writing it all up. You’ve just gotta be focused on it and maybe something will come to light or you’ll have some ideas that will help you to move forward. But the idea with DNA is also just fabulous. Yeah. Well, today we are talking about a really amazing book and the title of it is The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century A Social and Cultural History.

Diana (14m 58s):
This book is written by Richard Lyman Bushman, who is a historian. And I was really fascinated with the title because I pretty much only have farmers in my family history. And I think that many of us in the United States have farmers and You know thinking back to my ancestors who were in England and Denmark, some of them were farmers as well. So I think it’s really interesting to think about our Ancestors in this light of their profession. So this book is focused on the American farmer, and I think we have so many because it’s such a vast country, and There was so much new land in the United States, that was a huge draw for people from Europe where There was just not any land for them to give to their children.

Diana (15m 51s):
Or maybe they didn’t inherit any. So there’s really good chance if your ancestors were American farmed So. I’m just going to give the chapter headings, we’re going to discuss a few things from the book, but it is a long book. It’s 294 pages of text, and then there are 70 pages of notes. So You know we love notes. We love knowing exactly where this information came from. So I appreciated that. These are the headings. So there is farm thought. And then North America, 1600 to 1800. And then Bushman takes us to some specific places to illustrate some things.

Diana (16m 34s):
One is Connecticut 1640 to 1760. Then he takes us to Pennsylvania 1760 to 1776, then to Virginia 1776 to 1800. And then the last chapter is approaching the present 1800 to 1862. So if you notice he, he pretty much starts at the beginning of colonization there in the 16 hundreds and then has some very specific eras and discusses the differences as well as some differences in geography because farming in New England perhaps looked different than in Pennsylvania, which obviously looked very different in Virginia where we have the enslaved people doing the work.

Diana (17m 20s):
So it’s, it was fun to read and it had some really fascinating things and I think some good ramifications for our research.

Nicole (17m 29s):
I think this book is amazing. We just have so many farmers, it’s just so applicable to us. Right. Well, the author is Richard Lyman Bushman, and we have read books by him in the past. So I immediately know I’m gonna really enjoy this book because of the author. And he’s a distinguished historian. He’s currently filling the position of Governor Morris, professor of History emeritus at Columbia University, which is kind of like a special position. There’s only one at a time I believe. And he specializes in social and cultural history in America. And in the preface of the book, the American Farmer Richard Bushman talks about his fascination with agriculture.

Nicole (18m 14s):
Despite having no recent ancestors who were farmers. He wrote, I was motivated only by a desire to understand farmers. I wanted to know how they thought their strategies for getting on the obstacles and dangers they faced their fears and hopes. I aspired to write A Social and Cultural History of Eighteenth Century farmers. As I learned more, I was struck by the secure base that farming provided for British North American society in the Eighteenth Century, the tens and thousands of farms planted up and down the coast and spreading into the mountains formed a great productive system that yielded the bulk of what was needed to sustain life.

Nicole (18m 54s):
When European population growth in the Eighteenth Century left the continent short of food, the American population, although expanding at a far faster rate, continued to supply its own needs. And much of Europe’s, besides without any management or government directives, the population swarmed onto the land and went to work. No one had to prod farmers to produce food given the opportunity, they eagerly made the most of the continent’s ample resources. So wow. Bushman describes how the farmers not only provided for their own households, but also produced enough to trade with the community and ultimately add to the family’s wellbeing.

Nicole (19m 36s):
And he talks about the importance of the family farm and fathers seeking to provide an inheritance for their children in land. We see this in our research all the time where the fathers divided their hard-earned land among the next generation hoping to set up their sons with land of their own. And when There was not enough land to go around and establish communities, the sons moved west and search of land in the newly opened territories. And this cycle continued well into the 19th Century.

Diana (20m 3s):
Right. And it was interesting as I was reading the book, because I kept thinking of our different ancestors and different records that we’ve discovered that really pointed this out. And I thought of our Eisenhower ancestors. We have John Eisenhower Sr. And his son John d Eisenhower, and they absolutely follow this pattern. So John Sr. Moved into North Carolina and was granted land in 1792. And then I found the division of that this land in a deed. And he divided it between his three sons in 1817. So our ancestor, one of those sons, John d Eisenhower, moved west.

Diana (20m 45s):
He sold his land there in North Carolina and he moved first to Green County Tennessee and then onto Cape Gerardo County, Missouri. And I love his will because it also gives us a really good idea of his farm. From the time of his arrival in Cape Gerardo County, Missouri in the early nine 1820s until he died in 1844, he had amassed a large number of livestock, especially hogs. And when I was reading the book on the Ozarks, I learned that in the Ozarks, the hilly terrain was really well suited to hogs. And so it was fun to make the connection between his will and all these hogs and and the fact that those, that was the livestock that a lot of people had a lot of.

Diana (21m 31s):
And the reason why was because corn was a very easy crop to grow there. And it fed the hogs as well as the people. He also had sheep, which provided wool, and he had cattle that provided the dairy products. But his property also included the basics for running a self-contained plantation. So he had axes, handsaw, plow, wagon windmill, and he had amatic, which I didn’t know what that was, but when I looked it up, I learned it was for cutting through roots and keeping the land cleared. And this kind of was made me think of my dad and his story when he and his family lived in the Ozarks in the little cabin, and they were actually in Arkansas.

Diana (22m 15s):
And he would talk about having to go out and cut the You, know the part that grows back from a tree after you’ve cut down a tree, it wants to keep sending up those suckers. And he would talk about how they just kept growing up and they’d smack you back in the head if you didn’t get ’em cut. And he hated doing that. You know it was a very wooded area. So they had to, they had to get that land cleared somehow. And then John also valued his rifle that was in his will. And this would have been of course, very important for hunting wild game and defending his family and home against intruders. He had an orchard which likely grew a variety of fruit and he would’ve raised grain to feed his stock.

Diana (22m 56s):
So a big part of the book talks about how the farmers were very self-sustaining and they wanted to grow everything, raise everything they could to be self-contained, but then they also had the surplus and they would trade and they would, they just had such an economy in their communities based on the farm. So it was really fun to put this information from the book into perspective You know with the actual records that I had seen, because we don’t have stories about how it all worked. We have to just infer things from the will and from some cultural history like this.

Nicole (23m 34s):
Wow, that’s such a good connection between our ancestor and this whole idea of the American farmer and looking at his possessions that he had. And I had to look up what a matoc was. I don’t even know how to say that, but it apparently it’s a ham tool used for digging, prying and shopping. And I’ve put a link to that in the show notes to Wikipedia.

Diana (23m 54s):
Well, and that’s the fun thing when you read these wills or look at the inventory, whatever you have from probate, you see some really different terms. And it’s fascinating to research those. I know I took a class much on once in a southern Institute, I believe it was one by Mark Lowe, and it was all about getting the most information from the will as possible. And he talked about You know, okay, so your ancestor has a set of China dishes and it’s 1840 in Arkansas. What did that mean? Well, that meant they had some money because who had China dishes You know if we were very poor. And so sometimes I think we look at the household property and we just think, oh yeah, that’s nice.

Diana (24m 38s):
But then we have to put them in context and think what this meant to them to have this little piece of whatever it is that to us maybe we take for granted. So those bills are really, really helpful.

Nicole (24m 51s):
Yeah.

Diana (24m 53s):
Well the other thing that I thought about was how things changed as the years went by because I am the daughter of a farmer. My dad farmed when I was young. And we were in no way a self-contained farm. I mean, we bought everything at the store. My dad grew huge crops of wheat and potatoes, but he just sold that all. And then we used of course the proceeds to just buy whatever. And so things changed greatly. And I think if we look at our farming ancestors and we look through the years, maybe we see more and more of this idea of selling your crops rather than being self-contained. So something else to think about.

Diana (25m 34s):
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Diana (26m 16s):
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Nicole (26m 34s):
Great. Okay. Well, whether our ancestors hailed from New England, the middle states or the South Richard Bushman tells us in his book of the different ways that farming could be impacted in climate and culture. And what we know for sure is that there are few records left to us by the farmers. There are the censuses. Sometimes we have additional like agricultural censuses, there’s tax lists, deeds, and of course probate records like wills. And when we put the details from those records into the context of history, we can really understand their lives on a different level.

Nicole (27m 18s):
And Bushman uses original writings in the form of diaries and letters coupled with historical research by many who have studied this topic. The extensive end notes provide the reader with a lot of extra sources to study on a lot of different topics. So those are valuable as well. So there’s a lot to be had in this book. Well, what about the native people who were displaced by the ever increasing number of white settlers? This is covered a little bit. And Bushman tells the story of land repeatedly lost to settlers through the mohegans of Connecticut during the 16 hundreds. He also touches on the Pennsylvania massacre of a small band of Conestoga in 1763. This sparked controversy among settlers on the frontier and the government officials driving for peace with the native peoples.

Diana (28m 6s):
Right. So the book can’t go in depth, of course on all the different conflicts, but it gives you a little taste of what it could have been like in your area because of course the land was peopled before the white settlers came. And we can see that. I’ve seen that in our own family history where an ancestor got a new land grant in Alabama and that’s because the land had just been seeded by the creek tribe to the You know they were basically forced, forced to seed the land and then it was put up for the land patents for the settlers coming in. So all along the way you see that I think it’s good for us to really think about if our ancestor is getting a land grant or land patent, well who was on the land first and how did this come about that they were able to get this land.

Diana (28m 59s):
And another sensitive topic that Bushman does handle is the impact of slavery on the colonies and the business of farming. He talks a lot about how the climate differences between the north and south really impacted that and how the ability of southern farmers to employ slave labor throughout the winter led to the growth of slavery. South of Pennsylvania, and I had never put this together in the northern climates, they had slavery for a while until about early 18 hundreds when it was all abolished. But in the northern climates, there were several months outta the year when There was no farm work.

Diana (29m 40s):
It was too gold. And farmers could not afford slave labor when they didn’t have work for them to do. And that was really a fascinating idea. Bushman does take us all the way through the revolution and we get to learn about how farmers felt about this new form of government. And it was a big deal for them. You know going from a monarchy to a republic. And the thing is, these little farm communities had lived in basically a type of democracy. They were out here in the colonies kind of doing their own thing and they knew, they knew who could lead in the area.

Diana (30m 22s):
You know they knew who would be a good mayor or who’d be a good governor. And so they were not fearful of having a government under the authority of the people. It really gave a climate for revolution because of this whole community of farmers. So whether our ancestors farmed in New England, the middle colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania or the South, we can get a lot of perspective on their motivations and actions. It gives us, the book gives us a deep look at American history from the perspective of the farmer and it gives us more context. I know sometimes people will say, oh my ancestors, were all farmers.

Diana (31m 5s):
There’s nothing interesting about them in their records. But the thing that I really appreciated about the book was the many interesting things brought to my mind as I read the book. So it can give us some additional ideas for research beyond the usual and help us tell more of the story of our ancestors.

Nicole (31m 25s):
Well great. Thanks for reading the book and sharing it with us. And I am excited to have this resource available now that I know about it in case I need to cite anything about farmers, which I probably will since a lot of our research focuses on farmers.

Diana (31m 40s):
Right. It’s, it’s just a, a way to expand our story of our farming ancestors when they have left us little.

Nicole (31m 48s):
Alright, well thanks everyone for listening and we will talk to you again next week.

Diana (31m 52s):
Alright, bye-Bye everyone.

Nicole (31m 55s):
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 book sellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket 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 FamilyLocket 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.