RLP 296: My Genealogical Publishing Company Library with Barry Chodak

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 296 MyGPC Library with Barry Chodak. 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. Let’s go.

Nicole (43s):
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

Diana (52s):
Hi. Nicole. how are you today?

Nicole (54s):
Really good. How, are you? I’m

Diana (56s):
Doing well. I’ve been working on writing up my research on my Pennsylvania German Johan Valentine Schultz. Don’t you love that name, Valentine? It was apparently originally ton in Germany and became Valentine in the United States, so it’s been fun to write that up and You know this was my first stab at this ancestor and what I’m discovering is that there needs to be like a full on project. This was for the 14 day mini challenge and I just wanted to Discover more about why he immigrated to Colonial Pennsylvania in the 1730s and I discovered that actually there are two Valentines that appear to show up and nobody’s exactly sure which one it is on the ship’s passenger list.

Diana (1m 43s):
And so now I want to do a study of all the associates and look at the families and just see if I can get some clarity because a lot has been written about this You know with descendants and there’s a lot of theories out there and I’d like to kind of create my own theory, but that’s gonna be more research.

Nicole (2m 1s):
Oh wow. I didn’t realize there were two men of a similar name and Valentine is such a great name. Love it.

Diana (2m 9s):
It got passed down a bit in the family too, which is fun.

Nicole (2m 13s):
Yeah, I do remember about that with the Schultz line. Great. Well our next Research Like, a Pro Webinar is March 16th with Allison Kotter using Research Like a Pro to trace an African American ancestor back through enslavement. Allison is one of our professional genealogists at Family Locket and she’ll be talking about Martin Fabro. He was born in slavery around 1838 in South Carolina and died in Georgia. His wife was Francis Collier and the family knew very little of his life before he came to Dalton, Georgia in 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.

Nicole (2m 58s):
This will be an interesting case study focusing on enslaved Americans, Georgia wills and estates, land deeds and newspapers. If you would like to join our newsletter, you can receive a weekly email from us every Monday with any coupons and new blog posts and podcast episodes that we’ve put out.

Diana (3m 19s):
Well today we are excited to have a guest with us. We have Barry Chodak here from genealogical.com and we are going to be talking about a new feature from Genealogical called the MyGPC Library. So hello Barry.

Barry Chodak (3m 36s):
Well hi.

Diana (3m 37s):
So great to have you here. I have to tell a little bit about how we met. So last year at the National Genealogical Society Conference in Richmond, Virginia, Barry and I were both invited to a breakfast by family search and walking out of the hotel, walking across the street together, we started chatting and discovered that You know, of course we both love genealogy and Barry told me all about the MyGPC Library and later in the expo hall demonstrated it. And back then I knew that we needed to have him on the podcast and tell our listeners about this wonderful resource.

Diana (4m 17s):
So we are going to talk all about that today. But first Barry, I would love to have you tell us a little bit about Genealogical Publishing, how that got started, your involvement with that. And let’s just start with that.

Barry Chodak (4m 32s):
Well, if I go back to the origins, when my dad proposed to my mom, she said, I won’t marry you until you have a real job. So he opened a bookstore, he always loved books, he was a a book scout. He would find old books and knew he was looking for a particular rare book. And that’s really where the origins of the company, he noticed that people were interested in books with a lot of names and was curious enough to say, oh, genealogy. So in 1952 when Offset Lithography became an acceptable way to duplicate a book, dad started reprinting some of the Evergreen Titles in Genealogy and that was the start of the company.

Diana (5m 19s):
That is amazing. So it’s been around for 70 years plus or minus a few. And I know our listeners have probably seen that in many books that you have ordered that title Genealogical Publishing. So it’s so fun to hear the origins, but what we’re really excited about now is this new GPC library. So tell us a little bit about that.

Barry Chodak (5m 46s):
Well, over the years when the internet came along, the book kind of lost its prominence and we knew we needed to find some way of staying viable in a digital world. And so Kelly, it’s been about 10, 12 years now, we started working to convert some of our best books to eBooks and offering them on the site. But as the amount of new material got smaller and smaller, You know we’re not offered nearly the the number of books that we, that we used to be offered back in the seventies, eighties and even the nineties.

Barry Chodak (6m 27s):
I took a look and went, if we’re gonna be able to continue, we’re gonna need to have the company have, shall we say, putting all the books together in a collection would be more valuable than the individual titles themselves. ’cause the Titles cover You know so many different areas geographically by time period by subject So. I went looking for a platform and the the first platform I found just didn’t have the tools that I wanted. I kept looking and looking and through a You know, kind of a, a lucky happenstance came upon the Vital Source platform called Bookshelf.

Barry Chodak (7m 7s):
Bookshelf is the reading platform with great tools for, for searching, for bookmarking note taking, highlighting. It even has a a, a way of grabbing a citation. You know for a book, if you’re a busy person, you can use the read aloud feature like that and it has an an app that you can download to a laptop, an iPad or a phone and then access all the books online, download what you want to use onto the Bookshelf app and go to the beach or to the mountain wherever you are like that and have access to the book, work with them.

Barry Chodak (7m 52s):
And then when you reconnect to the internet, all of the work that you’ve done is synced to your books so that you never lose your notes. Even if you stop subscribing, if you stop subscribing for whether it’s a month or a couple of years when you come back, your notes will still be there. Of course you can download them before you end your subscription. You can always do copy and paste from the pages and You know I find it to be a terrific app. It even adds a lot of great protection for our authors, which today makes a big difference. You know too many occasions people will say, oh it’s really free, let me just share it or give people access or a copy and like that not realizing that what it does is discourage authors and publishers these days.

Barry Chodak (8m 47s):
So it’s a great way of protecting the authors and making a great tool available for people.

Diana (8m 54s):
Hmm. Well as an author I love that, that you are trying to protect authors because we put a lot of work into the books that we come up with. So just for our listeners, I’ll just explain a little bit about what the website says. This says that MyGPC Library has 800 at the best titles in genealogy and family history, which is amazing and I love that you have got the subscription set up so that someone could have it just for three months. Do a lot of in-depth research like you said and put their notes in there. You know, we would always recommend of course that you use your research log You know capture the information you need, but then if someone wanted to do six months they could or a year You know so many different options and with so many books out there, this just sounds like a wonderful tool to get you into some of these really specific titles.

Diana (9m 50s):
And we will talk a little bit later about some of the books that we found that we’re interested in browsing through this. So we’re excited to have this new resource.

Nicole (10m 2s):
Yes we are. This has been really fun and Thank, you Barry for letting us have a little trial so we could talk about it on the podcast. One book that I know, you’re all wondering is it in there? Is Elizabeth Scho Mills Evidence Explained? And yes, the answer is you can view Evidence explained the third edition there in MyGPC Library and the pages look just like they do in the the printed book, which is nice if that’s what you’re used to seeing and I love that you can access that from your phone or your tablet if you have downloaded the app and you can have it with you wherever you go and you can have your bookmarks in your notes helping you make citations on the fly wherever you are. What a great resource.

Barry Chodak (10m 43s):
Now Nicole, we talked before the podcast started, you asked me if the fourth edition would be available on the subscription and what I said was not right away, it will be available at some point in time. First in a collection that will feature Elizabeth Mills books and then later we’ll add it to the full subscription. But for now the third edition is available. It’s got great material. This is a a 2017 edition You know that’s there as well as both of her professional genealogy titles and some other titles. We have roughly 144 of our how to books and guidebooks. This is a collection that’s only available from us.

Barry Chodak (11m 26s):
Almost all of those books are under copyright. So you either either purchase the books or get ahold of of the subscription so that you have those books available whenever you are doing, doing your research. When, we talked earlier, you mentioned a a county in Tennessee and I said, oh, while you’re working you can always go to the map guide and find out the history of the county. That’s just one example of how the How to books and guidebooks will support you when you’re working with roughly 650 other books, which are books focused on Colonial America up to about the Civil War.

Barry Chodak (12m 8s):
If you are looking for a revolutionary Ancestor You know that collection is some of the best books you will find anywhere that’ll give, give people an idea of of what’s there and what’s available in the Subscription. And you can always go to our website genealogical.com, you can click on the subscriptions tab and it will tell you a little bit about how the subscriptions work. And you can also click on the eBooks tab and you can see, oh do you have any books of interest to me? ’cause the eBooks tab will let you search almost all of the Titles at least find almost all the Titles that are in the Subscription.

Barry Chodak (12m 49s):
There are only a couple of titles that are not listed on the website ’cause we’re not making them available yet as individual volumes. But you can search titles, you can search by author by title, you can search by region, you can search by time period or by subject. And those filters work together. So you can say, oh do you have books on Massachusetts in the Colonial time period or the revolutionary period? And get a pretty good idea before you purchase a subscription. And then the other side is when you have the subscription you can find books that you want to have as print books. That’s the, that’s the other part.

Barry Chodak (13m 29s):
So You know, have fun searching, find some books that you want and, and instead of buying this book or that book and kinda like buying a pig in the poke, you’ll already know that that book is exactly what you want. So we priced it in such a way that we want lots of people to use the subscription, whether it’s for three months and then come back later or whether it’s year by year, it’s gonna just up to, up to you the purchaser.

Nicole (13m 56s):
That’s so great. One feature that really stood out to me was the read aloud option and as somebody who loves listening to audio books and I do feel pressed for time sometimes it is a really nice option to be able to read a book through having someone read it to me. So Thank you for adding that feature. And I think that will be really nice to be able to read some of these how to books without having to sit down and look at the page myself while I’m doing dishes or whatever I’m working on. I can still gain the value from it.

Barry Chodak (14m 29s):
Exactly. One of our affiliates, when I first sent him a a, a sample You know code to, to log into the subscription comes back and that was exactly what he was most interested in. He said, this is great. He says, I’m visually impaired, I can enlarge the type, but I also can have a a book read to me and and you can read it using the app from any platform so you can listen from your car from a train or a plane like that. So thanks for pointing that out.

Nicole (14m 60s):
Well let’s talk a little bit more about some of the books that are available in MyGPC Library that are more focused on searching records for ancestors. So of course we know that with the internet ancestry and family search have these big collections full of millions of records. So can you tell us a little bit about what these books in MyGPC Library offer that we cannot get from the big data websites?

Barry Chodak (15m 27s):
The, the one thing that I’ve already pointed out that are, that’s not available in the big sites is the guidebooks, the guidebooks and how to books. More than 96 or 97% of those are books written by our authors, written by the authorities. And that’s something that you can only find from GPC. The other part really has to do with the difference between using a book and using a search engine just to find data. ’cause from the book you’re getting something something more, you’re getting a point of view of the of the author and not just a number and a date.

Barry Chodak (16m 10s):
And you’ll find things related by using the book. ’cause on the pages you’ll find other people, other places and other events. It’s the way that you use it as a book that is different from what you get online. And part of the reason why the book has been so successful over centuries and centuries,

Nicole (16m 31s):
I love that

Barry Chodak (16m 32s):
Some of the material, even some of our books are available on the various websites ’cause they’re books that are in public domain. But a lot of the books, probably about 60% or so of the books on the site are ones that you won’t find anywhere else. And there and there’s some great books, some great books on Virginia, some great books on New England and the like. And then when it comes to Irish or Scottish material or the Royal and Noble material, you just aren’t gonna find those on on the major sites ’cause they’re not the, not the biggest areas of interest.

Nicole (17m 13s):
Well one thing that stood out to me that you just said is that when you access material like this through a book, you do it differently than you do when you’re searching a website. And I’ve found that to be very true and especially the part about finding other events and other people that were really possibly in the community of our ancestor and learning about them at the same time. And that can be so valuable, especially for our challenging research questions that require us to do fan club research. And I’ll talk a little later in the episode about one of the books I searched and how I recognized a lot of names from the community of my ancestor. But I think that’s really important.

Diana (17m 51s):
Yeah, I agree it with a book you can see the context of the record so much better. And when I am looking at something online, say on Ancestry or Family Search, I always want to go figure out more. And sometimes you just can look at the book that’s digitized if it is digitized and sometimes you can’t. So having the full book is just amazing. So Barry, I’d love to have you tell us a little bit more about how the new ebook library works. We’ve talked a little bit about the tools such as being able to listen to audio and then you also mentioned notes. But maybe just give us a rundown of some of the special tools there and how someone that is just brand new would go about making the best use of it.

Barry Chodak (18m 37s):
Well, my favorite way of of pointing to the advantages of what the Bookshelf platform and MyGPC library can do has to do with the searching, particularly surname searching. So you can put in a a surname. Now you were looking for Schultz, one of your family names and I kind of took a co a couple minutes last week and went, oh look at this. There’s so many different spellings. You know you’ve got the C, the CH, the S, the Z, how do I find them? Well you’d have trouble if you were, if you’re just doing a, a random search. But you can search by different variations of the spelling and you don’t have to be specific.

Barry Chodak (19m 22s):
You can put in a few letters and it will pull up and show you all of the books in which those letters appear in that order. Now sometimes it’s kind of amusing, like I put in DNA in in the search and I see a a Spanish handwriting book and I’m going, what’s that got to do with DNA? Well that was part of a name, it was something Dena, blah blah blah. And I went, oh that’s amusing, but I eliminated that one right away. So, so if it’s something that doesn’t fit whether it’s a DNA or a Schultz, you can eliminate that very quickly and narrow down the the books that will apply and you can do it so easily.

Barry Chodak (20m 3s):
Once the list of titles appears of books that, that have a hit on that name, you can click on ’em one at a time and over an aside panel it will show you the instances of that word or words in the book and you can quickly look and say, no, it doesn’t apply. Or maybe it does. And then click and go, right, continue on your list. Click, click, click book by book by book. And sometimes you’ll have a many, many books to look at and then you can begin to add You know limiters. You could add a geographical limiter and you could say and Stansberry and it will only show you books in which both the word Marilyn and Stansberry appear.

Barry Chodak (20m 45s):
Or you can use the surname and a given name or a couple of given names to say, oh, I know that there’s an Elizabeth Stansberry that’s related to a Jemima Stansberry. So if I put in Stansberry Elizabeth Jemima, I’ll only see books where both are mentioned and I’ll have a much better chance of finding people who are of the same family. So the search and the search is a lot of fun. It will bring up books that are, you don’t expect to see. One of the people who works with us was looking for her Virginia ancestors and she kept seeing Tennessee books. So she clicked on the Tennessee book to see what it was and You know what she found.

Barry Chodak (21m 26s):
She discovered the children moved. I found that a little amusing. Anyway, I like that. So,

Diana (21m 34s):
Oh yeah, people from Virginia never moved. Right? We laugh because all of our Ancestors in Virginia moved west or south.

Barry Chodak (21m 43s):
That’s awesome. Yeah, sooner or later. So the search tools are, are what I find to be really exciting and a great addition because partly for the surprises and partly because when you’re searching, when you put in a search term that term, you’re searching all of the books in five GPC library at one time. So it takes a little time for the search engine, but a lot less than it would for you to go book by book. And it will look for Schultz in all 800 titles. They’re roughly 857 volumes or so currently in that library. And that search engine is going through every one of those books.

Diana (22m 26s):
That’s so fun because I just did that search again and one of the first ones that I know exactly what the record is because it’s my latest research project is this names of foreigners who took the oath of allegiance. And this is one where my immigrant ancestor that we talked about at the beginning, Valentine Schultz is in that or a Valentine Schultz, not really sure for You know exactly which one it is. But that’s so fun and I see other titles such as Pennsylvania German Pioneers. But here’s a fun one more Psychic Roots, further Adventures in Serendipity and Intuition in Genealogy So I mean. There’s some things here that look kind of fascinating for me to explore.

Nicole (23m 9s):
I have to laugh because I actually own two copies of Psychic Roots. I’m fascinated by those stories of people having serendipity in their genealogy research.

Barry Chodak (23m 19s):
Yes. Well what you discovered is Hank Jones did more than Shrink the Kids that for those, for those of you who are listening, Hank Jones is the author of the psychic Roots books.

Nicole (23m 31s):
That such a fun collection of stories. All righty. Well I just have been playing around with the site as we’ve been talking and the search feature, it really is nice. I like how the results appear at the top in a slider with You know Maryland marriages, 14 Results Settlers of Mari Maryland. One result runaway convicts Six results. And when you click on that little box, it opens up the sidebar and shows you the context of the surname. You searched for So I searched for Hollingsworth on my dad’s side and in the runaway Servants convicts and apprentices book, I can see that there’s a Charles Hollingsworth and it’s in New Jersey and the year is 1776.

Nicole (24m 14s):
So it gives you a little context to know do you really wanna click on that one? Is that going to be relevant to your family? It gives you some of the helpful information to quickly make that determination. So it’s a really great site.

Barry Chodak (24m 27s):
Yeah, you get, you get the benefit of both the digital side and the, and the book side. You get to search and and Discover the books. And then you get to open the book and work with a book page through it if you like. Look at the table of contents, use the read aloud for the introduction. ’cause with a lot of the books, even some of the books that were public domain books, we’ve added introductory material to You know to kind of guide you through the use of the book. So You know we see it as a a great combination.

Nicole (25m 1s):
Yes, it’s definitely a resource that you can use to advance your, your research, especially Colonial Ancestry. There are so many books from that early time period where things get a little more challenging and you really do need all the help you can get. I like when you click on one of the books from your search results that on the left side you have a panel with all of the chapters and, and you can click on the chapters there and then in the middle you have the page that you’re reading and then on the right it still keeps your search results in case you wanna go to one of the other search results from the book. Then at the bottom you have the slider for where you are within the book progress and the page number and the total number of pages and a little arrow to page through the book. So it really is a very fancy tool.

Barry Chodak (25m 46s):
I’m not sure which screen you’re looking at, but usually in the upper left you’ll see three little dots. If you click on those, it gives you the option to choose a citation and save the citation for the book that you’re looking at. It also gives you the option to save the page within the subscription platform for that book. So you can save the URL of that specific page, put that in your notes so when you ever come back to the book, you don’t have to go, well now where was I? Do I need to search again for Valentine Schultz whatnot. You go, here’s the citation of Ex of the page that I found that has the information that I want.

Nicole (26m 28s):
Yes. Okay, thanks for pointing that out. So yeah, I do see the three dot options for the book in that left panel next to the title of the book for making a citation, copying the page URL and then reading offline. Those are three great options. I didn’t notice that. Thank you Barry. You’re welcome. Well let’s take a minute and have a word from our sponsors newspapers.com. Dive into the newspapers where your family’s history unfolds as you search nearly a billion pages in seconds. newspapers.com offers an unparalleled treasure trove of historical newspapers providing a window into the past with papers from the 17th Century to today.

Nicole (27m 8s):
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Diana (27m 42s):
Well let’s talk about some specific books because there are so many and You know with 800, we obviously can’t talk about all of those but we, we each picked out some of our favorites and one that I was drawn to right away was Roberta Estes book DNA for Native American genealogy. And I own the paper copy of that book and have read it thoroughly. But I love that you have it here in the library for anyone that just wants to check it out And You know you have this story that you’ve got the Cherokee Princess in your ancestry and you wanna see if that’s true. Does DNA show that? And Roberta gives such a great overview of how to use mitochondrial DNA and YDNA and what to expect in your ethnicity estimates.

Diana (28m 31s):
So it was really fun to see that book and I just love the way you see the book. Like when you were mentioning you want it to look like the paper copy and it does. I love that it has all the color and the headings and the images and You know if you have a struggle with your eyes and you really need things to be larger, make it easier to read. This is just amazing. So, so fun. That’s one that I was really excited to see as part of the library.

Nicole (29m 4s):
Yay. I love that book and I’m excited to review it again in MyGPC because then you can highlight things and save your highlights and you can come back to it. It’ll be really nice.

Diana (29m 16s):
I agree. And then I found another one that was titled The Colonial Families of the Southern States of America. And I’ve been You know, kind of fascinated with the Colonial part of my ancestry. And I noticed that when I went into this book, I saw There was a whole chapter on the Wyatts of Virginia. Hmm. Which is very interesting to us Nicole because we have our ancestor Richard Wyatt Royston and we really do not know who his mother is. This was from Gloucester County and it’s severely burned. We don’t have all the good things that we normally would have for researching in the 17 hundreds.

Diana (29m 56s):
We don’t have the marriages or probate anything to connect families, but we have those names. And so just looking through the Wyatts of Virginia, I love looking at all the different families and thinking about perhaps one of these women could have been the mother of our Richard Wyatt Royston. So wow, it’s fun and it’s just full of names and dates and places. So these are really wonderful sources to start with on your colonial research You know you don’t need to rewrite anything, just go to what’s already published and then use that to go forward. So I think that’s a real value of this library being able to access these types of books

Barry Chodak (30m 41s):
In the library. According to my notes, 453 of the books are focused on the colonial period. And when you mention Virginia, there are 53 titles that are Virginia books, specifically revolutionary period 354. So You know if you’re looking for a revolutionary ancestor, you got a pretty good chance of finding that person somewhere in the MyGPC library collection.

Diana (31m 9s):
Yeah, I absolutely agree.

Nicole (31m 12s):
One thing that I thought of about this is that when you’re starting a research project for a colonial ancestor, it’s so wise to review the published information on that person or that family or that time period because so often there are many derivatives created from the original records and and many authored works that can help guide us. So it’s really important to do a literature survey to really know what’s been printed, what’s been published already on the topic before we go start looking in the original records again because we need to see You know what people have already done, what they, how they’ve interpreted it. And we can either build on that work or we can You know.

Nicole (31m 52s):
Sometimes we don’t agree with that and so we can kind of look at things in a new way.

Barry Chodak (31m 57s):
No, I love what you, what you just added ’cause so many of these books were written by contemporaries of the person that you’re looking for. So you get a very different point of view when the material and the stories are written by contemporaries of of the people.

Nicole (32m 16s):
So true. Well Mary, did you wanna highlight a specific book? If not, we can go on to mine ’cause I have about 10 I wanna highlight,

Barry Chodak (32m 27s):
Why don’t you go on to to your list and I will comment as I say, like you’d mentioned Roberta, Roberta es When, we have a new book coming out shortly on DNA from Roberta. That’s as much as I’ll give away at this at this point. Ooh, right

Nicole (32m 43s):
Tantalizing.

Barry Chodak (32m 44s):
But it’s possible if, if I get the file early enough that the ebook may be available for Roots tech.

Nicole (32m 51s):
Well that would be wonderful. I love Roberta. Her book on Native American DNA is so wonderful and I read everything that she writes. So I. Can’t wait to find out what the topic is. Alright, well some of the books that I picked out to talk about were, first of all professional genealogy by Elizabeth SCH Mills. And we mentioned this briefly, but this is such an important work for anyone following our podcast who wants to Research Like a Pro. This is the manual for anyone wanting to become a professional genealogist. And there are two additions. The first from 2001 was subtitled, a manual for researchers, writers, editors, lecturers and librarians.

Nicole (33m 39s):
And that first edition is the one that I studied in pro gen. Now come to think of it, I think I did focus on the 2017, the second edition, but we had to go back to the 2001 edition for the chapter on transcriptions and abstracts. So both of them are just wonderful because they’re not the same. They, each chapter is written by a new person in the second edition and there’s new chapters in the second edition. So you really need both and both are available in the MyGPC library. And so this is a wonderful place to be able to access the professional genealogy manuals by Elizabeth Schills. And the subtitle of the second edition from 2017 is Preparation Practice and Standards So I.

Nicole (34m 21s):
Think you’ll find that both of these are just invaluable.

Diana (34m 26s):
Yeah, I agree with that. And You know they are big books and so if you are limited in space on your bookshelf as some of us are, as we continue to add books to our physical collection, it might be nice to be able to access those through the the MyGPC library and save yourself some space and also just be able to really quickly search for things using the search engine there. So I heartily agree. Those are both books that as professionals or aspiring professionals we need to have access to.

Nicole (35m 0s):
Another one that I had on my list that many of you’ll recognize is Ancestral Trails, the Complete Guide to British genealogy and Family History by Mark d Herber. And from what I have learned, this is the book for British genealogy. Is that right?

Diana (35m 20s):
Yes. And I have that physical copy too on my shelf.

Nicole (35m 24s):
So do I. So that one shows up in the MyGPC library and you can learn everything you want to know about researching in the British Isles and, and there’s a lot of things that are different about, about researching there. So it’s important to study and understand that. And this book is actually a winner of the Library Association’s outstanding reference work. So it received that medal.

Diana (35m 52s):
I really love how these books show up and You know we get to see the table of contents page but then When, we click on a chapter, it takes us directly to that chapter in on the website. And I find that so helpful that we don’t have to scroll through and try to find it. We can get directly to it. And I also love the feature to search within. So just thinking about ancestral trails and this whole idea of British genealogy, it is a big detailed book. So let’s say you specifically just want to learn about probate, say You know you can put that in your search bar and then you can get all the instances within the book So I love that I mean.

Diana (36m 36s):
There’s just so many great features to being able to read a book like this on this type of a platform.

Barry Chodak (36m 43s):
I am thrilled to just listen to what you’re saying ’cause it’s exactly what I wanted to produce when I put the books together into a library offering and I said this is what we need. We need an easy way to, to search the books, to find the books, to search within the books and then to have the book there You know for all that it offers. So Thank you for for the compliments.

Nicole (37m 11s):
Well we have to Thank you because you shared it with us. So speaking of ancestral trails and you looked up probate mom, I looked up illegitimacy because that’s one of the things I’ve studied in our career line. William career married Sarah Jane Miller, who was born as an illegitimate child in Lincoln Share England in 1841. And she’s one of the ancestors I studied a lot. And there are several parts of ancestral trails that have discussions about illegitimacy and there’s a a section about it in the parish registers, there’s some bibliography entries. So there’s a lot to be found that you cannot really find as easily when you have the physical book because even though you look in the index, the index doesn’t always include every single instance of the word, whereas the search function does.

Nicole (38m 0s):
So this is just pretty cool.

Diana (38m 4s):
I agree. And the search function puts it in context of the paragraph or the sentence so you get a little bit of a hint about what it’s about. You know So I love that too. So yeah, this is, this is fun. We’re having fun obviously listeners as we are going through this and discovering things about searching books.

Nicole (38m 24s):
Well I better get on with my favorite books because I have three more.

Diana (38m 29s):
I think you had some fun.

Nicole (38m 31s):
Okay, well here’s my next one. Tennessee Cousins, a History of Tennessee People by Wirth s Ray. There are sections in this book for each county. And of course I went to my brick Wall county, Hawkins County Tennessee, where I’ve been searching for the parents of John Robert Dyer, who was born in 1810 probably in Hawkins County. Tennessee records conflict about where he was born. But some say that he was born there in that county and that’s where he lived his whole life, at least the records I have from 1830 forward, well I haven’t found too many candidates for his father that lived in Hawkins County just because of record loss. I have found that There was a store that had records at the Tennessee archives and There was an Ignatius Dyer, haven’t really been able to identify him.

Nicole (39m 16s):
But then in the book, Tennessee Cousins in MyGPC Library, I read through the whole Hawkins County section and found two more candidates for a parent of John Robert Dyer. Wow. And the thing that really stood out to me is that the author had some background information on the first newspaper that was published there in Hawkins County. And the county seat is Rogersville in Hawkins County. And in Rogersville There was a newspaper published called the Knoxville Gazette starting in the early 1790s. And that’s kind of funny. And the author talks about the fact that it is weird that they had a, a newspaper called the Knoxville Gazette published in Rogersville.

Nicole (39m 55s):
Eventually it was moved to Knoxville, but it started in Rogersville. And in one of those early issues of the Knoxville Gazette on June 30th, 1792, There was an article about the taxpayers in Rogersville. And it says at the meeting of a committee appointed by the Worshipful Court of Hawkins County at the June term to examine the stray Master’s books, we do find that the following persons are indebted to the county for the following sums. And then one of the people listed was a Francis Dyer. So that person, whether it be a male or a female, is a candidate for either a parent or grandparent of John Robert Dyer.

Nicole (40m 37s):
Maybe unrelated Dyer is a common name, but it’s something, it’s a lead to follow. The other thing I found was a list of military officers in Hawkins County in 1794. And this was a man named Henry Dyer listed as an ensin. So that was exciting to find another Dyer possible possible research subject of a future project.

Diana (40m 57s):
Wow, that’s so exciting and so fabulous and you wouldn’t have easily found them at this book.

Nicole (41m 3s):
Well, I haven’t found him yet and I’ve been working on this research problem for years. The other thing I found is that as I read through the whole section on Hawkins County in the Tennessee Cousins book, is that I recognized many of the names I’ve identified as fan club associates, people who might be related to John Robert Dyer in some way associated with him. Some of the surnames are Mitchell and Armstrong. John Robert Dyer named one of his sons, Richard Fein Dyer. And I’ve always wondered where does that, that middle name come from Fain FAIN. And that’s always been a clue to me. Well, in the chapter on Hawkins County and Tennessee Cousins, it mentions early burials at the Rogersville Cemetery and including one called Ruth Fain Powell.

Nicole (41m 48s):
And that’s just interesting to me that this Fain surname is used among some of the earlier settlers of Hawkins County. And just a clue that I need to keep digging on that Fein surname and the origins within the county and see where it comes from. Wow,

Diana (42m 3s):
That is amazing.

Nicole (42m 5s):
Another one I liked was the 2,400 Tennessee pensioners by Zilla Armstrong Revolution and War of 1812. So if you have questions about your military ancestors, you can search that I searched for Dyer and I found my friend Baldy Dyer, who I’ve talked about on the podcast before. And it has the same information that I found in his pension information for the war of 1812. But it lists his dates of service in 1814 and his heirs Willie James William, David Susanna Simpson, and Mary Dyer. So that was fun. And my last two books are about South Carolina. This one is the original index book showing the revolutionary claims filed in South Carolina by Janie Revel.

Nicole (42m 48s):
And I wanted to learn more about the background of this book because when I looked inside it was just, it was basically an index. And when I went to the South Carolina archives, which was mentioned in the Index Books forward, it talks about how the archives have some of these documents. Well at the South Carolina archives website, they had a PDF document about their Revolutionary War collections. And it talks about this index and it says the general index and state of the returns and entry books for South Carolina Revolutionary War claims lists only the names of the claimants and the number of the list called a return with which the auditor and Accountant General forwarded the audited account to a legislative committee.

Nicole (43m 30s):
The back of the volume also contains a list of officers and men on the frigid South Carolina. The numbered returns do not survive. A published transcription of the volume by Janie Revel is shelved with the original record. So this is a transcription of the original index. And So I looked in this for Welch because I have done a lot of research on George Welch trying to find his parents. And one of the candidates for the parent is William Welch and William is listed in the index. I had seen that he was possibly a Revolutionary War soldier. Not too much is known about him and he’s still a candidate for George’s father.

Nicole (44m 11s):
But George isn’t listed as one of his heirs anywhere. Some people think Nicholas Welsh was the father of George Welch. But this is giving me a clue that there are possibly some more records at the South Carolina archives about his Revolutionary War service because in that same finding Aid I was reading it mentions that there are two other series of records from the records of South Carolina Auditor and Accountant General at the archives. The schedule of accounts passed from 1778 to 1780 and accounts in receipt for balance of cash in 1780. So who knows what’s there, but even though all of the originals don’t remain, now I have a clue that I can go follow up on at the archives.

Diana (44m 52s):
Well, and that’s the real value of these types of records, these derivative types because you need something to give you a clue. You know, otherwise it’s a needle in a haystack. But now You know that you can perhaps even contact the archives and have them pull that record for you. Or we could just go in person. I was there last summer and I wish I would’ve known to look for that. But there’s always so much to do

Nicole (45m 15s):
At an archive. Right. Well that’s such a good point that if we ever are going to an archive, we should do a literature survey and see You know what these authors have done. They’ve done such a great service to go and create these index books and these transcriptions of the originals to help us as binding aids. Well my last book that I had picked out was by Brent Holcomb. We talked about him in a previous podcast because he made a, a lot of books about South Carolina research that have been helpful to me. And this one I wanted to look at is called South Carolina Naturalizations from 1783 to 1850. And in our previous podcast series on Naturalization records, we talked about You know having to go to the court and submit your first papers and things.

Nicole (45m 59s):
And we talked more about Naturalization in the later years. And this is in the earlier years, So I was very curious when I saw this title. And So I went to the chapter on Pendleton District, which became Anderson district in 1826. And just read through all of the 30 or so naturalizations that have been extracted from the court records. And You know what’s funny is that, where do you think most of them were from? 23 were from Ireland and then there were five from England and they actually were listed as Great Britain. So that was so fun to think about You know, we’ve hypothesized in the past that our Welch and Keaton and Harris ancestors You know were Scotch Irish and came from possibly Ireland or Scotland and, and thinking about that, how they landed in North Carolina and South Carolina.

Nicole (46m 51s):
And it was fun to see that that really was where a lot of Irish people went in the early, in 18 hundreds.

Diana (46m 59s):
Yeah, those patterns of immigration are important for us in trying to put our people in place because as we’ve learned and talked about, there just were not a lot of great records. Everybody was already in the British Empire who was coming over and so they didn’t really care that much about them. So I find that very interesting that the ones from Ireland, this group of 23 people had to seek Naturalization. So apparently they weren’t considered from the same country as England because,

Nicole (47m 26s):
Well this was after the United States had separated from Great Britain. So it was 1783 to 1850. So that’s why you’re seeing the naturalizations there.

Diana (47m 36s):
Interesting.

Nicole (47m 38s):
Well I’m sure I could go on and on about different books in MyGPC Library, but I’ll stop there because we are getting to the end of our time allotted for recording this. But we just have to say Thank, you Barry for coming on our podcast and sharing this wonderful subscription with us.

Barry Chodak (47m 55s):
Well, Nicole and Diana Thank you for having me. I love listening to your story ’cause it illustrates the variety of titles and that there’s, there’s something there for almost everyone. So it’s been a delight Thank you for having me and I will look forward to, to probably listening to the podcast when it’s actually released.

Nicole (48m 18s):
Yes, it’ll be fun. Well Thank you everyone for listening.

Diana (48m 23s):
Have a great week everyone, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Nicole (48m 26s):
Bye-Bye bye.

Barry Chodak (48m 27s):
Bye-Bye

Nicole (48m 28s):
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 books 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.