RLP 346: The Mystery of Claude “Dock” Harris’ Nickname

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 346, The Mystery of Claude “Dock” Harris’ Nickname. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (51s):
I’m doing great and I’m excited to talk about our topic today. How about you?

Diana (55s):
I am doing well and I’m excited to talk about it also. It’s so fun to talk about our research and our discoveries and share those with our listeners. So thanks everyone for listening to us and letting us share. It’s fun.

Nicole (1m 9s):
Well, What have you been working on?

Diana (1m 11s):
Well, as you know, we’ve started our new DNA study group. Last year I did my Cline project really working with the DNA of Clemsy Cline trying to solidify my hypothesis that John C. Cline was her father and I was able to do that. But in the course of that I had this mystery match and I will just call her Mary to privatize her name and I could never figure out how Mary connected and she shared quite a bit of DNA with me and my other two cousins that I am using their DNA and it just bothered me that I could never figure out who she was. You know, I used all my tricks. I could not figure her out.

Diana (1m 50s):
Well, as I returned to this project, and this time I am using the same batch of DNA pretty much, but working on Clemsy Cline’s husband’s line, the Weatherfords. And so I, I returned to this match and with Pro Tools I thought, oh, maybe I can get a clue finally about who this woman is who was married. So I did the sorting so that I would see Mary’s closest matches first and right away there was a new match there. It wasn’t like something really obvious like a sister or a child, You know, sometimes we have those instances. This one was more first cousin once removed, something like that.

Diana (2m 33s):
But right away I could see on this other person’s tree, the branch of the family finally, that they came through and it was through one of Clemsy Cline’s grandsons’ line. And this was coming down through our ancestor, Isabella Weatherford, who had two husbands. And this line was through the first husband who we are not related to. So these would all be half relationships. And I was really excited to find that because those people that shared DNA with us on that line means that they’re not part of the, the Roystons. We only got DNA from the Cline-Weatherford ancestors, if that makes sense. So because their halfs, I was able to lop off some of the DNA and know specifically where it would come from.

Diana (3m 19s):
So anyway, that was exciting. But the problem was as I was working on this descendancy and filling out this tree, going down to, to really try to figure out where Mary came from, I noticed a problem with one of the descendants, and her name was Cleo. She was Cleo Carpenter and there was just a problem. She, she had married a Zin, but the records that had been attached to her on the FamilySearch Family tree and on other people’s trees on Ancestry just seemed really convoluted. Like there were two different death dates, there were three different husbands.

Diana (3m 59s):
And I started to get the feeling we had two different women here, two Cleos that married a Zin and were both born 1904 in Oklahoma, Kansas type area. So I spent a few hours separating out two women who had very similar profiles and finally was able to get the one that’s connected to us figured out. And the interesting thing was she never had any children. And so I’m guessing that’s maybe why profiles were really confused because people didn’t know anything about her. You know, she didn’t have any descendants that had stories coming down and could go in and say, oh yeah, this was what happened with her life.

Diana (4m 39s):
So I had some fun for a few hours working on Cleo.

Nicole (4m 42s):
So the Cleo we’re related to, has no descendants, but the other Cleo does?

Diana (4m 47s):
Yes.

Nicole (4m 48s):
Oh, interesting.

Diana (4m 49s):
Yeah. And the, the reason I knew for sure that she was this Cleo Zin was part of the family was because I looked at the mother’s obituary. It was Mary Clem Carpenter and her obituary said her daughter Mrs. R.E. Zin. And so there was the surname, but the R.E. didn’t match the initials and the name of the others then who, you know, the husband had been attributed to Cleo. So I just kept having these red flags like this is not adding up. So

Nicole (5m 25s):
wow, good job.

Diana (5m 27s):
I, at first I was trying to just do it the easy way, You know, looking at hints, attaching hints and, and then I thought, okay, I’ve just really got to open up AirTable and do a real research log and log all of these different things so I could see in front of me what was going on. And that’s when it started to come clear. So, you know, shout out again to research logs,

Nicole (5m 47s):
Right? You really need a spreadsheet to help separate those people of the same name. Well, since you were doing DNA research, I’m a little bit wondering where does the descendancy line come in there? ’cause you obviously have some living descendants

Diana (6m 1s):
From her brother.

Nicole (6m 3s):
Oh, okay. So

Diana (6m 4s):
Mary Clem only had two living children, two children that lived. The census says that she had six children but only two living. And we don’t know who those other four children were, but the brother Elton Jay Carpenter had children. And so all of the descendants are coming down through him. So it was also helpful to see that Cleo didn’t have children because now I know to attribute all the DNA matches that are on that line through her brother Elton and his children. So that was helpful. And I was able to see Mary in there when, once I got into Elton’s descendancy and coming down, I found, I think it was the 1950 census where she’s named and I was like, oh yay.

Diana (6m 45s):
There she is. Because it was an unusual name. It wasn’t something, you know, common like Mary. It was a more unusual name. So now I have identified my mystery match and it’s exciting to finally have that. So,

Nicole (6m 59s):
Great. So you had figured out it was on this one side of the family, you started building the tree down, you found two women that had the same name and you had to figure out which one was which and then you realized the one that’s in our family had no descendants. So then you built down her brother’s line and found the mystery match line.

Diana (7m 18s):
Exactly right. Because I thought maybe the mystery match came down through Cleo. Yeah. And I had to figure out, you know, ’cause the other Cleo has several children and, and so figuring that out, I was able to not have to worry at all about those others. Now I just know to focus on the brother’s line going down.

Nicole (7m 38s):
Great.

Diana (7m 38s):
Yeah. A little win for DNA and our research and to have figured out another person in our family.

Nicole (7m 45s):
I love that. I love how incorporating DNA evidence allows us to research these collateral lines of our family and descent lines that we haven’t ever looked at before and gives us a chance to do, you know, this type of interesting research in timeframes where there are plenty of records. You know what I mean?

Diana (8m 6s):
Right. And do you know, it really helped on this one was newspaper research and I know you’ve done a lot of that as you were working on your, your portfolio for certification and oh my goodness, the newspapers were fabulous. That’s where I found a marriage notice that, you know, there was no marriage record, but I found it in the newspapers. I found that Cleo’s first husband was a professional baseball player for this team that was there in Oklahoma. I mean, I just found so many interesting, fun things, You know, gotta love newspapers, but we also have all those great censuses that give us relationships and just a lot of things that we can work with in the 20th century.

Nicole (8m 51s):
Well neat. Well that was a fun thing to hear about. Thanks for sharing.

Diana (8m 54s):
Of course. Thanks for listening to me.

Nicole (8m 57s):
Right. We always need someone to tell our fun discoveries too.

Diana (9m 2s):
People who are not tired of hearing us talk about genealogy.

Nicole (9m 6s):
Alright, our announcements today are that our next webinar in the Research Like a Pro Webinar Series is Saturday March 15th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. We will be hearing from one of our Family Locket researchers, Heidi Mathis. She will be teaching a lecture called Irish 4th-Great-Grandparents – Dealing with Sparse Records and Mild Endogamy. And his case study examines methodologies for identifying the parents of Irish immigrants Patrick Dinan and Bridget Riordan, who settled in Ohio. Through analysis of surviving Irish Catholic parish records and DNA matches with documented ancestral links to specific Limerick townlands, multiple potential siblings emerged.

Nicole (9m 51s):
These genetic and documentary connections strengthen hypothesized parental identifications despite the characteristic challenges of pre-Famine Irish genealogical research. So we are returning to Irish records again after our January webinar, which was also Irish. And the topics include atDNA, multiple test takers, clustering, Leeds Method, recombination, segment analysis, identical by descent and identical by state segments, population segments, building family trees of matches, finding most recent common ancestors, diagramming MyHeritageDNA, and tracing Irish Americans back to Ireland.

Nicole (10m 33s):
So this will be a really great webinar. We hope that you’ll join us and if you haven’t registered yet for the Research Like a Pro series of webinars for the year 2025, then we encourage you to do so and you’ll have access to previously recorded webinars and live upcoming webinars. So every month we have another one. Alright, well the next Research Like a Pro study group, will be happening in August of 2025. That’s when it will begin. And it’ll go for the three months in the fall, August, September, and October. And so if you’d like to join us as a peer group leader, please email us or apply on our website. Also, every Monday we send out our newsletter. So sign up for our newsletter to get new information about our new blog posts and podcast episodes and any specials we have on our products.

Nicole (11m 21s):
All right, coming up soon, we are going to be at RootsTech on March 6th through 8th. So we will see you there if you’re going to be attending in person. And then we will also be at the NGS Family History Conference in May in Louisville. So we look forward to seeing you at both of those conferences. Today we have a listener spotlight from David. The title of his comment is Spanish Land Grants. So on that episode he commented, “this was really cool, I have researched our Family Land grant for the past six years. We found our family inherited land from El Senor de La Carrera Spanish Land grant beginning in 1835 and patented in Texas in 1870.

Nicole (12m 10s):
We found our ancestral grantor along with the original patent and deeds to our ranch land. Prior to my great-grandmother, I was so overwhelmed by what we found. Discovering our history is amazing.” So that was such a fun review. Thank you David for sharing your experiences with finding Spanish Land Grants in your family.

Diana (12m 32s):
Absolutely. Those are just amazing. They’re all digitized on the Texas General Land Office website and yeah, they are so fun to find if you have Texas ancestors. Well today we are going to talk about one of our ancestors and the challenge of names. So we have found, especially in the South, that our ancestors could be listed by their first name, their middle name, they could have a nickname, they could have initials. And we see all these different things in the records and sometimes it can point to two different people, but often it’s just one person. And so how do you know when you’re looking at a record if you have the right person?

Diana (13m 17s):
And the answer is that we have to use every single clue that we know about the individual. So this means tracking down all the dates and places, knowing the family members occupations, everything we can see in a record can help us to identify a person. So we’re going to talk today about my great-grandfather “Dock” Harris. And his name has been a challenge for every generation of researchers. I know when my dad, Bob, started his research in the early 1970s and this was his grandfather, and he was working so hard to get all the specific names and dates and places and he would write letters to everyone trying to get things nailed down.

Diana (14m 0s):
But he ran into a roadblock with his very own grandfather Dock. And my dad only knew him as Grandpa Harris. And the records all named him as DH or Dock H or just Dock. And it didn’t really sound like his real name, but perhaps a nickname. But even the family Bible just named him as Dock Harris. So by the time my dad was really working on this, he had passed on, Dock had died, and so had his wife and their children, Burt and Eddie had also passed away. So my dad was trying to think who else could he ask? So he wrote to his dad, Charles Leslie Shutz, and he was hoping he would know more about the situation ’cause this was his father-in-law.

Diana (14m 45s):
And my grandpa Shutz knew Dock Harris. Well, they had lived with him at different times and you know, of course, course you know your, you know your father-in-law. And he wrote back and said Mr. Harris’s first name was Claude, don’t know where he got DH. His brother was Sam, he had a half brother named Tom. The last time I saw him was in Kent County, Texas, the Bone family in Love County, Oklahoma at Marietta was his sister. So Grandpa Shutz gave some information that his name was Claude, well he, Les and Eddie. So my grandparents apparently named their first son, Claude Houston Shutz after their fathers. So Eddie’s father would’ve been, You know, Dock would’ve been Claude Harris.

Diana (15m 26s):
And then Grandpa Shutz’s father was William Houston Shutz. So that made sense. But there were no records that ever showed the name of Claude until one popped up.

Nicole (15m 39s):
Well I was just looking back at my kind of my journal, I call it my daily log of portfolio work in progress. And on December 1st I had just like received a bunch of letters that you scanned and because I’d asked you to scan some letters and I was reading the letters from Grandpa Shutz, Leslie, where he tells that his father-in-law’s name was Claude. And I was just like, what? I have never heard of this before. And so I thought, okay, well I’m going to go ahead and search Ancestry for Claude Harris.

Nicole (16m 19s):
And I think I put in that he was born in 1886 in Texas. Well in 1942, draft registration card came up with the name of Claude Harris and his exact birth date of December 29th, 1886. And it’s really neat that these draft registrations include the full birth date because there’s not a whole lot of records that do include someone’s full birthdate. And so this was really helpful. And it said his exact birthplace as well. It said Milam County, Texas. And it actually conflicted slightly with his other draft registration, which said he was born in San Saba County, Texas.

Nicole (16m 60s):
But in correlating all the records, the family moved from Milam County to San Saba for a couple years and then moved back. And so when he was little, he probably lived in both places and maybe just wasn’t exactly sure where he was born. I think he was actually born in San Saba, but they quickly moved back to Milam. So anyway, that was interesting to see Milam County, Texas to see his exact birthdate. I was still kind of doubting that this was really him because I didn’t think he was out of the mental hospital in 1942. And that was really interesting because we had hospital records and this was such an amazing set of records to analyze.

Nicole (17m 48s):
There were so many details in the hospital records and every time I reviewed them I was just so thankful that my mom ordered them. So good job mom.

Diana (17m 57s):
Yeah, that’s a story in and of itself. Just, I don’t even know how I ended up getting those. I called so many people, wrote so many emails and then one day they just appeared in the mail. So yeah, a little miracle.

Nicole (18m 8s):
That was a long time ago too.

Diana (18m 11s):
It was,

Nicole (18m 13s):
When was that like 2005 or 08 or something?

Diana (18m 17s):
No, that was actually 2015 I believe. ’cause that was one of my very first blog posts that I wrote because I had just gotten that packet and wrote all about it.

Nicole (18m 26s):
So 10 years ago you ordered those. Wow.

Diana (18m 29s):
And so I think it was before privacy had really shut down a lot of records. I don’t even know if I could get those now, but somehow I got through to somebody who said, oh, I can send those on to her. Well

Nicole (18m 45s):
One of the challenges with that file is that it was a photocopy printed. And so it wasn’t like a digital copy of the records where you could like zoom in and really see what it says. And the photocopy was pretty poor quality and it was challenging to transcribe some of these typed records. And I don’t know if the contrast was just up too high on the copier, but it made it difficult to actually decipher some of the words, some of the numbers of the years. And so I had gone through and tried to extract all the details and transcribe everything. You know, you had, mom had done a really good job of abstracting a lot of stuff, but there were just some parts that were really hard to read.

Nicole (19m 32s):
And so when I saw the the 1942 draft registration, his residence at that time was Diamond, Missouri. And this was not a location I had ever seen him living in. It was not something I’d ever seen anyone in the family living in. So what that one gave me pause, and it was dated April 25th, 1942. So I was like, well what can I do to see if you know, Dock was out of the hospital at this time and based on what I had already seen, he had gone in and out of the hospital multiple times in that first five years where he was hospitalized from 9, 1937 to 1940 he was in and out a couple times.

Nicole (20m 18s):
And then I thought from 1940 to when he died in 1957, that he was in the hospital that whole time. But when I really looked at the details on one of the pages, I found this one little section that had to do with leaving the hospital. It had a lot of words on it that were like paroled and died, just different ways that you could leave a hospital. And one of the ones that I couldn’t read very well was I think escaped and I puzzled over that word over and over. Did it say paroled or did it say escaped? And I finally decided that it must have said escaped.

Nicole (21m 2s):
And when I researched that, I found that there were instances of people leaving that were unauthorized and in various mental hospitals at the time. And so my hypothesis is that he escaped, the date that was next to the word that I couldn’t read that I think was escaped, was April 19th, 1942. So that fits with him going straight over to Diamond, Missouri and then registering for the draft April 25th. I would love to see how that unfolded. Why would someone who just left the state hospital voluntarily register for the draft?

Nicole (21m 45s):
You know, maybe he was receiving some kind of government relief or something, who knows? But he did that and the person who knew his address was a completely random person, too. It was William Taylor. So I researched that William Taylor forever because one of Dock’s sisters had married a Taylor, I think it was his half-sister and no connection. So I wondered also if it was somebody else from the hospital who he left with. And I think that one fits. I think there was a woman at the hospital who related to this Taylor family. So who knows how he got there, why he ended up there.

Nicole (22m 26s):
But he did end up going back to the hospital not too long after that. So it was just so interesting. And I also wondered if he used that different name because he was leaving under those circumstances, You know, he didn’t want people to know where he was. So he decided to go ahead and use a name that he never used on any of his other documents, Claude.

Diana (22m 46s):
Exactly, yeah. Maybe the person he was living with said, well we have to go do this, we have to go register it. It’s just so interesting. In fact, it would be fun to research that draft, You know, that 1942 draft and learn a little bit more about the situations. Did they send somebody out, scouring people? You know, were they looking for people to go register or was it completely voluntary? You just showed up. That would be another way to research the context of that.

Nicole (23m 15s):
Right? But it’s just so neat that we were able to find that one record that showed his name as Claude, because of course, like having it with the family letter. I do think that the family letter was very good evidence because it was a person who knew the individual, like it was his father-in-law and they lived together multiple times during their lives and they even named a son after him. Right.

Diana (23m 42s):
So, and the fact that they used both father’s names in Claude Houston is pretty strong evidence,

Nicole (23m 49s):
Right? And so it was just perfect to be able to find a government record created that was totally separate from the family oral history to be able to correlate and corroborate the name.

Diana (24m 4s):
Well, good job on doing that. That was fun.

Nicole (24m 6s):
That was really fun. And it was very fascinating. You know, after researching someone for so long, it’s hard to think of them as any other name than Dock. His name is Dock or DH, not Claude. But now I have, I have to change my mindset. So that was a funny thing to have to change too.

Diana (24m 24s):
Yeah.

Nicole (24m 24s):
Well let’s have a word from our sponsor. Have you ever wished you could step back in time and see the world your ancestors lived in? With Newspapers.com you can. It’s like having a time machine right at your fingertips. With a simple search, you can explore more than a billion pages of historical newspapers dating from 1690 to 2025 from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Uncover the details that bring your family story to life in birth notices, wedding announcements, or obituaries. But it’s not just about facts. It’s about experiencing the moments they lived through. Imagine reading the same headlines they saw, or finding an article about your great-grandfather’s farm. Newspapers.com doesn’t just show your history, it helps you feel it.

Nicole (25m 6s):
Start your journey today at Newspapers.com because sometimes the past isn’t just history, it’s a story waiting to be discovered. Come make infinite discoveries today on Newspapers.com. Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription.

Diana (25m 23s):
Well, when I started writing up this story, I used it for one of my 52 ancestor stories. It was all about nicknames. And I thought, oh, this would be fun to get this down in a little blog post. I decided I wanted to do a little research on this whole idea of Dock being a Nickname. And we really didn’t have any other clues from records or family stories. So I decided to turn to AI and I prompted ChatGPT with what can you tell me about the nickname of Dock in the 1880s in Texas? And I got so many interesting responses from ChatGPT. One of them said the nickname Dock was relatively common in Texas during the 1880s, often used as an informal or affectionate name for men.

Diana (26m 7s):
While its origins are not entirely clear, several plausible explanations exist. It could be derived from Doctor, the name nickname doc was frequently short for Doctor. This could have referred to someone who was an actual physician or someone known for treating ailments even without formal medical training. It was also a playful or honorary nickname given to people with an knack for fixing things or solving problems. It could be a family nickname. In many cases, Doc was a shortened form of names like Dawson or Devereaux, or even a nickname unrelated to the person’s formal name. Southern families were known for bestowing, affectionate, or unique nicknames that often stuck into adulthood.

Diana (26m 47s):
Or it could have a cultural context. In 1880s, Texas informal nicknames were prevalent and were a sign of community and familiarity. Doc could have been used to signify respect or comradery, especially in frontier areas where social ties were strong. And finally, occupational connection. In some cases, nicknames like Doc might’ve been associated with an individual’s trade, though this would be less common in landlocked Texas compared to port towns. And then ChatGPT had a final thought to better understand a specific individual’s nickname. Local records such as census documents, obituaries, personal letters or community histories might reveal the origin or context of its use. So I thought that was really interesting. It gave me so many different ideas about how this name nickname perhaps came into being for Doc.

Nicole (27m 33s):
Right? One that really stood out to me, there was the affectionate nicknames that stick to adulthood and how common that is for southern families. And we even know, like one of my cousins has a nickname like that that’s totally unrelated to his, you know, real name.

Diana (27m 50s):
Yeah

Nicole (27m 50s):
Like a weird name he got when he was a baby and then it just stuck.

Diana (27m 56s):
Exactly. Exactly. I thought it was kind of fun too. That could be a playful or honorary nickname for people with a knack for fixing things or solving problems. You know, it makes you wonder if as as a young kid, he had a knack for something. So yeah. And fun to think about

Nicole (28m 12s):
And honorary, right? Like he wasn’t actually a doctor or, but they just kind of jokingly call him that.

Diana (28m 23s):
Right, right.

Nicole (28m 23s):
Well it’s a good idea to ask multiple AI models the same question, to just get some different ideas and see what you can get. So Mom, you also asked Claude AI, which we love Claude. Claude is such a good writer and it can do a lot with writing. Well, when asking about this Nickname in Texas in the 1880s, Claude said the use of doc as a Nickname emerged from several distinct cultural practices. The primary usage came from the southern tradition of bestowing honorific nicknames where doc derived from doctor, much like how judge or colonel were used as nicknames, even for those who hadn’t earned those titles formally, this practice reflected the high social status accorded to medical professionals in 19th century Texas society in Texas frontier communities in the 1880s.

Nicole (29m 16s):
The Nickname also sometimes indicated a person who, while not formally trained, served as a community healer or medical practitioner. This was especially common in rural areas where access to qualified physicians was limited. When researching family histories from this period of finding someone, nicknamed doc might suggest they play this informal medical role in their community. The geographic distribution of the Nickname shows interesting patterns across Texas. It appeared more frequently in East Texas counties where southern naming traditions were strongest compared to West Texas or the border regions. This distribution aligns with settlement patterns of immigrants from other southern states, particularly Tennessee and Georgia, where the Nickname was also common.

Nicole (29m 56s):
So that was fun. And in my research I never found anything suggesting that Dock might have played an informal medical role in his community. But I did find that he was affectionate, soft spoken and kind. And when his daughter, Eddie, was married to Charles Leslie Shutz, Leslie’s mother died giving birth to a baby. And so, you know, Charles Leslie Shutz’s father didn’t have time to care for an infant ’cause he was working on the farm. And so Dock Harris and his wife kind of took care of the baby for the first few months of the baby’s life. And then after that, were always known as Grandma and Grandpa Harris to Christine, the baby.

Nicole (30m 39s):
So they were really loving, affectionate, helpful, compassionate people.

Diana (30m 46s):
That’s so interesting. I’m glad you discovered that because I’ve often wondered who took care of Christine as a baby, You know, ’cause they were working so hard on the farm and when her mother died at birth, there were older girls in the family, but they were teenagers, you know, so that’s, that’s such a neat thing to find that out. Well, I was really fascinated with this whole idea about the South and how this name was more prevalent in the South, this nickname. So I decided I would do a little bit of research on that and I decided to test the theory that Dock was a common nickname in Texas. And so I went to the 1880 census and found it really was Common Family Search, found 438 instances of Doc as the first name in the southern states of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Diana (31m 40s):
And so then when I did the search and just limited it to say New York or Ohio, I would find like maybe two or three, just very, very few as opposed to hundreds for the southern states for the surname or the first name of Doc. So You know, we concluded that Doc was indeed a nickname for our ancestor named Claude Harris, who was born December 29th, 1886 in Milam County, Texas. And it seems that his family started with this nickname probably as a child, and it stuck with him throughout his life. So if you have the same type of thing in your family, You know, it behooves us all to just keep doing the research to see if we can find something else to help correlate these names.

Diana (32m 26s):
And I would encourage using AI to help learn about naming patterns. There were things AI came up with that I had not thought of and led me to do that additional research about the prevalence of the name, which was fun.

Nicole (32m 41s):
Well, that was such a good idea to check the hypothesis from ChatGPT and Claude. You know, we don’t wanna always just believe everything Claude and ChatGPT tell us. So I love that you went and tested that hypothesis. You know, it gave us a theory and then you could test it by looking in the 1880 census to see if it really was common in the southern states. And that’s neat that you were able to find evidence that it was true. Well, this was such a fun thing to talk about, especially since I worked so much in the month of December on Dock Harris. And not just the month of December, but the whole entire year. It was such a fun year last year to be able to visit Love County Oklahoma where he was living, you know, for like his later childhood and early adulthood and find records in the courthouse with his tax records.

Nicole (33m 35s):
And then learning all about the oral history from the family. And there was, it was such a rich research project with so many findings, and I just learned that diving in to one particular ancestor who, you know, he is relatively close to our family. He’s my second great grandfather. He lived in the 20th century and there were a lot of records about him, but you know, it was amazing how much more I could find when trying to do more reasonably exhaustive research on him. So it was just a really good experience. And if you haven’t done that with your ancestors to try to write like a biography or a kinship determination type of narrative report, I really encourage you to try it.

Nicole (34m 17s):
It was just wonderful. So good luck to everyone and we hope that we will hear back from you about any cool nicknames that your family has.

Diana (34m 28s):
All right, thanks everyone for listening. We’ll talk to you next time.

Nicole (34m 34s):
Okay. Bye

Diana (34m 35s):
Bye-Bye.

Nicole (34m 34s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.