were your ancestors at a specific historical event?
Tutorial
These very basic steps can be used to find relatives at various locations and time frames. For this example, we are trying to find if descendants of Alton Keith Brimhall have any ancestors that may have attended the celebrations of the completion of the Erie Canal along its route in New York in October and November of 1825.
1. Go to Family Search and login.
2. Under Family Tree choose Tree. For this activity we will use your Fan Chart. It looks like a paper fan. If another chart came up, such as Landscape, go to the left, near the top, click the drop down box and choose Fan Chart.
3. Find Alton Keith Brimhall and put your cursor on his name which will highlight him and show a little Fan Chart icon under his name. (If you’re using a touch screen, you can tap on the name twice and the icon should show up.)
4. Click on the little Fan Chart icon which will change your chart and put Grandpa Keith Brimhall in the middle. (He went by his middle name, Keith.)
5. Now go to the left near the top and find the Generations rectangle box. Click on the number 5. That will change the chart to show 5 generations.
6. Look again at the left near the top and you will see a list including “Birth Country”. Click on that one. Using the key on the right, you can see which ancestors were born in the United States.
We’re going to look at the names in the 5th generation, which is the outer circle.
7. Starting on the right bottom is Mary Ann Saxton. If you left click on her name, you can see her birth information.
We are looking for each ancestor that was born in New York that would have been old enough to remember the completion of the Erie Canal celebrations in 1825. Someone born in 1820 would have been 5 years old, so old enough to possibly remember a big celebration.
8. Make a list of the names of each ancestor on Grandpa Keith Brimhall’s line in the 5th generation that meets the following criteria:
- born in New York
- born in 1820 or earlier.
(Remember you only need to check the information on those whose names are the color designated for “born in the United States”.)
Now, do the same steps with the 4th generation, which is the circle inside the outer circle.
Hopefully, you and I found the same names. If you'd like, send me an email with the names you found at spackmans@gmail.com.
Now you are probably thinking, “Just because a person was born in New York doesn’t mean they still lived there in 1825.” True! So now we are going to do some deeper investigation. Let’s start with Mary Ann Saxton. We want to find out where she was in 1825.
9. Left click on Mary Ann Saxton name and then right click and you should see an option “Open link in new tab”. Go to that tab, which is her information page in Family Search.
10. Near the top, choose Time Line. This shows major events from a her life plus some historical events. What major events occurred in Mary’s life in 1825 and 1826? Where did each of these occur?
Now you can go to Google Maps and find each of those cities. If Mary and Hosea lived in Butler, NY in October of 1825, they may have traveled to the Erie Canal and seen the fireworks at 10:30 pm in Montezuma. This was the third day of traveling for the first boats. How many miles is it from Butler to Montezuma? How long would it take to travel there? Your Google Maps is probably set at default for car traveling time. They didn’t have cars in 1825, so how might they have traveled? Probably by wagon and horse or maybe by walking. Click on the biker’s way of traveling and see how long it may have taken them in a wagon. If they were living in Bridgewater, NY, how many miles would it have taken them to get to Utica, NY? This is where the passenger boats, or "packets", were on Sunday, the 5th day of traveling. It's recorded that the travelers on the packets went to church in Utica and stayed for supper and speeches. The boats left Utica the next morning.
If your interest is peaked, figure out how close our other ancestors were to the Erie Canal in 1825. Send me what you found, and I'll add your list and name to this page! spackmans@gmail.com