Thankful Thursday - Unions and Child Labor Laws

I wrote this post months ago and scheduled it to go out around Labor Day. I've got a series of posts for Mondays so I didn't want to schedule it on Labor Day so I felt "Thankful Thursday" would do perfectly.

So what precisely am I thankful for? I'm thankful for unions that demanded action, better conditions, better pay, time off, etc. The union helped to build the middle class in America. Do some of the unions have bad reputations? Sure, but what group doesn't have some bad eggs. As they say, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater." They are still beneficial today.

I have ancestors that worked as children. I'm grateful that my children don't have to do that. I'm grateful that it is illegal for children to work until they are a certain age. I'm glad that school has become more important (although not important enough) in our country. This was not always the case and if you have coal miners, railroad workers, etc in your family tree you may very well have a great aunt, uncle, or cousin that died as a child at a job.

I was searching through Newspapers.com and looking for hits on names in my tree. I was going down my Brogan line with no good hits for John Brogan. I was just getting ready to click on another member in my Ancestry.com tree when I saw the hint by his name. I had been ignoring the hints recently because I was in school and just didn't have time to sift through them the few times I was on. School was out giving me more genealogy time so I started looking through the hints and found a hit in the 1870 US Federal Census Mortality Schedule. So I took a closer look.

1870 US Federal Census Mortality Schedule from Ancestry.com

This tells me that John Brogan was 12 years old when he died in August by being run over by a rail car. He wasn't playing on the railroad tracks though. He was at work. To me that looks like it says "work at mines," but the 1870 US Federal Census Mortality Schedule Index lists his occupation as "railroad worker." It could be both though because the coal was transported by the railways so he could have been at one of the many mines, but working for the rail company. Either way here is a child that should not have died.

I'm sure that he was working because more money would have been helpful to the family so just saying that he shouldn't have been working isn't that easy. There was no minimum wage and wages weren't spectacular. There wouldn't be a national minimum wage until Roosevelt's New Deal and a federal child labor law didn't come into existence until 1938.

I could go on for quite some time about how unions and political movements to improve the lot of the blue collar worker were usually connected and how important it is to support our unions so we don't go back down this road, but this is a genealogy blog post so I'll stop there.

This information was important to me because I had a Family Group Record (FGR) given to me by a distant cousin who helped me so much with this line and many others we had in common. The FGR was the only source I had for John Brogan though and that's not good research. As mentioned I got no good hit on Newspapers.com for John because there weren't newspapers covering this time for the Hazleton area, or at least not on their site. This record tells me how the little boy died.

There's also something else significant about this find. I had his death listed as August 1870, but it's not. It's August 1869. This is an easy mistake to make though because you can get lost in the title. The fact that this is from the 1870 census. You have to look at the top to know which year he died in...

Instructions (Top) for the 1870 US Federal Census Mortality Schedule

Under #2 where they ask for the name of the deceased it says, "Name of every person who died during the year ending June 1, 1870, whose place of abode at the time of death was in this family." So the enumeration began or ended around June 1, 1870. This would be the cut off. Since he died in August and that didn't happen yet it's clearly telling us that it would mean August 1869.

There's a memorial on FindAGrave for John Brogan, but it doesn't have any dates on it because there aren't any on the tombstone. He's on the same stone as his parents, Frank and Mary Brogan nee Monaghan, and sister Roseanna. As serendipity often comes into play I can easily fix this memorial since I own it. I created it after one of my many trips to St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Beaver Meadows when I canvassed the cemetery looking for surnames from my tree.

So as we prepare to celebrate Labor Day this Monday with cookouts with friends and family take time to remember what we are celebrating and those that can't be with us or died before their time at work. God Bless the American worker, but God Bless the organizations that help to protect them.

Tuesday's Tip - Using Other Ancestry Trees

Heck or any other family tree you find on the internet. No this isn't a post saying that you should seek out and copy information into your tree that other people have. Even when you collaborate you need to verify research. After all you may find that something was wrong! I'm talking about using the information from family trees to break through a brick wall.

I only uploaded my tree to Ancestry.com a year ago, but I've been delighted since. Originally I had wanted to wait until it was "done" before uploading it, but are our trees ever really done? Nope. Anyway, hits came up as "hints" next to people that I thought I'd done exhaustive searches on Ancestry's site. Hits that I hadn't gotten before. I don't know why exactly it happens. I think it's just a quirk of the system that the results vary on the search engine (general search versus a specific record set on Ancestry), but it happens. That's a different post and I digress...

I've never been a big fan of using other people's trees. Sharing research I love, but I won't ever copy someone's information and put it in my tree. However, you'll get hints on Ancestry for other trees that share the same person...or Ancestry thinks it might be the same person. I don't speak for Ancestry, but I'm going to guess that they aren't asking you to just steal someone else's tree/research and make it your own. They want you to use it. How do you do that?

Doubtless there are several ways, but I'm going to share what recently happened with me when I was clicking on hints for my Brogan line. Elizabeth Brogan had a hint next to her. Just one and it was a family tree. Several family trees, actually. All I had on Elizabeth was that she was born in March 1888 in Pennsylvania and I had gotten that from a census record. I found nothing else on Elizabeth. I didn't know if she married, when she married, or if she died a spinster. After clicking on that hint though I now know.

Screenshot of Ancestry Family Tree hint

I don't know ShirleyLong90 who created the Coyle Family Tree Ver 2, but I'm going to be sending her an email. I've got Coyles in my family tree and we both have Elizabeth Brogan (and I'm sure many more people) in common. So what did I do with this information? I didn't just put it in my tree and assume it was right. I compared it with other trees that also popped up under the hint to see if more than one person had this information. Sure, that can just mean that other people copied it from another tree, but finding similarities can be significant. So I searched Newspapers.com* for Elizabeth McHugh's death in March of 1963. I found it easily.

The Hazleton Standard Speaker, 20MAR1963,
pg 20

After seeing the obituary I can now put in Elizabeth's marriage and death. Because it was in 1963 I also can search the Pennsylvania Death Certificates database and maybe even find her birth. It will certainly/hopefully confirm the rest of the information on here and it's always important to get as many different sources to confirm your findings! From this obituary I can even see when her husband passed, who her children are, and where she is buried. I've walked past so many McHughs in St. Gabe's and this summer I'll be looking for her and Patrick's stones because I now know they belong to me.

So a lot of this blog post is common sense. Many of you are probably sitting there having gotten to this point and are saying, "Duh! Where's the real news here, Cherie?" The thing of it is, if you're already doing this then you're ahead of the game. There are people out there though that scoff at the idea of looking at anyone else's tree. Sometimes it's because they consider it cheating. Sometimes it's just because they don't trust other trees. Guess what? Don't trust other trees. Don't trust other research completely ever until you verify it yourself. I don't trust anything even when collaborating unless I can make the connection as well. Maybe some would say that this holds my research back. Perhaps it does, but I've had incorrect information in my tree before and I'll work hard to make sure it doesn't happen again. Here you aren't simply trusting another tree. You're using it as a tool to test that connection and see if it is valid.

As for cheating, you're only cheating if you take someone else's work and put it in your tree without conducting your own independent research. And that's not cheating it's stealing. It's plagiarizing. Don't do it!

Now I'm off to contact the creator of that tree and say hello.

*It's probably about time that I made this statement because I've talked about Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com multiple times throughout my blog's history...I am in no way associated or a paid representative or promoter of Newspapers.com or Ancestry.com. I just really love the results I get with them. Although with how often I crow about their sites maybe I should get paid ;)