Organizing our genealogy files is a good thing
The Legal Genealogist‘s files are a mess.
I keep telling myself that I need to really go through and organize the records I have, record them properly and get them entered into the database.
And I keep saying that I’ll get around to it.
And that keeps coming back to bite me, hard, somewhere I’d rather not be bitten.
The plan for this morning was to write about a really cool document being featured today in the Today’s Document from the National Archives series.
It’s titled the “Tally of Electoral Votes for the 1800 Presidential Election, February 11, 1801,” and it’s the tally of the 138 electors casting ballots between the Democratic-Republican slate of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr and the Federalist slate of John Adams and Charles C. Pinckney.1
All 73 of the Democratic-Republican electors voted for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr; all 65 of the Federalist electors cast their ballots for John Adams, with 64 also voting for Charles C. Pinckney and one from Rhode Island for John Jay.2
Only there was a hitch.
At the time, the votes were not distinguished between President and Vice President.
Which meant there was a tie.
Between Jefferson — the Democratic-Republican candidate for President — and Burr — the Democratic-Republican candidate for Vice President.
That’s why the election was thrown into the House of Representatives and, ultimately, why the Electoral College system was revamped through the adoption of the 12th Amendment in 1804.3
Now we all know that the House of Representatives “cast thirty-five ballots over five days to break the tie and finally, on February 17, 1801, on the thirty-sixth ballot, the House elected Thomas Jefferson to be President.”4
And my really cool genealogical lesson for the day was going to focus on checking to see if any of our ancestors were involved in any way in this or other elections that would help us flesh out our family histories. I even had a great example I was going to use: my own fourth great grandfather David Baker of North Carolina was involved in this very contested election!
No, he wasn’t one of the electors representing North Carolina in the Electoral College itself.5 But the electors from North Carolina were chosen by popular election in local districts.6
And David Baker was involved in that process!
I think.
I mean, I know that somewhere in my files, either paper or digital, there’s that document showing that David was either a candidate for elector or, much more likely since he was a local justice of the peace, a judge in the election itself. It might be an election tally in Burke County, North Carolina, where David lived at the time. Or maybe it’s a digital image from one of the newspapers of the day reporting on the selection of local electors in North Carolina. Or maybe it’s something I dreamt up in the middle of a fevered dream one night.
Because, for the life of me, I cannot find hide nor hair of that document this morning.
It doesn’t help that I still have digital images from a North Carolina research trip in 2009 that are named wonderfully useful things like IMG_1998.JPG. Or that I have way too many digital folders labeled Miscellaneous Original Records.
And it’s not at all helpful that I have a couple of dozen — I won’t even bother to count ’em — different folders with Baker somewhere in the folder title.
Sigh.
My files are a mess.
So today’s lesson isn’t going to be about finding and incorporating cool records of important elections in our family histories, though we all really should do that. I mean, how cool would it be to document that a fourth great grandfather was a candidate or a judge of election in that wacky election of 1800?!?
Instead … sigh … today’s lesson is on getting those records properly cataloged, entered and indexed so that we can find what we need when we need it to be able to document that a fourth great grandfather was a candidate or a judge of election in that wacky election of 1800.
I’m certainly going to do that.
Just as soon as I get around to it…
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “A lesson in why…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 17 Feb 2020).
SOURCES
- Tally of Electoral Votes for the 1800 Presidential Election, February 11, 1801; Record Group 46, Records of the United States Senate; Center for Legislative Archives; National Archives; digital image, Today’s Document from the National Archives, Archives.gov (https://www.archives.gov/ : accessed 17 Feb 2020). ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- See generally Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.com), “Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” rev. 13 Feb 2020. ↩
- “Tally of Electoral Votes for the 1800 Presidential Election, February 11, 1801,” Today’s Document from the National Archives. ↩
- For the names of the electors of 1800, see The Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 6th Congress, 2nd Session, at 1023; digital images, “A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875,” Library of Congress, American Memory (https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html : accessed 17 Feb 2020). ↩
- See Deborah Kalb, editor, Guide to U.S. Elections, 7th ed. (Los Angeles : CQ Press, 2016), 861. ↩
Whew! I’m not the only one who can’t find a document I “know” I have somewhere. Getting my papers organized is also on my “get it done” list. I hope I do not wait until a “round tuit” comes my way.
I share your frustration with finding documents.
I have over 4 decades of records that really need to be sorted. Pictures, documents, images (with similar names to yours), church minutes (with obituaries and pics), funeral cards, my grandfather’s copies of deeds, tax bills, and lots of ephemera. There in crates, boxes, notebooks and closets of genealogy related items. Multiple people in a single document from different families. Books, handwritten notes, letters, etc.
I’ve moved several times, packed and unpacked. I’ve used, filed, sorted, digitized and printed copies of documents. I have jump drives filled with images, and cds with land record images burned on them.
I’ve found multiple copies of the same document because I made copies of those I couldn’t find in my files.
I’m slowly beginning to reorganize using Zotero. Refining the way I want to organize everything and adding the information and keywords I would use to search for a document or item in the software. I can create a link to the document without adding it to the program. My citation information can be added in the program and my keywords allow me to search the database.
Progress is slow, since I’m still learning the program and refining my organization. But I love that its searchable by information I add about the record. As long as I put the document back where it belongs when I’m done with it I should be able to find it again. Plus if I enter information that matches something in the database it lets me know I have something similarily labeled in the database.
If its the same it goes with the previous copy(ies). If its not, it gets catalouged in Zotero.
Best of luck!
OMGosh… I’m not alone!! Guilty as charged.
I feel your pain, Judy. I inherited years of research files from my genealogist brother – paper and electronic, voluminous, detailed, exhaustive, and chaotic. Six years after retrieving them from storage, they’re still woefully far from being organized and integrated with my own research. And I *know* that early on I ran across a sheet of paper in those files showing his conclusion that our parents were something like 12th cousins, but I haven’t seen it since!
Our mother’s gravestone epitaph reads, “One of these days I’ve got to get organized.” – no joke, my brothers had that put on her marker – and I fear that my late brother and I both inherited her tendency toward chaos.
Kathy, I will show your reply to my kids!!!
Judy, now i have to go look for that 1800 voting list with my 2ndgrtgrandfather on it. He was a candidate, (didn’t win), and it shows who he voted for in other contests (I think?).
Judy afraid American law is way over my head but I was happy to see a connection to genealogy further down the page. The first thought that came to mind is that we all need a PA! (Personal Assistant). (Also guilty)
NOBODY understands the law with respect to that 1800 election!! 🙂 (It’s been changed since then.) And yeah… personal assistant, for sure!
Thank you for your honesty! Its nice to know that I am not alone in a mess of my own making. I have organizing my files as one of my goals this year and have worked on it…some. In the mean time, I am trying to tag, link and note my finds in 2020 in Evernote. I find that it works for me and I can tag as many random thoughts to one document/photo/website/etc as I please facilitating search at a later date.
Wow! If Judy Russell has this problem, too, maybe there is hope for me after all!
I am the poster child in some cases for “do as I say, not as I do…” 🙂
This certainly struck a chord as I’ve spent the last few weeks going through copies of documents I got last year and am just getting around to digesting. It’s a treasure trove of information on research done by my relatives years and years ago. It certainly is helping make sense of how some of the stories got started, and how some of the mistakes got made that keep getting perpetuated. For instance, an old local history put in an extra comma about an ancestor’s property: “After his decease, in 1828, it was conveyed to…”
Well, needless to say, more than a few of my relatives have over the years reported that he died in 1828. However, he actually died in 1819 (per probate records) and his estate was settled in 1828. So, that extra comma has led to all sorts of problems – it should have been: after his decease, in 1828 it was conveyed to… Yikes! It does indeed pay to look back through that old research. I finally understand why and how my family’s preceding genealogists got tripped up.
Judy – and everyone who has commented on this post – looking back to Feb from early May with lots of hindsight, I do hope that, like me, you have found lockdown (if your state had it, or you did it voluntarily) a brilliant opportunity for one or more these too-big-to-think-about projects. (from Auckland, New Zealand)