Reviewing Notes and Files

Today I decided to research Mabel Hiltz Buehring’s family a little more. Mabel is my great-father’s sibling. I decided to research her after visiting the Winnebago Court House in Oshkosh, Wisconsin yesterday while researching my husband's family. I decided to looked up Mabel’s daughter, Mildred’s death information because I realized I never recorded this information. Since I had photographed her grave last year I wanted to complete the process.

As I was inputting the daughter’s information into my genealogy software package, I realized I did not have death information on Mabel or her husband, William George. I decided to see if I could find anything on the family and proceeded to use FindAGrave.

FindAGrave not only had her grave information but her husband and another daughter, Mabel. This blew my mind. I didn’t know she had a fourth child. However, I must have known, because lo and behold there she was in my genealogy software package. This was a still an exciting find.

I had found her via the 1911 Canadian Census record and recorded this information previously. Looking at this little family group, I realized I had more missing information then known facts.

After recording the FindAGrave information which was recently added as of late fall last year, I proceeded to look for the family in additional Canadian Census records via Ancestry.com. This became quite difficult for some reason. Typing in the family name of Buehring, Behring, Buhring, was producing no good results or way too many results. Typing in the family unit’s first names only wasn’t providing the results I wanted either.

I decided to try FamilySearch and found the family in the 1916 census; however FamilySearch did not have an image or a link to the image on Ancestry. Taking the information I found on FamilySearch.

I moved back to Ancestry and used their search – Census and Voter lists function to narrow down my search category to Canadian census Collection, 1851-1916. After which I was able to open a window for each the 1916 and 1921 Census of Canada.

I decided to browse this collection and had to specify the Province, District and Sub-district based on my FamilySearch results.

I then proceeded to page 8 and found my family on that page.

After recording the census fact for each family member, I needed to find them in the 1921 Census. I decided I was going to try the same location as the 1916 census.

This time, it appears that Township 27 is in Sub-District 8 and not 7. Plus I don’t have the advantage of know what page number, but I figure if there were not many images, I would page through them.

However, this wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. The image order didn’t seem to match what I was hoping to find. Even though my previous attempt of using Ancestry.com didn't produce the desire results, I decided to use only the family first names and the age of the head of household along with Exact set for both his birth date and place in the search box for the 1921 census as follows:

I stuck gold when I found them on the first page of hits of 215 matches.

Now I saw the problem in the transcription of the last name. It was transcribed as Buckring instead of Buehring. I never thought of that misspelling before, I made a note that perhaps if I used Bu??ring for my searches might help find them in the future.

I still haven’t found Mabel’s two sons’ death dates but a little more research found that each had finally married and Paul’s wife’s name is Effie and George’s wife’s name is Martha. Paul was married prior to a 1945 Voter registration list and George was married between 1953 and 1962, because in 1953 he has no wife but in 1962 he has a wife.

However at this time, I am unable to find anything new on the two remaining sons and decided this was a good time to break from this little family research project.

Fixing the Gender in my Family Tree Maker File

I think I may have found a glitch in the Family Tree Maker 2014 (Ancestry version) software program. While running a Kinship report, I found two individuals that were showing as grandchild instead of grandson or granddaughter.

When I looked at the record in the person view, they should the proper gender.

However, when I view them from the edit screen, the gender shows up as Unknown.

Normally, I would just click on the down arrow and change the selection from Unknown to male or female; however it was not staying as my choice.

I thought I would try to change the gender back on the person view to unknown and then change it on the edit view, but that didn’t work either.

Finally, I created a new stand-alone, unrelated person with the same name as my problem person, making sure I specify the gender properly.

While still having my unrelated individual selected, I selected Person – Merge Two Specific Individuals and I select the problem person. This way the problem person facts merge into my new unrelated person.

This fixed my gender problem. I don’t know how this glitch came into my database. I must admit this is a project database, where I have been creating it through the Ancestry side of things and then syncing to Family Tree Maker. Normally I don’t add people this way. Normally, I manually add each individual on Family Tree Maker and then manually had all my facts and source citations. I would then sync back to Ancestry.

However on this project database, I have been following the shaky leafs and evaluating if they belong to the person in the database and if they do, I will merge the fact into my database. Perhaps the glitch is on Ancestry’s side and it created the two individuals improperly.  The only common source citation these two people had were Find A Grave records from Ancestry.com.

What I learned from all of this; is confirmation that by manually adding each individual, each fact and each source citation seems to keep glitches out of my “real” databases. It is a minor inconvenience in my project database but could had been a major annoyance had it been my “real” database. Then again, perhaps I better check my other databases and see if I have any unknown gender where I do know the gender.