Month: February 2011

Who Do You Think You Are? – Season 2 So Far

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During the first season of Who Do You Think You Are?, I wrote an episode by episode review of the shows, just like many others in the genealogy community. I thought that this season I would resist the temptation. Okay, so I lasted a week before breaking down and wading into some of the current dialogue.

Who Do You Think You Are?, the NBC network’s genealogy related television show (shown in Canada on the City TV network of stations), tells the story of a celebrity in each episode as they trace their family history. It appears that the producers of the show heard the collective voice of the show-supporting genealogy community loud and clear on two matters. Unlike season 1 episodes, the two episodes of season 2 to air so far have not been slowed by recaps following each commercial break. In addition, genealogists and historians appearing on the season 2 episodes have been careful in their handling of delicate, original documents by wearing gloves or using similar techniques to avoid hand touching the records.

Episode one of season 2 featured the ancestry quest of Vanessa Williams while episode 2 featured the story of country singer Tim McGraw’s family. Both episodes can legitimately be criticized for making genealogy look a lot easier than it is for us mere mortals. The shows seem to lack an acknowledgment that it took hours of research by a team of experts, assembled just to research the celebrity’s family, for a document of interest to be found.

Vanessa Williams was generally thought to be more engaged than Tim McGraw in the family history process and discoveries. I’m not convinced that Vanessa’s note-taking meant she more engaged in the process. I’ve seen The Blind Side and Tim McGraw seems to be a natural displaying a muted persona. My friend and terrific genealogy blogger Marian Pierre-Louis, author of Marian’s Roots and Rambles in her blog post In Defense of Tim McGraw, makes the case that while the Tim McGraw episode may not have been as good as the Vanessa Williams episode, it was still still really good. The McGraw episode perhaps would appeal more to men than the Vanessa Williams episode that might appeal more to women.

My conclusion: both episodes achieve the result they set out to achieve, that is, they are entertaining. They are certainly not technically correct in their presentation. In the Tim McGraw episode, it is fair as genealogy ‘technicians’ to criticize an eight generation jump that happened with a single brushstroke. It is even easier to criticize the broad sweeping assertion that McGraw’s ancestors were connected to Elvis Presley’s because both sets of ancestors were Palatines who came to what is now the USA around the same time. If it were that easy, I would have my fully sourced research completed back to Adam and Eve including connections to 45th great Grampa Hadden who liked to paint things on the walls of caves and from whom cousin Michelangelo got his artistic flair.

I try as best I can to recognize that these television shows are about engaging the viewing audience and providing an hour of entertainment. On that level, they succeed. They are not instructional videos. Whether or not they should be more instructional is a different debate, perhaps for a different time. For now, I’m content to sit back and be entertained by the family histories.

Contact me with your stories, questions and comments at ian.hadden@rogers.com

A Latimer Line Opens Up

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It’s a sad story that seems to have a happy ending. It’s the story of Catherine Isabella Latimer or, as she was named at birth, Louisa Orolong Latimer.

Louisa was born 25 May 1877 in Pembroke, Ontario, Canada, a small community located on the Ottawa River along the Quebec – Ontario provincial border. Louisa’s parents were John ‘Jack’ Latimer and Margaret Eliza Sills who were married in 1871 at Seaforth in Huron County, Ontario. The Latimers, including John’s younger brother and my wife Ellen’s great grandfather Edward, had moved to the southwest Ontario village from County Fermanagh in Ireland around 1864. Records exist that verify each of the above facts and here is where the story takes a decided twist.

According to the family story both Jack and Margaret Latimer died around 1884 or 1885 leaving their four young children orphaned. Louisa, as the story holds, was adopted into an Irish family in the Province of Quebec by the name of Buchanan and it was this family who changed her name from Louisa Orolong to Catherine Isabella. In 1894, Catherine Isabella Latimer (pictured above right) married John Andrew Scott in Montreal, Quebec. In 1908, John moved Catherine and their then five children to Yakima County in the State of Washington where they settled and the six feet, one inch tall John took up farming to provide for his family.
In Washington State, Catherine and John Scott welcomed an additional three children into their family and eventually all became US citizens in 1914. Seven of their eight children lived into adulthood and five of the seven remained in the United States, although they did go their separate ways – to Arizona, California, and Illinois – while three remained in Washington. Two of their children eventually returned to their native Canada. Their first child, Ethel was the last of their children to pass away in 1990 at the age of 94. Records exist to verify the life of John and Catherine Scott and their family.
The challenge is finding records that will verify Louisa/Catherine’s being orphaned at a young age and then of her being adopted by the Buchanan family. There does not appear to be a death registration for John ‘Jack’ Latimer in the province of Ontario records. Further digging is certainly warranted for this compelling tale.
Contact me with your stories, questions and comments at ian.hadden@rogers.com

Margaret Avenue, Kitchener, Ontario

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In my last post, I reviewed Lisa Louise Cooke’s new book The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox. The book is filled with easy to follow and well illustrated tips and techniques for using Google’s powerful search capacity. One of the results I have achieved thus far in applying some of the techniques is to uncover the naming of Margaret Avenue in Kitchener (formerly Berlin), Ontario.


Margaret Avenue is an arterial type street that runs from the centre of downtown Kitchener north through the neighbouring city of Waterloo. It turns out that the street was named after Margaret Wagner Bean (or with the alternate spelling of Biehn) (nee Hailer), my wife Ellen’s great great grandmother. The Google search I used involved using ever more refined search keywords and operatives which lead to among other things, like a lot of my past blog postings, to a newspaper article from the Kitchener Record that included the 1958 photo to the left of a train approaching the Margaret Avenue bridge. Below is a photo, captured from Google Earth, looking north along Margaret Avenue over the same bridge.

I have posted a number of stories previously about Margaret Hailer Wagner Bean who was born in 1831, a ‘stone throw’ away from the Canadian Horseshoe Falls at Niagara Falls, Ontario. Earlier posts have included among other references, excerpts from her will, newspaper reports of her last birthday party. The Record story by Jon Fear states that “Margaret Avenue was named for the sister-in-law of Philip Louis Breithaupt, an industrialist who moved from Buffalo to Berlin (now Kitchener) after launching a tannery business here in 1857.
Breithaupt, a future Berlin mayor, married Catherine Hailer, daughter of a prominent early Berlin woodworker named Jacob Hailer. She had a sister, Margaret, born in 1831, who married one of Breithaupt’s close friends, Rev. Jacob Wagner. They had a son together.
When Wagner died young, Margaret remarried. Her second husband was Daniel Biehn, a school instructor, and they had six children together while living in different parts of southwestern Ontario. When Biehn died in 1885, Margaret returned to Berlin, where she died in 1918.”
Contact me with your stories, questions and comments at ian.hadden@rogers.com

Book Review – The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox

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Unlike some, I don’t buy many genealogy related books. My bookshelves do have some of the required texts, many of which are now somewhat dated. The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox by Lisa Louise Cooke seemed to be a natural for my collection. The author, Lisa Louise Cooke is a nationally known speaker and is the producer and host of The Genealogy Gems podcast, Family History: Genealogy Made Easy podcast, and the Family Tree Magazine podcast.
Lisa, with the editing assistance of two of her daughters, has assembled more than 200 pages of amply illustrated tips and techniques for getting the best out of the powerful Google search engine. As a nationally recognized speaker, Lisa has offered ‘classes’ in the use of Google for genealogy research as well as producing two very popular Google Earth for Genealogy DVD series. This book, her latest offering, pulls all of that previous work into one easy to follow text book. Topics covered over the nineteen chapters include: basic and advanced search techniques, image search, Google alerts, Google books and timelines, Google translate, YouTube, and, of course, Google Earth.

I was familiar with many Google features before reading the book and in past, I have benefited from the use of many tips and techniques picked up through listening to Lisa’s podcasts. The book offered a full, well organized reference manual, something I could access that would offer suggested methods for improving my results. This allows me to focus on using the tool or tools best suited for my needs. As Lisa promises in the introduction to her book, “In this book you will learn how to fill your genealogy toolbox with free state-of-the-art online tools that are built to search, translate, message, and span the globe.”

As someone who is more visually inclined, at least from a learning perspective, The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox is filled with screenshots and illustrations that explain the words. In addition, links for YouTube instructional videos are provided that offer further explanation or context for a topic.

So what didn’t I know before reading the book that I know now? I now know about Google Translate. Maybe I’m one of the few who didn’t know that Google offered this feature but as my wife has a German ancestry, I am certain that I will be able to put this new knowledge to good and practical use. I knew some of the basics of Google Earth – I had dabbled a bit but putting the techniques outlined in the book to use, I saw for the first time, the house at 6 Pirie’s Lane, Woodside, Aberdeenshire, Scotland (below) that my paternal grandfather was born in just over 100 years ago and learned how to save an image of the “street view.”


The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox is available through the Genealogy Gems store at Lulu.com for $24.95 in print or $14.99 in a PDF format download. I chose the download version because 1) my ancestry is Scottish and I was going to save some money and, 2) the download is easy and instantaneous – no waiting for the mailman. One other feature that impressed me with the download version of the book – all of the links to featured instructional videos or sites with additional resource information are ‘live’ in the book, just point and click to see the video. The downside of the PDF version is that if I want a copy of the wonderful reference book on my shelf, I have to print it myself, in whole or in part.

As I mentioned previously, I don’t buy that many genealogy books. This is one that not only caught my attention but also met and exceeded all of my expectations. As Lisa acknowledges in the book, with time, technology and Google with it will change. The book will likely become ‘out of date’ but until that occurs, I expect to be able to put in many hours of improved quality Google search time and to benefit from the results.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Google, Lisa Louise Cooke or the Genealogy Gems in any way. I also received no remuneration for this book review and I purchased the book myself, with my own funds.
Contact me with your stories, questions and comments at ian.hadden@rogers.com

Old Letters

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As I was growing up, my favourite Hadden relatives, hands down, were my Granduncle and aunt Alexander (Uncle Alec) Gaull Hadden and Hilda (Aunt Hilda) Edith Smith. In the city of Toronto phone book at the time, there were probably only 5 or 6 Hadden families and we were related to all of them. We naively believed the rest of the Hadden clan to be in Scotland.
Uncle Alec (pictured on the far right in 1937, alongside his brother and my grandfather John Gaull Hadden) and Aunt Hilda (pictured below left holding my father in 1930) were incredibly kind and generous. Uncle Alec told me that his mother, Jessie McKenzie (nee Gaull) Hadden, was not happy that he was dating Hilda as she was not at all Scottish enough for Jessie’s oldest son. Uncle Alec stood his ground with his mother and in 1929, they married.

Uncle Alec and Aunt Hilda were also my early sources for Hadden family history information when I heeded the advice to interview your eldest relatives. They were able to identify people in photographs that no one else knew and share information and anecdotes of the family time in Saskatchewan and depression era Toronto that otherwise would have been lost.
I recently found three Christmas letters that I received from Uncle Alec and Aunt Hilda. The letters were of course tucked away in a place so safe and secure that I had forgotten about it. Aunt Hilda actually was the one who did the writing, just as she was the one you spoke to on the phone – Uncle Alec might have answered the phone on occasion but he was quick to pass it to Aunt Hilda. I don’t think he was ever comfortable with the invention.
1980 (from their winter home in Sarasota, Florida): “Alex got permission from the heart specialist to drive down, if we took it easy. I am feeling much better and we sure took our time and enjoyed the trip. It was good weather all the way and the colors [she was writing from the USA so didn’t use the Canadian spelling] in the mountains were really lovely. We were lucky to find good places to stay too.”
1986 (from their winter home in Sarasota, Florida): “Sorry I could not reply before, but I had so much Christmas mail and cards to send to my cousins and my sight is going and I have very painful hands with arthritis. It’s no fun getting old. We enjoy being here away from the cold and snow. But how much longer we will be able will depend on our health. Although we both keep pretty good and can both look after ourselves, we are both over 80 and I think we do very well.”
1990 (from Bancroft, Ontario): “We will not be going to Florida any more. We have our place up for sale. We have been going down 12 years – 6 months there and 6 up here. Alex driving all the time. We are not young anymore and 1990 has not been a very good year for our health.”
Aunt Hilda passed away in 1994 at the age of 88. Uncle Alec passed away in 1997, a week shy of his 93rd birthday. Neither forgotten, both forever in my heart!
Contact me with your stories, questions and comments at ian.hadden@rogers.com