It's time for this week's Ancestry Quick Tip Jamboree! Thanks to everyone who has sent in a Quick Tip. Please keep them coming so that we can keep this tradition going. You can send your tips to: ADNeditor@ancestry.com.

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Have a great day!
Juliana

Privy Digging Tip

I'd like to comment on SallyAnn Glynn's note on House History. She is excited about discovering her home's history, and wrote ". . . our privy digger has already located a possible site and plans to dig it later this year. What kind of luck have others had with subterranean house history?"

Some "privy diggers," are essentially bottle hunters, who will go into her backyard and dig up an archaeological site. The artifacts such as broken dishes, bottles, animal bones, plant remains, and so on, provide information that does not survive in the written records of the time period. These include mundane things like what sorts of foods past residents of her home ate. What kinds of dishes they used. What kinds of health problems they had. If excavated by a trained archaeologist, privies have the potential to provide a large amount of data on the everyday lives of the everyday people that genealogists are interested in.

Unfortunately, some privy diggers don't care about these sorts of things. They are only after the unbroken bottles. Everything else is discarded. No documentation is recorded, no maps drawn, or photographs taken. Nothing is preserved for future study. No report will be prepared describing what was found and how this relates to the people who once lived in Glynn's house.

How would genealogists feel if people tore out pages from the record book whenever they found an entry they were interested in? Similarly, an unqualified privy digger could destroy an important part of the heritage of Ms. Glynn's home, one that has the potential to provide information that doesn't exist anywhere else. A better alternative is to contact a local archaeological society for advice or merely leave the privy alone for some future archaeologist to study. A resource on Indiana archaeology can be found at: www.in.gov/dnr/historic/archeomonth.html.

Land Claim Stories

In Juliana’s article, "Movie Magic," the recommendation for "Far and Away" talks about how an ancestor was removed from his land claim with a shotgun. This happened in other places as well. My grandmother who was born in Minnesota in 1886 and grew up in Richland County, North Dakota wrote in her memoirs about her Father sitting up many nights with a young neighbour (a widow and her son) as some other neighbours were trying to get his claim by running him off with a shotgun. She never put the name in her life story, but talked about it often. This was in the 1890s. Sadly his mother died and we never knew what happened to him. She also talked about roving bands of men who would prey on the settlers for money, etc.

In 1904 they moved to Saskatchewan and what a difference. The area they moved to was patrolled by the NWMP (Northwest Mounted Police) which became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Brings PDA to the Library

Many times you are not permitted to bring a laptop to the library, but I can take my PDA. I have a Palm LifeDrive PDA and an infrared keyboard for it. When the PDA is attached to the keyboard it becomes a miniature computer. It has a 4GB hard drive and I have an expansion card for 1GB, so I am able to do almost anything with it that I would with my laptop. When I get home I download to my computer and then I am able to go again. I use the PDA program, MyRoots, which syncs beautifully with my RootsMagic program. This is really having my cake and eating it, too.