INTERVIEWING RELATIVES ! FORMAL AND INFORMAL INTERVIEWING

Originally posted On September 10th 2014...

Soon Thanksgiving will be here, and then the Holidays.  Of course, your best time to interview relatives may be when you go on a visit to them and life isn't overly busy.  Still, I find that visiting people during the holidays is a good time to talk about Old Days.

INTERVIEWING RELATIVES !  FORMAL AND INFORMAL INTERVIEWING

Some people respond to formal interviews better than others.

To do a FORMAL INTERVIEW you:

1) Contact the person and tell them that you want to interview them about the family history or focus on a specific aspect of family history.  Although this can be on the phone, in person is best.  Other people in this person's life need to give you both time and space and not interrupt.

2) Set up a time to focus on just that in advance that's good for both people, and be there.

3) Be prepared with a list of questions (at least to get you started) and a recording device.
(Whatever works for you.  Some people are still using cassette machines.  Some people are settling up more than one machine at a time "just in case" one of them fails."  Recording is sometimes a more natural process as taking notes can also be distracting or stop the process. You want to make eye contact, be comfortable, and listen too!)

The recording device sometimes intimidates people.  It may make the interview feel too important or heavy. You should tell them you intend to use one before hand, but it may help to put it out of the sight line.  Test your recorder to be sure it will pick up a voice from a few feet away.  Preserving the voice of a relative as they tell their story or give information can be very valuable, if you can keep doing technology updates with original recordings.  Our voices tell so much about us!

4) Set up water or tea or other beverages before you begin.  Avoid breaking the interview with eating food or other activities. Get into the flow.

5) If, however, it's going to be a long interview or a series of interviews, try to do the interview first before taking a meal or long break or wait until after the meal.  You and your interviewee will probably respond best to knowing how it's going to go.

To do an INFORMAL INTERVIEW you:

1) Show up and seize the moment. (It's good to have that recording equipment close.)

2) Let the other person pick the topic or gently guide them to what you want to know.

3) Lends itself more than a formal interview to including more than one person.

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MEMORY TABLE FOR DEPARTED LOVED ONES

From the Library of Congress, this Memory Table lithograph was designed 

by A. M. Bleichrode, circal 1974 in New York.

DEATH CERTIFICATES and BURIAL RECORDS : WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

In modern times the burial record is usually spawned from the mortuary that prepared the body for burial or cremated it.  The burial record will usually give information such as what cemetery, the name of a minister or priest or rabbi who conducted a ritual, and some other basic information. It is not a governmental civil records but the burial record and the death certificate seem to lean on each other. 

A death certificate is a governmental - civil report on what the person died of, the name of a doctor who had been treating that person or if an autopsy was performed.  It will often include the name of a spouse or next of kin, and don't be shocked but some people did not know the maiden name of their own mother!

Step one is to find a death certificate, as possible. Depending on location you might have to swear you are the spouse or child of the person who died.  But privacy laws vary and these records are being loaded into databases based on those privacy laws.

Yes, go ahead and check a TOMBSTONE PROJECT.

Step two is to contact the cemetery named and ask them for the burial record.  You might start by asking them for the plot location in advance of a visit.

Remember : Find A Grave TM and other such projects are TOMBSTONE PROJECTS.  There are more burials in that cemetery than the tombstones. Consider that:

There was never a tombstone or the cemetery is one that does not allow them.

That family members may have been buried in with an earlier burial that the tombstone does not include.

That family plots may not include the names of all the people buried in the plot.

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WAITING

 

WHERE DID HARRIET JEFFERSON GO INTO FREEDOM WHEN SHE LEFT HOME AT THE AGE OF 21?

With this excerpt, I end my focus on this wonderful book! I hope you'll get a copy to read through.

 My notes re pages 262-263  :

Harriet, the daughter of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, was to be freed from the slavery she was born into at the age of 21.Her older brother could have left earlier but he stayed till he was 24. It would seem that they were to leave together, and perhaps they continued to know each other? Any woman who was self supporting in the 19th century was living in poverty. So, despite her skill at weaving, marriage to a man who could provide would be important. Was that possible?  Jefferson let them go WITHOUT MANUMISSION PAPERS. In his farmbook he said they had 'run' but though they were fugitives, no one was looking for them either, and he didn't pursue that.

Excerpt:

"To avoid the paper trail that would connect them to him, Jefferson facilitated Beverley's and Harriet's departures without furnishing them manumission papers. In fact, for anyone who might examine his papers after his death, he wrote in his Farm Book "ran" next to their names. So by law they remained fugitive slaves until the Untied States abolished slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Although some states had already abolished slavery or put it on the path to extinction by gradual emancipation before then, the force of the Federal government had always been marshaled in support of slavery, first with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, and then its stronger successor in 1850. Not only was it a federal offense to assist fugitive slaves, the 1850 act required the free states to return runaway slaves to their masters so that even in the North they were not safe.

For forty-three yeas then, Harriet risked forcible return to Virginia and slavery if her identity was discovered and reported... And so would her children.

But Jefferson was not as uncaring as one might think.

Jefferson had his man pay her stage fair to Philadelphia and gave her fifty dollars.  Population 64,000 better than Washington City (D.C.) The city had attracted many manumitted slaves from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, as well as from the Pennsylvania hinterlands, between 1790 and 1820. 

Basically it seems he covered his daughter's tracks.

Since Jefferson had been in Philadelphia and the Continental Congress he would have been able to arrange for her to make to Philadelphia. But perhaps she got off in Washington City rather than Philadelphia... There also her father had spent 8 years as President of the U.S... Beverly Hemings was in Washington City and went there as a white man....

She was supposedly married to a white man of good standing in Washington City.  Her brother Madison said she raised a family of children but he refused to give any surname or names of children and as late at 1863 said her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticelllo had never been discovered...

I wonder:

With so many people doing genealogy, it is always possible that someone will discover they are descended from Harriet.

I suspect that there was some chain of communication between Jefferson and his children with Sally. 

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