Broken Binding

A while back I was in the basement looking at some of the genealogy books stored there.  I had an accident with a bound volume.  I was moving one of the books and I dropped it. The binding broke.  I was very upset because it couldn't be repaired.

The book was:
The Conger Family of America, Volume II, (CFA) published in 1992, by Helen Maxine (Crowell) Leonard. There are more than 725 numbered pages in the book, with printing on both sides of most pages. That is to say, a little over 365 physical pages.

To fix the problem I bought four black three-ring notebooks at one of the thrift stores and two boxes of 200 sheet protectors at Staples.  I worked, off and on for a couple of days, putting the pages into the sheet protectors. Opening the top of every sheet protector was a pain.  Did I really lick my fingers 365 times?

The two-volume CFAs are wonderful collections of genealogy information and family history.  I own copies of both volumes and both are now housed in three-ring binders. Years ago, I worked for many months keying the information from both volumes into my genealogy program in order to convert the collection into a genealogy. Some members of the Conger family spent time in Monroe county, Ohio. I worked with Robert Guilinger, Joyce Posey and many others to add the information they shared to the information recorded by Mrs. Leonard.

Page 1a of CFA II, is the Contents page.  Names listed on the page do not always match the titles used on the first page of each section.

Here's a list of the CFA II contents I prepared, using the page titles.

 1a - Contents
 2a - Libraries with CFA I
 3a - Preface
   1 - Search for Belconger Origin
   3 - Belconger Wills
 12 - Life of Belcongers in County Norfolk
 15 - John Conger (Primus) in Woodbridge, New Jersey
 16 - The Kelleys
 19 - John Belconger's Family & Wills
 21 - First Census of the United States - 1790 - Heads of Families
 51 - Descendants of John Belconger & Mary Kelly & Sarah Cawood
239- Conger Addenda
247- Conger Allied Families
462- Allied Families Addenda
467- Conger Index
531- Conger Spouse Index
565- Conger Index - CFA I
695- Update for CFA Volume I

Dick Henthorn
13 October 2014

Conger Research Challenge

On page 39a of The Conger Family of America, Vol. 1, Maxine Leonard states:

CHARLES CURTIS CONGER 1851 married Abbie Grant, niece of Ulysses S. Grant.

There is no source citation. As of September 2014 I wasn't able to find any information on the Internet that would support this relationship.

Here's what I know:

1. Charles Curtis Conger was born on 23 Jan 1851 in Oneida, Knox Co., IL.
2. Abigail "Abby or Abbie" Adelia Grant was born on 21 Apr 1853.
3. The couple had two children: Norma Grant Conger and Clara Hurd Conger.
4. Ulysses S. Grant was a Civil War General and later President of the United States.
5. U.S. Grant had two brothers: Samuel Simpson Grant and Orville Lynch Grant.  It appears that Samuel might not have married.  Orville married but I didn't see any children listed.

Here's my Conger Research Challenge.

1. Link Abigail Adelia Grant to one of the brothers of U.S. Grant.
2. Provide the name of Abigail's mother.
3. Cite sources to prove the link.

Can you help me solve this challenge?

Dick Henthorn

9 September 2014

AKA: or NAME-CONFLICT:

I'm working on a project to extract Nicknames from the Note fields in my Conger genealogy file. The goal is to add the Nicknames to the Nickname field that is defined by RootsMagic.  It's a slow process. When I was using Personal Ancestral File (PAF) I used the "data tag" AKA: in the Note field when I wanted to record a Nickname.  Using the search command of RootsMagic it's easy to find the Notes with the AKA: data tag.

I've discovered that I often used the AKA: data tag for information that was really pointing out a name conflict rather than an "also known as" name.

Much of the information in my Conger file came from the impressive two-volume work of Maxine -(Crowell) Leonard, The Conger Family of America.  I have probably written that, "Mrs. Leonard was consistently inconsistent in how she spelled people's names."  There is no guarantee that a name found in Volume Two is more accurate than the name found in Volume One.  I say this because sometimes she used two different spellings in Volume Two. Other researchers such as, Charles G.B. Conger, recorded spelling different from Mrs. Leonard.

As part of the project to extract the Nicknames I decided I would change the AKA: data tag in the Notes to use two other data tags, in combination, that I used in my PAF file, NAME-CONFLICT: when I'm recording that I noticed a "name" conflict between what various researchers reported, rather than a Nickname.

Dick Henthorn
6 September 2014