There’s a bit of a thrill to encountering a new “term of art”* and recognizing that not only do I know what it means but I’m already doing it without having a name for it.
The new term I encountered last week is “community reconstitution”. It appeared in a notation on several genealogy records at FamilySearch.org that I encountered in the course of a project I just finished. A bit of digging led me to the likely originator of the term — the Brigham Young University Record Linking Lab. If you’ve done any genealogy work at all, you’re probably aware that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has a deep interest in it, so it’s no surprise that BYU in Salt Lake City has the only family history/genealogy B.A. program in the U.S. and also devotes substantial resources, including 100 undergraduate assistants, to data-driven genealogy projects.
So, what is community reconstitution? The idea is to take a data set for a single community and either match each name to an existing record in the FamilySearch tree (which is a single tree, not multiple user-created trees as at Ancestry.com) or, for names that aren’t already in the tree, add a new record and try to find enough supporting documentation to link it with someone already in the tree. For example, if you took all the cemetery records for a small town or a church, you could build a better picture of all the interrelationships and would probably solve some mysteries about the identity of particular people.
My own community reconstitution project, which I finished in about a week, is another chapter in my work on early Black East Texas voters. Because the families I’ve researched (e.g. Harle and McFarland) were primarily from Mount Enterprise, Rusk County, I decided to see what I could find out about other Black voters from that community. First, I searched Ancestry.com for a list of all the Mount Enterprise voters, 183 in all. Then I looked at the image for each person. This was the only way to find the Black voters because each entry spans two pages and only the first page is indexed. The second page has crucial information — the place of birth and the label “Cold” for Black voters.
To see all the information for each person, you have to use the View Images option and find the person on the page.
Next, I used the name and place of birth to search Ancestry.com for related records in the 1870 and 1880 censuses. If I found a match, I did a lookup in the FamilySearch tree and added the person if he wasn’t already there. All the names went into a spreadsheet that includes the Family Search ID.
Date columns are for arrival in Texas and Rusk County. Code in right-hand column is the FamilySearch ID.
For those people in the FamilySearch tree, I traced as many descendants as I could, using census, birth, death, and marriage records. Death certificates were especially helpful, as they often record parents’ names and informants are often spouses or other kin. In many cases, these early Texas voter families intermarried and stayed in Rusk County. Sometimes they moved to other Texas counties. The Harle and McFarland families that I’ve worked on turned out to be the exceptions, not the rule, in their migration to Kansas.
In the end, out of 183 Mount Enterprise entries on the 1867 roll, 94 or 51% were Black, and of those, I was able to match 42 with evidence sufficient to locate them on the FamilySearch tree. Not bad, but it makes me wonder about the other 57. Could they or their descendants be lurking in other Rusk County records?
That gave me the idea of another possible project. While working on this data set, I found myself spending a lot of time in two Mount Enterprise cemeteries on FindAGrave.com. Could I get a data set of all records from those cemeteries that might be related to the 1867-1900 period? It’s apparently possible using XML, but my XML is very rusty and I don’t know the FindAGrave schema, so that may have to wait for another burst of data-digging enthusiasm.
In the meantime, if I feel like contributing to a crowd-sourced effort to make Black American families more visible to genealogy researchers, I could always volunteer on the BYU Record Linking Lab’s project to pull names from a collection of Virginia funeral programs.
* “Term of art” is a technical term specific to a particular field. I guess that means that “term of art” itself is a term of art specific to the field of terminology.