Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen
A "brick-wall" DIY genealogy podcast that features your questions and Kathleen Brandt's answers. She wants your stories, questions, and “brick walls”. But be ready to add to your "to-do" list. As Kathleen always says, this is a Do it yourself (DIY) genealogy podcast. “I'll show you where the shovel is, but I'm not digging up your family.”
Maybe, you have no idea where to start searching for an ancestor. Or, perhaps you want to know more about your family folklore. Host Kathleen has 20 years in the industry and is the founder of a3genealogy. She's able to dispense genealogy research advice and encouragement in understandable terms that won't get you lost in genealogy jargon. Along with her husband and co-host, John, she helps you accomplish "do-it-yourself" research goals, learn some history, and have a bit of fun along the way. Light-hearted and full of detailed info, Hittin' the Bricks is your solution for your brick-wall research problems.
Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen
Back to School: Records and Revealed Roots
School records dating back to the 1700s can break through genealogical brick walls by providing detailed information about individuals and families that may not exist in other historical documents.
Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.
Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org.
Ladies and gentlemen from the depths of flyover country in the heartland of America, the Kansas City on the other side of the Mighty Mo, welcome to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen, the do-it-yourself genealogy podcast, with your questions and her answers. I am John, your humble hubby host, and today we'll be heading back to school to find out how student records might be just the thing to break through your ancestor's brick wall. So grab those yearbooks and let's start hitting the bricks.
Kathleen:You're killing me here, John. You're killing me. You're killing me.
John Brandt:Okay, so let me see here when are we. It has been a minute since we've done this.
Kathleen:I've had to remember how to hook my stuff up. Probably a whole month. What have we been?
John Brandt:doing Kathleen.
Kathleen:Getting ready for a vacation that we never took for a vacation that we never took and my baby brother got married.
John Brandt:Yes, baby brother got married To a wonderful bride. Yes, welcome, macy.
Kathleen:Oh, and my office is a mess because I am now finishing up the final stage of moving into retirement.
John Brandt:Throwing out.
Kathleen:Yeah.
John Brandt:I was using discarding. Yeah, 25 years of records, Years of records yes, yeah, 25 years of records, years of records yes.
Kathleen:Yeah, where are you going To get a Kleenex?
John Brandt:I'm going to cry about this now, okay, but today it's September and I think we're doing following with the school buses that have returned, driving up and down our street at ungodly hours of the morning with their parents in pajamas with cups of coffee.
Kathleen:We're doing a back cups of coffee. I love that about our street, I know, yes. So what's today's topic about John?
John Brandt:We have back to school. So that did put me in mind of a few questions. So I taught for 25 years junior, senior, high school and college, community college level. I mean the rules changed, I saw more records when I began teaching community college level. I mean the rules changed, I saw more records. When I began teaching, student files were handled a little differently then at the end, where they're very much removed from you know, teachers didn't see all the background information on students, but there is always a ton of information that is kept on students, everything from financial aid to disciplinary issues, things where you might have an SRO or you know, campus police involved. So there are records that kind of tie into students and so I was wondering have you used or do you use, or is there a good way to use, some of those resources that would come from the classroom and from the institutions, for genealogy of course?
Kathleen:Yes, I use them a lot in brick walls because there is a lot of information about children, about the parents, there's a lot of information of how we trace an adoption. So I have lots of examples of how we use school records school records.
John Brandt:So one thing that just came to mind would be if you have a split family different people coming to pick up the child and people on an authorization list, then it gives you a clue as to parentage that you might have clues to otherwise.
Kathleen:Now, that's talking about more modern day. If we're going back to our ancestors, though day. If we're going back to our ancestors, though, we still get so much information from school records, and I'm talking back to the 1700s.
John Brandt:Wow.
Kathleen:One of my favorite ways of tracing women are through school records. My own school, stevens College, began in 1833. And from there there are all these school records about the women. For example, during wars, these records were treated differently. So, for example, in World War II, stevens College not only was a college, it also took in high school students and the stories behind who they took in the dormitories due to the war. Those are there and I can trace the parents where they were living, who admitted them. I even have an adoption case that just happened at Stevens, even though the person was from Oklahoma. Oh, interesting. So there's a lot of ways of using these records to trace a parent, trace an orphanage, trace an adoption, trace Native American assimilations and trace African American family units. Those are just some of the examples. Which one do you want to talk about?
John Brandt:What about the Native American assimilations? That seems really interesting that you would use the school records on that.
Kathleen:So the Native American Assimilation Project Across America took Native American children to these schools. They were to be educated and assimilated into the European way. I have followed school records where they have gone in the Native American community and they have children cemeteries at the Native American schools by tracing the Native American cemeteries at these assimilated schools, where we can find also which school they were placed in, information of who their parents were and also when they were admitted, how they did in school. Did they go to a tech school afterwards? This is not just for Native Americans. That same process was done in African Americans and in the orphanages during the orphan trains.
John Brandt:Okay, so what years are we talking about?
Kathleen:As early as 1819, we can actually follow the Indian Civilization Act where they wanted the Native Americans to be European trained by 1879, we did a lot of change.
John Brandt:Can we pause for a second and say that one more time?
Kathleen:In 1819, there was the Indian Civilization Act.
John Brandt:Okay, let's just stop for a minute and appreciate that America had a Civilization Act and I imagine that's using civilization as a verb, that they were civilizing somebody.
Kathleen:That's exactly what it was doing. They funded the missionaries and schools that were aimed at civilizing Native Americans by educating them in the Euro, and they did that by removing them from their family. In general, yes.
John Brandt:We can sum it up that you were saying the missionaries Christian missionaries traffics children from Native American homes into boarding schools where they were prepared to be what civilized?
Kathleen:Euro-American civilized. Let's continue. A little bit more about the Native American side. By 1879, we had the Carlisle Indian Industrial Schools. So now we wanted to prepare them this was in Pennsylvania to give them off-reservation boarding. The federal contracts were designed to become a model for the other Native Americans back in the reservation.
John Brandt:Now the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, I think was noted for its severe physical, emotional and sexual abuse of the Native American children in its care.
Kathleen:Actually, all of them were yeah, um, forced assimilation.
John Brandt:And uh oh, the, the school's founder, I guess, of the carlisle indian industrial school, had killed the indian in him and saved the man that's the kind of brainwashing that was done right civilization.
Kathleen:Yeah, we did, we digress okay because we are really talking about the school records right.
John Brandt:So what records what?
Kathleen:yes, so those school records exist up to about 1970s and for the native americans and that does not include the Native American territory in Oklahoma or others. Those records also included others who lived in the territory, like the African-Americans who lived in that territory because they were ex-slaves. Those records are mostly online. I normally go to FamilySearchorg. Those are there and you can follow the family lines and it also tells you who was the actual parent. So if you have been married two or three times, that's in there. Wow, the age of the children.
John Brandt:You're talking about the from the industrial, from the Carlisle industrial or all.
Kathleen:No, no, this is just the Freedmen Bureau records. After the Civil War there was the Freedmen Board really pushed for education of all people. There was never really a federal law that said that this was necessary, but about 1866 forward we can find African-Americans who were being educated in school records. Georgia has some great ones. You can see theirs online. The Indian Territory Also. Those are online at FamilySearchorg the early school records and I follow a lot of African-Americans from that Arkansas, oklahoma Indian territory through early school records the 1860s.
John Brandt:I thought that I would bring up just a kind of full circle on where we began with the forced assimilation of the Native Americans. And they recently, a conference of Catholic bishops, formally apologized for the church's role in the boarding school system in 2024. They thought an apology might be necessary.
Kathleen:The United States is not good at accepting history. We're so busy erasing it so it's kind of hard to also acknowledge it when you're very busy erasing American history. This is an issue that we have had through the Reconstruction era. Even post-Reconstruction era. There was an extreme abuse in how the education systems worked for the African Americans, especially in the South. But the records are there and we can trace them because often there is a financial component to them.
John Brandt:Right, so the receipts are still there.
Kathleen:There are a lot of school records also.
John Brandt:Okay. So one of the things that I found with and I'm just switching topics here real quick before I jump out a window found with and I'm just switching topics here real quick before I jump out a window. One of the things I found that was interesting was when I was doing my own family research was I found a high school yearbook with my mom in it. So let's talk about yearbooks for a second. Are they useful or are they more just like? Oh, that was funny. You know, grandma was a looker or Uncle John was obviously involved in illicit activities during high school.
Kathleen:Yearbooks, first of all, give you the where was my ancestor at that time? So they place an ancestor in a year at a place. Sometimes we use those when we're not sure even the family is still around, because we can't find records. Go to a yearbook and see was the child still there? So that's one of the ways we use yearbooks. The others is we can follow who they were.
Kathleen:I recently did a yearbook job on Arthur Strom, and the family had lost all of his activities, and he was an Olympic contender in skiing, he was a huge football player, he was all of this thing a horseback rider, and I was able to use the yearbook to really unearth what he was doing at the time and to reconstruct his history. So yearbooks have been around for a long time and they are excellent, especially our college yearbooks and high school yearbooks. The younger ones just gives us those pictures we get to see how our ancestors looked. My father was also in every yearbook.
Kathleen:Now, my mother went to a Mennonite school, and so she didn't have that kind of a yearbook. Her name, though, was in the yearbook because they did proper things for women in the Mennonite community in Kansas, and that was let the women tell you their favorite recipes. My mother was not only in the yearbook but her favorite recipes from the high school book was posted in the local newspaper. But it tells me more about it and my mother actually had a degree in home economics. That was one of her degrees and I thought that was really cute. She never told me that she was posted in these little snippets in the newspaper or in the school book.
John Brandt:So how does that work with her sister putting lima beans in spaghetti? I'm just asking for a friend. Did she not pass any of this on to her sister?
Kathleen:No, her younger sister was not a cooker.
John Brandt:Just checking Okay.
Kathleen:I use yearbooks almost always for women because we don't get enough information on women. So if you haven't looked at the women's yearbooks and I'm talking again back to 1787.
John Brandt:And is it because of the women's schools that the yearbooks offer so much more information than public records would? Because they weren't allowed to vote. So that's one less record. They weren't. They weren't owning businesses and things like that at least not commonly that's correct you don't have the resources.
Kathleen:That's interesting the women's schools took in women from small communities who needed to be fed and housed because their father was off to war, and so those school books might include a junior or a senior, someone as young as 16, because those women's schools were used as boarding schools. So again, I can trace families that way. Which one case I have to tell you? This one case, john, I'm excited. There is a little girl named Helen. Helen was dropped in front of an orphanage at the age of two. Her son knew his mother was adopted but knew nothing except she was raised in an orphanage. I was able to use school records on Helen to follow not only which school she went to here in Kansas City but who adopted her, and follow her school records again into a different state and she ended up at one of the private women's schools and I was able to continue following this orphan, who was never legally adopted but written down as adopted everywhere.
Kathleen:She was not she knew she wasn't, but she didn't know who her biological father was.
John Brandt:Because she was literally dropped off too young to know Right.
Kathleen:Between newspapers, school records, I was able to piece her story together and DNA was able to prove the rest.
John Brandt:How do you think today's records, which are so digitized and often set up so that the student can't be identified in them readily, how is that going to impact, let's say, future genealogists?
Kathleen:So there are always things that you're going to be able to trace. First of all, the school records. Because of social media, we have our schools that we supposedly graduated from readily available.
John Brandt:So what do you mean? Supposedly graduated from.
Kathleen:Because there was a time that there was a school in St Louis Missouri that burned up. Because there was a time that there was a school in St Louis Missouri that burned up and all of a sudden a whole lot of people graduated from that school because the records were burned up and so there was no way to prove whether or not they did or did not. And I have my father literally had friends who claimed that when we moved to Kansas City that said, oh, we graduated from this school and they knew he didn't graduate from this school. So these people did my father he graduated from a different school but they would claim it so a lot.
Kathleen:Yes, I have my father's school records and it also covers all of his sports activities.
John Brandt:Okay, okay, that's some proof there, good.
Kathleen:So what I say supposedly is because that is always a windfall for people who need a degree was that when the records were destroyed before, you could use them and just make up your own diploma. Your own, yes.
John Brandt:But it was lost of course, Of course.
Kathleen:So now though things are digitized, we do have this on social media that I graduated from the University of Michigan and this year, I guess that's a semi-permanent record at least. It is a semi-permanent record, once proven, because me saying it does not make it true.
John Brandt:And there's a whole lot of other things that will go into. It is with AI, and there's a whole lot of other things that will go into it is with AI, and I mean there's a whole can of worms there that I would think that future genealogists are going to have to sift through.
Kathleen:It's a lot more work. Now, personally, I have all of my school records because my mother, a librarian, cataloged them in our home, so I have all of my transcripts. Does not mean it's digitized for the future, so it's up to us to scan them and to digitize them.
John Brandt:Yeah, she did call that an evidence file, though why an evidence file? She was. She seemed to feel like she needed to indemnify herself when it came to raising you. No, and I found in, found in my bucket of my box of things that my mother saved. I have scans and I've scanned mine in from kindergarten and I found it somewhat disturbing Some of the notes that were included from the teachers. So that'll be something you and I can talk about over some wine.
Kathleen:Well, it can't be any worse than my brother Todd. My brother Todd had all kinds of notes in his school records and again my mother cataloged all of ours.
John Brandt:Yeah, again, you're working into the area of evidence for future hearings. All right, do you want to mention anything else coming up or anything else that you want to cover?
Kathleen:Yeah, I said one other thing, john. You didn't mention when to find these records.
John Brandt:Well, where do you find them?
Kathleen:A lot of these records are no longer with the schools. They are in archives. For example, I looked for both county archives for the little girl named Helen.
John Brandt:Right.
Kathleen:I found some school records in a library, in our central library, for other cases, Right. And the same with the yearbook that I reconstructed. I used archives out in the state of Washington His archives, and then most of the information on their school records were there. So in addition to online records search like familysearchorg, you have to go to the local community when we're looking for school records.
John Brandt:And I would assume, if there are any churches that have schools attached, that you need to keep those in mind as well, not just public schools. We think public schools, but there's probably plenty of people in private schools.
Kathleen:Yes, but we have to find out where are the schools' archives. Now a lot of schools have been closed down, so where did those archives go to?
John Brandt:Probably the Department of Justice in some cases, I would think.
Kathleen:No, John, that was the wrong answer.
John Brandt:Wrong answer, John? I would hope Sometimes.
Kathleen:I've contacted the school boards to see if they have a track of where they sent records to. Also.
John Brandt:Okay, so let's say goodbye then now. Goodbye, bye, john. Well, congratulations, you made it to the end of another episode. Thanks so much for staying. Thanks to Chewy Chewbacca Brand, our part-time monkey dog, for his unwavering lack of interest in anything we're doing. The theme song for Hittin' the Bricks was written and performed by Tony Fistknuckle and the Flippity Jibbits Watch for their next appearance in the basement of Joe's Volcano. Do you have?
