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The WPA and Its Impact on Family History

What do the Bryce Canyon Airport Hangar in Bryce Canyon, Utah, the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California, and the Norfolk Botanical Garden in Norfok, Virginia, all have in common? They are all Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects, created to ease the financial burdens of millions of unemployed Americans affected by the Great Depression. But did you know this initiative also included projects that have greatly impacted family history research?

The WPA and its impact on family history research
Norfolk Botanical Gardens, photo courtesy of MamaGeek at Wikimedia Commons.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA was just one of many Great Depression relief programs that put unemployed Americans (mostly men) to work building roads, bridges, schools, playgrounds, post offices, hospitals, dams, and other resources still in use today. The projects went beyond basic infrastructure. Unemployed creative arts and academic professionals such as writers, actors, musicians, and painters were given jobs writing and producing plays or creating murals designed to celebrate American heritage, among other tasks.

The WPA and its impact on family history research
“The Old Days” by Edwin Boyd Johnson, a 1941 WPA mural in Tuscola, Illinois Post Office. Courtesy Wikimedia commons.

One significant program under this umbrella was Federal Project Number One, which had five different focuses: Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theater Project, Federal Writer’s Project, and Historical Records Survey. While all of these programs served noble purposes and helped the country recover, the Historical Records Survey is the program of most interest to genealogists.

The Historical Records Survey was the smallest endeavor of Federal Project Number One, but its impact on the field of genealogy is one of the greatest. Its purpose was to identify, collect, and conserve the United States’ historical records.

WPA employees visited courthouses, archives, historical societies, town halls, vital statistics offices, and public and university libraries to compile and analyze inventories of state and county records, manuscript collections, newspapers and archives. Why? “To conduct a national records survey consisting of guides to every state’s manuscript collections and various federal records, plus a coast-to-coast master index of the collections.” They created indexes of these collections and in some cases even transcribed them. You may have used records created by the WPA without even knowing it. Some of the most useful include:

  • Federal and state census indexes
  • Indexes to vital records (births, marriages, and deaths)
  • Burial listings of cemeteries
  • Indexes of naturalization, military, and school records
  • Indexes to newspapers
  • Inventories of records located in county courthouses
  • Historical narratives of slaves, immigrants, Native Americans and other groups as part of the American Folklore Project

While not all states participated or were included, many Americans saw value in continuing these efforts beyond simple economic recovery. When the WPA project was terminated in 1943, many state historical societies and archives picked up where the government left off, creating microfilms of their records and making them available for use. Unfortunately, not all were cared for properly and some were even intentionally destroyed in later years. Thankfully, with the rise of the internet, many of the surviving indexes are now making their way online.

Where to find WPA-created records

No one single repository exists for all the records and indexes created by the WPA. Historical and genealogical societies and local history societies have many of these materials in their collections, though the quantity varies depending on the size of the repository and collection. Some WPA collections are difficult to locate because they weren’t always cataloged as WPA-created works. Some search strategies for finding these materials are:

  • By state or jurisdiction in library catalogs by title or keyword subject searches using the search terms “(Name of Jurisdiction) –Works Project Administration or Works Progress Administration”

For example, typing “Tennessee WPA” in the “keyword” search box in the Family History Library catalog at FamilySearch.org yielded these results:

  • Google – search for state name and WPA records in search box
  • State and county historical societies – check their website and resources in the state you are conducting research
  • Local libraries as well as major genealogical research facilities such as:

The WPA Historical Records Survey produced a large amount of information about records that may have otherwise been lost. Family historians continue to benefit from the diligence and work of those employed during the recovery from a dark period of U.S. history. There is a wealth of information ranging from finding aides to family history narratives that, when added to the genealogist’s arsenal of tools, can help to dig deeper in his family history. Spend some time browsing online repositories in the area of the United States in which your ancestors lived, and see what WPA records were created that might enhance your family history research.

If you are interested in learning more about your family history — whether you're just interested in names, dates, and places, or if you want to add historical details and context to their lives — the experts at Legacy Tree Genealogists are here to help! Contact us today for a free consultation.

Sources:

History, “1933 FDR Creates the WPA,” This Day in History, www.history.com, accessed March 2017.

Wikipedia, “Works Progress Administration,” https://en.wikipedia.org, accessed March 2017.

National Archives, “Records of the Work Projects Administration [WPA],” https://www.archives.gov, accessed March 2017.

Bryan L. Mulcahy, “Works Progress Administration (WPA) Historical Records Survey,” 14 March 2011, http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~flmgs/articles/Works_Projects_AdministrationMarch2011_BM.pdf, accessed April 2017.

Paula Stuart-Warren, “Good Works: WPA Projects,” Family Tree Magazine, 3 November 2009, www.familytreemagazine.com, accessed March 2017.

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Five Tips for Deciphering Old Handwriting

5 tips for deciphering old handwriting in ancestor research

One of the hot topics of debate among parents and educators these days is whether it is necessary for today’s computer-age students to learn cursive handwriting. Given the time investment required, is it important enough to continue to be taught in our public schools? If professional genealogists and historians were to weigh in on the subject, we would vote with a resounding Yes! 

Historical documents that are fundamental to our nation’s history and laws, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were written in cursive. And what about handwritten letters from grandpa sent home from the war, or great-grandma’s gingersnap cookie recipe, to say nothing of actual genealogical research in original documents? Some would argue that soon optical character recognition (OCR) technology will be able to take care of reading and deciphering these records for us, but in the meantime, we’ve got to do it the old-fashioned way.

Even if you were taught growing up to write with cursive handwriting, it can still be tricky to read!

Here are five tips to help you tackle those difficult to read handwritten documents that will inevitably cross your path on your discovery of your own family history:

1. Read the entire document quickly to get the context. Even if you feel like you don’t understand anything on the page, your eyes will start to get familiar with the handwriting, and you will begin to recognize some words.

2. Write out the alphabet using the scribe’s handwriting. Make a cheat sheet of sorts, creating each letter the way the scribe does. One way to do this is to trace the strokes of each letter with your finger to get the feel of the way the scribe writes. The lines where the scribe begins a letter are often thicker than where he stops, helping you follow the direction the scribe took to make the letter. If you're really dedicated to getting the full experience, you can even purchase a historic style dip pen, nib, and inkwell for only a few dollars online or through a local art shop.

3. Leave blanks for words or letters that you don’t know. As you start to transcribe the document, write down each word, but don’t spend a lot of time on a word or letter that is giving you trouble. Use placeholders for the letters you can't figure out («st_e») and move on. Continue to the end of the document and come back to those spots later when you have seen more of the forms and context of the document.

4. Look for common words or phrases. There are many options. Look for the word “the.” Months of the year are also usually easy to read and contain many letters of the alphabet to compare to. Learn about common phrases used in the type of document you are looking at, such as wills and land deeds. Becoming familiar with these boilerplate terms and clauses can give you several words or phrases with which to compare other words and letters. For example:

Wills:

  • Often, the very first line in a will is “In the name of God”
  • “I give and bequeath to my beloved wife…”
  • “my last will and testament”

tips for reading old handwriting in tracing family treesDeeds:

  • “This indenture made this …[date]” often begins a land deed.
  • The words “grantor,” “grantee,” and “appurtenances”
  • “Know all men by these presents…”

deciphering old handwriting in genealogy research

  • “In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this [date]”
  • “Signed sealed and delivered”

5. Remember that spelling, punctuation, and capitalization were not standardized until the 19th century. Something that is helpful to keep in mind when dealing with early American documents is that spelling, punctuation, and capitalization were not as important to early Americans as they are to us today. It wasn’t until 1806, when Noah Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language –  the first American lexicon to define spelling – that spelling began to become more uniform, and even then, it took years to catch on. This was largely because basic education was not totally compulsory everywhere in the United States until all the way in the 1920s. As a result, the following are important considerations:

  • Words were often spelled phonetically, the way they sounded. Local accents could also affect the way a word was spelled; for example, the surname Harrington could become Arrington. This is even more common when an ancestor in a record was an immigrant from a non-English-speaking country. The German surname Schneider may have become Snyder, Snider, Schnieder, or any number of other variations.
  • A person’s name could be spelled several different ways within the same document.
  • Punctuation was seldom used, and when it was, it was used haphazardly. Dashes or equal signs were often used at the end of a line, after an abbreviation, or to show the word extended to the next line.
  • The first word in a sentence may or may not start with a capital letter; sometimes words in the middle of the sentence are capitalized. Names were not always capitalized.
  • Clerks often used abbreviations, substitutions, and contractions, even with proper names. For example:
    • Wm for William, Danl for Daniel, Geo for George
    • Superscripts were used in the abbreviations such as Junr or Esqr and Danl
    • substituting “y” for “i”
      • dyed = died
      • eyther = either
      • Catherine = Catheryn
    • adding e to ends of words
      • sole = soul
      • doe = do
      • sume = sum

Being able to read old handwriting and transcribe the contents of wills, deeds, vital records, and other period writings are skills that are important to a genealogist but also to historians and anyone desiring to make connections with the past. With practice and patience, the process will become easier, and you too will be able to unlock the mysteries captured inside these precious pieces of the past.

The experts at Legacy Tree Genealogists can help you read, transcribe, and even translate the documents necessary for learning more about your ancestors. Contact us today for a free consultation.