Tika & Researching

Sitting on our deck in the sunshine, it's easy to share a lesson on researching with Tika. She's a captive audience.

Following up on researching my ancestor, Stephen Hopkins, a Mayflower passenger, I had made a note to access TAG (The American Genealogist), Volume 73, pages 161-171. Okay, me thinks, we have those books in our EWGS collection so I'll put that on my Library To-Do list.

Then I had an "AHA" moment:  use the Internet! I used Google to quickly find the website for The American Genealogist and found out I could order that 1998 back issue for $10. Okay cool.

Or I could order copies of those pages from the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center for 20cents a page plus $7.50 ordering fee.

Or I could click to the New England Historic Genealogical Society website, AmericanAncestors.org, and access that article there......... IF I was a member (which luckily I am). So I clicked to back issues, to issue 73, and viola! There it was.

The point of this post is yes, I could have put accessing this article on my Library To-Do list (and only paid 10cents a page) but I wanted it now. And I saw it as a use-modern-technology-to-solve-the-problem learning experience.

Did you know that Stephen Hopkins was in Jamestown, Virginia, about 1610? Some ten years before he sailed on the Mayflower. He was aboard the Sea Venture in 1609 when a hurricane wrecked the ship on what is now know as Bermuda. After about six months, Stephen Hopkins began to challenge the authority of the governor and went so far as to organize a mutiny for which he was sentenced to death. He pleaded his case "full of sorrow and tears" and eventually they pardoned him. The fifty castaways survived for ten months and eventually managed to work together to complete construction of two ships which they used to sail to Jamestown. What a story; what a guy.

Tika said she'd rather I'd have done downtown to get the article for she loves riding in the car.