Spelling was a thing-- if you go back far enough into the early 1800s, many of the people were not literate.

And oftentimes their census records or whatever-- any kind of records, for that matter.

It might be probate record even-- was spelled the way the person who was writing it down heard it or thought it would be.

And they didn't always get it right.

[folk instrumental music] Historically, genealogical research has been a difficult endeavor.

In recent years, as libraries and local archives have made more information available online, and many websites have launched to help people with their research, genealogy has become easier and more popular.

Our guest today is Blanche McKinney, a native of Southwest Missouri, who worked alongside her husband, Edgar McKinney, for nearly 60 years to trace the genealogy of one of the area's earliest settlers, Henry McKinney.

Join us as we talk about her genealogical journey and some of the many resources available to researchers today.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Well, Thanks FOR joining me today.

And this going to be a very interesting show to me because I've always been-- my sister was particularly interested in genealogy.

I wasn't so much because I never could understand all the work that went into it because it's a hard thing to do.

There's a lot of work.

And-- but before we get started with all that, why don't you give me yet little bit of background about yourself, where you're from, and-- Well, I grew up in the Ozarks.

And I have taught school forever.

I've actually taught 50 years, which I would never have thought I would teach 50 years.

JIM BAKER: [laughs] I did public schools 35 years, although I taught university classes during the evenings much of that time.

And then thought I'd retired when we moved to West Plains in '94.

But the university down there on the campus at West Plains found out what degrees I had.

So I taught another 15 years for them and for Missouri Baptist University over at Mountain View, that campus.

But my husband, Ed McKinney, had a PhD in history.

And he was the head of the History Department at the West Plains campus for many years.

And we've always been interested in genealogy, particularly my husband with his family.

JIM BAKER: Right.

Whenever we were first married, we knew that there were a lot of McKinneys in Texas County.

But we didn't know quite how they were related, and they didn't know.

Everybody would say, well, we're some sort of cousins you know.

But who knows what.

And so Ed decided he was going to figure it out.

And I know the first thing we started with, my father had a country store.

And Ed came into the store one day, and he took a big long sheet of butcher paper.

And I think it was about four or five feet long.

And he went to talk to three of his elderly relatives at that time, who he thought would know as much as anybody.

Well, they were pretty good.

Although, they thought some of their half brothers were cousins.

You know, they were a little mixed up.

But it was pretty close.

It got us started.

And then we started working on finding census records for families.

And in those days-- and that would have been in the '60s-- you had to go search out those census records then.

It was not easy to find.

Today you can get them straight off the internet, and it's not that difficult.

But in those days, it was hard to find them.

And so we started searching out census records and figuring out who was whose parents and all the way down.

And eventually we spent a lot of time traveling.

We went to Tennessee four times because we knew the McKinneys had come from Tennessee originally.

There are still McKinneys there, but we cannot establish any relationship with them.

They're very nice people.

We really grew very attached to some of them.

But-- and we talked to a lot of relatives and got their scope on it.

But once the internet came along, then it was a lot easier to figure out.

Eventually, we put all of it together.

And Ed and I were almost finished with the complete-- we were going to do five generations.

Because if you go to the sixth generation, you get into various things.

First of all, there are so many of them that it would be difficult to get all the six generations of this family figured out.

Also, generally speaking, publication of living people on a genealogy chart is not usually a kind of thing that is done.

So we didn't want to put too many living people on it.

JIM BAKER: Right.

I only know of one living person that's in this book that we did.

This is what we finally came up with.

We had it almost finished when he had died.

And I knew that one thing he would want done was to finish this up and get it in print.

So I finished it and got it printed not long-- I had it printed within about six months after he died.

And it's 512 pages.

And it has a lot of McKinneys in it and a lot of information.

JIM BAKER: (CHUCKLING) A lot of McKinneys.

A lot of McKinney's.

And it's basically 60 years of work that we did on it.

I got to know your husband pretty well at West Plains.

And he was very meticulous.

And I'm sure-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Yes, he was.

--he-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Was very picky.

I mean, he was really picky this whole way through it-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Both of us were.

--which I guess would be a characteristic for genealogy.

BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Oh, you have to be.

You'd have to be.

Right.

That's one of the things you have to watch too, even today.

If you look on ancestry.com, don't believe everything you come across in family listings because people post their family listings how they think it is.

And they're not always right.

One of them that has-- I have worked on trying to correct for people a few times.

The oldest person that we originally had in this book, Henry McKinney, we don't know who his wife was.

We have never been able to find her name.

I'm sure if we could get to her tombstone, which we know where it is, but we can't get to it-- and I'll explain that in a minute-- we could probably get her name.

But we do not know her name.

And several people have posted her name as Mary Robbins.

But if you look carefully into the records, Mary Robin-- Mary Robbins did marry a Henry McKinney, which is what this one is in Tennessee, North Carolina where they were about the same time.

But it's a different Henry McKinney.

And if you search it down, you'll find that they are buried in Cookeville, Tennessee, both that Henry and Mary Robbins, their son, who is James, who was-- our Henry McKinney's oldest son's name was also James.

So I can see where they get confused on it.

But a lot of people have that on internet.

And I've tried to correct several of them.

And some of them have taken it off after I have corrected them.

But that's one of the things you're going to find sometimes are mistakes that take it with a grain of salt, you know.

JIM BAKER: Well, yeah.

So, yeah.

I would think-- we were talking a little bit, too, about how the spelling of names changes over time and how people used to use phonetics to get the name how they would spell it out and everything.

So it's different.

BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Right.

So that would have to be something that really confuses the situation.

It does in many cases.

And a lot of people will say, well, that can't be my family because it's not spelled the way we spell it.

Spelling was a thing-- if you go back far enough into the early 1800s, many of the people were not literate.

And oftentimes their census records or whatever, or any kind of records for that matter-- it might be probate record even-- was spelled the way the person who was writing it down heard it or thought it would be.

And they didn't always get it right.

I know I have just last week worked on a Farris family.

They spell it F-A-R-R-I-S.

I find many cases for them it's spelled F-A-I-R-E-S as though it's fairies.

JIM BAKER: Fairies.

Uh-huh.

In my own family, my maiden name was Scheets.

And my family spells it S-C-H-E-E-T-S. Part of our family has actually dropped the C. Originally, it ended in a Z.

And before that, I understand it was S-C-H-E-U-T-Z.

So we've come a long ways with that name.

And names do change, you know, You can always-- always check.

I want to get back a little bit later about how you go through the whole process.

But it seems to me, like, once you get these names and the spellings are going a little haywire, and you're kind of going off in this direction and then that direction, I suppose you just have to have a whole bunch of patience.

You do.

And you need to watch your dates on it when a person was born and died, And if you can't, who they married, you know.

And if you can find lists of children, that helps.

Census records, if you look at census records carefully, often you can find many of those things on the census records that will keep you on the straight and narrow.

But sometimes even those can be a little confusing too.

Were most of the census records-- as you go back generations, were those handwritten or how-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Yes, right.

Right.

And so then you got-- Somebody went out house to house and wrote it down, you know, how they heard it.

Which introduces a whole bunch of error-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Yes, it does-- --into the process because it's the census taker that's really recording everything, right?

BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Mm-hmm.

So well.

And really, census records are not-- I don't put too much stock in them past 1850.

Now, there is 1840 and so on back.

But they only listed-- before 1950, they only listed the head of the household.

And the other people in the household were just listed by age and how many of them there were.

And that gets a little confusing.

But from 1850 on, you find it-- of course, one of the big problems with census, too, is that the 1890 census burned at one time.

So there are a few 1890s, but they are so scarce that don't ever count on finding an 1890 census.

Was there variation in the quality of the census records, depending on, like, a rural area versus an urban area?

Or was the census pretty consistent?

It's pretty consistent, uh-huh.

There's not much difference between one area and the other that I can tell.

So you didn't have to worry that-- at least that was one variable you didn't have to-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Right.

--take into account, among the many variables that were out there.

Let's go back and talk a little bit about-- I'm kind of fascinated.

You send a thing into the station, and it was kind of here's the things you need to do to do genealogy.

And I thought, well, it might be a really good thing for the viewers if people that are interested in doing genealogy.

It's, like, I wouldn't know where to start.

I mean, I would just be totally lost.

And so why don't we just you do a genealogy 101 lecture.

We'll both kind of go through the process.

And then I know you wanted to talk about some sources like the Daughters of American Revolution.

So why don't you walk us through that a little bit.

So I think-- Well, probably a good place to start, if a person doesn't have too many ideas, is to go to your local library because most libraries subscribe to ancestry.com and other things.

There are some sources that are free on the internet, but not-- I think Ancestry is probably the one that is most used.

And most libraries-- it's fairly expensive to take for yourself.

I don't recall, something like $180 a year I pay for it.

But libraries usually have it.

And you can use it for free there.

Also, if you need to, find somebody that you know who is pretty good at genealogy and enlist their help.

I have assisted a lot of people in looking up materials, like this Farris family I told you about recently.

But if you can find somebody that's good-- I also strongly recommend Daughters of the American Revolution or Sons of the American Revolution.

There is a chapter of the Sons here in town.

We're still working on getting one in West Plains.

But we do have a very active Daughters of the American Revolution.

And of course, to be in that organization, you have to prove that someone in your ancestry was in the American Revolution, preferably on the American side.

[laughs] Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, for most people, unless your family are recent immigrants, you're probably going to find at least one ancestor who is.

And for most people, there are various ones, you know.

I have-- I know three of mine.

And, you know-- and that's not unusual.

I'm not an oddball person to do that kind of thing.

But usually you can find someone in the background of that family that has ancestry who taught-- who fought in the American Revolutionary War.

And that's a good place.

And if you need help, there's-- every one of those organizations has somebody who will help you with it.

So they just maintain a database, essentially, of all the records.

Right.

There is a database that includes all the people that have been entered as ancestors who taught in the revolution.

And if you can get back far enough that you can get onto that database and find your ancestor's number, you've got it made.

All you have to do then is prove-- you probably have to submit birth certificates and marriage certificates and things like that.

But it's pretty well done if you can get to that point.

So I always thought when you start-- and I think you'd kind of mentioned it one time about when you go back to an original source, like the oldest person in the room type thing, you're pretty much depending on them to be fairly accurate, right?

You are.

How do you double check or cross check that?

Well, again, you can go to census records and other records that you find in order to do that.

But it is good to check because sometimes some of us get a little hazy maybe in our old age.

Well, if somebody asked me about something now, I have no idea what I would say.

It's hard to tell.

Yeah, right.

I can understand that.

But it is difficult sometimes to find.

So when you're cross checking, do you kind of look at dates?

Mm-hmm.

Like, so if someone says, well, back in '04, we did x, and then you look at the census records, and there's-- Right.

Look at 1900 and 1910, and see if there is an opportunity to change in that period of time, as 1904 would be there.

And then if it fits in there, it sounds, OK, well, this is probably-- Yeah, it could be.

Probably pretty good.

And sometimes you can find other records of things, too.

You know, like, there was one person in this book that we found.

I had no idea.

Ed and I, neither one had any idea about him.

But he had grown up down on Jacks Fork, pretty well down in the boonies of the Ozarks.

And he had grown up apparently doing hunting and trapping.

By the time he got-- I don't know-- 18 or so, he joined the army, or was drafted or something.

Anyway, he wound up in the army.

And while he was in the army, he was there during World War I.

And I really can't understand what the deal was.

I haven't checked into this.

Ed would probably have known, but I don't know.

Ed knew all these historical things.

He was my instant historical reference.

But he was assigned to a base in Maine, of all places.

And he looked around and realized that there was a lot better chance for hunting and trapping in Maine than there was down in the Ozarks.

And so when he got out of the army, he set up a camp, a hunting camp in Maine.

And he charged people to come and stay there.

And he would take them on hunting and trapping expeditions.

He also sold bears and wildcats to zoos and circuses during the time.

And he got famous enough that he wrote articles for various things so that he became rather well known for it.

And there's a book written about him we found.

So the book pretty well goes through a lot of his life.

And so we use that a great deal.

Also, once he retired in Maine, since he was from this area, his brother lived in Sarcoxie.

And so he moved to Sarcoxie, Missouri, here in Missouri and lived his last few years there.

He was important enough that if you go to the Sarcoxie Library today, down in the main part of Sarcoxie-- it's a small library.

But they have one little room that is devoted just to him and all of his stuff.

Huh.

Are government records, like vital statistics and different things like that, where you have death certificates-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Yes, death certificates are good.

Those are all good documentation to have.

Oh, they are very good.

States usually keep the death certificates.

Right.

And they are very helpful.

I know in my case, I did not know who my great-great grandfather was for many years on one-- on the side that I used to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, actually.

but my great-- my great grandfather died in Oregon.

And eventually I got his death certificate from Oregon.

And death certificates usually list father and mother.

Right.

And I got my great-great grandfather's name off of that.

So, if you-- you know, if you're going back very far, look for a death certificate.

It's easy to get here in Missouri.

But if it's another state, usually you can write and get it, or you can sometimes get it by internet.

It depends on the state and what their policies are.

Do some of the commercial, like the Ancestry things, do they utilize what we're just now talking about?

BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Mm-hmm.

They go in and create a giant database.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

If you put your name into Ancestry, it will give you a series of things that that person is listed in.

And one of them will sometimes be a death certificate.

And you can go back-- you can go to it.

Sometimes it will even be an obituary that was published in a paper, and you can go to it.

JIM BAKER: Oh, that'd be-- And that's very helpful.

JIM BAKER: Right.

You know, sometimes it may be marriage records or probate records or land records.

And there are lots of things-- you get a lot of choices, usually, down the right-hand side of things about that person that you can go to.

Yeah, I was thinking of the obituaries.

There's always a listing of survived by different relatives.

And so you could end up-- so essentially, it's almost like doing doctoral research.

I was just thinking, you go backwards , and you start kind of getting every source you can.

And I'm sure Dr. McKinney appreciated doing that.

Yes, we went through that with his dissertation.

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

So you find all these names, and you have to follow up on each one until you get back to the source of where everything starts.

BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Right.

right.

And then you say, OK, this is about as far as I'm going to be able to dig.

You know, one interesting thing on this, too.

We started with Henry McKinney because that was as far back as we could get while Ed was still living.

Mm-hmm.

Interestingly enough, after he died, and I published this, I lucked into Henry McKinney's ancestors.

And I am now able to trace Henry McKinney all the way back to the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

JIM BAKER: Wow.

And I just wish Ed could know that, you know.

JIM BAKER: [chuckles] So what I've done with this, I have added an extra sheet in this material.

It's a loose sheet.

But this is Henry McKinney's material that goes back.

And I try to put this in every book that anybody requests from me.

But I went four generations back.

Well, when you-- but I don't want to miss out on talking a little bit about the book itself.

What-- as you did all this stuff, what were the surprises that you ran into?

What was something that really surprised you or-- for bad or-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: I can't think of too many surprises.

--for worse?

Or you just kind of-- Almost everything is.

I mean, sometimes-- I guess one surprise, this one family line I had just checked out.

And I was pretty big on if I found a person that I thought I could get in touch with that knew something about the family.

One lady-- one number I called, I got hold of a lady who was in her 90s.

And she knew all of this background in her family.

And that was kind of a surprise, you know, because I did not expect to find somebody in her 90s who knew all of these things.

But-- and she was very clear.

I mean, she had a very good memory.

Sometimes we get older, we lose our memory a little bit.

But she had not lost anything.

And I can't think of too many surprises.

There's one fellow listed in here supposed to have worked on the Golden Gate Bridge.

I found information about him.

There's one guy in this who was city manager for-- oh, I can't think of a town in Florida, one of the towns with a hurricane came through recently.

But he was city manager for that town for, like, 30 years.

Did not have any idea about that.

And there was a group of them.

Many of the people in this area left this area to work.

Now, around the 1900s, there was a big lumber operation down around-- centered around a little town of Grandin, down near Poplar Bluff.

A lot of the people in Ed's family went down there and worked until it quit.

And when it quit-- it was a major operation.

They had-- they built a town for it.

They had church and school and built stores and everything, even built a railroad into it to haul off the logging material.

But once it shut down, some of them moved up to West Eminence and worked in a place there.

A number of them left there and went to Washington to work in the logging industry.

So there is a large number of Ed's relatives, distant relatives, who live there.

But it's interesting.

How we-- I think one of the reasons Ed was so interested in this, when he was growing up, he always went to his grandparents' house on Sunday afternoons with his parents.

And they lived right-- just a few steps away from the Ozark Cemetery, which is not related to Ozark Missouri.

It's down-- it's five miles out of Houston, Missouri.

But it's called Ozark Cemetery.

And Ozark Cemetery has Ed's fifth-great grandfather buried there.

And all of his grandparents from there on down are buried in that cemetery.

And that's where Ed is now.

And he would listen to his relatives.

And they would go around to the different tombstones and talk about each of the people there when he was young.

And he was probably, you know, from seven, eight years old on.

And he-- Ed listened.

And I think he was a historian even then and didn't know it.

[laughs] He listened to all of their stories.

And that was where he got really interested in family history.

That's smart.

That's interesting, yeah.

Uh-huh.

Well, that's really kind of-- well, that's kind of a nice way of having the history of your family-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Uh-huh, it is.

--being explained to you.

If you go to Ozarks Cemetery, you'll find a lot of McKinneys in it.

One of Ed's favorite stories is one of his relatives was being caretaker for that cemetery at one time.

And he was there working.

And a man and a woman came and were copying down various things from tombstones.

And the lady was still copying things.

And the man wandered over to this relative and introduced himself.

And the guy introduced himself.

He was Churchill McKinney.

And the man didn't say anything else to Churchill.

He turned around and yelled to his wife.

And said, hey, Ma, I found a live one.

[laughs] There's-- there is actually a live McKinney.

[laughs] Actually a live one here because there were all of these people who were dead there, you know.

And-- but Ed has a lot of stories like that about his family that were fun.

He had one relative whose name-- a lot of people were named after popular political figures or military figures at the time.

He has one relative named General Sheridan McKinney.

Well, I'm sorry to say this, but we're running out of time.

BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Oh, I know.

I mean, we could talk for another hour about that.

But-- BLANCHE MCKINNEY: Could I say just a little about Daughters of the American Revolution?

You sure can.

I belong to that chapter in West Plains.

We have one of the guys-- the guy who's going to be our speaker this next month is Crockett Oaks.

JIM BAKER: Yeah, I know him.

You know Crockett?

JIM BAKER: I know Crockett, yeah.

He's a great guy.

He served in the military, I believe it's 28 years, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, he'd be a good person for people to get to know.

He would be good to talk to.

And I apologize for having to end our conversation.

Thank you very much for being with me.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

We'll be back in a moment.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I'd like to Thank our guest Blanche McKinney for talking with us today.

And we'll see you again next time on another "OzarksWatch Video Magazine."

[folk instrumental music]