Mining Data

The title "mining data" is wholly a research term that, as a university professor, I'm very familiar with. It is a process of looking at existing data and seeing it from a different perspective. Maybe a new perspective or a tangent of an existing perspective. It is an act of creativity, an act of faith, and an act of patience. In research sometimes mining data provides you with nothing new. Other times it may provide you with small nuggets of valuable information. And yet at other times it may open doors for you that were not imagined.

This past week I started a new personal genealogical research project focusing upon our genealogy. Some of the results I will address in companion blogs over the next few weeks and months. However, what I am doing now started is looking at who our first American ancestors were. I wanted to track who came to America, when they came, where they came from, where they died, and who their first offspring were. I call these two groups the "immigrant Americans" and the "first-generation Americans."

Several years ago at Ellis Island in New York looking at
their passenger lists. None of our family went through
Ellis Island - at least not yet in my research.

It seemed like an inordinately simple task, but I was wrong. Any research project has to have a purpose and a methodology. I described the purpose above - to identify our immigrant Americans and our first-generation Americans. The methodology involved going backwards from myself to my grandparents, and JoAnn's grandparents and create categories within those lines. For example there are, in this research, 2 family lines (first level categories) - (1) McLean and (2) Longcor. For the McLean line I identified 4 ancestor lines (2nd level categories) - (1) McLean, (2) Goff, (3) Merriam, and (4) Johns. For JoAnn I went to (1) Longcor, (2) Plaser, (3) Hardie, and (4) Shaw. I could have broken the ancestor lines down even further, but for this research I deemed that appropriate. Okay, I've lapsed into research jargon and I apologize.

Beginning with McLean ancestor line I systematically went backwards looking at males and then females in each line carefully identifying first who was the immigrant American and then working forward to their son or daughter, who was quite literally the first-generation American. In some cases an individual was first-generation American for their mother or father, but not for both since one spouse was an immigrant American and the other was a first, second, or third-generation American.

My initial effort only addressed male immigrant Americans and male or female first-generation Americans. It didn't take me too long before I realized that was inappropriate. For me, the best part about research is learning how to do it better. I went back to the start and gathered immigrant Americans regardless of their sex. That was an essential task since in some cases immigrant Americans married someone who was not an immigrant American (see below).

What have I learned thus far? While much of what I have learned is for future blogs, I can tell you the number of people in our family line who are immigrant Americans is staggering (there is more detail on this in my next blog). From the McLean Ancestor Line I count, thus far, 17 individuals and 12 first-generation Americans. From the McLean ancestor line we have always said we are "Scottish and Irish," but the truth is, in just this portion of the line we have ancestors from Scotland, England, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Barbados. Only 1, yes just one, member of the McLean ancestor line is Scottish. That is 5.8% of immigrant Americans.

I do not have arrival dates, although, if I'm lucky, at some point I may find some of those. Staying within the McLean family line (that is McLean and Goff combined), I find immigrant Americans born as early as 1575 and as late as 1731. The initial first-generation McLean's were born in 1615. The first ancestor with the name "McLean" was born in 1794 in Moore County, NC. We don't know when his father Angus arrived and if you look at ship records the number of Angus McLean/MacLean/McLain arriving is innumerable. Records of the family were kept in the Moore County Courthouse which burned down following the Civil War.

What I am doing is called "qualitative research," and the reason we do it is because it allows us to become intimate with the information (data). I have become very close to this data and feel a kinship with those names, even if I don't know much about them yet. I didn't feel that kinship before I started the project when I was merely looking at charts and tables. I've invested myself in this project and it is capturing me.