WELCOME

Welcome to the sixth issue of the quarterly online newsletter supplement to "Self Portraits: The Self Family NetLetter," the Website dedicated to Self family research at http://www.selfroots.com

You are receiving this newsletter because you were kind enough to join "Self Seekers: The Self Family Association." We appreciate all of your contributions, large and small, and we hope you will continue to support our page, our surname list, and this newsletter.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

We would like to have your gedcom so that we can add your information to our database. With your permission, we will also list and distribute your gedcom on request (but only with your permission). Please send us gedcoms so that we can start a library that will help others. If you've already submitted one, kindly re-send so that we will have the latest information. We would appreciate being kept informed of new family members as well as other changes.

If you haven't joined our Self Surname Mailing List yet, please subscribe. Instructions will be found on the main page of our Website. Note that we also host the Swindle Surname List as well as listservs for Erath County, TX., King County, TX., Murray County, GA., Grayson County, TX., and Clay County, NC. In addition, we host the King County, TX, Murray County, GA, and Clay County, NC USGenWeb sites. Our three county sites join "Self Portraits" in featuring a handy search engine for locating topics discussed in previous messages posted to their corresponding listserv--please click on the button directly beneath the instructions for joining the listserv on the main page of each site.

If you haven't gone to our supplemental Self site, please do so at your earliest convenience. This site is for Self Seekers only. Feel free to change or update your own profile to enable services that will be of most use to you. For example, you cannot send e-mail unless you provide your e-mail address in the profile. We would especially like you to upload photographs and articles to this new site.

We are proud to be a very large repository of Self information. With three domains, a GenConnect Board, a Listserv, well over 5,000 pages of connected and unconnected Self lines, and over 750 valid e-mail correspondents willing to share information, we are well able to help you with your family research.

Membership fees remain the same in 1999: Regular Member, $12 and Charter Member, $25. If you are a Patron Member, your initial contribution is gratefully acknowledged and good for the lifetime of the "Self Seekers" association.

In 1995, when I first switched from my old text-based Internet account to one that utilized an early version of Mosaic, I eagerly scoured the World Wide Web for sites that could help with our genealogical research. Entering the name "SELF" into my favorite search engine produced lots of "self-help" and "do-it-yourself" pages, but nothing relevant to our family. But when I entered the names of states where our Selfs once lived, I discovered many Websites featuring the spider-web logo of the USGenWeb Project,* and eventually I found my way to that group's main page. Where I had expected names, dates, and viewable/downloadable databases, though, I found just the inevitable list of links that led to pages with more links leading to more pages with even more links. It was only when I studied the structure of the USGenWeb sites that I learned how to utilize this valuable research tool.

SITE STRUCTURE

USGenWeb sites can be plain and utilitarian or as colorful and unique as their coordinators' imagination allows. Some states have certain requirements for their State and County pages such as the inclusion of a logo or the names and e-mail addresses of the State Coordinator and Assistant Coordinator. Others have certain prohibitions: for example, in some states it is illegal to display the State Seal except on official government pages. But almost all USGenWeb sites have several things in common. Among them are a history section, a wealth of links, a place for posting queries, and a list of researchers and their surnames.

The typical history section contains a background and overview of the USGenWeb Project as well as a brief history of the State or County to which the page is devoted. The text may be supplemented by maps, photographs, census records, cemetery records, or facsimiles of documents such as Bible entries, wills or deeds. If you take time to read through this section, you may learn something new about the places your ancestors lived. The descriptions may give you an idea of how they earned their living, how they spent their free time, and perhaps even why they chose to settle and raise their families in that location.

In the links section, you'll find links to the USGenWeb Project, links to nearby counties, and links to resources for the State or County whose page you're viewing. After you read the history section, these links may help you follow new avenues and provide new insights into the lives and migrations of your family.

The heart of the USGenWeb Project state and county pages is its system of surnames and queries. This is where you can find actual names, dates, and locations and contact others who are working on your lines. Surname pages usually contain an alphabetical list of last names and the names and e-mail addresses of their respective researchers. You can add your surnames by contacting the State or County Coordinator. Queries are handled in the same way, although they are usually listed randomly as they are submitted. Many query pages have guidelines for writing queries--formatting preferences and suggestions for what items to include in addition to names and dates. If the site is hosted by RootsWeb, the Coordinator may use the GenConnect system which allows visitors to post their own queries and/or reply to those posted previously. Both manual and GenConnect query systems have their advantages: using GenConnect, you have control over your own queries and responses; submitting queries for manual entry can provide another set of eyes for editing spelling and grammar errors and allow for friendly interaction between you and the Coordinator of the site.

MAKING THE MOST OF USGENWEB SITES

The successful USGenWeb site owes a great deal to its visitors. The best way to find more vital statistics on a USGenWeb site is to contribute to it yourSelf. If you know what counties your ancestors lived in, visit them first. Submit your surnames and post queries there. Remember that queries do not have to be based on the desire to find out information unknown to you. You can post information that you already have (such as Census and Soundex transcriptions) and offer to help others (by doing lookups in books about the county, for example). Even if you know all about your ancestors, you may not be aware of very close relatives who might read your posting and reply to you.

If you know that your ancestors settled in a particular state, but you're unsure of the exact county, you can go to the State page and look for a link to "Unknown Counties." Posting a query to an "Unknown Counties" page may help you locate the county in which your ancestors lived and find the specific information you need by affording you a wider audience of potential respondents.

HOSTING USGENWEB COUNTY PAGES

While we cannot speak for all sites and all Coordinators, we can recommend our own USGenWeb County pages as examples to supplement this article. We host three of these: Clay County, NC; King County, TX; and Murray County, GA. Visit these pages, and you will see that their format, design, features, and amount of information are based on the size, location, and history of the county and the amount of input we get from our visitors. King County--a rural area that never had a large population--is a tiny site that is infrequently updated. Clay County is a medium-sized site whose guests are descendants of those hardy folk who subsisted on small farms in the mountains of Western North Carolina. We have begun a "Vital Records Project" for Clay County where visitors can submit births, marriages, and deaths of their ancestors for inclusion on a dedicated sub-page. Murray County has a lot of traffic and requires almost daily updates. A special feature is a page, similar to our own "Self Revelations," entitled "Tales of Our Murray County Ancestors" offering articles and stories written by Murray County visitors. All three of these sites illustrate the basic offerings of USGenWeb County pages and the influence of those who use them to their best advantage.

Once you visit enough USGenWeb sites and become used to posting and corresponding with new contacts, you may want to host a county yourSelf. Each State page has a list of counties that need adoption. You'll find that the maintenance of your county site requires very little effort in proportion to the enjoyment you'll get from meeting and helping others.

*The USGenWeb Project is not affiliated with USGenWeb, Inc.

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Our list of "Bookmarks and Favorites" includes many, many Websites: cousin homepages, USGenWeb County pages, pages of genealogy-related links, and pages which offer real vital statistics. This article focuses on those in the last category. Names and dates and small personal genealogies can be found on many pages, but only a few sites offer extensive information on hundreds of surnames. Following is a discussion of the excellent features found on Gene Stark's Gendex, Ancestry's Ancestry World Tree, and FamilyTreeMaker's Family Finder Index as well as some of the improvements that we'd like to see in the future.

GENDEX

According to the "Welcome" page, Gene Stark's Gendex site indexes over 8 million names. To get there from this main page, click on the following links as each successive page appears: 1. GENDEX WWW Genealogical Index 2. Access the Index 3. Go to the Surname Index 4. Enter SELF or all of part of the desired surname in the first CGI entry box and click on [SUBMIT] 5. Click on the desired entry in the Index of Surnames What appears next is an alphabetical list of people with the surname you selected. The list is first divided into groups--for example, SELF, AARON--to--SELF, BILLIE followed by SELF, BILLY--to--SELF, CHARLES. Click on the link that contains your ancestor's name, and you will be taken to a further division of that link. Click on this second link that contains the name that you want, and you will see a list of links to individuals. Click on a name, and you will see that person in the context of his or her family. There may be links to that person's ancestry and/or descendants.

The really neat thing about the Gendex entries is that they are portions of larger works, such as Websites or gedcoms; and clicking on the name of an individual takes you right to the relevant section without further searching or scrolling. Gedcoms in particular can be wonderful documents until they become so large that loading and importing take far too much time from you and your processor. For those submitters who want to contribute a gedcom, there is a small program called "Gedcom2HTML" which converts the encoded gedcom into an HTML document that is easy for anyone to read and understand in their Browser without the need for special plug-ins or viewers.

ANCESTRY WORLD TREE

Ancestry's "Ancestry World Tree" currently boasts 9.1 million names in its databases. Those who submit information are promised that Ancestry will never sell it even though it does advertise other records on its fairly expensive CD-ROM collections. From the main page, under the "Free Searches" heading, click on "Ancestry World Tree" and then on [SUBMIT]. You then have a choice between a Basic Search (given name/last name) and an Advanced Search which qualifies the Basic Search with any combination of birth date, birth place, death date, and place of death.

The results of your search are displayed in pages of tables. All the available material is in gedcom format, and clicking on the box in the far right column allows you to download the gedcom and/or contact the submitter by e-mail. Because gedcoms are often quite large, they have been compressed on the Server. You can download each one as either a .zip file or a self-extracting .exe file. The site gives the number of individuals in each gedcome as well as the size of the file--but remember that these files will be much larger once they are expanded, and just a few of them will consume quite a lot of space on your hard disk.

FAMILY FINDER

You can begin your search in FamilyTreeMaker's "Family Finder" 130-million-name database from the main page of "Self Portraits." FamilyTreeMaker, publishers of the popular genealogy software, like Ancestry, has quite a few CDs for sale. However, there are some free databases on their site which are so helpful that the user can spend hours there gleaning tiny bits of information from sites available on the Web.

On the "Family Finder" page, fill in as much of the name as you can of the individual you're seeking or enter just the surname. Uncheck all the boxes except one or both of the following: The Internet or User Home Pages, Message Boards...etc. Everything in these two categories is free with the exception of the Message Boards, Classified Ads, [ ]--you must be a member to access them. The results of both searches are listed in table format. If you checked "The Internet," you will be shown all instances of the individual's name on the Internet. If you checked "User Home Pages," you will be shown all instances of the individual's name on all home pages created by the FamilyTreeMaker interface as well as those on message boards, ads, etc.

There are both positive and negative aspects to the way the results of "Family Finder" are presented. The amount of information is incredible--try entering only SELF as the surname and be prepared to wade through over fifty pages of possible matches. This translates into extremely slow loading time for each page. If you enter just a surname, the given names are displayed in no particular order. A first name beginning with "A" could be on page 30 while one beginning with "T" could be found on the first page. One other source of confusion is that there may be multiple instances of a given name all leading to work by the same submitter. The actual genealogy pages are just wonderful, but I personally question the need for the "Reports," indexes which list names but have no links to the genealogy pages and the lists showing degrees of relationship to the person who is the focus of the research but provide no links to the "descendant trees." A clever feature is the "InterneTree," a java creation which presents one's family in a chart-like format. The viewer can scroll from top to bottom and side to side and zoom in by clicking on a particular name. But once the desired information is located, the user must manually record everything in a text editor or word processor or take notes by hand--the java display has no provision for copy and paste.

SUMMARY

All three genealogy Websites--Gene Stark's Gendex, Ancestry's Ancestry World Tree, and FamilyTreeMaker's Family Finder Index--are excellent resources. You can find an vast amount of information on their pages, so much so that you can become overwhelmed and intimidated by what they have to offer.

One problem that I have encountered with these sites--when searching for just a surname such as "SELF"--is that I have found no good way to know which links and pages I have visited and which are new. At first, I tried to use my Browser Options to increase the number of days before links expire. But it seems that each time information is uploaded to one of these sites, it can change a whole link or page of links from the "visited link" color to that of a link that has not yet been examined. If anyone reading this article can think of a way other than recording the visited links manually, please let me know so that we can all utilize these wonderful resources without a duplication of effort.

Green McClellan Self, 1823-1893, was the son of George Washington Green Self and a Miss Atterbury. He was the grandson of John and Elizabeth Self who migrated to Kentucky from Chester County, SC in the early 1800s. John's brother Edward also moved to Kentucky. The other brother, Ezekial, was tried and acquitted of murdering his wife earlier in Chester County. Green McClellan was a rolling stone. He served in the Army in the Mexican War and later as a Sergeant and Lieutenant in the Union Army during the Civil War. He lived both in Kentucky and Indiana and had children born in two counties of Kentucky and one in Indiana.

His son, George Washington, 1843-1933, served in the same unit, the 9th Kentucky Cavalry, during the Civil War. George suffered snow blindness in the war and applied for a pension in Hart County. He was a Methodist minister.

William Washington, 1867-1948, was a merchant and Post Master at Forestville, the focal point for that area of Hart County. Within a few yards of the post office and store were a sawmill, blacksmith shop, Methodist Church and a one room school.

Mayme, 1906-1995, and Alma, 1911-1993, were William Washington's two youngest children.

You are all familiar with our "Self Family of the Week" page, part of our "Self Portraits" Website and its compilation, Family Record. In reality, these presentations are part of a much larger work--over 2,000 pages in length and maintained in 11 separate documents--that contains all we know about the Selfs that can apparently be tied, through best evidence, to Olde Robert Selfe of Virginia. There are, however, quite a few lines (filling another 2000-3000 pages) whose origins are still undetermined. Some are almost assuredly Robert Selfe descendants, but we're missing important links that could connect them to the rest of the family. Others are either known to have come directly from England (or elsewhere, but mostly England) or have just mysteriously appeared in Census or other records without a single clue as to their past.

We hope to present some of these families as a regular feature since they are actually the ones that need the most work, theorizing, documentation, and discussion. If you have any ideas concerning their ancestry, you can write to us or post them to the SELF listserv (please refer to this online newsletter) or offer them to us for inclusion in the next newsletter--in fact, we would like to present follow-up information in this spot as well.

CHARLES C. SELF--He m. Jan. 27, 1881, Margaret Mitchell.

G. C. SELF--Born June 27, 1854. Died Oct. 22, 1902 in Centerville.

LAVINA SELF--She m. Nov. 17, 1831, Peter Jones.

NOAH SELF--He m. May 29, 1854, Margaret E. Garner.

MINTIE SELF--Born 1887. She m. James Cephas Borders.

MADISON SELF--Madison Self went to KS. He m. Marjorie Elizabeth Casebier.

CHILDREN: Maybelle--Alfred--Benjamin B. (have information)--Madison Campbell, b. Mar. 9, 1861, d. 1942 (have information)

M. A. SELF--She m. Jan. 16, 1898, Walter A. Campbell.

WILLIAM SELF--Born 1831 in GA. He m., probably in Boone County, AR., Martha W. ---.

UNKNOWN SELF--He m. ---. There have been speculations that this Self was named William N. Self and that he came from England. We have never seen any reference to a family of William N. Self and would like references on where this name originated.

CHILDREN: Baxter b. ABT 1790 d. ABT 1840--John b. 1793

John and Baxter helped with the emigration of the McIntosh Creek Indians in 1827-28 in IT. The family left the Creek Nation in 1838 and went to TX, then to Natchitoches Parish, LA. In 1854 they sold the LA land and went back to Creek lands.

BAXTER SELF Born about 1790 in Jasper County, GA. Died about 1840 in Natchitoches Parish, LA. He m. about 1819, Susannah Berryhill, daughter of John and Elizabeth (Derrisaw) Berryhill. Elizabeth was a full-blooded Creek Indian.

CHILDREN: William Baxter ("Buck") b. Dec. 9, 1820 d. June 2, 1904--John Baxter b. 1826 d. 1905--Susannah b. 1827--. Mahalia b. 1830 d. young--Sallie b. 1835 d. young--Child b. ABT 1837 d. young--Elizabeth b. 1837 d. 1971--Lucinda b. ABT 1840 d. 1905

JOHN SELF Born 1793 in Jasper County, GA. He m. Nov. 9, 1820 in Jasper County, GA., Catherine T. Berryhill, daughter of John and Elizabeth (Derrisaw) Berryhill.

CHILDREN: Amanda b. 1821--Dorinda b. 1823--Eli Alfred b. 1825 d. Oct. 29, 1895--John Clarke b. 1828 d. BEF 1880 --Samuel C. b. 1830 d. ABT 1890--William ("Will") b. 1832--Alexander Marion b. 1835--Tabitha Ann b. 1838--James M. b. Oct. 1842

SELFS IN SPACE

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