BCG 50th Anniversary — Judy Russell transcript
Speaker at an Event: Celebrating 50 Years of Genealogical Credentialing
A speaker at an event like this often finds themselves not very hungry beforehand. It's a kind of intimidating group, but we'll see what we can do.
We're here to celebrate 50 years of genealogical credentialing—50 years of rigorous development and dissemination of genealogical standards. This photograph you're looking at? It's a "Then and Now" photograph of New York's Bowling Green Park. It illustrates that we've really come a long way. The people who photographed this park in 1907 couldn't have imagined the Creative Commons license that I'm using tonight to show you this composite 2013 image.
The standards process that was begun by ASG 50 years ago—I'm not sure the people who began it could have imagined the challenges that still remain for us today as we look to evolve into the 21st century. I suspect that the people involved in that process were more familiar with problems posed by people like this man: John Casper Branner.
John Casper Branner was born in Tennessee in 1850. He was a geologist by education, the State Geologist of Arkansas, a member of the founding faculty of Stanford University, and served as the second president of Stanford University. He was also an amateur genealogist, and in 1913, he wrote a book called *Casper Branner of Virginia and His Descendants*. It was privately published at Stanford University and meticulously details this gifted geologist's foray into the world of genealogy.
So, how do I know about John Casper Branner? John Casper Branner and I are third cousins, three times removed. He and I are both descended from the Baker family of Virginia and North Carolina. If you can name a state that's south of the Mason-Dixon Line, we're there.
You can read what he wrote about the Branner family on the Internet Archive, which is one of many sites that now reproduce these pre-1923 publications. You can also go over to Amazon and shell out $27.39 for the paperback or a little under $40 for the hardback. But I don't want this book. This is the Branners, and I'm a descendant of the Bakers. So you can just imagine how happy I was when I found this: a collection of John Branner's private papers from the Stanford University Library. When you look at the scope and content of that collection, it has a manuscript of the Baker genealogy.
Could I resist? Not for a minute. I wrote off to the library, paid a ridiculous amount of money, and got every piece of paper on the Baker family that's in that entire collection. I couldn't wait for the mail to come, and when it finally did, I was so happy. I started looking through it, and it turns out that every single thing my gifted academic cousin had relied on was correspondence.
He sent out a letter to every town clerk, county clerk, in most of the southern United States, asking, "Do you know anybody who's a Baker, maybe related to this guy David Baker?" And then he wrote to every one of those Bakers.
What he collected in those personal papers, what is in that wonderful manuscript collection, is roughly the same in genealogical quality as the old adage: "There were three brothers who came to America—one went south, one went west, and was never heard from again."
What I want to know is, what was it out here in the West? Were there dragons out here? Everybody who came west disappeared. My cousin John Branner is not the only genealogist to have relied in whole or in part on correspondence.
For just $595 in hardback, or $305 if you're willing to go used, you can get the entire seven volumes of the *Abridged Compendium of American Genealogy: First Families of America*, a genealogical encyclopedia of the United States by Frederick Virkus. So much of Virkus's work was not based on personal research in the kind of repositories that we would think of as good genealogy. It was also based largely on writing to others and getting their answers back.
But at least people like Virkus and my cousin John Casper Branner were well-intentioned. We may be able to think of one or two people who probably don't quite fit into that category.
This is 1912 New York. The Secretary of the American Genealogical Society was a man by the name of Gustav Anjou. Now, if that's not bad enough, he's listed a second time in the same directory under the B's. He's also with the British American Record Society. Kind of lucky he didn't start the war of 1912.
What Anjou managed to pull off was good enough, if I can use that term, to get him his own personal entry in Wikipedia. One of the subheadings on this page is "Genealogical Fraud," and he's described this way: "Few, if any, names in genealogical circles draw the outrage that Anjou enjoys."
What Anjou did, as aptly described by Gordon Remington and Robert Charles Anderson, was fleece the unsuspecting. He produced beautiful works—beautiful products, like this *Early History of the Freeman Family*. These are star-studded genealogies, telling people, among other things, that they can be entitled to use coats of arms from their illustrious English ancestors. And of course, they were always illustrious English ancestors. There were no pig farmers, no horse thieves in any Anjou genealogy. And who's going to argue with this guy? After all, he was credentialed. He was a member of the Harleian Society, the Parish Register Society, the American Historical Association, etc., etc. What more could anybody want?
As Bob Anderson pointed out in his 1991 article, "We was robbed." Even in the 1980s, people were still defending Anjou's work. One guy wrote that he had to believe what Anjou said because Anjou had all these credentials, including a Ph.D.—the Ph.D. he had awarded to himself.
Even today, you can find Anjou's work all over the place. If you're a Freeman descendant, just hop on Amazon. You can buy a copy of this Anjou genealogy of your family. It's only a few dollars. And while you're there, don't forget to buy any one of the other 23 Anjou publications that are still available for sale today on Amazon.
But you know, as bad as this may be for genealogy, for us as a profession, it was probably worse when we get into the broad genealogical frauds, things like the Baker estate hoax. A little bit more than 100 years ago, an unscrupulous bunch of folks, self-styled genealogists among them, started telling people that some of the most valuable land in the nation—in downtown Philadelphia, including City Hall, the Pennsylvania Railroad terminal—had all been owned by a Revolutionary War soldier named Jacob Baker. If you could prove a relationship to Jacob Baker, you were in for a share of an estate that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
You didn't have to work very hard to prove your descent. You just sent in $10 or $20 or $50 or $100 to some operator, and he'd take care of those pesky little proof issues. Now, it didn't seem to matter a whole lot that people were warned over and over that this was a hoax. Even in Wyoming in 1921: "Don't be swindled just because your name may be Baker." But people were taken in by the thousands.
I have to believe in my own family that the only possible explanation why Thomas Baker, where every single solitary fact about this man places him in Virginia, yet my family wants him to be born in Pennsylvania, has got to be the Baker hoax.
Now, you might think that people would have learned from this sort of thing, but the fact is, dozens of people were prosecuted in connection with this. It was proved to be a fraud in court case after court case, all the way into the 1930s. But genealogical fraud is a little bit like a hydra—you cut off one head, and another one pops up someplace else, like the Buchanan estate hoax.
Now, this Buchanan land isn't in Pennsylvania; it's in New York, in Brooklyn. Allegedly, a brother of President James Buchanan had left this land, and all you had to do was prove you were a Buchanan, just by sending in your money, and you too could share in an estate that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Again, every bit of it was a hoax. Denials by the governor of New York, a fellow by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, didn't do a thing to stop people.
And yes, before you ask, I am also a Buchanan descendant. As a matter of fact, I am a descendant of a Baker-Buchanan marriage, so I get this from both sides. But I'm not going to complain—not one bit. It is true that some of my kinfolk were taken in, but what that meant was they all went running to places like the Burke County, North Carolina courthouse, and wrote out affidavits with all of the old family Bibles. That's my third great-grandmother—she's the one who married the Baker, by the way—listed in this affidavit.
But for us as a community, this is embarrassing. It was written up in *Reader's Digest*, for Pete's sake! The indictment in *Reader's Digest* was damning: "There were 25 estates most commonly used as lures. It was not necessary to be a direct descendant; the genealogist attends to that. He can furnish a tree proving anybody under the sun to be in the direct line."
Did you notice he didn't even use a tree from Ancestry? Not one. The scheme served as perpetual revenue for... we won't mention the chiseling lawyers and genealogical shoppers throughout the country.
Ow.
This clearly was a pivotal moment in the
history of genealogy, a moment that called for intervention. The answer, ladies and gentlemen, was credentialing. We had to weed out the charlatans and the frauds. We needed standards—standards that would rise above what had been done before.
It began 50 years ago this year when the American Society of Genealogists was founded. And, since then, standards have been the key to separating the professionals and the charlatans from each other.
Those standards may have had humble beginnings, but, as we've heard, they have grown, been refined, and expanded over the years. The process of credentialing, which started out with a few like-minded people determined to improve genealogy, has evolved into something that continues to set the bar higher for all of us.
We still need these standards because genealogy is a field that is, by its nature, susceptible to error, misunderstanding, and even fraud. And as we look ahead, it’s clear that our work is far from over.
The rise of technology, the ease of accessing information, and the growing interest in genealogy present both opportunities and challenges. It is up to us, as credentialed genealogists, to ensure that the standards we uphold continue to reflect the highest levels of integrity, accuracy, and professionalism.
So, as we celebrate this milestone, let’s remember why credentialing matters. Let’s recommit ourselves to the standards that make our work valuable and trustworthy. And let’s look forward to the next 50 years with a sense of purpose, knowing that we are building on a foundation that will continue to serve genealogists—and the families they research—for generations to come.
Thank you.