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| Look-Ups by Sheldon Sheldon Fergus, 1930–1999 · Billings, Montana · 73 |
| Sheldon | From the List | His Advice | E-mail Eileen |
I never met Sheldon Fergus. I never heard his voice. I don't know what he looked like, except that his
daughter says he was tall and wore a feed store cap everywhere, including to church. But for almost five
years, from November 1994 to April 1999, he was the most generous person in my life, and I live two
thousand miles from Billings.
My name is Eileen Corwin. I'm a programmer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in my spare time I chase my Irish great-grandparents through the records. Sheldon was a retired railroad telegrapher who spent his mornings at the public library in Billings, Montana, sitting at the microfilm readers and doing census look-ups for anybody on our mailing list who asked. He never charged a penny. He never asked for anything back. He did hundreds of them, maybe thousands, for strangers all over the country. He died of a heart attack at home on Friday, May 7, 1999. He was sixty-eight. The list found out on Monday morning when his daughter, Jo Lehner, posted a short note from his account. I read it at my desk at work and had to close my office door. This page is for him. There's a second page, From the List, where other members have sent in their own memories.
In the fall of 1994 I posted my first query to a Montana genealogy mailing list. My great-grandfather Horan had come over from County Cork and gone to Butte to work in the copper mines in the 1880s, and I had lost him somewhere between the boat and his death certificate. Two days later I got a reply from a man in Billings. It was in all capital letters, because nobody had told him yet that capitals are shouting. It said he would be at the library Tuesday morning and would be glad to look at the 1900 census for Silver Bow County, and it was signed 73, SHELDON. I had to ask what 73 meant. In telegraph and ham radio code, it means "best regards." He'd been signing off with it since he was eighteen years old. He kept on signing every e-mail that way for the rest of his life, even after somebody on the list gently explained the capital letters and he switched to lowercase and apologized to everybody, individually. Every Sunday night he posted the same short message to the list, LOOK-UP OFFER, saying what reels the library had in that week and that he'd be there Tuesday through Saturday mornings. He answered every request in the order it came in. If he couldn't find somebody, he said so, and he said exactly what he had checked, reel by reel and page by page, so you'd never have to look there again. If he did find somebody, he typed out the whole household, every column, with his own notes in brackets: [enumerator's handwriting poor, could be Haran].
Most of what I know about his life he told in bits, in the P.S. at the bottom of a look-up. He went to work for the railroad at eighteen and spent forty-two years as a telegrapher and station agent in depots up and down the Yellowstone, copying train orders in Morse code until the radios and computers made the job disappear. He said he could still send thirty words a minute and nobody wanted them. His wife died in 1991 and his daughter bought him a computer the next Christmas so he'd have something to do in the evenings. He found the genealogy lists by accident in 1993 and, as he put it, never found his way out. He went to the library every morning it was open except Sundays and Mondays, with a thermos of coffee and a stack of steno pads. He'd work the reels until lunch, go home, and type up the results in the afternoon. In the winter, Jo says, he sometimes went in during blizzards when the library was nearly empty, because he said the people waiting on him didn't know it was snowing in Billings.
After he died, I went back through my old e-mail. I'm a programmer, so I save everything. I have a folder named SHELDON with 214 messages in it. Here are the look-ups he did for me alone:
Thirty-one look-ups, and I was one of hundreds of people he did this for. On that first one, in November 1994, he found my great-grandfather in the 1900 census in Butte, misspelled Haran, with my great-grandmother, who was born a Corkery, and five children, one of whom was my grandmother at age two. I had been looking for three years under the right spelling. He found them in two mornings under the wrong one. In 1997 he found my great-grandfather's obituary on a reel of an old Butte newspaper, which told me the name of the parish in Cork he came from. That one sentence let me write to Ireland. I have a letter now from a priest there with a baptism date in 1861. None of that happens without Sheldon. I offered to pay him, more than once. He always said the same thing: do a look-up for somebody else someday. I do them now, at the State Archives in Raleigh, for anybody with North Carolina people. I sign them 73.
He gave every newcomer on the list a version of this, usually in a P.S. These are his rules as I remember them, in my words. He'd have said them shorter. 1. Start with yourself and go back one generation at a time. Don't start with a famous person who had your last name and try to work down. Start with your parents. Get the papers in your own house first: birth certificates, the family Bible, funeral cards, old letters. 2. Talk to the oldest people in your family this year. Not next year. He said this one twice. 3. Check every spelling. Census takers wrote down what they heard, a lot of the people they talked to couldn't read or spell their own names in English, and then somebody copied it all over by hand. My Horans are in the records as Horan, Haran, Horen, Horne and once, memorably, Whoran. Write out every way your name could be spelled, then every way it could be misheard, and check them all. 4. Use the Soundex indexes. Soundex is a code that groups names that sound alike, so the index lists them together no matter how they were spelled. You keep the first letter and turn the next consonants into numbers (B, F, P, V are 1; C, G, J, K, Q, S, X, Z are 2; D, T are 3; L is 4; M, N are 5; R is 6), skip the vowels and H, W and Y, and stop at three numbers. HORAN is H650. CORKERY is C626. FERGUS is F622. There are Soundex indexes on microfilm for the 1900 and 1920 censuses, for the 1880 census (but only households with a child ten or younger), and for part of 1910. Learn your code by heart. It'll save you weeks. 5. Don't count on 1890. Most of the 1890 census was lost after a fire in Washington in 1921, and what was left was later thrown out. Only scraps survive, plus part of a special count of Union veterans and their widows. If your family went missing between 1880 and 1900, that's why. Use city directories, state censuses, church records and land records to fill the gap. 6. Write the courthouse before you drive there. Courthouses burn. Records get moved to the state archives or a basement. Clerks go on vacation. Write a short, polite letter first, ask what they have and what copies cost, and put in a self-addressed stamped envelope. He said he'd met too many people who drove five hundred miles to a courthouse that had burned in 1902. 7. Write down where you found everything. Reel number, page, line. You will need to find it again, and you will not remember. (He was right. I didn't, the first year, and I had to redo half of it.) 8. A family tree in a book isn't proof. Somebody else's work is a clue, not an answer. Check it against the records yourself. 9. Say thank you, and pass it on. He never said this one out loud. He didn't have to.
In May, after Jo's note, there were more than two hundred messages on the list in two days, from people in thirty-some states and three countries, all saying the same thing he'd done for them. Somebody suggested we take up a collection. Jo asked the library what they needed, and the answer was a new microfilm reader. We raised the money in about three weeks. In August the library put the new reader in, on the second floor where he used to sit, with a small brass plate on it with his name. Jo went to see it and sent us a description. She says it has a better crank than the old ones and he would have complained that it was too easy. So if you're ever in Billings and you need a census reel, go sit at Sheldon's machine. And then do a look-up for somebody else. 73, Sheldon. Thank you. |
Visitors since June 1999:
    
Did Sheldon do a look-up for you? Send me your memory for From the List. [email protected] Eileen Corwin, Raleigh, North Carolina · Last updated September 12, 1999 |