One Plus One Equals More Than Two – Drew Smith

Synergy is a wonderful concept. Most of us already know what synergy is (even if we’ve never heard the word), but we recognize it best through the old saying, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In genealogy, it is possible to create synergistic effects by using a combination of research sources. Today’s column will talk about an example of this that I experienced only this past week.

I received an e-mail message asking about a man named Leaf who had been the author of children’s books. The person writing was curious as to whether Leaf was related to her family, so she asked for advice on how to find out more about him. I used the opportunity to see what I could learn about him using a combination of online and library research. I was hoping for synergistic effects!

The correspondent wasn’t certain of the spelling of Leaf’s first name, although she thought that it might be “Munroe,” “Monroe,” or “Monro.” My first inclination, then, was to determine exactly what Leaf’s first name was, and how he spelled it. Because Leaf was supposed to be fairly well known, I decided to use the Biography and Genealogy Master Index (BMGI). Many large public and academic libraries have it available in bound volumes. In addition, some academic libraries subscribe to it as an online database, including my university’s library. Ancestry.com also makes the BGMI available to its subscribers.

A search for “Leaf” in the BMGI showed that Leaf’s full name was “Wilbur Munro Leaf.” Some of the entries seemed to conflict slightly regarding the year of his birth and the year of his death, but most seemed to agree that he was born in 1905 and that he died in 1976.

The year of his death and his age at death suggested to me that he might be listed in the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), an online database available free at both Ancestry.com and RootsWeb.com. An SSDI search for “Munro Leaf” told me he was born 4 December 1905 and died in December 1976. So far, all my research had been accomplished online, from home. It was time to employ some synergy.

The BMGI had given me a long list of printed reference works in which biographical information about Munro Leaf could be found. Many of these sources were available to me (or to any other genealogist, for that matter) at the university library. From home, I was able to search the university’s online catalog to find the exact location of the printed sources I wanted to check. During lunch the next day, I stopped in at the university library and began reading through the sources.

Especially helpful was the Dictionary of American Biography (Supplement 10), which provided a three-page biography of Munro Leaf. From that source, I learned where he was born, the exact date of his death, where he lived when he died, the name of his wife, their marriage date, and the number of children they had. (Checking another print source, Who’s Who in America, gave me the names of the two children.) The same biographical article also told me the names of Leaf’s parents (including his mother’s maiden name) and told me Leaf was a third-generation descendant of Maryland families on both sides of his family.

I e-mailed the result of this search to the person who had originally sent me the question, and it was enough information to establish that Leaf was not a relative of hers.

The online sources had given me some of the information I needed, but more important, they had pointed me to the print sources that filled in the critical details. Most of the world’s genealogical knowledge is not online, so limiting yourself to online sources cuts you off from important sources. But print sources can be especially tedious to search without a helpful online index. By combining preliminary online searching with detailed research involving print sources, you can achieve genealogical synergy!

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the “Cybrarian” column. He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.