My dad and my mom used to tell me family stories, some of which I used to think were tall tales…
I eventually found out they were mostly true, only the details being slightly bent in the oral history.
I found out, for instance, that my father came from a family that had been very determined to keep family records, before and after coming to America.
And that my mother had a grandmother who’d lived a real western adventure.
And that my parents both grew up in Oklahoma during the wild days, just after the state came into the Union.
The outlaw Cole Younger, associated with Jesse James, had a nephew who worked on my mother’s parents’ farm. And it was this gentle-spoken young man who introduced my mother to my father. Cole Younger himself had been in prison in Stillwater, MN, and had been released, to spend his final years in Missouri. Most of Cole Younger’s family had been killed in the violence of the post-Civil War period in Kansas—it was a bad place and a bad time. But one of his brothers or sisters apparently lived long enough to have a son, whose name was Bill or Bob, as my mother recalls, who worked on the family farm in Anadarko OK, and who apparently visited his uncle in Stillwater. When my father admired my mother from a distance, Younger, acquainted with both, managed an introduction. My father worked at the Anadarko ice house, and my mother began to insist on doing the drive into town after ice that summer. They were secretly married in El Reno OK, and didn’t tell relatives on both sides until some months later.
My maternal great-grandmother was the survivor of an accident that drowned or separated her family as they were crossing a major river on the move west. Her name was Missouri Duff. But in my searching census records, I found her on an old census report from before the accident, and I found, in the next census, her mother and a brother living in a town near the Missouri river. Evidently they’d survived, her father and other children had drowned—and she’d survived, taking the name of Missouri and moving first to Kansas and then to Oklahoma, to grow up and marry with never a notion she had living relatives.
My grandfather was a cowboy turned salesman as Indian Territory became settled towns. His mother was Louisiana Carolina Boone, and my father named me after her. She was one of those Boones, and she came into Indian Territory out of Texas with her husband, my great-grandfather, and ended up living with my grandfather, then taking care of my father when he was very small.
When she died, my father went to live with other relatives, an uncle, and only came home to live with my grandfather when he married my step-grandmother, a spectacularly gracious lady, in every sense of the word.
Well, I got all the family stories—including the night St. Elmo’s fire turned up on a herd of cattle when my grandfather was riding herd in an impending thunderstorm: horns and hooves glowed—the herd spooked, and if you remember the song “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” it must have been like that.
A part of my family is Dutch, and used to own a major slice of New Jersey and Manhattan: they became bankers, and one a Supreme Court judge—but half that family broke off and went down to Virginia and the Carolinas. That was my half, poor as church mice, and working in farming, from Virginia to Nebraska during the Civil War and down to Kansas in the Bleeding Kansas days, then on into Oklahoma.
But when I got seriously into genealogy, I began to fill in the pieces of various things. I found Missouri Duff’s missing family. I found how we connect to Daniel Boone’s father, Squire Boone, and how we connect, though part of the Boone family fiercely disputes it, through a dubious union, to the de Bohuns, one of the kingmaking families in England. Whether or not the Boone line does connect—I’m related to the de Bohuns down another line as well. And here’s an interesting point: these families keep connecting and reconnecting: geographical closeness, and social circles: availability of potential good matches, strengthening economic and political ties, in an era of arranged marriages. When you have a nest of connections that keep reiterating, I think it likely that relationship is true.
A great number of my forbears came over from England: read: ran for their lives to get out of England during the English Civil War. A lot of them were Charles I’s supporters. My ancestors were not fans of our Pilgrim fathers, quite on the other side of the political fence.
I’ve been able to trace relations going back and back and back…a lot of lines through those English emigres…
And here’s the kicker. It turns out Jane and I are related to each other—back in England. One of her folk married one of the de Bohuns, both of us in direct descent.
One of the really fun things is going through Wikipedia finding out about these people. Mine had a penchant for getting involved in royal politics and getting caught on the losing side—many were very creatively executed in a very brutal age.
Fortunately, they managed to reproduce before meeting their nasty end.
Not all were saints. I’m related to Hugh the Despenser—-reputed as one of the most corrupt men in England. And to William Marshal, reputed as one of the most honest.
I’ve found answers to family mysteries: the family story is that we came over from Ireland, when most geneologies try to make us German. Well, we’re right: our guy, John Cherry, married to Bridgett Haney, was of British origin, but had been living in Ireland, and his wife was apparently Irish—when they, or he, immigrated to the states. And that was the origin of the story. That family came over from Normandy, but not in the invasion: the name(of, originally de Cerisy, has a ‘de’ (of)—which is the sort of thing that ordinarily denotes some lordly family, but in this case I think it simply means “from the village of Cerisy”, a little place in Normandy, France, no nobility involved, and not one of William the Conqueror’s lot, just a guy from a French village who came to England.
And—a very interesting update: research in French records gives another story—not de Cerisy, ‘from the village of Cerisy’, but de Chery, from the town of ‘Chery,’ in the Centre district of France. It seems that one Jean de Chery held property in Normandy, or had some ancestral rights in William the Conqueror’s land, but that one could not at that time enter Normandy from the rest of France without a royal permit—which Jean de Chery sought from his king, Charles. King Charles, now called Charles the Mad, had once been known as Charles the Good, but he had had a mental breakdown, what they call the glass syndrome, becoming convinced he could shatter, literally, and convinced that assassins were on his track.
Actually, re Charles’ paranoia, it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you, and it wasn’t a bad guess. There were three contenders for the French throne: the Capets, descended from Charlemagne, the Burgundians, who claimed southern central France as their ancestral domain, and had allies clear across France; and the de Courtenays, who contended they should be kings of France. Burgundy was assassinating people who stood in his way.
And there is a document which indicates that the de Cherys were a) in charge of the substantial town of Chery, and b) closely tied to the de Courtenays who were c) increasingly split as to where their fortunes would best advance, in William’s enterprise, or in France, trying to succeed the failing Charles Capet the Mad…that Burgundy was intent on killing and supplanting. There was a de Courtenay branch, the lords of Arrablay, one of whom, I think also named Charles, is documented to have married his neighbor, one Jeanne de Chery; so there were marriage ties between the de Cherys and the vastly powerful de Courtenays.
Burgundy began to gain ground, and while the de Courtenays didn’t sail with William the Conqueror, a number of them went over to England after the Conquest—possibly because they were feeling the heat from Burgundy and Charles the Mad was, well, mad…
The de Courtenays who emigrated to England set up a castle with William’s permission, in Leicestershire, central England.
Well, now we have one Jean de Chery (the male form of John/Jeanne) who at a certain point seeks the permission of Charles the Mad to go visit his properties in Normandy, after which he vanishes from history, and the de Chereis turn up in Leicestershire…attached to the de Courtenay branch that had established in England. It was, thanks to William, *no* trouble to get ship from Normandy to England in that time.
And Burgundy was busy assassinating his rivals, and King Charles was getting crazier, and the de Courtenays in France finally dwindled down to a few, one female unable to pass the title, and virtually powerless, though they still existed.
Part of the de Chereis family moved from Leicestershire and set up in the south, at Maidenhead and Bray, in Berkshire, and those folk by then are spelling it Cherry, and still marrying people of some substance, to judge by the graves, the literacy, and the constant interweaving of spouses of some indication of wealth, even title. Then from Bray, a Cherry (they all tended to be named John and David and Thomas) went over to northern Ireland, and after a few generations, a John and his son David emigrated to Virginia, in a time of religious unrest and civil war. So my little guy from de Cerisy may instead be a much more politically connected guy skipping out of the town of Chery, in central France to go join the de Courtenays in Leicestershire, before the king who was his patron went entirely over the brink.
Jane’s family name, possibly originally Faucher, may, according to one name-origin, have come from the Limoges area of France, then to London, then to the Americas, which is kind of generic information and not easy to attach to individuals, but there is new information, too—indicating a substantial house in England, the house at Fanshawe Gate, which is now a beautiful garden showplace in Derbyshire—and a connection of her very definite ancestor, via records in Massachusetts, to a Fanshawe from the house at Fanshawe Gate who went from that Derbyshire hall down to London: that ancestor married one Eunice Bouton, who seems like a quiet New England lady of French ancestry—until you get into her past, and figure that—ironically enough—that lady’s ancestors run back to the dukes of central France, back before the Norman Invasion. Both these possible connections are still under investigation—but they do answer some interesting questions and fill in some gaps; and they are better connected to specific individuals whose time and place we can say match and intersect. It’s worth more study, at very least. The de Chereis are in Burke’s Peerage.
Anyway, hunting ancestors one of my favorite winter-evening hobbies. I was amazed that I could trace anybody by real, checkable records, but the computer age has made it an easy-chair kind of hobby; you can access, almost instantly, every digitized census report and village record, not just in the States, but in Britain, Italy, France, and now apparently into Japan and Germany, the Netherlands, you name it. They open up more of these every month, and if they ever digitize Creek County, OK, I may be able to open up a whole new part of the tree by finding my paternal great-grandmother. That could happen.
The software system I use is www.ancestry.com and if you’ve ever wanted to get into this, it’s a marvelous way to learn history: it gets pretty personal when you know it was your great-great-great-great grandfather in that battle…
For any of you who are in the Ancestry network, our tree is “It’s the Eleventh Century and We’re All Barbarians…”, a quote from our favorite Christmas movie, The Lion in Winter, which is appropriate on so many grounds.
If you want to get started on your own family history, the first thing to do is to get hold of the oldest person in your family and sit down with a paper and pencil and let them tell you things—in whatever order occurs to them.
But say you’ve lost touch with family. Can you do it?
Nowadays, yes, with tools like ancestry.com—because you can’t live in this country or any other without generating records, official records, that aren’t erased. People are born, get married (or not), die, are buried. They vote, they get drafted into the military, they have children born, they join churches, they get arrested—you simply live and the government comes along and takes a census, listing everyone in a given house, related or not, and where they came from, what their jobs are—you name it, you make a move and some public official is taking notes.
And these records are now in databases that extend all over the world. If you know a probable date and place, you can find things. Birth certificates. Death certificates. Census records. Service records. They’re all out there a mouse-click removed, and will display the photocopy on your screen. Census-takers can’t always spell worth a darn, and some people lie about their age, but over the years, given four or five censuses, you can begin to figure that great-aunt Maisie lied like a rug about her real age until she was 80, and then she began to exaggerate it.
The human foibles thus exposed are charming.
Another characteristic of family stories: they’re almost always right, but often not in the way you think. I worked 4 weeks trying to figure out how great-grandmother Carolina connected into the Boones. The family story said it was through Squire Boone of the Yadkin Valley. Here’s how tangled it got: first, Squire Boone, son of a British immigrant to America, was a weaver, resident in Pennsylvania, until he moved to the Yadkin Valley, with numerous offspring. But ‘Squire,’ his name, not his title, was so popular in the family about every one of his sons who had a son named the lad ‘Squire’…among the dozen other kids they tended to have. Most of the family was born in Pennsylvania, and all these people went to the Yadkin Valley, down south.
One Squire Boone was actually born IN the Yadkin Valley. And when I realized it and looked up his offspring, there was my great-grandmother. The family story was dead on accurate, across a hundred years, but I had to actually listen to what it was telling me. Why had the story come down with that obscure river name attached, always “Squire Boone of the Yadkin Valley?” It was because it was his absolute distinction in a family where that name was so often given.
It’s that kind of detective work that’s so much fun for me. I love a puzzle. I like finding out the history behind the history.
And that’s how, if you’ve got one clue, and can find two clues, you can begin to put together a hypothesis about how it all connects. You may have a name like Smith or Johnson, but when it comes to census records, you know that John Smith living at 209 Pine Street in 1952 had to be your uncle, and you can look and see he had a sister named Mary, which would be right, and that, yes, his father was from Ohio and he was 24 when the census was taken, etc., etc. One record leads to another. You look up Ohio censuses, subtracting 24 or 25 from the date…and you find his family, with his father’s name.
It’s like potato chips. You can’t look up just one. Every new link brings a new puzzle. And they are now, with the computerized records, do-able. You don’t have to haunt graveyards with a notebook—although to find my paternal grandmother I may have to do that. At least I know which cemetary in which tiny Oklahoma town.
As a “for fun” search on http://www.google.com image, I typed in a few ancestor names. Imagine my surprise when I FOUND photos! I’ve found a great-great grandfather, a great-great grandmother pictured with her identical twin sister, and a different great-great grandmother.
Also, a relative allowed me to read through her collection of letters. In one letter, a single sentence mentioning a trip to attend a funeral helped me fill in a missing gap of family members; it made a wonderful surprise trip for the relative when she saw the graves of her grandparents and great-grands.
Great idea, the google-search.
Thanks!
ANd guess what I just found; they’re starting to inventory the old cemetary where my great-grandmother may be buried.
Apparently this is a new thing; if you know where somebody is likely buried, many cemetaries are now producing lists. I found a great-grandmother and great-grandfather on my mother’s side in just a casual read of the Anadarko OK cemetary ‘addresses’ for that lane of the cemetary.
One of my former co-workers taught me to search Google for Surname __________. I’ve also found information on some of the larger geneaology forums by searching for a spouse’s name. Example. Rather than searching for Thomas Berry, I searched for Susanna Feese in the Berry forum.
Another important thing is to get that older family member to identify anyone they can in photos. I have an 1860’s tin type with no names and only that it was some of Daddy’s people. I did ask him, but he had no idea who the people were. Carrying a few photos to a family funeral paid off for me. I was able to discover who other children were in one photo taken when I was 4.
There are also sites by state that list cemetaries by county. It’s been too many years since I used that main site to remember it.
I don’t know if they still do, but ancestry.com used to give a free week. If you had a week of vacation, with all your ducks in a row, ie, as many family names as you could get together, and were really prepared to use that time, you could do an amazing lot of research in that week. And it’s value-for-value, because they will keep and distribute the connections you make, in what they and associated websites call The World Tree. You can print off the tree you make, and when your week runs out, well, a year’s world-wide membership is pretty pricey, but the America-only one is a little less so. And by a well-used week you can figure whether or not it can be valuable to you.
That’s how I got sucked in. 😆
Been playing a bit with the Ancestry software—and had a piece of luck. I know my grandmother on my mother’s side was a Tipton, but she didn’t ever say much about her family, except they were from Kansas and she had sibs. Well, I traced what I could and found the family I was pretty sure was hers—right name, right date, right place, but she didn’t show up in the census.
I installed her with that family in the record, and waited.
Now, Ancestry is an interactive sort of thing: it grows as other users tag on and contribute, or as the government releases more census records in digital form. And sometimes it really pays to click and get the actual image of the record. They don’t write down everything.
Well, in a recent piece of detective work, I found my target family went back in turn to a family whose matriarch was Mae or May. Now, that was gran’s middle name.
And, this week, after several months, up pops a new census record and there she is with that family: Ida Mae Tipton, plain as can be, written down a long, long time ago. She was about 15 at the time.
Sometimes a guess just pans out. In the case of the World Tree, sometimes if you feed it a little educated guess, you find something—in this case the solid link to one of my grandmothers. And the Tiptons are a fun link to follow because they married interesting people. The original name was de Tiburton, English, and I’ve found the point at which the name changed. I don’t know why it changed from de Tiberton to Tipton, but given that it happened before the English Civil War, when some families were in upheaval, and others were running for their lives—before this, well, likely there was likely somebody born on the wrong side of the blanket…or the family land went to another branch, also possible.
My paternal grandmother remains a mystery, but I’m still hoping.
Well, Jane and I have proved to be related yet one more time: she just picked up a bunch of my ancestors. I *wish* this program had a “fill in” feature for when you get to somebody whose tree is well-known.
I *love* ancestry.com–but!
I can understand the delightful grandpa and gran who are doing this for a hobby and do not know (naturally, not being linguists) that Hrolf, Rollo, Ralph, Rollon, and Raul, and Raoul are all the same name. I can understand that they don’t get the titles right, and that not all the children in the family are ‘lord’ this and that.
I do have problems with the person, evidently Nordic-descended, who has helpfully filled in Mrs. Male Name for every available wife-slot, which has to be carefully cancelled out throughout a database of hundreds of years.
With the same person, I believe, who has Hilda Roricksson…instead of Hilda Roricksdatter or -dottir. Gender matters, and it really stops the ‘bot dead when its search runs into a roadblock like that.
But the person on whom I wish to File Intent is the person who installs Y as the place for anybody whose death site he does not know. I feel he is a relative of mine, since it starts with my ancestors and goes for-EVER.
And worst of all, the serial killer who is kidnapping people out of the Crusades and declaring that they died in The Holy Land, Ontario, Canada.
We have another of that ilk who happily asserts that somebody in 1080 died in Indiana, USA. I’m sure there were deaths in Indiana in 1080, but they were not named William de Crecy.
Hi, CJ.
Isn’t it amazing how people love to rearrange the world?
You don’t mention what software you’re using; I use Legacy and it has a way to go in and edit the master location list. All edits to the master list will update ALL the individual entries. 🙂
If you’re interested, there’s even a free version so you can try it out and only purchase if you want the extras. Just do a google search for “legacy genealogy”.
I’m using Family Tree Maker from Ancestry.com. My only problem is that I’ve already had to double the size of memory on this machine to handle the tree, and it’s got more to go. We’re back into the silliness-factor genealogies, which happens when you delve too deep into the Merovingians or the Vikings…(In one, I’m related to a Frost Giant or some such, not to mention a Roman emperor who donated a spare daughter to an invading barbarian)—but that’s only one thread that ran back obligingly quickly. We haven’t probed that far into some other lines, and if they insist on Frost Giants, we’re going to run out of memory and have to break the tree into branches.
I find that much of the medieval stuff online is pretty bad. (I found one tree with someone linked as their own great-grandparent!) There are some relatively reliable sites – try http://www.genealogics.org/index.php for a start.
I just got an upgrade for my genealogy software. Not yet installed, but I was involved in the beta testing earlier this spring. (I use Rootsmagic. It’s easy to deal with, reasonably flexible, and their wizard makes it easy to get uniform sources.)
Thank you for that genealogics link. Ancestry.com makes you crazy in that era, and Jane and I both have multiple links to the same people. When you know ‘the truth is out there’ and somebody insists Henry II was born in Ohio—and gets it into the record, weeding out the clutter that accompanies that little attachment of place just gets crazy.
I’ve made some suggestions to the ancestry.com people, to wit, that they clean up The World Tree at least far enough to provide a basic, sane descent for certain people whose facts are what they are, so far as the needs of most researchers, and provide a way for a user to just ‘install Robert Curthose,’ for instance. It would do a lot to keep the chaff out of the branches.
At a certain point I just abandon their tree and go to the history books and encyclopaedias…once granny and grandpa have been trying to cope with the Merovingians, it’s really dicey.
I’m using Family Tree Creator, out of the Ancestry.com site: the thing is like a massive lot of dough: you knead it and shove it and try to beat it into shape. Right now a band of Boons out of a German family have gotten their info into the World Tree and are trying to ‘swipe’ my great-great grandfather Boone into their line. U-uh. Nope. Great-gran told grandad how that line ran and I’m taking her word. 😉 It’s a genealogical tug of war. But I know I’m right.
Unfortunately, it can be somewhat depressing to try doing this if you are not blessed with a large family to start with. I have the problem that my grandmother, her three sisters and three brothers were all sent to an orphanage after their mother died (dad apparently couldn’t raise them on his own in those days). The girls came out of the orphanage when they were adults, there is no record of what happened to the boys. Family lore is that they died in the orphanage, but you never know. And great-granddad on that side is supposed to have changed his name when he emigrated from Sweden, from a rather common name to one that is much more unique. I have managed to trace back my paternal grandmother’s family some distance.
But the other issue I have run into is that both my grandparents were from broken families. On the paternal side, my grandfather was in his 50’s when my dad was born, and died when my father was a teen. On mom’s side, her parents got divorced when she was a teenager, and dad skipped the state. So I have a lot of family stories about my dad’s stepdad, and all my mom’s family stories tend to be about when her dad was around. But the people I can trace genealogically aren’t the ones in the family stories. So it’s somewhat frustrating. And the family is not big, so it’s hard to tell if the Carl Sandeen I can find is the one related to me, or some other one… there’s no extra links to check.
Name: Carl Sandeen
Birth: abt 1903 – Sweden
Residence: 1930 – Quincy, Norfolk, Massachusetts
Name: Carl J Sandeen
Spouse: Hannah M
Birth: abt 1880 – Sweden
Residence: 1930 – Hudson, St Croix, Wisconsin
etc. I found a raft of them on ancestry.com mostly clustered around the 1930’s census documents. I see what you mean about a ‘common name.’
The best help I’ve found in straightening things out is the civic records everybody leaves behind when they register, vote, marry, or die. And getting into the actual photostat (online, these days) means you get to read the names that surround the name you’re looking for, which is a help. My grandfather’s WWI enlistment card was mistakenly (and in other handwriting than his or the other person who filled out the rest of the card) attributed to the wrong race, and thus was not available under some search programs.
My grandmother on my father’s side is another enigma, and one I haven’t solved yet, except to find out generally where she’s buried, in a cemetary that went inactive for a while and now has been taken over by the town, which is trying to catalog it on the internet. I suspect that there was no official marriage. It was pre-statehood in Oklahoma, it was Indian Territory, my grandfather took the baby, the mother only visited occasionally, and then vanished into a marriage elsewhere in the state. Neither my father nor my grandfather were willing to tell me more than her name. So I’m still searching on that one—which is 1/4 of my family tree. But I’m persistent. I’ll find her, if I have to go to Oilton OK and start looking for gravestones. All I need is a couple of more names in her line.
There’s some Swedish Boon[e]s also: they came in as ‘Bonde’, then became ‘Boon’.
(One of my great-grandfather’s sisters married a Boone, son of George and Hester, of North Carolina. The connections are interesting.)
I’m out of the Pennsylvania batch. My great-grandmother was Louisianna Carolina Boone, after whom I’m named. She brought up both my grandfather and father, sort of our family’s Ilisidi. I never met her, but she was one strong woman. She was the daughter of William James Boone, son of Miles Boone, son of Squire Jr. (as she told it, and I maintain), and lived on the Arkansas western border until she came to north Texas and Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma. She’s buried in Anadarko, OK. My other great-grandmother was Missouri Duff, so we have an abundance of states in our family tree. No, there was no Indiana Jones.
A new deal on ancestry.com if any of you are also members: they want volunteers to key in genealogical records. It’s kind of mindless, once you get onto it: you sit and key in entries from naturalization records, 1800’s army records, etc, etc. There’s a learning curve, but it gets much faster, and what you’re doing will help somebody somewhere say, aha! That’s great-great-grandad! And his wife was named Emily!
I’ve just got to tell someone about my GREAT find – only another genealogist will understand the feeling. I stumbled upon my Uncle Arthur’s complete WWI service records fully digitized on the National Archives of Australia site http://www.naa.gov.au. My Uncle Harry M. is there as well – he was gassed in the trenches in France and invalided out. I’m an Aussie of course.
That’s tremendous. And there are more records coming; I’m doing a little keying in my copious spare time, and Aussie records are being keyed in even as we speak. I volunteer for this in my downtime: I’m a heckuva fast typist, and I studied ancient document and inscription interpretation and restoration back when I was in university—plus I taught high school for 10 years, and handwriting can’t throw me. 😉 So I do it fast and pretty darned accurately—haven’t delved into any Aussie records yet myself, but I’ll give it a look and see what’s up there….yep, it’s the Sydney and NSW street index, 1861-1930, which, if it’s anything like what I’m keying for Jacksonville Florida, may have a lot of personal names.
CJ,
You might want to check on the Lucy Harris-William Shelton and their daughter Lucy Shelton section of your tree. Check out the respective birthdates for mother and daughter. I haven’t researched it myself, (Internet downloads can be damn painful) so I can’t help you with a gedcom or anything. Looking briefly through your tree we have William Overton and his wife Mary Elizabeth Waters as common ancestors. On my side they’re 8x great-grandparents so that probably puts us at 8th cousins or thereabout.
And I followed up your Dutch ancestry and we have Aeltje Braconie/Brackhonge as a common ancestress. I trace through her first husband, Thomas Badie, while you trace through her second, Cornelius Lambertse Cool. You might want to fix her birthplace since the Dutch had colonized anywhere in the New World in 1600. My source shows b. 1590 in Netherlands, which is probably more correct, but her birthyear is honestly unconfirmed.
No Oklahoma connection though other than my great-grandparents settling in Tulsa and running a boarding house there into the 40s. I have the address, but it was demolished for a freeway interchange a few decades before I got there.
Jason
Well, hello, cousin! six degrees of separation, to be sure.
The Sheltons are an absolute nightmare of contradictory records. I don’t know how they got things so bollixed up. Usually when it’s that bad you have a missing generation of an identical name…
Appreciate the note on Aeltje Brackhonge. The Dutch are actually kind of fun to trace, like the Vikings (no small connection there) because you can get something off the patronymic middle name, which can sometimes keep you going with some good guesses.
I know how you feel about the boarding house—they demolished the whole downtown of Lawton, OK in favor of a shiny new megamall, and they had had beautiful theaters and buildings dating from statehood. Everything I remember from growing up is just—gone. Not even a stone left.
CJ,
My copy of the middle volume of the 4th edition of Adventurers of Purse and Person that has the Harris’s is in storage, but it might have some data as its six generations generally reach to around the late 1700s. Maybe you can get it through ILL or something. And maybe a little poking around PERSI is in order for me, not to mention Southside Virginia Genealogies and maybe my pdfs of the Virginia Genealogist.
I know what you mean about the crappy research that people will put up on One World Tree or Rootsweb. I downloaded a massive medieval gedcom a few years ago and spent months, months I tell you, weeding out duplicates 🙁 I can understand the errors of fact and date, but duplicates? How in the world…? You simply can’t count on people to update their stuff with good data, that takes too much work. But you can correct OWT manually for things that you know are facts and can verify. One guy had another wife for my grandfather that showed up on OWT and I edited her out as he’d only been married once. It was still on the guy’s database, but not showing up on OWT anymore. I did much the same for a few of the more egregious medieval entries, but that’s like the Augean Stables, and me without a handy river nearby.
Jason
I’ve written to Ancestry suggesting that they have some Bonus Prize sectors on the tree, ie, once you have proven HOW you are related to, say, the ever-prolific King John of England, OWT will hand you a file that contains all of John’s antecedents, properly done and historically accurate. I think it would do wonders to clean up the tree. They may think doing that would shorten the time people spend on line: I think it would cure a lot of frustration. I, God help me, am related to a Viking line that is incredibly messy—and I am not just related to them once. It gets gruesome. I see Ivar the Boneless turn up yet one more time and I just shudder and feel like abandoning the project for the day.
“One of *those* Boones” reminds me of the first Futurama episode: “one of *those* Wongs, the Mars Wongs…”
Lol.