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.
Boy you’re not kidding about the scholarship! No, that’s not the mom/dad — they were born a 100 years after this person and nope, that guy with that name is the grandson. Sure can be frustrating, especially when you do get to a historical figure and it’s really obvious that no one paid any attention to the historical accounts. Some of my tree is just ignoring the ancestry member trees and I’ve just relied on the historical accounts, which may or may not be as suspect when I think about it. I’ve run into the same problem you did and had a couple that I’ve had to remove. I have been checking out any attached stories first! But it’s sure been interesting so far. Once I get the holes filled in, then I’ll take the time and really research individuals. There’s a lot of mom’s side that I’ve been ignoring while tracking down one branch. And dad’s side is languishing and my husband is wondering about his end of the world. So I think I need to retire!
Historical data is generally good. I don’t totally rely on the transcriptions but look at the image. When there is no image it’s back to the microfilm. Ancestry has a nice feature for some databases where you can modify the transcription. This gets added to their databases and eventually indexed.
Another site (now owned by Ancestry, but still a unique site) is http://www.rootsweb.com . There you’ll find a lot of user trees, web sites, and miscellanea. There is also http://www.usgenweb.com and http://genuki.org.uk . These, like Cyndi’s list, are compendiums of data, historical facts, web sites, etc. They are run by volunteers and while some pages are wonderful others are sparse in facts.
I’m definitely with you on the images! When possible I’ll look at those first — was especially helpful on the Quebec end of things, even though I had a lot of information already. But geez! No only are those Drouin records all in French [Catholic Church records], but there’s a lot of variety to the quality of the image, not to mention the handwritting, the ink and the quill. But nice that you get mom and pop mentioned for baptismals and marriages, and the French habit of listing the woman by her maiden name sure makes it easier to find that ancestress instead of the English (American?) approach of listing the woman as Mrs. Robert Rick. Like we suddenly loose all identity once we marry. So aggrivating on so many levels! Thank you so much for the hints on the other sites! I tend to go with more info is better and getting at the front end makes for so much less editting on the back side. Thanks again!
The thing is–Ancestry is a database. People put stuff into it—but—it’s all bot driven. So nothing is valid until you do the math and see if a particular connection is even possible mathematically. Treat it as a giant shoebox full of snippets some of which actually are valid and a lot of which are chaff. I honestly wish (and probably the people who run Ancestry do too) that they would boiler-plate the genealogies of people like Charlemagne and John I, and if you get one,legitimately, it would just plump the whole mess into your tree—
It’s started to do that on a modest level, but you have to be careful what you agree to let the bot provide, or you can end up wiping some of your own info. My own method is to accept everything offered, build a huge tree, then wade through it in sequence verifying the connections (I’m now back to the 1600’s on one side, but I have several pounds of printout to get through.) This method of building unfortunately establishes my tree out on that DB, and I get mail from all sorts of people wailing that there must be a mistake somewhere—yep, I know there are, but I’m one of half a million doing exactly the same thing, which is how the db gets so messy. If I blitz it at their say-so, that could be right or wrong, and my tracking hasn’t reached that spot yet. I have noticed that the historical figures are getting MORE accurate. But not all. And the Boone family practically goes to war over the issue of whether the Boones and de Bohuns are related. Which is no skin off my nose: I’ve got legitimate de Bohuns (and Boones) on both sides of the blanket—and we’ve got family stories that directly contravene what some of the trees argue. The Boones are just one knotty problem of many, many out there. What’s exciting is how some of the ‘regular Joes’ of history are getting filled out, found, notated, and families are able to learn something about the times by using the info. Like one obscure batch of mine that suddenly left Gloucester and ended up in Cold Ashton, a very remote area also in Gloucestershire—look up the year in history and you find it was when Gloucester was under attack in the English Civil War and cannonballs were flying IN the city. That sort of thing I find very exciting, the ability to take a name out of time and understand what may have motivated somebody who was just dates and a name. You can imagine their family, you can understand why the son went back to get a wife, yet came back to Cold Ashton, etc.
Oh there’s no doubt that there’s fun stuff to be found. And getting a glimpse of social dynamics is definitely a plus! I had a friendly argument with a friend who was dead certain that all the tales of marrying girls off young was just an urban legend since nothing like that had showed up in her family searches [and she’s been doing this for years and years]. Well good old Nicolas back in 1660ish, not long off the boat married into one of the more prominent families in Quebec [which in itself is interesting since we can only take his side back to his father, so how did he rate this sort of connection?] and the girl was 12. She died about a year later, no children, having drowned as she crossed the river in the spring ‘returning from her devotions’. The next wife, also a daughter of another prominent family, was 14 — Nicholas was 31 when he married wife #1. Apparently my friend doesn’t have any french ancestors. We’ll ignore the fact that they arrest people for this sort of thing these days.
Young children (girls and boys) have been betrothed amongst the upper classes as far back as recorded history, I’ve no doubt. It’s the usual political, financial etc jockeying for position.
I’ve found no few early teen mothers in the family tree. But there was conversely a cemetary full of wives who had had kid after kid until they passed thirty, then died. This one guy had had 4-5 wives all of whom were married in their 20’s and died in childbirth. Post-thirty childbearing had risks in these days. Ideally the guy would marry 20’ish and his wife would be just a shade under that, and the primary reason for this thinking was so that the wife could have her first child at 20 and by having gotten the first born alive might have a better shot at living. Childbirth was far more dangerous than warfare in those days.
And that’s where, for the ambitious wealthy woman with learning, a convent could be extremely enticing. Those women wielded real power and influence.
I remember long, long ago taking an English history course in college and during the Medieval period, a woman reached majority at 14 and a man at 21 — which may have had something to do with a male being close to their full growth and strength [or not, just my guess]. I remember checking on line after Amelia made a comment in one of the Elizabeth Peters books, that 12 was a legal marriage age in England around the turn of the century. Childbirth was dangerous as hell, definitely in the early teens and very much so into one’s 30s. Seems to me when I was in college that the conventional wisdom for life spans until the 1800s was 35 for men, 25 for women, with the understanding that there were always the occational exception [often linked with social status]. And endless pregnancies create their own hell on a woman’s body with stresses on nutrition, bones, immune systems and the heart/kidneys. My friend Kathy has a picture of a great-great who is 5 years younger than her husband, looks like his mother and had 17 pregnancies. I’ve no doubt that more than one woman managed to escape off to a convent to get away from husbands and/or fathers. The age disparity many have facilitated that escape [widowed at 18 and I’m outa here]. Even the rigors of a religous life must have been a relief.
I have to wonder what all those young deaths did to the family dynamics. I have a line of fathers and sons about six generations long, between the mid 1600’s and the early 1800’s, where the boy in my direct line was always under 10 when the father passed. How cohesive could a family be, under such circumstances?
Mind, I know more about a gggg-grandfather through a son born to his wife by her second husband, ten years after the first husband’s death, than I know through sources in the direct line. (I suspect a lack of literacy in the direct line.) You take your info where you find it.
Then there’s one of mine, who died, probably in childbirth, couple of hundred miles from her home and another hundred from her father’s house. Kind of a sad story there, but when you look at the habit of the English-descended, you often find the wedding taking place in the bride’s town, and her burial in the husband’s unless she survives him by a long time and goes to live with a married daughter. The birth of children, however, is often in the woman’s home village, sometimes the baptism likewise, so the woman must have gone there while she was not too pregnant to travel far: the mother and aunts and elder were probably playing midwives.
A parent going to live with a married daughter has proven invaluable to investigating some of my female lines, because in some cases, the census that captures that cohabitation is the only document link I can find between the two.
It can be frustrating, however, when it’s the mother and stepfather living with the married daughter. Anyone know anything about Mallory families in Ontario in the 1850’s? I have a gg-grandmother born to one, and her father was apparently a minister, but she doesn’t appear in any of the Wesleyan Baptismal Registers, and I can’t find a Mallory minister, either, and none of the Mallory families I can find mention an ‘Adelaid’ of the right age within fifteen years, or even have a decent gap in the children where one might fit, and there’s apparently a lot of records still in private collections…
AAAGH!
Make sure where they were born—and records can assume incorrectly: 1841-52 was also the time of An Gorta Mor, the Irish potato famine, and no few Irish people who could possibly do so took to the Colonies, or just tried to get anywhere there was food and hopefully a job—went to relatives, etc. Unfortunately Irish records of any era are not in as good a state as you would expect of local priests, but there were also two famines and numerous wars and uprisings, and perhaps a fear that too good records might be used to track people or get at relatives.
I’ve wondered if Adelaid was an immigrant, but the data from my great-grandmother, her daughter, was specific: born in Canada, maiden name Mallory, b. 14 Feb 1851, father a minister. The first official document I’ve found for her, the 1871 Canada Census, where she’s already married my gg-grandfather, substantiates the place and year.
There were a lot of Mallory families in Upper Canada (Ontario) in the 1840’s/50’s, all of them related through a John Mallory, born in Connecticut, who left that state because of the Revolution. Some of the lines are very well documented, but some are downright ephemeral. Adelaid could very well be a daughter or grand-daughter in one of those ephemeral lines.
The ‘father was a minister’ is significant. The area I’m looking at had a lot of little churches, some serving only handful of families, and each of those churches was served by several travelling ministers — it was a popular occupation. Although the records of these ministers spans the 1820’s through 1880’s, not all of those records reached public hands (where they exist at all). The Wesleyan Methodist Baptismal Registers is a compendium of baptismal (and some birth) information for many of these ministers, but not all. For instance, I have found Adelaid’s husband and one of his brothers in the lists, but not their sister, born between them, and none of their other five siblings, either. This implies to me that there are records missing, and the records specialist in me has a wild urge to go digging in church basements, rooting through boxes.
This doesn’t mean Adelaid’s family wasn’t immigrant, but does imply that it didn’t have to be. At the least, she should be showing up the 1861 Census, and possibly even the 1851 Census.
The mother married the stepfather on 31 Dec 1866, within the area I’m looking at, but I haven’t been able to track *her* further back, either. And why was she (apparently) using her maiden name for this (supposedly) second marriage…? Am I looking at an illegitimate birth for Adelaid? Or an early widowhood and reversion to a maiden name by mother Mary? Or…?
Like I said: AAARGH!
Sometimes people named a next child after a deceased child. Which can really mess a line up.
Any idea of the denomination of minister? Church records might help.
Answering after lo, many moons…
I have a bit more info on these people. I found Adelaid’s obituary, which gave her birthplace as Castleton, Cramahe Twp, Northumberland, Upper Canada (Ontario). Found her and her mother in the 1851/52 census, living with her mother’s father there… and all three are surnamed Tompkins.
Methinks the ‘Mallory’ may be the name of the father, but perhaps not the husband…
Mary Tompkins shows up in the 1861 census with her father, again, but with the notation that she is only visiting from Pickering. No sign of Adelaid. After Mary marries in 1866, she can be found in subsequent censuses with her husband. Adelaid married in 1870, before the 1871 census, where she shows up with her husband, my gg-grandfather.
I’d thought that all of these people were Wesleyan Methodist (Adelaid is mentioned as a life-long adherent in her obituary, and my gg-grandfather was baptised as an infant into that denomination), but it turns out that Mary’s father was Baptist, and his children are mentioned as being the same, on the censuses.
I tried writing to the National Archives, but apparently they’re in the middle of a big move/renovation, and aren’t taking requests by mail at the moment. Haven’t heard back from the Baptists. All this might be for naught, anyway — the 1850’s were a decade before regular records-keeping for most denominations, apparently.
This doesn’t mean that the information isn’t out there, though. I’d been looking for Adelaid and husband Isaac’s death dates for years, hitting brick wall after brick wall… and then the Otsego County newspaper archives came online in December, 2010. And there was their obituary. And several notices of significant anniversaries (60th, 62nd, and 65th wedding), marriages of their children (including that of my great-grandmother’s first wedding), and random things like who was visiting whom and where they were from…
Sometimes patience pays. (Mostly in frustration, but a nugget of gold every now and then, too!)
Total non-sequitur: Why, when I answer this, do I get an image of Ysabel staring at me from the upper left corner of my screen? Lovely kitty, yes, but I know I’m answering a CJ reply already…
Not necessarily with regards to the maiden name. In Canada it’s very common for the woman to keep her maiden name in common usage. All my family [with the exception of two cousins] are in Canada. Although my father’s mother might be referred to as Mrs. Ryan in newspaper accounts, all the records on her — and her grave marker — use her maiden name: Catherine Poitras, Beloved Wife of M.L. Ryan. The same situation holds for her mother. And this was in Alberta and the Northwest Territories. Now, admittedly the records for the NWT were primarily from the Catholic Church [not sure how well this might correspond with the Protestant side]; but using a maiden name seems to be common all over Canada, not just in predominately Catholic Quebec. The down side, is that it’s not necessarily a constant [I stumbled on one great aunt’s maiden name by sheer luck — she never used it], and you might get records/referrences for one person using both maiden and married name(s). Which I can see being a real pain.
I’ve seen a preference for the maiden name with French and/or Quebec names, where it appears to be the rule. The Protestant side appears to prefer married names over maiden names. The Registers mentioned above tend to be of the form: “John Smith, Cramahe Twp, b. 08-08-1840, bap. 09-09-1840, Joseph, Mary, Rev. R. Roe.” You may get extra information, such as a mother’s maiden name, but don’t count on it.
They’re a useful tool, if incomplete. Apparently, they’re the work of one person, gathering all of the records she could get her hands on into one cohesive whole. She typed the original. Let it not be said that keying in records isn’t appreciated, because here’s one researcher who says, “Yay!” I just wish she’d been able to get her hands on more…
I’ll have that pony now. Can it be a gray one?
Here’s an interesting reference in a baptismal register that I found a few minutes ago.
16 Jun 1811 at St John the Baptist at Garboldisham, Mary, dau of Hannah MARJORAM (Daughter of Hannah a Married Woman – Spuria Proles)
Apparently Hannah’s husband wasn’t the father. Spuria Proles – bastard issue or descendant.
Mary was buried in July 1811 and in August 1813 Hannah had another little girl, Mary. This time there wasn’t a notation against the name in the parish register but still no mention of the father or Hannah’s husband.
And without dna, hard to prove which man, unless, say, the husband was in a war overseas.
FamilySearch has announced they have started indexing Oklahoma Land Allotment Records, 1899-1907[Part B] this week.
https://library.familysearch.org/node/1059
About halfway down the page. It looks like they’ve nearly finished Part A of the land allotments and are doing OK county marriages. Now, I don’t know if that is Oklahoma County or state-wide. Also doing some Essex registers that I would dearly love to get my hands on.
Do you have a spare minute (stops to laugh hysterically) to consider indexing 16th century English Parish Registers? The writing is very old-style 16th century and I don’t have the expertise to even attempt it. Looking at the forums it seems they’re short on experienced transcribers for this style of writing. The link is: https://familysearch.org/volunteer/indexing . I looked at some of these and sent them back. I’m doing New York 1930 census, New Zealand Transportation Registers and Dorset UK registers which aren’t as old and those I can manage.
Lol—I’ll consider doing it. Since I do a little calligraphy myself, it’s not too hard for me. There are some ‘ligatures’ or letter bundles that can make it a little less than apparent what they’re doing. I’ve lost my connection to that site via a computer glitch, and I’ll use your link to see if I can get in.