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.
more on the Australian daughters Margaret Eleanor Hoggard, the first daughter, married John Harper McConnell in 1920. they had John Robert McConnell (in 1920!)and a boy, Ian Bruce, born in 1928, died the same year.
John Harper married Myrtle Minnie, but they both died in the 2000’s and apparently there were no children. so I did have Hoggard cousins in Australia, but sadly, not now. it does look as if we are the only descendants left. amazing, considering how he sprinkled his genes around the place ….
anyway, it’s been a very exciting chase, and thank you very much for contributions, CJ and Tulrose.
Maybe Maude was the love of his life—who can know? And the tree protects living relatives: sometimes nervous people won’t put them in at all, but only anyone with a birthdate within a hundred years, the online dbs won’t change their name from “Living Smith” to “Mabel Smith” until they have a date of death registered.
But I’m glad we’ve been able to help. Tulrose is quite, quite good at it. I’m a relative newcomer to the hobby, but my family cooperated by having (in all instances but one) abundant records. You see how we do leave paper trails, even when we have no idea we’re doing it!
Thank you. I’m absolutely no use with US genealogy but I can bumble my way around English and Australian records.
I like to think she was …. his daughter was a very very special person, and I wish he could have known her. 🙁
it would be nice to think there was a living relative. of course those girls in Australia were very useful to him at home, they worked in the family business according to the census. and they were of that sad generation whose men died in WW1. my grandfathers both worked in reserved occupations – they were engineers – that’s how I come to be alive, I am sure. one of my paternal grandfather’s older brothers was killed on his first day in action, shot through the head. and he was a valued teacher; they only let him join up very reluctantly. the other brother was in the Navy – an engineer too – he was lucky at Jutland – his ship survived and had only one man slightly wounded. I just found that story and typed it up.
John and his wife Margaret are buried at Sale Cemetery. I’ve found that a polite note to the cemetery will often produce a digital image of the grave and its inscription. I generally ask the cemetery office to recommend someone and volunteer to recompense them for their time. I just received a couple of nice photos of my uncle’s grave over in Bunbury, Western Australia and in this case the cemetery said it was part of their service.
http://www.salecemetery.com.au/Burials.aspx
oh, look at that! how amazing and weirdly sad …. thank you tulrose
next week I am getting all the info on the other side of the family. my great grandfather was a genealogist; he researched many Norfolk families, and I am going to have fun putting it all on ancestry.com and seeing where that takes me!
thanks for all the encouragement … now I have a new obsession 😀
Oh yes, majorly obsessive.
In the way of things, you will be contributing to the system and giving information which may open doors for other families looking for connections. Everything fed in online goes everywhere.
If you really get into this, a good software to have to organize it all on your computer is Family Tree Maker, published by Ancestry, which lets you organize printout and serves as a friendly interface between you and Ancestry. At times I swear at it, but mostly I swear by it.
and now an even bigger surprise – the person who had all the info on roots.com is one of my cousins, has done the family tree on ancestry … but she has no time as my uncle (91) just had a second heart attack .. oh dear …
Time to claim all these things while you have your relatives with you. So many that I could have asked are gone
I do have a pile of notes and family trees from my mother’s collection, she did quite a lot of collating, other people wrote down stories, I’m quite lucky. the heart attack not a big one, he had forgotten all about it by the time she talked to him …
I did just chase my great grandmother Musgrave’s family back to the conquest .. not sure if that’s really true, but there’s a big Musgrave family from Great Musgrave in Westmorland, Cumbria, with a castle and all, just not sure if the in between connections are right – from lords of the wild north to lincolnshire tenant farmers and millers after the civil war …. amazing how many people put wrong info in – some of the musgraves had Jamaica as their country of residence in the 13th C!
Yep. I got Musgraves too, quite a lot of them. Musgraves and Leghs, which I think were intermarried. [Lee]. The naming of manor houses is a hoot: the Leghs had one named High Legh.
no really? I suppose there weren’t that many people to be descended from in 1060 … 😀
It gets crazy: Jane and I both are related to Tiptons ( later form of de Tybynton, Staffordshire) and one we think is closer to Jane than to me (but still related to me) married Isabella Musgrave, ca 1264, dau. of Roger. My grandmother was a Tipton, dau. of David Abijah Tipton. You won’t meet that name nowadays. The confusion we’re still working out is that one set of trees uses the name Tybynton all the way, and the other renames some of the Tybyntons as Tiptons. So we go by date and place to straighten it all out, but it’s a jigsaw.
you have to be really on the ball, especially when a given name is used down the generations … it all has my head going round and round.
there’s a Robert Musgrave, ancestor of my great grandmother, born in lincolnshire 1585, apparently son of Henry Musgrave, who was born 1530 in Leeds, and died in leeds. so maybe there’s some slippage and I need to see if that really is a connection. the leeds musgrave men go back about 3 generations, and then they start being born in Hartly castle, westmorland, which should join up to your Isabella, but I haven’t got a Roger Musgrave at that date ….
ANd just remember to crosscheck with Wiki anytime ancestry tells you something doesn’t exist (like a village), and don’t depend on it being righter than you are. We’re all just people, and the further we get from home ground the more we have to guess. Ancestry insisted up one side and down the other, in every single record, that we’re German, once Kirsch. Family tradition says that name is Irish. I’m right. It was once Norman, de Cerisy (not from a noble guy but meaning ‘from the village of Cerisy’ in Normandy, and my guy didn’t come over in the invasion, but a couple of decades later, probably as a carter. The family was English, then went to Ireland (before King William), then part came back. I had to hammer all that out from outside research, because ancestry just didn’t have the record until I started working out of that little spot of ‘wrong origin’ they had. Once I got to the Tubervilles and such, the links matched up.
Ahah, I have just found your Roger Musgrave father of Isabella, he’s the brother of my Thomas Musgrave. but I have to redo it all because I managed to chop my Musgrave tree in half, dammit!
and hooray, you were right, apparently I have 3 second cousins descended from the scamp alive in Australia and one sadly recently died, 4 in all. they may be surprised to know their great grandfather had another wife and 3 more children back in England. or perhaps he was honest and they knew. there’s no record found so far of his actually marrying in Australia.
The Australian Marriage Index doesn’t have him but it’s missing a whole state. South Australia has absolutely nothing available in any of the online indices. I would say they’ve been drinking too much of their excellent wine but that would be tacky.
if they hadn’t married there might have been problems, they look very respectable and settled, daughters all working in the family business, one married … She came from Heidelberg, Victoria, a big Irish family, her mother died 2 years after the first child was born. might have been hard to hide that they weren’t married, and no reason not to, either.
Dunno in Australia: Tulrose might know: but in frontier USA, marriage was what you got done someday when you had a preacher you liked and yardage for a dress. That’s why commonlaw marriage was so strong in Oklahoma, and treated as a real alternative. Couples that stayed together and gave out that they were married, were married in the eyes of the law, (and still are). The reason for the practice is simply that with no counties, nor courts (or courts that covered vast territories,) no settled religious institutions (even more scant if you were Jewish), circuit-riding preachers, and no place but the family Bible to record a marriage anyway, you were kind of on your own about that. Neither of my parents had a birth certificate, though born after statehood (1907), nor any church record. All they had was the statement (in the 1970’s, when they applied for passports to take a trip to England) from the county clerk of Caddo County (my uncle, who didn’t have one either) that they were known to him; and to a couple of longtime locals; and I think they threw in a highschool transcript…proving you were born in a place is not easy at a remove of 60 years. Fortunately the courts in Oklahoma are very used to that sort of thing emanating from the state’s formative years, and from districts under tribal rule (where a lot of non-tribal folk were also living, including my grandparents on both sides. Grandfather Tipton and Hattie Ferrall may have come in from civilized Ohio in possession of a marriage certificate and birth records, and Great-great-grandfather Boone and my great-gran,yes: he was a lawyer, son of a doctor; but the rest? Not so likely.
In sum, they may have been as formal as they could be conveniently.
I looked at the Victorian Federation Index (1889-1901) and couldn’t find a marriage for Margaret Egan or any of its variations. If she was Irish Catholic I would assume they were married in church unless he said he was divorced and in that case it would be a quick trip to the registry office and everything kept very quiet. The registry office would result in her being in the database (except things do get left out on occasion). It would be very difficult to hide something like this from her parents.
Common law marriages existed, but I don’t know anything about the legalities, especially for Victoria. My only experience with them is in New South Wales where I have a 2nd cousin whose mother was in one and he won’t speak of his Dad, even to his own children. That gentleman was also a bounder, he lied over and over again, took his brother’s name, and was a “remittance man” (the family paid him off and sent him to the colonies).
Sale was a prosperous town, connected by rail to Melbourne, so her family could easily visit. Also it was far enough away that Margaret’s relationship with “that man” was out of sight, if not out of mind.
http://www.salecommunity.com/history.php
thanks for that link, tulrose – Sale looks like a very prosperous place!
we have no death date for margaret Egan’s father, but even if he was not still alive there were brothers, Michael, and John (James too young) to stick up for her and the family’s honour.
I wonder. if a photographer could set up in business in a street, there were newspapers, and races reported, there were definitely churches of various denominations – I think so near Melbourne everything was very civilised and “English”. very different from the wild west of USA! Australia was part of the empire, even though there were republicans who didn’t want to recognise the King (referring to the newspaper link that Tulrose gave).
those medieval Musgraves had official weddings no doubt, because of land agreements, but for the rest you only needed to plight your troth privately; I can’t remember what date it was the church started to control marriages amongst the whole population.
Mr J. W. Wherrett, photographer, has purchased the Rembrandt Studio, The Block, Collins-street, Melbourne, and has secured as manager for his Sale business, Mr John Hoggard, who has had a high class English training.
The Gippsland Times Monday 23rd November 1908 Page 3
MR. J. W. WHERRETT, Photographer, Raymond-street, Sale, begs to announce that he has purchased the Rembrandt Studio, The Block, Collins street, Melbourne, and has been fortunate in securing, as Manager for his Sale Business, Mr John Hoggard, who has had a high-class English training, and previous to accepting this position was Retoucher and Artist at the Johnstone O’Shannesy Studio, Melbourne. Mr Wherrett desires to thank the residents of Sale and surrounding districts for their generous patronage, and hopes for a continuance of the same.
The same newspaper as before but this gives John’s previous employment in Melbourne.
oooooh, and then announced his non-connection with JEH once he set up his own business … what date was that other link you found .. going to look …
in 1913 “Mr J. W. Wherrett notifies the residents of Sale and district that he has not executed any orders of any description for Mr J. E. Hoggard, photographer, of Raymond street, Sale, nor does he intend to do so” …. sounds like they had a disagreement .. 😀
There’s a lot of references to him in the Gippsland Times about his work. He took photographs of all important occasions. What I find very odd is that there is nothing in the Family Notices in that paper where you expect to see the Birth announcements. I haven’t looked in the Argus yet, thinking that the local paper would be better.
No, nothing in any of the other papers either. More and more papers are coming online. The National Library is doing a great job of getting them out there. They are run through high speed readers in Asia and then they go through quality assurance. After that, it’s up to the individual researcher to clean up the scanned copy; it’s all done on a volunteer basis similar to indexing for FamilySearch, FreeREG, or Ancestry. I’ve tagged all my family references so I can easily find them again.
that is odd. nice to think he was successful though. 😀
now I need some technical help with just tree building. I have missed a generation out, and all I seem to be able to do is redo the whole thing in parallel. is there a way to insert a generation without redoing the whole tree?
oh, sorry, I just worked it out, please ignore me! 😀
To detach someone from a person:
Pull up the profile of the person to whom they’re attached.
Click on “Edit this Person”.
Then go to the Relationships Tab.
Then Remove the person wrongly attached. This doesn’t delete anyone, just removes the relationship.
Then, when you want to attach that person somewhere else, make sure you “Select someone from my tree”. The terminology is a bit poor because you can have strays not attached to anyone.
It helps to have 2 windows open while doing this; one with the person your working with and a second with a list of all persons. Then you can see if you’ve already got him/her/it out there.
Confusing, no?