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.
CJ,
I’ve spent a lot of time on soc.genealogy.medieval getting some of that stuff straightened out. I’d also recommend the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy as they put out an internetf magazine with cutting-edge genealogy. Cost something like 8 pounds for a year’s membership, but worth it, IMO. Or if you really want to get serious is to buy a copy of the Complete Peerage. You’ll need a magnifying glass for the modern reprint, but it’s pretty reliable because the people on s.g.m have a website updating it with new info as it gets researched. Don’t think that it goes back much further than the Conqueror, but Anglo-Saxon genealogy is its own little nightmare.
Jason
I appreciate the suggestion: when I get more than surface deep into that area, I think it’s going to be a GOOD suggestion: wikipedia can only be as accurate as the last chap that posted, but even wiki is clearer than OWT when it comes to the Merovingians.
More on Aussie WWI records: a shirt-tail cousin died in France in 1917 and didn’t leave a will. As late as 1940 there were still letters from lawyers requesting a will, other members of the family having died and left bequests here and there. This correspondence, when I get it sorted into date sequence, will shed some light on a relative we didn’t know existed until he popped up in the WWII records from 1939-1945. Such fun!!
I love mysteries…especially ones with pieces you can almost get…and have some hope of finding.
No progress yet on the missing grandmother, but I’ve been too busy to really get down to research lately. I’m really holding out hope that the cataloging of Oklahoma cemetaries is going to find her.
Which cemetary? I belong to the Tulsa Genealogical Society and they’ve done a lot of the local stuff. The Tulsa City Genealogical Librarian will certainly know what’s available. She’s wonderful and our expert on the Dawes Rolls.
The old Oilton cemetary. It was derelict for years, has recently been taken over by the city of Oilton, in Creek County: the Creek county records are not yet digitized, but the cemetary is supposedly being surveyed and recorded. My grandmother’s name was Gertude. She died sometime in the 30’s, I’m pretty sure. Her maiden name was Scanlan, and she may have been buried with other Scanlans, but nobody remembers the name of her second husband, and she may have been buried under that name.
I’ve also done some transcribing for FamilySearch.org. I quit for a while because what I’d been given were German families in South Texas and it was just too difficult. I’m about to volunteer for FreeReg in the UK, the parish register equivalent of FreeBMD. I need to see the Essex records that haven’t been transcribed and this will kill 2 birds with one stone.
I’ve been keying slave ship records out of New Orleans—really appalling stuff–lots of kids shipped off alone. But I spent quite a while in document/inscription decipherment, and reading 1800’s handwriting (especially from really bad spellers and people using shortcuts and abbreviations common at the time)is not a skill that grows on trees, and I figure I can at least put my esoteric skills to good use.
Lord, they’ve got to be ugly.
Very. Cold, dispassionate, but the ages…one sticks in my mind, a young mother with a 6 day old baby named Ramah, which, in the Bible, is connected with lamentation. And 11 and 12 year old boys and girls shipped off alone. A 70 year old woman. A 60 year old man named Job. It gives you a sense of outrage. But these records need to be known. So I’m keying them to make them available.
My Gt Grandfather Henry wasn’t a slave but was a convict. Sentenced to death at 13 for stealing a cow in 1832, then commuted to 7 years transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) finally spending 13 years under irons, in chain gangs, in solitary, doing hard labour, diet of bread and water, etc until he got his ticket-of-leave. Somehow he survived, married, and spent the rest of his life on the goldfields as a miner. I found his probate file the other day, for free, too.
I’ve often wondered whether my great-grandparents lied in the stories that they told my mom. According to mom, they were Swedish nobility, but the records that seem the most likely to be them have great-granddad listed as a farmhand, which seems a bit odd if they were. On the other hand, my mom does remember meeting a great-aunt at a church retirement home who was dripping with diamonds, so it seems at least possible that they had money. Did that happen often… people “upping” their social class when they got to America, because who was going to check on you? Why not claim to be nobility/upper-class/rich, but a victim of sad misfortune, instead of admitting that you were a farmer or shopkeeper? On the other hand, it is possible that something I don’t know about the social dynamics of emigrating and settlement patterns in America would make that more difficult than I think.
What happened in Europe was religious war and civil war, several rounds of it, not to mention the Black Death, and those who had money enough and were in fear for their lives took ship and got out of Dodge. I know that several bursts of emigration out of England in my family were likely prompted by the English Civil War: I even have found the story in one instance, in the Vane family, where junior stole some documents involving high officials out of his father’s desk and took them to the authorities. And papa was in deep trouble. In others, the old nobility ran into financial difficulty, and in one case sold the family seat to the highest bidder, and emigrated. There was, I think, a thought in the head of some that they could found a new nobility and a new monarchy in the Americas.
My Boones were another case in point: the one that migrated, son of a line of George Boones, but harking back to the old de Bohuns, came to the Americas. Papa Squire Boone was a weaver and a Quaker, dedicated to no-war. One of his sons, a teacher, became the family historian. Another, Daniel, became a colonel—and had ambitions to rise in the British army, I’m pretty sure, but things didn’t work out, he hadn’t the connections, and he ended up fighting on the other side. He founded towns—and left in high dudgeon when the people who moved in didn’t regard him as the authority. He finally moved on to Missouri, founded a family compound there, where he died, still holding court in his small domain. I think he’d gotten the family stories of ‘who we are’ from the teacher-brother, and though he was himself virtually illiterate (his spelling was atrocious, if the sample we have is real), he thought opportunity in America was his claiming the family legacy of power. My great-grandmother was similarly insistent on lineage and connection, and infused it into my father and grandfather, which is where I got the genealogy bug: I heard this stuff literally at my father’s knee.
So yes, to your question, there were plenty of reasons for old nobility to be over here hoeing potatoes. Mostly it was survival and a new start.
Stealing a whole cow—that was ambitious, for thirteen: he’d have had to get it to someplace isolated, butcher it, package and distribute and sell it all without tipping his hand—if he was ever actually guilty of the crime, solo, which is up for grabs.
Justice in those days was a scandal and actual starvation was not that far from many people.
And thanks to your great-grandfather’s grit and enterprise, we have Tulrose.
I’m afraid some of my more colorful forebears are scoundrels.
Well, Henry had help in the guise of an older woman of 17, one Elizabeth Baker. He had his dad’s initials tattoo’d on one arm and hers on the other during the 7 months before actually getting to Hobart Town. This wasn’t all at sea. He spent time on one of the prison hulks waiting to be transported.
One of my English ancestors when a small boy was handed over to the lord of a certain castle as a hostage as part of a peace agreement. His father used the truce to gather forces and came back and beseiged the castle.
The lord of the castle took the kid by the scruff, dangled him over the parapet some distance above the ground and threatened to kill him right in front of his father if the father didn’t abandon the seige and go away.
The father replied, “I can get another son,” and kept on with the seige.
The lord of the castle was appalled and outraged, and felt so sorry for the boy having such a father he hauled him back across the parapet and adopted him as his own. The castle held out. And my ancestor, as you may figure, was not particularly close to his father, but came to regard the lord of the castle as a second father, one he much preferred.
The boy grew up to be an advisor and a diplomat, known for his scrupulous honesty and his ability to get compromises in difficult situations.
You’re upper class compared to us. If you happen to ride by a peasant slaving away in the fields, that’s probably an ancestor. I’m missing a Gt Granparent. We have no clue who Grandpa’s father was and since his mum had 3 other kids by lord knows who we have little chance of finding out. He was probably the gentleman in the “big house” but could as easily have been a travelling salesman.
Lol! My grandfather *was* a traveling salesman, with the Schyler Fruit Company, in early Oklahoma, after the cowboying trade began to die out—he did all right, though, that or great-gran Louisiana’s inheritance from her husband built that pretty white house on the acreage. Louisiana lived with him, or he lived with her, which is how she ended up in charge of my father after he was born, and until her death. I have a feeling my gran’s ‘marriage’ was never ‘official’—de facto: I like that; and gran Gertrude may have been staying there until the baby was born. I am not sure my father got a birth certificate until he wanted to travel overseas—for that matter, while Caddo was a county, it was later subdivided into several counties, so who knows where records went. I know my mother didn’t have a birth certificate until that trip: she was born in a farmhouse. Most kids were, I think, in those days: the doctor traveled out to the house.
I checked to see if our local Tulsa libraries knew anything about Oilton cemeteries.No luck. The OKC people stick to Oklahoma county and we here in TUL do Tulsa County with a few side excursions into Creek and Wagoner. There isn’t an active group doing Creek county at present.
sigh—someday!
Hello there,
I have been a reader of yours for awhile and just found your blog here. I saw the genealogy topic and had to have a look, since it is an area I work in as an archivist in Scotland.
Ancestry.com is very good for providing searchable databases (often with images) of large, usually national, series of archives (i.e. army, naturalisation, civil birth, death and marriage records) but has large gaps when it comes to more ‘local’ archives (i.e. landed family estate records – not just the family but also its tenants and servants; local government records – taxation, politics, social welfare; businesses – employment, / training).
This is especially true in the United Kingdom where the biggest institutional provider of images and data is the National Archives. Local archive services often have a wealth of material relevant to family history but have not put their archives online via Ancestry.com. Sometimes the archives are available online via their own websites but often they just haven’t been digitised. To look through these types of records you have to trawl through catalogues, which are usually online via the institutional website or a collaborative project website. Most of the time you can only access the description of individual archive items or series of items but if you really want a copy of something you think is relevant from the description you should be able to contact the archive service about getting one – it is the bread and butter of what we archivists do.
Here is a useful English archives website that allows you to search across the catalogues of numerous archive services across the country; http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/, plus a URL for an open ended search under Cherry to give you an idea of what it can turn up. I’m coming from a British point of view here so no doubt there are similar projects in the US – I just do not know them.
Hope this helps (I may have been going over old ground if you have been searching for a while) but if you find any Scottish ancestors let me know and I’ll see if I can help.
Thank you very much. One of our problems is in Jane’s family, where the McPhails arrived in Canada, as we best can guess, and some went to Vermont, but getting very far back gets confusing with the repetition of names. We’ve got a lead, but it’s a skinny one, and we’ll be very interested to pursue those links.
@Tryfells: Many thanks for your explanation of A2A. I’ve dabbled with it but haven’t understood the results.
OK tulrose – A2A is a search engine of archive catalogues. What it gives you are descriptions of individual archives. These descriptions will cover the whole item rather than specific information contained within it. So, for instance, a register of police constables will be described as a “Leeds City Police Constable Register, 1912-1930” rather than listing all the constables who are recorded within it. A database of constable names would do that for you but such things are not available via A2A. However there are still ways to use A2A and online catalogue sites like it.
Firstly you can search for bigger things that your ancestors were involved in. If your ancestor was a police constable and you found him in Leeds on the 1901 Census, you can search A2A under ‘police’ and ‘leeds’ to see what records are kept and where. This works for particularly well for businesses and the estates of landed families too. Once you know where Leeds City Police records are held you can then contact the relevant archive service to see if they can search the constable registers for you. Chances are that they already have a searchable database or maybe just a physical index that is not online but will make searching for individual register entries much easier. They may charge you for that research but it is likely to cost less than the travel to get there.
Secondly, although the constable register example I gave you does not detail names, there are many, many, cases where people’s names are vital to the description, usually personal records like correspondence and diaries. Searching A2A for a name would throw up every description with that name in it. You would then have to go through the descriptions and sort out which ones are more likely to be relevant. You can always put in a place name in the advanced search option to limit the results even further.
Once you have your list of results you then have to bear in mind how archivists catalogue archives. Unlike librarians, who usually catalogue books as individual items and categorise them by subject, archivists usually group archives together by the original creator and then catalogue them as a whole collection. So all archives of the Leeds City Police, held by West Yorkshire Archives service, will be collected together and catalogued in the one catalogue. It goes further than this as archivists would group all the Leeds City constable registers together as a sub group within the catalogue of the whole organisation and do the same for station records, financial records, annual reports etc. In archive catalogues there will be descriptions at the whole catalogue, sub group and individual item levels telling users what is contained within. Since A2A will search every individual description of ALL the catalogues it has data on for the search terms you have put in, it will often throw up a lot of disparate entries that, in archival terms, have no connection to each other. To give you the option of understanding where the individual descriptions from your search list are coming from, the A2A search engine details not just the description you are interested in but shows the rest of the collection it has been grouped into. This is why you will often see large numbers of hypertexted descriptions above and below the description you have selected to look at. They may not be relevant to your own interest but they give you an idea of what else relates to that item in terms of creation.
I hope that explains A2A a little better than they do on the website itself. Unlike the databases via Ancestry the descriptions via A2A are usually a means to information rather than the information itself. You are likely to either have to physically visit the service to view the original item or contact them about getting a copy sent out to you.
Oh and for McPhails you should have a look at George Black’s Surnames of Scotland to give you a general background on the name. The book is still in print and is quite popular in genealogy circles so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a copy nearby. The Scotland’s People website is also very useful in allowing you to search the Old Parish Registers of Scotland (OPRs – Pre-1855 Baptism, Burial and Marriage registers) by surname. You do have to register with the site and it does cost money to look at images. The search engine however is pretty good and it provides access to the census and wills and testaments as well. One very important thing to note about the OPRs – they only cover those people who were members of the Church of Scotland. Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Quakers etc. will not be covered. For those registers you will need to track down if they physically survive and where.
Finally the Scottish equivalent of A2A (see above) is the Scottish Archives Network or SCAN for short. It has more than just catalogues on it too so it is worth a look for anyone looking into Scottish genealogy.
Thanks so much: I can see we haven’t even begun to search the Scottish angle!
I appreciate that. You get a little bit of education with every branch you track down. We’ve gotten this one back to nearly the 1700’s, but we are going to have to learn an interesting bit of new stuff to keep that line going backward.
And many thanks from me as well. That’s a very useful description of the way it works. The Norfolk part of the family is the most likely to be found in some of the railway archives but the Staffs people were itinerant, in and out of the poorhouse, and Roman Catholic to boot in the late 1700’s, very early 1800’s. I’ve tried Staffs directly for the poorhouse records but they’re extremely sparse and don’t cover the years I need. Then they were transported and Kew has a vast amount of data for them once they entered the legal system. Until then they pretty much flew under the radar. Rosemary
The slave registry is more or less finished…and now they’re keying in some orphanage records from Australia…in one case I’ve entered, a family emigrated to Australia, but the father died on board ship. The mother landed penniless, with children, and was selling the clothes she had brought with them to feed herself and the kids—but was asking to put the older two into the orphanage, where they would live the next seven years.
The orphanage would try to find placement for the children as servants or apprentices. People would write (much of the record consists of such letters) asking for a 12 year old girl to be a servant-seamstress (big families had a lot of linens to repair and keep in shape); another to be taught embroidery. Then there were mothers who had married writing to reclaim a child; and in another case, a wealthy farmer wanting two boys to learn sheep husbandry, etc. It certainly gives you a window on a society in those days with no social safety net. It was a pair of orphanages run by a religious group.
Would that be in Victoria? They have some very useful records online. I’m finding the probate files fascinating and end up wasting time just browsing around. Victoria also commits highway robbery. Sure, you can search the online BDM indices and they’ll tell you how many results they found but then it’s 99c per page to view the results even if they are inconclusive.
I’m still tracking down the parentage of the WWII vet, Harry, we didn’t know existed. I found a series of letters in his uncle’s WWI records that have signatures of Harry’s mother. This looks nothing like her signature on her first, or only, legal marriage. So far no record of a 2nd marriage unless it was in Victoria. I’m going to have to pay them eventually to get at the data but I want to have my i’s dotted and t’s crossed before I do to make best use of the searches.
The Orphanage documents are New South Wales, 1813-1890 or thereabouts.
They’re presently cataloging the streets and residents in early Sydney, also, and are about 1 submission short of finishing it. I ain’t volunteerin’, no’m, not for the dreaded Sydney Street registry: the slices they give you take hours to complete. I got into that once, and you can’t tempt me in again. Funny thing, that one has lain untouched for a week: nobody wants to do it! Meanwhile I’m cataloging clipping from the English agony columns, and getting names and dates from those in, for those with British relatives ca. 1875-1960—you see many marriages in India; and then sad stories, like the family with a series of clippings memorializing their several sons, lost in WWII; you find clippings announcing the birth, then the marriage, then the death notice of certain people—and no few looking for lost relatives, many in BC or Australia.
And just to exercise my Italian, I’m doing the marriage registries from a small region in north Italy ca 1900 and, a workout for my Latin, the London Parish Registry around 1600, which is half in Latin and written on lineless parchment/paper by people phonetically spelling words like Honeifrey [Humphrey] also written as H with a squiggle, and writing with a quill pen that should have been re-trimmed 3 pages back, the wretches.
I suspect that she was a de facto wife.
In the past year or so, I’ve been taking a more interest in my own genealogy and family history, although I’m an amateur by comparison. About three quarters of the ancestors I know anything about joined the Mormons back in the early 19th century, came west, and settled in Utah and easten Arizona. Those came from a mixture of American Colonial-era families I haven’t followed back vey far, and later immigrants from the British Isles. The principal exception is my paternal grandmother’s family, which was in or near Oklahoma City from about 1910 to 1930. There’s so much raw and half-baked information that it’s a struggle getting a handle on it.
It’s something of a mixed blessing that so many of my relatives (I estimate over ten thousand descendants of my great-great grandparents) have also been actively involved in genealogy. I pretty much know who, when, and where, or can find it without much difficulty but I’m a short on stories: the what and the why are a little bit harder. It’s partly in self-defense that I’ve been working forward from ancestors to descendants, because those small towns all over southern Utah and eastern Arizona are full of what one of my aunts called half-step-neighbors-in-law.
It’s going to take me years, at the rate I’m going, to work back into medieval or earlier times, and sort out what’s verifiable from what’s fabulous.
When you get together all the family stories you can (and get older relatives to write things down for you) consider one of the paid online databases. The Ancestry.com I use, and the One World Tree, are both Mormon-run, I believe—certainly there’s plenty of info they’re collecting, for religious reasons; but they’re also providing a very good amount of information to everybody—and it’s fast —you can ask for an 1880 census report for a county in Tennessee, and a few seconds later, you have it, both in summary, and in facsimile, so you can look and see if the keyer could have misspelled something useful.
Oklahoma City 1910-1930, the very years and place I’m searching to find my great-grandmother Scanlan. Wouldn’t be a Scanlan in that picture, would there? Married to somebody in the oil business?
Actually, if you wanted to devote the funds and time to join Ancestry, Roots Web or any of the other critters with the European option, and you had weekends to work on it, you could be deep into the middle ages in a few months. Everybody thinks you have to be related to knights and bishops to have records. England was very recorded, down to villages, ditto certain others: because property was passing via inheritance that had to be taxed, you betcha John Chandler the candlemaker was just as documented as John of Gaunt. I love the mental picture you get not just of the big battles and who-got-whoms of history, but just the little villages, the parish, the weddings and funerals and who was connected to whom.
I’m already using Ancestry.com for a lot of my research and sticking to the US: (budget constraints, and I’m so woefully ignorant of British geography I would get lost quickly). Although I have had my own amusing encounters with One World Tree. I can’t see how someone born in Britain in 1179 could possibly be the child of someone of the same name who lived in Indiana in 1456.
The US Census records are useful, although I’m gathering my own collection of bloopers. One ancestor’s name was misspelled differently every single time. Another displayed an increasingly creative memory about where his father was from and how old he himself was on each successive census. (Fortunately for me, the truth in each case is well documented in other sources.) Another was called “Cheston” by the transcriber, although a family source had “Clayton”, and a look at the original confirmed that the family was right and the transcriber was wrong. But the ability to look up a given region is a little less helpful if the family was mobile. (They were here in 1910 and there in 1930 but where were they in 1920?)
Since I’m not in very close contact with most of my very many relatives and I’ve moved to the other side of the country, I’m doing things the other way around from what you suggest. I’ve constructed a web site with information about the families of my ancestors and relatives. It’s not too hard to construct a skeletal outline with when and where the parents were born, when and where they were married, when and where the children were born and married, and where they died and were buried. I’m hoping I can pry more stories out of relatives with “this is what I have so far…what else can you tell me?”
In addition to a sense of the little towns and the network of relationships, back before we became industrialized and citified, more people were better connected to their families. There were usually brothers, cousins, aunts, or in-laws somewhere nearby, and those often give useful clues.
My great-grandparents from Oklahoma were named Barr (earlier fom Arkansas) and Richards (earlier from Texas). They wound up in Lawton in 1902 (with a couple of children born in Waco, Texas, and Moore, Oklahoma) although they were mostly in Oklahoma City. They apparently missed out on the oil boom and went west to southeastern Arizona sometime between 1930 and 1933. Sorry, no Scanlans that I know of, although I don’t have much about my GGp’s brothers or sisters.
Are you still transcribing stuff? I’m doing burial registers from Ardleigh St Mary the Virgin in Essex from the early 1800’s to around 1866.
English Parish Records, 1500-1630. Plague years. A lot of seasons of burial records when it’s one child after another, and some few strangers whose name the parish didn’t know; plus during those years, the handwriting goes from someone moderately precise with good ink (you mixed it yourself) to somebody writing with a badly trimmed quill and a soupy ink that often fades, with no skill at spelling (Ffraunnnces is my favorite) and an occasional bent to try to explain a situation in largely illegible writing. The ONLY salvation is that it’s a parish I’ve done with good records and I know the family names: Godfrey; Hammond; Spencer; Pratt; Robertson; Jamieson; Norris; Cordell; etc. Occasionally you’ll find the notation ‘pestis’, ‘plague’.
MY mother and I are working at ancestry.com on our ancestry. I can easily prove (4 to 5 good sources a person) through 1700’s it after that it gets harder. I cannot stand when peopl just go copy information and never proof it. A source isn’t a book it is documents! I am working on proving anedotal evidence back to John Lackland, (thats prince John of robin hood mythos and movies), as well as Robert the BRuce (another line) and a member of Canutes’ court called Bryan “Jernigan” son of King Scoland of Denmark.
I am beginning to think if you have British Isles ancestry and can go back far enough everyone is decended from Royalty, like the percentage of people who can trace DNA back to Gengis Kahn is somewhere in the 880% range. Literally if you can get back far enough on paper, we are all related through famous historical personages. As well as the English Royalty was able to legally acknowledge thier bastards so they begame peers and were more sucessful than children born elsewhere.
There are several factors that make it more likely. 1. the best and most complete records belong to notable people. 2. notable people tended to marry each other, a lot. Often. Obsessively. 3. In England, the parish kept records of people not necessariy notable, so if you have ancestors in England, your odds of finding even the right ‘John Smith’ or ‘John Johnson’ are not that bad, if you’re in the right parish. 4. The English Civil War drove a lot of notable people to leave and emigrate, and once in the Americas, they tended to keep close records. So the USA has a lot of people who can trace their ancestors quite well.
Jane and I are related back and forth quite a bit once you hit the 1600’s. And your King John connection is entirely likely. He notoriously slept around. He must have supported his unscheduled offspring tolerably well, since he apparently had no dearth of people willing to see their daughters in his company. He must have had a different partner every night when he was traveling about, and had no shyness or stinginess about acknowledging possible offspring—which in a way must have been its own protection against a possible bastard upstart claiming the throne. There were just too many of them to pose the kind of threat to the succession only *one* counter-claimant could stir up.
CJ: Check this out. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8160081.stm
Medieval knights records. Rosemary
oh, oh, oh! Happy!
Hugh the Despenser was one of mine, the de Bohuns and the Percys that Jane and I share, are going to be in there, and the Mainwarings and, and, and… Oh, what a treasure!
I am stuck in Merovingian Hell.
Everybody, male and female, has serial marriages, and the men sometimes have a set of concubines of fairly elevated birth; you have 3 spouses for everybody, and they marry relatives, which means you have to repeat the same tree, over, and over, and over…and over…and over.
I swear I would pay money if Ancestry would just give us a file we could plug in: pick your ancestor, and install.
Over, and over, and over.
Aaaack!! (for you)
I’m trying to synchronise Family Tree Maker with my tree on Ancestry. Why wasn’t I more religious about concurrent updates at the time I was doing them??? Enquiring minds don’t need to know.