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.
I hate cousin marriages in amply-reported trees. One of my Boones had a daughter who married one of my other relatives, and apparently it was a real May-December affair, which totally makes me crazy: the two lines are a generation apart and running side by side. And worse, it’s one of those very long, very involved lines. (Thump. Thump. Thump. Me banging head against the wall.)
And if there’s one thing worse than the Merovingians it’s the Vikings. I never knew we were Norwegian. But we were, yes, NORMAN French. Doh.
I haven’t got into the French side of the family. This is the Tissot side; no relation to the watch family unless it’s on the wrong side of the blanket. His family went to work in England in the 18th century and landed up at The Humber in NE England. From there he moved into the midlands with the potteries and heavy industry.
Just wait until you find Normans. My family’s related to the snakepit guy from The Vikings (Kirk Douglas)—they have it as wolves, but it was snakes, or vice versa: whichever way they have it, it was the other. And to a charming fellow by the name of Ivar the Boneless.
I recently got into ancestry.com. My dad’s side of the family is from Mississippi — a little town called Sanford. It’s the kind of town that when you turn on the TV, the streetlights go dim. It’s got history though and my dad’s family goes way back into the 1600’s. Mostly they originate from England, Scotland and Ireland.
My mom’s side goes back to Italy/Switerland. Now that one was interesting because they had some dealings with the island of Elba and Napoleon. My mom’s elderly cousin knew the history by heart. Sadly she passed away before we could get any of the real details.
You may find a relative online who knows. Keep digging.
I did just a minute’s worth of research, and found this:
Gherardo Appiani (c. 1370 – May 1405) was the lord of Piombino from 1398 until his death.
He was born in Pisa, the son of Iacopo I Appiani. He was lord of that city from 1398 until 1399, obtaining the lordship of Piombino in 1398 in exchange of Pisa, sold to Gian Galeazzo Visconti for 200,000 florins. In 1396 he married Paola Colonna, daughter of Agapito Colonna, and sister of future Pope Martin V.
He died in 1405, succeeded in Piombino by his son Iacopo.
The name was misspelled. It should have been Appiano — which I believe dates all the way back to the time of the Caesars. The Appian Way (Via Appiano).
And to think that I’m related to a Pope!
Thanks for the nudge 🙂 It’s got me going on a quest…
This can become an addiction.
Bravo!
This is my longest line
I have not included my mother or me as we’re both alive and it’s kinda rude to invade people’s privacy like that:
Eva Hamblin 1905
Nancy May Rodgers 1875
Joseph Knight Rodgers 1844
Helen Moffett Curtiss 1821
Matthew Curtiss 1784
Ruben Curtiss 1757
Phoebe Judson 1718
Capt. David Judson 1693
Rebecca Wells 1655
Alice Tomes 1595
Ellen Gunne 1571
Ann Fullwood (or Fulwood) 1545
Robert Fullwood (or Fulwood) 1519
Margaret Mitton 1479
John Mitton 1431
William Mytton 1465
Margaret Pershale 1393
Joyce de Botetourt 1350
Joyce la Zouche (Baroness Botetourt) 1342
Alan La Zouche 1317
Alice de Toeni 1284
Ralph de Toeni 1255
Roger (Ralph) de Tonee (Toeni) 1238
Ralph de Toeni 1189
Roger de Toeni (de Conches) 1156
Ralph de Toeni (de Conches) 1130
Roger de Toeni (de Conches) 1104
Alice (Adeliza) Huntingdon 1085
Waltheof, Earl of Northumberland 1046
Siward Bjornsson 1020
Bjorn Ulfiusson 1021
Ulf Thorgilsson 993
Thorgils “Sprakaleg” Styrjornsson 970
Thyra Haraldsdatter, Queen of Norway 947
Gyrithe Olafsdotter, Queen of Denmark 905
Olof “Mitkg” Bjornsson, King of Sweden 885
Bjorn “the Old” Eriksson, King of Sweden 867
Emund Eriksson, King of Sweden 849
Erik Refilsson 832
Refill Bjornsson 796
Bjorn “Ironside” Ragnarsson 777
Ragnar “Lodbrok” Sigurdsson 765
Sigurd “Ring” Randversson, King in Sweden
Randver Radbartsson 670
Aud Ivarsdatter 633
Ivar “Vidfame” Halfdansson, King in Sweden 612
Halfdan Haraldsson, King in Sweden 590
Harald Valdarsson 568
Valdar Hroarsson 547
Hroar Halfdansson 526
Halfdan Frodasson 503
Frodi Fridleifsson 479
Fridleif Frodasson 456
Frodi Dansson 433
Dan Olafsson 412
Olaf Vermundsson 391
Vermund Frodasson 369
Frodi Havarsson 347
Haver Fridleifsson 325
Fridleif Frodasson 303
Frodi Gridleifsson 281
Fridleif Skjoldsson 259
Skjold, King of the Danes 237
Odin (Woden or Woutan) 215
Frithuwald (Bor) 190
Frothalaf 160
Finn 130
Flocwald 100
Godwulf 80
Godwulf is my 70th great grandfather. I don’t believe the dates, however. Most are guesses and not very good ones at that.
Yep, once you hit the Botetourts, we share some ancestors.
oops, I left out Thomas Wells, 1625
I’m seriously impressed.
My family has been working on this since the 1880’s. So don’t think I did this! lol
Well, at least yours were literate in the 1880’s. Some of mine as late as the 1870’s were still x-ing their mark on documents.
I’d put the average level of mine about 5th grade: literate, but not facile with it. I particularly like the inscription by one of mine on a certain tree: “[Name] kilt a bar.”
I have a lot of scholars, historians and librarians in my family. As well as scoundrels by the bushel.
Ms. Cherryh, i am also getting into the family geneology. while my dad has done my mother’s side back to the ancestor on the mayflower, his side is a tad more tangled. one set comes from ireland, have you found a good site for irish records? i’ve also got english, dutch and german on that side to research. my dad has been using the lds sofware to record everything but we’ve both been a bit stumped with the irish side. and the hinterlands of germany aren’t online yet either as far as we could find last year…
Thanks
Dee
Not yet. The Irish situation is complicated by the wars and the Potato Famine, which drove so many into emigration; not to mention the number who died. Irish parish records are the best hope; and I do transcriptions of various records for Ancestry.com, because I happen to read Latin AND know old handwriting. There are some German records undergoing transcription, but I’ve not seen anything from Ireland, yet. And there have to be records. Dutch is not so hard. Once you realize the middle name with -se or s or -z on the end IS the father’s first name, it’s helpful. I’m a Vandeventer on my mum’s side, and they start in New York and head back to Holland pretty quick. But if you go very far back in Holland, you’re likely dealing with the Norwegians and the Swedes. I have a guy on the Mayflower, too: name of Richard Warren.
But I went back over my tree this last month, and found that a lot of info has developed where there were dead ends, if you’re using Ancestry.com or any of the related softwares.
The English are much, much easier: they kept good records in the parish churches (that’s actually what I’ve been transcribing lately) and those records (I’m doing births, marriages, deaths) are getting more complete by the day.
Just keep at it, and also search online: you’ll be surprised what a name search can turn up. Expect irregular spellings. Wikipedia can help. I use it a lot.
thank you, i will try that. i know the parish records for the irish are the main thing, i’ve also been warned that name spellings are inconsistent. i need to find out how i can get copies of my irish great great grandparents naturalization records as g-g-grandpa’s info is sketchy to the point of almost non-existent and g-g-grandma’s is almost as bad. and they didn’t talk about their lives in ireland. other than the counties they lived in, i have little info. we can’t even find the marriage cert from ct for them which is strange. at least the german side i have enuf info that i hope to be able to get somewhere and hopefully find current relatives.
my mom’s side is all english and yes, that was relatively easy for my dad, especially as they stayed mostly in one area of new england.
fortuntely my husband is dutch and fluent in german as well so i have help with the language aspect for that side. oh, let me know if you need any xlation of german or dutch stuff.
i’ll have to try wikipedia, hadn’t thought that would be helpfull for geneology. time to start scheduling a couple of evenings for geneology digging…
thanks!
D
If you end up joining Ancestry, they’re looking for language-fluent folk to transcribe. ;)I can do Italian and Latin. Beyond that and older English, I don’t try.
If you know the year they immigrated, that’s helpful.
Also, with the databases, certain techniques help: if you don’t know a date, figure that whoever it was was marrying and attempting to reproduce about 20, women at about 18. That gets you close enough the db may come up with a match and a correction.
Try father’s name, minus 20 years, to get to the grandfather’s birth, etc.
The English notoriously never move about much. But some of the noble families do branch out and settle a manor in a neighboring shire.
oh and my mayflower ancestor was william brewster – reputed to be fleeing england to escape hanging for horse thievery ;P – i’ll look at the family tree and see if we intersect anywhere 😉
D
Mine was the local redshirt: Standish sent him ashore to scope things out.
John Billington (c. 1580 – September 30, 1630) was the first Englishman to be convicted of murder in what would become the United States, and the first to be hanged for any crime in New England. Billington was also a signer of the Mayflower Compact.
Billington came to the Plymouth Colony on the famous voyage of the Mayflower in 1620 with his wife and two sons. He soon made enemies with many aboard the ship. He was known as a “foul mouthed miscreant” and “knave”. He was not a member of the separatist Brownist congregation that dominated the colony’s life, but had fled England to escape creditors. His sons were also seen as troublemakers.
In March 1621, Billington was convicted of contempt for insulting Captain Myles Standish. His punishment was to have his heels tied to his neck. Billington apologized profusely and was spared from the penalty.
In 1624, Billington became a follower of the Reverend John Lyford, who was banished from Plymouth Colony in 1625 for being a danger to the community. Though Billington was nearly convicted as Lyford’s accomplice, he was permitted to remain in Plymouth Colony.
In September 1630, after a heated argument over hunting rights, Billington fatally shot fellow colonist John Newcomen in the shoulder with a blunderbuss. After counseling with Governor John Winthrop, Governor William Bradford concluded that capital punishment was the necessary penalty. Billington was convicted of murder and hanged at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The inland pond known as Billington Sea was named after his son, Francis.
U.S. President James Garfield was a descendant of Billington as am I.
Dee, have you google’d your family from other than the main google site. I regularly use google.co.uk and google.com.au for UK and Aussie searches making sure that the hits come from local sites. Also, look at RootsWeb.com. It has a lot of data put out there by other researchers and, like the data at Ancestry, the PRF’s and IGI’s at FamilySearch, the content is only as good as the amount of work that the researcher has put into it. Rosemary
10,000 grandparents…scary, isn’t it? But those are the number of grandparents everybody has in the 13th generation back, in what is their 11th-great-grandparents’ list. If all of them could be found it would be one heckuva list; but that’s why you have a fair chance of finding somebody: there are so many…
A genealogy newsletter I get just mentioned a book “Google Your Family Tree” which is supposed to help in google searches. I don’t know what it is like and I’ve just ordered it from my library to see how useful it is.
well after an evening of digging around in ancestry.com – i’m doing just the 14 day trial for the moment – i can’t get to the naturalization records for ct! they don’t seem to have put them online yet – nor much in the way of marriage certs! ARGH! i have approximations of when the 2 irish ancesters emmigrated but not enuf info on g-g-grandpa to get anywhere, i need to go find the census that has my g-g-grandmother in her brother’s household listed again and get the sibling names. i evidently didn’t print it out. i don’t have their parents names at all and am hoping to get more info from the naturalization paperwork.
i don’t think current day europeans move about much either 😉 at least not my husband’s family.
we do have fairly close birth years for the irish ancestors, but with very common last names and no villages/towns of birth, just counties, it’s slow going ;P thanks for the db search hints, i’ll try that tonight.
If counties-only, they may have been rural. Get a map. It’s like trying to find things in early Oklahoma: they redrew the county lines just around statehood in 1909 and it’s a pita trying to find what county meant what if you don’t know it.
Once you have a tree on ancestry.com, however, you may get correspondence or just a new ‘leaf’ symbol, where the db has located somebody that somebody else had records on: I haven’t been active in the db for a few months, and all of a sudden I’ve got whole new lines opening up. All it takes is for some very distant relative to pop up with a tree, which the db takes in, then reports to all with similar connections. Don’t believe the db as gospel—it’s somebody’s best guess; and if they tell you they died in Y Somme Picardie, ignore it—somebody globalled the whole darn db and didn’t know what they were doing. —But enough ‘good guesses’ by enough people can lead to physical records. If you don’t know a date of birth, figure it as happening when the mother was about 18 and the father was about 20…amazing how often that gigs the db into telling you the real number. If you don’t know a death date, try 50 years from birth date. Be careful to erase wild guesses so as not to let them into the db, which will eventually record your tree into the master tree, but you won’t be that far off.
thanks. from the ancestors that either died or were born here we have good info. went over to the lds site today and got the 1880 census info on the irish side but it doesn’t indicate whether the parents were naturalized or not. talked to the national archive people in mass that seem to have the ct records, gonna have to call them again and see what we can do with the info i have now, at least i have the town patrick and bridget were living in in 1880.
meanwhile i’ve got some ships records to go thru on bridget to see if one of them looks like a match. got to go back thru old bookmarks and see if any of those sites have be updated and have any new info/search tools. my dad isn’t that computer savy – i’m lucky he can manage to use the lds sw for inputting the info – so i’ll be the one doing any internet searching.
and then there’s the great-grandfather who took off when grandpa and his 2 brothers were growing up ;P chasing THAT one down is gonna be worse than the irish side, i don’t think we have any info on him other than his name unless i can find a marriage cert. i can’t understand why connecticut doesn’t have more stuff online! they certainly aren’t THAT backward ;P
Curiously enough, the hardest ancestors to run down are the ones nearest to you in time…a good advertisement for talking to aunts and cousins and great-grands where at all possible.
The older ones have usually been researched by somebody: remember you’re proof they had living descendants, and somebody may have already worked out that chart.
One line of mine had a habit of second-cousin-marriages. This makes a real knotty nuisance in the tree. Do check the blank that says Include duplicate lines of descent.