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.
yes, some of the fairly close ones will be the hardest. after great-grandfather young dissappeared, i doubt my great-grandmother cared to discuss him much with the 3 boys. my grandmother was pretty good at documenting things with her parents and in-laws but there are still gaping holes and then she had a habit of spelling the foreign names phonetically ;P i’ll make sure i check the box for duplicate lines of descent. when i upload my mother’s side that may be needed as brewsters and pitchers seem to have intermarried periodically over the generations…
we’re off to fl this weekend to surprise my step-mother for her b.day and i’ll be talking geneology with daddy so will make sure he has notes on all the family history he knows and i’ll make copies and type it up if he hasn’t…
and i’ve now found a new way to get distracted during the day when i should be working ;P
😆
Well, you’re not alone. I have a disappearing grandmother who gave birth to my father just 3 years after statehood, left, reappeared, periodically, until her death under another name in around 1930. My great-gran both named and brought up my father until she died about 7 years later, and then an uncle and aunt took him in until granddad married my stepgran, who was a great person, and who made a home for him.
ain’t family trees interesting at times? i told my father this morning that we need to get all the oral history into a written format, i would bring the laptop over thurs and take dictation from him – ain’t that gonna be fun! – for all the things my grandmother told him.
i’m hoping to find something for george young somehwere ;P my grandmother didn’t put any info past his name on the geneology sheets she kept, i don’t know if there is any oral history, probably need to send for a copy of his marriage cert and then track the birth cert from that.
it’s amazing that the people of that time – your grandparents/my great-grandparents – did that kind of stuff! i always think of that time frame as a much stricter time with less of that type of behaviour going on…
In tracing people on ancestry.com (which will give you a trial week before charging you), concentrate on: full names, as full as you can get them. Be flexible about spelling during a search.
Get addresses, as close as possible to exact. Get cities, streets, names of other relatives.
Every little move you make, dying, being born, voting, enlisting in the army, buying property, paying taxes [though we can’t access current records on that], giving birth, enrolling in school, encounters with the law or courts, graduating, being religiously registered—all these things leave records, both public and institutional. So make yourself a checklist of things you want to know about various people. If you can find one person, their birth record will turn up the parents, whose birth records or death records will turn up others, etc. One key is all it takes to start getting specifics. And a database like ancestry can use the stated relationship to known individuals to propose a match.
I don’t remember if findmypast.com has a trial period but I know you can buy vouchers for a specific amount of money to spend. They have just about all of the UK census material searchable by address – invaluable for people across the street and neighbours. I’ve also found that their transcribers are sometimes more accurate than the ones that did ancestry’s and what you can’t find on one you may be able to find on the other. Their parish registers are often better; they have all the work done by the Federation of Family History Societies. Their passenger lists out of any port in the UK to anywhere in the world start at 1890 and go to 1963 or thereabouts. This includes scans of the original passenger manifests.
And don’t forget familyhistory.org. It’s free but you have to be really careful and double check everything. A lot of the early work in the Pedigree Resource Files is suspect. The IGI is a lot better.
Yep, Ancestry is prey to various things from vandalism to honest folk with bad eyesight. The current plague is somebody who must have imported a whole raft of files with the spaces within names left out. So de Clinton is Declinton, and de la Warre is Delawarre.
And 10,000 people who don’t know any better have picked them up and proliferated them into THEIR trees. Consequently the search engine is returning 7 choices of namesets with Delawarre and only one with de la Warre. The unaccustomed are going to think, “Gee, 7 to 1. I’ll go with the majority.” Sigh.
Oh yes. Sometimes I really wonder at what shows up in the other trees. For people who have never left Australia and who are really easy to find at the Perth Metropolitan Cemeteries Board site I’ve found at least 3 trees where they somehow died in North Carolina. It makes me want to write notes to them explaining where they’ve gone astray. However, I’ve had some folks say I’m totally up a tree; so I don’t.
Yep, there’s a lot of personal investment by some folk in a given reality—you have only to hear the Boones debate the tricky connection via three (or four) George Boones and the mysterious Anne Fallace. It’s worse than chili recipes. People can get shot over that dispute!
I have kind of an odd perspective in that debate, incidentally, which relates to whether D.Boone was descended from the De Bohuns of England: I’m not related in direct line to D. Boone, but to his uncle; I have connections enough to the de Bohuns in other lines without adding in the Boone connection, (about 3 or four times)…but it was the right district (Bradninch, Devon, which seems to be a town with about 4 main streets), the names were pronounced alike, and beyond all that—the fact that the de Bohuns are married into our OTHER family lines 3 and four times fifty years apart indicates to me that there IS a connection. These families weave back and forth and marry for advantage, most always. SO there’s that persistent connection, the continual re-cementing of valuable family ties, which I think is quite, quite strong motivation. It’s a case of ok, it’s been two centuries, how am I related to you LATELY, and can you make it worth my while?
That intermarriage picture is very common. You didn’t want to add too many outsiders to the family to make sure all the family assets remained intact. When the outsider had something to offer, land, money, strength, aged parents indicating general good health then they were welcome. However, feckless relatives supporting the wrong political party were a liability.
anybody got a recommendation for a good irish site? ancestry is so-so for that and i’m trying to focus on the irish stuff as that is apt to be about the most difficult part of my paternal side….
http://www.genuki.org.uk may have some pointers. Cyndis List is another possibility. I seem to remember that a lot of records were lost in a massive fire. I haven’t tackled my mother-in-law’s family yet and they were all from Ireland, being Gallihers.
Irish Origins at http://www.britishorigins.com/
I haven’t used it myself, but it may be worth a look — you can buy 72 hours access for $7-$8.
Uh, my reply disappeared. It had a couple of links in it. So, genuki dot org dot uk and Cyndis list are possible sites to start with.
At worst, it’ll just get snagged in the spam filter, and when I next log on, I’ll clear it through… I hate that feature! I’m going to see if I can improve its behavior…
Irish Genealogy: this looks good. I found it by googling genealogy blogs.
http://www.irishroots.com/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/
thannks! i’ll go dig around those sites and see if i can find anything…
D
Hey, it’s back!! I’m transcribing a marriage register where the pen hadn’t been sharpened in eons, there was a hair or something caught in the nib, and lots of blots accompany this literary masterpiece from 1828 Essex.
I’ve given up for the night.
Had an interesting contact from a nice reader: turns out her husband is related to me: 8th cousin twice removed; and her ex is Jane’s 8th cousin…which means, since Jane and I are related, that both husbands are related to each other…unless their branches branched before Jane’s remote relative married one of mine…but before then we also share several branches. I love this hobby! And I’ve met such interesting people.
How fun for you. And we are, with few exceptions, wonderful people.
I came across an exception last week; a remote relative by marriage who doesn’t see fit to take down copyrighted images from Ancestry. In the spirit of sharing I gave them to him and asked that they not be put online. (sighhhh). See if he gets any more images from me.
Some of the message boards I read have had long discussions on this topic and the loudest and most annoying folks are those who don’t care for the copyright laws and flout them. The images in question that I’m irked about have large letters down the side saying National Archives Copyright (that’s the National Archives at Kew, London).
Mmm. There are curmudgeons in this hobby, for sure. And then there’s whoever answers the Death blank as “yes” for somebody born in 1600. 🙂 Sometimes you just want to bang your head against a stump. 😉
Got my file back—the right one—after a computer glitch. I work on Ancestry, tool of choice. But you have to be careful, because silliness abounds there. A little math and crosschecking actual census record photostats, etc, are helpful.
And I had a real fun trip last night. My father’s line has been particularly hard to trace—a grandmother with absolutely no records: can’t trace her. And a general insistence by the software that the line is German, when every bit of info in family oral tradition says Irish. Well, I tracked it down. David is a traditional name in that line, and so is Robert Edward. Well—there aren’t any such in the German line starting from Kirsch. But there are in a completely unrelated line stemming from Ireland, and before that, from Normandy, in France, as de Cerisy. So that part was interesting. But one of the marriages along the way, back in the 1800’s, was to a Terell, which has variants as Tirell, Tyrell, and so on. And that line kept going and going and going, to, of all things, a Basque connection. To quote Morgaine, “Is there anyone in Andur-Kursh thee is NOT related to?” I never expected Basques.
Another fun bit: Jane and I are related so many times over it’s funny. We share the Badlesmeres, the Giffards and Giffords, the Percys, and others, and at a certain point our lines just merge and don’t untangle. One of these days I’m going to track down exactly which Badlesmeres we actually share, in what degree of relation to us. The same person could be, for instance, my 20th great-grandfather, but her 19th. But it’s funny that I’ve gotten to know ‘neighborhoods’, ie, families that keep marrying into other families in the neighborhood—so when I come on a Badlesmere I’m never surprised when there turns out to be a Giffard in the mix. They lived near each other, and likely were in the same social circle.
The deal is, everybody ultimately has hundreds of great-grandfathers, and if your family is from England, say, or Germany or Holland or France, you end up with various lines of grandfathers emanating from the same general geographical areas, over and over and over. Not only that, neighborhoods emigrated to America together: one comes over, and pretty soon a few others of that generation come over, particularly after an aging parent has passed. A few go back to the mother country to marry, then come back with the bride…interesting window on the times and the connections.
Anyway, last night was a romp. The ancestors just kept linking up, fast as I could key the links, into stranger and stranger places. Now I get to go through and start with the Terells and do the math, to make sure the relationships are accurately tracked, and we don’t have something silly going on that links incorrectly.
Basque. That was a surprise.
Ain’t it just marvellous when things just click? And there’s lots of silliness out there.
Turns out one of my Terrells was a Tyrell, and closely related to James Tyrell, who (a former confidant of the king) was executed (beheaded, since he was knighted) for the murder of the princes in the tower. There is intense speculation that he actually spirited the princes away to safety and anonymity, and that the backers of his arrest wanted him to tell where they were, which would have threatened their lives and upended the government—which was finally stable. It is suggested he knew, but would not tell, where they were, and the trial process ended in his execution. That’s the version the family likes, to be sure—but adding something to the story: nobody believed it, notable people wouldn’t let it rest, and James Tyrell was later semi-officially exonerated.
I think I’ve got the prize: just found out I’m related to William Shakespeare.
Turns out his grandfather Richard is my 13th-great grandfather. The descent runs through William’s uncle Robert, brother to John, his father; and via Robert’s daughter Isabel.
I rather like the portrayal in Shakespeare in Love…