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.
WOW!! 🙂 😀 😆
Well, and just to balance that, I have another ancestor who died in Fleet Prison for debtors, fortunately after siring a child, back when if you missed your credit card payment they locked you away until you could get relatives to raise the money. Nobody could or would, so this poor fellow died there. It wasn’t a very nice place: you had to pay for every amenity, and if you were already broke, you didn’t get any amenities and had to stay in the big room with the general clientele.
No doubt you would have met up with some of my folk among the general clientele.
Roommates. 😉
Marvelous new genealogy resource:
http://www.thepeerage.com/p32761.htm#i327603
Lists (between certain dates) how the titles pass in England and Europe and who-to plus birth/death/place and non-titled relations.
I hadn’t run across that one. It’s fascinating just to wander around it. Sigh … the best I can come up with (at first glance) is that some really really remote cousins married into minor Italian nobility.
Ultimately we’re ALL related. I’ve got Goths. And sometimes it’s worth it to check out every single family name in the Peerage and see if there’s anything of appropriate date. I wouldn’t have thought sweet little Mary Booth in America had more than her father to lean on. She turned out to be something interesting. Plus ancestry.com has a snit-fit if you put somebody’s title into the record (I do, anyway, since I think it’s pertinent), so people with nothing listed in the way of titles in Ancestry turn out to be the 4th Marquis of Queensbury, or some such.
There’s also been a burst of new Scottish names turning up: ancestors of mine that were completely unfindable are suddenly blossoming with leaves. Somebody got in there with info from the Scottish registry.
Careful with the leaves: some of them are real shaky. 😀
you got that right. ;)I’ve got a woman whose children by different husbands married each other, and she died twice, once in Taunton, Mass and one in Rappahanock, VA, 10 years apart.
Yes, you know, I really wonder what people are thinking when they propagate that sort of idiocy? NOT thinking is probably the answer. I’ve seen trees where my cousins died in the US and they are well documented on a BMD and cemetery site in Australia. There are always long discussions on the message boards about how people “steal” their work when the answer is to make your tree private and non-searchable. I keep one of my trees public and if things are used, well, they are. There’s no-one living in it and any “sensitive” data I’ve removed. I do try for accuracy and detail – nitpicky mainframe system engineer brain. My other tree is private; searchable, but private. I’ll answer polite questions about it by secure email.
What they may be thinking is much of what I think when I run across such items: I have no way of telling which is the true source, and which isn’t. Obviously this woman did not die twice, but I have no way of knowing whether I should keep the Massachusetts data or the Virginia data. Also, not all of us have a lot of family history to help flesh out the information in the databases. For example, I have been told that my maternal grandfather changed his name when he got to the US, what he changed it to, what it is supposed to have been before, and that the family was wealthy back in the old country, which is part of why they left it. There are Census records which put him where I expect him to be, and then there is one Census record that lists someone of the same name and approximate age as a farmhand somewhere near where I expect him to be. Now, I have never heard that my grandfather worked as a farm hand. But the name is not common, and it’s not impossible for him to have been (especially shortly after immigrating, which is when this was), and there is no one left alive to ask who would know. So I keep both, and hope at some point to piece everything together correctly.
I’ve keyed in masses of naturalization records for ancestry.com (you can volunteer to do this) and they do record name changes in most instances. They’re still in progress—there are huge numbers of them—but don’t give up. If you can reason out which port he would have used getting here, and can get the immigration records for a city or state, then you can find out part A, arrival date and name. Then there’s an application for naturalization, which will list country of origin, date of birth, and spouses and sometimes children, especially children coming with; then there’s C, the actual naturalization document. So your grandfather had to leave three more records, at least, and they’re out there somewhere, if he arrived when there was a United States. If you can pin that down, you can sometimes find cemetary rolls (starting to be scanned.)
I’ve got a missing paternal grandmother with a name change after my father was born, and a general family silence about her…unfortunately she was probably born in Indian Territory, and lived during Oklahoma statehood organization, when records were chancy. Likely she was born at home and had no state records. I just have a town name where she was buried; and if I do find her, the immigrant origin was likely Irish fleeing the Potato Famine, so I’m pretty sure to lose them again immediately as they hit Armagh or Dublin or some such—Irish records just are not as much in the ancestry database, though you’d think parish priests in a largely Catholic population would have made records. Probably it’s a case of not-scanned-in yet.
Parish records aren’t always that easy. I’ve scanned some from the plague years in England, and in one you could imagine the regular guy had died of the disease, and somebody barely literate was doing the records—they go from a regular, beautiful clerkly hand to a spattered scrawl and obvious stupid mistakes, like calling Annabella the son of John Smith (copying the Latin words by rote without thinking what filius v filia means.)
I don’t get this about ‘stealing’ their work. Seems as if their ancestors would appreciate being recorded accurately.
I’ll put in questionable info to try to make sense of it later…as in this case. Where her children were born is one clue. Where her husband is buried is another. Where her parents died is another. These people coming from England to the Americas can have really confused records, because there’s no way to go back to, say, the parish church of birth or have close neighbors straighten it out—and if there is a Sarah Jane and a Sarah Marie, daughters of Sarah Jane, in the same family, married and gone off to different areas of the country—there’s little to stop them from each calling themselves Sarah, if that was the name they preferred—or if some census taker insisted on writing down the first name only. I’m betting it’s a Sarah Jane and Sarah Marie problem, because the mother is Sarah, and there’s convincing evidence there’s two different women involved.
Well, apparently they feel that since they did all the work documenting Gt Grannies 1st marriage which was quietly annulled that no-one else should copy it and have it on their tree with the assumption that said “stealer” did all the work. As I said, make it private and un-searchable and that covers that problem.
Unfortunately Ancestry now has Mundia.com with access to the Member trees and the ability to change them. That is being sorted out as we chat. My recommendation is to NOT sign up for Mundia. It’s designed for the European market and the right hand at Ancestry didn’t know what the left hand was doing; hence the access mess. Huge flap on the message boards and Ancestry is hastily re-thinking some things.
Hmm, I’ve been out of it so long I have no idea what mundia is or how it interfaces. Looks like I’ve got some catch-up to do.
How about some fun news to rival your Scotland leaves? I finally found a marriage!! FindMyPast.co.uk has just released the first installment of the Chelsea Pensioner’s records – and there it was, tucked among the payroll records as proof of dependent status. No wonder I’d been beating my brains out. It took place in King Williams Town, Cape of Good Hope Colony while he was stationed out there. This South African link explains another link to South Africa in the next generation where their son married a South African girl very shortly after she arrived in Australia. I’m guessing the women had kept up a correspondence with people they had met while out at the Cape.
If you have anything you want looked up on FindMyPast.co.uk email me. You can search for free but after that it’s pay-per-view. They have some wonderful English Military Records and Passenger Lists. Also, the 1911 census is there.
That’s a wild one!
Contact between individuals was probably a big motivator when it came to boarding a wooden ship for a 4 month journey through weather and all to reach a new country. You needed to have a clue where you were going, and who would be there.
The Quakers moved a lot of people: during the English Civil War the Puritans were busy persecuting the Quakers, (the story that the Puritans came to the New World looking for religious freedom ain’t so, my friends: they ran England, and Quakers were scared to land in Boston, because the Puritans had some ports sewed up) —and the Quakers were busy rallying people in communities like Chester, PA, probably hoping ultimately to outnumber the Puritans, who didn’t waste much time before beginning to try people for witchcraft and heresy.
My ancestors number both, plus the ones at odds with both sides. And there was a lot more to the poor persecuted Pilgrims than turkeys and pumpkin pie. It was scary stuff, and they tried to institutionalize their religious views and prosecute those who disagree…with the death penalty in view.
I’m amazed how far back you have been able to go with your searches. The best I can get with my family, with a lot of records and papers is only about 110 years before myself and others keep hitting various brick walls.
Apf: I haven’t got that far back with mine. The time frame I’m talking about here is the 1860’s and ’70s. On Dad’s side of the family I’m descended from a long line of peasants, petty criminals, and no doubt serfs. Unless they got caught up in the criminal system they didn’t leave records. The farthest I go back in that line is 1766 or thereabouts and his family probably sailed from France to England to get work. And my Dad’s lines keep showing up in the criminal registers.
I go back further with my mothers line although not too far. All of that research was done by a cousin in England in the year he was out of work. Now he’s working he doesn’t have time to visit the parishes and scour the original registers.
One thing I’ve found helpful is to keep Wiki open while using Ancestry. I can type in, for instance, Shepton Malet, which is a village in England, and I can get a picture of (usually) the church, and an idea of the kind of community it is, a city, a village, agricultural, flat, hilly, etc. Another useful tool is, on wiki, search, say England 1610. That will bring up a set of records that tell you what was going on in history in 1610, 1620, 1630, etc. So if you have somebody in Gloucester in 1643, that is the time during which the Parliamentarians and King Charles were going at each other with cannon—aimed at Gloucester’s city center. So if your relative died in, say, Cold Ashton, that is about as far away from everywhere else you can get and still be in Gloucestershire…which with cannonballs flying in and around Gloucester, must have gained population.
These brick walls tend to come down, because now that these trees are online, somebody who knows something tends to come along who recognizes a connection. My records and papers that I can access run out in 1930, but census records are online, cemetary rolls, immigration, naturalization, land ownership, just a lot of traces—depending on the country. It’s a little harder to get some records that aren’t in English. In Ancestry, they kind of wait for somebody who knows that language to come along and volunteer to transcribe. I read English, even 1500’s English, as well as Latin, some French and Italian, so I’ve done some marriage record transcribing for small towns in Italy back in the 1600’s. (I’m always relieved when they break into Latin: it’s concise, clear, and simply spelled.)
Are you using ancestry.com or roots or whatever, or relying on family records only, and what areas of the globe are you searching?
For me, my father’s memory and recollections with older relatives went back to about 1900, may be 1890 and stop. So I can go back to my great-great grandmother and no further. That’s despite some very unusual family surnames which in theory should be easy to find. Sadly, the main records office suffered a direct hit during WW2 and took out all the known records that could let us go further back without having to rely on some very dubious oral traditions. I’ve met two other family historians distantly at the 1900 boundary and they have hit exactly the same problem.
Don’t despair. And don’t discount family and oral tradition. It can be slightly sideways—ours was dead-on on curiously minor points, and missed the really major one about WHICH line we came through. Write down absolutely every detail, no matter how small, descriptions, right down to the grammar. In our case, whether somebody was in, of, or from the Yadkin Valley was very precise, and huge. Misguided—but huge. 😉 Oral traditions do that sort of thing: great-gran was interested in preserving the illustrious history of her famous cousin and wasn’t quite as clear on her grandfather, who was murdered under questionable circumstances—so she told everything from the other branch’s viewpoint; but she was dead-on. There was another clue in my father’s name, which was completely off the wall odd, until you realized that the family habitually borrowed famous people’s names; but she named my father after HER father who was named after the Marquis de Lafayette. Bingo. We have a name. Oral tradition should be as carefully recorded as everything else, because very, very often it’s got details the other records have forgotten. Somewhere, wherever, somebody has the other pieces: it’s like a shattered hologram, begging reconstruction, and with the growth of these massive databases and instant answers, it’s more possible now than it ever has been.
I have found the online records for my part of the UK to be very unreliable in certain parishes and certainly do not match with the few records I do have copies of. Pretty much the only progress we have ever made has been going to the local records offices and looking for ourselves. We’ve also noticed a trend for migrants from either the other end of the country or abroad to have had their names replaced with some minor place name or feature in the area that they were living in. An example is (von) Rheinberg being replaced in the census with Keslake by the census taker. It took us several years before we discovered that Keslake was a small pond that was a local feature that disappeared shortly afterwards due to creeping urbanisation and not a family name prior to that point. Not helped by Keslike being the name of another, totally unrelated family in the same area. I guess that took me and my father the best part of six or seven years to unravel with the help of a local expert.
Even the official records can be wrong. My own father’s birth certificate for example contains the wrong dates; but that entered the official record and they wouldn’t change it. For my maternal grandfather we have come across no less than three different birth certificates for him, covering a range of 18 months. It’s not a case of a name being recycled (as far as we can tell) but simply that even in 191x people in parts of Scotland were very relaxed about recording some of the basic information with the authorities. At least one of the certificates appears to have been issued by the army making him older than he was so he could enlist.
Fascinating. My mother was born in a farmhouse, and they didn’t bother with a birth certificate at the time. Finally she did get one, because the birth was recorded, and she needed a passport—but she’d worked for the federal government in the Bureau of Engraving, printing money; she had to prove she’d been born and when, so she got paper. My father didn’t have one at all,and his birth wasn’t recorded that we can figure out. He was born just after Oklahoma became a state, but before the boundaries on counties were firm. And we think it may have been another country birth…records in Indian Territory were really hit and miss, but fortunately people didn’t move about much. Ironically, part of what he did in his job was help people who didn’t have documentation prove their identity.
Have you browsed around http://www.GenUKI.org.uk ? Some counties are very well done e.g. Yorkshire while others leave a lot to be desired. I bop back and forth between google.co.uk and google.com.au for most searches outside of Ancestry and FindMyPast. Also, new Family Search http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html has quite a few different records to the old IGI search. I recently found some births to a soldier in India through them. These babies were also on FindMyPast.co.uk under the military records but the parents weren’t mentioned there and they were on FamilySearch. Additionally, these were controlled extraction records with batch numbers so they weren’t just submitted by well-meaning members of the LDS church.
Another great way to find out things are the old newspaper files. I’m lucky that the National Library of Australia is digitising their collection and it has been wonderful for early shipping arrivals and convict tickets-of-leave.
Oh yes, official records are only as good as the person giving the information to the registrar’s office. Of course the Scots were relaxed about giving the information. After all, these were English records.
We have a family tradition of the great grandmother and her twin sister coming over from Germany. Three quite separate branches of the family kept the same story with very little differences between them and we only linked up our researches in the 1980s-1990s. It’s a dramatic tale of two sisters fleeing an arranged marriage, leaving Germany to head to the USA and being ship wrecked and stranded in a rural part of Devon. It’s the sort of story that does leave records. Or at least so we thought.
There are a few fragments of records that suggest the story is true – up to a point. However there were other members of the family as well and they went onto the US via (we think) Canada (well those not listed as drowned) but somewhere they changed their name) and disappear without a trace. If it wasn’t for one official record that described the wreck and one newspaper account of a body being washed ashore some weeks (months) later with a money belt attached – which matched the details passed down quite well. In some versions of the story it was a brother and sister – but we were able to workout this was a mistake based on not knowing which were male and female German first names and confusing one with a male one popular in England.
In the UK there is a gap of fifty years during which we can find no trace of great grandmother. No marriage records, no birth certificates for any of her children. Nothing in fact until she dies.
We do know that after she died, her daughter, my grandmother was contacted by the German High Commission trying to trace any living descendants. Sadly this was in July 1939 and whatever this was supposed to lead to was lost during WW2. In one of the bombing raids in 1940 the Germans managed to bomb the building that they had stored their records in. Being associated with Germany was not popular at that time and the family seems to have done a good job of covering up that piece of family history.
The only other thing that came down through the family about Germany was that the “house had a hundred windows”.
But there is always hope that some day one of us will find a missing fragment that opens up the whole story and we get to be able to find out what the real story was.