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.
Ooooh, that’s a good one!
I had a great-grandmother who escaped a shipwreck, but it was only a flatboat on the Mississipi or the Missouri: families going somewhat downriver and across out of Ohio and Illinois tended to buy or build these chancy craft, somewhat resembling a bread kneading trough adequate for a family of 4 and some luggage, and since they had absolutely no steering but a steering oar at the rear, roughly adequate to aim you generally but not accurately, they had *no* ability to go upstream. So they were always sold to somebody, another family or trader going downstream. When they got all the way to New Orleans, which was hungry for wood, they were sold again and disassembled into the wooden sidewalks that kept New Orleans above the water level.
Well, the Duffs had a flatboat either turn over or disassemble itself prematurely. My poor great-grandmother thought she was the only survivor: that’s the way she told the tale. She called herself Missouri and married eventually into the Oklahoma territory. But census records from Ohio indicate part of her family may have survived—a possibility I turned up while searching census records. And she never knew. Irony aplenty.
A house with a hundred windows. That’s got to be quite a spectacular house. And a curious and precise description. It might trigger a memory in some relative on the other side of the Channel. You might also look at the era in which they are said to have come across: figure what was going on in Germany, and what was going on in England, and figure that if it was that big a house, it was well known in its district. Such people get into politics, for one thing.
I clicked submit too soon. That description finally did bring some confirmation. My wife is from the US but her step mother is German. When visiting her step mother in Germany, we went and met step mum’s her first husband’s father, a retired artist. In his studio was a water colour that I admired. It turned out to be of the place in Germany my great grandmother had fled from. He was closing down his studio and gave me the painting. He died shortly afterwards and when Step Mother in law and my wife met up a year or so later in germany they went on a trip and went through the area in question. Outside, about to be demolished was a house known as the house with a hundred windows that was now a ruin and about six or seven months later was demolished. They took a couple of photos of it.
Is it the right place? I don’t know. But it’s kind of cool to think that it might well be.
Of the family that had lived there we know they died out either before or during WW2. But if they had died out by WW2 starting, that would tie in with why there was contact from the German govt. just before the war started. Was it the same family or another one that took over after the previous one fled some years earlier? Again we hit the problem of records being destroyed.
But then I never thought we would get that confirmation that took us so far.
The problem I run into with tracing my maternal grandparents (actually the great-grands) is that they emigrated from Sweden, changed their name from Swenson (or possibly a variant of that) when they got here, and named their oldest son after dad, so those records can get confused. If I had to guess a port of entry, I’d go with Chicago, since they were living in that area, except for the one stray record which I think was from Iowa. And great-grandma simply has “born in Sweden” as birth information, even though her name (Ellen Phillips) does not strike me as very Swedish. I would have guessed Irish, myself. Although I guess nothing stops someone from Ireland settling in Sweden and having a family. But trying to trace anything back to the old country gets into the problem that the records are in Swedish.
But now that I am thinking about this, how do you handle people like my mom, who was given a name on her official birth certificate that would make people think that she was a boy (apparently her dad, from what I have been told, never even thought of the possibility that his first born wouldn’t be a boy), went by the female version of that name for most of her official records (school, etc.), was commonly called by a nickname totally unrelated to her name, faked a birth certificate at 13 with the female version of the name in order to work, and then entirely changed her name (first, last, and middle) when she got married? And what notes should I keep so that someone in the future looking into this will be clear about who’s who?
Phillips could be Welsh.
On the multiple names, you can do an AKA (also known as) Mary Elizabeth aka Marie Beth aka Marie Barnes Smith. The programs fuss a bit: what you really have to be careful with in the databases is to be sure the name by which you want the person to be alphabetized turns up last.
Hmm, I have a female ancestor named Philip Gaverigan. Gotta wonder. Of course, sometimes it’s the transcriptions. But I also had a female student once named George.
Oh my, what a tangle. Document it as thoroughly as possible is all I can recommend. Also, when you feel comfortable with the notion, add it to the rootsweb trees.
We’re relatively straight forward; horse thieves, embezzlers, the odd bit of larceny, and poor as the proverbial church mouse. A distant relative was thrilled when I found his Gt Grand-dad’s prison record in the Victorian Government Gazettes and a handful of newspaper articles when the police were actively looking for him in 2 different colonies. One side of the family did without the benefit of marriage throughout the generations so we have no proof who contributed their genes to the family pool.
On the other hand, commonlaw marriage is recognized in a multiple of countries, and practically nobody in early early Europe did more than notify the neighbors and the village lord—priest, if you have one, but the early, remote places, it just didn’t happen. Even in Oklahoma, before the run. If birth records were iffy, so were marriage ones.
Some tips I’ve found in working out a spotty history and finding who’s lying:
Procreation takes place within a prescribed time. Usually men didn’t set up their main marriage/relationship without some sense of maturity and a job—which happened around 20. Then they tended to reproduce with zeal, legally speaking. If you want a father’s date from a son’s birth, subtract 20. It’ll get you close enough to trigger the database. If you want a father’s place of death, son’s place of birth is a good clue.
Females are even better: females have to start reproducing around 20 if they want to live, and in European culture, particularly England, tend to be 5-10 years younger than the husband, if a first wife. The smart ones stop reproducing around 30, or you see the sad notation of a child’s birthdate coinciding with the mother’s date of death. Birth after 40 is almost unheard of, but death around that time, after a raft of children, suggests that somebody had no restraint, and the wife died with the last one.
Especially in primitive areas, these conditions hold: a guy has to be old enough to have ‘prospects’ and ‘substance’, and a wife has to be young enough to survive childbirth.
Husband and wife dying the same date is often house fire. Or very close to each other: disease.
Women often travel to their mother’s place to give birth, in primitive areas. Which is why some wives die at their birthplace though married in the adjacent county.
Just some tips from the friendly neighborhood archaeologist.
Yes, all true. My Gt Grandmother Elizabeth had 4 children, the youngest being Grandpa. We haven’t found them in the 1881 census and by 1891 he was working on a farm. My cousin spent a lot of time scouring records on Norfolk as did a very remote cousin. Our best guess is that she had just moved in with someone and took his name. This was her pattern and we are lucky that she even registered the 4 children. For a while she was a “seamstress’ up at the big house but by the next census she had moved on. What he told Mum about his early life doesn’t really stack up from the records. Then, he was just a little boy and was probably shuffled around the relatives. The only thing that was true was that he had 4-5 aunts. Mum was under the impression that they never married but that wasn’t so. I really need to get my cousin to take a DNA test. He’s the only one interested in genealogy and I’ve been hesitant to bring it up.
I’ve wanted to try one of those dna things too—I’d love to know if the native American in one history and the middle eastern in the other are true. The only three areas of the world I’ve never turned anything up from are Asia, Africa, and Australia/New Zealand. BUT—if the middle-eastern part is true, that branch staying for a while in Egypt, I may be able to scratch Africa off the short list.
I keyed a lot of ‘orphanage’ records from Australia. The records run for years, and a not uncommon story was a mother left alone with kids after dad died on the voyage, or a wife dies and the husband or partner, having no relatives at hand to take the kids, surrenders them to a benevolent organization (orphanage) that will give the kids a rudimentary skill and farm them out to a household that will agree to feed, clothe, and educate them as a servant/seamstress/ladies’ maid, gardener, etc. However, the parents’ names are in the records.
(The possibilities for misuse of this system are mind-boggling.)
Can you remember which databases these were? Grandpa worked for the railways in London before they went out to Australia in 1911. He had a job on a station in Victoria and eventually worked at an agricultural college training men to use the large teams of 8-10 horses used in ploughing. When that became mechanised it was back to work on the railways. And his son, grandson, and gt-grandson were/are railwaymen (and very proud of it too).
I believe these were in Sydney…but couldn’t swear to it entirely. I know I did pages of the Sydney phone directory. They were in the World Archive project, and an inquiry to ancestry re Australian projects keyed in, say, September 2009 might turn something up.
I’ve been through the card catalogue and the nearest things are the passenger lists. Their indexing is awful, which I’ve reported more than once. Why they have Queensland lumped in with Western Australia I’ll never know. It’s like lumping the whole NE US in with the west coast and mountain regions, particularly since WA is just under half the continent. I haven’t seen anything at all with orphan in the title either.
At the moment ACOM is about 5-6 weeks behind in its indexing. I think they need to beef up their hardware to handle it. Still, with all its problems, it’s the best resource out there. FindMyPast.co.uk has some really excellent databases – think address search on a census – and their military is proving more and more useful. They are about to launch FindMyPast.com.au taking over what used to be WorldVitalRecords.com.au and that can only be to the good. Australia-UK research is very intertwined.
The Chelsea Pensioner records which have just opened up are proving wonderful. These are basically payroll and medical and I don’t know what it is but the guys I’m researching seem to end up with VD of various types and spend time in the brig.
Try ‘children’ or ‘child’ or ‘home’. If the name of those things occurs to me I will post it.
All right, now I have to delurk. Genealogy: squeee!
When I hit a brick wall in my research, I’ve found it has been useful to work on side branches of my tree–siblings, for instance. The death notice of a maternal g-grandmother’s youngest sister gave me their mother’s maiden name, for instance. I suspect the name is wrong–all I can find is the transcription of the record, not the original, and … well, long story short, all Googling aside, I think it’s wrong. But at least it gives me a place to start my searches from.
BTW, CJ: are you descended from Alexander Scofield (1575-1616)? I found a tree that I thought was yours, but am not certain (no mention of barbarians.) He’s a 9-greats grandfather of mine, and I’m wondering if you’re descended from him, too.
Cheers! R.
A Schoolfield in the Americas, but no Scofield—yet. I had my entire db crash, and am slowly reconstituting it.
Yep, I’ve been known to temporarily pursue a side branch to see if I can discover the trunk. The habit of recording only married names is pernicious. So many family stories get lost to this habit.
Side branches will be the death of me. (grin). I’ve got so involved with this family, who married into one of my side-trees, that my research on them is now better documented than the tree of one of their direct descendants. Ah well, everyone has to have an obsession or two. I’ll take recording married names over just recording the mother’s given name on baptismal records. At least they were supposedly married, not like my Gt Grandma Elizabeth (see post from yesterday).
And then there are those records which only record the lady as ‘daughter of So-and-So’. I hate those… but less than the ones which ignore her entirely.
I’ve known it (once) to lead to a father’s actual name…but only once.
But the branches ARE an adventure. I’m also in love with looking up the date on Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1660_in_England
There are a number of these tables, some covering all of Europe. If you know people were starving in Ireland during the potato famine it’s a good bet why Sean O’Hara turned up on a boat headed for the US. And if you know that Protestants and Catholics were already at war in Ireland, and you know that the Puritans (Church of England) dominated Boston, you can see what happens when Sean O’Hara turns up trying to get work in Boston, etc. My Quaker ancestors headed for Pennsylvania, avoiding Boston as a port, advisedly. Knowing something about the common landing zones (New York, Boston, Isle of Wight, Virginia, and Philadelphia, somewhat inland as it is, helps you understand why people chose certain routes.)
Plus, for later migrations, I recommend three books, one of which made a movie: Gangs of New York, Gangs of New Orleans (which involves Chicago), and Gangs of San Francisco. These are wonderful books chronicling the underside of these cities and explaining WHY people in New Orleans might head for Galveston, St. Louis, or Chicago at various times.
I’m doing a book on my family by generations, with my best (sometimes informed) speculation about their lives, motivations and times—in addition to the usual tree. In other words, Chapter three: The Grandparents. Chapter Four: the Great-grandparents. Chapter Five: The Great-great grandparents. Chapter Six: the 3rd-Great Grandparents, etc. Of course the chapters get to where they will have to have subchapters. But it’s far more informative than a tree, and lets you put in all those side-notes you have to leave out of a tree. You can put in all the family stories, etc. Or the historical notes. Which I think makes a great thing to hand down to the nieces and nephews. A way to understand history on a very personal level.
And I’m sure you’ll make it entertaining as well.
The Ancestry blog just announced the release of the NSW orphan records. They haven’t been available until now.
Ha! I’ll bet those are the ones I worked on. I’m sure after us amateurs have had a go at them for a while, the experts have to go over them to be sure they make basic sense!
Now and against you run across a real good story in the genealogy stuff. Here’s the pick of the litter. http://home.cogeco.ca/~richardiii/tyrell.html
And you wonder where I get the gene for convolute plots.
[Actually he’s the cousin of an ancestor, so it’s not direct descent.]
How does one find “It’s the Eleventh Century and We’re All Barbarians…”? The family tree I’m actively maintaining is EDC.
I’m on ancestry.com —can’t give an absolute url, I don’t think, without giving ‘access’ on that site. But I can give you the names of my traceable great-grands, which will lead you as far back through the tree as you want to click. That’d be William Pinkney Cherry, Louisiana Carolina Boone, [maternal missing]; Tolbert Vandeventer, Missouri Duff, David Abijah Tipton, and Harriet J (Hattie) Ferrall. Most of both sides came from Devon, at one point or another, another lot from Holland (obviously), some from Scotland, and another big lot out of Gloucestershire, being on the wrong side of the Parliamentarians, most of that group, or just trying to get out of the line of fire. Many were Quaker, avoiding the Puritans, and some of those coming initially to an organized Quaker center in Chester, Pennsylvania.
My public tree is “Tissott and Lindsay”. A search on Henry Tissott, Joseph Tissett, Maria Antoinette Tissott should find it. I’m currently tied up with the Annakin family; no direct relation and I’ve been finding a lot of military records for them. I’ve a private tree as well that I need strip of all living people before I make it public.
Your eleventh century barbarians are in my QuickLinks.
🙂 I’ll have a look and see if we cross anywhere.
One of the really curious things I find is that no few of my people in Devon came there from Wales. I’m wondering what the connection was: if they’re Welsh, and they don’t die in Wales, they die in Devon. Anybody turn anything up on some burning reason this would be so, or is it a case of one family coming in and others arriving and clustering around them and eventually marrying? I used to wonder why on earth so many of mine ended up in Chester, Pennsylvania, until I figured out the Quaker connection—apparently the Quakers exercised quite a lot of control over the lives of their members, approving of spouses, etc—you were supposed to stay inside the community; and I’m wondering if some emigrations weren’t at least at the suggestion or urging of the Quaker community, which was under a lot of pressure from the Puritans about that time. My tongue in cheek guess is that there was a Quaker plot to outnumber the Puritans in the Colonies, or at least not to let them have the Colonies all to themselves.
My ancestors were not very good Quakers, as was, once you got past the emigration-generation. They hit the Colonies and ran berserk—marrying outside the community, holding an officer’s rank in the local militia, probably drinking and who-knows-what—but they were clannish. They all took out for the Carolinas and all lived in the same neighborhood.
The Tissott’s are up in Staffs and the Annakins (married into the Tissott’s via the Free’s) are Yorkshire. The Frees are all from the Cambridge area. The Lindsays I don’t have a lot on; Grandma Mary (Minnie) Lindsay’s name should have been Mary Lindsay Higgs. They dropped the Higgs when they moved from Tas to Vic. They were from Scotland and what I have out there was found by my cousin Harry. Eventually I’ll concentrate on them; but one branch at a time and I’m getting tired of Annakins. My private tree has my mum’s family and they are all East Anglia.
Mine were forcibly moved (transported), signed up for one of any number of “free” emigration schemes to the colonies, or followed the lure of gold. They were prospecting for gold in Victoria and then went to the goldfields in Western Australia. Some of the family still live in gold / coal mining towns and a cousin in WA is involved in mining in remote WA working 12 days on and 12 days off and being flown in and out while his family lives in Perth.
I always associate Wales (and Cornwall) with mining. I don’t associate Devon with mines, however. Were they in the Militia?
One line (the Boones) tended to be blacksmiths and weavers—I guess the stout lads became the smiths and the littler guys became weavers. Once they got to the Colonies, papa continued weaving, one son was a teacher, and most were farmers or woodsmen—one branch married into the Harris/Morgans, who were Welsh and some of whom were either militia or British Army—sometimes it’s hard to tell.
The weird thing is, the Boones were prolific in Devon, and there was a second line of them, out of a chap named George I Boone, that came out of Bradninch, Devon, who apparently came in way before the rest—he arrived in Baltimore, had a kid, who is a several-back-great grandmother of my mother’s family, and the OTHER Boones, who are out of George II Boone (they weren’t kings, just a genealogist’s convenience to tell them apart) came to the Americas en masse and multiplied all over the place.
My father’s line came out of the brother of the patriarch of group II, and that line used to name people after famous people: James Monroe Boone, etc, who got himself killed in a slave revolt, after he’d sent his pregnant daughter-in-law and his youngest son away from the family farm, or I wouldn’t be here—I kind of get the feeling he knew the trouble was coming, and maybe he deserved it, maybe not. He was, besides a farmer, apparently the district doctor—but that’s no guarantee he was on the side of the angels. The story seems to indicate he was specifically targeted by three or four very angry people.
The baby his daughter-in-law was carrying was my great gran, Carolina, after whom I’m named.
Since you’re re-building your member tree you should consider downloading it as a Gedcom (GED) every once in a while as backup. This week Ancestry was making changes and had to disable the member trees to recover and there are reports of some craziness in the files. I don’t know if they had to go back to a previous day for these files or not. They’re not saying. Anyhow, go to “Tree Settings” and on the right you’ll find the instructions to download your GEDCOM file. It sits for quite a while generating the file and then produces a button for a download. DON’T change your tree while it is generating; have dinner, a drinkie, watch TV … And then download to one of your computers. You can import a GED with just about any genealogy program and can read and modify it with simple old Notepad. Last night’s long outage of the member trees prompted me to get mine copied down.
Thanks, Tulrose. That seems like a good idea!