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.
Well, I’m finally wading into this too, although I just flat don’t have much time to devote to hunting down the family lines. But I find it all fascinating as can be and am making notes galore on websites and tricks of the trade.
But Philosopher 77, you may have a situation of different family members, same name. We get names in my family that turn up forever. My grandfather Ryan gave both of his daughters names his sisters had, which were also names his aunts had; sons got names his brothers had in various degrees [one son named Patrick, one named Garth and his oldest brother was named Garth Patrick although everyone called him Pat]; another son was named John which was his father’s name, his father-in-law’s name and was also the name given to 2 grandsons with the last name Ryan. I have one friend who’s name is Mary, and her mother’s name was Mary — neither had middle names. So you may have cousin so-and-so named for aunt so-and-so who was my favorite cousin as a child that later moved to New York.
Admittedly, it can be damned frustrating, but you may have stumbled on some additional relatives.
Oh, I know! I have run into that already. Eva Weiler married and became Eva Fetha, and then had daughters named Eva, Helen Eva, and I believe Eva Marie. All last name Fetha, of course. So it’s fun figuring out exactly who is being referred to sometimes in the records.
I know that one, too. Some names in my family come with a nickname or the question ‘which one?’ (Some of the sets: Big Evan, Little Evan, Evan 6; Big Elinor, Little Elinor)
And then there’s Squire Boone…Squire was his name, not his title. He had 9-10 kids. Every kid he had but John (who as I recall didn’t marry) had huge families, each of them replicating most of the names in the family, including 9 more Johns (who did marry), 9 more Squire Boones, and each of those had 9 or so kids, with brothers and sisters named exactly the same as the previous generation, so now you have even more Squire Boones. One of my puzzles was answered because grandad had always said “Squire Boone OF the Yadkin Valley”, and everybody else was FROM the Yadkin Valley. Difference of born-there versus moved-there. It was a tiny detail. But in the way of oral family history, it was passed verbatim, from what my grandad memorized as a child.
Sure makes you wish folk showed some gumption and came up with something different. A little imagination would be helpful. I was very happy when I found a Garrett Ross on dad’s side. Mom’s side was much nicer — someone else gathered all those baptismal records [actually a priest who was a great-uncle of my mom] so the Lebel side is all deciphered in Quebec at least. Course it’s all in French, which requires a lot of staring at and dredging up high school French. Having looked at a few of the original records on line, I am very grateful someone who spoke French compiled all this. I can sure sympathize with CJ on old records!
In the Boones, it was as much resentment for not being in England, I suspect. John was the family historian, who kept the genealogy, apparently: and the family was originally Quaker, but there was a falling out with the Quakers because of an unsanctioned second marriage; then a relocation to the Yadkin Valley, which was pretty close to the edge of civlization at that time, if not over it. And for the next several generations the family made much of their connection to England and family history, endlessly replicating the family ‘names’—until the branch that started naming sons in particular after famous people. My fourth-great grandfather was Dr. James Monroe Boone, who had Lafayette Boone, and his full name may have been Marquis de Lafayette Boone…why stop short? We always wondered why my father bore the name Lafayette—not his favorite—and who in heck in the family was named Lafayette. Found ‘im, and that explained everything. Great-gran named my father, and brought him up so long as she lived: we knew that. But why Lafayette? Because one of the many, many branches of the Boones was tired of John, Squire, Polly, Daniel, and Israel, etc.
Is there any Revolutionary War connection there? Lafayette is a big deal back East here, we have schools streets named after him in Williamsburg.
It’s pretty certain Lafayette was named for him in admiration, not because of kinship, as his father was named for President James Monroe; they often named the girls (a habit of the period) after states they’d been through. So I have one great-grandmother named Georgia, one named Missouri, and one named Louisiana Carolina, which is where I get my own name—she’s the grandmother who named my father Lafayette. But she was born in Arkansas. Go figure. In that instance she probably was given the names because they liked the sound of them. Missouri Duff, however, took the name herself, because she was (she thought) the sole survivor of a river accident with a flatboat.
I wonder if my g-grandmother’s family had ‘the hankering for England’ that your Boone relations did, CJ. I know the branch of Sellecks I’m descended from were Empire Loyalists during the Revolutionary War–at least one ancestor decamped to Canada on a ‘Get Out Or Else’ declaration by his neighbors. There are both Wellingtons and Lafayettes in among the cousins, though, which may have been a softening of opinion as the decades progressed. (This also produced a family myth that my gg-grandfather was second cousin to the Duke of Wellington.)
Re Loyalists: the Restoration, which brought the monarchy back, put no few Canadian and American folk in a quandary—the English Civil War was a big motivator for emigration: people were in fear for their lives, some of the old landed and titled families fled the country, no few of them coming to the Americas; and when Charles II took the throne, and England changed back into a more liberal mode—here you have families that have settled, in some cases are into their second generation in the Americas—but who also have strong ties to the English way of life; so they either try to reshape where they are—or return to England, uprooting their kids from the only world they’ve known.
But life in Merrie England wasn’t all good: annual outbreaks of the Black Death so decimated the country that you couldn’t, say, find a candlemaker in one town, or a blacksmith in another. And then the Great Fire destroyed the heart of London. The news reaching the Colonies was pretty daunting.
Worse, the English Civil War and the emigrations had thinned out the royal family considerably: Charles II’s brother and heir, James, turned out to be Roman Catholic, which sent shockwaves through the country—a controversy which birthed the Whig and the Tory parties, as James took the throne. The political upheavals continued, rebellion, civil war (the third time), executions…finally culminating in Parliament asking James’ Protestant cousin William of Orange to come in and take over. [joint reign of William and Mary (James’ daughter)]…followed by Queen Anne; followed by the Hanoverians (George)…whose popularity absolutely plummeted in the Colonies.
I have some clue what powered the Boones’ ‘hankering for England.’ The Quakers were building a utopia at Chester, PA. They were scared to death of the Puritans who were in control of New England, as the Puritans had been persecuting them in England…it was the outcome (temporarily) of the English Civil War part I. [It is not unreasonable that quite a few Americans have ancestors in the Peerage of England, because people in the Peerage had been defeated in the English Civil War, or felt they would be targets.] The religious conservatives won the first English Civil War and beheaded the king. Religious persecutions ensued with the development of sects each wanting to be holy and special. Witch trials. Salem. The Puritans were a branch of the Church of England that felt some purity wasn’t enough, and were prepared to burn witches on suspicion, and Quakers were on their list. I never did trust the Pilgrim Fathers. Even if I can claim a few of those, too.
Anyway, the Boones came over in the Quaker movement to the Colonies, but fell out because one of the Boones didn’t get the approval of the assembly before taking a wife. The rest of the Boones got mad (the family temper is legendary) and left. Squire Boone the First, a weaver from Devon, went with them: he was the patriarch, and he remained quite Quaker throughout his life, though his sons—well, Daniel, *that* Daniel, tried to get an officership in the British army, but it didn’t pan out. This was during the French and Indian War. Then the Colonies declared independence, and some of the tribes were pro-British, and some weren’t. Those who were, were urged during the Revolution to attack American settlements, which they were glad to do, since some of these were in their traditional lands—and this is where Daniel Boone joined the Revolutionary war as a militia colonel and forgot all about being a Quaker (Quakers are pacifists). It cost him a brother and a son (Battle of Blue Licks)…but that was, in fact, the Revolutionary War as fought in the Carolinas, not blue-uniformed Colonials against red-coated British, but the British egging on the tribes to attack settlers, and the settlers with their tribal allies (some of which were allied to the settlers because they were traditional enemies of tribes allied to the British) fighting in the woods by ambush and skirmish and very few outright battles. And you think *I* deal in complex plots. The American Revolution and the Pilgrim Fathers are taught in school to kids WAY too young to have a clue what it all means. It’s worth an advanced class in combined British/American history of the period to really dig the dirt. And there was plenty of that.
I remember one friend of mine years ago said that after Culloden and the failed Jacobite attempt, whole clans were gathered up and transported to the Carolinas. Mary said that they had to swear to never again take up arms against the Crown. Not sure how accurate this is, but it sure could have created a quandry for honorable folk come the Revolutionary War.
When it comes to getting the various Indian Tribes involved, not at all surprised. It’s the same thing the US Army did during the Indians Wars and against the Apaches [although then it was offering clans a chance to explore their individual feuds] — the enemy of my enemy is my ally.
My mother was very into genealogy, she did a very good job of documenting her own ancestors (from Germany, Sweden, and Norway), my father’s (from Wales, England, even some Scotch Irish thrown in…), and later even did some of my sister and brother’s spouse’s background…
In one of her careers, she was a librarian, and was meticulous about her sources… she hated a lot of the type of genealogy that people do to show they are descended from royalty somehow…
She found a lot of interesting stuff… and you have to watch out… one of her German ancestors, who had married a somewhat younger man, kept cutting years off her age as she got older…
and one of my father’s ancestors had been married to one of the Salem “witches” (but I’m not descended from the “witch”, but from the marriage after she was hung…)
She also taught me that you have to take genealogy with a LARGE grain of salt… usually you can trust who the mother was, but in some cases, not even that (because sometimes a woman might take her unmarried sister’s baby in as her own, or even
her own daughter’s illegitimate baby…), and recent DNA studies have shown that there are a lot more cases of the father not really being the husband than you would have thought!
I’ve been into tracing my family history for four years now. On my Dad’s side, I can trace my West line only to 1802 but from the women who married into the family we go back to the Mayflower and the Great Migration. But on my Mom’s side, I’m descended from Irish and German immigrants from the 1880s. Lots of mysteries on both sides for me to research and blog about.
The Irish are a major problem of non-records—but the Church had to have kept them, if they survive from the years of upheaval. Ancestry.com has been transcribing stuff from Germany; and hopefully parish records have survived that just haven’t been transcribed yet. There is always the chance, too, that once you hit on the right cousin, *somebody* knows something. In my case, there was a major jog in my third-great grandfather’s records, when he opted to live in a remote area and then got himself killed in an uprising; but his wife’s family extended to a sane and civilized area, ergo the situation was explained, and records for them are better, including records of him. There are some details of the event we wish we knew, but early-deceased wife Sophie’s family had some of the connections we needed. I love the twisted mysteries. They’re so much better than “George begat George and Sam and died, and George jr begat George 3, etc.”
I found a new site for Irish census data. http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/
Back in 1985 I was over in Ireland and trundled off to the small town we had imigrated from back in the early 1840’s. Parish records only went back to 1850 and were only baptismal records that early; apparently the earlier records were destroyed in a fire of the priest’s residence. I was told that burial records really didn’t exist, but this might be a locational thing — cities may have more comprehensive records. Now I can’t remember which, but either death records or marriage records weren’t kept until the late 1800s or the 1930s. Most of the centalized records were kept in Dublin and the Brits burned the building in 1922. And a friend was telling me of a recent trip she made where they discovered that there was more than one parish church in the community her family came over from. You’d think that our ancestral Celts would have done a better job of it given the importance they used to place on such info. The up side is that Ireland is an amazing place and getting to roam about and poke about regardless of the results if a special treat all by itself.
That’s what I feared: the repeated wars of really ancient times actually involved fire not quite so destructive as when cannon and red-hot shot got into the act, so the later the war, the worse for records. Also the Irish and the Scots built more with thatch and timber, which was terrible about fire: mistress oversets the bacon grease into the cook-fire and all of a sudden it flares up and catches the thatch and there it all goes. And if the Reilly house goes, the sheds go and if the sheds go the fire jumps to the neighbors and the church. Misery got shared all too often. It was bad in London, when half the town went up, but that kind of disaster happened in the villages, too.
Just read your Genealogy — also a hobby of mine, I’ve been a member of Ancestry for about 3 years now. Checked my tree and sure enough — there’s about a dozen deBohuns in there, all back in the 1300’s. Plus all my relations on both sides of the family came over in the 1600s and 1700s, mainly in the northeast, but also some in Virginia. Ishams, Tafts, Hollises, etc. I’ve even found and gotten to know present day relatives I never knew I had! And some I wish I hadn’t found.
😆 and if you follow the de Bohuns back far enough you find a motley enough crew, too! I’ve found really interesting folk, some of which I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Jane and I both cross into the de Bohuns…I’m from the Boones, and if you want to get into an argument faster than saying ‘beans’ in a Chili Cookoff, say ‘de Bohun’ in a batch of southern Boones.
But that’s all right—half the Boones deny they came from the de Bohuns, but I’m crossed into the de Bohuns from another direction, too: that family certainly got around in the 1300’s!
I’ve spent the last week tracking down yet another convict in the family tree. They’re both from my Dad’s family and both ended up in Van Diemen’s Land at around the same time. And did you know there were some Americans and Canadians transported there? I didn’t until today.
Interesting.
I didn’t know that either.
Here’s a brief write-up on them. I also found them mentioned on the Archives of Tasmania web site but can’t lay my hands on the page.
http://www.perthdps.com/convicts/canadian.html
Very interesting. A way of getting potential combatants way out of range to re-enter the combat. Better than Andersonville…but hard on anybody who left a family in Canada or the states.
In Van Diemen’s Land the authorities instituted a system of Indulgences which you could apply for and which were dependent on good behaviour. Permission to live away from your assignment, permission to marry, permission to bring your family out, …
Indulgences always remind me of WKRP in Cincinnati where the huckster was selling steak knives, they shut him down and he then went on to sell indulgences. Of course, Indulgences have a long history in the Church.