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.
Oh, do they! Indulgences were a very popular topic in our high school world history class; the teenage imagination of being able to buy forgiveness either in advance or in retrospect made it clear they would bring teens into the churches in droves, if offered today….
CJ: Browse this mailing list for August 2010. There’s a spirited discussion of when surnames first came into use in the Middle Ages.
http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/index/ADVANCED-RESEARCH
Rosemary
Thanks! I’ll enjoy that!
If you want to add your 2c to the discussion, post it here and I’ll send it to them under your name. Or email me. I subscribe to that list.
Just for fun: The Boone/de Bohun controversy…and my family’s oral history; and how bollixed-up a history can get when families take Attitude during certain anti-establishment moments…like the Revolutionary War.
Almost more bitter than the dispute over beans and no-beans in Southwestern chili is the dispute within the Boone families of America as to whether the Boones of Kentucky and Missouri, descended from George I, II, and III Boone of Devon, England, were descended from Humphrey de Bohun, one of the mediaeval kingmakers and general mover and shaker of that world. The connection is shaky: it goes through a mysterious Ann Fallace [that name actually comes from several families connected to William I or his relatives—it was originally de Falaise, [of the town of Falaise, his birthplace] and bestowed generally on his and his relatives’ numerous bastards]—and from her to a Gregory Boon, [there’s another big later split in the American Boone family between those with an -e and those without.]
Making matters worse, the Geoffrey Boon connection goes through a Bohn, and somewhat messy Welsh connections, before it gets back to the de Bohun {Bohun is actually pronounced as Boone). But here’s another bit: in OUR family, there is a tight connection between the Welsh ancestors AND Devon (southern England) where the Georges Boone lived. They’re in Devon, they’re out, and they’re back again. So a connection between visiting Welsh folk and the Boones is likely, not only on that ground, but because my family is related to a whole lot of Devon folk who, yes, ALSO have Welsh family members in that same period. So one could reasonably conclude that the Welsh marriages are not out of line. Get beyond Gregory Boon, I think it is, and you definitely connect to the de Bohuns, one of the last of Humphrey’s line. That’s one.
One thing I’ve found (personal observation here) is that families that knew each other in one generation or were neighbors tend to keep marrying each other in subsequent generations. Just as a curiosity, BOTH sides of my family are related to the George Boones, but to different George Boones—my father’s side comes from George III Boone, and my mother’s side from a Humphrey Boone descended from George I Boone. Well, it’s also true that personal NAMES persist and get reused. And remember the most famous de Bohun was Humphrey. So the George I who begat George II and III, passed on the name Humphrey: the later generations, who were incidentally Quakers,Plain Folk, who weren’t enamored of titles, didn’t. The branches of the Boones who argue most passionately that there is NO connection with Humphrey de Bohun are the descendants of George II and III. My mother’s family, descended from George I Boone, is equally convinced that there IS. The name Humphrey is, at least, not replicated in the other Boones that came to America.
So…the controversy is still noisy, but my bet is on Humphrey.
I find it interesting that your family still preserves its history enough to argue about it. I seem to be the only one in my family with any interest, let alone any opinion, about our collective past. I didn’t know, for instance, that my grandmother’s grandfather marched with both Jackson and Lee… and although she probably knew the man herself, I wonder if she knew, either, since when I asked her genealogy questions, lo, many moons ago, she didn’t mention it, although she did know about five generations back of herself.
I can understand why my grandfather didn’t know his family; it appears that it had a regular and unfortunate tendency to smash itself to bits and let the pieces drift apart (multiple marriages, and break-ups where both parties claimed to be widowed, etc.)
That’s all history within the last two hundred years, among people who either knew the people involved or who knew people who knew the people involved. Having arguments about people 800 years or more gone? Not on the horizon, or even within the horizon of that horizon.
Maybe in the distant cousin lineages. I don’t know them, so I can’t comment on any current controversies.
Speaking of the de Bohuns, I looked up the name in my own chart, and found a Margaret de Bohun, who married a Hugh Courtenay, both born abt. 1305, in the twentieth generation back. Margaret was from a long line of Humphreys (about 6 – 8 of them, depending on the chart you look at) which resolves to a Richard, then a Ralph, in abt. 900 AD. No Georges to be found. When I go looking for Georges who connect to Fallaces, I find them at about 1500 AD, and they connect to Humphreys in about 1100 AD. Does this match what’s in your research?
I admit, I don’t pay much attention to the sections of my chart which are that far back. I’ve built a ‘scaffold’ of names for the first twenty generations going back from myself, and I concentrate on these people, doing the research on each line in groups of three generations at a time (grandparents, children, grandchildren) which seems to be a convenient way of grouping efforts. I’m currently grinding away at some brick walls in the fifth generation back, which goes to show just how far from medieval concerns I am!
Yep—good Lord, we’re cousins 20x removed! also with Jane!
I particularly like the older history…I love looking up wikis, even of the villages in England to see what they look like now; and I love the weirder stories, which often enough get one of my ancestors beheaded—or close to it. One of mine was a lady in waiting to ALL Henry VIII’s wives, and I bet she had some really upsetting moments. I’ve given up keeping track of all the sibs, just the direct descent.
But yep, that’s the Boones for you. John Boone was the family historian, and teacher, when the family came over from England, and he set great store by the family remembering, so they remembered. Half of them couldn’t sign their name and the other half couldn’t read it in a few generations, though my own great-great-great grandfather was actually the district doctor—before he was murdered. My family’s full of ’em—and remember, I got the dose from BOTH sides of the family. I heard the stories—I first remember my dad telling me when I was about 6, and I’d done something (6 year old version) amiss. His line was “WE don’t do things like that…” and followed with all the ancestors who’d disapprove. You didn’t get away with anything, I’m telling you. There was always a family story against it. And I was dead sure the boy who cried wolf was young Daniel Boone. We borrowed all the good stories. Nowadays I can sift them out.
It’s not just the Boones, either: my uncle had a bunch of foreign visitors turn up in Anadarko OK—turned out they were from the Netherlands, they knew part of the family had come over here when New York was New Amsterdam, and they wanted to trace the family descendants and what had become of them. From them we got a wonderful book of who was related to whom that has since disappeared. I never got to see it after I was old enough to really read it for what I could get, but the most of it is probably in Dutch even if I could run it down.
People from the Netherlands showed up in Anadarko? That’s way off the beaten track.
Oh, lord…
Non-sequitur time! While noodling around the web, checking what is attached to the search string ‘Newcastle Ontario Selleck’, I have found an article in the Weekly World News, of all places, which refers to my gggg-grandfather. It is… true enough… in some details… but is so hideously overblown in others that I cringe at the melodrama. Of course I have to share! http://books.google.ca/books?id=-u8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT34&lpg=PT34&dq=Newcastle+Ontario+Selleck&source=bl&ots=uJref3bpeb&sig=orn5RPgirWNWPQTC3Ljv5AUlido&hl=en&ei=EoSJTMrzMYKosQPuuOTNBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=13&ved=0CFcQ6AEwDA#v=onepage&q=Newcastle%20Ontario%20Selleck&f=false
The article is ‘Terror of the black rock’, about four pages from the end of the magazine. The black rock in question is a formation known as the Devil’s Horse Block, which was charted as being only 8 inches below the surface of Lake Ontario in May of 1804 (there’s a photo extant of several Royal Navy men standing on it, somewhere on the web.) That area is part of a magnetic anomaly known as the Sophiasburgh Triangle. To make a long story short, HMS SPEEDY, in a blinding snowstorm and therefore relying on her compass (oops) is presumed to have hit the Block, snapping off the highest point of it (hence why searchers couldn’t find it later). Her wreck has (probably) been found and that’s interesting reading in itself. http://www.oceanscan.com/sidescan/speedy.htm
Oy. Mentioned in the Weekly World News. OY!
Oh, that is so good! I love finding these things in my research!
We learned that one of Jane’s relatives, not quite in direct line but a brother, actually built the first steamship…but Robert Fulton got the funding, and the Fitch steamship was mired in controversy. http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/westcott/
Just found a small scandal in the immediate family. My Dad had a half-brother. He was 20 years older, raised by his grandparents as their own, and lived 2800km away. He was only 3 years younger than the youngest of Grandma’s sisters.
Mmm. That’s a real interesting find—maybe unguessed cousins. You turn up all sorts of things. I’m pretty sure I know of an ‘informal union’ in my immediate family tree—but if you lived in Oklahoma before it was a state, records not only weren’t kept, weddings probably weren’t even a thought on the horizon. And my mother was born at home, the birth recorded when they finally got to town…I never did ask her whether we celebrated her real birthdate or the birthdate on the county record, or whether the county record recorded the real date. My father didn’t have a certificate at all. All this made things somewhat interesting when, at 60-something, they decided to apply for passports. But they’d both worked for the Federal Government, so they had those records to use.
No cousins that I can find. They appeared to have no children. Privacy laws are such that birth records post 1908 in this state are restricted. There’s plenty of remote cousins however; Grandma was one of 14 kids.
His wife’s death certificate says that there weren’t any children and she was widowed. Well, there weren’t any children that the informant (the undertaker) knew of and she wasn’t widowed because he died in 1961. I can’t find him after 1924 and they either separated or divorced and she became a “widow”. She stayed in her home town all her life; he probably took off or was kicked out. The online divorce index only goes to 1924 and they aren’t there. Eventually I may pay a researcher to go through the divorces but not right now.
Some of those records are slowly coming on line, as they get the easy ones first…I’m waiting for a cemetary in Oilton Ok to take a census.
Whenever we refer to my mom’s side of the family, you have to imagine it with a thick Czech-Hungarian accent: “Ve came offer on de boat. Mit de shickens. Unt de cabbaches.” Dad’s side is a little better documented, thanks to a distant cousin who actually researched the clan in the 70s; they’re mostly small craftsmen, farmers and millers (Muller-with-an-umlaut) and the like from central Germany. DH’s family actually has a history that goes back into the Middle Ages. Not surprising, because part of the family responsibility was as recorders and record keepers at that time.
Neat. We’re still signing our name with an X well into the late 19th century.
One of the interesting things I did when I had time (sigh) was keying in old ship’s manifests and English parish records—probably most of the parish including the well-to-do Spencers (who may have been THOSE Spencers) signed with an X, but the parish priest wrote down the begats and the like, and the village events, which involved the demise of strangers, etc.
If by using history and sometimes family names as an indicator leads to a village, the chance of records is much better. I’ve found some really amazing connections in my tree, people who lived in the most remote little hamlets and had some really odd names that you never could make up. Temperance Bailey. A cousin was Anne Mourning Grubb. I used to think it might be direct descent, but nope, I came through the other side. Oliver Atte Wode. Actually he was fairly well to do. Walkelin Wadard and his sister Helewise Wadard. Adelheide von Zahringen. Williswint von Wormsgau. Obedience Turpin. John Thickpenny. Henry Featherstonehaugh. Devorgilla de Galloway. Hodierna de Sackville. The names are so colorful, I couldn’t possibly invent them. Once you find one of these, you know they’re going to be easier to track. Though I do have my share of John Smiths…one quite extensive batch of Smiths, with one of the prize names: Peregrine Smith. I love that name. He was a bit of a character, too, claimed to be the son of Captain John Smith and Pocohontas, or something like, and tried to get money and invitations from the rich and famous, apparently, but his real father was a Reverend Smith and his mother was a sedate homebody.
My half-uncle had a very sad end. He drowned in a lake on the grounds of the old folks home and hospital where the indigent often ended up. I imagine he was either an alcoholic or suffered some sort of mental disorder. A very kind person (a teacher, CJ) has volunteered to get the inquest records copied when the school term ends in December. He’s buried in a public grave by order of the Cheltenham, Victoria, police (from the cemetery records).
Sad, but now he has relatives again.
Genealogy-wise I’ve been doing some work on DH family. It makes a nice change to rummage around Alabama instead of Australia and England.
Well, I’ve finally managed to take the plunge into all this; wonderful husband gave me an ancestry membership for my birthday a month ago and I’ve been having fun filling in the spaces. Still on mom’s side– was really helpful having a lot of info that relatives had pulled together from Catholic records [this is Quebec]. Well, the direct ancestor who came off the boat in 1658 doesn’t go any further back, but boy howdy! I was amazed at how well documented the female side of things was, even though we’ve about fallen off the table way to the right. So far, I’ve got Charlemagne along 3 lines and CJ, I think I’ve got your Williswint von Wormsgau [I know I’ve got a passle of folk from Wormsgau]. My other big surprise has been that I’ll occasionally get the french wiki lists, which has made my brain hurt. Clicking the ‘please translate’ button often results in way less info than the original french, so click back to the french and then it’s an adventure trying to use my high school french after 35 years! But also fun — don’t know if you ran into Fulk the Black [I thankfully go thru his sister], who got very annoyed upon discovering his wife having an affair with a shepard [or goatherd] and burning her alive at the stake in her wedding dress. But he was a good guy who very devotely founded several religous houses! Always amazes me the species managed to survive.
Oh my, I’m green with envy. We’re all peasants and serfs … didn’t leave a trace except when they landed in gaol for some reason or other. That’s my Dad’s side. My mother’s family are just the regular folks down the road working on some-one’s farm. Ag-Lab is their usual occupation. Or else it was F.S. and M.S. I’ll leave you to guess.
Have you found Cyndi’s List? This is Cyndi Howell and she runs http://www.cyndislist.com .
ooohhhh, that looks interesting. Thanks! well, odds are really good that most of my ancestors were like your ancestors and just regular folk worrying about the weather and why the cow suddenly quit giving milk. But sure seems to me that at some point everyone has someone famous in the mix — Ghengis Khan is supposed to have something like 18 million descendants, and Charlemagne definitely had a bunch of kids with a whole collection of women! One friend told me if you have family from northern Europe you probably have Charlemagne in there somewhere. It was just one link thru the wife of my mom’s first Quebecoise ancestor that I ended up with an amazing collection of names! Otherwise there’s been lots of dead ends and no more records. The Ryan side only goes back to 1811 in Ireland as far as I can tell, but my dad’s great-grandmother Ryan, who was a Ross, goes zipping on, and probably were neighbors of CJ’s Boones [Rosses and Peytons]. It’s really intriguing to me that the male lines frequently deadend and the females lines open up whole new avenues.
Just a word of caution about Ancestry Member Trees: there’s a lot of flaky stuff out there with some truly awful scholarship. Marrying your grandmother comes immediately to mind in a couple I looked at. I also added a whole branch to one of my trees where the child was born over 100 years before the parent. (Ugh … took a lot of effort to remove). When you get matches in member trees have a look at the little icons that mention how many sources (it’s just below the image icon). Pulling up that tree, and looking at the sources in detail can be very useful. I’ve found some great hints that way. I’ve also found others that just copied their data from someone else.
Please don’t let this deter you. It can be a fascinating hobby/obsession. When you Google people use ~genealogy after the name and you’ll find genealogical references. Don’t forget the Mormons either http://www.familysearch.org . Their website is in flux at the moment and their research facilities in SLC second to none.