The 52 Ancestors theme for week #46 is “Random fact.” When I got my Mayflower lineage from my cousin, one of the first surnames I noticed was Delano. “Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt” I thought. According to Wikitree, we are related through Phillippe (De Lannoy) Delano as 6th cousins 3 times removed. Like many descendants of…
52 Ancestors week 44 theme is “Bearded” and I have several bearded ancestors. Ora Philander Seward had a pretty good beard for example. So did another ancestor named George Douglass (below left) who was the father of Ada Barnum Douglass. The most impressive beard I found though belonged to an ancestor on my father’s side…
Week 42’s theme is “conflict.” I started this post a couple of weeks ago and then had to redo it after finding and reviewing a key source. A while back I wrote about my ancestor Reverend Jonathan Ellis. He followed in the pastoral footsteps of his father, Reverend John Ellis, though he went to Yale instead…
This week’s 52 Ancestors theme is “Cause of death.” It took me a while to come up with an idea for this week, then I remembered that this year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Spanish flu pandemic. My great-grandmother Emily Thomas was born in Canterbury, England in 1879 to Henry Thomas and Minnie…
The theme for the forty-first week of the 52 Ancestors project was “Sports.” My immediate family was not very serious about competitive sports. I played softball and my brother played soccer for the YMCA. We learned to swim at young ages and that was about it. My grandmother Joan (Avenell) played basketball in high school…
Last week’s 52 Ancestors theme was “10.” Priscilla Mullens was one of my Mayflower ancestors and also one of my 10th Great-Grandmothers. She boarded the Mayflower at age 18 along with her father William, step-mother Alice, brother Joseph, and future husband John Alden. Historians are not sure exactly when John and Priscilla were married, but…
One month ago I wrote about the Rev. Solomon Gleason Barber who raised my 2nd Great-Grandfather, his nephew, as his own son. Since this week’s 52 Ancestors theme is about farming, this post belongs to the younger Solomon. Many of my American ancestors either farmed as a profession or lived on small family farms while…
This week’s 52 Ancestors theme is “Unusual Sources.” Most of the sources I’ve referenced have been what you might call “usual.” Census records, birth, marriage, and death certificates are all commonly used by genealogists to confirm evidence. Many people have family bibles where their older relatives have recorded family events. Not many of my ancestors…
This week’s 52 Ancestors theme is the ancestor with the “birthday closest to yours.” According to my research, I don’t have anyone sharing my birthday, not even brothers and sisters of ancestors. I’ve already written about the ancestor whose birthday was closest: Jonathan Ellis, born April 11, 1762. Next in line is Lucy Sylvester Morse,…
In celebration of Labor Day, the theme of week #36 of the 52 Ancestors challenge is “work.” I knew my Granddad as someone who could fix anything electronic. The Shell Geophysical Lab in Houston, Texas knew him as their “first radio man.” According to an article from a company newspaper he saved, he was responsible…