The 26th week’s theme was “Black Sheep.” Jonathan Ellis did not start out as a black sheep, but then he left his family and disappeared. I have been gathering family stories since a young age and very few have been what you might call scandalous. A few NPEs (Non-Paternal Events) here and there, maybe a…
Alternate title: “How many James Prays were there in Maine?” This week’s theme is “Same Name” and many genealogists are faced with untangling which James Pray (or Robert Smith or Patrick O’Brien) belong to which generation. If you do a search for James Pray in Maine on FamilySearch you will see many many James Prays….
This week’s theme is Father’s Day. My father was a contrarian. He always loved the underdog best and often took the less popular side of an argument. One of his more interesting assertions was that if he had lived during the American Revolution, he would have been a Loyalist instead of fighting for the Revolution….
I’m still catching up from my move, so this and the next post will be short. The 22nd theme was “So Far Away.” I thought of an ancestor on my father’s side whose details still need some fleshing out. I wonder where her grave was located; close to family or far away from where her…
Theme is Military. Today is Memorial Day, made official in 1868 after the Civil War. I’ve known about two ancestors who fought for the Union for a while now; Solomon Gleason Barber, my paternal grandfather’s grandfather and Ora Butler Douglas, a 3rd great-uncle on my maternal side. Though some of my paternal grandfather’s ancestors moved…
The theme for week 20 was “language.” I’m in the middle of packing for a move, so this post will be short. Do you notice anything different about Aeltje van Couwenhoven’s headstone? It was written in Dutch, not English. Quite a few people in the Dutch community at that time still spoke Dutch as a…
From London to Houston The above photo was taken sometime in 1916, in Houston, Texas. The couple sitting in the center are my 2nd great-grandparents Walter and Jane Ellen (nee Hagell) Avenell. The theme this week is Mother’s Day, and Jane Ellen is the mother of Bertrand (top left), Eleanor (next to Bertrand) and Walter…
This week’s theme is “Close Up.” When I first started delving into the Dutch history of New York City, I started to notice people in databases like Ancestry having birth places or death places in Long Island City, a neighborhood of the borough of Queens. That is not very far from the neighborhood I live…
One of the great things about the 52 Ancestors exercise is that it points out the gaps in my family history as well as the more researched parts. As this week’s theme is cemeteries, I will write about a fairly well-researched ancestor and a cemetery I have yet to visit. Philander Seward was born to…
This week’s theme (really last week’s theme) was “Storms.” I don’t have any family stories of storms at this time, though if I were to sit down with my ancestor Benjamin Morse Melcher’s ship log on microfilm, I’d probably find some mentioned. Instead, I’m going to write about a storm that came up in my…