Sunday, December 11, 2016

Genealogy Verifications

It's nine o'clock on a Sunday morning...  Bertrando, the squirrel, has been on top of his telephone pole twice this morning, eating walnuts that we put out for him - and it's snowing, again.  Before dawn, we had a a combination of rain and sleet fall, as I heard it hitting my window; now it's just snowing.  It started out with tiny flake, and, in the past fifteen minutes, the flakes have gradually increased in size.  I spent 70 minutes putting up the Christmas lights yesterday morning, so they are up and I don't have to think about them again until a few days after New Year; then I'll take them back down.
   I've been working on my family tree again, thanks to my cousin Brian and his interest in the family.  My old PC crashed and I couldn't recover the family tree, so I've been re-examining it and trying to double check what I had put down as fact previously.  I found a sticking point earlier this week, and am just going to work around it for the moment.  I was following my Washburn family line back, and discovered discrepancies that I could not accept, looking at my old records, and preparing to put them in the new ones. My Grandma Grace's grandmother was Lucinda Washburn, daughter of Lewis Washburn and Nancy Moore.  Lewis is the son of Benjamin Bartlett Washburn and Dorcas Hall, and Lewis' first son was also named Benjamin Bartlett Washburn.  I was surprised to read that Nancy Moore's maternal great-grandfather was George Washington's "brother, Col. William Washington."  Wrong.  The man's name was William Washington, but he was a distant cousin (5 generations back) to President George Washington.  I was eventually able to trace the Washington family back to the 1200s in England.
   But Benjamin B. Washburn is another story...  Apparently I fell into the easy theory that a lot of other folks have followed:  That Benjamin was the son of land speculator John Washburn, who was born in Connecticut, and then moved to Culpeper County, Virginia.  John Washburn married Sussanah Suchy, and they had multiple children; some of the children's birth dates are recorded, others aren't.  John and Susannah had a son named Benjamin, who married, and moved to Shelby County, Kentucky.  He was born in 1852.  After much digging, I found that John and Susannah's son Benjamin had the middle name of Austin - not Bartlett.  The birth and death dates did not match, nor did the place of death....  So I'm back seeking the father and mother of Benjamin Bartlett Washburn.        That's one of the joys (and aggravations) of doing genealogy on the web - there are such a great number of sources of information to be found and used.  But do not completely trust someone else's research - I've seen more than 50 people who have my Benjamin B. Washburn listed as the son of parents who do not belong to him...  Keep seeking the truth!

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