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!

Family Genealogy and Stuff...

It's a sunny Monday, 25 degrees out, and something spent a lot of time on my patio last night. Whatever the something was, it had both kits looking out the window and the door off and on all night long. I looked out, myself, a couple of times, but never saw anything except leaves blowing around. Both kits spent a good deal of time this morning sniffing the edges, legs, and seats of my three rattan chairs that stay on the patio - but I haven't a clue as to what was out there. It could have been a raccoon, fox, cat, or skunk - who knows....

  Yesterday I watched the Broncos game, then the Jets game, and, finally, the Texans game. The Jets lost, but the other two teams won; and the Saints beat the Falcons - so I had an enjoyable day of football. And I didn't put a toe outside my doors... had on warm, woolly socks; blue Gators sweatpants, and a long-sleeved orange Broncos shirt - a nice way to spend a day where the high temperature was all of 29!

  I'm doing some genealogy research for family members, and I need to get back into transcribing the family tree onto the web. I must say that in following my family tree, I have found some very interesting connections, and have run across some memorable names... My sister likes Marmaduke de Thwang, a very old Norman ancestor in England; I still like Hepzibah Starbuck Hussey, and, in Jim Snow's family, Eliphalet Pease. Seeing that I am distant cousins with Presidents Franklin Pierce and Grover Cleveland had me delve into their histories; and finding the same distant cousin connection to James Dean and Mary Ann Mobley had me viewing films.

  One of the things that fascinates me most about genealogy is that how there seems to be the tale of an "Indian princess" marrying into the family in a majority of family stories. The most usual tale is that it was a Cherokee maiden who married outside the tribe, and completely gave up the Native American lifestyle. I have had ten genealogy clients who were very certain that this was true. I told each of them from the outset of my research that I would only report what I could document - I was able to trace all ten clients' families back to England, Scotland, or Ireland - and none of them had a Native American in the family tree. Now, I admit that there are gaps in histories, especially in the South where a lot of records were destroyed by fire during the Civil War - but I always note that fact. My mother told me that we might have some Indian blood in her side of the family - but that it would be Native Americans native to the Eastern Shore peninsula, if it was true. I have not been able to verify any Indian blood there. My father told me (as he had been told) that his mother, whose surname was Lancaster, traced her family tree back to John of Gaunt; and that his father's family had "some Cherokee" in it... Grandma Grace's Lancaster ancestor was a man of French descent (according to the National Geographic genome program), who had lived in England, and then moved to Virginia. Dad's family can be traced back to John of Gaunt, but on his paternal side, not maternal.  And there is a possibility that we have some Native American blood on his side of the family - but I'll write about that tomorrow.