What I learned in 2016 Part One

Welcome 2017! Hope you're better than 2016.

Last year wasn't completely without merit. I learned many new things about my family history and also about myself. After attending the International Black Genealogy Summit in early September, I learned that I am an intermediate researcher and I need more challenging and informative conferences at that level. Of course, it is always a plus to mingle with like-minded people and to meet some of the experts in this field. Meeting and talking with Hari Jones and Kenyatta Berry was the highlight of the conference for me. Jones  is a writer, lecturer, historian, curator and motivational speaker. For twelve years, he was the assistant director and curator at the African American Civil War Freedom Foundation and Museum in Washington, DC. Berry, pictured below, is one of the genealogists featured on Genealogy Roadshow.

 

I learned the hard way how difficult it is to hold a family reunion. The Warrens and the Wilkins on my family tree met in late August. It was a labor of love for me. However, I'm afraid the result of this labor will be a "one of."

I took a trip back to Mississippi, hoping to uncover more information from the family cemetery in Summit. That was a big disappointment. I couldn't even find the tombstones I located on my trip three years ago or so I thought. After looking at the photos I took, I realized one of them was that of my great aunt Elizabeth Cotten Ames' tombstone, one I had discovered on the first trip. It seemed to have deteriorated faster than I would have expected.

Surprisingly, several new information surfaced in the last month of the year. Much of it came about because of the results from my DNA test, a gift that keeps on giving. More on that later.

I made no new resolution this year. The second edition of my family history is finished. There may or may not be a Koonce family reunion this year. I'm not even planning any trips for this year. If I had a resolution it would be to take it one day at a time and thank God for each day.

Maternal difficulties

As already stated, I have a wealth of information about my grandfathers, greats and otherwise. My grandmothers are a lot harder to flesh out but I'm not giving up.

Last week I discovered that my great-grandmother Katie Featherston, the woman on the left in the photo, had even more children than I was previously aware. I happened upon it after looking for information for a cousin by marriage. The cousin is a Wilkins and had heard of Katie. She tried to put two and two together but it didn't add up to four.

Katie married Tom Wilkins in 1881. By 1898 she was married to a Henry Hardy. On the 1900 Dyer County Tennessee census, she listed all her children as Hardy's. Not only that, she stated that she had been married to Henry for 16 years. Not true. She also stated that she gave birth to 11 children but only 6 were living. That math didn't add up either. On the very same census eight children are listed. Obviously the younger 6 were hers from her first marriage. The census taker didn't catch that or didn't care.

Two years later she is married to my great grandfather Ike Warren. By the 1910 census only my grandfather and her youngest child by Wilkins, Joseph, are living with her. She states here that she had three children but only one is living. The census taker didn't correct her again.

These are just some of the discrepancies genealogy geeks have to weed through in our search.