Grains of Truth

In 2013 I confirmed an oral legend I had recently learned about my paternal great great grandfather. Up until 2009 my family had never heard about our ancestor John Alexander being in the civil war. I was skeptical even after I found a John Alexander on the roster of U.S. Colored Troops out of Mississippi. After all, John Alexander was a common name. I found dozens of them serving in the war. For that reason, I did not send for the pension papers. It was a lot of money to spend to find out it was the wrong man. I decided to go in person. I justified the expenditure as a trip for business and for fun.

It turned out that the pension papers were for my relatives and it gave me more details about John's life. However, it did not give me the name of his slave holder. That was left blank. I had to deduce who it might be from other evidence. I concluded that the slave holder had been a Huffman. This was also the man my aunt always thought was the slave holder.

Since 2013 I haven't done much more research on John Alexander but I think the ancestors have been nudging me this week. Yesterday I decided to look into John Huffman born in 1801 in Alexandria, Virginia and died in 1882 in Lincoln County, Mississippi.  In 1870, Huffman lived in the same neighborhood as John Alexander. This is one of the clues I have been told to look for when trying to find the slave holder. I looked at Huffman's family tree. Huffman was married to Mary Glass. Her parents were Frederick Mason Glass and Elizabeth Strother. When I saw this I got very excited. You see, according to another oral legend, John Alexander lived on a plantation in Virginia called Strouder. Some of my cousins have told me that "Strawder" was his nickname. Am I on the right trail?

I was still skeptical. Glass and Strother married and lived in Georgia. Georgia was never part of any oral history for Alexander. However,  I was able to find a family tree on ancestry.com for the Glass family. It gave me Mary's ancestry. Her grandfather was William Strouther, born in 1755 and died in 1833 in Virginia. He was living in Fauquier County when he died. Fauquier is adjacent to Rappahannock County, where John Alexander claimed he was born!

I definitely think I'm on the right trail now. It also makes me curious as to whether all the oral legends I have heard have a grain of truth. My to-do list has just gotten longer.

Definition of Frustration

frustration [fruh-strey-shuh n] noun

1. when you get a new DNA match on ancestry and the match has no tree.

2. when your new DNA match has a tree and it is private.

3. when your DNA match has only two persons in their family tree

4. when your match has over 500 names in their tree and you still don't recognize any surnames.

Same Old, same old

I know I have complained before. It  is not an attractive trait to whine. However. I get so frustrated while researching when I come across information that I know can't be true or has not been verified.

It reminds me of this quote from a new cable docu-comedy, "Family Tree." It's about a man (played by one of my favorite actors, Chris O'Dowd)  who has become obsessed with tracing his family roots. His father doesn't share his interest. He blames the new passion of his son on a romantic break-up. Besides, he says, aside to the camera, "genealogy is like any other 'ology. Best left to the scientists."

In episode 2, the Chris O'Dowd character mistakenly believes his heritage must be Chinese because he is given a photo of his great grandfather that looks to him that he is Chinese. He finds out first that the picture does depicts  a Japanese person, not a  Chinese person. Next he learns that the photo is of his great-grandfather acting in the theater production of The Mikado as Nanki-poo. Even though that information was on the back of the photo, even though his grandfather is clearly Caucasian, O'Dowd still leaped to that erroneous conclusion.

That's the kind of assumptions I keep finding all the time online. And to be honest, I may have made a few of them myself in the beginning. And I may make a few more in the future. I remember speaking to a cousin who tried to tell me that her great grandfather was a Dunnegan and not our shared ancestor, a Warren. I looked at the same census she used as her source and I realized that the census was in error. Her great grandmother, who had divorced our great grandfather, had left her children with her parents. On the census those children were listed as sons and daughters, not grandchildren of Dunnegan. It was an obvious deduction but when looking at the ages and other evidence, it was apparent to me that the census was wrong.

I'm working hard to get my family history updated in time for the family reunion this September and I keep getting sidetracked by contradicting information. Familysearch.org's new Family tree addition to the site is the newest culprit in spreading wrong info. Just like ancestry.com, anyone can add information without sources to back up their data. And many times if they have a source it is from another source that was not verified.

Argghhh!!!

That was my primal scream. I had to vent. Now back to the drawing board.

I Seek Dead People

The Warrens circa 1965

(Introduction - Tapestry of Tangled Ties)

It has been over 15 years since I began researching my family roots. I’ve hit my head on the brick wall many times, stopped, stuttered, and began again. Sometimes I wonder what keeps me going when the information has seemed to dry up or when others question my tenacity. It is a combination of many things.

I am just plain nosy as my family will attest. I am passionately curious about my own history. Why I am that way is partly why I continue to research—it’s in my genes. But where I got it from, I’m still not sure. So I keep searching.

And because it’s in my genes, there are others out there who share my curiosity gene and I do this for them. Inquiring minds want to know, as my uncle Johnny used to say, so I want to help them.

When I learn something new it is such a rush. It’s my geeky Achilles heel. I absolutely love it. It is the avocation that fills my time and mind and crowds out all mundane and/or troubling thoughts. 

So I continue. I originally planned on just updating my first book, “Say My Name,” but I kept finding new data and vital statistics kept changing. Therefore, I am writing this new version of my family history with some information from the aforementioned book but also with all the new stuff I’ve learned. I do this knowing that things will still need to be updated. A genealogist’s work is never done. Researching a family tree is the work of many lifetimes.

 

 The Cottens circa 1986

The common sense approach

For years, I believed everything I saw online as fact. Wrong. I want to believe but I've grown wiser. Now I check and doublecheck all I see online.

I'm working on my connection to Charles Featherston right now. My maternal grandfather's grandfather was most likely Charles Featherston, born in 1825 in Charles City, Virginia. I'm 90% sure about this. Charles' father was William Featherston born in 1793 to Carolus and Lucy Elmore Featherstone. There is proof of this. Carolus' parents were Charles and Jean Wright Featherston. There is proof of this too. Both sources are wills. When I look on Ancestry.com I find several family trees that take the lineage back further with no other proof than other family trees on ancestry.com. I used to be guilty of that too.

I looked at the Featherston family trees. They have Charles being born between 1718 to 1720. We know he died between 1788 and 1790 because of  his will. Where did they get that date for his birth? The same family trees have Jean being born around 1723 and giving birth to children between 1760 and 1776. She died in 1812. There is proof for her death. I don't know where the dates for her birth came from but it seems preposterous. That would mean Jean gave birth from her late 30's to her 50's and then lived to be 90. A brief look at the history of colonial Virginia proves that is a very unusual for a woman. Most women married around 15 years old then. The average lifespan was 45 to 50 years old.

Now that I'm studying the family trees harder, it is making me a little upset at myself and others online for not being more responsible. I was guilty of passing on this information as gospel. Mea culpa. But I have learned. I am checking and rechecking my information and couching most finds in the phrase "possibly" or "probably" but rarely "definitely."