My dad and my mom used to tell me family stories, some of which I used to think were tall tales…
I eventually found out they were mostly true, only the details being slightly bent in the oral history.
I found out, for instance, that my father came from a family that had been very determined to keep family records, before and after coming to America.
And that my mother had a grandmother who’d lived a real western adventure.
And that my parents both grew up in Oklahoma during the wild days, just after the state came into the Union.
The outlaw Cole Younger, associated with Jesse James, had a nephew who worked on my mother’s parents’ farm. And it was this gentle-spoken young man who introduced my mother to my father. Cole Younger himself had been in prison in Stillwater, MN, and had been released, to spend his final years in Missouri. Most of Cole Younger’s family had been killed in the violence of the post-Civil War period in Kansas—it was a bad place and a bad time. But one of his brothers or sisters apparently lived long enough to have a son, whose name was Bill or Bob, as my mother recalls, who worked on the family farm in Anadarko OK, and who apparently visited his uncle in Stillwater. When my father admired my mother from a distance, Younger, acquainted with both, managed an introduction. My father worked at the Anadarko ice house, and my mother began to insist on doing the drive into town after ice that summer. They were secretly married in El Reno OK, and didn’t tell relatives on both sides until some months later.
My maternal great-grandmother was the survivor of an accident that drowned or separated her family as they were crossing a major river on the move west. Her name was Missouri Duff. But in my searching census records, I found her on an old census report from before the accident, and I found, in the next census, her mother and a brother living in a town near the Missouri river. Evidently they’d survived, her father and other children had drowned—and she’d survived, taking the name of Missouri and moving first to Kansas and then to Oklahoma, to grow up and marry with never a notion she had living relatives.
My grandfather was a cowboy turned salesman as Indian Territory became settled towns. His mother was Louisiana Carolina Boone, and my father named me after her. She was one of those Boones, and she came into Indian Territory out of Texas with her husband, my great-grandfather, and ended up living with my grandfather, then taking care of my father when he was very small.
When she died, my father went to live with other relatives, an uncle, and only came home to live with my grandfather when he married my step-grandmother, a spectacularly gracious lady, in every sense of the word.
Well, I got all the family stories—including the night St. Elmo’s fire turned up on a herd of cattle when my grandfather was riding herd in an impending thunderstorm: horns and hooves glowed—the herd spooked, and if you remember the song “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” it must have been like that.
A part of my family is Dutch, and used to own a major slice of New Jersey and Manhattan: they became bankers, and one a Supreme Court judge—but half that family broke off and went down to Virginia and the Carolinas. That was my half, poor as church mice, and working in farming, from Virginia to Nebraska during the Civil War and down to Kansas in the Bleeding Kansas days, then on into Oklahoma.
But when I got seriously into genealogy, I began to fill in the pieces of various things. I found Missouri Duff’s missing family. I found how we connect to Daniel Boone’s father, Squire Boone, and how we connect, though part of the Boone family fiercely disputes it, through a dubious union, to the de Bohuns, one of the kingmaking families in England. Whether or not the Boone line does connect—I’m related to the de Bohuns down another line as well. And here’s an interesting point: these families keep connecting and reconnecting: geographical closeness, and social circles: availability of potential good matches, strengthening economic and political ties, in an era of arranged marriages. When you have a nest of connections that keep reiterating, I think it likely that relationship is true.
A great number of my forbears came over from England: read: ran for their lives to get out of England during the English Civil War. A lot of them were Charles I’s supporters. My ancestors were not fans of our Pilgrim fathers, quite on the other side of the political fence.
I’ve been able to trace relations going back and back and back…a lot of lines through those English emigres…
And here’s the kicker. It turns out Jane and I are related to each other—back in England. One of her folk married one of the de Bohuns, both of us in direct descent.
One of the really fun things is going through Wikipedia finding out about these people. Mine had a penchant for getting involved in royal politics and getting caught on the losing side—many were very creatively executed in a very brutal age.
Fortunately, they managed to reproduce before meeting their nasty end.
Not all were saints. I’m related to Hugh the Despenser—-reputed as one of the most corrupt men in England. And to William Marshal, reputed as one of the most honest.
I’ve found answers to family mysteries: the family story is that we came over from Ireland, when most geneologies try to make us German. Well, we’re right: our guy, John Cherry, married to Bridgett Haney, was of British origin, but had been living in Ireland, and his wife was apparently Irish—when they, or he, immigrated to the states. And that was the origin of the story. That family came over from Normandy, but not in the invasion: the name(of, originally de Cerisy, has a ‘de’ (of)—which is the sort of thing that ordinarily denotes some lordly family, but in this case I think it simply means “from the village of Cerisy”, a little place in Normandy, France, no nobility involved, and not one of William the Conqueror’s lot, just a guy from a French village who came to England.
And—a very interesting update: research in French records gives another story—not de Cerisy, ‘from the village of Cerisy’, but de Chery, from the town of ‘Chery,’ in the Centre district of France. It seems that one Jean de Chery held property in Normandy, or had some ancestral rights in William the Conqueror’s land, but that one could not at that time enter Normandy from the rest of France without a royal permit—which Jean de Chery sought from his king, Charles. King Charles, now called Charles the Mad, had once been known as Charles the Good, but he had had a mental breakdown, what they call the glass syndrome, becoming convinced he could shatter, literally, and convinced that assassins were on his track.
Actually, re Charles’ paranoia, it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you, and it wasn’t a bad guess. There were three contenders for the French throne: the Capets, descended from Charlemagne, the Burgundians, who claimed southern central France as their ancestral domain, and had allies clear across France; and the de Courtenays, who contended they should be kings of France. Burgundy was assassinating people who stood in his way.
And there is a document which indicates that the de Cherys were a) in charge of the substantial town of Chery, and b) closely tied to the de Courtenays who were c) increasingly split as to where their fortunes would best advance, in William’s enterprise, or in France, trying to succeed the failing Charles Capet the Mad…that Burgundy was intent on killing and supplanting. There was a de Courtenay branch, the lords of Arrablay, one of whom, I think also named Charles, is documented to have married his neighbor, one Jeanne de Chery; so there were marriage ties between the de Cherys and the vastly powerful de Courtenays.
Burgundy began to gain ground, and while the de Courtenays didn’t sail with William the Conqueror, a number of them went over to England after the Conquest—possibly because they were feeling the heat from Burgundy and Charles the Mad was, well, mad…
The de Courtenays who emigrated to England set up a castle with William’s permission, in Leicestershire, central England.
Well, now we have one Jean de Chery (the male form of John/Jeanne) who at a certain point seeks the permission of Charles the Mad to go visit his properties in Normandy, after which he vanishes from history, and the de Chereis turn up in Leicestershire…attached to the de Courtenay branch that had established in England. It was, thanks to William, *no* trouble to get ship from Normandy to England in that time.
And Burgundy was busy assassinating his rivals, and King Charles was getting crazier, and the de Courtenays in France finally dwindled down to a few, one female unable to pass the title, and virtually powerless, though they still existed.
Part of the de Chereis family moved from Leicestershire and set up in the south, at Maidenhead and Bray, in Berkshire, and those folk by then are spelling it Cherry, and still marrying people of some substance, to judge by the graves, the literacy, and the constant interweaving of spouses of some indication of wealth, even title. Then from Bray, a Cherry (they all tended to be named John and David and Thomas) went over to northern Ireland, and after a few generations, a John and his son David emigrated to Virginia, in a time of religious unrest and civil war. So my little guy from de Cerisy may instead be a much more politically connected guy skipping out of the town of Chery, in central France to go join the de Courtenays in Leicestershire, before the king who was his patron went entirely over the brink.
Jane’s family name, possibly originally Faucher, may, according to one name-origin, have come from the Limoges area of France, then to London, then to the Americas, which is kind of generic information and not easy to attach to individuals, but there is new information, too—indicating a substantial house in England, the house at Fanshawe Gate, which is now a beautiful garden showplace in Derbyshire—and a connection of her very definite ancestor, via records in Massachusetts, to a Fanshawe from the house at Fanshawe Gate who went from that Derbyshire hall down to London: that ancestor married one Eunice Bouton, who seems like a quiet New England lady of French ancestry—until you get into her past, and figure that—ironically enough—that lady’s ancestors run back to the dukes of central France, back before the Norman Invasion. Both these possible connections are still under investigation—but they do answer some interesting questions and fill in some gaps; and they are better connected to specific individuals whose time and place we can say match and intersect. It’s worth more study, at very least. The de Chereis are in Burke’s Peerage.
Anyway, hunting ancestors one of my favorite winter-evening hobbies. I was amazed that I could trace anybody by real, checkable records, but the computer age has made it an easy-chair kind of hobby; you can access, almost instantly, every digitized census report and village record, not just in the States, but in Britain, Italy, France, and now apparently into Japan and Germany, the Netherlands, you name it. They open up more of these every month, and if they ever digitize Creek County, OK, I may be able to open up a whole new part of the tree by finding my paternal great-grandmother. That could happen.
The software system I use is www.ancestry.com and if you’ve ever wanted to get into this, it’s a marvelous way to learn history: it gets pretty personal when you know it was your great-great-great-great grandfather in that battle…
For any of you who are in the Ancestry network, our tree is “It’s the Eleventh Century and We’re All Barbarians…”, a quote from our favorite Christmas movie, The Lion in Winter, which is appropriate on so many grounds.
thanks,yes, having 2 windows open is very good advice, when it gets complicated you can get very lost!
I’m going to have a look on my big screen tomorrow – quite frustrating on my smallish macbook. but I seem to have resolved the problem, also my Musgrave problem is resolved if I believe one lot of family trees rather than another!
Just FYI, my tree(s) is(are)”It’s the 11th Century and We’re All Barbarians…” [Lion in Winter, re their family difficulties]…there are several versions up, because when I started I didn’t know the darned thing was proliferating onto the web… Anyway, if you see that in a reference, I don’t swear it’s accurate [I took what the WOrld Tree said to ‘have’ it, and am slowly sorting it for reality], but at least you can ask me.
I found you on google rather than via ancestry, and it took me straight to one of those Tiptons … I’ve cleaned up my Musgrave line now, so I am more confident it is as correct as it can be. seems like someone has done research on them well pre-internet and then it’s gone into ancestry, so as long as you keep an eye out for flagrant errors of copying – eg children born after the death of the parent, it should be fairly reliable.
and ancestry seems to have been offline for the past 2 hours … hope they haven’t lost my family tree! can’t get roots.com either … what’s going on!
This happens now and again: they’re huge and they’re creaky, and now and again they go ‘out’…I’ve seen weeks when they’re off and on again. Then they’ll be fine for months. They never lose things, IME. If you’re on your free trial, phone them and ask for more time based on the outage: they’ll probably accommodate you.
Creaky, yes, but a good place for a backup file to live.
I’ve been using it to collect census and other vital records for mine (‘Tangled Roots, Knotted Branches’ – there are at least three places where different lines intersect).
I put up a copy of John Shane’s interview of Samuel Pointer (Painter?) here. Samuel died in 1849 and was, he said, born in 1759. (It always reads to me like an old man in overalls and a plaid shirt, sitting on his porch in a rocking chair, and holding a corncob pipe.)
He was in Kentucky at the same time as the Boones, and probably met them.
It wouldn’t be unlikely at all.
hmmm, I think it was my connection – lots of connecting circles going round and round and not connecting … I rang them in the end, they refreshed the line – hey presto, ancestry working fine …
I back up my Ancestry trees on Rootsweb every month or so. Download them as GEDcoms and then upload to Rootsweb. I don’t allow GEDcoms to be generated for my trees on Rootsweb; if anyone wants the data they are going to have to type it in.
And then I have another set of files locally in Family Tree Maker format.
do you think that ancestry will lose them Tulrose?
have to say I found myself dreaming ancestry.com last night … that’s bad! thinking I have got some connection wrong – but it was a connection I dreamed up, literally!
I am looking for another family now, my aunt married into the Fulfords who came from Devon. the furthest I can go back is what she already managed to find from the census – William Fulford, schoolmaster, married to Esther Lake, born 1772 Kingsleighton, and lived there. but nothing further back is coming up. googling gets me the Fulfords of Great Fulford in Devon way back, who were the local gentry and have an interesting history, coming forward to the present day. some people on ancestry have this William, and his parents as de fulfords in the 1300’s – I ask you! also some people have him married to someone else, but Esther Lake is on the census.
Not lose them, precisely, but I prefer the belt ans suspenders approach to data backup and I’ve put a lot of time into researching them.
Don’t neglect http://www.familysearch.org . They are getting more and more databases online and they’re free.
well, I have got these Devon Fulfords back to 1160 when KIng Richard granted the manor of Dunsford to William de Fulford for going on crusade. before that there seems to be nothing, after the conquest William the C put a norman into the manor, I have the domesday entry, but they didn’t have surnames . then the only recorded offspring for 400 years are the male heirs, so no side stems that my people could be from. then it’s pretty clear that there weren’t any spare males after that either. so I have hit a blank for the time being, unless some other evidence comes up. :(( been googling everybody and getting the roots web info and other stuff.
wondering if the name actually comes from Yorkshire where there was a battle of fulford just before the battle of Stamford bridge in 1066, which the anglosaxons lost to the Norwegians, it says in Wikipdeia.
Getting the distaff line can be interesting. Sometimes these ‘new made men’ marry their way to a castle, and it’s not uncommon for the man or his son to marry ‘well’ and drag in property and political connections. Try The Peerage.com to trace this sort of goings on: it’s also helpful when figuring which mother belongs to which child. Plus people change their names when they get property. They may have been Smith—but become de Fulford.
funnily enough my musgraves did exactly that, gaining Hartley castle round the corner at Kirby Stephen. apparently the fulfords started out as Lamberts, but I haven’t been able to find any names; I thought maybe they brought the name from the north because Great Fulford is not even a hamlet, it seems to be a castle they built just outside the manor of Dunsford Richard gave them, and they have been there ever since.
I am sure there must be lots of younger sons from which my Fulfords are descended, but perhaps the peerage.com will give me them.
Doing happy dance today. I just found a raft of aunts, uncles, and cousins for my Great Grandmother. Her older sister shares a grave with a gentleman whose surname is the same as Gt Gt Grandmother’s maiden name. Try looking for John and Joseph Bull in the Greater London area – lots and lots of them.
of course, there’s no record of the distaff side for the first generations, and where there is it leads to very little … I suspect that a few people descended from the main line of Fulfords have entered what is readily available and have not been interested in going sideways. there is a Robert Fulford born in 122 who goes nowhere – nothing entered … must try more options on him. they were not a flashy set, just local squires who made some judicious marriages, and stayed in their manor. lost out by supporting Charles 1, but survived …. no real genealogists have had their teeth into this family. my great grandfather who did all the work on my Norfolk side delved into so many families I have a lovely job entering it all into ancestry. 😀
I mean 1222 ….:(
This might help for some of the European nobility — or even near nobility. I stumbled onto this a while back and used it in concert with wikipedia to help decipher some of the ggggs etc. http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/CONTENTS.htm One thing I that really surprised me was once I got a French wikipedia site by accident and it had a lot more information than the English version. You might want to click the different language options on the left side of any wiki site to explore more possibities. A couple of times the French version had a lovely genealogical chart as well. Sometimes the French version would have links for the different wives, parents or children that the English version didn’t. Now, all of this assumes you can speak/read French — or other similar languages. But I’ve found it pretty helpful.
There’s also Gen-EU: http://genealogy.euweb.cz/
They have quite a bit on the continental nobility. (It’s in English.)
Great site: I have some real odd ones.
I found this today … Statistical Accounts of Scotland in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/
It’s browsable for free down to the parish level and I’ve been finding what the local industry is in parishes I’m interested in.
For some time, the LDS (Mormon) church has been working on computerizing its genealogical records. The Family Search website has been available for some years now, but the church has also been working on a newer concept, called New Family Search, for its members to share information about ancestors they may have in common.
The concept is similar to Ancestry.com, although it’s not a me-too effort; the church already had several huge data bases to merge, and developed its system principally for religious rather than commercial purposes, so there are differences in their approach. It has been available but restricted to LDS Church members for roughly three years now.
However, the New Family Search has now been opened to the general public so that anyone, Mormon or not, can create an account, contribute their information, and search for common ancestors. For those that have have used the existing Family Search and have an account there, it appears to be possible to merge that with the New Family Search, and join the crowd. The ambitious eventual goal is to create a common shared pedigree of humanity.
There are still a few kinks associated with incorrect and conflicting legacy information submitted by persons with all degrees of care and competence in their research, (none to painstaking expert), but the issues are being addressed.
Still, it’s easy and fun to work with, and it’s FREE!
https://new.familysearch.org/en/action/unsec/welcome
Interesting. Thanks. My really problematic branch is Irish, probably Roman Catholic, and Irish records are harder than usual to get: they’re *starting* to trickle out. I volunteered for a while to transcribe photocopies into the db and I think Tulrose does: it’s helpful on that one if you happen to have a little Latin. I did manage to get a lead back to Ireland, and I pretty well know which area (west coast)…but they’re the parents of the ones who came to the Americas, so I’m still trying to push that one back a bit.
A big injection of new info is good news for everybody, because it gigs families that haven’t been active into getting active, and then more and more stuff starts pouring into the db.
Here’s a new site and project that should interest you – English nuns in exile on the continent. http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/wwtn/index.html
It’s something to browse around in the future when more people are contributing.
Interesting. It’s easy to forget those ruined abbeys etc from those troubled times involved individual people who were living as cloistered religous, likely somewhat naive about the world, and they had to figure what to do, where to go, how to survive. The world meanwhile was getting increasingly unfriendly to their way of life.
Did you see where they plan on publishing a multi-volume reference work on the writings of these women? The price is stiff, of course, but as a reference work it would be fascinating just to browse around it.
CJ and the rest of the gang, a friend who’s been hunting down ancestors way longer than I have sent me a great source you might want to explore: http://askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/index.xml
Years ago I was in Ireland, in the village my gggrandfather and mother came from and I found our that the family history goes back further than the offical record did. The baptismal records only exist back to 1850 — earlier ones were lost in a rectory fire. The parish priest told me that marriage records weren’t common until the 1900s and death records only go back to the late 1800s. Most Catholic records only went up to the diocese level and were frequently not forward on to the offical national records [which were in Dublin and cheerfully torched by the British in 1922]. There may be some variation depending on area; and almost certianly is more variation depending on faith. The Church of Ireland was the offical church in the south at least until 1922 and given the wide range of laws over the years affecting Catholics and the church, some area may have no records to speak of. Heck the only cemetery for the old family village was the Church of England even though they were Catholics. Ireland is definitely fascinating but a challenge!
Thank you! 🙂 I can find one fellow, Thomas Scanlan of Tipperary, born 1808, married to Mary Shaughnessy, father of John Basil Scanlan, born in Tipperary, died in Kansas, father of James William, father of my mysterious paternal grandmother—I think. The Scanlans in the Griffith Valuation are unknown except in the Tipperary North Riding, so it may include the right Scanlans. It’s at least one more brick in a wall slow in building.
My friend came up with another Irish genealogy site which can help track down the geography of family names, as well as the background of the actual places. It might come in handy, especially for the less common names [like Ryan]. LOL — that long ago trip to Castleconnel where I was told “Ryan is it now? Oh, the place is lousy with them.” http://www.libraryireland.com/topog/
I keep hoping I can find something on my father’s ‘uncle Mike’ (uncle by marriage). He was a Driscoll from Cork, and it seems that Cork has Driscolls like Castleconnell has Ryans. even known the names of hissiblings 0- in his death notice – doesn’t help, because those are all perfectly normal Irish given names (Stephen, Timothy, James, Cornelius, and Katie).
It’s beyond frustrating! And I’ve got an Evans in the mix as well – married my great-aunt Amber — who is very easy to find. But her husband, great-uncle Tom is not. While I dearly enjoy all the celtic heritage and all it’s variations, I would dearly love to pin them all down!