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.
Here she is in the 1911 census:
PAUL, Charles, Head, Married, M, 55, b.1856, Law Clerk, b.Attercliffe Sheffield
PAUL, Ellen, Wife, Married 28 years, F, 56, b.1855, b.Drayton East Notts
PAUL, Maud Hurman, Niece, Single, F, 21, b.1890, Pianoforte Student, b.Newcastle on Tyne
Also there is a visitor and 3 servants.
FindMyPast.co.uk has this available, you don’t have to buy a complete subscription, just so many credits and then you can download the image.
that’s very nice, thanks Tulrose. my daughter has her piano …
Breaking the brick walls is such a relief! Broke one of my own just last month — finally proved who my gg-grandfather’s parents were by finding my gg-grandfather’s death record… in a database that I’d searched multiple times before. I thank creative searching for the find. I got him by his first name, the year of his death, and the county he died in. The last was a guess, where I figured he might have died in the same county he was living in, and there he was.
I blame bad spelling for the delay, because lo, the bad spelling! And we aren’t talking boondocks or even really long ago — we’re talking 1920 Detroit. Perfectly readable handwriting, btw.
Worst story of bad transcription I have: I kept running across a record for a ‘Louzo Ingraham’ in my searches for other Ingrahams. I tried to match him to Alonzo Ingraham (no). Lysander Ingraham? (No.) Lewis Ingraham? (Nope to that one, too.) Finally found an image of the original record… and there he was — GEORGE Ingraham.
Sigh.
So, you entered US Cavalry pay records, CJ? Union? Indiana 7th Cavalry, maybe? (*looks hopeful…!*)
No, alas, not that unit. As I recall it was one based in Oklahoma. But other volunteers are working with them, and you may find them going on line. They’re a particularly frustrating kind of record, a little on the cryptic side. What really frustrates me in doing some volunteer work was having to leave really useful info behind, because the template they’d set up for us to use on that kind of record didn’t have a place for it. Wah! Which means it’s a really good thing not just to take the info on Ancestry, but to look at the actual record.
Yes and Amen! I do transcriptions for FamilySearch and FreeREG. FamilySearch indexes very little information while FreeREG wants everything on the page. FreeREG allows for notes, things that were written on the parish register that don’t conform. Such as, bride and groom signed with an X, bastard daughter of So-and-so, maiden name of mother and where she was from on the baptisms, witness names (Extremely useful) … you get the idea. Burials can sometimes give the parents, cause of death, comments by the vicar. All wonderfully useful that you won’t find on FamilySearch unless you pull up the image.
And, Tulrose, did you get that Hackney link I posted up by your original discussion. Seemed to have some records links in it.
Yes thanks, finally back here after being busy with stuff all day.
well, joined ancestry for their free fortnight, so far all the John Hoggards of the right dates I can find in the area have the wrong job – blacksmith, dairyman, farm labourer. no photographers. that’s from the census. there are some others who got married – one in Sheffield seems a possible lead, but they just appear in the list with the date and no other details, not even the spouse! very helpful!
hooray, I seem to have found him, John Edward born 1861 Booton York, father Samuel, but they have got him down as married to my great gran! some inaccuracies there. on 2 family trees … so further hunting is possible … none of it is from census or verifiable records though …
Well, as in yours, information exists in family stories that are sometimes right on. Census helps, but remember people lie to census takers and other strangers. Or census takers assume. The question is, in England, what constitutes a common law marriage. In Oklahoma, in the 1950’s, sharing a mailbox and giving out to the neighbors that you’re married would constitute a marriage that, if one wanted to contest, would mean a divorce court to get severed, with property at issue. Frontier state. We used to joke at science fiction conditions, be careful not to tell the chambermaid you’re married or you may need to live together forever.
I think the law has been tightened up a little bit since, but who knows, at that period.
Several things will help you search the db: most men procreate for the first time around 20, give or take, and sometimes into their 50’s; most women a little under that, and not past 40, most not much past 30, so that can give you birthdates. And families may be real conservative about names: if you can’t find anybody, assume, in your case, John, or any other male name often used, and sometimes that will make the db cough up a candidate in the neighborhood. Marriages in England were in the bride’s town, and deaths occur usually in the husband’s town; and it is safer to assume the bride’s place of birth is also her father’s place of death: don’t assume about his place of birth, because that might have changed. If you aren’t sure of a date, put in, eg, abt 1850, and the db will understand it and search either side of that line. Also look at the family habit re age at which married, age at which having children, etc: that can give you a clue that, for instance, that family marries late, this family often marries early.
I have him, and some way back too, but sadly the trail stops with him at 1891, and he is not on any census after that. maybe he emigrated. maybe he died … but not recorded in this country at any rate. also I have my great grandmother’s lot back to the 1600’s. now hunting my paternal grandmother backwards, knowing that somewhere is the Swynford connection!
but I must go and finish my pots! this is VERY addictive …
A second check does not immediately reveal that he emigrated. He appears to have married one Ann Burnicle, whose parents can be traced to Redcar, Yorkshire, and whose mother is from Durham. Here is where tracing a non-related line can sometimes turn up geographical facts of use. Did he meet her in Redcar, and how? Children do not appear. Ann had sibs. Where did they live? Is this an accurate report or has he been confused with someone else of similar name?
Meanwhile, which was first, his relationship with Ann, which seems to have lasted until her death in 1891, or his relationship with your relative? Or were the relationships at any time concurrent?
yes, I found the wife, the one that was supposed to be an alcoholic, according to one family story. she died in 1892 or 1 as you seem to have found. my great gran’s relationship with him was concurrent, my grandmother was born in 1890, family story goes that the wife approached her when she was walking out with the baby and reproached her – result she ran off to her sister in Sheffield. who knows! this is the family skeleton in the cupboard and lots of stories were made up to save embarrassment. eg bigamy, gretna green marriages . etc etc. he was supposed to have turned up in Sheffield once his wife had died, to do the honourable thing, but my grt gran’s sister answered the door, turned him away, and didn’t tell my grt gran. so were they broken hearted? Jimmy Hawnt was short and stout and ultra-respectable, a lay preacher , and he was prepared to marry a woman with bastard daughter – although that was taken care of as she (my granny) lived with her aunt, who loved her dearly and spoilt her rotten! photos exist of her at 16 with a mass of hair under a huge hat, in a hobble skirt, looking very gorgeous.
but the trail stops there … I will attack it again, now I am getting the hang of it …
As a novelist, I always consider the families that have stories the best—not just, got married, lived here, died respectable. The knottiest of our family stories kept me from knowing who my paternal grandmother was until everyone who could have told me was gone. So my dad’s story became one of the intricate ones.
Don’t forget the Web Search option, fill out all you know, and try Edward and Yorkshire just to see if any vertical or lateral relatives show up. If you can go up a chain from a possible cousin, it may lead you to a branch you can track downward to very close to your relative. Also run Google searches to see if there are any Hoggard family trees lurking out there in the ether.
oh, good old google … I just found this!
John Edward married four times: (ahem)
Annie Burnicle
Maud Elizabeth Musgrave
Ada Ellen Blake
Margaret Egan (Victoria Australia)
seems he did not have much luck. he’s also down in a list of victorian photographers
yes, my great grandfather did emigrate – he went to Australia according to this
John Edward Hoggard was registered as a photographer under the name of Jonathan E Hoggard. He seemed to have worked in Scotland in 1881 when he was 20, so he may have worked briefly for a few years prior to this date in Coatham, Redcar and then he was back there again in 1882 – 1890. Then he seems to have moved around (Sheffield 1890, Whaley Bridge 1893-95, Australia 1895 – 1933)
just joining a forum to see if I can find more!
Lol! Good for you! I think the old gentleman can’t hide from you any longer. He appears to have been a bit of a scamp. You may have cousins in Australia.
now I will have to get world ancestry! with any luck I will get everything worked out in my free two weeks!
funny, I don’t think of him as an old gentleman, I have a photo of him when he was about 30, so that is how I think of him.:D
Here’s the latest hoot from the Geneablogging world!!
http://wetree.blogspot.com/2011/07/if-genealogists-ran-hollywood.html
Lol!
Australian Electoral Rolls 1909 Victoria
District Gippsland, subdistrict Sale
Hoggard, John Edward, Marley st, Sale, Photographer
Hoggard, Margaret, Marley st, Sale, home duties
He’s also in Sale in 1914, at the same address.
Something fishy going on here. There’s a little para about him in the 3rd column.
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page6186139
competition??? well discovered, hard to scan, isn’t it! and thank you very much
There’s quite a number of articles in the newspapers, advertisements, etc. Go to:
http://newspapers.nla.gov.au
Search for John Hoggard and then restrict the output to the Gippsland Times and the decade 1910-1919. You can further restrict the output to advertisements, family notices, etc.
It’s a great resource.
Margaret Hoggard’s death notice is in the Gippsland Times on 22 Dec 1941. John had already died and it lists 4 surviving daughters, Eleanor (Mrs J H McConnell, Florence, Mable and Marjorie.
Death Index
Digger – Death Index. Victoria 1921-1985
Surname: HOGGARD
Given Names: Jno Edwd
Father: Hoggard Samuel
Mother: Unknown BARTHOLOMEW
Death Place: SALE
Age: 72
Age Code:
Year: 1934
Reg Number: 13265
Event: D
If you are interested in his death certificate the following link will get it for you. Make sure you put the registration number in the search fields. Vic charges an arm and a leg just to get the results of the search as well as the image itself.
https://online.justice.vic.gov.au/bdm/index-search?action=getHistIdxSearchCriteria
amazing, thank you! over 100 years we have not known what happened to this scamp, and now the floodgates open!
oh, my head is whirling!
just found this reply in roots.com – he was a busy boy, and a bigamist, I think …
Married Annie Burnicle who died young in 1892. She ran a boarding house not far from her father-in- law (Samuel Hoggard) house.
In 1892 John Edward tried to marry Maude E Musgrave and was refused by her family.
In 1893 he married Ada Ellen Blake. He had two children named in 1901 census (where Ada lived with her two children in West Derby, Liverpool – working as a photographers receptionist) – Dorothy Eleanor aged 7 and Ernest John aged 5. From a human point of view Ada Hoggard must have had a very difficult time bringing up two small children on her own in the late 1890’s. Both of her children were born in Kings Lyn and I assume this was at her mother’s home.
Ernest John Hoggard was killed in 1916, 5th June. His mother was noted as living in Shepherds Bush, London at the time. There is another Ernest John Hoggard born in 1896 who died in USA….. so I have not been able to confirm which he is. I have not looked up Ada Hoggard in 1911 census and this might give us a clue.
In 1901 (same time as Ada was in Liverpool) her husband was registered as voting in Victoria, Australia, as Edward Hoggard, photographer, with wife Margaret. His daughters were….. Margaret Eleanor born 1899 (mother Margaret Egan), Florence Mary Hoggard, 1901, died 1960, Mabel Annie born 1904.
In 1931 John Edward Hoggard (photographer), Margaret (home duties), Florence (clerk), Mabel (clerk)and Marjorie (saleswoman) were all living in Macarthur St, Sale.
One thing for sure is that both Samuel and his son JE Hoggard travelled a lot when their other family is likely to have stayed close to their wider family. Samuel having been born in Nottingham and then moving to York in 1861 and up to Redcar and dying in Yorkshire. John moving from York to Red Car up to Scotland in 1880, then to Red Car, Whaley Bridge, Australia! All at a time when travel was not so easy.
dear me!!!!
the family’s story of bigamy was not so far from the truth, after all …
obviously his itinerant lifestyle must have left him living in boarding houses, lonely and as susceptible to interested young women as they were to him. the fact that he tried to marry Maude Musgrave must mean that he either had a conscience about her and the child, or was in love with her – or saw her well-to do relatives as advantageous! so you could read it as being the victim of circumstance and a little rash, or as a person who didn’t care too much about the harm he did to others. but to leave his second wife with kids and start another family in Australia … perhaps she didn’t want to go, or they didn’t have enough money … but even so! are there letters somewhere, one wonders .. could this be the basis of a novel?