through dear Aunt Ada.
The hysterical fun of genealogy, or—kissing cousins and worse. It seems 2Oth-great-grandfather Ralph’s father Henry was also related to 20-times-removed Aunt Ada’s stepfather or something like, and the genealogy program wants to take the blood relation of Aunt Ada as more important than the relationship between my 21st-great-grandfather Henry and his own son Ralph, because, yes, 19 times removed is one mathematical step closer than 21 times removed, even if he’s a half first cousin at that remove, rather than a direct great-great-great, etc.-grandfather in line with ME.
Making matters EVEN worse, that’s my
-
father’s
side of the family. On my MOTHER’s side, at several centuries’ remove and completely unexpected, we located a line of ascent going up from one Mary, sweet child, daughter of Captain Humphrey, wife unknown, who is HIMSELF a direct descendant (through another brother of a large family at generation 6) of the SAME 21st-great-grandfather Henry.
Not only that, but Henry is ALSO himself my 20th-great-grandfather in yet another line, because of cousin-marriage, and that line, over centuries, tending to procreate just a little younger than the other one. [You have two grandparents, four great-grandparents, 8 great-great [or 2nd-great] grandparents, and by the time you get to the 20th-great, your number of 20th-great grandparents is quite large—somebody want to work that out? Neighbors married neighbors, people stayed in the same villages, and it just got worse and worse, my friends, until it became a complete tangle. I believe in five more generations, ie, by the 25th, I am likely related to everyone in England.
Jane and I are, by best calculations of the same program, 20th degree cousins…BOTH of us related to Ralph and Henry, or at least to their ancestor Humphrey, not to be confused with Captain Humphrey, but then—we haven’t gotten the Pierces we’re pretty sure we have in common.
These people are posted to the EDC tree at ancestry.com. If you want to explore it, contact me and I’ll send you an invitation. My public email address is herwin@btinternet.com
I think I already mentioned my connection to the Bohuns or de Bohuns, back in the 1300’s, in the genealogy thread. They weren’t called Boones yet.
Otherwise, pretty slim pickings… which given the Devon connection, strikes me as surprising. I have a lot of southwestern England ancestors — Somerset, Cornwall, Dorset, Devon…
Hulls: three of them, two Elizabeths and a Reuben, with births between 1628 and 1673.
Roberts: two, Hester Ann b. 1747 and William, b. 1682.
I thought I had a Mehitable Hoyt, but I can’t find her; maybe she got edited out of my tree during one of my research sessions. I remember her best because she died in childbirth at the age of nineteen, with her first child.
Favorite names include Anabel Bland Smith. Because, really. I’m also really fond of one of the Selleck families, who ended up with sons named Wallace Lafayette, Washington Fletcher, and Wellington Weck. I think that 3G-grand-uncle really liked W names…
I have Bohuns as well, Ruadhan, 13th century. I count 4 different Humphrey Bohuns over the course of 200 years. I’m not finding any of the other names.
One English tie is through Edmund Littlefield of Devon who settled in Wells, Maine around the 1640s. The other is Gillespies, but I haven’t explored that branch yet.
While most people derive from really modest backgrounds, go back far enough and simple mathematics guarantees some prominent forebears. In my case, porters and first Calverts and then Brents married in the early 18th century in Stafford County VA (south of Washington/Alexandria and just north of Fredricksberg VA on the Potomac. George Calvert (I believe he was a protege of the Cecil’s) was a cabinet officer under James I and then Charles I who converted back to Catholicism. He then left the cabinet and was eventually granted a charted to found what became Maryland. His son Cecil was the actual founder after George’s death. The Brents (I gather a more aristocratic family) and the Calverts) much intermarried in both England and, later, in North America. One of the Brents got into a lot of political trouble in Maryland after a marriage to a Native American princess, which he claimed gave him ownership of about half the colony. That branch had to move across the Potomac to Virginia’s Stafford County, where they bought up a lot of land and attempted to subdivide it, a lot like Florida in the 1920’s. Anyway when a Porter married a Calvert heiress, she came with about a thousand acres; next generation a Porter-Brent Union brought about 600 acres. Next generation, my ancestor fought as an 18-year-old sergeant of the VA militia at Cowpens, but,as the youngest child and little inheritance, took off for Kentucky and Indiana (along with the Lincolns, and with but modest prosperity) and allegiance to the Union cause.
My point? Ancestors on the Ark and Dove (ships) ranks almost with the Mayflower (but there must be a million), and the English Brents have been traced back to the rulers of tenth century Castile. That family had married the daughter of a Caliph, so I a (and every other person in Western Europe) am a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammad, and I can prove it. Of course everyone of English ancestry is a descendant of (I forget) either Edward I or Edward III. yet my immediate ancestors on the Porter side were Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma dirt farmers.
2 to the 30th or 40th power is a very, very large number, far greater than that of all humans that have ever lived. And surely brings one no further back than Julius Caesar, if that far. Lots and lots of repeats. There was an interesting Atlantic Magazine article on this subject a few years back.
i figure everyone has someone famous as an ancestor. It’s just finding the line that’s impossible (or at least difficult).
Humphrey (son of Henry son of Humphrey son of Humphrey) is on my tree too. Via two of his daughters. The software I use prefers the direct line to the cousins, though it will tell you all the various connections between two people if you ask (possibly it’s a bit smarter).
Reptile, I don’t suppose that Porter or Portier ancestry in Missouri / Illinois / Oklahoma includes anyone named Felix Thompson, around the 1880’s to early 1900’s? — My maternal grandfather’s middle name was Porter or Portier, and Felix was his father. IIRC, Felix may have been an orphan, so he didn’t know a lot about his family. I think it’s likely Porter or Portier was a family name. On my maternal grandmother’s side, there’s an Adair as a middle name.
I had also seen a curious reference to Adairs and Thompsons, and apparently there was a group with those names friendly with the forcibly relocated Cherokee Nation. I don’t yet know if my branches were that same group, other than a great or great-great aunt or grandmother who was fully Indian, but for whom I don’t know which Indian nation she came from, and haven’t relocated her photo, which may have had hrr name, but not where the photo was taken or who else or what white and Indian families there were, besides my ancestors. If I knew, I could discover that branch of relatives. Evidently, she and her Indian relatives were accepted and friendly with the white family she married into. They were in Oklahoma and Texas, and the white ancestors (the branch from among whom I am descended) were in Missouri or Illinois before.
I believe my email is accessible here or through the Shejidan forum, but otherwise, my user name (at) shinyfiction (dot) com.
Have you looked up the Dawes List? Indian families were recorded in that in early Oklahoma?
My grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great grandfather {all at once] ran cattle in Indian Territory near Ardmore, crossing out of Texas, and having good relations with the tribes—I suspect they were paying cattle to run cattle on the pasturage the tribes held. When great-great and great-grandfather died my grandfather and great-grandmother shared a domicile in the area. Where that was is now a cultural park run by a Kiowan Parker family, whose daughter was a friend of mine and my cousins in my youth. The Cherokee and I believe the Seminole are centered around Talequah. There was a small town in Kiowa territory named Porter Hill, mostly a gas station and a few adjacent buildings, when I was a kid.
@83Eridani: Re: 1300’s Bohuns: ORly?
I have a Margaret de Bohun (b. 1305) m. Hugh de Courtenay. They trace down through several Courtenay generations to Trelawney, then to Hawkins (who were in Devon.) Margaret traces up through several generations of Humphrey de Bohuns (a quick look around says four Humphreys, then a Henry, then four more Humphreys, then three Henrys…)
I read somewhere that anyone alive today who has English roots is related to 80% of everyone in the Domesday Book of England from 1086, due to the collapse of ancestral lines into each other. Those people who you aren’t related to are people whose lines went extinct between the time of the Book and now. Therefore, anyone alive today who can trace ancestry back to someone in the Book is a cousin of some degree to anyone else who can do the same. My reckoning of the generations puts that as everyone in England is at least a 30th cousin of everyone else in England and/or who has English roots.
I *still* think that amusing, for atevi numerology reasons. Unlucky two times lucky three times very lucky five equals thirty — that’s a lucky number, yes?
I don’t have her, but I have a bunch of other Bohuns (and some Courtenays) in my offline files. There’s a Margaret Courtenay who married a may-times-great uncle, Thomas Danvers. I don’t have her ancestry, although I’d expect a connection somewhere.
My non-living-people file is on Ancestry – the tree name is ‘Tangled Roots, Knotted Branches’, and the user name is pj_evans_gen. I trimmed the earliest parts off, so it only goes back to thirteenth great-grands; my offline ‘modern’ file goes to 18th great grands, and overlaps the offline ‘medieval’ file by a few centuries.
Margaret de Bohun of Tynemouth, Northumberland, was my 20th Great-grand-aunt, daughter of my 21st-Great-grandfather Humphrey VIII de Bohun, out of Essex. Hugh de Courtenay, of Okehampton, in Devon, was Jane’s 18th-great-grandfather. So we three are practically kissing cousins.
And I just (thanks to Jane) found a lead on my missing grandmother—that I’ve searched for, for more than 40 years. My father’s first names were Basil and Lafayette and he was brought up by my great-grandmother, Louisiana Carolina Boone {after whom I’m named}. The Lafayette is for Lafe Boone, Civil War spy, and sometime lawyer, of Arkansas, HER father; but who was Basil? The name is of Greek and Russian origin…but attached to a good Irish name like Scanlan? Jane said, try it—so I did; and I found one this morning. Basil Scanlan, born in Kearney NE, who is the same generation as my missing grandmother, but—these odd names are frequently generational, and that’s a huge lead. I found his draft card for WWI, and know now where his father was from, Staunton, Virginia. Amazing. One name. An intelligent question. Bingo!
Margaret de Bohun is my 17G-grandmother, which makes her father, Humphrey VIII de Bohun my 18G-grandfather. I believe that makes you and I, CJ, 19th cousins three times removed.
Hugh de Courtenay is my 17G-grandfather. Assuming he’s the same Hugh de Courtenay you’re mentioning as Jane’s 18G-grandfather, that makes Jane and I 18th cousins once removed.
No, I didn’t figure this out myself. I used this tool. http://www.searchforancestors.com/utility/cousincalculator.html
And yes, I couldn’t let this rest without figuring that out. Sorry! I’m like that!
In Missouri, Halltown (my middle name is Hall), now a suburb of Springfield, (Greene) and Lawrence County. Someone once told me that “there’s sure a lot of Porters up by Springfield,” before I learned there was a connection. In Kansas, near Winfield and Arkansas City and Chataqua County near Sedan and Peru; Oklahoma, Pawnee area and perhaps others nearby. Illinois was a short stay before they went on to Halltown area. Lots of Porters in southern Indiana, Orange County and vicinity, apparently all descendants of Nancy Hall and the Nicholas Brent Porter who fought at the Battle of Cowpens and some years later served in the Legion of the United States, the first U.S. Army created by Washington and “Mad Anthony” Wayne, in the 1790s.
When I mentioned Lincoln, I wasn’t joking, apparently Thomas Lincoln and Nicholas Porter worked together on several jobs, according to family stories retold on the internet and my visit to gravesites and the Lincoln country of Indiana last summer.
I grew up knowing none of this, even though much of the time I only lived 70 miles from Springfield. My father, who once estimated that he had at least 100 first cousins, was born in Peru, Kansas in 1912 and his father, on oil pumper, died in 1914. (Obama’s grandmother was born in the same tiny place in 1921, and her father was a pumper for Standard Oil. Makes you wonder) My father was orphaned in 1921 and knew his mother’s family (Livergood) better than the Porters. As a young man he was in business in Los Angeles, only after the war did he decide to buy a dairy farm in Northwest Arkansas.
I don’t know if that helps at all with one strand of Porters.
My parents’ families were from that part of Kansas, too. No Porters on my tree from there, but one of my several-greats-uncles was living in Belleville in 1880, along with his family, and his mother. (A week later she was in Independence with her youngest daughter and *her* husband. The censuses have overcounted as well as missed people.)
LOL, I don’t know if it’ll help or if there’s a connection beyond his middle name, but thank you!
And the Boones of Yadkin Valley [and probably those in England] argue endlessly about whether the Boones ARE related to the de Bohuns. It’s almost a shooting war among Boones that say yay and those that say nay—which is not too much of a great issue to my DNA, since I have other connections to that family. BUT—I tend to believe that families that associate within a district tend to marry that way, especially where politics and religion are involved; and if you have a cluster of de Courtenays, the de Bohuns are not far over the horizon, etc, etc, in connections of various sorts. But there are some connections that the Boones AND the de Bohuns have in common, plus residency in the same shire, which, with the fact the names are pronounced nearly identically, sorta argues that there is a connection. I’m suspecting the de Bohuns were Catholic and the Boones were Quaker to the max, and the REAL argument is a dimly-remembered disapproval of the de Bohuns by the Boones dating from the upheaval of the First English Civil War. Don’t, however, assume that the Boones were on the side of the Puritans: if there was one batch of people the Quakers didn’t get along with even more than they didn’t get along with Catholics, it was the Puritans, who in the main lumped the Quakers and the Catholics together as people who ought to be burned. And since the Puritans had Boston sewn up and the Dutch held New York, the Boones went over the hill fast, on landing, and ended up in Pennsylvania, until they discovered one group of people they disapproved of more than de Bohuns, Catholics, and Puritans, and that was the Pennsylvania Quakers, who shunned eldest son John for his choice of brides. The family heritage is a famous temper, which has gotten members of the family into serious trouble in more than one generation. 😉
Ruadhan, CJ and PJ, I’m sure we have the same set of Humphrey Bohuns. The name Bohun peters out in my line early…there’s no Margaret, but there is an Aliainor born in 1240, and an Alice born 1230 – 1252 depending on the source; Alainor is granddaughter and Alice daughter of Humphrey, V Earl of Hereford, born 1208. I’ll leave the whole “cousins many times removed” calculation to you folks!
I’ve read that if you’re European, it’s highly likely you’re descended from Charlemagne, Henry II or Robert the Bruce (all 3 in my tree). They and their children all got busy!
Boone names: my great-gran was Louisiana Carolina Boone, her father was perhaps Marquis de Lafayette Boone—at least Lafayette—son of James Monroe Boone {after President James Monroe)—and his brother was Beya Boone, aka Daniel Thales Boone…can you wonder he went by a nickname?
After that and upward we’re safely into Benjamins and Johns and Georges. But the Boones were a bit flamboyant in names as the generations wore on.
I’m reading this discussion while a male Great Tit is hammering at the window trying to chase off its rival. Spring has begun!
Lol! I so envy Britain those birds! I met one somewhere northward in Britain, maybe at Twice Brewed, near Housesteads…it was cadging food from the guests, and being very clever.
Sweet! After reading this discussion, I picked up my charts and started poking around to see what they’ve added to the online genealogy stuff (NOT ancestry-we-want-your-money.com, thank you very much) and found marriage and birth records for Mass have been photographed and indexed and are now available (at familysearch-we-want-your-soul.com) for free. Well, enough of them that I could find my great-great-great-grandparents and info on THEIR parents. SO, chased it back another generation! My black hole was a ‘William Welch’ which, for anyone of non-irish descent, is like John Smith. I had given up because all I had was an approximate birth date and ‘Boston’ for a birth place from census records. Er, yeah, I found 12 William Welches born in the Boston area within 2 years either way of the approximate date I had. FIVE of them were the exact year. The MARRIAGE records however have info on parents, so those were quite a find. Provided you can figure out that they are BOTH pages in a book, so you have to flip between two files to get the full information availabe. Parents names for both parties are listed on one page, then the parties getting married are on another. *THWACK*
Genealogy is sort of like social networking, only with the past. And oh, my family has some characters. One of my nicer, or at least more harmless ones, is Peregrine Smith, who was actually the son of a Reverend Smith, but who had quite a career doing speaking engagements and cadging nice treatment as the [he claimed] son of Captain John Smith and Pocohontas…
This Great Tit is knocking its brains out on the window–hardly clever! It sounds like you’ve visited Hadrian’s Wall. I drove up to Alnwick this afternoon to trade books at Barter Books. When will your oeuvre be available electronically? If there are no illustrations, Kindle is much more convenient than hardcopy.
Alas, it will be ready when dear Penguin gets off its…well, intentions. DAW, an independent distributed by Penguin, is treated as Penguin’s wayward child, and its projects are not the top of Penguin’s agenda.
Are you going to open the window and give that poor bird a piece of bread or the like? 😉
Count me in as another with Humphrey VIII de Bohun as my 20th Great-grandfather, although my line diverges pretty quickly when his granddaughter Elizabeth married Richard III FitzAlan and continues through two of his daughters. I can’t prove that my parents were related in any way as things got lost over there in rainy Ireland and who knows about the Dutch/German/Swiss/French possibilities?
I have a few favorite names as well. How about Anne Mourning Grubbs, who was the mother of Higgason Grubbs Boone? Or Seaborn Longino, Vernonica Schneebeli, and Fortunatus Cosby?
Yep, for a while I thought Anne Mourning Grubbs and Higgason Grubbs might be one of mine, but I’m from the Benjamin Boone line.
One of mine is Eleanor Featherstonhaugh. Try saying that three times fast!
Grandfather Humphrey de Bohun got around—or his descendants were really fast runners when it came to trouble.
From what I remember it’s pronounced Fanshaw … but I could be way off base here.
I would much prefer it be Fanshaw! 😉
But Jane’s batch (Fancher, Fanchier, out of Limousin, France) went to London and had the name mutated every which way– except Fanshaw—which is a common way people try to write her name. And one of her ancestors in Massachusetts was called Fanshaw all his life: evidently he got tired of respelling it.
My father was his own 7th cousin.. It traces back to an unusual individual named Moses Stepp, Indians nailed him to a tree by his ears. A rather interesting character to be related to twice,
The Great Tit is just showing off for potential mates. Its location is not that great, so it has to do something to show it’s fit. The front garden is kept natural, so wildlife can find sustenance. We’ve had a hedgehog family raised there.