Saturday, March 26, 2016

I Discovered the Younger Gang were my Cousins

As I was recently doing some clean-up work on my genealogy database, I
Bersheba Fristoe Younger,
my 3rd cousin, 4 times
removed. 
reviewed a list of descendants of my 7th great grandparents, Richard and Mary (Williams) Fristoe. I noticed the name "Younger". Richard and Mary Fristoe's great-great granddaughter Bersheba Leighton Fristoe married Henry Washington Younger. 


Bersheba and Henry Washington Younger's sons Thomas 'Cole', James Hardin, John Harrison, and Robert Ewing were the Younger Gang, who were associated with the famed James Gang. Their story is told on Wikipedia here.

This chart shows my relationship.

On the chart, you can see that "Cole" Younger was married to Myra Shirley, also known as "Belle Starr". Her story is written on Wikipedia here

I just never know who I'll find in my family tree as I dig into the descendant lists of my ancestors. 

Friday, March 25, 2016

We finally know she died in a mental hospital

When I started researching my husband's family 16 years ago, records weren't as plentiful on the internet. Today we often find that records are brought to us, instead of us searching after them. I experienced this today as I read my email from Ancestry.com giving me hints on Larry's family. Listed with hints was Laura M. Jamison, Larry's great, grandaunt, for whom I only knew a birth year. 
I thought Ancestry may provide us with a census listing, but I hit the jackpot. Laura Mae's death certificate was available.
Her death certificate shows that she died August 10, 1925 at the age of 57. Her death was due to Ex Paresis. I had to look this up to learn that it meant "Chronic Mania". She died in the Dixmont Hospital in Kilbruk, Allegheny, Pennsylvania. 

There's good information on the history of Dixmont Mental Hospital here at Wikipedia. It opened in 1853 but by the 1920s, when Laura was a resident, it became very overcrowded due to PTSD patients from World War I. That gives us a picture of some of the conditions when Laura was a resident there. 

We're so blessed to be able to learn more about our ancestors today when so many records and historical information are available at our fingertips. Larry and I had given up hope of learning anything more about his great-grandaunt Laura Mae Jamison and we learned a LOT simply with a death certificate that was delivered to us in an email today! 

Discovering Rob Roy McGregor Hall, Our Cousin

I'm grateful that I'm so easily impressed. A few years ago I discovered that my husband and I each had cousins who married each other. You may think that's a common occurrence, but it was stunning to me, as we seem to come from different worlds. Larry is originally from Pennsylvania, with ancestors from England and Scotland. He grew up traveling the world, attending the Methodist church and living what I call an exciting and adventurous life. On the other ha I'm grateful that I'm so easily impressed. A few years ago I discovered that my husband and I each had cousins who married each other. You may think that's a common occurrence, but it was stunning to me, as we seem to come from different worlds. Larry is or nd, I'm a Kansas native, descendant of Germans from Russia, from Germany, and immigrants from the United Kingdom. I was raised a strong Lutheran and lived a very quiet life in the same town until I was 40 years old. Quiet and still by comparison to Larry's life. A world opposite of my husband's. So when I find that we had cousins who lived in the same proximity and even married each other, I'm just astounded. I wonder "How did that happen?" It happened because we both had ancestors in Pennsylvania.

My first cousin, 5 generations back was Isaac Strait, born 1793 in Bedford, Pennsylvania and died 1872 in Palmyra, Illinois. Isaac was married to Phebe Rush, who was born in 1802 in Amwell, Pennsylvania and died 1884 in Palmyra, Illinois. Phebe was Larry's 5th cousin 5 generations back. 

These charts show each of our relationships with their great grandson Rob Roy McGregor Hall.
Larry is an 8th cousin twice removed of Rob Hall. I am a 4th cousin twice removed of the same Rob Roy McGregor Hall. 

As I dug a little deeper to learn something of this Rob Hall, I learned that along with about 350 others, he died as a result of a shipwreck of the steamship "SS Princess Sophia" on 25 October 1918. The ship left Skagway, Alaska for Vancouver, BC on 23 October 1918 and wrecked on the waters of Lynn Canal at Vanderbilt Reef near Juneau, AK as the result of a storm. A very good account of this tragedy can be found here.
Rob Roy MacGregor Hall was 42 years old at the time of his death. 

Saturday, March 19, 2016

I Went to Boot Camp, Trello Style

This morning Thomas MacEntee and Lisa Alzo 
presented a class about using the web site Trello that they called "Getting Started with Trello Mini Boot Camp". I eagerly attended the online class as I know from experience that they deliver excellent lessons that are well worth watching. This class was hosted by Thomas and presented by Lisa. 

 As soon as the class was over I got an idea for an application of all I had learned. I serve as a Consultant in our local Family History Center and help with Training of the staff. A tremendous amount of resources are available to us from the wonderful folks at FamilySearch, but it's scattered across many web sites. It's challenging for new staff members to find what they need. 

I created a Trello board for the Consultants that will be a centralized place for them to find access to training materials. I can share the Board with anyone, so I'll be inviting the other Consultants and Directors of our local and regional Family History Centers to have access to this Board.
I've created cards for such things as Blogs, Videos, Lessons, Training, staff roster, etc. Each card has information "inside" that contains such things as attachments, photos, links, email address, comments, checklists. And each "Card" has several lists on it ....as many as we want. The lists and the cards can all be moved around. I've added color-coding via "Labels", as you see the green, blue, orange bars, etc. 

A few weeks ago when I opened my Trello account, I told my second cousin Kate Keller about it. She immediately started using it to create Boards for her ancestral families and is sharing those Boards with the family names we have in common. We're able to choose the color of the Board background, so she has chosen green for the families we have in common. She's created cards with such headings as To Do, Researching, Documents, Photos, Items Needed, Contacts, etc. We can each contribute to the cards, modify them, and basically manage them. It's a good way to work together on our family history research. 

The first board I set up when I opened my account last January was for planning purposes for our trip to RootsTech, the genealogy conference we attended in Salt Lake City in February. I made cards with lists for Registration, Packing, Flights, Schedules, Syllabus, People to See, etc. It was quite handy and actually well used. Trello is available for smartphones and tablets, so I had everything with me. 

While starting my free Saturday off in "Boot Camp", I'm happy to tell you I've had a really fun and interesting adventure with Thomas, Lisa and my new Board creation. I can't wait to invite my fellow Consultants and Directors to share my new resource. This might be a good subject to offer at our April training meeting. 

Friday, March 11, 2016

My Husband's Family Connection to My Family, with cousins in between

The chart at the right looks like a maze to everyone but me. As I'm researching my family names, I often notice a name that actually "belongs" to someone else's family line. In this case it connected from MY family to My Husband's family. When I see that, I'm curious to follow the connection and see it laid out visually so I can understand it. This was the case last night as I looked at Strait descendants. 


Emma Cornelia Strait
You can see my name at the bottom right, as the great-granddaughter of Emma Strait, wife of Joseph Becker. In reviewing the descendant list of my 7th great grandfather, I saw that my 8th cousin, Elaine Litchfield, had married a man named Darwin Oler. The Oler name was familiar to me from research I'd done many years ago on a family connected to my husband. 

You can see those connections by looking at Larry's name at the bottom left of the chart. Larry's great, great grandfather John Haught was first married to Pleasant Horner, Larry's 2nd great grandmother. And John's second wife was Catherine Campbell. At the time of our initial research, I learned really interesting stories about Catherine's sister Mary Campbell, wife of Absalom Critchfield. In fact, I wrote up a small booklet detailing the stories of the interesting ties to the early day Mormons.
The chart shows that Mary and Absalom's great-granddaughter Myrle Jensen married Farrell Oler. Farrell's father was George Oler, who also had a son Roy Oler, whose son Leroy was married to Ruby Savage. Ruby's grandfather was Levi Savage, the well-known leader in the Willy Handcart Company of LDS History


Levi Savage, Jr. 
So we see that George Oler had a son Farrell who connects to Larry's Critchfield ancestors. He had a son Roy whose grandson married the granddaughter of Levi Savage, and he had a grandson Darwin who married MY 8th cousin through my Strait ancestor line. 

Call me weird, but I find that quite interesting.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

An 1880 Census Connects my Kansas Cousin to my Colorado Co-worker

While cleaning up my genealogy database I noticed that one of my grandmother's cousins from WaKeeney, Trego, Kansas married a man who was born in Coal Creek, Fremont, Colorado. WaKeeney was the birthplace of my father in Kansas and Coal Creek is a small settlement 10 miles southeast of Canon City, where I currently live in Colorado. Two different worlds. WaKeeney was inhabited at the turn of the 20th century by German immigrants from the Volga River region of Russia. 

I was surprised to find this connection in the 1880 census for Coal Creek, Fremont, Colorado that is shown above. The bottom 6 rows of the census page list the Fred and Mary Dixon family, with their children Alex, Mamie, Alfred and Grace. The chart below shows that Mamie married James Lindsay. 
Their son James E. Lindsay married Amelia Meisner, whose 3rd cousin in the column at right is Amalia Koleber, my grandmother. I'm the "Becky Margheim" listed at bottom right. On my other blog "Grace and Glory Plus" on my web site, I wrote an article about my cousin and author Amelia "Mela" Meisner. You can read it here.

When I look at a census page I always review the entire page. I noticed the name Cowan at the top of the census page, shown at the top of this story. I knew that two of my "co-workers" had Cowan relatives, so I noted the names of John and David Cowan and looked at the research I've done in the past for those co-workers. This chart shows my findings.
The John and David Cowan on that census page were the sons of Charles Cowan and Margaret Scot. John Cowan's brother was Charles, whose great granddaughter is Sallie Poteet McQueen. Sallie is my friend who attends the church where I'm employed in Canon City, CO.

So on that one census page from Coal Creek, CO in 1880, I'm able to see the family of the in-laws of my distant (Kansas) cousin Mela Meisner Lindsay, as well as the cousins of my friend Sallie here in Canon City, Colorado. I had not suspected that I'd ever discover such a cousin connection. 

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Rachel Jamison led me to cousins connected to cousins and more cousins

Today I read the news that Irish records are available free on the Find My Past site. I did a quick search for my third great grandparents Andrew Wilson and Ann Jane Fall, who were each born in Ireland in the late 1700s. While I haven't yet found any further information about Andrew and Ann, I did make an interesting discovery as a result of my search. 

I started looking at the descendants of Andrew and Ann Wilson and noticed that their great-grandson James Flack was married to a woman named Rachel Jamison. That caught my attention because I have a step-daughter named Rachael Jamison. I immediately did a bit more research on that Rachel Jamison to see if she might be a relative of my step-daughter. It appears that she's a descendant of a different Jamison line, although they also resided in the region in Pennsylvania of my husband's ancestors.  

I drew up the chart at the top of this story. It shows that Rachel Jamison was the first cousin five times removed of Barbara Ann Smith, the wife of Jim Roblyer. The chart shows that Jim's sister is Bonnie Roblyer, the wife of my uncle Albert Flanders. Looking at it from the perspective of my cousin Nancy Flanders Orrick, her cousin James Flack was married to her Aunt Barbara's cousin, Rachel Jamison. 

This isn't necessarily significant to many people, but I sure find it fun and interesting when I make these discoveries and notice the NAMES as I investigate ancestors and descendants. 

Just please don't tell me "It's a small world".