Lori Thornton

I love a mystery series with characters that seem fresh, and an original premise. J.J. Cook succeeds on both accounts with the first in a new series, That Old Flame of Mine. Set in the small town of Sweet Pepper, Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains, the book features two fire chiefs. One is temporary, and one has been dead for forty years.

After Chicago firefighter Stella Griffin hit her cheating boyfriend in the nose, she thought it might be time to take a break. She accepted a temporary job in Sweet Pepper where she would serve as fire chief for three months while training the volunteer fire department. However, the team only had a couple months under their belt when a house caught fire and the owner was found dead in a closet. Most people blamed smoke inhalation, but something felt funny to Stella, and she pushed for an investigation. While she headed up the arson investigation, the local police chief reluctantly looked at the death.

She doesn't have time to investigate before she's knocked for a loop. First, she's knocked off her Harley, and after being rescued, she's stunned to learn about her own connection to Sweet Pepper. And, someone doesn't seem to want her in town, but she won't let a few "accidents" push her away.  Stella does find an unexpected ally, one that she's reluctant to accept. Everyone in town knows the cabin where she's living is haunted by the ghost of the old fire chief, Eric Gamlyn. Stella is too grounded to believe in ghosts, but finally she's forced to give in, and accept that he does exist, and he can help. But, how much help can a ghost be when he can only haunt the cabin and the fire station?

Combine a volunteer fire team, two fire chiefs, one of whom is a ghost, family secrets, and murders and fires that haunt the town, and you have a fascinating, successful mystery. It's hard to go wrong with an intriguing mystery involving a ghost, a strong female character in a role normally reserved for men, and a spark of romance. J.J. Cook is kindling a sizzling good mystery series, beginning with That Old Flame of Mine.

J.J. Cook's website is www.jjcook.net

That Old Flame of Mine by J.J. Cook. Berkley Prime Crime. 2013. ISBN 9780425252048 (paperback), 297p.

*****
FTC Full Disclosure - The publisher sent me a copy of the book, hoping I would review it.

The most serious difficulty that arose over the stateline issue, and one which threatened bloodshed, was what has been termed the “The Water-Works War.” In April, 1889, the Bristol-Goodson Water Company, then just completing their plant on the Tennessee side, desired to extend their water-mains to the Virginia side. This evoked a loud protest from the Virginia authorities and public.

Sam L. King, president and principal owner of the water company, ordered his workmen to extend a pipe to Everett’s restaurant, located near the corner of Main and Front streets. No sooner had the workmen reached the disputed territory than officers arrested them and they were fined for trespass.

As a further test the president himself stepped into the ditch and began digging, when he was arrested by officer James Cox — taken to jail and afterwards fined. The Goodson council issued an injunction, restraining the water company from working beyond the middle of Main street. This injunction was respected. The Goodson authorities had engaged some of the leading lawyers on the Tennessee side as council- N. M. Taylor, C. J. St. John, Sr., and W. D. Haynes.

When the Bristol-Goodson Water Company desisted in their work the Goodson council ordered work to begin on a line of pipe down Main street. They had a large force of men and made considerable speed. King appealed to Gov. Taylor of Tennessee to prevent them from trespassing, claiming that the agreement between the two councils as to the location of the line had never been approved by the legislature of either state. The governor in answer referred him to his legal advisers, who were also representing the city of Goodson. Warrants were issued for E. H. Seneker, acting mayor — in the absence of Mayor Fanning Miles— and all his councilmen.

The matter being laid before Judge John P. Smith, chancellor of the first Tennessee division, an injunction was issued, restraining the Virginia authorities. N. M. Taylor withdrew from the case.

Sheriff R. S. Cartwright, with his deputies, was placed in charge. Sheriff Hughes, with his deputies, hastened to the scene to protect the interests of Washington County and the State of Virginia.

Gov. Taylor being notified of the injunction, immediately wired, “The laws of Tennessee must be upheld.”

Cartwright hurried his deputies through Sullivan County and summoned a posse comitatus. Several hundred responded. They came with all kinds of weapons, as determined as their forefathers were, when called to defend their country.

 

King’s forces seized the armory of the A. D. R. Rifles and appropriated all the guns. The hardware stores found eager buyers for all the weapons in stock.

On account of King’s life having been threatened, Sheriff Cartwright made him a deputy sheriff so that he could go armed, to protect himself.

The Sullivan County forces rendezvoused on Alabama street— they marched out Fifth Street to Main and lined up and down the street, facing the ditch on the Virginia side. The workmen in this ditch were armed, as were the line of deputies put there to defend them.

Sheriff Cartwright, with a warrant for James Cox, stepped over to serve it, when Cox, in his effort to elude that officer, caught his foot on a water pipe and fell, with the sheriff on top of him.

Charles Worley came to Cox’s rescue, when H. C. Caldwell, Chief-of-Police of Bristol, and Tip Powell, a deputy, rushed to Cartwright ‘s assistance. It became a general scuffle and the tenseness of the scene was such that, had a cap exploded, it would have been followed by a fusilade of bullets, for the guns were not loaded with blanks that day.

Officer Worley, who had not taken the situation so seriously as had some of the others, said to Caldwell, “Oh, let’s get out of this,” and the two men got up and walked off together.

Mayor Seneker, acting under reasonable advice, withdrew his workmen from the ditch and placed them in another part of the town. Influential citizens addressed the assembling crowds and urged peace. After much persuasion the leaders agreed to settle the matter in court, and so the friction between the two states, that had threatened a bloody conflict, was tempered by the prospect of an amicable adjustment.

In 1890 the state-line controversy came up before the United States Supreme Court. The state of Virginia was represented by Rufus A. Ayers and William F. Rhea — Tennessee by A. S. Colyer, Abram L. Demoss, N. M. Taylor Thomas Curtin, Hal H. Haynes, C. J. St. John, Sr., and W. D. Haynes. Rhea for Virginia, and Curtin for Tennessee were the examiners. Many witnesses were introduced — among them the sole survivor of a former survey, Col. George R. McClellan. Gen. J. D. Imboden and Gen. James Greever were also witnesses.

As usual the ridiculous side developed in the testimony of some of the witnesses. One confused the Henderson-Walker line with the Mason and Dixon line.A complete history of the dispute was submitted and the Supreme Court decided in favor of Tennessee — that the compromise line of 1802 was the correct line.

In April, 1900 a commission composed of William C. Hodgkins, of Massachusetts, James B. Baylor, of Virginia, and Andrew Buchanan, of Tennessee, was named to retrace and re-mark the old compromise line of 1802. This was completed in 1901-02.

On January 28, 1903, the State of Tennessee ceded to Virginia the northern half of State street, thus ending a long and tedious controversy.

 

from “Historic Sullivan; a history of Sullivan County, Tennessee, with brief biographies of the makers of history,” by Oliver Taylor Sr., King Printing Co, Bristol, TN, 1909

The post Gov. Taylor immediately wired, "The laws of Tennessee must be upheld." appeared first on Appalachian History.

Gesher Galicia is an American non-profit organization dedicated to genealogical and historical research in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire province of Galicia. This territory lies today in eastern Poland and the southwestern Ukraine. While the primary focus is on Jewish families, many of their materials cover other religious, cultural, and ethnic identities as well.

 

 

 

The organization is very active in providing resources to help researchers. Some of these are available to members only, while others are available to the general public. The good news is that even if you need to become a member to access, it is relatively inexpensive at $25 for a  year.

The Galician Archival Records Project (GARP) is the umbrella for all of the group’s research projects. The projects focus on the towns in Galicia and local records that are more difficult to obtain. The group works with professional genealogists to research in Austria, Israel, Poland, Ukraine, and the United States to unearth records of interest. To date 150 towns have been included, and more are added as interest and funding are approved. Research on a new town can be initiated for a donation of only $250, which is matched by the organization.

There are currently four major initiatives:

The Austrian State Archives Project
In 2011, Gesher Galicia starting collecting materials from the Staatarchiv (state archives) and the Kriegsarchiv (war and military archives).

The Vital Records and Census Project
Vital records held in Polish archives that are more than 100 years old have likely been indexed by JRI Poland. Because of this, Gesher Galicia focuses more on the records held in Ukraine. There are also Polish records not available through JRI.

The Cadastral Map and Landowner Records Project
Galesh Galicia has been working since 2007 to scan and make available cadstral maps from the Central State Historical Archives in Lvivi, Ukraine. The organization has also been working to make land records available as well.

A fourth initiative, The Stanislawow 1939 Census and Passport Applications Project, will start soon.

The abstracted records are available in the All Galicia Database. The cadastral maps can be viewed in the Gesher Galicia Map Room. There are a half-dozen regional maps dating from 1775 through 1938. Dozens of nineteenth-century cadastral maps are available for various towns.

If you have ancestors in Galicia, you will want to check Gesher Galicia. The groups resources will be helpful to you, whether your ancestors were Jewish or not.

It can't do everything, but a research chronicle can teach as much as a logical reconstruction. Two of my favorite genealogy periodicals reminded of this recently.

Malissa Ruffner, "The perfect puzzle piece," NGS Magazine vol. 39, no. 1 (January-March 2013), 40-43. "Recently I found a piece that didn't belong to my puzzle but it was so unique and well-defined that I was compelled to look for a puzzle that needed it" -- in the Green and Lanterman families.

Tami K. Pelling, "In Search of Medda," Crossroads vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 2013), 26-30. "To prove or disprove Medda Sissie Hay as a child of Rubin and Mary, a timeline for the family was created, and the quest for Medda began" -- in Vigo and Vermillion counties, Indiana.

NGS Magazine is a benefit of membership in the National Genealogical Society. Crossroads is a benefit of membership in the Utah Genealogical Association.




Harold Henderson, "In praise of research travelogues," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 April 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

I’d never looked twice at the building on Depot Street at Ogden. It was just a big, blank, one-story building, looking from the front like any utilitarian warehouse from the 1970s. I remember the ’70s, but can’t account for what we were thinking then, especially concerning architecture.

My ancestor Symon Tootill/Tuttle/Tuthill never lived in the New World.  His wife, Isabell Wells, came with her sons, William, John and Richard, on the Planter in 1635.  There is no further record of her in New England, so she probably did not live long after the voyage.  In genealogy we often laugh about the “myth of the three brothers who arrived in America”, but this is the third time I’ve written about three brothers arriving in the New World.  I descend from The brother John, and also from their sister, Dorothy, who married John Bill in England and also came to New England.

Symon Tootill was born about 1560 in Ringstead, Northamptonshire, England.  He was mentioned in his father’s and also in his father-in-law’s wills.  Simon’s will mentions his sons Richard, Thomas, John, Simon and William.  He was buried at Ringstead on 15 June 1630.  Simon’s will was dated 19 December 1627 and proved at Northampton:

In the Name of God Amen The nyneteeneth Day of December in the yeare of our Lord god one thousand six hundred twentie seaven I Symon Tuttell of Ringsted in the Countie of Northton yeoman strong in minde and of good and pfect memory thanks and praise be to allmighty god and weighing and considering the frailety of mans life and the uncertainty of this world doe make and ordayne this my psent Testamt contayning therein my last will in mann[er] and forme as followeth that ys to say ffirst I [c]om[m]end and com[m]itt my soule into the hands of Allmighty god Creator assuredly believing through the onely meritte of Jesus Christe my saviour to be made ptaker of Everlasting life And my body I comitt to the earth from whence it came to be buried [torn] Christon burialls at the discrecion of my Executrix hereafter named, hopeing assuredly to receive the same again at the gene[ral] resurreccion not a mortall but an immortall and glorious body.

And now as concerning those lands and goodes wch god of his goodness hath lent me I give and bequeath unto Isabell my wife All that moytie or prcell of land meadows and com[m]ons wth theire and each of theire appurtenances wch ys due to me out of the land formerly [?] conveyed to my Edlest sonne Richard and the house messuages or ten[emen]ts wherein I now dwell together with all the houses yards lands meadows pastures com[m]ons comodities and appurtenances whatsoever thereunto belonging or in any wise appurteyning and also All those landes meadows and comons wth thappurtances wch I lately had an purchased of Thomas Holding Edward Asin [?] al[ia]s James, and of Will[ia]m Sillyman and of each of them To ahve and to hold the same for and during the terme of her naturall life and after the naturall death of decease of y saide wyfe I give and bequeath all and singular the said mentioned lands and premisses wth their and each of their appurtenances unto Will[ia]m Tuttell my youngest sonne to have and to holde the same unto the saide Will[ia]m Tuttell and to the heirs of his Body Lawfully to be begotten, and for want of such yssue to the second sonne of my sonne Richard and to his heirs for ever

Itm I give and bequeath unto John Tuttle my second sonne all that dwelling house wherein Mr Wrothfall now dwelleth wth all the houses thereunto belonging and the yarde and orchard thereunto adjoyning, and sometyme in the tenure or occupason of John White to have and to hold the same unto the saide John Tuttell and to his heirs and assignes for ever Itm I give and bequeath unto Isabel my said wyfe the one halfe [torn] that meadow wch I lately purchased of Joane Bateman wydow to have And to hold the same for and during her naturall life, And I give and bequeath the other Mytie or half of the same meadowe to my sonne Will[ia]m to enter [there] upon ymmediately after my decease, and I likewise give and bequeath unto my said sonne Will[ia]m the other Moytie of the same meadow to enter thereuppon after the naturall decease of my said wyfe to have and to hold the same unto him the said Will[ia]m and to the heires of his bodye lawfully to be begotten, so as he my said sonne [re]linquishes the twentie poundes given to him by his grandfather John Welles in and by his last will and testamet and the fyve pounds wch fell to him by the death of his brother Thomas Tuttell and for want of such issue of the body of the said Will[ia]m I give and bequeath the same meadowe unto the eldest sonne of my said sonne Richard and to his heirs for ever and I doe gie to my sonne Richard [illegible] halfe [illegible] the lord mordant [?] on both sides of it.

Itm I give to my sone John and his heirs for ever one dole of meadow [of?] forty foote in same which I purchased of Eusache Morton Thomas Ekins [?]. Itm I give to my sunn John his Daugher Abigaill fiue pounds at the age of fifteene years: Itm I give and bequeath unto the poore of Ringsted aforesaid xxs. to be distributed amongst the poorest sorte at the discreson of the minister and churchwardens. Itm I give to my godchildren xxs. apeece. Itm I give to my sonne Will[ia]m my best bedsted wth the bedding and furniture thereunto belonging, or therewith usd, the table in the hall wth the frame, halfe a duzzen of framd stooles, the yron barres on the chimneys wth the hookes and hangings the bed whereon he lyeth my best brasse pan my best brasse pott, my mault mill as now yt standeth, my bolting [twine and yeelding?] fatt, the barr of yron and the package [?], and I will that all my sheepe be equally devided betweene my said wife and my said sonne Will[ia]m wth the increase thereof so long as he keepeth himselfe unmarried. Itm I give and bequeath unto my said sonne Richard and to his heirs for ever one acre of leyes wch I purchased of Mr Carier, and half a dusson sheep. Itm I forgive [missing] my said sonne John thirtie pounds. Itm I give more unto my said sonne Will[ia]m my great cubbord in the [missing] the greater chest, two of the biggest chaires, and the chest that standeth by the bedsted. Itm I give untomy grand [childre]n xxs. a peece Divided allwaies And I will that all the said Movable goods herein given to my sonne Will[ia]m carefully to apply and husband his mothers business to the best of his power in [missing] of the person herein bequeathed pformed and my funeral expenses discharged. I give & bequeath unto Isabel my said wife [missing] and to be executrix of this my psent testamt and for the better execuson thereof I order [missing] them supervisores thereof and [missing]s. apeece [missing] and seal the day and year above written.

There is an additional line written in different penmanship (Abigail was born in 1628)

"to my sunn John, his daughter Abigail, five pounds at the age of fifteene years."

The will was signed by Simon T.... (the paper of this will is described as fragile and broken)

Simon’s son John Tuttle came to America on board the Planter with his wife and her three children by a first marriage (two of the Lawrence daughters are my 9x great grandmothers), and his brothers William and Richard and their families.  He settled in the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. In 1651 he returned to England and then to Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland.   On 6 April 1657 his wife, Joan, wrote that he had died there on 30 December 1656.  She probably died there, too. I descend from their son, Simon Tuthill, my 9x great grandmother, who settled in Ipswich and Lynn, Massachusetts.

My lineage from the Tuttles:

Lineage A:

Generation 1:  Symon Tootill, born about 1560 in Ringstead, Northampton, England, died before 15 June 1630; married about 1592 to Isabel Wells, daughter of John Wells.  She was born about 1565 and died about 1635 probably in New Haven, Connecticut. Six children.

Generation 2: Dorothy Tuttle, born about 1592 in England and died about December 1638 in Boston, Massachusetts; married about 1612 in England to John Bill, son of John Bill and Ann Mountford. Five children.

Generation 3: Philip Bill, born April 1629 in Ringstead, died 8 July 1689 in New London, Connecticut; married 8 July 1689 in Groton, Connecticut to Hannah Waite, daughter of Samuel Waite and Mary Ward.  She was born about 1625 probably in Finchingfield, Essex, England, and died about 1709 in Groton, Connecticut.  Eight children.

Generation 4: Samuel Bill m. Mercy Houghton

Generation 5: Ebenezer Bill m. Patience Ingraham

Generation 6: Asahel Bill m. Mary Rand

Generation 7: Reverend Ingraham Ebenezer Bill m. Isabella Lyons

Generation 8: Professor Caleb Rand Bill m. Ann Margaret Bollman

Generation 9: Isabella Lyons Bill m.  Albert Munroe Wilkinson

Generation 10: Donald Munroe Wilkinson m. Bertha Louise Roberts (my grandparents)

Lineage B:

Generation 2: Dorothy’s brother, John Tuttle married Joan Antrobus in 1627 in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England.  She was the widow of Thomas Lawrence, who died on 20 March 1625.  Joan and Thomas Lawrence are my 10x great grandparents on my maternal side. John was born about 1656 and died on 30 December 1656 in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland.  They had five children together.

Generation 3: Simon Tuthill, boarn 1637 in Ispwich, Massachusetts; died 11 January 1691 in Lynn, Massachusetts; married about 1663 to Sarah Cogswell, daughter of John Cogswell and Elizabeth Thompson. Twelve children.

Generation 4: John Tuthill, born 22 April 1666 in Ipswich, died 27 Feb 1715 in Ipswich; married on 3 December 1689 in Ispwich to Martha Ward, daughter of Samuel Ward and Abigail Maverick.  She was born 16 September 1672 in Salem, Massachusetts, and died 17 August 1723 in Ipswich. Eleven children.

Generation 5: Martha Tuthill m. Mark Haskell

Generation 6: Lucy Haskell m. Jabez Treadwell

Generation 7: Nathaniel Treadwell m. Mary Hovey

Generation 8: Jabez Treadwell m. Betsey Jillings Homan

Generation 9: Eliza Ann Treadwell m. Abijah Hitchings

Generation 10: Abijah Franklin Hitchings m. Hannah Eliza Lewis

Generation 11: Arthur Treadwell Hitchings m. Florence Etta Hoogerzeil

Generation 12: Gertrude Matilda Hitchings m. Stanley Elmer Allen (my grandparents)

  On 28 March 2013 the Fieldstone Common internet radio show featured an interview with Ava Chamberlain, the author of The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage Murder and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards.  Elizabeth Tuttle was the daughter of William Tuttle, Symon and Isabel's son, and neice to Dorothy Tuttle, my 8th great grandmother.  You can find a link to the podcast (archived version) of this interview at the Fieldstone Common blog:


  http://www.fieldstonecommon.com/show-notes-the-notorious-elizabeth-tuttle-with-ava-chamberlain/
--------------------------------------

Copyright 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

Our basement is a book storage facility.  There are eleven floor to ceiling bookcases, and several smaller ones around the perimeter of the room.  Books are also stacked beside the book cases, on top of tables, and in boxes.  Two humidifiers run constantly from May to October, removing the damp air.  During flooding rains and hurricanes we run up and down the stairs making sure the books are safe.  Most people have no idea there are so many books down there, since our living room and bedrooms are overflowing with books.  They can’t believe there are MORE downstairs.

Every once in a while I take a box and purge books.  The extra books, VHS movies and magazines go to the library as a donation at least twice a year.  A few years ago I looked at the two and half shelves full of journals full of over 20 years’ worth of NEHGS material.  I knew this stuff was online at the website www.americanancestors so I had a major spring clean.  It all went to friends or the library.  I gained valuable book real estate that is already filled with new collections.  It felt great!

Then last week I was writing up a sketch of an ancestor for my weekly Surname Saturday series.  As usual, I rechecked all my research.  Most of my surnames were researched decades ago, so I usually start with a peek at Martin Hollick’s book New Englanders in the 1600s.  This valuable book is not in my basement, but right at my elbow at my desk, next to Elizabeth Shown Mills’s Evidence Explained, Michael Leclerc’s Genealogist’s Handbook for New Englandand other genealogy reference books.   New Englanders in the 1600s, which summarizes research published between 1980 and 2010, mentioned an article in the NEXUS journal.

Yes, I use an old lottery ticket as a book marker in this book, because you never know! I need all the help I can get with certain ancestors

When I checked online at the NEHGS website for the NEXUS article, I couldn't find it.  It seems that all the NEHGS Registers are online, and American Ancestors, and New England Ancestors are there, but NEXUS (which preceded New England Ancestors) has not been digitized, and was not listed under journals on the database.  I was devastated!  I found some of the articles from Volumes I to X listed (not in the database but on an impossible to find page called “articles” which was only available through Googling “NEXUSgenealogy”) but the article I needed was in Volume XIV.  I even discovered that the old search box that was on the previous version of the NEGHS website is no longer on the new version, thus forcing me to resort to Google to find the NEXUS archive instead of easily finding it on the home page.

Don’t do what I did.  Keep your old paper journals.  Not everything is available, nor is it all online.   The NEHGS website does not explain any of this, so let this be your fair warning.

Scenario #2:  I was writing up a second sketch of an ancestor for Surname Saturday.  Again, I double checked my records and consulted New Englanders in the 1600s and found a new reference to my ancestor in a Register article.  I ran to my computer to call up the article, but it was not online.  The volume of the Register I wanted was there, but the page with the desired article was unavailable.  Puzzled, I ran to my basement to check the paper version only to remember I no longer had the paper versions.  Arrrggggh!

I quickly consulted with David Lambert, the online genealogist at NEGHS, and learned that not all the articles from the Register are online because some authors of "certain articles" have not given permission for their works to be distributed digitally.  Did you know this?  I had no idea.  It was not explained at the website. Of course, again, it had to me MY ancestor. 

Now, for both these sketches I will have to wait until I get back to Boston to search the paper versions- which both should have been in my basement.  But that’s another story!

------------------------- Copyright 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

Every two years the NERGC conference rotates around New England, and this year it will be held in Manchester, New Hampshire from April 17^th – 21^st, at the Radisson Hotel and Expo Center on Elm Street.  I attended my first NERGC in Springfield, Massachusetts in 2011, and I had a wonderful time.  There were lots of wonderful workshops and lectures, and I met up with some of my favorite friends, genealogists, bloggers and Mayflower cousins.  I highly recommend this conference if you are a New England genealogist or if you have New England ancestry.

NERGC 2013 is the twelfth genealogical conference, “Woven in History – The Fabric of New England”.  There will be lectures, workshops, a society fair, an exhibit hall, special interest groups and the popular “Ancestor’s Road Show” where experts will help you to find those elusive ancestors (think of the “Antiques Road Show” on PBS).   Best of all you can meet and mingle with hundreds of other attendees at the conference who share your love of genealogy.   Some of your favorite genealogy speakers will be there, including Thomas MacEntee and Lisa Alzo, among others.  The featured speakers will be Colleen Fitzpatrick and Stephen Morse.  The banquet speaker will be Milli Knudsen, who works for the state of New Hampshire organizing and indexing "cold case" files for the police, using her genealogical skills to help solve these crimes. 

Yours Truly, blogger Midge Frazel,  Mr. Frazel, and blogger Russ Worthington at the NERGC banquet. Don't we look like we were having a great time!

There is a librarian’s and teacher’s day on Wednesday, April 17^th, with workshops developed especially for those groups looking to learn more about genealogy for students and library patrons.   Wednesday, April 17^th is also Tech Day for both the technically challenged or tech-savvy genealogists. 

The Society Fair on Thursday night, April 18^th, from 5 to 7pm will feature over 20 genealogical, historical, family and lineage societies.  This is a great chance to mingle with members of these societies and ask questions, and maybe join a few of these organizations.  Groups like the American Canadian Genealogical Society, the New Hampshire Mayflower Society, and the Massachusetts Society of Genealogists will all be in attendance.

See the website www.nergc.orgfor information and registration.

Volunteering at NERGC can expand your experience.  You don’t have to even be a registered attendee to volunteer.  The Volunteer Chair Christine Bard is looking for people who can give one or two hours of their time, for simple things like introducing speakers or manning the registration booths.   Please contact Christine Bard at bardc@comcast.net if you can volunteer.

Check out the NERGC blog at www.nergc.blogspot.com

Click here for the NERGC e-zine http://www.nergc.org/E-zine_1_2013.pdf
------------------------ Copyright 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

Testing the cousins

One piece of advice you hear over and over in autosomal DNA testing: test as many relatives as you can afford to test.

And boy did The Legal Genealogist get handed the best evidence in the world as to why that’s good advice this past week.

Now before we go on, the reminder: an autosomal DNA test is the kind of test that works across genders and helps you find cousins in recent generations.¹ Unlike YDNA, you don’t have to locate sons of sons of sons to test and only get results in the male line,² and unlike mitochondrial DNA, you don’t have to locate daughters of daughters of daughters and only get results in the female line.³ With autosomal DNA, you can test the son of a daughter of a son against the daughter of a son of a daughter and get good results even across genders.⁴

But while you can test more people against each other to compare their autosomal DNA, you also have a shorter time frame for the results to be useful: unlike YDNA or mtDNA, which can be basically unchanged for hundreds, even thousands of years, autosomal DNA changes very rapidly from generation to generation through a process called recombination.⁵

In a nutshell, each parent has pairs of chromosomes but will only pass one of each to you. Before that happens, each pair the parent has gets mixed together and jumbled randomly so what you end up with may be more or less from any one ancestor. That’s why even brothers and sisters don’t have the same DNA: though each child gets 50% from each parent, each won’t get the same 50% as any other child.

Because of these changes, you get a rapid drop-off in the odds that you and a relative will actually share enough DNA in common to show up as matches. With a close relative, say through second cousin, the odds are pretty close to 100% that you share enough to match. Third cousins will match about 90% of the time. By the fourth cousin level, your odds are only 50-50; nine out of 10 fifth cousins on average will not share enough DNA to match; and by the sixth cousin level it’s really a crap shoot.⁶

Now 90% odds at the third cousin level are pretty good. So I was really delighted when, recently, we identified a third cousin in my Cottrell line.

He and I share a great great grandfather — my nemesis George Washington Cottrell.⁷ I descend through G.W.’s oldest son, Martin Gilbert Cottrell. This cousin, whose first name is David, descends from the youngest son, another George Washington Cottrell. His grandmother Luda Pearl Cottrell and my grandfather Clay Rex Cottrell were first cousins; his mother and mine second cousins; so he and I are third cousins.

But David had tested with AncestryDNA… and so have I… and we don’t show up as matches there. He matches a Cottrell cousin who’s also tested with AncestryDNA but not me.

I couldn’t believe it. I asked him if he’d be willing to test again at Family Tree DNA where the robust analysis tools would tell us so very much more than the “your tree matches his tree” (or not) results at Ancestry. He was willing, the test went in, the results came back this past week and…

He and I don’t match.

Now lest you sit there knowingly smiling to yourselves about some unreported non-paternity event, let me hasten to dissuade you from heading off down that blind alley. David matches both of my Cottrell uncles and my Cottrell aunt. He matches my Cottrell first cousin. He matches both of my Cottrell-side second cousins. He even matches my nephew, for cryin’ out loud.

He just doesn’t match me.

In other words, the key pieces of DNA that allow a positive match between this particular cousin and his relatives in my direct line happened to get passed down to just about everyone in my family… and to miss me.

To see this, take a look at the graphic with this blog post. You can click on it to see it bigger. This view of the chromosome browser shows in orange how my nephew and I match. You can see all those orange-colored chunks on just about every chromosome. These are chunks he would have gotten from his mother, my sister.

Now look at the chunks in blue. That’s where my nephew and my third cousin David share those very particular Cottrell segments that allow the testing company to be able to declare them a match. You can see that there is no orange in those areas.

David got those DNA segments. My nephew got those segments. My aunt, my uncles, my first cousin, my second cousins — they got those segments.

I didn’t.

In a situation where the odds are 90% in my favor… I landed in the 10%.

Maybe the DNA I got in those areas came from my grandmother and not my grandfather. Maybe it came from a different side of my grandfather’s family than the side that shows up here. Whatever the explanation, my DNA in those particular key locations just isn’t the same.

Now think about that for a minute.

If I was the only member of my family who’d been tested, and I was just starting out with autosomal DNA testing, can you see how I could have been misled by these results? It would have been so easy to think David and I weren’t related just because, in the random genetic crapshoot of autosomal DNA, the DNA dice just didn’t happen to roll the same way for the two of us.

I wouldn’t have known that it was just my DNA that differs, and in just the right (or wrong) place to make me the one who didn’t get the segments all my other relatives did.

So the moral of this story is: widen the net. If you’re going to do autosomal DNA testing, test all the relatives you can afford to test.

And don’t be discouraged when — not if, but when — you and a third cousin just don’t share enough DNA in common to be declared a match.

It happens to us all.

---

 
SOURCES

1. See generally Judy G. Russell, “Autosomal DNA testing,” National Genealogical Society Magazine, October-December 2011, 38-43. ↩
2. See ISOGG Wiki (http://www.isogg.org/wiki), “Y chromosome DNA test,” rev. 21 Jan 2013. ↩
3. See ISOGG Wiki (http://www.isogg.org/wiki), “Mitochondrial DNA test,” rev. 29 Jan 2013. ↩
4. See generally Russell, “Autosomal DNA testing.” ↩
5. See ISOGG Wiki (http://www.isogg.org/wiki), “Recombination,” rev. 12 Jan 2013. ↩
6. Russell, “Autosomal DNA testing,” at 39. ↩
7. See e.g. Judy G. Russell, “Oh George… you stinker!,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 9 Jun 2012(http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 6 Apr 2013). ↩

The May treasures may be few compared to all the books coming out in April, but there are some special books due out in May. Now's the time to place your orders with your favorite bookstore or place a hold at your local public library.

Casinos seem to be popular right now. Double Whammy by Gretchen Archer features Davis Way who lands a job on the security team at a Biloxi, Mississippi casino. But, she has a streak of bad luck, running into her ex-husband, a rigged slot machine, her evil twin, and a trail of dead bodies. She's going to need a little help to get out of jail and win a high stakes game to stay out of trouble.

Award-winning author Ann Cleeves introduces her Vera Stanhope mystery series to the U.S. with Silent Voices. Called a "Smart police procedural with emotional heft", it features Inspector Vera Stanhope who finds a body in the sauna room of her local gym. And, the bruises on the victim's throat indicate Vera has a murder on her hands.





Deborah Coonts takes us to a Las Vegas casino in Lucky Bastard. Lucky O'Toole is head of customer relations at The Babylon, which means she's head troubleshooter dealing with all the problems that can happen in a resort casino. First, a woman's body is found on display at the resort's big car show. That's bad enough, but Lucky also has to juggle the men in her life. Just more days and nights in Lucky O"Toole's fascinating adventures.

Dead, White, and Blue is the latest Death on Demand mystery from Carolyn Hart. Summer brings hordes of tourists to Annie Darling's mystery bookstore, Death on Demand. But, this time the Fourth of July holiday also brings trouble to Broward's Rock when first one islander, and then a second one disappears. It isn't long before Annie and her husband, Max, find themselves following a trail marked by blackmail, betrayal, and murder.

Once in a while, I receive a juvenile book in the mail. This time, it's the first in a new series by Ann M. Martin, author of The Baby-Sitters Club series. Better to Wish is the first in the new Family Tree series that will feature four generations, four girls, and one family. The series is designed for ages 8 to 12. In this one, eight-year-old Abby Nichols, a girl in a small coastal town in Maine can't imagine how much her life will change with new siblings, a new house, and new friends. At the age of one hundred, Abby looks back to tell her own story.

Jason Matthews is a retired officer in the CIA. Now, he turns his hand to a spy thriller with Red Sparrow. Russian intelligence officer Dominika Egorova is ordered to become a "Sparrow", a trained seductress in order to operate against a Nathanial Nash, a young CIA officer. Nash handles the Agency's most important Russian mole. Their duel of spycraft, deception, and finally carnal passion turns deadly when an assassin is dispatched.

The Trojan Colt is Mike Resnick's second mystery featuring down-on-his-luck private eye Eli Paxton. Hired to guard high-priced yearlings on a horse farm in Lexington, Kentucky, he uncovers a history of threats to grooms, disappearances of staff, and a multimillion-dollar plot.

Following a strong recommendation for Julie Thomas's The Keeper of Secrets, I'm looking forward to
reading this book. The debut novel spans seventy years, recounting the journey of a rare violin from Nazi Germany to Stalinist Russia to contemporary America. It's said to be "A tale of secrets, music, love, courage, survival, and family".

Daniel Wallace brings us The Kings and Queens of Roam, the story of two sisters who live in a town called Roam. When their parents die, Rachel, the younger, beautiful, naive one, must rely on her older sister, Helen, for everything. But, Helen is bitter and conniving, and convinces her sister that the world is a dark and dangerous place. Then Rachel makes a choice that turns their world upside down.

Is there a book or two here that jumps out at you?

In some other time or place a historical novel about a mountain preacher might have been titled ‘The Marrying Man,’ or ‘The Baptizing Man.’ But The Burying Man sets the reader into Depression-era Harlan, KY, where lethal labor strife leads to the county’s desperate coal mine wars. Funerals are an all too regular occurrence.

It’s May 1939. The mine operators in the fields of ‘Bloody Harlan’ have refused to sign a union shop contract with the United Mine Workers. The ensuing violence prompts Kentucky governor A. B. Chandler to send 900 troops from the Kentucky National Guard to restore order. They come, with machine guns and an armored tank.

The miners believe the Guard has been sent to reign in the violent thugs hired by the operators. That ‘s not the case at all. “Their commander, Lt. Col. J. Baldwin Smith,” The Burying Man tells us, “set the record straight when he was heard to scoff, ‘These damn miners thought we came here to help them.’”

The Burying Man’s main protagonist, Oakley ‘Mournful’ Grace, finds himself caught right in the center of the building storm.

The Burying Man was originally written by Cleudis Robbins, born in Colmar, KY in 1934. “He had been writing it for most of his life, scribbling on notebook pages, old receipts and backs of envelopes,” says his daughter Janene Nielsen, who stepped in 4 years ago to help her father pull the manuscript together into publishable form.

Robbins & Nielsen locate their story in the Harlan coal camp of Emerita. Emerita is but one of 12 such coal camps in the area, a fact we learn from local Sheriff Gibby, who’s taking bribes from coal operators in all 12 camps. However, the authors have wisely chosen to keep a concentrated focus on just one camp. The loves, strivings, betrayals, jealousies and joys of Emerita serve up a microcosm easily representative of the whole county.

The Burying Man plot hinges on the lifelong relationship of Mournful Grace, who is both a preacher and a miner, and his antithesis Cork Markham, son of a coal operator, recipient of a fancy far-off education, and heir-apparent to his father’s position. Despite having grown up as boyhood buddies, they are destined to cross swords.

When the reader first meets him, Mournful is a tongue-tied adolescent who can barely gather his thoughts enough to ask his sweetheart Evangeline to marry him. As the story unfolds, his oratory from the pulpit starts to shine. Finally, at a meeting with Markham over wages and working conditions, Mournful’s sense of justice, leadership and tact prove to be formidable tools in speaking on behalf of the miners.

Markham’s having none of it.  For him unionism is the same as communism. His response to the miners is merciless: “The coal operators stepped up evictions. Some families disappeared in the night like they had never existed. Others weren’t so lucky, like the miner was found tied to the rails of the L&N Railroad track. He had been clean cut in two. He was last seen in the custody of Deputy Rake Mullins. This atrocity was followed by the shooting death of Creed Brasher while working in a soup line to feed starving miners and their families.” As Markham’s cruelties become more numerous, so do his drunken binges on ‘Little Boys,’ moonshine that’s been packaged in recycled glass Coke bottles.

Death is ever-present in Mournful’s world. He watches as his first-born twin boys fade away, probably malnourished. His miner father dies in a cave-in. His wife Evangeline dies in childbirth, though not before she’s been raped, twice, by Cork Markham. Her brother Daniel is shot, then poisoned, by thugs hired by coal operators. Mournful’s next-door neighbor turns traitor against the miners, then double agent, and is finally shot by operator thugs in a drive-by. Mournful’s brother Top is ax murdered by a wife who’s been cheating on him. We know from the novel’s first page that Mournful’s daughter Bud, who serves as the omniscient third person narrator throughout the book, will die, though not till the story’s surprising end do we learn how.

Authors Robbins & Nielsen provide an antidote for all the bloodshed and sadness in the form of minor characters such as Baby Ray and Longneck, who appear to be carefully modeled on the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern characters in ‘Hamlet.’ Like Shakespeare’s bumbling assassins, Baby Ray and Longneck puff up their talk to appear intimidating, and can in fact be dangerous in spite of themselves. But they are fools too often drunk on moonshine, easily confused and outwitted, and lacking any real courage.

In one scene they decide to sneak up to Keziah Grimwood’s mountain home under cover of darkness and steal some of her moonshine. Keziah, a Melungeon granny woman familiar with the art of black magic, knows shape shifting. When the two would-be thieves hear the howls of panthers and the growls of angry dogs all around them, they go tumbling down the mountainside one over the other. “Much as Keziah enjoyed spooking those boys, she didn’t follow them off the mountain.” They reappear near the book’s denouement as linchpin figures in the death of Mournful’s daughter Bud.

Nan Potter, Cork Markham’s office assistant, is another side character who provides the reader with a Falstaffian relief from the relentless horrors swirling through Emerita.  She’d “tell you her life story without being asked, and start in all over again when she finished. Nan had the habit of avoiding people’s eyes as she talked — not because she was shy or even dishonest as most people thought, but rather because she was sneaky, sly.” She’s in the middle of a long gossipy digression, when “About that time Nan’s flatulence caught up with her and she let one go. ‘Ain’t that a lonesome sound?’ she said, grinning.”

The Burying Man is peppered with numerous Appalachian folk wisdoms —“Fact is, a branch from the witch hazel tree in the hands of one who knows how to use it has the power to find water running underground” — plus carefully observed details of daily living during the Depression — “Many a night neighbors used to gather on the Wilder’s stoop to listen [on the radio] to the likes of ‘The Lone Ranger,’ ‘The Shadow,’ and the ‘Grand Ole Opry.’” These specificities help to anchor The Burying Man in Appalachia, imbuing it with a sense of the genuine.

The novel is occasionally marred by grammatical glitches: “Then without warning the coal-plumed creatures took to flight like the lifting of a dark cloud and with them something of Evangeline’s unease.” Or: “She stood in the yard watching Mournful’s slow approach hating the birds singing in a nearby tree.”

The Burying Man is told in a vernacular style, but sometimes the authorial voice (less folksy, more saavy) bleeds through: “Seated next to him was another reprobate, Baby Ray Wilkins.” Or: “Evangeline was a pretty girl who was spared the indignities of real beauty.”

However, the grammar/voice issues are mere blemishes. Solid plotting, well-rounded character development, and good vs. evil themes make for a stirring read. The Burying Man is published by Beans Fork Group LLC and is available at Amazon.com.

The post Book Review: ‘The Burying Man’ appeared first on Appalachian History.

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1. Book Review: ‘Tales from the Hills and Hollows of East Tennessee’

West Virginia entrepreneur Donald F. Duncan (1892-1971) had never heard of the yo-yo until 1928, when he encountered Pedro Flores on a business trip to California.

Earlier that same decade, Flores had immigrated to America from the Philippines, and initially worked as a bellhop at a Santa Monica hotel. Carving and playing with wooden yo-yos was a traditional pastime in the Philippines, but Flores found that his lunch break yo-yo playing drew a crowd. He promptly started a company to make the toys, calling it the Flores Yo-Yo Company (“yo-yo” means “come-come” in the Tagalog language).

In 1930 Duncan bought out Flores, who went to work for Duncan running promotions. The company teamed up with Hearst Newspapers to promote yo-yo contests. Hearst added a twist, requiring players to sell three newspaper subscriptions if they wished to compete in the contests. A single promotion in Philadelphia sold 3 million yo-yos in 30 days. Duncan introduced the looped slip-string, which allows the yo-yo to sleep – a necessity for advanced tricks.

The company imported a number of teenagers from the Philippines to demonstrate the toy and numerous tricks and stunts to the American public. This marketing worked and quickly the toy (which Duncan called the “O-Boy Yo-yo Top”) became a bestseller. Manufacturing shifted to Baurle Brothers in Chicago. The first ever World Yo-Yo Competition was held in London, in 1932. Harvey Lowe, age 13, won.

Also in 1932 Duncan filed for and was assigned a trademark for the word yo-yo, which the company held until challenged in 1965. In a landmark intellectual property case that year (Donald F. Duncan, Inc. v. Royal Tops Mfg. Co., 343 F.2d 655 (7th Cir. 1965), a federal court of appeals ruled in favor of the Royal Tops Company, asserting that the term had become a part of common speech.

The genuine Duncan yo-yo is a classic toy that has endured for 80 years. With more than 600 million sold, it is probably the most popular toy in history, and has been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame.

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/yoyo.htm

http://www.yo-yo.com/history.asp

http://www.coolquiz.com/trivia/explain/docs/yoyo.asp

http://members.aol.com/jeff560/famousd.html

Duncan+yo-yo appalachian+history appalachian+culture appalachia history+of+appalachia

The post America loves the yo-yo appeared first on Appalachian History.

When the U.S. Army came to what is now Oak Ridge, TN in 1942 with the Manhattan Project, one thousand families on 56,000 plus acres had to be moved. Half of those acres were in Roane County, the area where K-25 and X-10 are now.

Of the people who were ordered to leave on very short notice, Congressman John Jennings, Jr. tried to render some help, and in a telegram to President Roosevelt, pleaded that “their plight is desperate.” Payment and aid were urgently needed for relocation. The following comments are from Dorathy Moneymaker, one of many whose families had to leave from the Wheat community in Roane County in early 1943.

 

“I want to tell you, my people had lived in the Wheat section for four generations. I don’t mean Moneymakers, they were new people. They just lived there 10 years, but I want to tell you a funny thing. It wasn’t funny when it happened, but it was funny.

“We didn’t get out in time and we were supposed to be out by the last day of ’42. They came to evict us, and the man come up to the door and he wanted to know where my husband was, and I said he was at work. He was already working up here in Oak Ridge, and he said, ‘Well, I come to evict, serve eviction papers on you, so I’ll just serve them on you.’

“Now, I was expecting our first baby, and he was born on the fourteenth day of January in 1943, and he weighed well over eight pounds. So, you know very good and well I was showing. I stepped back and I said to him, ‘Did you know that there is a law in the state of Tennessee that will not allow you to evict a pregnant woman?’ And he was so amazed, he almost stepped off the front porch. He never did come back.

“I didn’t know that there was a law and I just made it up, but come to find out there was one. But we didn’t get out until April of ’43, and as I told you that child was born on the fourteenth of January.

“We went down to Blair Road to where the gate was and I was in labor. We started to Harriman Hospital and the man at the gate wanted to see my card. I didn’t have one and so they wouldn’t let me through, and me in labor now, mind you. And so, they let my husband through because he had one.

“He went to Oliver Springs and got a doctor and brought him down there and let me go with him, let me go with the doctor, but the doctor was so uneasy that he brought his nurse with him when he come. But we got to the Harriman Hospital.

“The community had been there for a long time and had been known as Bald Hill. That was because all the trees on the hills had been cut down, I guess they chopped them down back then. When we got our first post office in the Wheat community, our postmaster was Henry Franklin Wheat, and they named the community Wheat after our first postmaster.

“There was a building that had been used for a school and a church up on the hill not too far from where the old church that is still there. And when they put up a new church they moved the old building down the hill across the road and put it down there where they have got George Jones Memorial Baptist Church. It was Wheat post office and there was a store and they added five rooms so the family could live there.

“If you have ever read We’ll Call it Wheat, which is in the city library, you will find that they had a school in the Wheat community when it was Bald Hill. They were subscription schools. The people that come pay for it. It usually lasted about three to four months.

“Tennessee became a state on June 1, 1796, but there was no levy on a tax to establish a public school until well into the 1800’s. They had private schools, subscription schools, they had schools at churches, there was lots of teaching went on in the homes, not just your children, but if the neighbor children wanted to come in that was alright too.

“The Robinson Schoolhouse is the first one I have a date on. It was in 1850, and there were other schools besides that, but I don’t have exact dates on it. This Robinson Schoolhouse, it states that it was where the Mt. Zion Baptist Church and Roane College later stood. Did you know that the Wheat community had a Roane College before we had a Roane College?

“It was a four-year accredited. Also our high school, when it became a high school, it was one of the accredited schools. Many of the people — and I will not name neighborhoods that had schools — but they were not qualified. So people would come to Wheat and go to school so that they could get into college.

“We have a Homecoming the first Sunday in October of every year. And you can get in there then, but you go up to the top of the hill and instead of turning to the left where the church is, you turn to the right and go out on the top of the hill, which you can’t do now because it is covered with trees, but out there is where the Roane College was, but some of the other schools was in a close connection, it was just Roane College and it was accredited.

“It eventually, now, it had no state help until it become Wheat High School. Then Roane College moved into the Wheat High School building and it ceased to exist. I’m going to tell you where the high school sat. You know where Blair Road is? And the Turnpike, before you get to that Blair Road light you are going through the football field of the Wheat High School. The school sat in the corner of Blair Road at that right and the Turnpike. For a long time it sat there. Then it was torn down. I think some of the steps are still there, but anyways that’s where it was, but it grew gradually; I can remember when they added to it.

“We had a Delco, thing-a-ma-jig that had water in the school, before we got regular sewage and so forth. The school sat where I told you there in that corner.

“Just across there on the other side is where my grandmother and grandfather lived there. He was a rural delivery mailman. For years and years. I forgot how long, I think I wrote it down somewhere. You see my memory isn’t getting short, it’s just that I know so much it is hard to remember. You see he carried it on horseback. He wouldn’t get off his horse and leave the mail on it. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday he did one route, and on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday he did the other route. The women along the routes would fix him a plate of food and he would sit on the horse and eat it.

“Let’s see. Back to that Roane College though. It was a two story house when it was built. They had been Poplar Creek Seminary before that in 1877, and W.H. Crawford, well, he was the president and teacher of the Poplar Creek Seminary, but he was also a Common Presbyterian preacher. He went to Washington College and then there was talking about land being given.

“A Pyatt couple gave land in 1878, George and Lucinda McKinney-Jones donated 100 acres in 1879. All denominations were involved in all the schools and all the churches. Let me tell you how we had churches back then. We had two buildings and three denominations.

“Now, if you know where the turn off to Lenoir City is down there, across from there you will see a marker where the Presbyterian Church sat. My maternal grandfather gave the land for that, but it was used for dangerous materials during the war, and so it had to be torn down.

“On the first Sunday in every month, we met at the Baptist Church, that one that is still standing, and had Sunday school, all denominations and those that didn’t even have the Lord. Didn’t have nowhere to go, no television to watch, so they all came to church. The Baptist preacher would come and preach.

“Then the second Sunday in the month, we would meet out at the Common Presbyterian Church, all of us had Sunday school. Then we would have the Common Presbyterian preacher to preach. He usually lived in Oliver Springs. He had a church in Oliver Springs, Coalfield, Wheat, and Lawnville. That was the other one. On the fifth Sundays, he went to Scarboro and had church.

“But anyway, the third Sunday in the month, the Wheat community went back to the Baptist Church and had Sunday school. Oh, and by the way, it didn’t matter whether your Sunday school teacher was of the same denomination your family was or not. We didn’t ask them, and didn’t know to ask them. We would have Sunday school.

“We didn’t have any preacher that Sunday. So, us young’uns enjoyed it more than anything else because we got out and played together while the parents gossiped with each other.

“And then on the fourth Sunday we went back to the Common Presbyterian Church and after Sunday school the Methodist minister preached. Now for my life, I can’t remember what we did on the fifth Sundays, but I am sure we had Sunday school. I can’t say what church we met in, I don’t know who even decided it, but any way we had it.”

 

Source: Center for Oak Ridge Oral History Panel Discussion: Wheat Community “The Way We Were: Pre-Oak Ridge and Early Oak Ridge” Interviewed by Patricia Clark; Transcribed by Jordan H. Reed on July 10, 2000. This was a videotape received from the American Museum of Science and Energy.

The post Wheat, TN disappears at the hands of the Manhattan Project appeared first on Appalachian History.

I once read an article about a woman who moved to Fort Wayne in order to work on her genealogy. I know just how she felt.


When I first went to the Allen County Public Library there, my concept of genealogy consisted of photocopying lots of derivative sources and downloading what little there was on the internet. In those days the stacks were closed and you had to request items on paper slips. Now the Genealogy Center is bigger and better, with open stacks, and I'm older and less ill-informed, in part thanks to the patience of its staff.

Over the years it gradually dawned on me that this is not a normal library. It's big, it contains many unexpected resources on and off line, and to get the most out of a trip there I sometimes need to plan how to make my plan.

Which of the six catalog entry points should you start with? Books? Periodicals? Microtext? Microfilmed newspapers? Digitized Fort Wayne newspapers? The Center's own databases, including three specialized research portals?

How do you get at the mammoth collection of city directories? Or the world's best collection of genealogy periodicals? Which of its holdings may now be available on line? (And where?) No wonder some of my knowledgeable friends had trouble navigating it.

Over the years the center has produced brochures, pathfinders, and an introductory video -- and maintained generous hours and an unparalleled staff of helpful genealogists who are also librarians (or is it the other way around?). This is all good, but nothing quite gives the whole picture.

So I've tried my hand at an unofficial independent guidebook to what I think is the best all-purpose genealogy destination between Salt Lake City and the east coast. This booklet does NOT describe all the center's holdings (I'm not that crazy). It does explain how you can more efficiently find what you need -- even if you never actually manage to show up!

It comes in four parts:

• Introduction (p. 2), 

• Before You Go (p. 4), 

• When You Arrive (p. 11), and 

• Wait! There's More! (p. 25), with two appendixes that link to a 13-part blog history of the center and include some numbers showing just how far it reaches beyond its Indiana and Ohio homeland.

It's a free 26-page PDF download with live links for on-line use.

I hope it will help as you make plans -- either to attend the Federation of Genealogical Societies 2013 conference there in August, or to visit another time, or to make better use of the library's resources remotely. Let me know of corrections or potentially useful additions.



Harold Henderson, Finding Ancestors in Fort Wayne: The Genealogist's Unofficial One-Stop Guide to the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center (La Porte, IN: author, April 2013; http://www.midwestroots.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ACPLGC-April-2013.pdf).

Midwestern Microhistory by Harold Henderson

For those of you planning on doing research at the Allen County Public Library (ACPL) in Fort Wayne, Indiana life just got a whole lot easier.

Harold Henderson, CG, of the Midwest Roots blog and Midwestern Microhistory blog has published a new FREE pdf guide for genealogists to research at the ACPL.  The guide has a preparing "Before You Go" section as well as online finding aids. The guide the focuses on what to do after you arrive.

What I love about this guide is that it contains lots of photos and screen captures both of the library and its databases.  It allows the genealogist to become familiar with the library before ever setting foot in the building. That is a real time saver.

Finding Ancestors in Fort Wayne: The Genealogist's Unofficial One-Stop Guide to the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center is the kind of tool every genealogist needs to keep in their bag of tricks.

I hope that more libraries (or bloggers!) will consider making a resource guide like this readily available.

More matchmaker’s matching

Life as a DNA geek can occasionally be very very good.

H marks the new match!

You may recall that, back in August, The Legal Genealogist was musing about the potential for secret relatives — secret only because you didn’t know about them yet, hadn’t met them yet, not because there was any deep dark family secret about their existence.¹

And I was hoping against hope that one of my secret relatives might be about to come out and play in the sunshine, thanks to autosomal DNA.

The problem is pretty simple: thanks to burned courthouses and other typical genealogical calamities, there’s not a shred of evidence that my 2nd great grandmother, Martha Louise Shew, ever married the father of her first child, my great grandmother Eula.

And, moreover, there’s not a whole lot of evidence as to who that father might be.

Eula was born in 1869 in Cherokee County, Alabama — where the marriage records went up in smoke sometime thereafter.² The only census where she was enumerated in what we hope was her father’s household was the 1870 census, and the line there for head of household simply reads “Baird” without a first name, age 22, a farm hand, born in Alabama.³

Eula’s Texas marriage record doesn’t name her parents.⁴ She never had a Social Security number, so no SS-5. Her death certificate names her stepfather, A.C. Livingston, instead of her father.⁵ There’s no family Bible, no baby book, no artifacts to help nail it down.

We do have a family story that Eula’s father was Jasper Baird, son of “Billy” Baird,⁶ who took the wagon out one day into Indian country around 1870-1871 and was ambushed; the wagon was found, the story says, but Jasper’s body never was.

The fact that there hadn’t been an Indian attack in that part of Alabama for decades makes it a little unlikely that this happened in Alabama, and the fact that nobody in the family lived in Oklahoma until after 1900 makes the alternate version (“it was in Oklahoma”) a little unlikely too.

But we had some room for hope. There actually was a William Baird living in Cherokee County as of the 1860 census, with a son Jasper who could have been Eula’s father.⁷ That family moved to Pope County, Arkansas, by 1870, but Jasper wasn’t enumerated with them there — meaning he could have been the Baird on the 1870 census with Martha Louise and baby Eula back in Alabama.⁸

Our hesitation in adopting that Jasper was due in large measure to one minor little detail: that Jasper didn’t die until 1909, in Arkansas.⁹

Now, ordinary DNA testing wasn’t ever going to solve this problem. Since we descend from a daughter, and daughters don’t have any of their father’s Y-DNA, we couldn’t test against a male descendant of William Baird for Y-DNA.¹⁰ And since Eula got her mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from her mother, not her father, we couldn’t test against a daughter of a daughter of Christian Baird for mtDNA.¹¹

When autosomal DNA testing came along, the big question was finding a descendant of William Baird and his wife Christian (Campbell) Baird who’d be willing to test. Last August, Connie Baird Bowen — who’s the G on the chart here — agreed to be tested.

If we were right, Connie would be a fourth cousin to me (I’m E on the chart) and to a first cousin of mine (F on the chart), and a third cousin once removed to the members of the earlier generation of my family who’ve been tested (A is my mother’s first cousin, B and D my mother’s brothers, and C my mother’s sister). But it’s a crap shoot at that genetic distance: third cousins once removed share less than four-tenths of one percent of their DNA; fourth cousins only 0.195%.¹²

But we got lucky: Connie matched both my uncle David (B on the chart) and my aunt Carol (C on the chart).

And more recently, we got even luckier. You see, the autosomal DNA that Connie shares with David and Carol might be from her mother’s side, and not her father’s Baird side. Connie has some brick walls on her mother’s side, and we have some too. So there was still a chance that — while we are cousins — we’re not Baird cousins.

Except that Connie has a half-sister. On the Baird side. Who also agreed to be tested.

The results are in: the half-sister, who is H on this chart, matches both of my uncles, David (chart B) and Mike (chart D). GedMatch, the third-party utility that allows for really in-depth analysis,¹³ isn’t taking new data uploads just now, but when it does, we’ll be able to do that deeper analysis to be sure but…

What can I say?

Life as a DNA geek can occasionally be very very good.

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SOURCES

1. Judy G. Russell, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 26 Aug 2012 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 30 Mar 2013). ↩
2. The earliest available marriage records in Cherokee County begin in 1882. See “Local Government Records Microfilm Database,” Cherokee County, Alabama Department of Archives and History (http://www.archives.alabama.gov : accessed 25 Aug 2012). ↩
3. 1870 U.S. census, Cherokee County, Alabama, population schedule, Leesburg Post Office, p. 268(A), dwelling/family 15, Baird household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 25 Aug 2012); citing National Archive microfilm publication M593, roll 7; imaged from FHL microfilm 545506. ↩
4. Bexar County, Texas, Marriage Book N: 24, marriage license and return no. 14,298, Robertson-Beard, recorded 21 Feb 1896; County Court Clerk, San Antonio, Texas. ↩
5. Virginia Department of Health, Certificate of Death, state file no. 6367, Eula Robertson (1954); Bureau of Vital Statistics, Richmond. ↩
6. Interview with Opal Robertson Cottrell (Kents Store, VA), by granddaughter Bobette Richardson, 1980s; copy of notes privately held by Judy G. Russell. ↩
7. 1860 U.S. census, Cherokee County, Alabama, population schedule, p. 136 (stamped), dwelling/family 332, Wm. G. Baird household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 25 Aug 2012); citing National Archive microfilm publication M653, roll 5. ↩
8. 1870 U.S. census, Pope County, Arkansas, population schedule, Dover Post Office, p. 383(B) (stamped), dwelling 614, family 630, William Baird household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 25 Aug 2012); citing National Archive microfilm publication M593, roll 61; imaged from FHL microfilm 545560. ↩
9. “J.N. Baird Dies Suddenly,” The (Russellville, Ark.) Courier Democrat, 19 Aug 1909, p.2, col.3. ↩
10. See “Genetic Genealogy Q&A for Beginners,” FAQ 28, International Society of Genetic Genealogy (http://www.isogg.org : accessed 25 Aug 2012). ↩
11. “Understanding DNA,” Family Tree DNA (http://www.familytreedna.com : accessed 25 Aug 2012). ↩
12. ISOGG Wiki (http://www.isogg.org/wiki), “Autosomal DNA statistics,” rev. 26 Apr 2011. ↩
13. See Judy G. Russell, “Gedmatch: a DNA geek’s dream site,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 12 Aug 2012 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 30 Mar 2013). ↩

The missing pension

Most folks whose families have been in America since oh-dark-thirty — defined roughly by The Legal Genealogist as after the Mayflower but before the Revolution — ended up with one or more ancestors involved in one or more of America’s early wars.

The Legal Genealogist is no exception.

My 3rd great grandfather Jesse Fore was a fifer in Captain Michael Gaffney’s company of South Carolina Militia.¹ Another third great grandfather, Elijah Gentry, and his brother James Gentry, and their father — my fourth great grandfather — Elijah Gentry Sr. all served in the 1st Regiment Mississippi Territorial Volunteers.²

Now I’ve seen some of the pension files for the War of 1812. They can be absolutely wonderful. The application forms alone can contain all kinds of details you can’t get anywhere else. So one of the very first things I think of when I find a War of 1812 ancestor is: where’s his pension file?

I’ve sat in the National Archives and held Jesse Fore’s file in my hands.³ I’ve seen the mark he made on an 1857 affidavit about having transferred a bounty land warrant — and you can see it illustrating this blog too.⁴

In the case of the Elijahs, it’s pretty easy to understand why Elijah Sr. never got a pension for his 1812 service: he died before May 1818, when James was named executor of his will.⁵ But for the longest time it upset and frustrated me that I couldn’t find any pension records for Elijah Jr. He is all over the Mississippi state records for years, decades even.⁶ So why couldn’t I find his pension file?

It dawned on me, finally, that I didn’t really have a very good handle on just who could get a pension for serving in the War of 1812 and when. So it just might be a good idea to take a peek at the pension laws.

Duh.

Until 1871, the only folks who could get pensions for service in the War of 1812 were those who’d been hurt in the war and the widows of those who’d been killed. That wasn’t a lot of people — there were only 2,260 reported battle deaths and 4,505 reported woundings in that war.⁷ You didn’t qualify for a pension just because you’d served until 1871⁸ — when most of the 286,730 men who’d served were likely to have been either quite elderly or dead.

Under the 1871 law, to be eligible, a survivor had to have served 60 days and been honorably discharged, and widows could collect if they’d married before the peace treaty was ratified on the 17th of February 1815.⁹

It wasn’t until 1878 that the law was changed to make anybody who’d served at least 14 days eligible for a pension, and gave pensions to widows no matter when they’d been married.¹⁰

And there was my answer.

Elijah Jr. died before the end of 1868; though probate files don’t survive for his home county of Neshoba County, Mississippi, for that year, his wife Wilmoth and their surviving children sold some of his land in neighboring Winston County on 19 December 1868 and, in the deed, Wilmoth was identified as his widow.¹¹ So like his father before him, Elijah simply hadn’t lived long enough to be eligible for a pension for his service.

Wilmoth herself wasn’t eligible under the 1871 law, since her marriage to Elijah wasn’t until about 1817.¹² And she probably died before the 1878 law took effect.¹³

You’d think by now I’d have learned, right?

Check the laws.

Always, always, always, check the laws.

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SOURCES

1. Compiled service records, Jesse Fore, musician, Captain Michael Gaffney’s Company, 1st Regiment South Carolina Militia; Carded Records, Volunteer Organizations, War of 1812; Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1762-1984, Record Group 94; National Archives, Washington, D.C. ↩
2. Compiled service records, Elijah Gentry, Pvt., James Gentry, Pvt., and Elijah Gentry Sr., Pvt., Captain Samuel Dale’s Company, 1st Regiment Mississippi Territorial Volunteers, War of 1812, RG 94, NA-Washington. ↩
3. Jesse Fore (Musician, Capt. Michael Gaffney’s Co., 1 Regiment South Carolina Militia, War of 1812), pension no. S.O. 4,553, S.C. 7,041; Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Applications Based on Service in the War of 1812, 1871-1900; Pension and Bounty Land Applications Based on Service between 1812 and 1855; Department of Veterans Affairs, Record Group 15; National Archives, Washington, D.C. ↩
4. Ibid., affidavit of Jesse “Four,” 4 Nov 1857, Union County, Georgia. ↩
5. Monroe County AL Orphans Court orders, 11 May 1818, estate of Elijah Gentry. ↩
6. See, e.g., 1850 U.S. census, Neshoba County, Mississippi, population schedule, p. 119 (stamped), dwelling 74, family 79, Elijah Gentry; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 12 July 2002); citing National Archive microfilm publication M432, roll 378. Also, 1860 U.S. census, Neshoba County, Mississippi, Hills Bluff Post Office, population schedule, p. 153 (penned), dwelling 988, family 1022, Elijah Gentry; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 28 September 2002); citing National Archive microfilm publication M653, roll 588. ↩
7. See Hannah Fischer, “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” Congressional Research Service, 13 July 2005; html version, Navy Department Library (http://www.history.navy.mil/library/ : accessed 29 Mar 2013). ↩
8. “An Act granting Pensions to certain Soldiers and Sailors of the War of eighteen hundred and twelve, and the Widows of decease Soldiers,” 16 Stat. 411 (14 Feb 1871). ↩
9. Ibid. ↩
10. “An act amending the laws granting pensions to the soldiers and sailors of the war of eighteen hundred and twelve, and their widows, and for other purposes,” 20 Stat. 27 (9 Mar 1878). ↩
11. Neshoba County, MS, Deed Book Q: 619, Wilmoth Gentry et al. to Lemuel Knowles, 19 Dec 1868. ↩
12. Elijah had been a circuit-riding Methodist Episcopal preacher in 1816, at a time when the Mississippi Conference was described by its historian as “exclusively a bachelor Conference.” Rev. John Jones, A Complete History of Methodism as Connected with the Mississippi Conference, vol. I (Nashville, Tenn. : Southern Methodist Pub. House, 1887), 427. ↩
13. She was enumerated in the household of her son George Washington Gentry in 1870, 1870 U.S. census, Neshoba County, Mississippi, Philadelphia, population schedule, p. 374(A) (stamped), dwelling/family 1264, Wilmoth Gentry in household of George Gentry; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 11 Oct 2011); citing National Archive microfilm publication M593, roll 741; imaged from FHL microfilm 552240, but cannot be found in the 1880 census and likely had died by then. ↩

The Battle Road between Lexington and Concord is a combination of modern roads, modern neighborhoods, historic homes and one small section of unpaved road.  This section of the Battle Road is my favorite.  It is preserved for pedestrian access only, and looks (to me) as it probably looked in 1775 on the day the citizens of Massachusetts chased the British back to Boston after the altercations in Lexington and Concord.  There is also a Battle Road Trail, that meanders through wetlands, lush meadows and forests . 


This is the Hartwell Tavern Historic Area Ephraim and Elizabeth Hartwell lost five children in a 1740 "throat distemper" epidemic,  but then went on to have eight more children! 

This is just the frame of a Revolutionary War era house. I love seeing how the center chimney takes up a large portion of the entire square footage of the house.  It provided radiant heat in the wintertimes, too. It was built by Samuel Hartwell, son of the tavern keepers next door.

Time travel, just walk down this lane a bit...

Minute Man National Park http://www.nps.gov/mima/index.htm 
The Hartwell Tavern Historic Area http://www.nps.gov/mima/hartwell-tavern.htm
-------------------------- Copyright 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo