Leaves & Branches

It's the time of the year when we celebrate our Irish heritage and I have plenty of it.  My mom claimed Irish heritage through the Donaldsons.  My dad always made fun of her.  I think he bought into the stereotype that the Irish are drunks.  The rest of us didn't care, though.  We were proud to have Irish heritage.  My dad said that his father, James Quincy Davis, always told him the Davises were Welsh. Very early in my research, I learned of Robert Hamilton, my fifth great-grandfather through my paternal grandmother, Jennie Esther Ballein.  Robert Hamilton was born in Ireland in 1760.  He came to America shortly before the Revolutionary War and served in that war.   I told my dad he had Irish blood and he promptly told me that only the male line (i.e., the Davises) counted when determining one's cultural heritage. I will always remember the day that changed my dad's life.  I was sitting at a microfilm viewer looking for ...

Researching my Davis ancestry has been full of brick walls. The Davis surname is quite common, which can always make research difficult. The Davises haven't, to my knowledge, been rich, powerful, criminals, or officeholders, so no books have been written about them. If there are family pictures, documents, or bibles, I don't have them and don't know who does. Samuel Davis, my 3X great-grandfather, is the first Davis ancestor in my family tree. According to census records, he was born around 1782 in Ireland. I don't know who his parents were. I don't know how or when he arrived in the United States. He settled in Brown County, Ohio, but not early enough to be mentioned in any of the Brown County histories. He and his wife (I'm not 100% sure who she was) had a family. I know their names, but not much more. I'm not even sure when Samuel died. Isaac Davis, my 2X great-grandfather, was born around 1827 in Ohio, possibly in South Lebanon in Warren County, but I h...