Leaves & Branches

I haven't posted recently because I have been hard at work filling in the many gaps in my family tree.  When I first started my research many years ago, I didn't understand why anyone other than the people from whom I was directly descended should be important to me.  By the time I realized that I had been, well, stupid, I had passed over a lot of important information.  I just finished filling in some gaps in the Kincaid family. The Kincaids are on my paternal grandmother's side.  Margaret Kincaid was my great-great grandmother and the second wife of Peter Ballein.  Margaret was born in 1836, the daughter of Samuel and Jemima Coulter Kincaid.  Samuel was born in 1804 to Samuel and Sarah Reed Kincaid.  The first Samuel Kincaid died May 5, 1813 during the seize of Fort Meigs in the War 1812.  After the elder Samuel's death, the Kincaids settled in the area around Sardinia in Brown County, Ohio. Had I only focused on Samuel Kincaid, so...

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 ...

Why did our ancestors have so many different variations on their names?  Since a very young age, I have known my full name and the correct spelling.  You probably have also.  But I see so many different names for the same people and families and, well, it's frustrating. First, there is my great-great-grandmother, Lulu Dunn Wardlow.  I refer her to as Lulu, because that is the name on her gravestone.  However, I have seen her name spelled Eulala, Eulali, Ulalia, and Lula.  Someone told me I was wrong about her name but who's to say? My great-grandmother, Rosa Ogden Davis, has been referred to as Thankful Rosa, Rozella, and Rosie. Again, she is referred to Rosa on her gravestone, so that is typically how I refer to her. Ballein is problem name.  I have seen it written as Bowline and Bauline.  I can almost excuse this, though, since it is a somewhat unusual name. Shaper is a problem for another reason.  It is pronounced the way...

I have recently been printing copies of Ohio death certificates from FamilySearch.org.   I already have many death certificates, but this time I am focusing on relatives from whom I am not directly descended (and, quite honestly, for whose death certificates I wouldn't pay).  My primary medical concern has been stroke, since there is a strong family history on my dad's side of the family.  As I read the death certificates, though, I noticed another pattern - death by train. I have known for some time that my great-uncle, Lewis Jefferson Dudley, died after being hit by a train.  Uncle Lew was the second child of Jesse and Mary Shaper Dudley and the brother of my grandmother, Mary Dudley Donaldson.  Other than the cause of his death, we don't know much about Lew.  From the newspaper account, he must have been walking along the railroad tracks on the night of November 11, 1906 when he was hit by a train.  He sustained a deep wound in the back of hi...

This afternoon I was looking through a notebook with some of my research notes and stopped on the page containing information on my great-grandfather, James Ulysses Davis.  A note from my conversations years ago with my dad, Russell Lee Davis, caught my eye.  My dad told me that his grandfather gave him an 1868 two cent piece. My dad always kept a little maroon velvet drawstring bag with his coin collection.  He was mostly interested in silver dollars, but also had other assorted U S coins and a few foreign coins saved from his Air Force days in Europe.  He would occasionally take the bag out and show us his coins.  I hadn't seen the little drawstring bag in years and asked my family where the coins were.  We searched and located the coins and found the 1868 two cent piece.  As I compose this post, that two cent piece is on the desk in front of me.  It isn't in mint condition.  It isn't worth a fortune.  But it's quite m...

This week I had the honor to receive an album of information, newspaper clippings, letters, and photographs related to the Dudley family.  This family documentation was apparently compiled by my great-grandfather, Jesse Dudley with the assistance of his eldest child, Charles.  After Charles' death, the information must have been passed on to his brother, Clarence.  One of Clarence's step-grandsons was kind enough to send the information to me.  One of the pages in the album reads as follows: These records was set forth by the hand of Jessey Dudley in the year of our Lord Dec-9-1922 and to him goes the credit for their keeping to the best of his knowledge, his records were handed down to his first born son Charles Henry Dudley who has faithfully kept them to the best of his knowledge.  And they will be kept and handed down to all the Dudley progenitors to come.  In God we trust.  Amen. This family record answers a lot of questions, but also raises a l...

After a few years of limited interest in what I consider my primary hobby, I became active and interested in genealogy again in 2009.  My accomplishments: I started putting my family tree on Ancestry.com I have made a lot of progress in organizing the family photographs and documents I have obtained over the years. I have met some distant and not-so-distant relatives with whom I have been able to exchange information. Sharing information with my heretofore unknown relatives has been rewarding.  I had shied away from sharing my research with others because of a bad experience in the past when I shared a great deal of information with a distant cousin who didn't as much as acknowledge receiving it. However, I had reached the point in my research where having only a few facts and maybe a photo or two wasn't enough.  I wanted to know more about the personalities of the people I have been researching for years.  To do this, I needed to network with people who had th...