SNGF: 100 Words on My Most Interesting Ancestor

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seavers of geneamusings is to write a short 100 word story using the phrase "...the most interesting ancestor I have ..." in 100 words and then share it.

Here's my offering:

Robert Henry Collins is my most interesting ancestor...and my obsession! Born on 6 August 1849 in Benton County, MO to Henry W. Collins and his second wife, Susannah Bartshe, Robert was an only child with 14 step-siblings and another 14 double-step-siblings (children of his mother’s other two husbands). He married Rebecca Jane Campbell in 1872, with whom he had 5 children before she died in April 1882. Then he vanished. From newspapers I know he traveled widely in the West, living in Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Montana, occasionally returning to Missouri. He committed suicide in my great-grandmother’s smokehouse in 1924, age 75.

 

 

 

High hopes for a Brookshire Breakthrough!

I have been doing family history research for well over 45 years, beginning with helping my grandmother help someone else write a history of our part of the Boone family. My mother and I were working on her lines back in the mid 1970s. My mother's mother was a BROOKSHIRE, and try as I might, I haven't been able to connect our line of Brookshires to either of the two brothers from whom supposedly all U.S. Brookshires descend. There have been several well-researched books written on the Brookshires in the U.S., but those authors have either ignored our line or stuck them in the "uncategorized" section. It's been very frustrating. I cannot begin to count how many hours I've spent searching for and reading early records of east Tennessee and southwest Virginia trying to find my 3-great and 4-great grandfathers.
I've researched all of my great-great-grandfather's children and their lines. While Henry Clay Brookshire was married three times and had three wives and 6 sons, only 3 of those sons lived to adulthood and only one had a son who lived to adulthood and had a son. I did track that male Brookshire down, but he was totally disinterested in his family history and was outraged when I asked him to do DNA testing.
So a couple of weeks ago I went back to my Brookshire genealogy and stepped back another generation to Henry Clay Brookshire's brothers, sons of William L. Brookshire. William and Sarah (VARNELL) Brookshire had at least 10 children, 6 of whom were sons. I had identified a number of male Brookshire descendants of these men over the years, but have never been able to actually "find" any of them in real life. So I started looking again and amazingly found a son of a son of a son of James Houston Brookshire, the eldest child of William and Sarah.
Even better, I discovered that this 4th cousin of mine is on Facebook.
Eureka!
After messaging back and forth a few times, I told my new favorite 4th cousin about the sale that FTDNA is running on DNA testing and he agreed to YDNA testing. I am SO hoping his DNA will tell us which of the brothers we descend from, although the BROOKSHIRE group at FTDNA apparently only has 10 test results.
Hope springs eternal.

SNGF: The Rivers of our Ancestors

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver of Geneamusings is a particularly fun one for me, as a geographer.

This week, your Saturday Night Genealogy Fun mission is to make a map using the National Atlas map (at http://nationalatlas.gov/streamer/Streamer/streamer.html) showing the downstream course of a river that one of your ancestors may have traveled on.  What does it tell you?  What did you learn?  Did they live at other places on that river, or downstream of that river?  

Tell us about it in a blog post of your own (please show us the map you created - use an image snipping tool or take a screen shot), or make a comment here on this post, or write a Facebook status or a Google+ stream post.  

As I commented on Randy's blog post about the Streamer maps yesterday, I have some tangential ancestors in my SWICEGOOD line who went out to the California goldfields to get rich in 1850. According to one source,

“William Crutsinger and a company of sixteen left Knoxville April 3, 1850, on the riverboat Ellen White to make the cross-country journey from Independence to California. The group was made up primarily of men from “the upper counties of East Tennessee.” They reached the gold fields by the middle of August 1850 where their presence was reported August 23 by J. S. Wall of Kingsport who had arrived by sea about a month before. No account of their crossing has been discovered.” [1]

I’ve tried in the past to figure out what route that riverboat might have taken, but have not been successful. Streamer shows me that the Tennessee River, which flows through Knoxville, flows into the Ohio River at Paducah, KY, which then joins the Mississippi River at Cairo, IL. A riverboat could then chug upstream on the Mississippi to St. Louis, connecting to the Missouri River to near Independence.

 

Quite a trip!

---

[1] Durham, Walter T. Volunteer Forthy-Niners, Tennesseans and the California Gold Rush. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville and London, 1997, page 105.

 

Fraternal/Social Organizations: What were our ancestors up to?

One of the things I do for the Seattle Genealogical Society (SGS) is attempt to raise a little money by posting some of our extra books (duplicates and books that don't fit into our library collection on Ebay.

I brought another box home from SGS the other day and started working through it. Last night I came across this amazing book. It's relatively large (10.5" x 12.5") in format, but only contains about 60 pages. It's a hardback and the decorative strip on the front is embroidery, with every centimeter of that strip covered with thread.

The only text and only black-and-white pages are the title page and what would normally be the table of contents. In this case, it's a list of attendees and invitees to a single event--the 43rd annual Ranch Meeting of the Conquistadores del Cielo in September 1980 at the A Bar A ranch near Jackson, Wyoming. Most of the book's 60 pages are covered with color photos of wealthy men connected to the aerospace industry in some way having a good time. They're shown arriving on their private planes, dining, golfing, playing tennis, skeet shooting, fishing, ..... you get the idea.

As it turns out, the Conquistadores del Cielo--the Conquerors of the Sky--is a very exclusive fraternity (at least in 1980 they were all men; hopefully it's been integrated by now) of the most prominent leaders in the global aviation industry, including heads of the largest airlines and aircraft/power plant manufacturers. They've been meeting since 1938, and are apparently still active. The affiliations are not listed for the members, but the invited guests for the 1980 ranch meeting included executives from Eastern Airlines, General Dynamics Corp., British Caledonian Airlines, Douglas Aircraft Corp., Hughes Aircraft Corp., Rockwell International, American Airlines, United Technologies, Boeing, Canadair, Pratt & Whitney, Gulfstream, and TigerAir. There are apparently multiple levels of membership, as some are listed as "ranch members" and some as "fiesta members", plus a few (3) life members. Officers and Directors are listed. The only names I recognize are T. A. Wilson, former chairman of Boeing, Bob Crandall, chairman of American Airlines, and Neil Armstrong, astronaut. I'm sure aerospace enthusiasts would recognize many more names. If you're interested, they're all included in our eBay listing here.

Posting this book got me thinking. What organizations did my ancestors belong to? What role did these organizations play in their lives? How can I find out what groups they affiliated with? I do have a couple of membership cards in my ephermera collection. I've got my great-grandfather Brookshire's membership certificate in Blendville Lodge 573, Independent Order of Oddfellows, from 1913. And I've got a small red membership/dues card for my great-great-grandfather Collins from the Communist Party in Galata, MT, showing dues paid through 1913. Unfortunately, I've had no luck learning more about the latter, but it sure is intriguing. I know from newspaper accounts that my maternal grandmother was active in several "social clubs" in Weaubleau, MO, in the 1920s and 1930s, but they don't seem to have been formally chartered organizations. To fill out my ancestors' FAN clubs (friends-associates-neighbors) it certainly would be nice to know what social clubs they belonged to. Anybody have any ideas about how to find membership lists for such groups? If so, please post a comment.

SNGF: Database Stats

This week Randy Seavers of the Geneamusings blog has challenged us with the following tasks:

1)If you have your family tree research in a Genealogy Management Program (GMP), whether a computer software program or an online family tree, figure out how many persons, places, sources, etc. are in your database (hint:  the Help button is your friend!)
2)  Tell us which GMP you use, and how many persons, places, sources, etc. are in your database(s) today in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook status or Google+ stream comment.

This was more easily said than done for me, since (1) I don't have all of my families in a single tree and (2) I'm still using an older version of Family Tree Maker (2009). I could not find the number of places (just the number of unresolved places) nor the number of sources (just the number of source groups).

What I was able to generate for my THREE family files is shown below.

                                 SWICEGOOD                  SHARP              SOMMARSTROM
                           (my maternal lines)   (my paternal lines)    (husband's lines)
People                       14,684                           2,014                    1,855
Marriages                     4,868                             734                       558
Generations                      14                               14                        11
Surnames                     2,485                             593                       417
Source groups                 596                             156                           9 (?)  

Is there any doubt as to where I spend my research time?
It could have something to do with the fact that I have NEVER met ANYONE on my father's side of the family and that nobody in my husband's family has shown any interest in family history. On the other hand, I regularly correspond with a number of cousins on my mother's side (from 1st to 5th!) and several of them keep asking me questions about truly tangential lines (for me).

SNGF: Remembering Dad on Fathers' Day

Randy at Genea-Musings has given us this challenge this Father's Day weekend ================================================================
Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to:
1)  Sunday, 16 June, is Father's Day.  Let's celebrate by writing a blog post about our Father, or another significant male ancestor (e.g., a grandfather).
2)  What are three things about your father (or significant male ancestor) that you vividly remember about him?
3)  Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status or Google+ Stream post.

================================================================

Curt and Nancy Sharp ca. 1977

This is my Dad as I remember him, except for the suit and tie! I only remember seeing him in a tie ONE time after he retired from the Army in 1957.

Alva Curtis Sharp was born on Halloween in 1917 and died in September 1978, seven weeks short of his 61st birthday. One of the most important things about my Dad is that he never had any contact with his family after he ran off and joined the Army in 1925. And he was adamant that he didn't want any of his kids (meaning me) researching his family history. After his early death from cardiac arrest, my Mother continued that policy and would not listen to any of my findings about his family. In fact, it wasn't until after she died in 1996 that I learned his family had been in contact in 1979 and a brother had even come to meet her. Ah, the secrets we hide.....




My Dad was incredibly smart and, when he decided to take up a new hobby, did it whole-heartedly. In the early 1950s that hobby was photography. In the later 1950s and 60s, it was woodworking. He built much of our family's furniture. In the late 1960s he got into golf. In the 1970s he took up needlepoint. Thankfully, we have many mementos from his various hobbies.

My Dad was also very athletic. Neither of his sons had any interest in sports, but I did. He taught me how to pitch and hit and tried to sneak me into Little League as a kid (girls weren't allowed then). He was a semi-pro bowler at one time and supposedly made quite a lot of money hustling bowlers. He'd bowl right-handed until he hooked some poor guy, then switch to his natural left-handed style. He taught me to bowl starting when I was about 8 or 9 and insisted that I do it "right." That instruction finally paid off when we got Wii Bowling a few years ago; impressed the heck out of our kids that I could pick up spares! I spent hundreds of hours with my Dad at the local bowling alley, either be instructed, bowling in youth leagues that he ran, or keeping score for him, sometimes even in league play.


SNGF: Genealogy fun this week?

Since Randy Seaver, the originator of Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, is having too much fun at the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree this week, he posed the simple question in the title of this post as this week's SNGF challenge. Given how much truly useful and informative genealogy-related information Randy posts each week, I'm not complaining.
But as for genealogy fun this week, I don't have much to report.
As I write this I'm listening to the start of Jean Wilcox Hibben's presentation on "Creating Stories from Stats" at Jamboree via LiveStream. I can't thank SCGS enough for making some of their live presentations available to those of us who couldn't make it to Jamboree this year. I also watched/listened to Judy Russell yesterday and Craig Scott this morning. Both were great presentations and I'm hoping Jean's is equally as good.
Other than listening to these presentations, I haven't done much genealogy this week. I had a good time volunteering as the desk volunteer at the Seattle Genealogical Society Library yesterday. Several people came in (thank Goodness!) and I was able to steer them to some potential resources. Amazingly, the first person who came in--purportedly to renew his SGS membership--had Danish ancestors who settled in Hudson, Wisconsin. This was a Hank Jones serendipity moment. Our good friends from Hudson are arriving here on Tuesday for a short visit. Anyway, I was able to read some of his Danish and suggest some resources he hadn't tried to find out more about them. I also offered to check for records the next time we're in Hudson, probably this fall.
Unfortunately, I haven't made any progress on my own research this week. I did some dabbling in my COLLINS line and requested help from a friend, but that's about it.
Time to concentrate on Jean's talk.