My mother was not exactly forthcoming about her family's history; I do know that there were some bad feelings between some of the siblings, but I haven't yet learned who was involved, what happended, etc. She and her closest siblings are now all gone, and it is likely that I'll never know the entire story. I have some older cousins left who may be able to shed some light... But one of them has already said that she had no idea why our mothers kept the family history such a secret. It is fairly obvious that there is at least one skeleton in the closet. In the early 20th century this might have been the way to deal with it, but today, it almost makes me mad that there were family members that I never even knew about. Family members who could have told me sweet stories about my mother's childhood. Family members who could have introduced me to their own expanding families. I have first cousins who were adults when I was but a child.
However, I have been doing some geneology work on the Starbuck side of my family and have successfully linked to the Massachusetts Starbucks. I was close to accomplishing this in 2004, but was at least 1 generation away. As it turned out, I was 3 generations away. In Dec. 2011, I made some discoveries in the Starbucks which pulled it all together for proving to me that we were actually related to them. Mom had told Aunt Marilyn that she had plenty of relatives in Nantucket, but she provided no data to back it. I was sooo close in making the connection, and it wasn't until I went to the brother of one of direct ancestors that I was able to make that final connection. Old census records had bad information, stating that this one Starbuck ancestor was from North Carolina. Had that been true, then there was no link to Massachusetts. But I found one record listing a brother, and the brother listed the birthplace as Massachusetts, and he was younger than my ancestor. What I think has happened is that, because my family has a long lineage of farmers, the man was in the field when the census takers came. Knowing that their mom was from North Carolina, they assumed that their father was too, since he and their mother had wed there. Therefore, the story of him being from NC was perpetuated. There are too many Federal Census records with the same people listed for this not to be so.
I had heard the story that Mom was one of 10, comprised of His, Hers, and Ours, and that her sisters Anna and Beatrice were her only full siblings. Well, as it turns out there is some truth in the foregoing statements, but not the entire truth. Mom's father was married to another woman, and had 3 children by her. So that is the His Kids. He then married Mom's mother and they had 7 kids together. This means Mom had 7 full siblings and 3 half siblings. That gives the 10 kids. But there is no Hers kids, so that much of what I'd heard was wrong- or at least, it is wrong with what I've been able to find out so far. Stranger things have happened in geneology searches... I asked my brother about it, and he'd never heard that story. But he also had no clue that Mom had 9 siblings with 4 of them half-siblings).
We used to have Thanksgiving meals with some of Mom's relatives, but I always thought that Anna was her half sister. That part is false; Anna is her half-brother's wife, not Mom's half-sister. I'd also been told, or at least understood, that Mom's half-sister-in law Anna (wife of Earl) was older than Dad's mother. That doesn't seem to bear out as well. I don't know why we stopped going to Camden, or why we never had them to our house for holidays. Of course there were zero cousins and half-cousins my age; they were all several years older, so the visits were very boring to me. BORING!!! But I was probably 8 or 10 years old, so that was not exactly an outcome which should have been expected. After all, this half-brother was an adult when Mom was born...
I had started a trace on Mom's mother's side of the family, but hit a brick wall because I didn't know where her mother haled from lineage wise. I made an erroneous assumption that my brother and maternal cousins nearest me in age would be as ignorant as I was about the family, but in talking with them I have learned differently.
They have memories of Mom's parents and their elder cousins. Even after 60 some years after my mother's mother died, we are still finding out things about her that we didn't know. What a shame that I didn't get in to genealogy long before this; family members with knowledge are nearly non-existant, and so I try to gather as much data as I can, to be added to the family history. Even if I am unable to complete the job myself, there will be amble information for someone else to take up the challenge and finish the job.
Mercy, with birth records being what they are from the 1800s, it is a wonder that anyone can find out. There are alternate birth years, usually one or two years on either side of what I've already found, and that is to be expected. We have to rely on the memory of someone other than the ancestor in most cases. Birth dates were not so important even a hundred years ago, let alone two hundred or more. Sometimes a child would have no idea of when he/she was born simply because it didn't matter to the parents. It was, after all, the mother who imparted family history to her children, and with the fact that women often had 8 to 13 children, they didn't all have time to sit down and tell their offspring about the family. Survival was the name of the game. The present was what counted, not what went before. As for families being recorded in government records, well, if you didn't own property, you were a non-entity when it came to most records. Church records were the most common sources of family members, here in North America as well as in Europe. Were you fortunate enough to be from a well-to-do family, there would be housekeeping records and journals and letters, newspapers. Court houses and churches burn. State government building are destroyed by nature. Hospitals are damaged by storms, or merge with other hospitals, and records are lost or not considered relevant. I just found out that the 1890 Federal Census was burned, and there are but a few scraps left. Think of it - thousands and thousands of recorded lives no longer can be examined. The only way to find things from 1890 is to look at the state level census. Towns die and disappear and so do records of people living there. But so long as there is the internet, or whatever will someday replace it, the records of our lives won't be lost. I'm going all optimistic here and saying that we are not going to destroy ourselves, and that Dec. 21, 2012 is not going to be the end of the world -or at least the world as we know it. Our records will go on and on.
On thing which I have noticed is that not everyone maintains their online family records in the way that they should. A case in point is one family member I located who had multiple birth places, radically different birth dates, and multiple places of death. This person, according the family record I was purusing, was also married at least 4 times, a couple of times to different women at the same time. When these smoking guns were located, it required a significant amount of delving in to all these alternate records to locate which ones were relevant and which ones were not. What I assume happened was that they person researching her family tree found several people with the same first and last name in the same state. She added all records with no regard that there were at least 3 different people involved. She may have been in too big a hurry to realize that there were problems with all the information or was inexperienced enough not to know to really look at the data and figure out which sources were valid and which were irrelevant. I was able to locate my relative
in the midst of this chaos, and made certain that any incorrect records I had imported from this source were cleansed so that maybe someone else tracing down this family member might find the real deal. As good as Ancestry.com is when trying to find family members, people can and do enter invalid information which in turn sends those who come after looking up the wrong trees in the forest of family history.
We always want to connect to the past, and these electronic and digital records will continue to provide this connection. I don't and will not have any children who will carry on my side of the family. I'll just be the sibling of Eaton family member who has sent his genes forward - 3 generations worth now. But not being anyones direct ancestor is OK with me. I enjoy being the one who is taking up the challenge and linking all of us to our pasts.
No comments:
Post a Comment