Grandma's Granny's Family Album

 How much do you believe genealogy can really go back?  To arrival from the Old Country?  Knights of the Middle Ages?  Charlemagne in 800 AD?  Adam and Eve? (see West and Presbury-Mayflower Pedigree Charts) Here's a fact that gives me chills every time I mention it.  My children are descended from Moses's brother Aaron on their paternal line.  Yes, that Moses.  DNA testing shows that they belong to paternal genetic haplogroup J-1.  Kohanim, members of a special hereditary priest class of Jews that is passed down from father to son, have J-1 haplotype.  (this data is constantly being refined).  Kohanim believe that they are all descendants of Aaron.   A DNA study of kohanim around the world, the US, Israel, Europe, South America, found that over 90% of kohanim Jews are descended from one man .  That man lived 3000 years ago.  Aaron. the Domesday Book Kohanim aside, genealogy is difficult if you are not of English ...

If you know any Spences,   (see Spence & Robertson Pedigree Charts),  you know that they keep EVERYTHING.  Broken and whole. Expired and from before expiration dates existed. Ball gowns and fabric scraps. Canceled checks and World War II bonds.    Eastern Star keepsakes, 1953   You never know if you are going to find cash between the china, so you have to examine  ev.  er.  y.  th.  ing.  They know what they have and where it is, which is useless to us once they have died.  My mother claimed there was a radio cabinet, now antique, in the cellar; I never saw the walls of the cellar, much less any furniture.  My grandmother periodically declared, "We have boxes we've never unpacked [in 40 years] that we brought from Valley Stream" (their previous house). When we emptied my mother's 4-bedroom house with its full basement and 2-car garage,  it contained the possessions of 6 adult lives:  besides my parents,...

 Urggghhh! The assistant historian has sent all my information in to the Mayflower Society historian in Virginia, and he has determined that I do not have enough proof.  The generations without the proof, you will remember, are that Hannah Susan West Rushton is the daughter of Levi West, AND that Levi West is the son of Samuel West. (see West Pedigree Chart) Neither Susan nor Levi have any birth record, baptismal record, or marriage record, where you could expect to find parents listed.  Levi doesn't even have a death record, and Susan's does not give her parents' names. Lots 15 and 16, River Philip We still have leads, which is to look in the Township Books for where these events took place, and hope that they are mentioned.  The Township Book of River Philip is the one I really want to see - that's where Levi may have been married and had children, and where Susan was married.  The Westchester Book sounds promising also. As I said in my August 19 2020 post abo...

At what age do you feel comfortable sending your child off into the unknown alone, on a trip far away from home?   When I sent my children on a plane to see their grandmother, there were 3 of them, ages 9 to 16, and they had a familiar adult picking them up on each end, yet I had some friends who wouldn't dream of sending their children anywhere without them.  And when my 16-year-old lost his bus ticket and had to spend the night in LaGuardia New York City Airport, I was on the phone with an agent booking him a new flight. 100 years ago, with no cell phones or planes, few telephones in houses, at what age would you send a girl to a foreign country a day's train ride away?  To live with strangers?  16?  What if there was a known sex trafficking ring operating in the area?  25?  I annoyed my daughter with frequent travel admonitions when she was criss-crossing Virginia during the time that a murderer was kidnapping college students. Bessie Spence Ro...

Springhill, Nova Scotia This stylish couple is my mother, Anne Robertson Sulzbach, and her cousin, Harmon Spence Jr.  (see Spence Pedigree Chart) They are both 29 in this picture.  They were always close because they were the same age, and when you have 12 kids in the family, even a year makes a difference. They are on their way to a New Year's Eve dance in, I forget, Parrsboro?  Amherst?  My mother used to tell me about these dances and I always felt left out that I couldn't go.  This was, of course, 15 years before I was born. The big story was the moose.  One night, driving home from the dance on the dark wooded road, you can see how high the snow is piled, they saw a creature in the woods beside them.   "Look, a deer!"  said my mother. "That's no deer," said Junior.  "That's a moose!" The moose took an interest in them and decided to accompany them home.  As a kid, I didn't understand the significance of this - I knew that moose...

 All the stars aligned for a lovely Christmas present for me.  (see West-Presbury Pedigree chart)  Look at these gorgeous family trees from the Library of Virginia!  Above is the Fisher Family and below is the Carter Family.  The Carters are the most important family of Virginia, above the Lees and the Washingtons. A visual representation of how the Fischer/Fisher family split, with literally one branch staying in Germany and the other coming to America. All the tiny names. Having tried to lay out charts in perspective, I cannot imagine the hours it took to figure out space for each descendant in accurate place. It may look like a weeping willow, but all those leaves are names of children, divided, and sub-divided, and sub-divided again. As you can see, I spent a wonderful vacation day at the Library of Virginia drinking in their genealogy section and absorbing the march of women's suffrage in Virginia.  After going thru the parking garage, validated tick...

 Unbelievably, things seem to be progressing. For the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower's arrival, the Society has put its members' applications online, so if you want to apply, you should first look to see if anyone in your family already has.  Then, say, if someone has already proved descent down to, say, your great-grandmother, all you have to do is prove your descent from your great-grandmother. (see West and Presbury-Mayflower Pedigree charts)  Plimoth Patuxet Museum, 2019 The Mayflower Descendants Through Five Generations , known as the Silver Books, document from passenger Richard Warren to his great-great-granddaughter Mary Presbury and her husband Thomas West.  Since they lived in the early 1700s, surely some of their descendants have applied.  Their oldest child, William West, is well-documented in many records, from his birth on Martha's Vineyard to his immigration to Nova Scotia to being a founding father in Kings County.  Since William and his...

 Two years ago, when we could all still travel, I went to Kings County Nova Scotia very excited.   I intended to find a treasure chest of genealogical info, fairly quickly and easily.  For 20 years, we had all been wondering if Hannah Susan West Rushton had been born in Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island, and if in Nova Scotia, where? and if in PEI, why? (see West Pedigree chart)  The West name and the Scholfield (Susan's mother) name were very popular in Kings County.  I had previously found online a wonderful book called A History of King's County, Nova Scotia, Heart of the Acadian Land, Giving... the title is so long that no one even knows the whole thing.  It was written by A. W. H. Eaton in 1910, in that romantic scholarly language of noble souls and stout hearts that historians used 100 years ago.  I have ordered it and it is currently en route to my house for some indulgent Christmas reading. So I happily entered the Kings County Museum i...

 Desperate times call for desperate measures...... We don't have any proof that Levi West is the father of Hannah Susan West Rushton, so we have to get creative.  But will all that creativity pass the proof test? (see West Pedigree chart) Levi and the woman who I creatively believe is his wife, Pheby Scholfield West, do have a lot of kids, and all those kids have better records than Susan does.  (except Aaron, his are worse). I started off thinking that Susan only has 2 siblings, Aaron and Harding, who are 6 and 23 years younger than she is.  Very odd.  Odd for a family to only have 3 kids.  A 23-year spread between oldest and youngest is pretty wide, but not that unusual for the time.  What is strange is if Harding is 17 years younger than the second-youngest child.   Harding West, born in Pugwash, father Levi West born in Pugwash, mother unknown I feel better when I find Levi West living with Nathan West, who is most likely -No Proof!- his ...