#52ancestors #clintonco

52 Ancestors – Week 8 – I Can Identify

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Plugging along with the 52 Ancestors prompts so I can be caught up and work on putting some other things out into the universe and work on them. The prompt for week 8 is I can identify. Many different takes can be taken on this prompt. I am blessed that my Grandma started our family tree back in the day when things were done in person and letters via snail mail.

My Grandma is the reason I am so interested in family history, I have very fond memories of traipsing around cemeteries as pre-teen and teenager with my Grandma and Grandpa.

Picture of my Grandparents, Earl and Frances (Stewart) Witherwax.

So for the topic “I Can Identify”, I decided to highlight a couple of my favorite finds from over the years.

  1. When I identified that my 2x Great Grandmother Sarah Larkin Beardsley was indeed a doctor. This was found via a google search. She attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

2. Finding the passenger list of my Moro Family coming over from Italy in 1880. When I first found this record. I did not realize that the Chiara listed there was my 2x Great Grandmother.

3. Another favorite find of mine is the marriage registration of my 2x-Great Grandparents. Michaelangelo Moro and Chiara Ludivico in Italy. I am hoping to find more Italian records because every time I find one it is always a sense of accomplishment, especially since I can’t read, write or speak Italian.

Michaelangelo Moro and Chiara Ludivico were married in 1872 in Lentella, Italy.

4. Another fun find was my second Daughters of the American Revolution Patriot. Bezaleel Wood. After I joined the DAR back in 2016 through my original patriot Lorin Nehemiah Larkin. I joined a bunch of different Facebook groups pertaining to the DAR and in one of these groups a member said look at lines right near the patriot. So I looked at Lorin Larkin’s Wife Christiana Cutler and couldn’t prove her father so I looked at wife of his son John. John’s wife is a woman named Sarah Wood. Sarah’s father is Bezaleel Wood my 5x great-grandfather on my grandpa’s line.

This is Bezaleel Wood’s information in the DAR Database.

5. My last favorite find is anything on my husbands tree. Everything on this is fun because I am totally flying blind with no one to ask questions of. So when I am able to find records that confirm my findings or hunches I am totally ecstatic.

It is also probably a reason that I enjoy using ThruLines at Ancestry as an additional hint because I know there is a connection somewhere due to the DNA and it gives me a starting point to figure out where the connection is in the documents.

I hope you enjoyed my take on the prompt I Can Identify, until next time.

52 Ancestors – Week 6 – Social Media

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Yep another post today. This one is for week 6 of the 52 Ancestors challenge being hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. The topic is social media.

Social Media is a great tool to use in genealogy and I love connecting with family. Those of you who have been following for a while know that I love the <a href="http://&lt;!– wp:paragraph –> <p>Social Media is a great tool to use in genealogy and I love connecting with family. Those of you who have been following for a while know that I love the </p> NYS Historical Newspaper website. I have discovered so much about my ancestors and newspapers were an integral part of life back in the day.

I have discovered so many vital facts about my family from where my great grandparents were married in 1890.

to this query looking for the siblings of Jassiel Preston. I need to remember to look into this query and see what I can find out even if it is from the 1920s.

to this week finding the obituaries for my 2X Great Grandmother Ella Mayo Stewart. This first one appeared in the Plattsburgh Papers.

This second one is the obituary that appeared in the Massena, NY paper in the neighboring county where she actually died and is much more in depth.

I have been trying to break down the brick wall of who were the parents of Ella’s mother Jane A. West? I will break down my hypothesis in a future post. I think DNA is going to be crucial in deducting this so I am going to have to figure it out.

So back in the day, newspapers were the Facebook of the time. Also you can always hit me up on my social media if you want to connect.

52 Ancestors – Week 5 – Ooops

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The prompt for week 5 is Ooops. This Ooops can be a variety of things, maybe an oops you made or an oops an ancestor made. It is wide open to interpretation and to be honest I currently have Brittany Spears singing in my head Ooops I did it again.

It took me the longest time to figure out this one and the direction I wanted to go in but I figured this would be a good time to talk about the 2 men named Beverly Beardsley I have in my tree. They are father and son. They are also combined in ancestry trees to make a huge mess but it is slowly being rectified.

Beverly Beardsley (1770-1815) my 4x Great Grandfather and Beverly Beardsley (1815-1898) my 3x Great Grandfather. My 3x Great Grandfather was born 17 February 1815 in Chesterfield Essex County, NY to Beverly Beardsley and Ada Curtis, he was the youngest of their 5 children.

I was able to piece together this tree using the probate books online at Family Search for Beverly Beardsley who died in April 1815 in Chesterfield, Essex County, NY. I need to get my hands on copies of the original file because I see the letters appointing guardianship to all the children except their oldest daughter who was married already. I would like to know what happened to his wife Ada and anything I can piece together to get another generation back. It is one of the reasons I love wills and deeds because it can really bring the person to life a bit.

Here are some records I stumbled upon that drive me nuts because you create if a mess if you do not evaluate dates. One of the tools I do like to use on Ancestry is the notes and tags because I do put things in my tree that I have a hunch on and DNA hints but am trying to get further back.

This is a Geneanet hint that I found a on Ancestry today.

Ada Curtiss is my 3x Great Grandmother. Wife of Beverly Beardsley who DIED in 1815. Child Ada Curtis Beardsley is his daughter who married Asher Stevens. Everyone else on this belongs to Betsy Blake.

Beverly Beardsley my 3X great grandfather married Minerva Winchester who died in 1843. Betsey Blake was his second wife who I believe he married because he had 3 small children. Leslie Winchester Beardsley, my 2x Great Grandfather, his brother George Curtis Beardsley and Maria Helena Beardsley Weston.

This is the Geneanet page that the Ancestry tree takes you to and it stresses me out to look at because it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Evaluation and reason come into play when sourcing your tree especially with people of the same name.

So be careful in perpetuating Ooopses.

52 Ancestors – Week 3 – Favorite Photo

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This week in the 52 Ancestors Challenge hosted by Amy Johnson Crow, the topic is favorite photo and WOW it is a tough one. I can’t pick just one so here are a couple of my favorites.

The first is of my husband’s great grandfather, Henry Bass. Henry was a bit of a scoundrel and not much is known about him. I am hoping with the release of the upcoming 1950 census I can fill the picture out a bit more.

Henry Morrissey Bass picture courtesy of Ancestry.com

The next photo is of my favorite ancestor Sarah Larkin Beardsley, MD.

Circa 1880

Sarah Larkin Beardsley is my 2X Great Grandmother on my maternal Grandfather’s line. I joined the DAR through Sarah’s Grandfather Lorin Nehemiah Larkin. The stories she could tell and the trails she blazed by becoming a doctor in the 1880s.

My Mom is currently getting a bunch of family photos from a family member so it will be awesome to see what she gets.

52 Ancestors – Week 2 – Favorite Find

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This week in the 52 Ancestors Challenge hosted by Amy Johnson Crow, the topic is favorite find. To this date I think my favorite find is about my 2x Great Grandmother, Sarah Larkin Beardsley. Sarah was born in Clintonville, Clinton County, NY in 1847 and sadly she died in April 1886 but she is truly a remarkable woman. Now let’s get back to the find.

I discovered a blurb about Sarah being inducted into the Michigan Medical Society in 1884 that means she had to be a doctor. So there was more research and let’s look at the 1880 Census for Ann Arbor Michigan.

On this 1880 Census we find Sarah with her husband Lesley Beardsley and she is listed as a Student.

On Google Books I found the Calendar for the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and listed inside is Sarah A. Beardsley as a 3rd year student.

from the 1880-81 Calendar for the University of Michigan.

Another search of Google Books yielded the In Memoriam Page for the Michigan State Medical Society, where Sarah is listed as deceased.

Sarah died in Valley Falls, New York in April 1886 of tuberculosis. I have found numerous articles about her in the New York newspapers for Clinton and Essex County to this date she fascinates me.

I also have a new favorite find. I have been trying to find out a death date for my husband’s 2X Great-Grandmother, a woman named Bertha Maier Brucks. Bertha was born in approximately 1863 in Germany. She emigrated to the United States and in 1887 she married Robert Brucks who also was a German immigrant. Robert died in 1916 in Chicago, Illinois.

After Robert died the family left the Chicago area after the 1930 census, I know that two of the daughters settled in the Washington DC area. Daughter Charlotte was a gifted pianist and attended Julliard and daughter Helen settled in Maryland.

I found Bertha in a Washington DC City Directory in 1954 but after that I couldn’t find her after that. She was living with her daughter Charlotte.

So this past weekend I decided to run an Ancestry search on Bertha and a new result for Find-A-Grave popped up but I wasn’t sure it was her so I ran her husband Robert and daughter Charlotte. I knew Robert was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Chicago due to an obituary and his death certificate.

So I think this is my new favorite find.

Find A Grave Memorial – Photo Courtesy of MHunt.

This wonderful Find-A-Grave contributor has been going section by section and photographing Rose Hill Cemetery. So now I have a Year of Death for Bertha. So maybe now I will be able to find a death record for her.

So these are my 2 favorite finds.

52 Ancestors- Week 42 – Adventure

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When I think of Adventure, I think of my Grandpa’s sister Olive. Olive Witherwax was born 19 February 1895 in Peru, Clinton County, New York. She was older than my Grandpa by 15 years. Sadly I don’t think my Grandpa new his sister Olive very well as she died when he was 10 years old.

Olive married Henry Rogers in Saratoga Springs in August 1916, she was 21 and he was 29. He was a Railroad Conductor. Olive Witherwax Marriage

Henry Rogers enlisted in the Army during World War I and was sent overseas.’Henry Rogers Transport

In 1919 Olive applied for a passport application to visit Henry in Germany. For a girl originally from rural New York and then a suburb of Schenectady, New York this must of been a grand adventure. I love old passport applications, especially when there is a picture.

Olive Witherwax Rogers made it to Germany to see Henry but sadly passed away on 20 October 1920 in Cobelenz, Germany. Her obituary appeared in The United States Army and Navy Journal and Gazette of the Regular and Volunteer Forces, Volume 58, Part 1.

She is buried in the family plot in the Niskayuna Reformed Church Cemetery in Niskayuna, NY. ANR - 588

Olive and Henry Rogers had no children and it strikes me as tragic that her grand adventure wasn’t really very grand.

52 Ancestors – Week 40 – Harvest

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This was a rough topic as it reminds me how much of our history has been lost. My Weatherwax family were farmers. My grandparents were dairy farmers and lived in Clinton County, the stopped farming full time around the time I was born.

My great-grandfather, Benjamin sold the family farm that had been in the family for about 150 years in the early 20th century but I do not have the whole story and the parts I have heard read like a Greek tragedy so I have yet to research to find the validity of the story. It is on the list of items for another day.

Recently I joined the National Society of American Farmers, this society spoke to me as it is honoring those who have come before us and were the backbone of America. It was the need for fertile land and opportunities that drove so many to cross the ocean to America. Our history is not without tragedies for how we treated those who were here before us but I truly believe we should learn from the past no matter how ugly it can get.

One little memory about my grandparents farm. There was a garden next to the house and it was huge. It had corn, cucumbers, sunflowers and the biggest pumpkins ever. I would say in was in the early 1980s because I remember my uncle still being alive but I just recall walking up and down the rows of the garden and this pumpkin that had to be 50-100 pounds it was like a boulder.

52 Ancestors – Week 39 – Maps

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I will be totally honest here until the past week or so I really did not use many maps in my research. I have recently fell in love with Locality Guides and part of creating a Locality Guide is to show different sources.

Since a lot of my research is in Essex County, NY aka the Black Hole of genealogy in my family, this was the first Locality Guide I created and I came across this gem of a map on the Library of Congress website.

essex county NY historical map

Maps really put things into perspective and make the research a living and breathing organism in my mind. It brings the names to life when I see where they were.

The next locality guide I am going to work on is for Clinton County New York. I have been lazy in these as I feel that since I had been there and did so much research there, I knew everything and you know, what I have discovered some amazing sources.

Here is the Clinton County Map I grabbed from the Library of Congress site but sometimes you can find maps in the county archives or state archives. Somewhere I have a hand drawn map of the land my Weatherwax family owned in Peru and it is fabulous to look at.

Clinton County Historical Map

I am on a research roll lately and am grateful that I discovered the importance of having maps in my research.

52 Ancestors-Week 32 – Sisters

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I could right about several sister sets right now but I am going to go back to my Larkin Line, since I am continually enthralled with my Sarah Larkin Beardsley.

If you remember I started this genealogy hobby with my maternal grandparents and the Larkin family is through my Grandpa. The story goes that Sarah was one of three sisters and the other two were Lucy and Johanna. I have no clue where this story came from and my Grandpa was the youngest child and his mom died when he was fifteen.

So I take up the quest to find out about the sisters and for years it was a dead end. We then stumbled across Lucy Larkin Thompson in Valley Falls. I actually found her because of the DAR Lineage Books but it took us on a research trip and My grandparents and I met a delightful librarian who in turn sent us to either a lawyer or accountant who was Lucy’s paper boy. I seriously wish I could remember the stories he told us about her.

Fast Forward to about 2001 or 2002 when I took genealogy back in full force and I discover a Grandson of Lucy’s but unfortunately he did not have anything to share with me, though he did mention a family story of Lucy having a baby on a train in Jonesville, Michigan. Jonesville was where Sarah practiced medicine.

I did know that Sarah had a sister Julia as she appears on the 1850 census with her and their parents Benjamin Wood Larkin and Ruth Morgan Larkin, in St. Lawrence County, New York.

It wasn’t until quite recently no more than 5 years ago. That I stumbled across this gem from the Minnesota Territorial Census in 1857.

1857 Minnesota Territorial Census for Fillmore County

I was seriously in shock finding this as I really wasn’t sure what happened to Benjamin and I do not have lots of information on him or Ruth. Sadly from this I am kind of thinking Ruth died in childbirth or shortly after the birth of Little Ruth and Benjamin married Margaret right after as George is Margaret’s son.

So now I have all these sister’s to find of Sarah and Lucy and I have no clue really where to look. I do know in 1860 Sarah is living with her grandparents and uncle in New York and last night I did find a FindaGrave entry for sweet little Ruth.

Ruth K. Larkin FindaGrave Memorial.
This is the same cemetery her Larkin Grandparents are buried in.

So once I finish my little project on the children of Emanuel Beardsley. I am thinking these Larkin sisters and what happened to their father Benjamin Larkin may be my next project. I would also love to know where poor Ruth Morgan Larkin is buried.

I feel sorry for these sisters as they were left motherless at quite a young age and then I think they must of been dispersed amongst relatives but that is conjecture on my part but I do this research for the stories I can find out.

52 Ancestors – Week 31- Brothers

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I truly believe that our ancestors reach out to us and speak to us. I have been doing a lot of research on my Beardsley/Curtis Lines.

I have been working on an assignment for ProGen but I am also trying to link back to another Revolutionary War Patriot, Eldad Curtis. It is tough going because after the Revolution these lines moved around a lot. Also so far I have found 3 wives for Eldad.

So when I received an assignment in ProGen to transcribe a will and develop a Research Plan. I decided Emanuel Beardsley would be perfect he is a brother to my Beverly Beardsley and I had done no real research on him. Let’s be honest it took me for ever to sort out the mystery of the Beverley Beardsleys and Ancestry is still full of errors as some trees have him living to be like 120 years old.

Anyway I digress, the theme this week is brothers and I have been a bit obsessed. It all stems from this passage in the History of Clinton and Franklin Counties.

Screen Shot 2019-08-19 at 7.19.35 AM

So this passage has so much information and needs more but it was a huge diving off point for me. I love families that use familial names but also hate it because it creates a mess.

Screen Shot 2019-08-19 at 7.33.26 AM

So I have been studying these families and expanding them in hopes to go back further as you never know who is related. It is also fun to go back and hear names my grandpa talked about. I think this is the branch of the family they went to see as I truly believe his mother Minerva was bounced between these relatives as I never find her anywhere with her parents.

My Beverley Beardsley married and Ada Curtis in Wells Vermont. She was the daughter of Eldad Curtis and Clotilda Weeks or Meeks. Well I also discovered that an Immanuel Beardsley married an Astilda or Clotilda Curtis. So I am trying to piece this all together and I have DNA that shoes a connection but I really want more.

So my project for my research report has been the birth order of Emanuel’s Children named in his will and that has been interesting and has me doing a Deep Dive into DNA and that is not something I am very good at so I am looking for a crash course in it and am very happy for Ancestry ThruLines which is giving me places to go look for traditional research.

So today’s question does anyone have any good DNA webinars for dummies???