Trials and Tribulations of a Family Historian: Hall

Showing posts with label Hall. Show all posts

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Genealogy Packages and Discoveries

The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity on the genealogy front around here. My best day was last Monday when I received two items in the mail. One, a letter from a cousin helping me research my Combs family line, and two, books from my parents. Boy, it was like my birthday at the mailbox ripping open packages. The kids, once again, thought mom had completely gone off her rocker.

In the letter there were two marriage certificates. These certificates are needed to complete the DAR and the GSMD lineage society applications I am still working on. She had to do battle with an unfriendly court clerk to get these, and I am very thankful that she put up with lady to further our research. I am sure I am going to get to do that the next time I get back to Indiana. Oh course, there were a couple of surprising elements to the marriage certificates.

First was the certificate for William Hall and Malira Price. They are my 3^rd great-grandparents who were married in Greene County Indiana on 25 February 1854. It is a short form marriage register, so no good genealogical information for previous generations, but at least I have something for them. From the form I see they received the license on the 23^rd and had the marriage recorded on March 1^st. There isn’t any other information, not even a pastor’s name, but like I said I won’t be complaining.

Next was the certificate of their daughter Mary Margaret Hall. She married Willis Franklin Combs in Greene County on 5 September 1877. I stopped cold in my tracks, because something wasn’t adding up with that date. I read, and re-read, and read a third time. Then I went to look at my information on their oldest son Ira in my database. Ira was born 29 October 1877. Huh, that is interesting. Now I wonder all sorts of things: did they just wait a long time, was this "shot gun", was Ira his son? I could go on and on. Oh a puzzle and a family mystery!

The books were equally exciting, and proof that my parents spoil me. A few weeks back I received two books through inter-library loan that have a significant amount of information on early colonial generations of my family. I talked excitedly over the phone to my dad about it and he found a gently used copy online and bought them for me. I jumped up and down with delight when I opened the package. Tuesday I spent several hours reading and placing tabs in the book for each of the generations to make future look-ups easy. It is going to take me a while to read and digest all the information presented, but boy is t going to be fun. I particularly love that there are footnotes, sources, and a bibliography. If you have any of the following lines check out this 2 volume book set.

It is going to be interesting to read about my ancestors who were from New Amsterdam. I had no idea I had roots to Norway through one family. Or that my family owned property in what is now Manhattan (60 acres…imagine what that would be worth today!). Most unusual, “a husband selling his wife into Adultery”, I can guess what that meant. I foresee several more days of night time reading in my future.

My most common recent ancestor with the author of this book is William Hayden. William was born in Braintree, Massachusetts 5 October 1727 and died in Fayette County, Pennsylvania 18 July 1823. He married Lydia Kierstede who was baptized 14 February 1725 in Staten Island, New York and died 1794-1795 in Hampshire County, Virginia. This is the listing of their ancestor’s surnames that are covered in the book, all of whom are on my father’s side.

Alden

Bass

Dey

photo credit: Bunches and Bits {Karina} via photopin cc

Duyts

Hayden

Holmes

Hyde
Jan

Jansen

Johnson

Laurenszen

Molenaar

Mullin

Neale

Pray

Pullen

Roelofs

Satyrs

Savil

Scott

Stillwell

Webb

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Oral History to the rescue: Next FTF post is up!

My next Family Tree Firsts post is up, so run on over there and check it out.

This was such a neat experience for me. I have begun to fall in love with personal accounts, stories, and biographies as a window into the lives of my family. This was one of those moments that I will never forget; reading the life story of my dad’s great aunt to him over the phone. It was almost surreal at points when he would fill in information for me about where places were and other people mentioned in the manuscript.

As a recap, Eliza Jane Combs was the baby sister to my great-grandfather, Everett Combs. Their parents were Willis Franklin “Frank” Combs and Mary Margaret Hall. Frank and Mary had 9 children who were: Ira, Jennie, Homer, Ada, Everett, John, Margaret, George, and Eliza. Frank's parents were James Combs and Mary Jane Hayden. Eliza married first Everett Emmons and second Otis Kinnman. By the time she gave the interview in 1973 she had done genealogy research for about 20 years the best I can tell.

I have to give my heartfelt thanks to Jill Larson who is a librarian and archivist at the Lewis Historical Library in Vincennes, Indiana. She was great to work with while I was locating this document. The staff and the library is a real gem with so much to offer historians and genealogists who want more information on southern Indiana. Oh, and cheap too! They only charge cost of paper for copies ($0.10 a page!) and mailed it to me with no problems. Check them out!

Finally, I wanted to share with a couple passages from this interview. They really struck me, and made me feel like I was right there with her and my family.

In the summertime and in the fall we would go to fairs and things, but they didn’t have too much going on. We used to get out with our brothers and pitch horse shoes. I still love to pitch horse shoes. It was regular boys’ activites, bit I was a regular tom boy. My brother was four years my senior and we used to just love to climb trees. In the tall cherry trees we had these old fashioned black cherries. I would climb to the top of the tree with him and pick cherries to eat.

When we lived up in the hills – that was when I was a smaller kid of course – it was before I was ten years old. We had an orchard and he only owned 80 acres, but we romped all over that. We made our own sorgum. We had mulberries, chinquapins, beechnuts, and everything else on that old hill.

We didn’t suffer, but I thought that we were dog poor. We didn’t have much money. We raised our own beans and potatoes and dad kept a pretty good herd of calves and cows and he always had a lot of hog running around through the woods. They ate a lot of acorns from the oak trees. My older brother wasn’t married until he was 28 and he had a great big bunch of calves and cows running around there. They didn’t have too much farm ground. I forget just how much my dad did have cleared.

My dad and his dad were mean horse shoe players too. I guess I now know that it is a family obsession! She talked for almost 10 pages about growing up on farms and the life that she had as a child in the country. Priceless information to me.