Up a Tree

 The particular genealogy site I'm using for these posts displays some thumbnail pictures beside the names of ancestors on the tree. These are taken from pictures that family researchers have uploaded to the site, and I've learned that sometimes the person so honored will have accomplished some interesting achievement. It's certainly far from foolproof, but as I was climbing up my wife's side of the tree and not finding much material, I ran across a picture of a cabin or barn or some such. Whoever loaded this picture included no information about it. Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say it's located somewhere in Maryland, where the relative in question, Cornelius Shehane Sr., was interred. (I worked briefly at a funeral home while in college where I learned that particular bit of verbal camoflage.) I looked at the other items attached to his record and read this bit of information: Cornelius Shehane came from Ireland in 1678 via Barbados as an indentured servant. W...

 I began idly clicking one day through the section of our family tree that branches off from Sharon's father and ran across an entry that was accompanied by the picture, below right,  of a postcard stamp honoring the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. As best as I can tell, the USPS issued the stamp to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle. I showed Sharon the picture, and because it showed up on the tree entry of one her ancestors, Capt. John Weir, mistakenly assumed that he was the soldier pictured. Once I began reading about the battle, I understood that he was not the soldier pictured. Still, I had to look up the battle, as I don't recall having ever heard of it before. This is not surprising because I've read little about the Revolutionary War, and if my school texts mentioned the battle, I either missed it or completely forgot about it. The National Parks Service administers a national military park in South Carolina at the site of the battle and and its website sta...

 This week we switch over to my wife's, Sharon's, side of the family. As I learned after I married into the Reagan-Lackey-Womble clan, you could go just about anywhere in Texas and wind up finding someone she was related to. This is natural, considering many people in the southern and southeastern states seemed to have followed at least the second half of the Davy Crockett quote and headed for Texas in the 1800s. And a quick glance at Sharon's side of the tree shows a number of relatives who started out in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. And though it's not a southern state, many came from Missouri. If you ask Google where most of the immigrants to Texas came from in the 1820s, it will tell you, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.  In the early part of the century, many of these immigrants came to the state either by traveling the Mississippi River, presumably exiting in one of the states to the east and then heading our direction, or by the "Old San...

We looked at the origins of a national immigration policy in the last post. In case you didn't notice, nothing was said about how these immigrants became citizens.  Ellis Island, early 1900s This would be because state courts had jurisdiction over the naturalization process. Until national legislation was passed in 1906, as many as 5,000 courts across the existing 45 states. Not surprisingly, no standard procedures governed these courts. Even the oath new citizens took varied by court, from a simple statement rejecting the old country and pledging fealty to the U.S. to an oath using a list of promises contained in immigration. The legislation of 1906 established a bureau of naturalization, which over the years was part of the immigration bureau and a stand-alone department until well into the 20th century, when the departments were permanently joined. The scope of the Immigration and Naturalization Service has evolved to meet the changing needs of the nation, often in response to h...

 The recent discussions of current immigration policies and difficulties often prompted some people to trot out the now familiar phrase that titles this blog. This statement sometimes prompts the counter claim that we need to exclude indigenous Americans, who occupied the land when the first European settlers began arriving on our shores, dating all the way back to the Vikings. But if you go far enough back in human history, the likelihood is that none of the indigenous peoples of America, including those in the separated states of Alaska and Hawaii and those in American territories are actually from here. They just occupied the land for a lot longer than Europeans.  My paternal grandmother, Amalie, came here from Germany in 1912 and is the only one of my immediate ancestors with the documentation to show that.  What were the immigration laws of the time? What hoops did she have to jump through? Immigration in America is more of a journey than an event, though we can poin...

 I have no ties at all, that I know of , to the famous town of the Bard, but as I mentioned in my last post my maternal grandfather was probably born in Stratford, Ontario.  The town was founded in 1831 by William Sergeant and was originally called Little Thames. Some years  later the name changed to Stratford, and it was incorporated as a village in 1854. The river that flowed through it was called the Thames, but at some point the parts of the river flowing through the town was changed to the Avon.  I remember having a nurse from Canada and told her where my grandfather was born, noting that my mother had a habit of calling the town Stratford on Avon. She gave me a funny look, and I hastened to explain that, of course, I knew that would be the down in England. I guess she didn't know anymore than I did at the time about the town's having messed with the name of the river.  As would befit the town name, a Shakespeare festival began in 1953, with Sir Alec Guinne...

Let me just say that dealing with genealogy can be frustrating. Case in point, where in the world is my maternal grandfather from? I have documents that say he was born in Ontario. I remember seeing a document that specifically placed his birth in Stratford, Ontario, but I cannot find that information in the documents I have scanned. My mother often said the same thing, and at one point she and Dad took a vacation to the town so she could see it.  In other documents that I have, Gramp's place of birth is listed as Chicago. A census document listing him reports that his father was English but doesn't give the father's name. Canada was not independent from England when he was born. The country was formally established in 1867, four years before my grandfather's birth, creating four provinces from what had been three colonies, Canada, Newfoundland and New Brunswick. Canada was split in two to form the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.  Had great-grandfather lived in one of ...