Up a Tree

Gershom Morse, mentioned in the last post as the grandfather of Gershom Morse Barber, was born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and somehow managed to find his way to what is now Moravia, New York.  Morse built this house in about  1830. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and  is now a bed and breakfast. (This gives me entirely too many relatives from New York, I suppose, but you can't choose your heritage.) The land around there originally belonged to the Algonquin tribe until the 1300s when the Iroquois nations forced the Algonquins, and by the time of the events I'll relate in here was dominated by the Seneca and Cayuga tribes. I'm contemplating a later post discussing these tribes, probably in two weeks. Stay tuned. As an inducement to gain recruits for the Revolutionary War, the state of New York set aside almost two million acres to be awarded to veterans. Many took the offer and settled there, but quite a number decided to sell the land to spe...

This week we continue to look in the rich lineage lode of one of my multi-great grandmother, Orpha Morse. The Battle of Chickamauga Orpha married the Rev. Phineas Morse, and they produced four children, one of whom, Gershom Morse Barber, will be the primary subject of this missive. I have written somewhere else -- a Facebook post, I think -- about looking through photocopies of original documents I have concerning Phineas. Among the items I found was a document showing that his first wife, Orpha,  died and that he subsequently remarried.  One of the documents concerning this second marriage seems to show that he performed the marriage himself, something I wondered about in terms of legality. I subsequently learned that it was and is possible in some states to officiate your own wedding, but ... After I had scanned all the documents about Phineas, I took a last look through them before putting them back in storage. His second wife, Roxana, had applied for a widow's pension base...

The best source of stories that have a least a modicum of a connection to my family come mostly through my mother's line. Her great-great-great grandmother's portion of the tree stretches back through the original American colonies into Great Britain -- mostly England. A number of individuals in this limb participated in the American Revolution, most through militia service but some directly in the Continental Army. I remember when my mother found out my sister was researching our genealogy, she expressed disdain for the exercise because Sis was trying to connect with her father's family. (If this is the only post you've read, my sister and I had different fathers, though mine adopted her after marrying my mother.) I wonder what mum would have thought about this part of the family story. I've mentioned my family connection to the Massachusetts Bay Colony previously. Apparently many of the family members found Massachusetts to be an amenable state and stayed there fo...

 The most fruitful source of information on my family tree flows through my maternal grandmother. The clipper Great Republic All the other lines peter out but not before showing ancestors from Germany and England, which gives me German heritage on both sides of my family. And that makes my Irish heritage rather puny at this point, since I've not found anything on the grandfather who is the primary source of Irishness on my side of the family. I bring this up because I've always been proud of my immigrant heritage because my parents often referred to their parents as immigrants. If you've read any of the early posts in this series, a certain amount of doubt has crept into the origin stories I was told about two of those grandparents, leaving only my German grandmother with solid bonafides as an immigrant -- I even found a listing for her on the Ellis Island website. Imagine, if you can, my surprise in finding that I also have relatives who go back to some of America's fo...

"Bloody" Bill Cunningham appeared briefly in my last post because records show he was responsible William Cunningham for the death of one of Sharon's distant cousins, Dannett Abney, during the American Revolution. I didn't really have space to go into much of his background but wanted to return to his story.  Imagine my surprise when I found that Cunningham had also participated in a battle involving another of Sharon's ancestors, Capt. John Weir, at the Battle of Kings Mountain. (See "Kings of Kings Mountain, published on April 9.) I suppose that shouldn't surprise me, but it was a serendipitous coincidence. Remember that  the Revolution went beyond the war against Britain and was very much a civil war as well, pitting American loyalists, or Tories, against revolutionaries -- Whigs or patriots. Much of Cunningham's involvement, and the worst of his behavior lies in this civil war aspect. Cunningham originally enlisted in a South Carolina Whig militia...

 You sort of have to feel sorry for Georgia. In the War Between the States, aka the Civil War, Georgia became the focus of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who devastatingly marched through the South near the end of the war and set Atlanta on fire.  But I was surprised to find that Georgia featured prominently in the end game of the Revolutionary War as well. Much of the focus at that time fell on Savannah. As I mentioned in the last post, Sharon has relatives who were members of state militias during the Revolutionary Way. Pvt. Michael Abney lies in her direct line of succession, which makes him a great-great-great something or other. Michael appears on a roster of soldiers from South Carolina along with six other Abneys. Given that families back then seemed to love using a sometimes limited number of names, even with large broods of children. I'm pretty sure the men are all related, but I was only able to determine that Michael three brothers with names that appear in the r...

 This picture shows up in a listing for another of Sharon's ancestors, listed on the family tree as Pvt. Michael Abney:  I suspect that whoever put it in the family tree looked around on the internet, found this image, liked it, and decided to associate it with Michael Abney's entry. The image appears to come from an archive hosted by Georgia State University in Atlanta. I managed to find a site called Carolana.com that contains records of regiments that participated in the Revolutionary War, including lists of the soldiers who composed the regiments.  As an aside, Carolana.com's home page contains this bit of historical lore: "In 1629, King Charles I of England "erected into a province" all the land from the Albemarle Sound in the north to the St. John's River in the south, which he directed should be named Carolana. Carolana is from the word Carolus, the Latin form of Charles, and the name he personally selected for his new colony. Carolina is the name ...