Up a Tree

Another one of Sharon's forebears, William Davis, has a small connection to history -- The Trail of Tears. I can't find much about the man, and in fact, the connection comes from a single line in a history of the Cash family written by one of their descendants. The writer noted that Davis drove a supply wagon on the trail.  But the point of most of these posts is to find where our ancestors intersect with history so I, and by extension anyone who reads these little posts, can review historical events we may not know so much about.  Unlike many of the previous posts, I remember learning about the Trail of Tears in my long ago history classes, but my recollections are dim and only tell me that it was about the forced removal of a number of Native American tribes to the West back in the 1800s. I've always connected this with the concept of Manifest Destiny.  The term "Manifest Destiny" was coined by a newspaper editor in 1845, so it has no direct connection with the ...

John Tyler I mentioned in the previous post that one of Sharon's ancestors has a connection with John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States. Family rumor had it that Lucy Tyler Cash was John Tyler's aunt. The evidence for this is sketchy, but the story provides the tie.  I don't know about you, but pretty much the only thing that comes to mind when I think of Tyler is the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." This is probably because, like many people I know, social studies was one of those courses I endured during junior high and high school, and I didn't pay a lot of attention to anything that I didn't think would show up on a test. What I did learn for the test was promptly forgotten. Turns out I should have paid more attention, though I'm not sure we learned a whole lot about Tyler in those American history texts of the '60s. Tyler was born on a Virginia plantation and held a degree from the College of William and Mary, the nation's s...

Cousin Johnny Ever see those Ancestry commercials where someone is searching their heritage and runs across some relative who held an important place in history or who was a leader in or part of some important historic movement or struggle? (Wow, that's a tortured sentence. Forgive me. I may go back later and try to clean it up.) Or maybe you've watched Finding Your Roots  on PBS. I've never seen an episode, but the plugs they run on the show tend to follow the Ancestry pattern: Oh, hi, celebrity person. I've researched your family tree, and I found these spectacular people. Occasionally the host finds someone scurrilous up the tree, but I don't see those often. Of course, once you start looking at family history, you hope you find those heroes. It's not just about bragging rights, though. It shows that you come from good stock.  That's why I was excited to find that I'm related to members of the English peerage and possibly to a couple of English kings ...

Sir Walter Raleigh I said at the outset of this project that I wouldn't just chronicle the lives of our ancestors but would attempt to use their spots in the history of the world as a jumping off point to look at aspects of the past I knew little about. This is what will happen this week. I'm switching back to Sharon's side of the family for a bit. I traced her father's lineage back as far as it would go in Family Search, the free, online genealogy resource from The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. One of the individuals I ran across, Cornelius Shehane, was featured in a previous post that centered on indentured servanthood.  The end of that part of the tree lies with Daniel Shehane, Cornelius' father. In the records associated with Daniel is a list of passengers for the ship Encrease , sailing out of Youghal, County Cork, Ireland (now Republic of Ireland).  Youghal is located on the southern coast, with roots going back to the 5th century, when a ch...

This week we back up from my great-great-to-the x grandfather to just my great grandfather on my mother's side, Joseph Henry. Reading that made me think I was hearing a discussion from a family reunion: Now you remember Aunt Ida, who was your fourth cousin on your mother's side by way of the Orange clan ... I think this stuff may be getting to me.  Anyway, among the items my sister sent me from among my mother's effects was a small booklet containing a record of premium payments that Joseph made not long before his death. The booklet was from the Mistletoe Lodge 142, American Order Sons of St. George, Chicago, Il. and listed "Assurements and Dues." Because I'd never heard of such an organization, much like hundreds of other groups I've never heard of, I did what anyone would do. I Googled it.  Turns out the organization began as a secret society. I was intrigued. My father had once been invited to join the Masons and, according to my mother, had begun atte...

 The office of justice of the peace began in England sometime in the 12th century, when the king appointed mostly knights to keep the peace. In the 14th century a law was passed creating "conservators of the peace," who eventually came to be called justices of the peace. Also called magistrates, these were men -- unsurprisingly, given the times -- who were the first-line legal authorities in the counties they served.  Although not exactly police, who pretty much didn't exist except in the office of sheriff, they were responsible for dealing with miscreants when complaints were lodged. They operated pretty much under their own authority, hearing the complaints and deciding what would happen if they decided the accused was guilty. The American office developed from this English legacy, as the English colonists followed what they knew when they arrived and set up shop. JPs were mostly elected, though governors of the colonies, and later the states, were sometimes empowered t...

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...