Up a Tree

I decided to begin exploring a new segment of the family tree until I finish creating a database of the posts in this series, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a reference to the famous witch trials of the 1600s. And it's possible that one of my ancestors was called as a witness in the trial of a woman who was given a reprieve. John Choate came to America in 1643 from Essex County, England at the age of 19. According to a document titled, "John Choate and His Descendants," which may well be the subtitle to a book called The Choates in America 1643-1896 , by E.O. Jameson and published in Boston in 1896, not much is available about the details of his life. By "not much," the author seems to mean more than the 1,000 or so words excerpted from the work and provided on Family Search. To me, that much material is a gold mine. John settled in a section of Ipswich, Mass., know as Chebacco and married some 17 years later. He managed to purchase some land fo...

Last time we looked at the entry on my side of the tree for Lady Margaret Woodville, whose identity remains shrouded. But she also provides a jumping off place to a new limb of the tree. Lady Margaret's entry shows she married a John James Watson I, about whom I can find nothing remarkable. His importance lies in his lineage. Now given the problems I've described with Lady Margaret, you'll have to take what follows as speculative in terms of any actual relationship I may have. John James seems to be the first of the Watsons in England. His forefathers' ties lie in Scotland for many generations. If you track back far enough, you run into ancestors who hail from what is now Bremen, Germany. I'll try to find some information on those ancestors for a future post. Now, the Watsons aren't just from Scotland. More specifically they are from Aberdeen. I've been unable to discover exactly how important they were to the daily life of the city, so I thought for this we...

As I've mentioned before. I often check into the tree in preparation for writing one of these posts and find that the details have changed. In the previous post, I looked briefly at Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen, who at one time appeared in the genealogy for my side of the tree.  She had disappeared from my tree some weeks before, but I discussed her because while I was tracing one of the families in the history of my great x4 grandmother, I ran across a listing for the queen's brother, Sir Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl of Rivers, leading me to believe I still had some relationship to Elizabeth, though removed from my direct line. I announced that I would look at his life for this post. Before logging off last week, I did a run through the tree again, only to discover that he had disappeared from the family lineage, this coming just a week after having found him in the first place. Instead I found Lady Margaret Woodville, who I thought might still have some connection to t...

An impetus behind these posts is an accidental discovery I made while randomly shuffling through the family tree developed by our daughter. As I've mentioned in the past my grandmother's great grandmother, Orpha Morse, is a rich source of ancestors with connection to history. As an aside, I've no idea how to properly express this relationship, but I saw a reference a couple of weeks ago to someone's 8th great grandmother, which seemed to use the generational numbering associated with cousins. If I'm correct about that then Orpha would be my third great grandmother, or something like that. This stuff can be so confusing. But I started roaming through Orpha's portion of the tree and found all sorts of connections to British peerage and eventually to Elizabeth Woodville, whose second husband, Edward IV, king of England, was of the York family, and their symbol was the white rose. That would have meant that I was related to royalty, a situation that may not be as un...

I'm going to switch to my side of the family for a few weeks. I want to note before moving on that in the early days of our marriage, it seemed as though we couldn't go much of anywhere in Texas without running into someone related to my mother-in-law's side of the family, especially the Lackeys.  For the accidental reader who knows naught of my background, I served as a pastor in the United Methodist Church in what is known as the Northwest Texas Annual Conference, an area that encompasses all the Texas Panhandle, much of the Southern Rolling Plains and parts of West Texas from Midland east a few towns past Abilene.  As we served churches in this conference, we would almost inevitably have someone related to my wife appear in church shortly after we began service in a particular church. I, unfortunately had little interest in the family trees of either side and failed to keep in touch with any of them. What a source of information they would have been. Lots of events and t...

One of "fun" parts of exploring the family tree, and yes, I put it in quotes to indicate I'm being sarcastic, is dealing with the program that provides me with the names and dates and places of our ancestors. I often find that the information I'm provided can suddenly change. For instance, in the attempt to find out whether the Reagan side of Sharon's family is somehow related to John Henninger Reagan, for whom Reagan County, Texas, is named, I used a feature of the program that finds if and how you're related to a specific person, though the search only goes back 15 generations.  I did find a relationship but through her mother's side of the family, the Lackeys. Because so many of the names seemed to have good connections with historical events I could research and mention here, I bookmarked John H. Reagan's entry. The program does not allow a bookmark to the results of the search, probably because it appears in a popup window, but I could easily clic...

Going to make a brief departure from the direct lineage branches of the family tree because I found a story about Abraham Lincoln contained in an old, family-generated genealogy of the Lackey families in Illinois.  When the first Lackey appears in America, the spelling of his name has changed from that of the clan that began in Scotland and ended up in what is now Northern Ireland. You remember from the last post that in the Old Country, the name was spelled Leckie. I haven't found anything that explains the change, but such an occurrence happens frequently enough among immigrants. The first Lackey in America was Thomas Keaton Lackey Sr., and he, like many other immigrants to America, participated in the American Revolution on the colonies' side. I'll look at some of the engagements in which he took part in the next post.  One of his relatives, whose connection I haven't quite ferreted out, has a connection to a fella called Abraham Lincoln, who you may remember did som...