One of my favorite hobby's other than card making is working on our family genealogy. I've been doing this for years - first with my dad, when it was his hobby handed down from his Aunt Irene. Then my mom got interested in preserving her side when her parents died. When my parents lived in Germany during my college years, my dad's interest flared again because so much information was at his fingertips - just day trips to long ago homesteads. We actually found the old Picker farm in Wehe Germany and visited with distant cousins. Apparently my ancestors decided to send all of their sons to America to avoid the Prussian Army, and the farm was handed down via the daughters side. But I digress....
Now that so much information is readily available on the internet, I have been able to get back into this hobby more over the past 2 years. I started an Ancestry.com account - fabulous!- and have been able to trace several sides of my family back well into the 1600's. It's amazing - you just have to carefully choose who you copy information from - always making sure that they are well sourced. The other digital benefit is that I can scan old photos and keep them safe from deteriorating. I can print books and posters of the information I've saved. It's awesome.
I've also recently become a fan of the NBC show "Who Do You Think You Are?" and this inspired my family trip to KY. My mother's side of the family has the surname Daugherity- which of course has multiple spellings in the history books. There are numerous Daugherity's in KY and many books about them. I'm sure we're related somehow and that I could find the connection if given more time. But this trip took us in an unexpected direction. We had family stories telling us that Tom Daugherity was married to a Swarts, but there was not any documentation to back it up. Even the other Swarts in town didn't seem to think it was true. Well, while in KY we found the marriage certificate with the names and were able to trace her family back.......turns out I have a Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandfather named James Swart (the "s" was sometimes dropped, thought to be a plural or possessive) who fought at the Battle of Blue Licks in the American Revolution - with Daniel Boone! And, his name is on the monument at the state park as one of the very fortunate few to have survived this massacre.
It was so exciting - we were actually staying at the Lodge at the state park, which is quite lovely and serene. For your trivia game information, this battle was the last battle of the Revolution, although that honor is usually given to Yorktown. However, after the surrender at Yorktown, it took some time for the news to reach the frontier and so of course they didn't know that they weren't supposed to be fighting anymore - and they were actually just defending themselves from the British and Indians attacks. Daniel Boone's son was killed in this battle.
Once we discovered James - which we did RIGHT before leaving to return home - the door was open to many further ancestors. If you've never tried to research your family history, it is interesting to learn how difficult it is to get past the frontier if you had ancestors that moved west. In the time of the Revolution and the early 1800's, many of the states were of the Ohio River valley were actually frontier counties of the original colonial states. KY for example was part of VA. And of course, the first Federal Census didn't come along until 1850, with most of the states not complying very much until after the Civil War (because then they wanted their pensions so they registered). And of course, in the frontier you had fewer people that could read and write, so names are often spelled phonetically by the recorder. It is quite the challenge. However, once we knew that James had fought in the Revolution, and we had his land grant information that brought him to KY from PA, we could trace his family back - all the way to Norway in the late 1590's. Turns out that my first ancestor in North America was a Norwegian who first went to The Netherlands to build houses, then followed the dutch to New Amsterdam to help build the colonies. He was known by the dutch as "the norseman" and reportedly "Norman Ave." in NYC is named after him. He was a land owner both in and outside of the fort wall and it just makes you cry .....if only! Donald Trump has my family land! Oh well.
Sounds like a lot of detail to know about someone that lived so long ago, right? But again, once you get back into Colonial residence, the record keeping is very good. I even read actual court records online about Djirk's wife in court over a man selling her a hog that wasn't his to sell her! It's amazing.
Smiles,
Susan
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