Keep Key Family History Details Alive

Over the years, family history can be forgotten unless we tell the stories again and again to honor our ancestors and let future generations know about their lives.

Mayflower connection rediscovered

No one in my hubby's family had ever heard of any Mayflower connection until a cousin I met via genealogy showed us the research paper trail. 

This wonderful cousin linked the Wood family to five people who were on the Mayflower: Mary Norris Allerton, Isaac Allerton, Mary Allerton, Francis Cooke, and Degory Priest. 

Looking ahead: keep the stories alive

We don't want this key detail of the Wood family tree to be lost to those in the future! 

Every Thanksgiving, we send greeting cards to our grandkids, naming these Mayflower ancestors. We add a different focus each year to flesh out these ancestors. One year, we said who did and didn't survive that first winter after coming to the New World. Another year, we wrote about Mary Allerton Cushman being the last of the Mayflower passengers to pass away, in 1699. 

Tell your ancestors' stories

My family's history is different from my husband's side of the family. 

My four immigrant grandparents left Eastern Europe and came to New York City at different times and in different ways. All sought a better life for themselves and for their descendants.

By retelling the stories with a slightly different emphasis each time, we're doing our best to prevent these ancestral connections and motivations from being forgotten in the future.

No matter what your family's history, keep those key details alive for future generations. This is Family History Month!

Hubby's Ancestors in the Civil War: Part 2 (Mayflower Connection)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower

In Part 1 of this series, I applied multiple criteria to screen for potential Civil War ancestors in my husband's family tree: (1) organizing male ancestors according to birthdate to identify those of military age in the 1860s, (2) eliminating men who died before the war and who were not in America at the time, and (3) prioritizing ancestors closer to the main tree.

This reduced the number of possible Civil War veterans to research from 71 men to 33 men.

Next, I peeked at the 1910 U.S. Census to see which ancestors said they were veterans--a clue, not definitive evidence. This gave me positive clues for a good number, but what about those not alive in 1910?

Quick-and-Dirty Search for Civil War Activities

For ancestors who died before the 1910 Census, I did a quick-and-dirty search on Ancestry. Did these men register for the Civil War draft? If so, did they actually serve?

Between checking the 1910 Census and my quick-and-dirty search, I reduced the number of possible Civil War veterans from 33 to 20 [correction: 21, now that I've identified Lemuel C. Wood, Jr. as a vet]. This list included great-great uncles, cousins of various types, and two men married to great-great-aunts.

Mayflower Connections 

Along the way to profiling my husband's Civil War veterans, I filled in many blanks on the family tree and looked at family connections to prioritize my research.

A name that made the initial list due to his birth year was Thomas F. Wood (1843-1925), my husband's 1st cousin, twice removed. He was born and died in the whaling center of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the son of Isaiah Wood and Mary T. White.

As I climbed Thomas's family tree, I saw that his grandfather Isaiah Wood was descended from Mayflower passenger Mary Norris and her husband, Thomas Cushman of the Fortune. Thomas's grandmother Harriet Taber was descended from Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke.

Having made these connections, I immediately determined that Thomas F. Wood was to be the focus of my first Civil War investigation. More in Part 3!

Sepia Saturday and Saturday Night Genea-Fun

James Edgar Wood in his 1917 Ford, Summer of 1917

This week's Sepia Saturday ties in well with my response to Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge! So I combined the two.

Sepia Saturday: Posing with the Car

Above, a photo taken of my husband's grandfather, James Edgar Wood (1871-1939) by hubby's father, Edgar James Wood, (1903-1986). Ed was only 14 when he took this photo of his father during a road trip from their home in Cleveland, OH to downtown Chicago, visiting Wood family members along the way. Ed had gotten a camera for his birthday and began a lifelong hobby of chronicling family activities.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Top 20 Surnames in Family Tree

Using RootsMagic7, and following Randy's instructions, I went to Reports, then Lists, scrolled down to "Surname Statistics List," and selected "Frequency of Surnames" from the list.

With 3,128 people in my husband's Wood family tree, I could have printed 17 pages for the "Frequency of Surnames" report. Instead, I printed only the first two pages. After that, the frequency of surnames dropped off sharply.

And the winner is . . . WOOD, which appears a total of 204 times (125 males, 78 females). The oldest date of a Wood ancestor record is 1551, the most recent date is 2019.

The top 20 are: Wood, Larimer, McClure, Work, Steiner, Slatter, McKibbin, Hilborn, Denning, Smith, Cushman, Brown, Taber, Nelson, Johnson, Bradford, Short, Caldwell, Rinehart, and Miller. 

By the time I got to Miller, there were only 17 appearances in the Wood family tree (11 males, 6 females), with the oldest date of 1803 and the most recent date of 2006. A Miller married a Work (the granddaughter of a Work-Larimer marriage) and that's how the Miller surname connects to my husband's Wood family tree.

Happy Thanksgiving - Hubby's 5 Mayflower Ancestors

Penny postal card sent to Wallis W. Wood, circa 1910

Happy Thanksgiving!

As I do every year, I'm honoring the memory of my husband's five Mayflower ancestors. Thank you to cousin Larry, the family genealogist, for uncovering these connections to the Puritans.

• Francis Cooke 
• Degory Priest
• Isaac Allerton
• Mary Norris Allerton
• Mary Allerton

Young Mary Allerton later married Thomas Cushman of the Fortune. She was the last of the original Mayflower passengers to die, on November 28, 1699, exactly 320 years ago.

10 Generations Back: Last Wood Generation Born in England

This week's #52Ancestors challenge is 10 and there is no way I can go back that
far in my mother's or father's family trees.

However, my husband is a Mayflower descendant four times over and we can go back beyond 10 generations on his father's side. The Wood family intermarried with the Cushman family (Cushman of the Fortune married Mary Allerton and that's the basic Mayflower connection). Thank you to cousins Larry and Mike for uncovering new details tracing the Wood tree year after year after year...

The tenth generation back is John Wood Jr. (1620?-1704). This was most likely the last Wood generation of my husband's family to be born in England. I hypothesize* that John Jr. was christened in St. George the Martyr Church, Surrey, England, on March 10, 1621, as shown at top. I was amazed to discover that this church was built in the 12th century.

John Jr.'s exact birth date is a mystery. His cemetery stone is not legible, and 1620 is the "calculated" birth year. We do know he married (for the third time) to Mary Peabody (1639-41?-1719) around 1656 in what is now Newport county, Rhode Island. John Jr. died in the same part of Rhode Island, as did his wife. Both are buried in the John Wood cemetery plot.

On my husband's mother's side, we can go back 9 generations to James Andrew McClure (1660?-?). In checking for anything new on this ancestor, I came across a fairly new (June, 2018) memorial on Find-a-Grave, saying that James died "at sea, on trip to America" in 1732, age 71-2.

Of course I wrote the originator of this memorial to ask about the source and any details. We already knew the McClure family left Donegal and sailed together to Philadelphia, Halbert with his wife Agnes and numerous children. I didn't realize Halbert's father James was with them. Maybe this will open up more research possibilities.

*Updated to reflect cousin Mike's comments about clearly noting hypotheses. Thank you! I don't want to perpetuate unproven info as "fact." And so far, no response from the Find-a-Grave contributor about James Andrew McClure.

Family History: Mayflower Sails from Plymouth

Because hubby has four Mayflower ancestors, world history is closely intertwined with family history in his family tree.

On this day, 398 years ago, the Mayflower sailed away from Plymouth, England.

Among the passengers were my husband's ancestors . . .

• Degory Priest
• Isaac Allerton
• Mary Norris Allerton
• Mary Allerton

Mary Allerton would grow up and marry Thomas Cushman (who arrived on the Fortune). Generations later, their descendant Lydia Cushman became my hubby's 3d great-grandmom by marrying Elihu Wood, Sr., on March 2, 1784 in Dartmouth, MA (snippet of record shown above).

Lydia and Elihu's son Isaac Wood, Sr., married Harriet Taber on May 18, 1806. They were my husband's 2d great-grandparents.

One of Harriet and Isaac's sons was Thomas Haskell Wood (1809-1890), who married Mary Amanda Demarest (1831-1897) on May 14, 1845 in Lafayette, Louisiana. These were my husband's great-grandparents. 

Telling these stories over and over reminds descendants how events that occur in the wider world can profoundly influence the course of many individual families' histories--including our own. Looking ahead to Mayflower 2020, which is only two years away!

Oldest Ancestors with Names and Dates

My husband's family has several good candidates for the "oldest" ancestor with names and dates, because of his four Mayflower ancestors.

The family trees of passengers Isaac Allerton, Mary Norris Allerton, Mary Allerton, and Degory Priest are fairly well documented, and I've added their  parents' names/dates to hubby's family tree using RootsMagic 7 genealogy software. 

Next, I scrolled down the timeline looking for Mayflower ancestors and their parents to see who's earliest. Isaac Allerton's daughter, Mayflower passenger Mary Allerton, later married Thomas Cushman of the Fortune. So the earliest ancestor from that line is actually Thomas Couchman, b. 1538.

Now to my family tree. The oldest ancestor I can name and date on my mother's side is my great-great-great grandfather, Yosef Moshe Kunstler, who died in NagyBereg, Hungary (now known as Berehi, Ukraine) on June 13, 1854. My wonderful cousin B visited the cemetery and photographed the headstone 20 years ago. According to the headstone, Yosef's father's name was Hillel. That's where the trail ends.

On my father's side, the oldest ancestor I can name and date is my great-great grandma Rachel Shuham Jacobs, born about 1845 in Plunge, Lithuania. She married young, was widowed, and came to New York City with her grown daughter and son in the late 1880s. Rachel died in New York City on December 8, 1915. Her death cert shows her parents as Moses Shuham and Sarah Levin, but unfortunately, I have no other info on them.

Thank you to Amy Johnson Crow for this week's #52Ancestors prompt, which is "Oldest."

Family History Month: Top 10 Surnames on the Family Tree

Picking up a great idea from Colleen G. Brown Pasquale at her Leaves & Branches blog, I learned how to use the "surname statistics list" report function on my Roots Magic 7 software. No surprise that for my husband's family tree, Wood was the top surname by frequency, followed by Larimer.

But I also realized, with a pang, how many people appear without surnames in that tree. Uh oh. These are mainly missing maiden names, stretching back to the 1500s. This means I'll have to intensify my Genealogy Go-Over to see how many missing surnames I can identify. Perhaps new information has become available since I added some people to the tree? Turns out that these statistics can also reveal gaps in research...

The top 10 surnames that appear most frequently on the Wood tree are:

1. Wood (earliest instance: 1551)
2. Larimer (earliest instance: 1719)
3. McClure (earliest instance: 1660)
4. Steiner (earliest instance: 1802)
5. Slatter (earliest instance: 1811)
6. McKibbin (earliest instance: 1766)
7. Hilborn (earliest instance: 1794)
8. Denning (earliest instance: 1775)
9. Smith (earliest instance: 1724)
10. Cushman (earliest instance: 1578)

PS: Randy Seaver made this "top 10 surnames" theme the subject of his Oct. 21 Saturday Night Genea-Fun.

Thankful Thursday: Hubby's Pioneer Ancestors

Hubby's immigrant ancestors were all pioneers to be proud of--and thankful for:

• WOOD. Way back on the Wood side, via the Cushman family of Fortune fame, he has four Mayflower ancestors (Degory Priest, Mary Norris Allerton, Isaac Allerton, and Mary Allerton). Their courage in braving the dangerous trip to the New World in 1620 is quite astonishing. John Wood, Sr., called "The Mariner" by Wood genealogists, was a seafaring man who came to America around 1700. His male descendants were mainly ship's captains, ship builders, or ship's carpenters. Hubby's great-grandpa Thomas Haskell Wood left his life on the sea to marry Mary Amanda Demarest and raise a generation of sons who were all carpenters or painters.
• McCLURE and McFALL. The next set of pioneer ancestors to arrive in America was the McClure clan. Patriarch Halbert McClure and his family--originally from the Isle of Skye--came from Donegal to buy farmland in Virginia in the 1730s. McClures continued pioneering other areas further west in America. Halbert's grandson, John McClure, married Ann McFall in April, 1801, in Rockbridge county, VA. Above, a note scanned from the marriage bonds for that county, and posted by the US GenWeb archives. I'm now in touch with another McFall researcher and we're pursuing that family's connections. More soon!
• LARIMER. The original Larimer pioneer left from Northern Ireland for America in 1740 with a trunk of Irish linen. Alas, he was shipwrecked but eventually made his way to central Pennsylvania and then the family continued west to Ohio and pioneered even further west over time.
• RINEHART and STEINER. Hubby's McClure line includes intermarriages with the Rinehart and Steiner families. Both were pioneer farm families who seem to have settled originally in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s, then continued to Ohio (for more land?). Sadly, I still don't know which ancestors were the original immigrants and their original homeland.
• SLATTER. The Slatter family lived in inner-city London, apparently so poor that the parents put three of their sons into a training program leading to stable careers in the military. This was in the 1870s. These sons grew up to be pioneers in the Canadian music world--specifically, conductors and composers of military band music. Both the Slatter daughters came to America around 1895, and married soon afterward. Mary Slatter married James Edgar Wood, hubby's carpenter grandpa. 

Two of Hubby's Four Mayflower Ancestors Celebrated the First Thanksgiving

Hubby is descended from four Mayflower ancestors: Degory Priest, Mary Norris (wife of Isaac Allerton), Isaac Allerton, and Mary Allerton (daughter of Isaac and Mary).

Sadly, Degory Priest and Mary Norris didn't survive to the first Thanksgiving. Happily, Isaac Allerton and his daughter Mary (plus two other children) celebrated the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth.

Mary Allerton Cushman was hubby's 7th great-grandmother and the longest-lived of the Mayflower immigrants. She died on November 28, 1699--315 years ago this week.

Happy Thanksgiving!

52 Ancestors #38: Mayflower Ancestors on Mayflower Day

This is Mayflower Day and my post is in honor of four of hubby's ancestors, who were passengers on that ship:

Isaac Allerton, Mary Norris, Mary Allerton, and Degory Priest. 

Mary Allerton married Thomas Cushman, who arrived on the Fortune. Mary Allerton Cushman's son Eleazer Cushman married Elizabeth Royal Coombs, great-granddaughter of Degory Priest, linking these two families from the Mayflower.

Several generations later, Lydia Cushman married Elihu Wood Sr., father of Isaiah Wood Sr.. Isaiah was hubby's 2d g-granddaddy on the Wood side.

The Wood fam genealogist was in England two months ago. He visited the Mayflower Pub, formerly owned by Captain Jones, and wrote me:

"They talk of the Mayflower departure as if it is current events. There is a very different perspective on history over there. 1620 was recent history."

Thankful for the Mayflower on this September 16th.