Unforgettable

 

One of the most unforgettable people in my family tree is Miss Georgia Weston Morgan (18 Dec 1869 - 4 Dec 1951) a daughter of my great-uncle Dr. Robert Withers Morgan of Lynchburg, Virginia.

Little is known of Georgia's early life, but at the age of 29 she enrolled at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg and began a formal study of art.  Upon graduation, she was appointed an assistant professor there. 

In 1909 or 1910, she accepted a scholarship to the Academie Julien in Paris, France, and shared a studio with other artists on the Boulevard Raspail.  There she perfected her technique in producing miniature portraits.   The neighborhood was immortalized in Ernest Hemingway's novel "The Sun Also Rises," in which he wrote " . . . Boulevard Raspail always made dull riding . . ."  It is also home to a controversial Rodin statue of Balzac swathed in a large cape as he stands guard over the city's prostitutes.

Unfortunately, Georgia was forced to abandon her work in miniatures due to rapid eyesight deterioration and turned to larger media as outlets for her creative talent.  It was at the nearby Restaurant Bound that she met Pennsylvania artist Birge Harrison, a major influence on her work.  She made his book "Landscape Painting" the standard text in her later teaching career. 

Four drawings, three miniatures, and three sketchbooks survive from Georgia's days in Paris and are preserved in the archives at Randolph-Macon.  

She returned to Lynchburg at the outbreak of World War I and set up a studio on Church Street where she gave private lessons.  Her "Blue Door Studio" was for many years a favorite gathering place for the city's art community.  

In 1915, she also resumed her career as a college professor, joined the faculty of Lynchburg College and taught courses in painting, drawing, art history, interior decoration, and crafts.  

Over the years, Georgia's work was featured in several exhibitions at Gloucester, Massachusetts; New York City; and Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia.  But, her first major domestic exhibition was at St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1920.  

She was a charter member of the Lynchburg Art Club, serving as its president for several years.  And, in 1932, was a founder of the Lynchburg Civic Art League, which sponsored an annual exhibition of work by local artists--a tradition that continues to this day.  

Miss Georgia never married or had any children of her own.  But tales of her travels and eccentricities have survived for us all to enjoy today.  Some of the most repeated tales are about her lack of concern for fashion.  She frequently kept spare paintbrushes in her hair and wore her paint spattered smock well beyond the confines of her studio.  

First-time visitors to her studio had to be warned never to drink tea there, because she also used her teacups to clean her paintbrushes.

Most famously, she never refused an invitation to Sunday supper with her brother Peyton's family--especially if fried chicken was on the menu.  When she thought no one was looking, she would sneak a piece or two into her purse "for later."

Georgia's legacy is celebrated annually with a memorial art show in Lynchburg.  For more information on that, check out this link: https://lynchburgartclub.org/georgia-morgan-art-show.

Chosen Family

 

If you've been working on genealogy for any amount of time, you have probably employed the FAN research strategy.  (FAN is an acronym for Friends, Acquaintance, Neighbors.)  Basically, if you get stumped while trying to find information about one of your ancestors, you start looking at the folks in their life.  No man is an island, after all.  Even if these FANs aren't identifiably blood relatives, they still moved in the same circles.  And it's possible they generated records that mention your mystery ancestor.

I am such a genealogy geek that I often find myself working out the ancestry of my own FANs, to see if we might be (at least distantly) related.  I have been pleasantly surprised on more than a few occasions.

Here are a few:

• My college roommate and I are both descended from William and Elizabeth (Littlebury) Worsham of colonial Henrico County, Virginia.  That makes us 9th cousins, 3 generations removed . . . not exactly "close family," but, hey, it counts!
• One of my mother's longtime friends also turned out to be my 9th cousin, 3 generations removed.  We both descend from a French Huguenot named Robert Brasseur who settled in Maryland in the 1600s.
• The mistress of ceremonies at Pine Castle Pioneer Days (a local heritage festival that I help organize each year) turned out to be a slightly (very slightly) closer relative: my 9th cousin, but only 1 generation removed.  We both descend from a lady named Catherine Hubbard (1660-1706) by her second marriage.  Interestingly, by her first marriage, Catherine is also the ancestor of the comedian Oliver Hardy.   

It's kinda cool to think these people we have chosen to be a part of our lives are also distant cousins!

Black Sheep

 

I am pleased to introduce one of the black sheep in my family: my third-great-grandfather William Wright "Dink" Patrick.

Dink was born 9 October 1838 in Camden County, Georgia, a son of John Patrick and the former Mary Elizabeth Robinson.  Sadly, his mother was killed during a Seminole raid when Dink was a very small child, in 1840.  After this, his father remarried to his late wife's sister Malinda "Linnie" Robinson, but Dink was not raised by them.  Instead, he went to live with his grandparents Wright and Ellender (Jernigan) Patrick.

When he was 19 years old, Dink enlisted at Mellonville for service in the Third Seminole War as a private in Robert Bullock's Company of Independent Florida Mounted Volunteers.  He was described as standing 5'8" in height, with a florid complexion, blue eyes, and light hair.  The company's muster rolls note that Dink's horse was lost in service on 15 Feb 1858, and he had to be remounted (presumably at the company's expense).

A few years later, on 14 September 1861, Dink enlisted at Sumpterville, Florida, to serve as a private in Company D of the 1st Special Battalion of Florida Infantry.  The details of his service have not survived.  But, after the Battle of Olustee, his unit was mustered-in to Confederate service as Company E of the 10th Florida Infantry Regiment.  This newly organized regiment was expected to follow General Joseph Finegan to join the Army of Northern Virginia.  Apparently, this prospect did not appeal to Dink.  He had signed-up to defend Florida against the Yankees, not Virginia; so, he refused to report for service and was listed as a deserter in Confederate records beginning in May 1864.  (He would later claim that he had not deserted, but was home on furlough . . .)

The decision not to go north with the Confederates probably saved Dink's life.  His younger half-brother Dickie Patrick was not so fortunate and was horribly wounded at the Battle of Jonesboro in Georgia in August 1864.  This did not reflect well on Dink, with some even calling him a coward.  His own niece Drucilla Johns Tyler certainly had no respect for him, recording these scathing words in her memoirs:

"He was worthless, shiftless and lazy. He married into a respectable, proud-but-poor family. Somehow, he got a small homestead and got a house on it. I don't know how, for he was never known to work. They had 9 children and, quoting Little Sister in Laddie, 'not one of them ever offered to die.' They lived by visiting the neighbors at mealtime. They didn't know what it was like to have a square meal at home. About the time the last child was born, they had lost the little old home and moved to an old, abandoned house nearby."

Drucilla's recollections were not altogether accurate.  Dink married after the war to Sarah Ivey, a sister of former Orange County Sheriff John Ivey.  They may have been proud, but they weren't exactly poor.  In fact, they had a nice piece of property near the old Patrick homestead west of Orlando--part of which Dink inherited.  Over the years, he sold off portions of this land until he was left with just two acres, but this was probably a prudent thing to do with Orlando real estate values skyrocketing beyond what a small family farm could earn.

Anyway, Dink did not end up living in an old, abandoned house.  Instead, he and Sarah retired to a comfortable 6-room cottage in the town of Pine Castle, just south of Orlando.  It was only recently demolished to make way for the new Cornerstone Charter Academy.

In 1902, he applied for a federal pension based on his service in the Third Seminole War.  It took two years of battling federal red tape, but he was eventually awarded the additional income retroactive to the date of application.  In 1908, he applied for a state pension based on his Civil War service, but this application was denied because of the allegations of desertion.  Two years later, though, his federal pension was increased to $16 per month, more than enough to support both him and his wife.

In 1911, Dink made national news when he shared a funny story about himself with a roving reporter.  Apparently, he fell asleep one day while riding his horse through the words near Lake Conway.  Somehow, he fell off the horse's back and directly onto a very confused alligator.  The startled reptile only carried him a short distance before bucking Dink and slithering into the nearby lake waters!

Dink died peacefully at his Pine Castle home on 14 September 1913, age 75.  Despite his reputation as a hapless horseman, deserter; and despite his niece calling him worthless, shiftless, and lazy, his obituary in the Orlando Sentinel concludes, "He was an old resident and respected by all.  He was a Christian gentleman, a devout member of the Baptist church."

So, was he a black sheep at all, or was he simply misunderstood?

Your guess is as good as mine!

Small

 

Playing off of last week's posting prompt of LARGE, it was almost inevitable this week's would be SMALL.  So, I already had material to go on the ancestor with the SMALLEST number of confirmed matches in my DNA clustering analysis.

Her name was HANNAH.  

Here's what I know:

• She was born in Connecticut about the year 1785.
• Her maiden name was EVERETT.
• She was married at least twice, first to a man whose surname has been given as either CHAPIN or CHAFFLIN.
• She remarried about 1818 as the second wife of Thomas Macy of Hudson, New York.
• She and Thomas had one son: William H. Macy (who settled in Florida, my direct ancestor).
• She was living with her son William at Germantown, Tennessee, in 1850.
• She was not living with William's family in 1860.

What I think I know:

• She may be the Hannah Chapin who appears as a witness to the will of John Davis of Chatham, New York, dated 15 March 1814. 
• She was almost certainly the white female aged 26 to 45 who was enumerated in the household of Thomas Macy at Ghent, New York, in 1820.
• She was apparently the white female aged 50 to 59 enumerated in the household of her son William H. Macy at Hudson, New York.

What I do NOT know:

• Her exact birthdate or birthplace.
• Her parents' names.
• Who her first husband was.
• If she had any children by her first marriage.
• Where she was living in 1830.
• When or where she died.
• Where she is buried.

What I know to be FALSE:

• She was NOT the daughter of David EVEREST of Salisbury, Connecticut, as has been suggested by some researchers. Mr. Everest's daughter Hannah (1771-1857) has been well documented as the wife of Jonathan Holcomb and is buried by his side in Mason, Ohio.
• Nor does she appear to be the Hannah Everest who married Luther Chapin at Salisbury, Connecticut, on 1 May 1798; and removed to Indiana.
• She certainly was not the Hannah EVARTS who was born 29 March 1785 to Abraham and Asenath (Dudley) Evarts of Guilford, Connecticut. That Hannah died UNMARRIED on 15 June 1803, age 18.

I've been struggling with this brick wall ancestor for decades now, and would gratefully receive any tips or helpful tidbits!

Large

 

Autosomal DNA is "THE" topic most genealogists are talking about these days, albeit by ZOOM instead of in person.  

As a data analyst by profession, I am most excited about the opportunities to apply all the Excel sorting and filtering tools that I use in my "real world" workplace.  

The latest such opportunity is "clustering," whereby you dump all of your DNA matches into a data file and convert them into color-coded groups based on who is related to each other.  Basically, this is an amplification of the "LEEDS METHOD," developed a few years ago by researcher Dana Leeds.  (Read all about it at https://www.danaleeds.com/the-leeds-method.)

Anyway, I bring all this up because of this week's "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" blogging prompt: LARGE.

In examining all of my clusters, I noticed the matches I find from my dad's side of the family outnumber the matches from my mom's side by about a 3-to-1 ratio.  And I wondered why that number was so relatively LARGE . . . pun definitely intended.

Drilling down further, I notice I have at least 7 identifiable matches for each of Dad's 32 third-great grandparents.  But one couple has a disproportionately LARGE number of matches at 126 each: Isaac Timmons and his wife Sarah Davis, who lived at Mount Croghan, South Carolina, in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

If YOU find this sort of disproportionality in your own results, fret not.  This is typical.  There are two main reasons why this happens:

1. Fertility rates.  One side of your family may consistently have LARGE numbers of children, while another side has a history of only one or two children per generation.  The lines with multiple generations of multiple births will obviously produce more potential living matches, but that doesn't mean you inherited more DNA from your most recent common ancestors.
2. Who is taking tests?  Common sense tells us if you have a bunch of cousins from one branch of the family who are testing while very few cousins from another branch are submitting their DNA, the totals are going to be lopsided.  Many factors come into play here.  One group of cousins may be more interested in genealogy because their branch of the family belongs to the LDS church, while another group may have an aversion to DNA testing due to privacy concerns.  But varying participation rates do not mean you have more DNA from one pair of ancestors over another.

These apply to my own results.  In the case of Isaac and Sarah Timmons, they had a LARGE family of thirteen children.  All of these children survived to adulthood (a rare achievement in that era) and all but the youngest boy (who marched off to fight in the Civil War and never returned) went on to marry and produce large families of their own.  By my count, Isaac and Sarah had no fewer than 115 grandchildren!

The Old Country

 

If my latest Ancestry.com DNA results are accurate . . . and that's a BIG IF, since they seem to update their algorithms every couple of months . . . my ethnic origins are in Northwest Europe, and primarily in the British Isles.  More specifically, they currently say I am 48% Irish, 43% English, 4% Scots, 2% Welsh, and (randomly) 3% Swedish/Danish.

While "DNA don't lie," the trick is documenting just how this genetic material hopped the pond and ended up with me.

Given this week's blogging prompt, I thought I'd put together a list of my known immigrant ancestors and group them by origin to see if the list mirrors Ancestry.com's current calculations.  Here's what I found:

ENGLAND

• John and Mary Andrews - by 1654
• Joseph Austin - by 1649
• Thomas Ballard - by 1652
• Edward Barker - by 1650
• Robert Barnard - by 1638
• Thomas Barnard - by 1639
• Lancelot Bathurst - by 1680
• Thomas Batte - 1649
• Francis Bell - by 1640
• Sarah Bell - by 1638
• Andrew Benton - by 1644
• John Bidwell - by 1639
• Samuel Blakeslee - 1635
• Robert Bolling - 1660
• William Bradley - by 1638
• John Buckner - by 1655
• John and Sarah Butterworth - by 1652
• Edward Cartwright - by 1671
• Abraham and Jane (Howard) Childress - by 1643
• James Clark - 1637
• Tristram and Dionis (Stevens) Coffin - by 1645
• John Curtis, Jr. - ca 1637
• Samuel Eddy - 1630
• Peter Folger - 1635
• Richard Gardner - 1624
• Nicholas Gassaway - by 1650
• Phillip Goffe - by 1649
• Jane (Drury) Gregory - by 1655
• Roger Groce - by 1650
• Simon Hancock - 1637
• Captain Thomas Harris - 1611
• Joan Harvey - by 1642
• Audrey Hoare - 1621
• Sarah Hopcott - by 1640
• Anthony Howkins - by 1644
• John Hubbard - by 1668
• John Ingersoll - by 1651
• Robert Irving - 1849
• Thomas and Elizabeth Judd - 1634
• Mary Kinsman - 1635
• Abraham Lighthall - by 1719
• Thomas Ligon - by 1649
• Dorothy Lord - 1635
• Samuel and Elizabeth (Scudder) Lothrop - by 1644
• Thomas Macy - by 1639
• Thomas Meakins - 1633
• Nathaniel Merriman - 1632
• Mary Morrill - 1635
• Arthur Moseley - 1649
• John Moss - by 1639
• Thomas Munson - by 1635
• Thomas Newell - by 1644
• Rebecca Olmstead - 1632
• Paul and Martha (Hale) Peck - by 1639
• Phineas Pratt - 1622
• Mary Priest - 1623
• Alice Pritchard - by 1640
• Thomas Purnell - by 1663
• John Selman - about 1668
• John and Abigail (Kimball) Severance - by 1637
• Sarah Shattuck - by 1642
• Sarah Starbuck - 1635
• John Stith - by 1656
• Hannah Stocking - by 1634
• William Thomas - by 1659
• William and Elizabeth Tuttle - 1635
• Moses and Grace (Graves) Ventrus - by 1646
• William and Elizabeth (Warren) Walker = 1658
• William and Alice (Pyce) Wardwell - 1633
• Sarah Wilcox - about 1635
• Abraham Wood - 1620
• William Worsham - by 1640

FRANCE

• Antoine Bonneau - 1690
• Benoit Brasseur - by 1638
• Rev. Paul and Francoise (Durosel) L'Escot - 1701
• Marie Richford - by 1645
• Benjamin and Marie Esther (Dupre) Simons - by 1692
• John Timmons - by 1700
• Jeanne Elizabeth Videau - by 1697
• Pierre Villepontoux - 1693

GERMANY

• Jacob Michael Ittich - by 1710
• Johann Friedrich and Mary Margaret (Metz) Schlemp - 1767
• Johannes Spanknabel - by 1770

IRELAND

• James Cameron - 1767
• Thomas and Bridget (Seery) Conner - by 1856
• Thomas and Catherine (Cloonan) Daley - 1850
• James and Catherine (Cully) Gleeson - 1867
• Elizabeth (Gallagher) Lynch - 1844
• Michael Lynch - by 1841
• Patrick Norton - 1880
• Catherine O'Rourke - by 1849
• Robert and Mary (Holmes) Paddock - 1631

NETHERLANDS

• Harmen Myndertsen van der Bogart - 1631
• Cornelis Anthonisen van Schlick - 1634
• Jillisje Claese Schouw - by 1626

SCOTLAND

• John Hunter - by 1745

WALES

• Thomas and Blanche (Kemis) Gaines - by 1634

Newsworthy

 

How many of you have been admonished about life being more than the two dates that appear on your tombstone, that "it's the dash that's important?"

Trite, yes.  Nonetheless, true.  The stuff that happens between your date of birth and your date of death are certainly more interesting to most consumers of biographical information.

Sometimes, we genealogists forget that as we obsessively track down and record names, vital dates, geographic jurisdictions, and source citations.   We NEEED these to make our nice little pedigree charts and family group sheets look neat and tidy.

But, if that's all we focus on, we miss the whole point and the real joy of genealogy, which is learning about who our ancestors really were.

What were their day-to-day lives like compared to our own?  How did they confront life's challenges, much less unusual circumstances like the one we are currently facing with the COVID-19 pandemic?  Can we learn anything from what they went thru to apply to our own lives?

That's why I love newspapers.com.  This site has really helped me flesh-out my family's unique story.  

Some of the best items I've discovered would hardly be considered "newsworthy" by most folks' standards--like the article above that I snipped about my dad's run-in with a black widow spider at age 11.  But these little details certainly mean something to me, and hopefully will to future generations.  

At least that's what I keep telling myself as I digitally "snip" tidbits like this until the wee hours of the morning . . . 

Happy hunting!