Ancestral Musings

Disaster:  such a cheery topic!  My ancestors certainly did face their fair share of disasters--if one line of inquiry is to be believed, an ancestor was on the losing side at the Battle of Barnet;  he was killed and then his body exposed for three days to be eaten by the local carrion fowl.  That would have been on the Prewitt side--as a group they (we) are prone to picking the losing side in whatever conflict we are participating in. More recently, on the Belknap side, we have Moses Case, a member of the Continental Army.  He managed to die in August of 1776, possibly of small pox.  He left behind a letter to his wife, which she produced as evidence when claiming the pension Congress had voted to widows and veterans of the Revolutionary War.  This letter mocked the "lying Tories" who, he said, claimed that Small Pox was abroad in Montreal where he was headed.  Clearly a ruse to keep the Americans away, he thought.  Ah well.  His wido...

So, prosperity has always seemed to elude my ancestors, with a couple of exceptions.  This is a family story, not something I've found much documentation for, except for one very solid object and a few quilt tops. As told to me, my grandmother's aunt, Lillian (McDuff) Lillard was a professional tailor.  Census data show that her sister Minnie also was listed as a professional "tailoress"  so this is plausible.  Lillian supposedly owned land in downtown Olympia, Washington but I don't see anything about that in the history of the packet which later became the site of a canning factory and then a sort of department store. Had she held on to the land, it would have left us all a bit more materially wealthy but really, it all worked out. The family story about Lillian's husband, David Lillard, was that he lost his leg in a railroad accident.  I haven't found direct evidence of the injury but in the 1900 census he was 46 years old (the census taker wrote do...

Week 7:  Favorite Discovery.  Well.  I have learned a lot about my ancestors since starting to semi-seriously explore my family history.  And I have also learned a lot of mostly American history at the same time.  Maybe my favorite discovery is that there is so much more to be learned!  I never knew that I had Dutch Reform ancestors who had originally been banished to Brazil, then ousted from Brazil by the (Catholic) Portugese, then ejected again from the Netherlands to what was then New Amsterdam (OK, for sheer number of miles travelled, this may be my favorite). I didn't know about the couple who settled in Ohio on the future site of the Cincinnati Reds parking lot, or the Mayflower ancestors (there are apparently about 37 million descendants, literally, so not that unusual). So the thing that makes me smile is not a particular discovery about a particular person.  It's more about figuring out how the ancestors all fit into history and maybe draw...

I have to say, a lot of the ancestors shared the same names.  Williams, Johns, Thomases, Alices, Katherines:  they just weren't very original in their naming choices, though occasionally I'll find that they've used obscure Biblical names, usually just once. But here is an instance of same names that afflicted me as a child:  I don't know if this particular set of identical names reflects generational fashions or just a ridiculous coincidence. My father (born in 1915) was named Cecil Prewitt.  My sister, born in 1942, was named Cecilia after Dad (so, Cecilia Prewitt).  Within ten years, my father's youngest brother had named a woman named Cecilia (another Cecilia Prewitt) and my mother's older brother had also married a Cecilia (Belknap in this case).  Thus, I had two aunt Celias, a sister Cece, and my dad Cecil.  My two remaining aunts were Lenore and Laurel which seemed to me nearly identical.  I distinctly remember thinking that all aunts ev...

Week 5 of the writing prompts:  So Far Away (now I have to get Carole King out of my head!). Most of the people I've tracked down on the family tree came to Colonial America in the 17th century and some in the 18th.   They came from western Europe or the British Isles, hung out on the Atlantic coast for a few decades and then spread out to upstate New York or Kentucky or Ohio initially, then Michigan and Missouri and then to Washington state.  This is both paternal and maternal ancestors:  these people basically walked across the country in parallel lines for several centuries.  So, yeah, all of them came from far away and just kept moving.  But this gives me the opportunity to talk about one of the more colorful ancestors amidst all of these footloose people:  Welthian Loring Richards. It appears that Welthian was possibly born in Dorchester, England (or maybe Axminster in Devon), in about 1602 and came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in about 163...