Ancestral Musings

My newsworthy ancestors seem mostly to have lived several centuries ago.  More recently newsworthy ancestors and family members are just too sad to go into.  This one may be distant enough to be less sad, and besides, I cannot find the original story online.   This is more in the line of memoir and I cannot guarantee the facts. I was probably about 12 when I was browsing through my grandmother Belknap's family Bible (I'm really hoping one of the cousins has this Bible!).  I don't remember everything I found in it, probably some pressed flowers at least, but it did have a clipping describing the accident that had killed my grandfather, Melvin Dwight Belknap in 1936.  Since this was a sawmill accident in Malone, Washington in 1936, it was quite gruesome.  The description, in my memory, was a lot more detailed than you would find in a modern news story, and it was quite, uh, graphic.  I will only say that it did not involve any saws but it was defini...

Here I am at week 28, only two weeks behind!  Multiple is challenging my creativity.  No multiple births that I know of, most of the people who married more than once only married twice, hardly remarkable.  But, what I do have is multiple ancestors who moved to a different country or continent because they were being persecuted for their particular variation of Christianity (four distinct sects that I know of). First here was William Bradford of Mayflower fame, a Puritan.  It's a pretty twisty line back to him through a lot of daughters.  I was quite surprised to find a Mayflower ancestor but there are literally around 37 million descendants currently so perhaps I shouldn't have been.   Then, I think, Thomas Prewitt, who was a Quaker.  He came to Virginia in 1636 as an indentured servant and eventually married and prospered and left a boatload of descendants who did not adhere to the Quaker faith.  Neither the Puritans nor the Quakers were po...

Edited on March 4, 2021:  I have to put an addendum in here.  It turns out that Dwight Melvin did marry twice and had a son born of each marriage.  Webb Belknap was my grandfather Melvin's half brother, nearly a generation older than Melvin.  Webb was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, and continued to live in Michigan after his father left.  I don't know if they were estranged in the conventional sense of the word, though I wonder if they just sort of lost interest in each other:  Webb signed off on having no interest in the Washington state property when his father died.  On the other hand, he married a woman named Grace which means that both brothers married women named Grace, and the two Graces corresponded for many years so obviously they had not lost touch entirely!   This was meant to be for the week of July 1-7, but here I am on the 16th, so obviously that didn't happen.  Things continue to reopen in the pandemic, although ca...

One of the suggested themes for this one was the use of middle names instead of first names.  Middle names are definitely a thing on both sides of my family:  people who use them for given names, people who have unusual and enigmatic middle names, people who don't have a middle name at all, and people like me who use both their first and middle names in everyday conversation. First, those who use their middle names as their given names.  The first one I was aware of as a child was my grandfather, (George) Claud Prewitt.  I suspect that there were other George Prewitts around and that his how he ended up using his middle name, otherwise it is a mystery:  why would anyone choose to use "Claud" when "George" was available to him?  Grandpa was born in about 1885 which means that the best record of the people around him, the 1890 census, is gone (destroyed by fire). Dad had a Prewitt cousin, known to me as cousin Bob, who was also using his middle name.  Jo...