Ancestral Musings

I'm already behind!  It January26th and somehow I'm just getting around to this.  Next week, I am scheduled for my first dose of the coronavirus vaccine, but I don't know 1) which company's and 2) if it will even be available.  We shall see. So, the topic for week 3 is "Namesake".  I ended up looking up the precise meaning, which turns out to not be very precise at all.  Basically, its someone whose name is the same for some reason of connection.  I was kind of stumped on what I would use as last year I talked about the plethora of Cecilias on my family tree and nothing else obvious sprang to mind.  But then one of those genealogical gifts opened up when I clicked on the 99+ hints leaf on my Ancestry account, and the first on the list was Moses Case. Holy Moses.  I'd forgotten about these guys (oh yes, guys).  I happened to click on the middle of three and the only way I'm sure that they are really three different people is that they have thr...

 Family legend doesn't seem to have been much of a thing on either side of my family, nor can I remember being told much of anything from my husband's side either.  What we have here is a bunch of very taciturn people who either wanted the past to remain dead, or felt that the past was past and required no further reflection.  The latter would have been my mother and her mother, though as far as I can tell, there was no reason for them to shut this down so completely.  There was one whisper of legend from my mother who said there was a story about a Civil War ancestor, thought to be dead, who returned home on Christmas Eve.  I cannot tell who this might have been, possibly a Michigan ancestor, but unless there is a newspaper account somewhere, no way to find out for sure.

I've decided to continue on with this challenge this year because it keeps me from overly-sloppy thinking and research, and has let me consolidate some of what I've learned into one place that can be accessed by my children.  It's the 4th of January and the year has already gone downhill a bit, with the death of our 12-1/2 year old Golden Retriever Kolbe.  I know that his loss is sad but not tragic:  he lived a good life, in all senses of that phrase.  He kept us moving all of last year, getting outside for walks twice a day even at the various peaks of the pandemic surrounding us:  I suspect we are much healthier physically and mentally because of that.  Not to mention all of the love he gave us over the years.   So, beginnings.  I'm not sure where to start (ha!).  There are a couple of Mayflower ancestors so obviously people who were there at the beginning of the English colonization of Massachusetts.  There was the Prewitt ancest...