Ancestral Musings

I am trying to catch up!  The whole month of March in fact is themed "Females" but this first week is specifically aimed at women.  I've already written about the women in my line, at least my maternal line.  My father's line is a little harder as my father was not exactly estranged but had drawn some pretty firm boundaries between himself and his family of origin.  Nonetheless, the Prewitts and the people they married left a lot of traces in the records so they are not entirely mysterious.  My husband's family on the other hand has long looked impossible.  There were plenty of stories from his mother's family (complicated by second marriages and people referred to as cousins who had no genetic relationship at all) but his father's side has long been a puzzle, despite some hints of Alsatian origin.  What broke the logjam was one of those little shaky leaves from Ancestry attached to an aunt with a different last name. Ancestry sends emails with several...

The month of February has a reputation for being in the doldrums of the year, and this February was no exception.  The themes of the four weeks of this challenge were:  Branching Out, Landed, Maps, and Courting.  As it happens, I have done very little work with maps, though they do sometimes reveal interesting details.  In fact, I will tie a couple of these themes together, maybe all of them, in one post . . . My Prewitt grandparents were both from rural Missouri, a very little town named Elsberry which is about an hour north of St. Louis by modern transportation methods.  Since it is perched on the edge of the Mississippi River, it is highly likely that anyone wanting to go to St. Louis early in the 20th century went by boat.  It is also likely that they would cross the river by boat to get to Calhoun Illinois, where my grandparents were married, since in 2021 you had to drive some distance to get to a bridge and then some more distance to get to Calhoun....

I'm going to skip lightly over week three:  I have posted a lot of photos in the past and nothing new has come to light recently.  Week 4 may be more of a challenge.  The theme is "Curious" and, as usual, any hints about how to approach this topic is open-ended to a fault!  The three stories that Amy featured in her email for that week mostly had to do with the curiosity of the modern genealogist, looking for answers to incomprehensible family stories or trying to find someone who really should have been in the census (one turned out to involve terrible trauma and the other was a transcription error).  And now that I think about it, I have had my own fun with transcription errors, not to mention intentional obfuscation. My father's family has always been a bit of a mystery to me.  I know from what little he said, and from what my mother told me, that his life as a child was not happy, and he left home very young to go to work.  He did finish high scho...