Ancestral Musings

 Getting an early start on next year's challenge!  We'll see how well I stick with it but even when I'm not consistent about writing, it is still fun to think about these topics. So, who would I like to meet in the ancestral line?  I've concentrated most of my genealogical research (such as it is) on my American ancestors since both sides start during the early European colonization of North America (with a brief moment in Brazil as well).  My mother's side has a few kinda famous folk, but my dad's is full of people who you sort of wish weren't on your family tree.  And for that reason, if I could, I would like to meet the first of the paternal line on this continent, a man named Thomas Prewitt (1616-1692). Now, oddly, my father always claimed that we were the branch of the Prewitts (Pruitts, Pruetts, Pruietts and so on because I think these people were dyslexic) who spelled the name correctly.  Imagine my surprise when I found that Thomas, who arrived in V...

 My genealogical research has been interrupted by first, catching COVID on September 9th, then breaking my right arm on September 24, followed by catching a cold or maybe a sinus infection but then also another bacterial infection that landed me for an evening the ER and showed that I was still positive for COVID after a month and a half (no wonder you are still getting headaches was the thinking of the Nurse Practitioner who take care of me), followed by a confirmed sinus infection and now the probability that what I have is long covid.  I'm tired.  Anyway, this is part of the family history and I thought I would put it down for posterity.  My arm is getting better and I haven't been on antibiotics for a month!  Back to genealogy soon.

 I missed last week's topic of "Organization" which I was going to use as a starting point to talk about all of the many organizations that we in my family have belonged to, but I came down with a cold in the middle of this and found it all a bit uninspired when I looked over what I had written.   So, I deleted all of that, except for the mention of this individual who has been lurking in the shadows ever since I first realized that you could look at census records to do genealogical research.   We were living just outside Washington DC at the time, and it was possible to take the Metro to the National Archives stop, walk into the Archives, and make requests for records.  This was 40 years ago and I don't remember the details except for getting a bit lost in the soundex system.  However, one person I did find was James McDuff, my maternal grandmother's paternal grandfather (my 2x great grandfather):  I had never heard of him despite owning a pictu...