How I Love Original Records

Every once in awhile you get lucky!  I have had a transcription of my 4th great-grandfather's will for the last 15 years. It was the first piece of "evidence" I found about his family on the internet from my very first search engine search. It could have been the very hook that got me into this genealogy hobby. However, it was YEARS until I was actually able to hunt down the original document. I'll never forget that email ad from ancestry.com about their new Will and Probate Collection for Tenessee. I was thrilled when I entered my William Swain's name and, like magic, found his will as the first result of the query.

The transcription had left me with so many questions. For example, the will was proven in 1871 and the transcription still had my ancestor, William Swain, as the executor even though he had passed away in 1864. When I was finally able to see the original documents, so many of my questions were answered. The full will included three codocils or addendums to the will, and two of the three were focused solely on my direct ancestor, and William's son, William - my 3rd great grandfather. One of the addendums named the children of William Jr. and the other named his wife! And that date written on the transcription as 1871 . . . it was wrong. The real date of the will was in 1861 -- prior to the death of my 3rd great grandfather William Jr. and the reason for the codocils which came after.

Seeing the original record was gold. It cleared up some very important questions I had about this family and helped me "prove" theories and conjectures I had made. I am so grateful for the amount of original records I can now find online. I love everything about old documents and deciphering handwriting and creating a narrative about a person's life based on what the documents tell us!

Letters from the Shoebox

My grandmother was a prolific letter writer. She diligently wrote her cousins all over the United States seeking information about her family. Like I've said before, she really developed relationships with those strangers that became quite strong. I came across one letter the other day that really touched me. 

It was written on the 9th of August 1979. As a sidenote (and really the whole point of this post) is that that date is just a few days before I was born. So imagine my surprise when the first line read, "Congratulations on your new granddaughter" and the last sentence was "Give your new granddaughter a kiss for us".

It sounds silly, but I nearly cried as I read that line. The mere fact that I was discussed before I was even here, that there was excitement on both ends of this letter about my birth (feigned or not) and that I could feel the love they had for me even before I was born felt a little surreal and then to read it decades later was sweet.

August 29

So grateful today for great men in my life.

Aug 29, 1919 - The birthday of my dear grandfather, John Swain, who would have turned 105. I was only 9 when he passed away. I can still see him in his blue work uniform playing solitaire on the floor while listening to the dodger game on the radio or on the TV. I can feel his love across space and time.

Aug 29, 1926 The birthday of a second grandfather who turned 98 yesterday and brought so much joy and love to my dear grandmother in the last years of her life. He treated and loved me like his own and I was grateful to spend time with him.








Aug 29, 2024 - The resting day of my wonderful father-in-law whom I adored. We spent so much time with him over the years hiking, camping, going on trips and small adventures. So grateful for his dedication to family and the things that mattered most. He was a wonderful grandpa to my children and an example of hard work, determination, and faith.

I’ve been so blessed by their daily decisions to be committed, responsible, and loving fathers devoted to their families. It has made all the difference to me and my children.

Your Stories are Powerful - Let's Start Here!

The Magical Science of Storytelling | David JP Phillips | TEDxStockholm

Stories are so powerful. As we share them, they can motivate, inspire, teach, bond and strengthen. They also deepen identity and purpose, and build resiliency in ourselves and in our family members.

Studies have shown that one of the greatest indicators in childhood resiliency and the NUMBER ONE predictor of a child's emotional well-being was in how well they knew their family's story -- not just their parents' story, but the generational family stories that show how families and individuals grow between lows and highs and highs and lows in life. What power these stories have for ourselves and our children!

Personally, I think this is where we start with family history. It's easy to get bogged down in names and dates and research. As a mom with young kids spending that kind of time researching in books is less valuable than being present with our children and sharing what we know from our own life experiences and those of our families. We start with ourselves and we begin to write down our stories. These stories have come from pivitol moments in our lives and how we reacted to them, what we learned from them, how we overcame them, how we changed, how we loved, and how we became a better person. From there, we move on to our parents and grandparents. What were their stories? If our parents and grandparents are still alive, we get them talking about their experiences and our experiences with them and we write them down.

If you want a little inspiration, The TedX talk I've shared above is delightful and fun to listen to. David Phillips makes the point that stories are powerful because of the way our brain's chemistry reacts to various types of stories. He shares three important things that I relate to family history:

1) Every person is a born storyteller. Yes, even you!
2) Write your stories down. We have 3-4 more stories from our own life than we think we have!
3) Index those stories -- put them into categories and use them in conversations with your loved ones.

Your stories are valuable and powerful and your kids will remember them -- the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful. They all have purpose and can teach an important narrative as your family navigates life.

Scandals

There's nothing better than a good scandal to make genealogy a bit interesting. Newspapers.com helped me find some good ones as I was doing some broad surname searching. Not quite sure how this one fits in my family tree, but the family gossip must have been intense! In a nutshell: Carrie Wisler Swain, wife of Samuel Swain, was an actress in the 1870s. She married Mr. Swain in San Francisco in 1875 but was deserted by 1881. He had convinced Miss Swain, with the help of his doctor, that he needed to travel to the Bermudas to recover from an illness and would need half of her weekly salary -- $40 a week -- to live there. After traveling to New York, she learned that there had been several sightings of Mr. Swain in the city and connecting the fact that she would send her money to New York; she soon discovered that he had been in New York all along, living as man and wife with another woman on her salary!

While that one is a little more distantly related -- if at all -- to me, this one is just a few generations back. My third great uncle. It was never discussed in my family until I started doing research, and then my grandma in a quiet whisper shared a little about this saga with her great uncle:

This is one of many newspapers covering the event. And while I have many of the court documents around the trial, the newspapers articles make it all the more interesting.

Geographical Perspective

I was doing a quick internet image search today for some old maps of the United States and came across an awesome post by a cartographer, David Rumsey. He has a whole collection of old maps that are amazing to look at. What interested me the most, however, was this post about 19th Century Maps by Children. Back in the early 19th century, in order for children to learn geography they were actually taught to draw maps. The results are amazing.

Old map of Tennessee drawn by a Harriett Baker in 1819.

In that post he also shares a notebook by Francis A. Henshaw in 1823 entitled Book of Penmanship Executed at the Middlebury Female Academy April 29, 1823. Henshaw has hand drawn maps of the states in the Union at the time and writes beautifully drawn descriptions of them as well. Check out this one about Tennessee. It adds insight to the history of the state and country and more specifically my family as I see what they were learning and how they were learning about their geography at the time.  By 1820 my family had already lived in Tennessee for 10 years.

To check out more of these maps and descriptions you can find them here with an introduction about the history of the finding of America:

Slideshow of Francis A. Henshaw's Book of Penmanship

and to see them individually (and even export or buy prints from David Rumsey) you can click here:

Maps of the United States as drawn by Baker & Henshaw

I'm looking forward to using this website as I continue to study my family in the colonial days of the United States and refer often to these maps to help add a broader geographical perspective to my studies. Thank you to David Rumsey for making these collections available.

Patience

Years ago one of my most frustrating brick walls was my great-great grandmother, Margaret Deatherage Swain. It seemed impossible that someone who died so "recently" could be so difficult to discover. Census records didn't match with ages, and without consistency to Deatherage family residences, it was difficult for my inexperienced self to find her family. I stumbled upon a lead on a website by Mr. Ric Tobin, who has done extensive research on the Deatherage family, even publishing a book entitled "The Deatherage Family:  The First Four Generations in America." Through correspondence we figured out where she fit in the Deatherage chain (For more of the details here is the post describing how we came to this conclusion How I linked Margaret Deatherage to her Parents).

Although we had a lot of circumstantial evidence I wouldn't say any of it was hard fact, and frankly, I was just so happy to have her linked to a family with the information I did have that I didn't try any harder to find the concrete evidence to support the link. It's been nearly 10 years since that "breakthrough". Today I was just cleaning up my Deatherage files and decided to run a search for the father I linked her to, J.M. Deatherage, just to see if any "new" information could be found on him.

I found the typical census records that I already had (from the help of Mr. Tobin), but reviewed them again anyway. The key find wasn't Mr. Detherage's marriage record, but a marriage record of a J.M. Deatherage, his son, and the brother of Margaret. This is the brother who also went to Parker, TX (and died in Parker, TX) like my great-great grandfather, Milus Swain. When I looked at this marriage certificate, I found the evidence I needed! Surprisingly, on this marriage record of J M Deatherage to N E Dancer from McNairy, TN my great-great grandfather, Milus Swain, is written as the witness to this marriage.

 Although I felt confident in the relationship I had put together previously, this documents puts my mind at ease and provides solid support that Margaret Deatherage, the sister of J.M. Deatherage, and the child of J.M. Deatherage Sr is the Margaret Deatherage who married Milus Swain, my great-great grandfather.

Patience is one of the most frustrating aspects of family history work. When I get to brick walls and feel I've exhausted research avenues, I have to move on to a different family to keep myself motivated. Every once in a while I'll come back to my brick wall and do a quick search to see if I can find any new information. Inevitably, with all the new online resources available, something new will show up that adds more clues to help me piece the puzzle together.

Who needs a Facebook Crime Scene Game? I've got plenty of mystery in my family history as I look for real clues about real people. Unfortunately, patience is one of the keys to figuring it all out. I have been surprised over and over again how records find their way to me, a lot later than I sometimes hope, but they come at just the right time to motivate me and help me understand how my family fits in history.