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Monday, March 31, 2014

Wow, it's been a while!

What have I been up to? Well, there's the whole do-over project. I'm embarrassed by the lack of sources in my genealogy software. Some people have a few sources attached to them and some have absolutely no sources attached. So I'm starting over.

I bought Legacy 8 and NO ONE gets in the door unless they come with sources for facts. Period. I started with my Russell name, and I'm still looking for an actual record that connects my Daniel Russell (1824-1902) to his father Benjamin (1780?-1840?). I have a Delaware County history that presumably Daniel wrote about his father - he should know who is father is, right? But that's not good enough. Not yet, anyway. I'm looking for a will or other document or record that shows the relationship. I haven't come close to a "reasonably exhaustive" search, so Ben is still waiting on the front porch. To Do: On FamilySearch, create a list of Stueben and Ontario County, New York, wills, probate records, letters of administration etc. and cross off as I browse all 14,000,000 of them! That's a little dramatic because there is some order to the records, some indexes in front of the registers. But I need to do this in an orderly manner or I will end up looking in the same record twice. Or three times.

What if I don't find a definitive record for each fact? Well, after doing all the searching I reasonably can, and if I'm reasonably sure, I will let them in but with notes all over the place that this is iffy and shouldn't be taken as absolute fact.

The other project is on the other side of the family tree, where I'm chasing Jones and Davis families. In Wales. Like a haystack made of needles, but which one is the right one? I am looking to prove or disprove that Alvina Davis was the daughter of Daniel and Jane (Williams) Davis who were married 26 Dec 1846 in Wales. Census records say she was born about 1845. Maybe her husband gave the information and didn't know when she was born, maybe the census enumerator jotted down the wrong year, maybe Jane was a single mother when she married Daniel. According to "Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry Into the State of Education in Wales," it wasn't that unusual in Wales in that era for a child to be born out of wedlock. So I'm open to anything. I just want to find a record of her connection to Jane and hopefully Daniel, or something that disproves this hypothesis. To Do: Wait for information from Jennifer who lives near the place Daniel and Jane were married.


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