Getting to Know Your Ancestors

Unlike our Stoneage ancestors, people now days no longer have to spend their days searching for game and edible berries and grains to bring home for dinner. However, the hunter gatherer instinct still remains within most of us as evidenced by the popularity of seeking collecting things down through the ages.

Whether it be stamps, coins, rocks, antiques, pictures of movie stars or any of the numerous other things people collect as their hobby, people still feel the urge to venture forth in search of whatever collectible they desire and then proudly bring home and display their finds. And, just as their caveman ancestors enjoyed sitting around the camp fire and telling the story of their hunt, so too do collector hobbiests enjoy describing the story of how they found and acquired the various stamps, coins, antiques, etc. that they are most proud of.

Searching for one's ancestors or genealogy is a popular pass time with many, especially since the Internet has made access to previously local data available anywhere in the world as well as making it easy and inexpensive to publish the results of one's research. I haven't checked lately, but a few years ago genealogy was one of the three (with pornography and religion being the other two) topics with the most individual sites on the web.

While many people are satisfied with simply collecting names of ancestors along with the dates of their birth, marriage and death plus names of children and then arranging these into a family tree with as many generations as possible, others try to dig deeper in an attempt to get to know more about these people who preceded them in the family.

Of course the maintaining of lists of ancestors goes back to ancient times. The Old Testament of the Christian Bible contains many genealogies. The New Testament Gospel of Matthew begins with the Genealogy of Jesus which lists his ancestors beginning with Abraham. This genealogy is chanted by a cantor at the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in many Catholic Churches. In many ancient cultures genealogies were often memorized and chanted in the days before written records.

Genealogy was a must for royalty as it established the legitimacy of the current ruler by tracing his (or sometimes her) lineage back to the founder of the nation. It has also long been popular with wealthy people since while money can buy many things, old (meaning inherited) money buys more social status than new money. In fact in many societies having an ancient lineage can be just as valuable as great wealth because marrying such impoverished people is a quick way those who have worked and earned a fortune to gain the prestige necessary to gain entry into the aristocracy.

However, one doesn't have to be a member of the nobility or come from an old aristocratic family to enjoy digging into their past and discovering who proceeded them in the family.

One's interest in this area often starts with either listening to the stories told by older members of the family or coming into possession of old photos, letters, etc. that belonged to people before them. I remember, as a teenager, my parents allowing my siblings and I to look through a box of old photos and letters my parents exchanged during World War II before they were married. I still remember one, written toward the end for the war, in which my Father, responding to a letter from my Mother had written asking about his ideas for the type of home and furnishings he wanted after they were married. My Father's response was that, having lived in tents in the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines with all of his possessions stuffed in a duffel bag for the past three years he quite forgotten about things like beds, chairs, carpets, etc.

Humans are great story tellers and, as they age, they accumulate more and more things to talk about. Remembering the stories told to us by our elders, viewing the pictures and reading old letters and diaries can give us insights not only to people we have known but also those who had died before we were born. It can also give us a different and more personal perspective on the events of the past. Traditional history tends to focus on the macro or big view of events while the eye witness accounts of average people who lived through such events is often different.

While getting to know your ancestors is easier if you have old photos, letters, diaries, etc. it is still possible to get insight from public sources as public sources consist of more than census, birth, death and marriage records. Old newspaper articles, wills and probate proceedings, deeds, etc. often contain interesting and revealing information.

My grandmother, when she came to dinner on Sunday's would often tell stories about her half-brother who, in his youth, had been a bicycle racer and set a number of records, one of which my Father always claimed had never been broken. So, I went down to the local library and began looking up the articles, which were stored on microfilm, and making copies of them. In doing so I ran across a reference to a man who had the same name as my great-grand-mother's first husband and a woman who had the same name as my great-grandmother.

According to my grandmother and my Father, my great-grand-mother's first husband had gone out west with the stated intention of bettering himself financially and then having his wife and two children join him. However, shortly after he left, my great-grandmother received a telegram that he had died and, a few years later married my great-grandfather and had my grandmother by him. Well this article claimed that he had sent the telegram informing my great-grandmother of his death and then, some years later and after she had remarried and had another child, suddenly showed up on her doorstep wanting to pick up where he had left off.

The couple in the article were obviously my great-grandmother and her first husband but both my Father and uncle had never known this and suspected that my grandmother did not know as she was only about four years old when this had occurred. We debated showing the article to my grandmother but finally did and discovered that she had known about it. She told us the fellow left and my great-grandfather, a stickler for keeping everything legal, had followed him out west and had him legally divorce my great-grandmother. My sister later discovered that out west was Michigan and the first husband, one Patrick Iven, was serving time in prison for bigamy when my great-grandfather caught up with him (there is more on my great-grandmother and Patrick Iven in my Hub entitled A Twig Reconnects With the Family Tree).

Another time I was find how far back the name James Chambers Corbett in my Mother's family went as seemed to appear in every generation for over one hundred years. While reading the will of a James Corbett (who turned out to be the brother of the person I was looking for) I was struck by the fact that he kept referring to some sort of a trust in his deceased wife's will. Checking the wife's will it became clear that the small farm and mill that she and James operated was held in trust for her by her husband, James. Going back further, I discovered that the trust had been set up just before she and James married and that property in the trust had just been purchased a couple of days before using funds she had received from other property she had sold.

It was obvious that James had married a woman with some money. I was also fairly certain that the laws at that time required that the property of a married couple be held in the name of the husband. All the indications were that the couple seemed to have had a good marriage. They had a child and had worked and developed together. Upon the wife's death she had left her husband with the house to live in and the income from the property for the remainder of his life and, upon his death, the property in the trust would go to their married daughter and her husband. James had all the benefits of the property from the time he was married until his death, but ownership of the property was in the name of the trust for his wife (and their daughter after the wife's death) with James as trustee. It was obvious that this lady, who, from everything else I could find, began life as a simple frontier farm girl who was about a century and a half ahead of her time in terms of property ownership for women.

Digging further, I discovered that about four days before the purchase of the property she owned with James and the creation of the trust, she had sold a large block of land that she had inherited from her first husband. While James was about her age, her first husband, a John Clarke, whom she married as a teenager, was an older man with grown children. John Clarke was a Revolutionary War veteran who had taken advantage of the government's offer to pay his back pay from the war in land and had gone on to become very successful financially. Following his first wife's death, John had married this girl who later married James Corbett. The marriage only lasted a few years before John died without having additional children by his second wife. His other children appear to have reached adulthood at the time of his re-marriage and, in his will, after the name of each of these children by his first marriage, he stated that he was leaving the child fifty pounds sterling having previously given the child a fair share of the estate. His young widow was then left with the balance of the estate which was considerable. She was able to keep and operate it in her own name until she met and decided to marry James Corbett.

I don't know what this woman's motivations were in marrying John Clark. In those days women frequently died in childbirth and it was not uncommon for a man to marry more than once. It may have been love or money or both. He obviously loved her, or was at least sufficiently infatuated with her, to leave her with a comfortable inheritance.

Old files and records do contain a number of hidden gems and digging though them can be both fascinating as well as a good source of material for writers.