Category: Research and Resources
Posts that discuss specific books or databases for finding information about ancestors.
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“The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” (1989), by Allan Gurganus “The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” was a 1989 novel by Allan Gurganus in which the titular widow, Lucy, tells the story of her 1900 marriage to “Captain” William Marsden when she was 15 and her husband was 50. The specific details of…
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Or “Being dragged down the rabbit hole” Our story today begins with the Bowen family. You may recall my September post on William Bowen: Wavetops: William Bowen, Jr. The WikiTree pages for William’s siblings were not well-developed, and since researching William (Sr.) led to a very well-done NEGHR report on them at American Ancestors1, I…
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Wavetops: James McCullough (Sr.) (1757-1838) When John McCullough died in 1766, he left four orphans without family or support in Rowan County, North Carolina. The courts bound each child to an apprenticeship, each with different terms. In her 1991 Ph.D. dissertation, Johanna Lewis1 noted that of 52 orphans placed as apprentices before 1770, only one…
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Rescued from obscurity Before we begin: I’ve been struggling to make these Wavetops posts work the way I wanted them to work – so I’m taking a slightly different approach. Instead of pointing at the “top” and talking about the work that still needs to be done, I’m going to start at the “bottom” and…
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A woman who saw the changing rights of women in Ohio A story can seem straightforward once the facts are lined up and neatly documented. The life story of one of my 4th great-grandmothers, for example, could be summed up like this: Eleanor Waters was born on 3 August 1810 in Pennsylvania. Her family moved…
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Thinking about the moral baggage we attach to the idea of “work” A quick Google question “How many Americans are there” gives me an estimated population of America in 2022 of 333,271,411. In 2022, it was estimated that over 158 million Americans were in some form of employment, while 3.64 percent of the total workforce…
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A connection to the world tree When you put your work into WikiTree, the goal is to make your contributions as solid as possible. You want your ancestors’ profiles to be as thoroughly documented with evidence as possible, with source citations pointing other researchers to your sources. At some point, an ancestor you’ve put a…
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Why we keep doing research after we think we found all the answers Last week, we revisited a story about my 6th-great grandfather, a Hessian soldier who was captured by General Washington’s troops and sent to work in Mount Hope, New Jersey, for John Jacob Faesch, who needed laborers to continue making ammunition for the…
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Inter-cultural ties to the larger family tree If you’ve been following my new music newsletter, All Kinds Musick, you may have noticed my recent post about the Los Lobos album, La Pistola y El Corazon. In it, I said: I credit [David Higaldo’s] work on this album as the final puzzle piece that made me…
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The Hessian soldier in our family tree This week, I want to talk about Leopold Zindle, my 6th great-grandfather, a Hessian soldier who was taken as a prisoner of war by General Washington’s troops during the Battle of Paulus Hook in August 1779. To get to Leopold, we go through one of My Sixteen, John…
Mightier Acorns 