Category: Virginia
Families that lived in the state and left records behind there.
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This story is part of the celebration of America’s 250th birthday at Projectkin – Stories250. Look for more at https://projectkin.substack.com/p/stories250-now-in-timeline-and-map
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Finding and evaluating published family histories is a vital part of tying your research to that of your predecessors.
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Using secondary sources, like the local histories published in the late 1800s and early 1900s, can be a mixed blessing. It depends how much the anonymous authors enjoyed puffing up their subjects!
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How our origin story shapes our future A couple of weeks ago, David Shaw of Serengenity made a salient comment (emphasis added) on my post about great-great uncle George’s 1911 Callin Family History: In that time period Genealogy was quite a fad, consequently many are badly written and poorly sourced. Their resources at the time…
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Finding family in the military Charles Walter Putnam (1859–1922) was one of my wife’s sixteen great-great-grandparents. We talked about his family last year: Some families pass down maternal surnames as first or middle names in their children. In the Putnam family, Charles named his youngest son George Force Putnam (1904–1978), not only giving young George…
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The burden of proof requires more evidence The most important question in any research is: “How do you know that?” If you’re lucky, the answer prompts you to say, “Huh, that’s interesting…” and you learn something new. If you saw last week’s post about William and Oscar Martin or the original “Family Reunion: Martin” post…
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A tale from when the West was still young Once upon a time, several families founded a town in Ohio. Benjamin Montgomery (1766-1841) brought his wife, Nancy, and their six children from Virginia to settle in Weller Township, Richland County, Ohio, where they laid out a town in 1816. Benjamin called the town “Olivesburg” after…
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William “Zardie” Sly (1882–1954) – a.k.a. Jack St. Clair William Zardie Sly (1882–1954) took his middle name from his maternal grandfather, Gilbert Zardius Avery; most of the references I have found refer to him as “Zardy,” or by his initials “W.Z.” which probably served to distinguish him from the generations of William Slys related to…
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The family of Sarah Jane (Bellamy) Clark Sarah Jane Bellamy was born in Cabell County, Virginia, on 17 December 1836. She is my maternal grandfather’s paternal grandmother—and she is one of My Sixteen. Since writing about her grandfather, Matthew Bellamy, in The Slaveholders, I have spent some time improving the WikiTree profiles for this family, and most…
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Not everyone will make you proud My maternal grandfather, Russ Clark, did not like to talk about his family history. He loved to tell tales of growing up in Depression-era Arkansas and Kentucky, but he rarely said anything specific about his family. He had one brother, Jerry, who he seemed to like, but all he…
Mightier Acorns 