Genealogy Adventures

Actually, the title of this post should have been finding my father’s and my sister’s connection to the St. Clair / Sinclair / Sinkler family. Their DNA tests have proved a long-held suspicion of mine. It doesn’t look like I inherited enough St. Clair DNA from my DNA test to prove it. That’s the autosomal DNA inheritance roll of the dice for you. If you’re also using DNA tests to confirm and/or discovery family connections, this is another reason to have a number of people from your immediate family do the old spit or swab in tube thing.

In my decade-plus long ancestral journey, DNA testing has unlocked some surprising discoveries. It’s confirmed some things my family knew. It’s also disproved other theories. One thing it’s proven so far is that my African-descended family didn’t take the names of enslavers they liked or who may have treated them 'well' within the American chattel slavery system.  Nope, they took the surnames that were theirs through birthright. All of them.

My link to the St. Clair family is via my father's paternal grandmother, Jane Ann White.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2016/11/26/ann-st-clair-of-wytheville-va-finding-my-lost-connection-to-the-st-clair-sinclair-family/

Enter obituaries. Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that reading through hundreds of obituaries is more than a little morbid.  But hey, we’re researching people who are no longer among us.  So it’s part and parcel of the research that genealogists do. Believe it or not, obituaries are also a goldmine of information.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/01/19/obituaries-matter-when-it-comes-to-genealogy-research/

I’ve been meaning to write about Pleasant Roane for quite a while.  I’ve always felt badly that other research and other stories commanded my attention more, and overshadowed his tale.  Well, as much of his tale as I’m aware of. It's quite the interesting tale.

I’ve also been surprised that I see to be the only Roane family descendant researching Pleasant. Mine is the only family tree in which he appears. This, in part, probably has to do with the obscurity of his origins. Any Roane would be proud to claim him.

So what prompted my interest?  He is one of a handful of my enslaved ancestors who sued for his freedom...and then sued the State of Virginia to be allowed to remain in the state once he was freed.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/01/28/pleasant-roane-rowan-and-the-road-to-manumision-in-lynchburg/

When it comes to Leila A “Storm” Sheffey, a cousin who descends from a different Sheffey line than mine, African American newspapers have revealed a story worthy of a Jane Austen romance: a plucky, astute, and educated heroine; solid middle class values; a trip; an illness; a society courtship; and a marriage. OK, this being an Austen story comparison…a good marriage.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/02/06/leila-sheffey-taylor-a-life-lived-in-the-turn-of-the-20th-century-black-press/

I diagrammed the movement of enslaved people from one Williams family member to another. Every deed, every Will, every estate inventory, and every tax record citing enslaved people received its own diagrammed work-up. I would make notes linking individual enslaved people from transaction to transaction. I had dozens of sheets of paper in no time at all. Which was fine for me. However, I needed to share this information with an entire research team. Creating a PDF document from dozens of scanned pages wasn’t going to cut it. 

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/04/25/why-diversity-matters-for-online-genealogy-service-providers/

When it came to dealing with a family tree that is exploding in size due to the Moses Williams Project…I had to think of another way of finding the records I needed for specific individuals myself and the project team has been researching.

A different approach hit me out of the blue.

My Old Ninety-Six ancestors and family worshiped at specific churches.  Churches like Springfield Baptist Church, Liberty Springs Baptist Church, and Shaws Creek Baptist Church were established and built by members of my family. Their descendants still worship at these churches to this day. That was the clue that I needed. It’s one of those clues that has been under my nose the entire time.

I decided to do a general search on the terms ‘Liberty Springs Baptist Church’ and Greenwood, South Carolina’ on Newspapers.com. I struck gold immediately.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/06/16/using-church-names-and-obits-to-find-your-ancestors-in-rural-areas/

Critical thinking is part of my basic toolkit in terms of life skills. It’s no wonder considering I minored in philosophy as part of my university degree.  Critical thinking is one of the cornerstones of philosophy. It’s a skill that I apply to pretty much every aspect of my life. It is also the bedrock of my genealogical work.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/07/24/critical-thinking-an-important-skill-in-genealogy-research/

I had the opportunity to visit Monticello the other day. Considering my recent trip where I visited some of my Roane family relations on another plantation in Louisiana, I knew It was going to be a day of mixed emotions.

While I knew Monticello sat atop a mountain, it never occurred to me exactly what went into its actual construction. Enter our (amazing) tour guide, Mary. One of the first things she told our tour group was that it had taken hundreds of enslaved people to literally level the uppermost part of the mountain in order to create the flat plateau visitors to Monticello see today. It didn't occur to me until long after our tour had finished to ask how much earth had been removed as part of that human engineering feat. It was an exceedingly hot and humid day when we visited. I couldn’t image the physical toll that endeavor must have taken. While the view from the house and the surrounding gardens and terraces are stunning…they came at a real human price.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/08/04/visiting-monticello/