Genealogy Adventures

I thought I would share a quick article about maps…and how you can use them as part of your genealogical research practice.

I spent a hot minute or three chatting about how I use maps during my keynote talk at the Le Comité des Archives de la Louisiana- hosted genealogy conference in Lafayette, Louisiana.

My first stop during this part of my talk was introducing how I used maps to research my different enslaved Sheffey ancestral groups in southwest Virginia

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/09/13/using-maps-in-your-genealogy-research/

I have a gentleman in my family's ancestry who is causing myself, and the whole Genealogy Adventures team, one enormous headache. He is my 6x great grandfather, Reuben Holloway. He falls on my mother's maternal side of the family tree. His story is typical. While we know quite a bit about his life in Edgefield, we know little about his life before he arrived in that county. We know nothing about his childhood.

The problem with Reuben has everything to do with correctly identifying his parents.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/10/04/will-the-real-parents-of-reuben-holloway-1740-1806-please-stand-up/

I knew before I began this journey that I was going to have a multitude of white relations who would be utterly unknown to me. How? From my complexion, my freckles, my hair, and just about every other external aspect of my being…there was more than enough evidence of it. If I had any doubts, all I need do is to look at the wide circle of my immediate family. The evidence of numerous cross-ethnic unions down the generations abound.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/10/07/when-black-and-white-dna-cousins-meet-online-a-tale-of-two-very-different-experiences/

My maternal Quaker Holloway family has begun to rival my maternal Quaker Harlan/Harling family, my paternal and maternal Quaker White family, and my paternal and maternal Ulster Scots and Scottish Stuart/Stewart family in terms of size and importance. These four families are enormous. Together, they connect me to a mind-blowing number of Americans from all walks of life.  The sheer number of DNA cousins I have through these four families makes my head spin at times.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/10/13/william-holloway-martha-branson-phebe-crispin-a-genealogical-game-of-hide-and-seek/

Few of my ancestors' genealogies are as contentious as my 10x great-grandfather, Colonel Thomas Pettus, born abt 1598 in England (either London or the County of Norfolk). His lineage has sparked fierce debates among American genealogists for two centuries. One of the problems is the sheer volumes of Thomases in the Pettus family. It is incredibly easy to get them confused.

Then there is the debate about whether he married Ko Oke "Jane" Powhatan, a daughter of Matoake (better known as Pocahontas) and her first husband, Kocoum. While there is a European-descended researcher group who have challenged the marriage between Ko Oke and Thomas Pettus, 3 different Virginian Native American tribes have not only claimed this lineage down the ages, it verges on the sacred among them. I'm going to admit bias towards the Native Americans' claim. For who would have better knowledge of Native American history than Native Americans? This too has been supported by researchers William Strachey, historian at Jamestown, and Bill Deyo, the tribal historian of the Patawomeck tribe. These are two men who know the early colonial history of Virginia.

Putting that contentious issue to one side, the next question that surrounds Thomas Pettus is straightforward: who were his parents?

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/10/23/playing-genealogical-hide-and-go-seek-with-col-thomas-pettus-abt-1598-1663/

Endogamy features heavily in my family tree. From my Quaker and Jewish ancestors, to the big enslavers who formed the American South's elite, to my ancestors of more modest means who lived in rural areas...cousins married cousins for centuries. My Pamunkey ancestors also weren't averse to marrying cousins to help support and maintain peace.

Continue this practice of cousin marriages for long enough, and if you remain in the same county as your ancestors, it doesn't take long - 2 to 3 generations - for most, if not all, of a county to be related. Let's take a look at a purely illustrative example from the Old Ninety-Six region of South Carolina. And let's say each of the 4 topline endogamous groups depicted married cousins within the same family group for 300 to 400 years (this isn't as much of an exaggeration as you might think!).

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/12/07/endogamy-or-how-an-entire-county-can-be-related/

Today I am going to spend a little time discussing endogamy -the practice of generations of cousin marriages - within a specific context. Enslaved African-descended people toiled across every pre-industrialized sphere. While I have uncovered small numbers of enslaved kin who laboured in mines, aboard paddle boats, were dock workers, or manufacturing; the vast majority were enslaved within an agricultural context. That is the sphere the majority of my research has focused upon. It's what I know. Hence the somewhat narrow scope of this article.

Before I delve into the topic of this article, I'd like to paint a quick picture of what life was like on the farm or the plantation. I do so with the aim of illustrating the practical reality of how endogamy affected communities of enslaved people. For African Americans who have tested their DNA, this will be an important aspect of your ancestry that needs to be understood. Endogamy is a complicated factor that absolutely influences genetic cousin matches: the number of chromosome segments you will share with dna cousins, and the amount of cMs you will share.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/12/17/endogamy-on-the-plantation/

Military draft cards were essential to unlocking the mystery of which family lines moved elsewhere in the US - and when they moved there.

One clue to the extent of these migrations within my family is the sheer number of entire family groups who seemingly fell off the face of the earth after the 1870 Federal Census, and accompanying state census records for the same time period. They had to have gone somewhere. The question was: where? I bounced a few ideas around about how to find these missing families. Then it hit me: WWI and WWII draft cards.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2018/01/12/using-military-draft-cards-to-find-your-kin-during-the-post-us-civil-war-migration-periods/

I always enjoy genealogy research conference calls with my Edgefield-connected cousins Donya, Sheila, and Loretta. They are always illuminating. Nine times out of ten, we can solve whatever thorny genealogical conundrum we're faced with at the time. During a recent call with our cousin Donya, Loretta reminded me of a research strategy I had used to employ regularly...and had simply fallen out the habit of doing.

The research strategy Loretta reminded me of was doing very broad searches using Newspapers.com.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2018/01/14/newspapers-com-boolean-search-strings-and-finding-lost-post-civil-war-ancestral-lines/

Nestled along the James River, Varina is a remote and quiet part of Virginia. Its vast tracts of rich farmland provide no indication that this region was once the epicenter of early colonial Virginia. Nor are there any hints that three cultures - British, Native American, and African - did more than play out parts of a deeply troubled history. They merged. That these cultures met and mixed is not in question. History books are filled with accounts of skirmishes between British immigrants and the Native American tribes who called this land home. History books also tell us of the 20-and-odd Africans who were brought to this area in 1619.

History has been, and remains, silent about how these three cultures mixed in the primordial Virginia colony of the early 1600s. This part of their shared history has yet to be told.

Genealogy Adventures aims to correct that omission.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://genealogyadventures.net/2018/07/23/ghosts-in-the-dna-the-lost-diversity-of-early-colonial-virginia/