Any exciting finds?

Has anyone made an interesting genealogical discovery lately?

I must confess I've done little research because I've been focused on genealogy lectures. I finished 4 for Arkansas earlier this month and will be recording 3 for Texas over the next 2 weeks for use in their conference next month. I'm looking forward to having a little time to work on my own genealogy after those are out of the way.

I need to get busy and do more.

>2 mnleona: After next week, I should have more time to work on my own research--or to pick up another client.

I FINALLY found a connection to Maryland's original colonists of The Ark and The Dove ships. There is a direct connection to Robert Henry Wiseman. He would be my 9X grandfather.

There are hints at a connection to the Calverts, possibly Leonard Calvert, who was the first governor of Maryland. He had two known children, but no proof of the identity of his wife. I find that interesting, seeing as the Calverts were pretty big deals; you'd think there would be evidence. Many think her name was Ann Brent, but are not sure about that.

>4 theretiredlibrarian: Congratulations!

Woo woo! I think I found the link to Leonard Calvert... it appears he was also my 9x grandfather. Leonard Calvert was the younger brother of Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore; their father George Calvert is credited with being the founder of Maryland.

>6 theretiredlibrarian: You are on a roll.

I go in fits and spurts...it's how I spent my day off yesterday. The first work I've done on the family tree in 6 months. A data base of early Maryland colonists has been invaluable.

>8 theretiredlibrarian: I go in spurts also. Did you find Ann Brent?

No; is she a Marylander in your tree? Sorry, I don't know where my mind was at when I posted this. Yes, I found Ann Brent, but there is still some debate on whether she was the wife of Gov. Leonard Calvert.

According to Early Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia's Northern Neck Counties https://www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us/getperson.php?personID=I3982&tree=Tre... :

No record has been found as yet of the time or place of Leonard Calvert's marriage, nor of the name of his wife, which has frequently been given as Anne Brent. The following "Gleanings from English Wills" by Mrs. Russel Hastings in Maryland Magazine, Vol. 22, p.307,says:
"The identity of Leonard Calvert's wife (now that it is known that Margaret Brent's sister Anne was a non-juring spinster in 1651, ten years after the birth of Leonard Calvert's children) is undiscovered, although she was quite possibly a member of the prolific Brent family."
None of the Brents showed any interest in the children of Leonard Calvert, by will or otherwise, as it seems natural they would have done, had the children been nephew and niece.
Leonard Calvert accompanied his father to Newfoundland, and in August, 1628, with his brother-in-law, William Peaseley, returned to England where he petitioned the king that his father might have a share in certain prizes taken from the French by the ships Benediction and Victory. After the death of his father his brother Cecilius, Second Lord Baltimore, appointed him Governor of Maryland. The Calvert Papers state that he sailed from Gravesend, England, for Maryland with his brother George and other colonists, October 18, 1633. (See the First Settlement of Maryland, Part I) Proceeding to Cowes, Isle of Wight, they took on Fathers White and Altham, and lay there at Cowes until November 22, 1633, when they weighed anchor and sailed for the Needles, the southwest point of the Isle of Wight, and began their adventurous voyage across the Atlantic in the two ships the Ark and the Dove. They reached Maryland March 3, 1634, and landed founding the city of St. Mary's, March 27, 1634, which was named in honor of the Virgin Mary, it being the Feast of the Annunciation. (Spark's American Biography, 2d Series, Vol. 9, states: "The intended name for Maryland was Crescentia, but in compliment to the Queen, Henrietta Maria, a Catholic, daughter of Henry the Fourth of France, the name was changed to Maryland."
Neill in Founders of Maryland says: "His life as Governor of Maryland was not distinguished for boldness and originality, and his relative George Evelyn, the Commander of Kent Island, once sneeringly said, 'Who was his grandfather but a grazier? What was his father? What was Leonard Calvert himself at school but a dunce and a blockhead?'"
On April 1, 1643, before sailing for England on a summons from his brother, Lord Cecil Calvert, Leonard Calvert issued a proclamation appointing Mr. Giles Brent to be Lieutenant Governor, Admiral and Chief Captain of the Province during his absence. Sailing from Maryland about April 1, 1643, Governor Leonard Calvert must have arrived in England in the late spring of that year. Returning to the Colony in the summer or early fall of 1644, probably places the date of his marriage almost immediately after his arrival in England, the birth of his son William as of 1644, and his daughter Anne as of 1645-this latter after his return to Maryland. No record of his marriage nor name of his wife has been found. The first mention of Govenor Leonard Calvert's son William Calvert is contained in the record of a suit recorded in Maryland Probate Records, 1658-1662. (Also see Chronicles of Colonial Maryland by James Walter Thomas, Page 62) The suit brought by "the Lord Proprietary, guardian of William Calvert (then in England), son and heir-at-law of Governor Leonard Calvert, vs. Thomas Stone, son, and Verlinda Stone, widow of Governor William Stone," for the recovery of Governor Calvert's house and lot, at St. Mary's, and which Stone in 1650 had purchased of Margaret Brent, executrix of Governor Calvert, under the supposition that she had the power to convey it. The verdict was for the plaintiff for the land and costs-thus establishing the fact of both marriage and issue. Calvert Papers, Vol.I, Page 244, states: September, 1663, Governor Charles Calvert wrote his father, Lord Cecil Calvert: "Att the same time my Cousin William's sister arrived here and is now at my house and has the care of my household affairs. As yett no good match does present, but I hope in a short time she may find one to her own content and yr. Lspp's desire." In 1889, the State of Maryland purchased the eastern half of the old State House lot at St. Mary's to commemorate the spot where "civilization and christianity were first introduced into our state," erected on it an imposing and classic building knowns as the "Saint Mary's Female Seminary."
Since then the state of Maryland has done tardy justice to Maryland's first Governor, Leonard Calvert, by erecting to his memory a handsome granite shaft, placing it on the site of the "Old Mulberry"; and at the same time, in order to perpetuate the foundation lines of the old State House, planted at each of its twelve corners a massive granite marker. "The Shaft is thirty-six feet high and six feet square at the base. Above the inscription blocks are two bronze medallion plates bearing the Coat-of-Arms of Maryland." (Thomas' Colonial Maryland.)

This is more intriguing than exciting...

My 1st cousin (my mother's sister's daughter) and I both had our DNA analyzed through Ancestry, several years ago and a couple years apart, and were connected as a match. Except Ancestry declared us 2nd-3rd cousins. I had no sense of the typical accuracy so shrugged this off as a statistical oddity. My cousin speculated that maybe we weren't really full 1st cousins, but presented no supporting evidence. About two months ago she emailed that Ancestry lists half-1st cousins as an alternative relationship to 2nd-3rd cousins, and suggested that maybe her mother and my mother had different fathers. Again no concrete evidence, just a vague suspicion based on anecdotal bits from her mother (who died 15 years ago) about family dysfunction in the 1920s-1940s. Meanwhile, Ancestry has improved its data analysis, separates paternal and maternal matches, calculates common ancestors from personal trees, etc. I figured the tools were there to investigate, and this past weekend I devoted time to the cause. I checked common ancestors for my maternal matches, the ones I share with my cousin and the ones I do not (note that we should, in theory, share essentially all of them). And it turns out that... all of the matches we share are on our mothers' mother's line. And all of my maternal matches I don't share with her (and there are lots) are on my mother's father's line. My DNA matches the paper trail, and her DNA does not. Zero. I emailed her, she checked further, and she has no matches for what is supposed to be her mother's father's line, but plenty of matches with completely unfamiliar names in the trees. (Why she hadn't done this before, given her suspicion, I couldn't say.) Neither her mother nor mine ever so much as hinted at this possibility and almost certainly they didn't know. My mother (who is still living but has dementia so I'm not going to spring this on her) spent a decade on genealogical research for her family so I'd assumed it was a done deal for reasonably accessible documents and therefore not particularly interesting. The only Ancestry DNA matches I'd previously paid attention to were on my father's mother's side because that's where the mysteries are, or so I'd thought. My cousin is now on the case, looking for clues in the trees associated with her maternal matches. I am merely curious. She has a more personal stake; this may explain some puzzles about her mother, and she has lost a branch of family lore.

>11 qebo:, wow, that would be quiet a revelation! If she was personally close to anyone on that "lost branch of family lore" she should still view them as adopted family; it's not as if she imagined them. But if it's far enough back that she didn't know them, it would be more of an academic exercise ... I guess? Not sure how I'd feel. Depends how much I'd integrated that branch into my personal sense of identity.

I had one great-grandparent in Finland I did not expect ever to learn the name of. He was (we believed) the employer of my great-grandmother; she became pregnant by him, he refused to acknowledge the child, and his name was never handed down to us.

DNA to the rescue! A descendant of that man's family hired a professional to build out her family tree, and the professional contacted me. We were able to confirm the fellow's name and I learned more about him. He was actually the son of the employer, a couple of years younger than my great-grandmother (which paints a possibly nicer picture of how they might have hooked up, although that's still just guess-work.) So now I do have his name, and all of the extensive lineage attached to him that the researcher dug up. The guy went on to marry someone else and have a proper family, not sure how the descendant of that union feels about this curious other branch he is linked into, lol.

>12 Cecrow: I think the main impact is that it makes sense of some things about her mother, but too late for a conversation. The attachment to family lore was more a couple generations back, colonial ancestry and such. I don't know how much she cares about this. She could be glad to lose some of them. The tree she has constructed sprawls all over the place, so she can keep all the branches as biological connections to her mother's siblings and as you say adoptive to her mother. (I did not know any of these people well. I met my aunt maybe a half dozen times in my life, my grandmother also and she died when I was a kid, and my grandfather died before I was born.)
>13 Cecrow: Huh, interesting. So many stories of this sort pop up in news articles these days.

On Ancestry, I had the granddaughter of my biological father contact me but she no longer does. I would like to know more about him and who was her grandmother. I know he was married three times and my mother was his second wife.

As a general recommendation, if you're already done a 'thorough' crawl through old photo albums, letters, etc. it's always worth another sweep now and then. What I've found is that while on a first pass certain names and faces jumped out at me and I diligently recorded what I learned, on a second pass some of the peripheral information now comes to the foreground as things I've not absorbed, and become more interesting. I picked up a lot of new data from old, covered ground over the holiday season.

The earliest person in my family tree to live in South Africa (not a direct ancestor, sadly) that I have researched, was one Ignacio Ferreira, who was born in Lisbon c. 1694. He was shipwrecked off Simonstown in winter 1723 (difficult, the port is sheltered from the prevailing wind at that time of year) and survived. He moved to the Drakenstein valley (Franschhoek, about 50 km inland from Cape Town), and in 1725 married one Maria Terblanche. I assume she was a Huguenot, and either her parents or her grandparents arrived here in 1688 with the main body of the group. They had a gazillion kids, who in due course gave rise to:

1. Ignatius Phillipus Ferreira, an official of Kruger's Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek, who laid out (c. 1890) a new part of a mining camp that grew into Johannesburg; the area concerned is called Ferreirastown.
2. An unpleasant individual who lived in the Somerset East district in the 1860s. He sold his farm but wouldn't give occupation until one day the buyer's wife and sister-in-law saw their chance in a village dance, and so they wrote a song about him. This is still sung by almost everybody who knows some Afrikaans
"Vat jou goed en trek, Ferreira, vat jou goed en trek ..
Swaar dra, al aan die een kant ... Jannie met die hoepelbeen."
(Take your things and go, Ferreira ... heavy carrying, all on one side, Jannie with the gammy leg."
He was last seen, gammy leg and all, as a cloud of dust leaving the district.
3. Johanna Christina Ferreira, who grew up on a farm in the Humansdorp district (Eastern Cape) and married one Edward George Witham Harvey in the 1860s. His sister Kezia married one John Glen of Port Elizabeth, who was my great-grandfather.