Saturday Challenge- Most Children

For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you to:

1)  The Family History Hound listed 20 Questions about your Ancestor, and I'm going to use some of them in the next few months.  

2)  Please answer the question - "What ancestor had the most children?  How many?" 

This is from last week’s fun challenge from Randy Seaver that I’m just getting to. Yes, I’m behind on doing many things- not just writing posts, but hopefully I will catch up in the next few weeks.

I am not going to check my family trees on this one- just say off the top of my head that it would be my great-grandfather William Jennings. He was married twice and had children by both wives as detailed below:

 

William Jennings with Sarah & eight of their children

By Margaret Wilson:

Mary (1879-1879)

Richard  (1880-died young)

Fannie (1881-1948)

May (1884-1931)

Susie (1886-1940)

William (1888-1970)

Six children, that’s a lot, but after Margaret’s death, he married Sarah Damery and had a few more children by her:

Lillie (Elizabeth) (1890-1965)

Kate Ann (1890-1947)

Alice (Grandma) 1893-1970

Sadie (1894-1960)

Boby (1896-1969)

Bella (1897-1968)

John Richard (1898-1899)

George (1901-1901)

Ruby (Rebecca) (1903-1978)

Hady (Harriet) (1904-1989)

Emily (1905-1982)

Edward (1907-1909)

Yes, that is twelve more for a total of eighteen children that William fathered! You can see why I didn’t bother checking through the rest of the tree. Many people over the years have had large families, but this one stands out for it’s size. 

Granted, all the children weren’t present at the same time, but they grew up in a small cottage in Ireland. It was as I recall hearing two rooms on the ground floor with the a second floor that may have been divided into two rooms.  The house still exists today on a cousin’s farm. She tells me that in more recent times they have used the building as a granary.

Upcoming CNYGS Meeting- May 20th

Saturday Challenge- Life Decisions That Changed A Life

From Randy Seaver's GeneaMusings: Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music):

1)  Did you or your ancestor make a critical life decision that really changed their life in terms of place, work, family, relationships, etc.?

Life decisions. How often do we make such decisions and not realize what they are? Going to a new place one day we meet somebody new that turns out to be very important in our lives. Taking a job that turns out to be the opportunity that we never dreamed was right around the corner. These simple little things can change our lives and we never realize when making the decision how important they might be.

Other times, we agonize over our decisions. Should I do this or do that? Which is better for me? They seem like big decisions and sometimes they are, but other times they might not matter at all.

For our ancestors, often a large decision that did have lasting effects and changed their lives drastically as well as that of their descendants was the decision about immigrating. For some in my family it was the decision to leave Europe and come to America and for others, it was to move on from a settlement in the eastern part of the United States and move farther west. There are countless examples of this.

My own grandmother, Alice Jennings made a decision of this type one day in 1912. Her older sister, Elizabeth, was home visiting the family. She encouraged her sister to come back to America with her.  Home, Keelinga Leap, County Cork, Ireland, was a place of little chance for advancement and a small community with many people inter-related. Elizabeth supposedly told Alice: “You can do a lot better than staying here and marrying your cousin.”

On October 8, 1912 Alice arrived in Boston, Massachusetts. There she worked as a waitress for a time and then enrolled in a school that was being offered for young women of little means. The school was on a small island in Boston Harbor, called Long Island, and offered her education for a career as a nurse. A professional or as it was beginning to be called, a registered nurse.

The outbreak of World War I and the US involvement offered her another life changing decision that built on the one of becoming a nurse. She now was a nurse in the Army Nurse’s Corp. and being sent to Fort Brown in Texas. Although the destination probably didn’t mean much to her at the time, it was a place for even more life changing events to happen. There she met many new people, nurses, and soldiers in the Calvary that was stationed there. In particular, one soldier caught her eye. A young man from Upstate New York by the name of Marion Wooster.

The course of her life changed and she never returned to Massachusetts to live. Instead, she married Marion and they lived in Washington, DC for a time after she left the service. Here, she would give birth to her oldest, Robert. Later they would settle in Skaneateles, New York, where her other three children would be born.

All these decisions, the larger ones, were made up of many smaller decisions that led to them and charted out a course of life that was surely very different from what she might have imagined as a young girl.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

Jennings Family in Ireland

and a shamrock for luck.

Tombstone Tuesday- Great Grandparents

After doing the Saturday Challenge that I posted yesterday, I got to wondering how many tombstones I have collected of various generations. I looked through my collection for my great grandparents. There would be eight people that fit that criteria. As one of my great grandmothers died young and her husband remarried, I actually have nine that I might possibly have tombstones for. In my collection I found seven of the nine.

John S Ward my paternal great grandfather

Maria C Titus Ward my paternal great grandmother

Alice M & Charles J Ingalls my paternal great grandfather and his second wife

Achsah Brown Ingalls my paternal great grandmother

Verner R and Edith M Duff Wooster my maternal great grandparents

All that is left to complete this is William Jennings and Sarah Damery Jennings, my other maternal great grandparents. If anyone is reading this and is in southwest Cork, Ireland, I have a favor to ask! They are located in White Church Cemetery near Skibbereen....
Okay, well, I thought I could always ask. Maybe someday...

Find My Past has many new records for their free Friday announcement this week. Were your Irish ancestors criminals? I don't think mine were, but I bet I can find at least a cousin or two if not some direct ancestors in the records. We all know that even the most law abiding citizens are going to run afoul of the law at some point and I'm sure that while my ancestors weren't criminals, they weren't the most upstanding citizens either. Like most, they would have fallen somewhere in the middle.

One of their teasers of upcoming records has me interested as well. There's a mention of the Midlands of England. I admit, my knowledge of geography in Europe isn't the greatest, and I wasn't sure where the Midlands are. However, I had a feeling that Northamptonshire might be a part of it, and a quick look-up told me I am correct. Buckinghamshire, the other county where the Ward family originated isn't, but one of the two counties means that when those records are available, I might be able to fill in some more information about that family before they immigrated to America.

Here's a copy of their announcement, which the original can be found here. 

New Irish Court Records, Quaker Congregations, and English Burials View online

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Ireland, Petty Sessions Court Registers OVER 227,700 RECORDS   Find out if your Irish relatives had brushes with the law thanks to these new additions that reveal whether your ancestors were witnesses, complainants or defendants, their addresses, dates in court, details of verdicts and sentences.   SEARCH THESE RECORDS »

Dorset Memorial Inscriptions   New records: 40,235 Total records: 85,868 Covering: Inscriptions taken from gravestones, tombs, monuments and even stained glass windows from around the county Discover: Birth year, death year, burial date, burial place, names of relatives, memorial type and inscription   SEARCH THESE RECORDS »   Warwickshire Burials   New records: 21,263 Total records: 1,129,563 Covering: Witton Cemetery (Birmingham) 1987-2011 Discover: Birth year, death year, burial place, parents’ names, residence, inscription, grave and register number, and additional notes   SEARCH THESE RECORDS »   Northumberland & Durham Monumental Inscriptions   New records: 16,811 Total records: 23,021 Covering: 26 churches & burial grounds in Northumberland & Co. Durham Discover: Birth date, burial year, burial place, death date, denomination and inscription, and stone type   SEARCH THESE RECORDS »   Ireland, Society Of Friends (Quaker) Congregational Records   New records: 5,737 Total records: 1,208,254 Covering: Quaker meetings held throughout Ireland from 1600 onwards Discover: Details about the meetings your ancestor attended and the religious activities they engaged in   SEARCH THESE RECORDS »

Covering both civil and criminal cases, the Petty Sessions' brief was wide. Cases ranged from merchants who had not paid duty on their goods, to workers suing for unpaid wages. Farmers were fined for letting their cattle wander or for allowing their cart to be driven without their name painted on the side. Debts were collected and disputes settled. Public drunkenness was a common offence, as was assault and general rowdiness. Political feelings were often volatile and there are frequent cases all over the country of people charged with putting up seditious posters or leaflets.   FIND OUT MORE »

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Saturday Challenge- Genealogy Presents

The Saturday Fun Challenge from Randy Seaver's GeneaMusings:

1)    What gift that you received for Christmas is your favorite for genealogy purposes? Book, magazine, hardware, software, website subscription, research time, DNA test - what was it, and how will it affect your genealogy research?

Well, I didn’t really receive anything for Christmas that pertains to genealogy. In part, that is because I don’t really exchange presents with anyone except my husband and we do just a few little things. However I did receive a few things through the Christmas season that are wonderful genealogical items!

First, my husband and I figured out what dates we will be taking a trip in the spring. This trip is to NERGC (New England Regional Genealogical Conference) in Springfield, Massachusetts. Our registrations are in for the conference and we have our hotel room booked. I think that might count as a present? I’m excited to see everybody in New England that week and to learn a few new things as well. I have many ancestors in New England and enjoy researching that area, so there will be various classes related to specific places that I will be aiming to get to. Additionally, there is a Writing Track at the conference that I expect to take full advantage of.

There are a couple books that I got on Christmas Eve that might be considered genealogy as well. Both of them weren’t actual presents, but items that were in my late mother’s house.

The first is something that she has kept careful care of since 1970 when her mother died. It is a Bible that my Grandma owned and that was presented to her in her Sunday School class in the Church of Ireland. This Bible, originally received by Alice V. Jennings Wooster in 1905 won’t help my genealogy. I have already looked through it carefully to extract any data it might contain of a genealogical nature years ago. However, it is a tangible item of the only grandmother I was lucky enough to know.

The second book is a cookbook from 1950. The Levanna Community Church in southern Cayuga County, New York compiled it. This is a typical church or community cookbook that was compiled by the members of that group and sold presumably as a fundraiser. I noted that it was produced by a mimeograph machine in the Sherwood High School, which has long since been condensed into the bigger, consolidated school district of Southern Cayuga Central Schools. Flipping through the pages, many of the names are familiar to me. A few of them belong to people that are various  degrees of cousins of mine. Again, this book will do nothing to expand my genealogy research. However, the recipes are representative of that area in that time period. An area very near (a few miles of) where my direct ancestors lived; written by contemporaries of them, that were relatives, friends, neighbors or all of the above. Are these not the recipes my grandmother and mother would have been cooking with or very close to them? I do already have many of my mother’s recipes, but they are mostly of a later time period. These are, of course, from before there were so many convenience foods available. They are what those recipes of hers evolved from. It is nice to look through and maybe, make a few of the ones that most appeal to us.

Saturday Challenge: Time Travel

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings has given us another challenge this week: Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1) If you could go back into the time machine and re-attend one family event that you were present at as a child, and would love to return to interview your relatives, what event would that be?

I don’t know what event I would go back to. Maybe just a Sunday afternoon visit with my grandparents or my mother and I going over and having lunch with them. I know from a letter I saw that my grandmother wrote to one of her sisters that Mom and I visited for lunch on occasion, but I have no recollection of it.

Alice Jennings Wooster (1893-1970), “Grandma”, was the only grandmother that I knew. Unfortunately, I barely remember Grandma. She passed a few days before I turned 5 years old. I have vague recollections of visiting their house and Mom sitting on the couch with her talking while I was trying to get Mom to play “Slap Jack” with me. Probably on later visits, I remember Mom going into the next room and visiting with her as she lay in bed and I had a vague understanding that she had broken her hip.

This is the person I would want to interview. I don’t think I would have any specific questions to ask her. Rather, I’d want her to just talk with me. Tell me the stories that she told her other grandchildren. And to tell about her adventures she had as a young woman. We know the facts that she went to nursing school at Long Island Hospital in Boston and then entered the service as an Army Nurse during World War I. There she met my grandfather. The details, the little stories and how she felt about what she was doing and about what was happening around her, though, has been lost to the ages.

She never talked much about her growing up in Ireland. Perhaps if I asked, though, she would tell stories about that to. If she were willing to talk, they would be a great thing to be able to record, and fill in more about her childhood than just the vague generalities that we know.

Overall, I would just like to have a chance to sit and talk with Grandma. As I was so young, I didn’t really get to know her or ever have a real conversation with her. In actuality, I would love to be able to travel back in time and talk with any one of my grandparents even just for an afternoon. Grandpa left us when I was just 10, so he too I really didn’t get to know, although I remember much more. My paternal grandparents were gone before I was born, so I have just the stories that I am fortunate enough to hear from older members of the family. Perhaps, in a way, hearing these stories is a way of going back in time and “meeting” these people. 

Irish as in Church of Ireland Records Online!

For anybody that has listened to me talk about Irish records very much, you know that I have just one complaint about them. It is the fact that every time some new records become available and everybody is excited about them, there is another group off to the side that are not so excited. These people are like, "That's nice, but you forgot about us again." Contrary to what some people would like you to believe, not all Irish can be found in the Catholic parish records. There might not have been vast numbers, but still a small but significant group of Irish were and still are Protestant.

For those people, I have very exciting news! There is a new website, still in beta, but it is out there-- of Church of Ireland Records! It lists what is available and where. This list is published by the Church archives. For those that aren't familiar with the term "Church of Ireland", this is the Anglican church. In the United States the Anglican church is commonly known as the Episcopal church. There are a few differences between them, but in general it is a good equivalent for understanding. Here is a sample from it.



In this the green highlight for Whitechurch in County Cork has baptisms for 1824-1874, marriages 1807-1845, and burials for 1821-1873. The green indicates that records were lost in the fire of 1922, but that these are reconstructed records that are available. The yellow is for lost records and the non-highlight is records that are still available at the local churches. There is more information about finding these records in the text of the information.

A quick scan tells me that there are no records left pre-1922 at Whitechurch for my family, but there are other churches nearby that have possibilities for various members of the family. This is a wonderful start and I am crossing my fingers that more and more records like this become available for us to research at a distance!

For those that missed it above, the link to all this is available by clicking on the phrase "new website still in beta" or at: https://beta.ireland.anglican.org/news/6518/a-colourcoded-resource-of-what