I am blessed or cursed with multiple relationships to individuals. In many cases, I’m aware of these multiple relationships or at least propensity to have them in certain portions of my family. The tendency to have multiple relationships with many relatives is not unusual for some genealogists and often the multiple relationships are discovered within […]

Shared amounts of autosomal DNA can vary from one relationship to another. One should not assume that just because the amount of shared DNA is less that the individual is more distantly related when the paper genealogical tree is viewed. The amount of DNA shared can vary somewhat even if two different sets of individuals […]

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This image is from part of the 1880 U. S. Census agricultural schedule for Montebello Township in Hancock County, Illinois. Adam Trautvetter (the intent of the Adam Trautfether) is enumerated twice in this census. The first entry is for the property he owned. The second entry is for property than he rented for a fixed […]

There are lots of little clues in this oath of allegiance for Joseph Sledd which appears in Ancestry.com’s “Union Provost Marshals’ Papers, 1861-1867” and was taken from the National Archives’ Union Provost Marshals’ File of Papers Relating to Individual Civilians, 1861–1867 (microfilm publication M0345, made from War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109). Joseph Sledd […]

I am making my way through the pension file of Emerson Randles of Coshocton County, Ohio. Emerson married a Mary J. Rampley whose first “appearance” in any record is on when they marry. The hope is that there is something in the pension file that provides some clues as to her family of origin. But […]

I’ve decided to take another stab at the family of John Gibson (born in Stow, Massachusetts in 1751) and who I wrote a while ago after finding a reference to him in a Gibson family history. The author of that family history apparently loses John after a land transaction in 1799 where he sold his property in […]

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Haste makes waste. A search on GoogleBooks for Samuel and Sarah (Gibson) Sargent brought up the a reference in a genealogy of the descendants of John Gibson of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Sarah Gibson who married Samuel in 1798 is my ancestor. And it’s tempting to immediately conclude that my Sarah is the daughter of this […]

It’s the only signature I have for John Michael Trautvetter: when he gave consent for his seventeen-year old daughter Ida to marry in 1905. It was not the only document he ever signed in his life. By the time John Michael married in 1868 in Hancock County, Illinois, he had already purchased part of the […]