Wednesday, August 27, 2008

It pays to post...

Now that I have some time to catch up after my bout with Genealogicus Interruptus, I have been burning down my email list a bit. When they came in over the past two weeks, I've read them and ignored them and hoped to answer them when I found time.

Having a genealogy web site that Google and other search engines can find is great. Mine is presently at www.genealogy.com/users/s/e/a/Randy-Seaver/. The genealogy reports there are essentially unsourced, but they are great finding aids for anybody searching for their ancestors in my genealogy databases. Although I haven't updated these reports in three years, the information is still "good" - well, except for the branches of my family tree that I've lopped off since then and the branches that I've grafted onto my family tree since then. I guess I had better go update them soon! Actually, I had hoped to have my own web site by now, but I haven't gotten a round tuit...

Anyway, the information on my web site and my blogs has generated some email traffic over the past month, to wit:

1) A distant cousin of Linda's saw my web site genealogy report and wrote asking about my McKnew research - she was able to connect her ancestor Martha McKnew to the McKnew information in my database.

2) A distant cousin (?) of mine saw my blog post and inquired about the maiden name of Jerusha, the wife of Burgess Metcalf, a Revolutionary War soldier. We don't know Jerusha's maiden name, unfortunately. I sent her what I knew about the Metcalf line in hopes she can add or correct my information.

3) A distant cousin of mine in England saw my Private Member Tree database on Ancestry.com, and sent a message through Ancestry.com about the Hanny family, whose mother was Maria Richman, a granddaughter of John and Ann (Marshman) Richman of Hilperton, Wiltshire. Maybe he has more information about the Richmans!

4) A Seaver researcher saw my Private Member Tree on Ancestry.com and sent a message through Ancestry.com asking about John Wesley Seaver (1828-????). She apparently can connect this man to the immigrant Robert Seaver (1608-1683) of Roxbury MA, which I have been unable to do.

5) A Buchanan researcher saw my Private Member Tree on Ancestry.com and sent a message through Ancestry.com asking about Sophia Newton (1799-????) who married James Buchanan. I offered to send her a genealogy report about the Newton family in hopes that she can add to it.

This last query sent me off to look again for information about Nathan Newton, Sophia's father. I found that he had married, first, to Anna Brigham, in Marlborough MA, they had three known children, and the family moved to Andover, Oxford County, Maine, where Anna died and Nathan married (2) Dollie Wood and had several more children, including a Lambert Newton. Now my Thomas J. Newton, for whom I do not know the parents, married Sophia (Buck) Brigham, the widow of Lambert Brigham, of Southborough, MA. Notice the names that keep repeating here? That's a clue! The challenge is to connect Lambert Brigham to Anna Brigham, and perhaps that is a family connection for how my Thomas J. Newton "found" my Sophia (Buck) Brigham in about 1833 and married her. I've considered it probable that Thomas J. Newton was the son of either Jacob Newton of Dixfield, Maine or Nathan Newton of Andover, Maine, but I have absolutely no evidence for either consideration.

So - it was a pretty good night - I burned down my email list, I did a little research and thinking about the Newton/Brigham problem, and I helped some other researchers with their research too. I had fun doing it, too! It's great to be back in the research "saddle" again. I'm genea-cited... (as in excited, not source cited, I'm still very imperfect in sourcing).

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