Saturday, September 18, 2010

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - The Time Machine

Hey there, genealogy buffs - it's Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1) Determine which event in your ancestral history that you would love to be a witness to via a Time Machine. Assume that you could observe the event, but not participate in it.

2) Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a comment on Facebook.

Here's mine:

I am so tempted to pick the birth of one of my elusive ancestors - the ones that I don't know the names of their parents - like Devier J. Lamphier, Elizabeth Dill, Thomas J. Newton, Hannah Smith, William Knapp, John Kemp, Mary Hoax (who married Martin Carringer), William White (of the Mayflower 1620), John Richman (of Hilperton, Wiltshire), Jerusha (who married Burgess Metcalf), Robert Seaver (immigrant to Roxbury MA in 1634), etc. I have plenty more!

Or I could pick an event in history that my ancestors participated in - like The Great Migration, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the journey to the west, etc.

I'm going to go for the birth of Devier J. Lamphier just because it is a puzzle that I doubt that I will ever solve, because he was adopted by Ranslow and Mary (Bell) Smith of Henderson, Jefferson County, NY in about 1840. Was he a Lamphier child by a male Lamphier, an out-of-wedlock baby by a female Lamphier, or a foundling (and if so, why given the name of Lamphier?). Being a witness to the birth, with the mother and a midwife and/or her mother/sisters/aunts in attendance, with the father hanging around where I can figure out who he is, would be a wonderful boon to my ancestral quest.

5 comments:

Bill West said...

Randy,
Mine's at
http://tinyurl.com/2csfqud

Missy/Bayside Research said...

Great question, Randy!

http://baysideblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/sngf-the-time-machine/

Jane said...

I'd travel with one of my immigrant families:
http://nederlandsevoorouders.blogspot.com/2010/09/sngf-time-machine.html

Linda McCauley said...

It was tough to decide on one. http://lfmccauley.blogspot.com/2010/09/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-time.html

M. Diane Rogers said...

Horrible as it sounds, I'd really like to be at Frog Lake, in Canada's Northwest Territories in March and early April in 1885 (to observe only, especially if I could arrange to be able to understand Cree). A cousin, William Campbell Gilchrist, was killed there in an uprising. At one time, I did a lot of research about this, but experience might confirm or disprove some ideas.