The Slovak Yankee

State Censuses--An Underused Resource

If you don't own it yet, every genealogist needs to have a copy of Ann S. Lainhart's, State Census Records (Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1992).  I believe it has never gone out of print, and rightly so.  It is a directory of all the state census records in the United States, where they are (originals), and what information they contain.  I've had great success using the Massachusetts State Censuses of 1855 and 1865 as well as the Kansas State Censuses, which also ran on the "5" year from 1855 to 1925.  These important genealogical resources may contain additional information not found on the federal censuses, and as you see from the above, you can track a family every five years, rather than every ten.  Not to mention the 1885 and 1895 censuses help the hole created by the lack of an 1890 federal census.  Not all states have state censuses and not all state censuses survive.

As we move in to the digital age more and more, this is a resource I eagerly await being digitized and, more importantly, indexed.  With very few exceptions, these states censuses are not indexed and you always needed to slog through them town by town.  This is why they were seldom used.  However, the Kansas censuses have appeared on Ancestry.com and hopefully more will follow.  The most important state censuses that need to be indexed, in my opinion, are the New York state censuses.  I feel many brick walls will tumble if people can find their ancestors in the 1845 census (which is still head of household, but has birthplace), and the 1855, 1865, and 1875 which are all-name censuses.

As proof of the power of these sources, I direct you to Randy Seaver's Geneamusings blog.  A little while ago, he found his wife's ancestress in the 1852 California census, which is online at Ancestry.com.  This added enough information for him to knock down a brick wall, and get this family back from California to Australia to England.  There he has gone back another two generations, and I would think that after 24 hours at the Family History Library, he could solidify that research and go back even further.  It has been great fun reading the progress of his research and I have been living vicariously dreaming of  such a breakthrough for myself.  This post has a good summary of the posts, but there are many more.  It was all made possible by a state census.

Surname Saturday: Gregory Belcher of Braintree, Mass.

This is an interesting case.  In the early days of Internet genealogy [July 1995] (also known as the Rootsweb listserv), I came in contact with someone doing work on the Belcher family.  He pointed to Gregory's English origins which was a good circumstantial case.  I tried to get him to work on the problem and publish his results, but to date I've never seen an article.  So, this is not my own work, but put together by this person (whose privacy I feel I should preserve) and sent to me via email (which I printed off and stuck in my paper file!)

The basic framework of Gregory Belcher was published in the New England Genealogical & Historical Register in 1906, 60:128-29, et seq., by Joseph G. Bartlett.  He notes that Gregory was in New England as early as 1637 (without proof), but certainly by 30 December 1639 when he was granted land.  He deposed in June 1665 aged about 60 years.  We know his wife's name was Katherine.

Another Gregory Belcher of Barkswell, Warwickshire left a will dated 20 March 1620 which mentions his wife Joane and son Thomas [Putnam's Historical Magazine, Vol. 4, p. 183].  This Thomas is supposedly the same man who lived at Wardend, Aston, Warwickshire and who had a son named Gregory baptized there on 20 March 1606.  A Gregory Belcher married a Katherine Alcock at nearby Mancetter, Warwickshire on 11 December 1627.  So this all hangs together.  A man with the same name, with a wife of the same name, of the correct age, and who disappears from English records appears in Braintree.  I certainly think this is a strong case.  However, to really nail it down, we need the will or probate of Thomas Belcher the father.

As I noted in this post, last  year the English origins of Gregory's wife, Katherine, and her siblings who also emigrated to New England were published.   Gregory had seven children among which was Mary, the wife of Alexander Marsh, with whom Gregory had several land transactions.  Katherine (Alcock) Belcher survived Gregory and left a will naming her daughter as Mary Marsh.

Additional Sources:

• Belcher-Henshaw and Other Ancestry of Richard Townsend Henshaw 1882-1938 of Rye, New York by Richard Townsend Henshaw (Polyanthos, New Orleans, 1983), pp. 2-4.
•  “The Alcocks of Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire: John Alcock and His Wife Elizabeth Wrightman, Anne Alcock and Her Husband Nicholas Needham, and Katherine Alcock, and Her Husband Gregory Belcher” by Mary Locke Eysenbach, New Hampshire Genealogical Record 26 (2009):49-56.

Follow Friday: Amanuensis Monday at Geneabloggers

Geneabloggers is shaking up its blogging meme routine and having several options for each day of the week.  I've been participating in transcribing records on Monday thanks to Transylvanian Dutch's invention of the Amanuensis meme.  Now, there are literally dozens of people transcribing records on Monday. 

The records themselves are interesting to read, but it is the breadth of the types of records that really grab you.  If you are just starting out in genealogy (or even not), look at the types of records you can use: obituaries, letters, court documents, military records, deeds, wills, probate files, oral histories, diaries, and the list goes on and on.  

Mr. MacEntee should catalog the number of different types of documents and use it for his presentations.  It's a wonderful teaching opportunity and certainly can inspire someone to search in several new places.

Treasure Chest Thursday: U. of Maine

Among all the photos I have are two from my great-uncle Warren during his days at the U. of Maine in Orono (he was class of 1935).  I've donated both to the archives of the university.  The first was a large portrait of his fraternity Lambda Alpha Chi.  The other was the photo below of he and his roommates.  I love the gun in the corner (how times have changed!), not to mention smoking indoors.

Family Trees at the National Archives

The National Archives has a website called Docs Teach meant for teachers to have access to thousands of primary documents for teaching purposes.  The site is divided into historical eras and I clicked on the 1754-1820s link.  There are a number of family trees there and imagine my surprise to find my own ancestors Thomas and Bridget Pinkham!  This is the Docs Teach page.  This is my own blog posting on the very same Bible.  I recognized it instantly.  Very cool that my direct matrilineal ancestor is on the National Archives site.  However, you should check some of the other old family trees.  Maybe your ancestor is there too.

Tombstone Tuesday: Deborah (Buell) Dudley 1693-1789

 This is lychen-covered and I didn't want to hurt the stone.  However, you can still the name Deborah in the upper right and 1789 on the lower left.  This from the Pine Street Cemetery, Newport, N.H.

Amanuensis Monday: Obituary of Charles A. Keene

Beverly Evening Times (Beverly, Mass.)

CHARLES H. KEENE

Charles H. Keene residing at 29 Wallis Street and well known in Beverly passed away at the Beverly Hospital yesterday after an illness of about two months at the age of 63 years.

Mr. Keene was employed by the Boston & Maine Railroad and has a host of friends who will be sorry to learn of his passing.  He was a member of Liberty Lodge A. F. & A.M. The Scottish Rite Bodies of Salem and Boston, Aleppo Temple Shrine, Bass Rover Lodge I.O. D.F. and the Anchor Club.  Besides his son John W. Keene of Norristown, Pa. he elaves (sic a typo!) a sister in Watertown, three brothers Fred of New York City, William and Alonzo Keene of Boston and six grandchildren.  The funeral services will be held at the Funeral  Chapel of Curtis H. Gentlee Ellis Square, Wednesday afternoon at two o'clock.

Note: His full name was Charles Arthur Keene, and the H. is an error.  See his marriage and birth records at: Massachusetts Births for 1873, 250:188 and Massachusetts Marriages for 1892, 424:301.

Latest Article

My latest article was published this week: Deliverance, Wife of Abraham¹Clark and Nathaniel² Lamos of Oyster River Parish, New Hampshire, New Hampshire Genealogical Record 27 (2010):1-10.

Most of the relevant argument can be read in this posting.

Surname Saturday: Austin Bearse of Barnstable, Mass.

What can I say about Austin Bearse that I haven't already said in a slew of postings at Genforum on the Bearse Family Forum. My favorites are this and this.  I also posted about Austin in 2008.  Of course, the kicker is that I may not even descend from him.

Jacobus contended that the wife of John Hall, was Priscilla Bearse.  Luckily we do have her gravestone which clearly says: "Here Lyes ye Body of Prisilla Hall wife to Deacon John Hall aged 68 years died March ye 30 1712." If accurate that would put her birth between March 31, 1643 and March 30, 1644.  Austin Bearse had a daughter Priscilla born 10 March 1643/44 [Shurtleff's Records of Plymouth Colony, p.41]  However, that is the only evidence of this relationship.  There are no deeds to confirm this relationship and Austin left no will (or indeed any probate).  It seems there is a family tradition that was included in the 1871 Bearse genealogy and has been followed ever since in print.  John and Priscilla do not name a child either Austin or Bearse.

I always considered her to be a Bearse until the Great Migration Begins was published with the John Hall sketch.  Anderson doesn't disprove this, but notes that there is no proof of a relationship and the only evidence is what I've already written.  

Austin arrived in Massachusetts in 1638 on the ship Confidence.  He seems to have married here, a woman whose name escapes the records, but about whom there has been over 100 years of constant debate.  They had eleven children all born at Barnstable.  

Additional Sources:

• The American Genealogist 15 (1938-9):111-18.
• A Contribution to the Genealogy of the Bearse or Bearss Family in America 1618-1871 by John Bearse Newcomb (Elgin, IL, 1871).
• Genealogical Records of Austin Bearse, Barnstable, Cape Cod, Massachusetts 1638-1933 by Fanny Louisa Meadows and Jennie M. Ames (Cleveland, OH, 1933, typescript at NEHGS).
• The Ancestry of Thomas Chalmers Brainerd by Thomas C. Brainerd; edited by Donald Lines Jacobus (Montreal, 1948).
• Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins; Immigrants to New England 1620-1633 (NEHGS, Boston, 1995), II:842.

The Walton Family: An Update

So, as I previously discussed I wrote an article: Jane, Wife of Reuben⁴ Heard of Rochester, New Hampshire: Was she a Walton? An Enigma, New Hampshire Genealogical Record 23 (2006): 97-103.  I haven't thought too much about this article since.  However, a  Walton descendant and researcher recently contacted me and we've begun an email correspondence.  So, I've now re-looked at the files.  I was surprised to find that some of my hypotheses in that article can now be proved untrue.  

Since that time I've made two major discoveries.  The first in February of this year was that the History of Durham, N.H. has vital records at the end of volume 1 which I didn't know about.  In those records were four baptisms for the family of Shadrach⁴ (George³ Shadrach² George¹) and Mary (---) Walton which I had not seen.  Those baptisms were for: Shadrach and Mary on 3 Sept 1749, Sarah on 29 April 1750, and Jane on 10 May 1752.  I discussed Shadrach, his wife and his daughter Sarah in detail in my article.  I'm assuming that Shadrach and Mary left the Quaker church and were baptized into the Puritan church before the birth of their first child.  However, this new information merely strengthened my hypothesis that my Jane Heard was the daughter of Shadrach's brother George.  Jane was born ca. 1727 and had her first child in 1748.  This would also be the third confirmed use of the name Jane in this family.  Samuel⁴ had a daughter Jane (she married a Downs) and so did Elizabeth (Walton) Hoyt.  Again, this strengthened the argument that the Jane Walton fit into George's family.

Slight backtrack.  Jane is known in three ways.  She is called Jane when she releases dower on a deed with her husband.  Her great-granddaughter identifies her as a Walton in a DAR application dated 1903.  Lastly, she is called the Widow Heard in her death record in 1819, aged 92.  [The History of the Town of Rochester, New Hampshire 1722-1890 by Franklin McDuffee (2 vols., 1892, reprinted as one volume, Somersworth, NH, 1988), 2:584].

So, I didn't do anything about this new information, but stored it for later use.  In between the writing of this particular article and 2010, I wrote another article on what would be Jane's ancestor: The English Origins of Elizabeth Dowse, wife of Governor Samuel Allen of New Hampshire, The New England Historical & Genealogical Register 162(2008):164-73.  Unknowingly I stuck a deed in that file that I just read again this week. It is below the fold.  The deed discusses the heirship of the Mason Grant via the Allen family, and I mostly looked at the first name in the deed: Betty Morgan of Frenchman Bay, Maine.  However, the second name was crucial: Mary Walton of Somersworth.  This does change things.

I had proposed that George⁴ Walton had six children based on two deeds where two of those children deeded him one-sixth share in the estate of their late uncle John⁴ Walton.  The legalities of this always baffled me.  John died intestate.  So, his heirs should have been his living siblings: George, Shadrach and Elizabeth.  There was no way to parse the numbers out to get six heirs.  One of the deeds was from a Mary Walton of Somersworth which I thought was George's daughter.  I now see, that based on the deed with Betty Morgan, she is the daughter of Samuel⁴.  This confuses the matter tremendously.  Why would she deed one-sixth of the estate?  She had nine other siblings most of whom were still alive (or so I thought).  And the the other deeder wasn't one of her siblings, but George's own son.  Or was he?  He called himself George Walton III.  That would mean the youngest of three George Waltons in Portsmouth.  Was he also a child of Samuel?  If so, then it seems that Samuel got a full share of John's estate, despite the fact he was already dead.  He must have had six surviving children at that time, three of whom were Mary, Betty Morgan, and George.

So, what of George⁴ Walton and his children?  He certainly had a son named George and a daughter named Temperance who was baptized in 1735/36.  I believe he also had a son named John based on John's naming two children George and Temperance, ostensibly after his parents.  However, this man could also be a son of Samuel and one of the six heirs.   Naturally the only Walton not to leave a will or have a probate is this George and his wife Temperance.  
 
Therefore, Jane remains an enigma.  There is strong circumstantial proof that her maiden name was Walton, based on the time overlap between generations of she, her daughter, her granddaughter, and her great-granddaughter who made that claim.  The great-granddaughter calls Jane the daughter of Shadrach Walton.  That can be disproved.  You can also rule out all other Walton males as her father except George.  So, if Jane were a Walton, she must be a daughter of George.  However, perhaps she wasn't a Walton at all and her great-granddaughter was completely in error.  In any case, I need to do more work on this.  I need to identify the six heirs of Samuel Walton, which means killing off more than just his son Samuel (Jr.).  

In my defense, I did rely upon Walter Goodwin Davis's superb work on the Walton family.  He's considered one of the genealogical greats, but he omitted the daughter Mary from Samuel's family.  She clearly appears in his will.  Since I was interested in Janes and Samuel names a daughter Jane Downs, I didn't make the connection then.  I think I've mined as much as I can.  The Strafford County court cases are still being indexed so that provides a ray of hope for the resolution of this matter.