Freaky Friday’s ~ This Really Surprised Me!

Have you ever found an Ancestor that really surprised you? One you never would have thought could be related to you. Well, 4 years ago I discovered that I am related to General Robert E. Lee. I couldn’t believe it. I had every intention to write a blog about him, but I never did.

I have a lot of Ancestors who fought on both sides in the Civil War. For whatever reason, they really believed in their cause and they were willing to sacrifice for it, even if it was the price of their life. Some paid the price by being seriously wounded during battle and some came home unable to cope with what they had seen and done. I think I didn’t want to write about General Lee because I had a hard time with what he was fighting for.

 

 

Yesterday, I had a change of thinking. Not because I changed my mind about him, but because I discovered that I was also related to General Ulysses S. Grant. This was one of those “Freaky” moments I have been writing about.

 

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant                                                             Gen. Robert E. Lee

 

They are both my 4^th Cousin, 7 times removed

                                       

They both come from my Hayes family line

 

They both were 63 years old when they died

 

They both reached the rank of General by the end of the War

 

They fought against each other in 11 Battles

 

List of Battles:

Battle of Fredrick, Appomattox Courthouse, Cold Harbor, 2^nd Battle of Petersburg, 3^rd Battle of Petersburg, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Battle of the Wilderness, Totopotomoy Creek, Overland Campaign, Siege of Petersburg, and Battle of Richmond.

 

Lee Surrendered to Grant on April 10, 1865

 

Both Grant and Lee fought in Gen. Winfield Scotts’ unit during the Mexican American War

 

 I don’t know about you but to me that is FREAKY!

 

I am a professional genealogist, writer, photographer, wife, mother, and grandma. I have two books available on Amazon.com: Your Family History: Doing It Right the First Time and Planning Your Genealogy Research Trip. You can also connect with me via Facebook or Twitter.

Famous or Infamous?

As I was looking over my paternal and maternal trees, I remember thinking that I must be doing something wrong. It seems that I kept finding more and more “Famous” people and I am sure that couldn’t be correct. There seemed to be too many of them, especially coming from such common people. I realized that I should ask other Genealogists about this. I contacted three of my Ancestry friends and two of them stated they had only found one person that was well known in all of their trees. Another friend hadn’t found any. At this point, I thought maybe I should start all over again. I must have made a mistake of some kind. I decided to sleep on it before I did anything that drastic. When I awoke the next day I was determined to search my trees to see if I could find anything unusual in them.

I spent the next few days carefully tracing each famous person back as far as I could. I wrote down the dates and places and this is where my revelation became clear. Each of these persons was directly descended from an Ancestor who came to the New World between 1607 and 1655. This would make my immigrant ancestors my 8^th or 9^th Great Grandparents.

I then did some research and verified that in 1607 there was only one established town, Jamestown, in what is now Virginia. By 1620 Plymouth Mass. was founded. As more people arrived they began to spread out along the eastern coastline. By 1630 there was a whopping 4,646 people living here. By 1650 there were 26,634 inhabitants. That is equal to the population in Kingman AZ or Spring Valley NY. This meant there weren’t a lot of people to choose from if you wanted to get married. As our country grew more people came and intermarried with those who were already here.

Because of the limited amount of people living here, and taking into consideration all of the Historic events that took place I discovered that yes, it is possible to have more than a couple of “Famous” persons in my trees!

Do you have any “Famous” or “Infamous” Ancestors? Tell me who they are!

 

I am a professional genealogist, writer, photographer, wife, mother, and grandma. I have two books available on Amazon.com: Your Family History: Doing It Right the First Time and Planning Your Genealogy Research Trip. You can also connect with me via Facebook or Twitter.

I Can Use A Little “Wisdom”

I have been doing Genealogy research for over 20 years. When I first discovered Ancestry.com about 10 years ago I knew that it was a Godsend. I knew it was going to make research so much easier. I transferred all of my written Family Tree to the website and I spent a lot of time finding my Ancestors.

 

Fast forward to the present day. On July 1^st it was the 153rd Anniversary of the start of the 3 day battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Confederate Army was led by General Robert E. Lee. When I read this I remembered that I had some Lee’s in my Hughes line and I thought “wouldn’t that be weird if my line and General Lee’s line were related?” I went searching the tree and sure enough, Lee was my 4^th cousin 7x removed. My 10^th Great Grandfather was Lee’s 4^th Great Grandfather. I got excited and announced it via Facebook to all of my Hughes/Hayes family. I posted a photo of Lee with just a quick explanation and a promise to post the lineage link later.

A couple of days ago I started to do just that. Imagine my surprise and great distress to find that when I first joined Ancestry I had entered this online Genealogy world as a “clickophile”! As I was becoming a professional Genealogist I had gone through most of my trees and corrected a tremendous amount of mistakes that I had loaded that I had gotten from other peoples trees. So much of what I had originally linked to was undocumented and not researched. I spent a year and a half going through both my maternal and paternal lines. I thought I had done a complete job…WRONG!

I started with the lineage of Robert E. Lee and traced him back to Col. Richard Henry Lee, our common denominator ancestor. Then I started going back down the tree towards me. The problem is I got stuck about half way down to my 6^th Great Grandfather John Wisdom. The only documentation I had on him was his marriage information. Everything else was garnered from someone else’s’ tree! AND that isn’t the worst of it. John was born in 1738 and I had his daughter being born in 1746…he was only 8 years old. Now I am having to do some intense research trying to put the correct pieces together. Here I had announced to the family this new finding and now I can’t say positively that it is true. I am totally embarrassed that here I am, a professional, yet I had this glaring mistake in my own tree. I realize that as we go farther back we have multiplied the number of “Grandparents” and it can be easy to overlook one or two, but that doesn’t make this less disturbing to me.

The moral of this story is these few points: 1) If you are new to Ancestry.com or Genealogy do not just click on those little leaves, blindly trusting that what comes up belongs to your ancestor. 2) If at any time you were a “clickophile” you should go back and make sure the information you added was not erroneous and if it fixes it and 3) I am ashamed to admit that I should have used better “Wisdom” when I was adding ancestors to my Wisdom line.

I am a professional genealogist, writer, photographer, crafter, reader, wife, mother, and grandma. I have two books available on Amazon.com: http://tinyurl.com/Your-Family-History and http://tinyurl.com/Genealogy-Research-Trip. You can also connect with me via Facebook or Twitter.