THE CHALLENGE: FIND THEM

How many grandparents

Ancestry.com provides this chart. In reality each of us would have fewer because of intermarriage, but so far I have only identified 133 of a possible 8191 direct line grandparents. Although with cousins and aunts and uncles I have identified 829 ancestors. Need to get to work in the new year!

 

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4 thoughts on “The Challenge: Find Them

  1. Dorothy Lara

    Mind boggling, isn’t it? Your gene pool and great-grandparents. For our family, one-half of these numbers are from Wales, one-fourth of them are from Norway and one-fourth of them are English in origin and go back to the Mayflower and Winthrop Fleet (which equals 512 – nine times great-grandparents). However in actuality, this number is less as many, many of my/our Colonial great-grandparents families intermarried and intermarried in the first 150 years (starting with 1621). Below are my great-grandparents through my maternal line, following back to three times great-grandmother Lucinda Hovey, born in Vermont in 1783 and her direct descendency from Mayflower families. I have picked one direct line, although I know many others including Winthrop Fleet great-grandparents coming to the New World in the 1630s.

    Parents: 2 (Arthur and Marcia (Powell) Evans
    Grandparents: 4 (Evan Evans and Mabel (Williams) Evans); Ruth (Johannessen) Powell and Claude Powell.
    Great-grandparents: Evans and Ellis, Powell and Armstrong.
    2nd great-grandparents: 16 (Azariah Armstrong and Louisa Ickes).
    3rd great-grandparents: 32 (Stephen Armstrong and Lucinda Hovey.
    4th great-grandparents: 64 (Asenath (Cushman) Downer and Joseph Downer.
    5th great-grandparents: 128 (Allerton Cushman and Alethea Soule).
    6th great-grandparents: 256 (Joseph Soule and Mary Peterson); Allerton Cushman and Mary Buck).
    7th great-grandparents: 512 (Elkanah Cushman and Martha Cooke).
    8th great-grandparents: 1,024 (Thomas Cushman and Mary Allerton).
    9th great-grandparents: 2,048 (Robert Cushman and Sarah Rider).
    10th great-grandparents: 4,096

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  2. Dorothy Lara

    Weird things sometime happen when you are in the midst of family genealogy research! Please see below which I swear on the graves of all my ancestors to be true! Thought I would share my experience …

    Have you ever seen that show “Chicago Paranormal Cops” that was on the Travel Channel a couple of years ago? They are Chicago detectives who in their spare time, investigate haunted locations in Chicagoland. They themselves started doing this because of strange occurrences they had in their line of work as homicide detectives. As far as I know, they still do this in their spare time! Well, they had a psychic medium who helped them, Moriah Rhame, who lives near Galena IL. She was really awesome so I contacted her for a phone reading and almost fell off my chair right off the bat! See below.

    In March, 2013, I had my phone reading with psychic Moriah Rhame. She knew nothing about my doing family genealogy, nor did she know me. I told her I saw the excellent job she did on Chicago Paranormal Cops. Then the first thing Moriah said to me “… who is Lucinda? She is helping you with your family research.” I almost fell off my chair; no way she could have come up with this out of the blue! So I told Moriah “… yes, I’m researching my three times maternal great-grandparents, Stephen Armstrong and Lucinda (Hovey) Armstrong” and Moriah told me Lucinda told her “.. they called me Lucy. I was born in July. I am helping you with the family research” and this was the truth actually! So then my mother who passed in 1998 piped in her two cents to Moriah to “… look under the name Donner for Lucinda’s mother’s family, not Downer.” Lucinda’s mother was also Lucinda – Lucinda (Downer) Hovey. Well that threw me for a loop. “Donner” was incorrect and of course, the first thing that popped into my head was “the Donner Party;” and we all know what happened with them heading to California!

    So I wrote an E-mail to the Church of Latter Day Saints in Utah a week ago; they are HUGE in tracking families’ genealogies in this country, as you probably know, to see what I could find out! They had the wrong information! They immediately contacted me (which was great) and both their genealogist in Utah and I went on-line to check out Lucinda (Downer) Hovey who was born in 1759 in Vermont. Their guy showed me how to look up microfilmed records via their site which I was unaware of and we saw Lucinda (Hovey) Armstrong’s actual birth certificate for 1783 in Vermont, handwritten of course. Bad handwriting too – we could both see how “Downer” because of bad handwriting (probably with a quill pen) was misinterpreted for “Donner.” This of course caused me to have “kiniptions” as my Mayflower ancestry all goes back through Lucinda (Hovey) Armstrong. So they corrected “Donner” to “Downer” on all their genealogy sites. Lucinda (Downer) Hovey’s mother was Asenath Cushman (as in Mayflower Cushman). Seems to me all my ancestors are STILL helping me with my research. Oh, and I should, from here on out, call “Lucinda, Lucy.”

    Moral of story – ALWAYS practice good handwriting!

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    1. Avatar photoVera Marie Badertscher Post author

      Dorothy: Thanks for reading Ancestors in Aprons and sharing your own family history search. I’ve shared this comment with the story about the misinterpreted handwriting as a caution to others. I would say the other Moral is: Don’t ever take for granted that a transcribed record is correct.
      I have read your story of your very interesting findings about other ancestors, including multiple Mayflower ancestors, but have decided not to publish it because it is so long. If you have it on a blog or somewhere else on line, I’d be happy to publish a link to it. Meanwhile, for any readers who would like to know the interesting stories Dorothy has uncovered, contact me and I’ll pass your request on to her.

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