Family Notes

Two of my ancestors were at the Battle of Brandywine , but fighting on opposite sides. Matthew Cooney (1759-1808). He was born in Botetourt County, Virginia, and served in the 12th Virginia Regiment of Foot under Captain Michael Bowyer. The 12th was with Washington at Valley Forge, among other exploits. Matthew is my 5th great grandfather. Then there was Robert Morris (1754-1829). He was on the British side, a member of the 52nd Regiment of Foot, serving under Captain J. Powell. The 52nd was at Bunker Hill, where they took quite a beating. Robert was my 4th great grandfather.

According to Ancestry.com, my DNA shows 12% Sweden and Denmark, but only 2% "Germanic Europe," and yet I can identify no Scandinavian immigrants to America, but plenty from Germany (or Germanic Europe).  What I'm hoping to do in my current family research is identify when each family immigrated to America. As for those who immigrated to America, I can identify these surnames: Bader, Bess, Biddle (Buttell), Closser (Glaser), Eberhard, Goodapple (Gutapfel), Haag, Hafer, Kober, Larue, Leibrock, and Moore (Mohr). What part of Germany were they from? Here's what I'm able to piece together so far. They were from the following contiguous areas. Baden-Wurtemberg : Bader, Buttell, Haag, Larue Rhineland-Palatinate : Bess, Kober, Leibrock, Mohr Bavaria : Closser Alsace : Gutapfel

 My earliest known Pittman ancestor in America is Richard Pitman (note the alternate spelling). He is my 8th great grandfather. According to many online family trees (FTs) he was born in 1618 in Rye, East Sussex. He was baptized there on 9 Nov 1618. His father was Thomas, his mother (possibly) Frances. Thomas died in 1647 in England.  When did Richard come to America? The short answer is, no one seems to know for sure. Most online FTs say that his son Richard (2) was born there in New Jersey in 1660. This places the family in the colony long before the the first Quaker settlements in Salem County (1675 and thereafter), where he would eventually come to settle. Later family evidence indicates that Richard may well have been a Quaker, but he is not on the ship's roster of the Griffin  or the Kent , the two earliest ships to bring Quaker settlers. All that we know is that both Richards, the father and the son, died in 1707.  There is a probate record for Richard (2) sho...

 The Spencer and Pittman lines are the two longest streams in my family river system, with other family names representing tributaries or feeder-streams in that system. The Spencer line starts with Abraham Spencer (my 9th great), an early settler in Virginia, while the Pittman line begins with Richard Pitman (aan 8th great), who came to New Jersey a little later in the 17th century. I don't know much about these two men, to tell you the truth, but I propose to begin a series of portraits of these Spencers and Pittmans, down through the generations, collecting together whatever I may know or suspect about them, their spouses, their children, etc. I hope these portraits will be interesting to anyone doing research in these family lines.

 As anyone who's played around with genealogy for a while soon learns, it's no great rarity to discover "royalty" in the family lineage. There are millions of descendants of Henry VIII (to take one example) walking around on American soil, all of them quite ordinary citizens with not a trace of royal airs . Nevertheless, it's kind of fun to poke around in those "noble" branches of the family tree. Getting back to that scoundrel Henry VIII, he would be my 3rd cousin, 15 times removed. There is absolutely no reason to be proud of this, it's just one of those "fun facts" one runs across in the ancestry game. I'd known for a while that I was also related in some way or another to several of Henry's six unfortunate wives. This morning I started looking into the others, only to discover that, yes, all six of them occupy a twig in my family tree. Here's the tally: Henry VIII (3rd cousin, 15x removed) Catherine of Aragon (4th cousin, 15...

 John Wesley McDaniel (1813-1863) was my 3rd great grandfather. He was born in Nelson County, Kentucky, just south of Louisville, but by the time of the Civil War he had moved his family to southern Indiana (Spencer County).  John Wesley's son, Joseph McDaniel (1846-1930), was my 2nd great grandfather. He lived much of his life in Hammond, Indiana, and is buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Santa Claus, Indiana. He also took part in the Civil War, serving in the 10th Indiana Infantry , enlisting at the age of 15, according to my records, but officially at the age of 21 according to the Army records. But this blogpost is mostly about his father, John Wesley, and one of his brothers, Samuel McDaniel (1842-1861). Both of these men, father and son, died in the Civil War and are buried in National Cemeteries.  Samuel enlisted first. He served in the 25th Indiana Infantry , which was organized at Evansville in August of  '61. He was 19 at the time. According to Wikipedia, the...