Family Notes

The first person I ever discovered in my family tree that had a Wikipedia page was the  Reverend John Mayo , who was the first pastor of the 2nd Church of Boston (a century later it would be known as the "Old North Church"). Little did I know at the time that having Wikipedia-people in my family tree was not going to be a rare or unusual occurrence. With so many ancestors traceable to 17th century Massachusetts and Virginia, the likelihood of running into folks who were important enough to merit a Wikipedia article is pretty high. Not that these people were necessarily admirable, mind you. Some of them I do admire ( John Adams , my 3rd cousin, 8x removed, for example). Many of them, not so much. One of my most "colorful" ancestors doesn't actually have a Wikipedia page, but probably should. His name was  Thomas Sharpe "Big Foot" Spencer . He was one of the early white settlers in Tennessee. According to the legend, he lived for at least one winter insi...

 I come from country people on both sides of my family. Right up into the 20-century we were farmers. If there was ever anything like an old family homestead, I guess it was my great-grandfather Clark Pittman's farm in Gnaw Bone , Brown County, Indiana. Clark was the patriarch of large family. His father, Thomas Pittman, came to Brown County around 1853 or so, when Clark was just a baby, along with several other Pittman families, coming out of Monroe County, Ohio. Clark never learned to read or write, but he held onto the family farm in Gnaw Bone and died there in 1931. He married 5 times and had 12 children, one of whom was my Mom's Dad, Orval Pittman. In the picture below you have Clark on the left, Orval on the right, and Orval's young half-sister, Vernia Edell, standing in front. So, country people, as you can see. I don't know what exactly happened to the farm in Gnaw Bone, but it sure didn't come to Orval. According to the 1940 Census, when Orval and family ar...

If you were to draw a map of the migration of my Spencer ancestors from those early settlers in 17th-century coastal Virginia, you would draw a line westward across Virginia, then eventually into Kentucky and finally to Bartholomew County, Indiana. On my mother's side (the Pittmans), the line would start with Quaker settlers in New Jersey, then move across southern Pennsylvania (stopping for a generation or so in Bedford County, near the Maryland border), then into northwestern Ohio for a generation, and finally to Brown County, Indiana. These two lines would intersect at last in the town of Columbus, Indiana, where my Mom and Dad went to high school. The lines would get pretty messy after that. In the 20th-century the time between moves shortened a great deal, and the direction in which people moved began to vary. Where people once spent at least a generation and often many generations in the same place, by the mid-20th-century people were moving numerous times in a single lifetim...

 I want to talk about J. Fred Flynn and Lulu (Mayo) Flynn. These are two of my favorite of my wife's ancestors. They were her grandparents on her father's side. J. Fred was born in 1869 and grew up in Bangor, Maine. Lulu was younger. She was born in 1881. Her family was from Standish, Maine. Both J. Fred and Lulu were deaf. In the 1900 census, Lulu is listed as a pupil at the school for the deaf in Portland, Maine. In that same Census we learn that Lulu could both read and write but could not "speak English" (though she knew sign language well enough).  In 1905, at the age of 24, she marries J. Fred, who was 36. According to the Bangor Directory, he worked as a casket trimmer (casket upholsterer), working for a funeral home in Bangor. The 1910 census describes it as "shop work." I know he was a fine craftsman because we own a cedar chest that he built, and it is quite beautiful. J. Fred's family bore their share of tragedy. His father, James Flynn, serve...

 My first sketch here is going to be about the family history of my step-father, Jack Lloyd Picton (1927-2004). Jack lived nearly his whole life at the same address in Edwardsville, Pennsylvania. He was the son of a long line of Welsh coal miners.  His father was John Henry Picton (1886-1932). John Henry served in WWI. I remember a revolver that Jack owned, a hand-me-down from his father. It was the kind used by the military police during the war. Jack told a story about how his father arrived home from the war even as the wake for his own deceased father was going on at home. He hadn't known his father had passed, so what should have been a joyous occasion turned out to be a profoundly sad one. Another story Jack told about his father was that he had been exposed to gas in the war and his lungs never really recovered. Although he went back to work in the colliery after the war, his increasing troubles with breathing made things difficult. In the end he was not able to work at...

 I'm going to attempt some genealogical blogging here. I have been researching my (and my wife's) genealogical background for some time now (entirely online, mind you), and while I am still a rank amateur at this, I do enjoy the process. I'd like to use this blog as a place to collect stories about our ancestry.  Much of my own family tree goes back to 17th century Virginia, although there is a branch in early Massachusetts as well. My wife's, on the other hand, is heavily weighted toward 17th century Massachusetts, with a lot of Puritan divines showing up in her tree.  In the future look for posts here about the Spencers (Virginia) and the Mayos (Massachusetts) along with many others.