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...

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...