Family Notes

 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...

 This morning I added the 9,500th name to the family tree. He was Jabez Gorham (1656-1725). Jabez was born on Cape Cod, died at Bristol, Rhode Island. He was the son of John Gorham and Desire Howland, and the grandson of John Howland of Mayflower fame. I had to add Jabez into the family tree in order to get William Blaxton in there, which was my real goal. Jabez and his wife (Hannah Sturgis) had a daughter, Katherine. Katherine married John Blaxton, the son of William. William was an interesting fellow. He was a graduate of Emmanuel College at Oxford, and  priest in the Church of England (thus, not a Puritan or a separatist). He arrived in New England in 1623, on board the Katherine . He was a chaplain with the failed expedition to establish Weymouth, and after most of those settlers returned to England he traveled a few miles north to build a cabin on a rocky peninsula surrounded by swampland, later to be known as Boston. He lived there alone on land that would someday be k...

  I have about 8700 names in my family tree, which seems like a lot until you notice how many trees on Ancestry have 100,000 and more. As a general rule I don’t seek out every possible distant cousin to add to the tree. I try to be as complete as I can be on the direct ancestors, and beyond that look for people who seem interesting to me.  That “seems interesting” gives me a pretty broad leeway. I read somewhere about the man credited with being the first homesteader to take advantage of the 1862 Homestead Act. His name was Daniel Freeman and his homestead was in Beatrice, Nebraska. Now Freeman is a pretty frequent surname in my wife’s ancestry, so I looked into Daniel’s bloodline and sure enough discovered that he was her 7th cousin (4x removed). Note: since Laurie and I are actually related (17th cousins) that means Daniel is my relation as well, but far more distantly. Anyway, what really made me want to add him to the family tree was his picture. You can read about Daniel’...

 Oviel was born to George W. and Sarah Greenlee in 1894. He grew up in the little farming community of Kurtz, Indiana. He is my first cousin, twice removed, his aunt Lucinda being my great grandmother (on my mother's side). Oviel registered for the draft in June of 1917. He was an unmarried 24 year old who had been working with a railroad gang, laying track for the Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville Railroad. A side note: what I found most interesting about this registration was the tab in the bottom left corner. See that? "If person is of African descent, tear off this corner." Note also that on line 12 ("Do you claim exemption from draft (specify grounds)?"), is written the words "physical disability." I wonder what that was? In any case, the exemption was not accepted as valid and Oviel was scooped up by Uncle Sam. He was initially assigned to the 251st Infantry, drilled in Kentucky at Camp Taylor. Sent to France in June of 1918, he was immediatel...