The woman that I am bonded with has a half-brother.
He’s a hell of a nice guy, but he is a bit sad.
He doesn’t really get on all that well with my partner’s side of the family and his mother up and left him when he was very young. They have stayed in touch, but she lives in Arizona now.
Anyway, as I am doing the family tree for my extended family (was closing in on 500 people at the start of last night), including that of my spouse, she asked me to see about filling in her brother’s mother’s side a bit more. I asked him to get me some basic details; names, birth/death dates, locations, etc. He did this last week and I entered the info and really didn’t generate too many hints on Ancestry. We had the brother over a couple nights ago and showed him his tree, but I’ll admit it was not all that impressive.
Last night while my bride and I shopped for food for our clowder, she received a txt from the brother stating that he was going to swing by the house with some additional details on his family tree. When we got home, I found the packet in the mailbox and I started flipping through it. It was well done and nicely organized, but didn’t go back much further than the 1860s. Don’t get me wrong, getting back that far can be a wicked challenge! I was happy to have ANY details at all and the bulk of someone’s research is nothing the sneeze at.
So, after dinner I set to work on entering into Ancestry the missing info from the first page of the packet. Hints started popping up like weeds! I started tracing back one line and it just kept going further and further back; each new generation was documented and showing up in multiple previously created trees. Back into Bristol, RI. Generation after generation in Bristol, RI. Back to before there was a Bristol, RI, even. I ran to tell my bride about this news, but she pretty much hates anything to do with RI, thinking the entire state is Pawtucket. I set back to work uncovering these hints and comparing other trees and then there was a shift in the last names being used. Smith started appearing and then the names of the family trees I was looking at, not to mention the types of documents, all started pointing at the Mayflower! I kept digging and digging, tossing aside an officer in the Revolution, and eventually found that while close, that line did not come over on the Mayflower (1620), but rather a few years afterward (~1630). See the attachment. And I traced back even further into England where the freebie hints ran out around 1530.
I went back and finished tracing another line in this tree and had very similar results, but for a different family name, Bullock, which included a Sir Edward Bullock. I have to figure out what “Sir” means, but I was able to get that family line, documented, back to about 1520.
In a single night, I was able to trace back further than I have been able to get with my own family in, well, how long have I been doing this?!??!?! It was unreal! Who knew there was an American Genealogic Society?!?! Who knew that there were fights going on about who actually was the Robert Bullock that helped found Rehoboth, MA?!?!?!?! Not me, and certainly not my BiL, whose people these are! What really blew me away was how legible the vast majority of the documents I looked at were. I am used to NYC Census records that look like a semi-trained chimp was using a burnt stick to make the marks! Bristol, RI has some AWESOME Census records!!!
And remember, this is all from one line on the first page of the PACKET that he left for us. It is going to be an interesting week, I think. And judging from the amount of info missing from this packet, I don’t think his mom’s family has any “memory” of their lofty history.
Oh! Why the attachment? Besides being a reasonably interesting look at early America, there is a name that repeats a few times, as happens in families: Joshua. This is the BiL’s name.