This may be of more interest to family members than others, but here goes.
My first name, David, is after my father, who is also a David.
My middle name is Stephen, as in Stephen Fuller Austin, one of the founding fathers of Texas for whom the state capital is named. The family legend was that he was my great, great… uncle. However, no hard evidence had ever been presented for this relationship, and years ago I chalked it up to family mythology.
During his retirement my father starting doing genealogy, not only on his side of the family, but also on my mother’s. Turns out there is already a lot of genealogy done on both sides of the family for various reasons, not the least that there are a few famous folks in both lines. I inherited my father’s genealogy information and GED files. For a while I was working with it, but stopped. Recently I have started investigating the family history again.
I recently discovered FamilySearch.org, a collaborative genealogy site ran by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints aka the Mormons. Some of its strong points are that it is free and it has a ton of data in it. The fact that it is collaborative is both a strength and a weakness. Think crowd sourcing. But because a lot of folks doing the work are amateurs some of the findings leave me a bit skeptical. As does the fact that I have run across some very obvious errors, such as having one woman as both the mother and spouse of one my great, great… grandfathers. Another weak point is that you have to use 3rd party software to download information from the site, it is not part of the base functionality. Another issue I wonder about is living persons. Only the person entering can see living relatives as everyone is so rightly afraid of identity theft and scams, what else could they do. But I can see this leading to much confusion in the future with multiple entries of the same person possible.
Turns out I am related to Stephen F. Austin after all, but not closely, we are 5th cousins 5 times removed. The five times removed refers to the number of generations back, and 5th cousin refers to the offset of grandparents… as I understand it. We share a common ancestor back in England, Richard Austin Of Titchfield, who lived from 1548 to 1623. The gentleman had more than one wife, probably because they died off for various reasons. Several of the brothers and half-brothers came to Colonial America. One line led to Stephen F. Austin, and the other to me. I am making the supposition that much of this migration to America came from the practice of entailment. Younger sons were left without property or title, and needed to find other ways to make their “fortune”.
But wait it gets wilder. Turns out my parents share a 12th great grandmother, Elizabeth Vaughn Grey who lived 1462 to 1524 and was married first to Lord John Ludlowe then to James de Peckham, Esquire. You can trace one line of her descendants to Richard Austin Of Titchfield. So an argument can be made that I am related to Stephen F. Austin on both sides. Then another argument can be made that my parent’s marriage was a marriage of cousins!!!, albeit very distant cousins. But then again if we go back far enough we are all related…cousin.
I am not going to get into much of what else I discovered in the Mormon database, mainly because at this point I am very skeptical due to the collaborative nature of the project. Everybody wants to be related to Lady Godiva or His Lord High Duke or Winston Churchill, so I do wonder. But I have informed Señora that she can now refer to me as Sir David of Snottingham.
I have two jokes I tell when I talk about my family ancestry. The first – is it a joke if it is true – is that my great grandparents came out of the mountains of north central Arkansas for a better life sharecropping in Tom Joad country aka on land around Sallisaw, Oklahoma. The other is a riff on an old Jeff Foxworthy joke that both sides of my family have been in this country, the land of opportunity, since the 1600s and we still do not have a pot to piss in.
I need to revise my jokes so somehow I relate that my family came from the manor houses and castles of England, Scotland, France and Germany to the land of opportunity and ending up sharecropping in Oklahoma and growing tobacco in Kentucky. What’s up with that?
And so it goes.
Do we have to roll out the red carpet when you visit? 😉