Thursday, March 14, 2013

Treasure Chest Thursday: Biggerstaff Book

I'm so lucky to have Mom and all of her excellent work! I thank the genealogy gods every day for every scrap of what she's done over the years. Whenever I get stuck she's the first person I call or email. I wouldn't think of posting a Surname Saturday report without checking with her first. So when I launched into the Biggerstaff family this week I checked in with Momsie. She had a Biggerstaff book in her treasury and mailed it to me.

Here's the book, pictured below, fresh from Mom's treasure chest to mine. As you can see Biggerstaff is a branch on the Isaac Garinger Davis tree, but I'm happy to have any and all information about the Biggerstaff line. This book was privately published by Elizabeth Davis Thompson in 1979. She did a remarkable job of it that long ago before desktop publishing.


I'm thinking that this book is the earliest genealogy published on the Biggerstaff's from Hampshire County, Virginia then West Virginia. There are other Biggerstaff and Bickerstaff lines in the South and in Pennsylvania but they have not been proven to have any connection to the Biggerstaffs of Hampshire County. At all. The other Biggerstaff/Bickerstaff lines apparently trace down from England and there's every possibility that our Biggerstaffs (and it's always Biggerstaff with the double "g") were originally Blickenstaff from Germany or Switzerland. Wouldn't a lovely yDNA test help out sorting them?

Cousin William has done a fine job of constructing the first three generations back from Issac Biggerstaff (1798 - 1844), natural father of my 2nd GGF Samuel Albert House (1832 - 1917). Here they are, as per Cousin William.

Samuel Albert House (1832 - 1917)
Issac Biggerstaff (1798 - 1844)
Samuel Biggerstaff (1760 - 1804)
William Biggerstaff (1720 - 1803)

Treasure Chest Thursday is a blogging prompt of GeneaBloggers.


The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/03/treasure-chest-thursday-biggerstaff-book_14.html

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