Big Family Secrets

When Uncle Tuck found out that Mom was doing genealogy he told her, you might not like what you find out! Now Mom is way cool about family scandals... she doesn't care what the ancestors did as long as her brood stay out of trouble;)

Mom didn't think much about what Uncle Tuck said because he wasn't specific, but it did seem to her that there were secrets to be had if one looked hard enough. Some time went by and Mom discovered what Uncle Tuck was talking about. It looked like her great grandfather, Samuel Albert House was illegitimate!

After due research Mom wrote this in her Notes in Family Tree Maker:

"Samuel Albert House was born ot of wedlock to Rebecca House. There is every indication that his father was Isaac Biggerstaff.

Two reasons for this thought being that the 1850 cenus of Morgan Co.,W.Va. has a Samuel Biggerstaff living with Rebecca House Caton. His age is 16. Samuel was born 11 Feb 1832.

The other reason was that in his death certificate his daughter, my grandmother, listed his father as Issac House and his mother as Rebecca Biggerstaff but in that time period there was no Issac House and no Rebecca Biggerstaff in the Morgan Co. W,Va. area where he was born. There was a Rebecca House and an Issac Biggerstaff."

OK, so there you go. Big-deal family secret: Who da baby-daddy? All evedince points to Isaac Biggerstaff. Samuel Albert is even going by Samuel Biggerstaff in the 1850 US Census. And if you look at all the available male Biggerstaffs in Magnolia, West Virginia at that time, it points to Isaac.

So that's our starting point. I don't know what it is about all this but I smelled a really interesting story here beyond the usual who-slept-with-who tale. I have also just been back east to visit Mom and we all went to Magnolia, West Virginia, or what's left of it. The recent placing of my feet on the very soil of my ancestors back in the deep woods of West Virginia got me thinking.
(See posting below at http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/06/let-me-take-you-to-magnolia.html )

I have a big basket of information, random facts and thoughts surrounding this issue. So here in the best order I can make of it is what I know, or think I know. Please, feel free to jump in with thoughts and ideas about this saga. I'd love some help here:)

The Biggerstaffs were a landed family. Isacc's grandfather William left numerous acres of land to Isaac in his will of which I have a copy. Isaac also enjoyed additional land through inheritance from his father, Samuel. Isaac was land wealthy. The Houses on the other hand were, as Mom likes to put it, dirt poor. He did marry Elizabeth Longstreth who came from a prominent Pennsylvania family.
Thought: The marriage of Isaac to Rebecca House would not have been a good match in the eyes of the Biggerstaff family, especially Isaac's grandfather, William, from whom he stood to inherit. Did his grandfather step in?

Isaac Biggerstaff's first child in his marriage was named "Rebecca". Interestingly, this first child in his mariage to Elizabeth Longstreth arrived just about the time Rebecca House gave birth to Samuel Albert. We can conclude that Rebecca House and Isaac Biggerstaff were intimate right up the time he was married.
Thought: It's not unheard of back in this place and time for couples to get pregnant so as to force the parents to give them a blessing. Heck, my great grandparents did it because she was from a Lutheran family and he a Catholic family. They had to have a couple of kids to get the parents to cave:)

Rebecca and Isaac's child was named "Samuel". Samuel was Isaac's father's name.
Thought: Was this an effort to curry favor with the landed grandfather of Isaac by honoring Isaac's deceased father?

Rebecca House married Patrick Caton one month after Isaac Biggerstaff died. Rebecca House waited 12 years to marry and did so only after Issac's death on 24 March 1844. She married Patrick Caton, a man from Ireland, on 13 April, 1844.
Thought: Mom thinks that Rebecca and Isaac were true lovers and that she did not want to marry anyone else. Only after Isaac was finally gone did she feel free to mary.

Early 1900s House Family Reunion. In the early years of the 1900s and before 1910 there was a House Family Reunion in Ohio. Mom has a copy of the memories shared there and written down by all in attendance. It resided, gathering dust, in Mary's attic until one day Mary said to Mom, Hey you want to come over and see those old papers in my attic? You don't need to ask Mom a question like that twice:) She borrowed and copied them. In the papers of the House Family Reunion someone stated that it was commonly known that Samuel Albert House's father was Issac Biggerstsaff.

Isaac and Rebecca were possibly first cousins, once removed. Mom and I need to verify this but it looks like it could be correct. Yeah... it's West Virginia;)

Picture of the day from the Archive:

Samuel Albert House,

1832 - 1917

Other posts about the exploits of Samuel Albert House can be found on this blog at : http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2011/07/another-drinking-man.html

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/06/big-family-secrets.html

Please Note: Blogger is hay-wire today so I couldn't do a spell chack. I'm flying without a net for the time being. So sorry!

Mom's Big Tree

I must have told you about Mom's really big tree by now... maybe mentioned it about a skabillion times! She has 70,600 plus individuals on it. That's a lot, right? Mom said that she heard of someone who had 100,000 individuals on their tree but I dunno... That's hard for me to wrap my mind around.

Last time I was back east to see Mom we chatted about her Big Tree and how she likes to share information with interested people. She has, however, been reluctant to just put her Big Tree out there for the world to see. Her objections are twofold and quite reasonable, I thought.

A number of years ago a relative asked Mom for information she had complied regarding Samuel Albert House.  The relative didn't like what she saw, specifically that Samuel Albert was born out of wedlock... so she changed it. Unfortunately this relative got busy sharing her doctored information and now it's out there as gospel. Mom got burnt. And when Mom gets burnt she gets mad.

Another objection Mom had to making her tree public is that she didn't want people bothering her with the "where did you get that" question. You see, Mom has been at this since the 1970s when she kept meticulous notes on chart sheets and index cards. If you are old enough to remember doing genealogy in the good old days before the computer you know what this is about:) So when Mom got her first version of Family Tree Maker way back when, she put in the bare-bones information knowing that she possessed all of the back up data in her big blue binders.

On this most recent trip I spent some goodly amount of time browsing Mom's blue binders containing the Williams and Whetstone families information. There was one letter in particular in which every paragraph invariably contained the words, "where did you get that?"

Today of course, Mom is busy using sources and notes. We love Notes on FTM because Mom can use it as a note to me about random details she remembers.

Anyhoo, when I saw Mom last week we chatted about the best way to share her Big Tree. And do it in a way that no one but us can change it. I emailed Randy Seaver (expert and author of the blog Genea-Musings at http://www.geneamusings.com/) when I got home to ask him what our options were for uploading Mom's Big Tree GEDCOM. Randy, as always, was super helpful and pointed me in the right direction, anticipated my next question and offered pointers to keep us on track while selecting the best options. So Thanks, Randy!!!

We chose Ancestry.com and yesterday I uploaded all 62,967 individuals on the version of the tree I have in my possession at the moment. (Mom has more on the latest version of her working tree but I don't have it here and that's another story.) The upload was super easy... after I went and purchased the download of Family Tree Maker 2012. When reading Randy's emails I realized that I had FTM 2010 and it wouldn't have the automatic sync feature that would make my Gen life easy:)

I selected the Share button in the upper right of the screen in FTM 2012. It asked me what tree I wanted to share on Ancestry.com and how I wanted to name it. Did that then clicked the Upload Now button and went to lunch. Checked about 20 minutes later and it wasn't done yet. At about the 45 minute mark I got concerned. Went on Ancestry's web site to see how worried I should be. Maybe I should have uploaded the GEDCOM from the Ancestry.com web site's Family Trees drop down menu? But not to worry, a moment later when I went back to my open FTM program screen it told me the work was now done and asked if I wanted to see the tree online? You bet I did I did!

Seems like the only glitch is that some of the individuals born in the 1700s and 1600s were marked as living. Now that's inconvenient! So I have been busy going through as many branches as I can discover, trying to find all of those tagged as living - even when there is a death date - and change it to deceased. If I miss anyone they won't show on Mom's Big Tree because the Ancestry setting we've chosen hides anyone listed as living for security.

Mom's Big Tree is named "Virgiania Williams Kelly's Big Tree" on Ancestry.com, so if you run into it, say hi:)


Today's photo from the Archive:

Me, 1st birthday:)

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/06/moms-big-tree.html

I Emailed The Sheriff But I did Not Email The Deputy

With sincere apologies to Bob Marley, the post today is about finding another way to "skin a cat". I learn something about the grand pursuit of genealogy and family history every day when I talk to Mom. Today she's hunting over in Morgan County West Virginia. It's The House/ Shambaugh line she's after. She once had a contact in Morgan County who had hold of a pile of original family documents, including letters from Mary House Shambaugh who was Mom's great grand aunt. He was nice enough to send Mom copies of some of his treasures but died before they could exchange more information.

Mom has been trying to dig deeper ever since. She hopes that her friend's archive remained in tact but fears that it might not be the case. You know how it goes: kids see all the papers as "Dad's old stuff" and toss it. It happened to Aunt Edith on the Kelly side when she passed and her son tossed out all of her family papers. Who knows what was lost. And so Mom has been on the search for that Shambaugh guy's archive.

Now you have to know Mom! She's not one to give up at all! If it doesn't work out today she'll be back tomorrow. So over the ensuing years she's been hunting down anyone who has a pulse over in Morgan County in hopes of them pointing to a living Shambaugh who has the archive. Today she popped on to the Morgan County government web site and found a Shambaugh serving his community as sheriff! So she dug around for a couple of minutes and found his parent's names and grand's names and then saw the connection to Mary House. Boom! We have a winner.

Thus the title of today's effort: Mom emailed the sheriff but did not email the deputy. He's not a Shambaugh;)

Today's photo from the Archive:

Samuel Albert House (1832 - 1913)

Son of Rebecca House (1808 - 1851)

Who was sister to Mary House Shambaugh (1814 - 1905)

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/06/i-emailed-sheriff-but-i-did-not-email.html