William S Dean's Blog (28)

Have you ever had the experience of being contacted through some genealogy website by a cousin you've never met or even knew you had? It happens to me all the time and it's really a great experience to connect with someone with the same family roots that grew into you!



While some of these encounters develop into lifelong communication, others come and go; but cousins can be a wonderful source of genealogical data, stories, and most importantly photographs that you didn't even knew… Continue

While a lot of genealogical research can feel like you’re just slowly sifting your way through a soggy mountain of old data to occasionally discover a few tiny grains of precious family history, once in awhile your heart leaps with the thrill of finding those golden nuggets which add to the genuinely rich heritage that is the family saga.



As a direct descendant of some of California’s earliest European explorers and settlers, I am also related to most of the other early Spanish… Continue

I was recently contacted by a distant cousin who had seen the family work I've done at ancestry.com. Now a LOT of my family has been dispersed through early parental deaths, loss of records, etc. etc. So many family members don't know much about the ancestral roots, old family stories and connections, and so forth. My distant cousin has really helped me "collect" a "narrative" by asking about specific family members long passed. Sometimes, you have so much "data" that it seems overwhelming to… Continue

In the most recent GenWise newsletter, Gena Philibert Ortega wrote a column about the challenges confronting researchers whose subjects were institutionalized in asylums. This is more common than many people think, particularly the further back in time one goes. My gr. gr. gr. great grandfather, John Winterbourne (1776-1843), for example, was institutionalized and died at the Lainston House Asylum, Sparsholt, Hampshire, England.



From 1825 until 1846, the large estate and grounds of… Continue

When she was eighteen, Pauline P. Johnson went against her family’s long-standing Quaker traditions and married another lapsed Quaker, Isaac Newton Griffith. Pauline was descended from the Johnsons of Scotland and the Moormans from Isle of Wight, England, who had come to Virginia as early as 1619.



Thomas Moorman returned to England after serving a year in the service of the Virginia Company of London and was granted property. Although Thomas never returned from England, his son,… Continue

While the dates of births, marriages, re-locations, public service, deaths, and burials give genealogists the "bare bones" of a family history, we always need more. Sometimes we are fortunate to have family stories, anecdotes, letters, diaries, and quotes to help flesh out the ancestors' lives, but again, we always need more. What some of us would like to know about our ancestors is "how they lived, thought, and possibly felt" -- what influenced them, what was going on around them, and this is… Continue

As far as we can tell -- so far -- the first Barger in our family came to the "New World" in September of 1738. His name was Christian and he sailed from Rotterdam aboard the ship "Winter Galley" arriving in Philadelphia. By the mid-1700s, Christian was part of the "furthest westward" inhabitants of the time period at the New River Settlement of Virginia. The German New River Settlement, was contiguous to but not technically part of the Middle New River Settlement of Southwest Virginia. It… Continue

Although there is still some controversy, many genealogists now subscribe to the belief that my great-great-great grandfather, Nathaniel (Miguel Luis) Pryor (c. 1800-1850) was, indeed, the son of Nathaniel Pryor, a well-documented member of the famed expedition of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, the first American overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back (1803-1806).



There have been numerous books written about the expedition, of course, and also one written specifically… Continue