Painting a Broader Portrait

 

A new month, at least here at A Family Tapestry, signals a time to delve into the details on yet another ancestor in my family's history. Based on plans laid out at the close of the preceding year, I schedule the search for what I call my Twelve Most Wanted in the upcoming year. I spend the first three months of the year focused on three selections from my mother's line. Once that first quarter of the year is completed—hint: that would be today—I move on to the first of three selections from my mother-in-law's ancestors.

For April's selection, I want to focus on Lyman Jackson, my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather. Since we've researched this man in previous years, I don't intend to merely rehearse the bare basics of this ancestor's life story. This year, I want to dig deeper, painting a broader portrait of this colonial American who came of age right as his fellow colonists chose to declare war on Great Britain.

Rather than collecting dates as mere numbers, I want to place Lyman Jackson's vital statistics on a timeline of both national and local history. Rather than pinpointing locations on a map, I hope to explore details of the places where he and his family lived in their westward migration from the Connecticut town where he supposedly was born in 1756.

Lyman and his wife were an unusual couple, not in the fact that they had at least thirteen children, but that each one of those Jackson descendants lived to adulthood. With a family of that size, this Jackson couple bestowed a considerable legacy to future generations through this heritage, if nothing else. Indeed, there are at current count seventy of those descendants who are DNA matches on that Jackson line, at least according to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool.

Through not only DNA tools, but court records (thanks to FamilySearch.org's Full Text Search) and local history records, we'll hopefully find a rich source of tools to help us paint that broader portrait of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather during this month.