Thankful for the Trailblazers

 

Researching the men among our distant ancestors may be difficult enough, once we move from "modern" times to previous centuries, but turning to the women from those past generations presents even more of a challenge. Perhaps on account of this, I'm thankful for the trailblazers of earlier generations who thought to write down what they discovered about their family history, both of men and women.

As we move from the youngest of the ten sons of Lyman Jackson and Deidama Dunham to the next child, we step from that world of somewhat documented men to the invisible world of women. In this case, thankfully, we can rely on old family letters and records preserved in one book focused on the descendants of Lyman's father—The Family History of Michael Jackson—to serve as trailblazer for the three remaining Jackson children, daughters all. And more to the point, with the many digitized records available to us online now, we can confirm or reject many of the assertions made in such century-old genealogy tomes.

Following the birth of Norman Landon Jackson, the youngest of Lyman's sons, the next child was the last child to have been born to the couple in New York before the family moved to Erie County, Pennsylvania. This daughter, born on January 17, 1805, the Jacksons named Susannah Samantha.

By 1828, Susannah was a married woman, the wife of Henry Kennedy. Seeing that married surname sparks a question. As the Jackson sons had already demonstrated themselves to marry sisters—the Hendryx sisters for Jackson brothers Michael, David, and Abner—seeing the name Kennedy causes me to wonder whether Susanna's husband was related to the two Kennedy women who married Lyman junior and Royal Jackson. That is a research question I've yet to answer.

By the time we've arrived at researching the life story of the Jacksons' twelfth child, it comes as no surprise that Susannah and her husband Henry showed up in the 1850 census in Knox County, Illinois, destination for several of her Jackson relatives. We've seen that pattern before. And the census narrows the date range for when the Kennedys left their home in Pennsylvania, for their four year old son Byron was born there before the family made the trek westward to Illinois in time for the 1850 census.

Things did not go well for the Kennedy family in Illinois, for not long after their arrival, Susannah was widowed and remarried in Knox County on February 18, 1856. By the time of the 1860 census, Susannah and her son Byron were living in the household of her second husband John Robson, along with two of John's sons from a previous marriage.

Though in Susannah's case, the outline of her children's history in the Jackson genealogy book is sparse, it appears that following the trail provided by the book's author does at least help trace the family yet another generation—though the details need to be brought into clearer focus. This, as with all uses of published genealogy books, is a task for me to complete behind the scenes, but it has already been informative to peek ahead and compare notes with digitized records. Books can certainly point the way, especially when we are working with families whose recorded generations stretch back centuries, but those reports are best coupled with the documentation we can easily access online in our own times.