When the Pioneers Keep Pioneering

 

When working on an American ancestor from the mid-1700s, such as my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather Lyman Jackson, it is not surprising to see such a man described as a "pioneer." But when I begin tracing that pioneer's descendants, and run across a mention of his great-granddaughter listed in a news report as a pioneer, I'm surprised. Apparently, some pioneers keep on pioneering. Perhaps it is in their DNA.

For that very purpose of tracing the descendants of Lyman Jackson to confirm DNA matches to that line, I've been building a line of descent for each of his thirteen children. This, as you can imagine, may take some time. (Hopefully, I'll have this task completed by the end of the month, though this itself will be a challenge.)

Starting with the oldest of the Jackson children, I've been methodically sliding down each line of descent to our current time—and, hopefully, to some DNA matches. This past week, my focus has been on their eldest son, Jesse Dunham Jackson. Said to have been born in 1784, Jesse—perhaps besides using the initials "J. D." may have also gone by his middle name, Dunham—was a challenge to trace. 

However, I was able to pick up on one line of his descendants, Jesse's son Royal Montgomery Jackson, thanks to his 1912 death certificate. Clearly far from his grandfather's final resting place back in Erie County, Pennsylvania, Royal Jackson had died in Missouri. And yet, it took one more generation before I ran into that label of "pioneer" for one of the Jackson descendants.

Royal Montgomery Jackson's third daughter, Candace, was born in Illinois around 1845, but before she was five years of age, her family, along with Royal's brother and brother-in-law and their families, had moved to the town of Adams in Green County, Wisconsin. By the time Candace was married in 1866, she was even farther west, in Daviess County, Missouri.

That, however, was not the end of this Jackson descendant's journey. Along with her husband, Thomas J. Sweany, this next generation was into gold mining in Ketchikan, Alaska, by the time of the 1900 census. Perhaps needing a little less excitement in their own golden years, the Sweany family moved back to the States by the time of the 1910 census, where they had stayed at a hotel on Summit Avenue in Seattle.

It wasn't until twelve years later when an obituary appeared in the October 24, 1922, Seattle Star regarding  a "Pioneer's Funeral Set for Wednesday." The pioneer? Mrs. Thomas Sweany, a.k.a. Candace Jackson, great-granddaughter of Lyman Jackson, called by the newspaper a "pioneer resident of Washington." Perhaps the farther west one moves, the easier it is to be considered a pioneer.