Googling for Colonial Significance

It is certainly a different world, plying my genealogical research craft to the world of colonial ancestors instead of scouring passenger lists for American immigrants of the late 1800s. Still, that doesn't necessarily mean I must resign myself solely to dusty archives or crumbling documents. As I traced one of my lines to the granddaughter of Mayflower passengers John and Priscilla Alden, I couldn't help but notice how many results came up when I took those colonial names and plugged them into the search bar at Google. Old World meets New.

It seems incredible that names like Richard Warren (Mayflower passenger) or Love Brewster (son of William Brewster) would be on the tip of the tongue of twenty first century Americans. And, in case you missed my tongue firmly planted in cheek, those names aren't. Yet, a quick search revealed that each of them has a Wikipedia entry. Somebody knew about them. And thought somebody else might be interested.

Perhaps arrival on the Mayflower conferred a sort of "street cred" among colonials. Names of those early arrivals were noted by someone, obviously, but I wondered how my luck would hold out if I tried searching for the next generation.

Using the 1897 publication by Mrs. Charles L. Alden, Elizabeth (Alden) Pabodie and Descendants, as our unofficial guide (for my final bid to become a member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, of course I'll need to align with what has been verified in the "Silver Books"), we left off yesterday with John and Priscilla's granddaughter, Ruth Pabodie Bartlett.

She and her husband, Benjamin Bartlett, likely had nine children. This, though, may be difficult to verify as a complete list, for apparently there have been issues in which listings of Benjamin Bartlett's children may have been confused with those of Samuel Bartlett. The Elizabeth Pabodie author limits her list to those children gleaned solely from mention in Benjamin's will.

In particular, for our purposes, we are interested in Ruth and Benjamin's daughter Ruth. Born in Duxbury, Massachusetts, where the Alden and associated families moved after adhering to their seven-year obligation to the Plymouth colony, the younger Ruth eventually married John Murdock, son of the elder John Murdock and his wife Lydia Young.

While the earlier Mayflower generations provided me with names easily found on sites like Wikipedia, subsequent generations didn't carry as much historical gravitas, apparently, for while I can locate several ancestral names from this portion of my lineage, they are more likely to be found on genealogy websites than general interest pages.

Still, I can find information, thanks to Google—requiring further independent verification, of course—everywhere from the "Memories" section of FamilySearch.org to the online database listing the descendants of John and Priscilla Alden, provided by the Alden Kindred of America. That organization, interestingly enough, claims as one of its founding members—and treasurer—a gentleman by the name of Charles L. Alden, a name which we've seen affixed to a particular genealogy book of Alden descendants.

None of this I would have known if I hadn't decided to try my hand at Googling some of my ancestors' names. Granted, if there wasn't the cachet of being people associated—even several generations removed—with the landing of the Mayflower, perhaps these names wouldn't have been as ardently sought after. It's the demand that created the supply in this case. But I'm glad for access to that supply thanks to Google, nonetheless.

Above: The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, by British-born American marine painter William Formby Halsall in 1882; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Don Quixote, The Goon Show and Your Ancestors' Surnames

What, you might be wondering, does a classic Spanish novel and a 1950s British radio show have to do with the pursuit of genealogical pedigrees? It's simple: they both provided the zeitgeist inspiring the nickname of the Guild of One-Name Studies ("GOONS").

While one-name studies may seem as hopeless as tilting at windmills—and members are quite open about the seemingly sisyphean task of documenting everything there is to know about a particular surname—adherents to the pursuit of one-name studies approach their calling with a modest acquiescence to the craziness of it all. They are quite willing to hearken to the zany BBC comedy show in adopting that GOONS nickname, as if to convey the concept to their fellow Britons that they are indeed "crazy" for attempting their project.

While you or I might satisfy ourselves with pushing our pedigree chart back one or two more generations, members of the Guild of One-Name Studies want to know all there is to know about that one surname in their ancestry. When you think about it, "all" can encompass a phenomenal amount of data.

The Guild, itself, is a charitable organization founded in the United Kingdom in 1979, as an outgrowth of the British Federation of Family History Societies. Almost immediately, the Guild had two hundred members, and has grown from that inaugural body to over ten times that number, currently. Membership is open to anyone having an interest in one-name studies. While having its roots in Great Britain, the Guild now finds its scope—and thus, membership—to be international.

Members who have established one-name studies at the Guild endeavor to collect all occurrences of the surname on a worldwide basis. In exchange for all that voluntary hard work, membership, apparently, comes with an impressive list of benefits.

Articles on the Guild of One-Name Studies have found their way onto wikis at Wikipedia, FamilySearch, and ISOGG—not surprising, considering how many Y-DNA projects have been initiated by Guild members.

The Guild keeps a register of study surnames, which currently include two thousand studies of about eight thousand surnames and their variants. It's what can be found in that register that I'm most keen to learn. While I've already been alerted to the one-name study there for the Laws surname, I'm hoping to find a few more of my ancestors' names represented in the Guild's registry. We'll take a look at what is included there, tomorrow.

Above: "Norwegian Winter Landscape," 1890 pastel by Norwegian artist Frits Thaulow; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Focusing on One Surname at a Time

Some surnames seem to be so rare that it is virtually impossible to find any record of them at all. Then, having given up the chase, the surname seems to pop up everywhere—everywhere, that is, except for the very location in which you had hoped to find it.

That happened when I was researching my husband's Falvey line in Fort Wayne, Indiana. While it is not what you could consider a rare surname—Ancestry pegs the surname Falvey as having a distribution of up to thirty two families in each of twenty three states or territories in the U.S. by the time our Falvey ancestors settled in Indiana. At that time—1880—Massachusetts and New York had up to 190 Falvey families resident in each state, while the state our immigrant Falveys chose for their new home may have had only thirty others or less in the entire state claiming that same surname.

Yet, even though I couldn't find any Falvey relatives besides our immediate family in Fort Wayne, I did find some other Falveys living in the same city.

You can be sure that was a tantalizing discovery. Surely, I thought, these people had to be related to our Falveys. Why else would they have chosen to move straight to Fort Wayne from their point of entry into the country? But I could never find a connection.

Meanwhile, I learned a lot about the Falveys in Fort Wayne...

The same thing happened when I encountered what surely has to take the prize as the rarest of surnames in my pedigree: Aktabowski. After all, when researching that name back in the 1990s, I discovered Herby listed only one family with that surname—living in Warsaw—in the entire country of Poland. Talk about rare.

When I encountered the not-surprising result of very limited hits to my search through American records for that same surname, I couldn't resist the lure of finding others with that surname. What did it matter these other Aktabowskis were Chicago residents when I was looking for people living in New York City? They just had to be related, I reasoned. Anywhere I could find an Aktabowski, I followed the trail. As it happened, some did turn out to be relatives.

Hearing about the research pursuit known as One-Name Studies, I found it to be a concept with which I could definitely relate. I had already been doing that—admittedly, in the face of unyielding brick walls—so it seemed reasonable to realize that there might be a lot of people out there, curious about trying that same approach.

As it turns out, there are a lot of people out there, focused on researching a specific surname—not necessarily for sheer genealogical desperation, but out of a desire to spot broader trends or context about the surname's origin. Take the many Y-DNA projects, which in essence are based on surname studies, as an example. The major sponsor behind many of these projects, Family Tree DNA, now claims to have over nine thousand DNA projects they are hosting, many of which are classed as Y-DNA Surname Projects.

While DNA projects may be too high-tech for some researchers, the tried-and-true Family Association approach—and variants such as clans—also lend a hand to those who wish to study everything having to do with a specific surname. Cyndi's List, for one, contains an enormous listing of not only the many surname DNA projects, but a comprehensive guide to all family associations devoted to the study of a particular surname.

It may seem that this endeavor logically grew out of a curiosity similar to mine, when I was faced with the frustration of finding, say, any Aktabowskis—just not my Aktabowskis—but I have found the one-name approach has grown far beyond that happenstance into a much more organized approach, with the establishment, in the U.K., of the Guild of One-Name Studies.

Mainly because I want to familiarize myself more with the Guild's services, I'd like to take some time, tomorrow, to delve into just what the Guild of One-Name Studies actually accomplishes, courtesy of their many devoted members.

  

Above: "Night Train," 1899 painting by Norwegian artist Gustav Wentzel; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Of Mothers Long Forgotten

Some researchers favor a solitary approach when pursuing the history of their ancestors. I am not one of them. If I can conduct research in the company of—or at least in conjunction with—a seasoned researcher possessed of judicious methodology, I'm much happier.

Perhaps that's because I've had positive experiences in such projects. I've found that you can meet the most interesting people, circulating among aficionados of genealogical research. True, there are people out there who have tried that approach and walked away from less than stellar experiences. But for the most part, I've appreciated the insight brought to the equation when I have a research partner to compare notes with.

That said, I'm always on the lookout to spot others sharing interest in the same family lines as I have. When I branch out to a new surname, the first thing I do is try to locate others who are working on the same surnames.

As I push back through the generations—especially in pursuit of my matrilineal line—I'm getting into unfamiliar research territory. When the trail of my mother's mother's mother landed me—after several iterations of that process—in the early 1700s with representative to the House of Burgesses Thomas Lewis, it was his wife in whom I was most interested.

She, as it turns out, was daughter of a man by the name of William Strother. Not knowing anything about the Strother surname, I thought I'd go cyber-exploring to see what I could turn up. If I can't have real live research partners, at least I can go find them online.

My first stop was to see what books might have been written on the Strother genealogy. Apparently, there were not a few. One item on the list which caught my eye was entitled Houses of Strother: Descendants of William Strother I, King George County, Virginia. Not a book, it was one of those items in the "other" category for which access was denied.

Not to be undone, I decided on an alternate route of discovery: Google it. After all, though I had no idea who "William Strother I" was—nor where King George County might have been—I did know the Strother on my matrilineal line was the daughter of a colonial someone named William Strother. He, in turn, was the son of another William Strother, who was son of yet another William Strother. The odds were with me.

As it turns out, my Jane Strother, wife of Thomas Lewis, was great granddaughter of William Strother I. In the process of pursuing this item first found in FamilySearch.org's book list, I did access a separate volume of the same title with the subheading, "William Strother II (1653-1726) and his descendants." That, courtesy of his granddaughter, would include me.

Just in case I had the wrong William Strother, though, I thought I'd check out what could be found via Google Books. Though the volume wasn't accessible online, it was searchable, so I did a search for Jane Strother's husband, Thomas Lewis. Sure enough, there in the book were three entries which included his name—one of which specified the relationship of in-law to the Strother family.

From that shaky beginning—not being able to access the item included on the hyperlinked list of resources at FamilySearch.org—I made a few other discoveries, as well. Primary among them was that there is a family association for descendants of that original immigrant William Strother.

Since some websites are put online, perhaps hosted by a generous benefactor, and then left there long after the organization has disbanded, I had to poke around to see whether this was still a viable group. Apparently, it is; they are holding their biennial conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, this coming July.

In addition, they have a web page dedicated to genealogy helps. Most of them are generic, but on that page, I discovered references to some archives and holdings of Strother family papers. While that is beyond the realm of genealogy, per se, I'd be interested in perusing such holdings.

I also discovered from their website that The William Strother Society, Inc., are spearheading a DNA project at Family Tree DNA. Despite knowing that many such surname-based projects focus exclusively on Y-DNA test results, I still clicked through to see what the project gave as its mission statement. Sure enough, there was a Y-DNA project, but that was not all. They are tracking "Distinct mtDNA Haplogroups," which I'd specifically be interested in. After all, the reason that led me on the path to discovering this group in the first place was a question about my matrilineal line.

Family associations sometimes provide members-only resources for genealogical research—or at least the comparison of research notes. While this might not be exactly the research partnership I had in mind, I'm happy to stumble upon such an organization. Teamwork always holds out the promise of synergistic results.