Weaving Those Family Lines

 

I'm still at it, trying to trace the descendants of the one daughter of Lyman Jackson I've been researching for almost a week now. Susannah, next to youngest child of Lyman and Deidama Dunham Jackson, had married Henry Kennedy and moved west from her parents' home in Pennsylvania to a county in Illinois where some of her relatives had previously settled. Her children, in turn, had followed the same pattern, moving in stages across the American west.

With no way to assure myself that discovery of someone with her children's names were not merely name twins—after all, some of them showed up in records hundreds of miles from their Illinois home—I started looking around in those records for familiar names. If one Kennedy descendant surfaced in, say, Kansas, could I find any others from the family in that same new town? This was time to weave together all those extended family lines, tracing not only Susannah's children, but their children as well, to see how the families clustered.

The answer to my question, in the cases I've already researched, has been in the positive. At first, I was surprised, but upon further examination, I realized that line upon line, what might hold true for researching one individual family might hold true for cousins—or, complicating the equation, even half-siblings from second marriages of widowed parents.

In all, I've got seven Kennedy siblings to trace on their multi-decades move westward. I'm not finished yet, but the pattern, which seems to be holding firm, has become a guide for me in following a large family whose many stopping places along their westward migration seem designed to shake everyone off their trail. I'm hanging on to that cluster concept on every twist and turn—and hoping the process will also yield distant Jackson cousins who might just become DNA matches for added confirmation. 

Shaking it Up

 

Some family stories are just that—simply stories. Checking for details, the documents may lacking. When I saw the published report about one descendant of Lyman Jackson—his grandson Byron Kennedy—supposedly losing his own son to an earthquake in California, I had to check it out. That research question, however, led me down a bumpy path, prompted undoubtedly from the aftermath of the American Civil War, leading to a series of moves westward through the continent, partially unpredictable, had there not been siblings whose similar moves could be used for comparison.

Despite that, it is likely that I haven't been shaken loose in this genealogical chase. For one thing, an entry in any hundred-year-old genealogy book claiming "whereabouts unknown" can now easily be corrected through the many digitized resources now available to us. In Byron Kennedy's case, as it turns out, it may well be likely that he, himself, moved to California. In fact, the 1900 U.S. Census shows someone by that name living in Santa Rosa, California whose birth in Pennsylvania lines up nicely with our Byron's story.

That very location—Santa Rosa, California—was the one identified in the Jackson book as the place where Byron Kennedy's namesake son had supposedly died in an earthquake in 1906. That detail, too, could easily be verified. Though the most widely reported earthquake of that year was the one in San Francisco, Santa Rosa also suffered, being situated on the same fault line.

The impact, though focused on a series of city blocks downtown, was devastating. The destruction of historic buildings, followed by fires fueled by ruptured gas lines, did cause a significant number of deaths in what was then a city far smaller than San Francisco. Photographs of the aftermath, preserved in the digital archives of the Sonoma County Public Library, give a far more visceral effect than the sanitized State Earthquake Investigation Commission maps of the wiped-out downtown area, now preserved through the David Rumsey Map Collection.

Could Byron Kennedy have lost a son in the aftermath of the Santa Rosa earthquake? That someone could have lost his life in the collapsed buildings or ensuing fires is without question. Whether Byron Kennedy's own son was trapped in such circumstances is harder to determine.

However, just based on what can be found in the 1900 census, the only child remaining at the Kennedy home was their daughter Belle. Furthermore, following Byron's own death in 1912, the reading of his will listed three remaining children—all daughters. Granted, Byron did have a son who predeceased him in 1903, but he named that child Charles, not Byron.

Admittedly, tracing this branch of the Kennedy descendants of Susannah Samantha Jackson has led me on a convoluted trail. Piecing together the full story, in this case, requires tracking all branches of the Kennedy line at the same time—several independent family lines shaken up, only making sense in concert with each other. Just as the genealogical "FAN Club" concept teaches us to be aware of clusters in families, these Kennedy descendants demonstrate how tracing everyone at the same time helps identify the missing story lines in subsequent generations.  

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.