With This Ring I Thee Wed

As we move through the generations, we narrow our focus for this recounting of how I stumbled upon a name vaguely familiar from the world of politics, and yet, for my DNA research purposes, the search involved an ever-widening pursuit. While this may seem tedious, the way I attempt to figure out how I connect with my eighteen hundred—and counting!—DNA matches is to reach as far back in time as I can with each ancestor, then trace forward the lines of every single one of their descendants. Thus, a tree of over ten thousand names.

I work through this process in as methodical a manner as possible, of course. It's hard to keep track of what lines have been completed and which ones still need work. So, from one ancestor, I attach all relevant hints generated for that person's entry in my Ancestry.com tree. If that person was married, the process is repeated for the spouse. If there are children, each one is covered in order from oldest to youngest in a nesting process. In other words, while working on the oldest child, I then tackle the hints for that child, then that child's spouse, then that child's children in order from oldest to youngest, following the lines of descent for each of the child's children in the same manner.

I had been working through that process with the Estill family—believe me, there are so many of them, I thought I would never get out of Winchester, Tennessee, where one branch had settled—when I came upon the eldest daughter of John Floyd Estill and his wife, Lucie Lee Dice, whom I mentioned yesterday.

Again came that sweeping process of checking out every Ancestry hint, attaching appropriate documents to her record, and checking for any marriage and family information. After this oldest child of John Floyd and Lucie Lee Estill, I'd have four more children to attend to, using the same process.

But before I could get to the siblings of Susan Gay Estill, I encountered what turned out to be a huge detour into recent political history. I was stopped on her timeline when I hit the year 1907. That was when Gay, as she was called by family, was married. Sometime before that date of October 30, Gay Estill had met a man who had been born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1873, but who had arrived in America with his parents by the time he was seven years old.

Upon their arrival in this country, his parents had settled in the state of Maryland. By the time of the 1900 census, he had moved to West Virginia—which happened to be where Gay Estill was living with her family.

While I have no idea what the exact wording might have been in the exchange of vows on that date of October 30, 1907, at the conclusion of that ceremony, Gay Estill emerged with a new name: Mrs. Charles Spittal Robb.

Perhaps now that you see that name, you, too, are wondering about some family connections.

Above: "The Wedding Register," 1920 oil on canvas by British artist Edmund Blair Leighton; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

At Least I Thought it Was My Family

Surely it was a coincidence, yesterday, to find an Estill descendant—a relative of the very line we've just been discussing—listed in the DNA kits I administer at Family Tree DNA. The kit, however, belonged not to me, but to my husband.

When I first spotted that name in his list of DNA matches, I had to take a second look. A careful look. I had already wondered about that "Are your parents related?" test at GEDmatch, wishing our daughter had tested so we could run her numbers. (A one to one comparison between my kit and my husband's did show a smidgeon of matching base pairs, but nothing significant.)

This was not the first time one of my surnames had ended up in my husband's DNA matches. So why do surnames from my tree keep showing up in his DNA test results?!

Whoever this match was, he was a distant relative—possibly a fourth cousin, but more likely a weaker connection than even that. Normally, I wouldn't contact such a match, but in this case...well, we were just talking about this match's direct ancestors yesterday. We had left off with the children of Floyd and Susan Kincaid Estill. Their middle child—and only son, John Floyd Estill—was born in 1850 in Greenbrier County in what was, at that time, part of the state of Virginia.

John Floyd Estill, at the age of thirty three, took as his wife the young Lucie Lee Dice, daughter of John Dice and Sallie Roszell. The 1870 census listed Lucie's father as a minister of the gospel; hers was most likely considered the home of a well-bred family, for she carried that society penchant of bestowing family surnames as middle names for each of her children—including that spelling-contorted Roszell. Dice and Lewis and even a spelling-adjusted Roszelle found their places following the given names of her children.

Though as a young man, John Floyd Estill seemed to follow in his father's footsteps—in the 1880 census, he was listed as a merchant, same as Floyd Estill—in later years, he showed up in enumerations under the humbler entry, traveling salesman.

Of course, trying to figure out just how this man's descendant ended up in the listing for my husband's DNA matches is next to impossible. There are no clues to guide me—unless, like my own connection, his is buried in near-antiquity. In the meantime, this match was, thankfully, administered by one of the more dedicated DNA test participants, for it actually included a tree at FTDNA.

You know I took the time to compare notes. And drop a line. Never know when it will come in handy to have a connection with a distant cousin in the line I'm currently researching. Especially if his line ends up being the one related to that senator I've been wondering about.

Above: "Spring," oil on canvas by Ivan Grohar, a Slovenian Impressionist artist born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Doctors, Lawyers and Merchants, Oh My!

Searching through various family history records, I'm sometimes surprised to see how many professional people there were among my relatives of past centuries. Especially as I combed through all the records on my Broyles and Taliaferro lines in preparation for my D.A.R. application, I encountered several lawyers and medical people, along with a few successful merchants. And yet, checking out their entries in the census enumerations of their times, I'd be surprised to see them listed, simply, as farmers.

Now that I'm pursuing the lines of descent of my sixth great grandmother Jane Strother and her husband Thomas Lewis, I'm once again encountering doctors, lawyers and merchants. But this time, that is what they are called in their census entries—and confirmed with a good reading of their wills.

We've already talked about Jane's daughter Elizabeth, the one whose father died young during the time of the American Revolution, and mentioned her marriage into the Estill line of Augusta County, Virginia. I had already found records for what apparently were only a few of her children, but when I went searching for any published genealogies of that particular Estill family, I discovered a family history collection showing she and Isaac Estill were parents of twelve children.

Of the Estill children I already had found, there was Wallace Estill, presumably the eldest child of Isaac and Elizabeth, who eventually moved from Virginia to Tennessee. According to his Find A Grave memorial, Wallace purchased a large tract of land in Franklin County which eventually became known as Estill Springs. In addition to his work as a doctor, Wallace Estill also served as a state senator for one term.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Wallace—by then in his seventies, having been born in 1789—enlisted as a surgeon in the Confederate Army. While caring for the wounded during battles in 1864, he died in Americus, Georgia.

That, however, is not the line I am following for this particular pursuit. But it gives an idea of what some of the members of that family in that generation encountered in their lives.

Another child of Isaac and Elizabeth Estill that I was aware of was their oldest daughter, Agatha. Likely named for Elizabeth's mother, Agatha Lewis, this daughter married a Virginia man named Henry Erskine. For genealogical purposes, it was quite disappointing to discover Henry died before the 1850 census, leaving us no clues as to his occupation or success in life. The one notable detail of the Henry and Agatha Erskine family that I remember is that one of their daughters married into the apparently widespread Crockett family, leading me down a trail of wondering about relationships to the Crocketts of historical note.

I knew, also, of Isaac and Elizabeth's unfortunate son, Rufus, who died at an early age, likely from consumption.

Other than that, there was only one more son—at least before yesterday's discovery of the book collecting various Estill genealogies—that I had been able to find. His name was Floyd Estill, born in Monroe County, Virginia, in 1813.

Of this son, only one additional fact was provided by the Estill genealogy: that he had married a woman from Greenbrier County named Susan Kincaid.

Floyd Estill, at least in the later adult years in which his occupation was listed in census records, was an apparently successful merchant. True, in the earlier census in 1850, he and his young family lived in the home of a farmer, not their own property, but in 1860 he showed every sign of success at his endeavors.

Those census records revealed three children born to Floyd and Susan Estill: Elizabeth, John Floyd, and Agatha. It was the line of John Floyd Estill that led me to the descendant whose surname prompted me to question whether he might be related to a United States senator, so that is the line we'll focus on, as we continue this trek through the Estill generations tomorrow.

Above: "Spring," 1907 painting by Swedish artist Carl Larsson; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

There Were Three Brothers . . . Again

What's this with the three brothers bit? Almost like the family history version of "Once upon a time," that overused start to so many family legends has caught up with me, once again.

This time, rather than introducing my Lewis line, the phrase found its way into the next branch of descendants in the Lewis line—the pedigree of Isaac Estill, husband of John and Agatha Lewis Frogg's daughter, Elizabeth.

The Estill line is the one which, through the subsequent three generations, will lead us to that surname which prompted me to check about names of United States senators, so it will probably be wise to take a moment and review their family history. Like descendants of many other long-standing American families, someone in the early 1900s chose to assemble a history of that particular line. Today, we'll borrow from some of the notes on the Estill family from one particular book—John Holbrook Estill's 1903 collection, A Family History by One of the Family.

I call this a collection mainly because it seems to be just that: not one single family history, but an assembly of various family narratives written in the past by several individuals associated with the Estill family. That is a fortunate turn of events for us, because the book preserves what family members from prior generations had passed down—including, thankfully, more than one article about the very branch of the Estill family in which we are interested.

I had never found any mention of Elizabeth Strother Frogg's husband's parents. Of course, that is likely because I was focused on my own side of the family—a strange allegiance, considering "my" side was nearly two hundred and fifty years removed from me. The John Holbrook Estill book, however, provided the information on that detail—if, of course, the authors were reliable.

Still, when the first of the book's collection concerning this specific line of the Estill family mentioned the detail—Elizabeth's husband Isaac Estill was son of Wallace—in addition to the doubtful "three brothers" explanation, it came with contradictions.

The "three brothers" detail was inserted unobtrusively enough:

Wallace Estill was born in New Jersey in 1698, and was a grandson of Thomas Estell, one of the three brothers who settled in New Jersey in 1664. According to the record he was married three times, and after his last marriage removed to Virginia. The first recorded grant of land to him is dated November 3, 1750. It was in what was then Augusta county.

The subsequent pages following this introduction contained details which didn't quite support this statement, only adding to my doubt about the reliability of this old genealogy.

Apparently, Wallace had three wives—just as was noted in this introduction—but which children belonged to which wife seemed unclear. In the part of the collection called "The Ruth History," that 1853 record mentioned that Wallace's first wife—unnamed in the text—lived only three months after their marriage. Wallace's second wife—Mary Boude, whom he apparently married in New Jersey where five of their children were born—died after the birth of their sixth child, while they were living in Virginia. It was at that point in Virginia when in 1748, he married his third wife, seventeen year old Mary Ann Campbell.

Likewise, I felt some confusion in reading the listing of the children in the following text. After stating that Wallace and second wife Mary Boude had six children, the genealogy listed fifteen (including youngest child, Ruth, who composed that 1853 narrative). Corrected, on the next page in the book, was a listing of Wallace's nine children with his third wife, Mary Ann Campbell, including the one I had been looking for: Isaac, born in 1766 and married to our Elizabeth Strother Frogg, themselves eventually parents of twelve children. At least, that's according to this record—and provided the author had her information right. I certainly had no idea there were twelve children.

It may seem a trifling to fuss over such details, but I need to get this stuff right. After all, we are currently in the process of examining this pedigree, and it would help to be able to list the right parents for our Isaac—and the right children. It is almost as if inserting that "three brothers" phrase—having taken on such legendary proportions among our peers in the world of genealogy—makes me want to wince and pay closer attention to every single assertion.

While it's wonderful to be able to get my hands on an old genealogy like this part of the book's collection from 1853—closer to the time period in question than we are, no doubt—I often wonder how accurate a family historian from that era could have been. While we now can flip through a mind-boggling assortment of digitized documents, all at the touch of a fingertip, researchers from that time period had to rely on personally accessing privately-held family records, such as family Bibles, or church records such as baptismal verifications. Precious few governmental entities kept tabs on births and deaths at that time—in some cases, only marriage records, land records and wills were kept for public purposes. The author in 1853 had very limited resources to assure correct provision of such information.

When people post their family trees online now, I often remind myself that, while I would never copy that material, it still can serve as a trailblazer to point the way to possible right information. The genealogies of past centuries sometimes take on the aura of infallibility—as if old is better. Our research resources far surpass those of earlier generations, though, and it would best serve our interests to fact-check those revered genealogies of the past as carefully as we comb through the online postings—and even journal articles—of our current day.

  

Roots in a Revolution

When most Americans think of the Revolutionary War, they think of the date 1776. Thus, when a soldier designated by the Daughters of the American Revolution as a "patriot" died in service to his country in 1774, it seems somewhat contradictory.

Actually, that year of 1776 marked the date of the document we call the Declaration of Independence. The period of political turmoil in those particular British colonies in North America spanned the years 1765 through 1783. The outbreak of the war has been pegged to an event in the Massachusetts colony in 1775.

Thus, when Captain John Frogg, recently married and father of a young child, died as part of the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774, he became—at least in the minds of some—an American Patriot. Though Point Pleasant is still commemorated locally as the first battle of the American Revolutionary War, historians generally consider it part of preceding action which they refer to as Lord Dunmore's War—a complex strategy played out in the British governor of Virginia's hope to divert Virginia colonists' attention away from the crisis unfolding then among colonists in Boston and toward the opportunities possible with western expansion.

The governor's strategy failed, both in battle with the Native confederacy they faced at Point Pleasant and in diverting the Virginia colonists' attention away from the brewing revolutionary forces against the Crown up north, causing controversy among historians in the next two centuries. In the process, though, his plan precipitated a battle which, on the side of the militia, cost the lives of seventy five men, including Captain John Frogg.

The young captain—not quite thirty years of age when he lost his life—had married Agnes Lewis, daughter of my sixth great grandparents Thomas and Jane Strother Lewis, in 1770. The young daughter of John and Agnes—they named her Elizabeth Strother Frogg—probably was too young to even remember her father after his death in 1774, being barely three years of age when he died.

It wasn't long before the widowed mother of Elizabeth Strother Frogg remarried—another military man—and Elizabeth was raised by her step-father, Colonel John Stuart. Eventually, Elizabeth herself married a military man—Major Isaac Estill of Monroe County (then in Virginia)—when she was not quite eighteen. With that 1788 event, the family history of this particular branch of the Strother-Lewis descendants began four generations which traced the Estill surname—still far before that senator's surname I wondered about, yet full of stories of their own family history.

Above: Photograph of a Virginia frontiersman on the Point Pleasant Battle monument in West Virginia; courtesy West Virginia Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, U.S. Library of Congress.

From the Past to the Present

Alright, I admit it: sometimes it is just hard to concentrate enough to do that family history research. And the handy excuses about spring fever are not the only ones to displace an activity which, frankly, I love. Sometimes, Life has a way of moving along with bumps and fits and rocky starts. Today was one of those days that jerked me away from the past and landed me right in the middle of an uncomfortable present.

Perhaps I've already been primed for this change. Our family has spent the past week trying to be available companions for friends who just passed the one year anniversary of the death of someone in their family. Anniversaries like that are hard to face, no matter how much everyone else says Time heals all.

Right on the heels of that, I received a message that one of my own close family members just got some bad news following an unexpected trip to the emergency room. Since we live on opposite coasts of a three thousand mile wide continent, you can be sure my nervous energy got displaced into mindless, repetitious activities—anything to keep occupied while waiting for the phone call with answers. Time can weigh awfully heavy during waiting periods like that.

When the call finally came—more waiting for diagnostic results to be reviewed by overworked specialists—we talked about stuff that tangentially sounds like genealogy, mainly because it has to do with family, with genetics and with life. The kind of health histories that review which grandparent had which health problem. And how those propensities get passed down to some descendants but not others.

Face it: I take to genealogy like the air we breathe. It's the "water" I swim in. Yet, even those who love learning about our people in the past need to refresh their connections with our relatives in the present. Especially those who love the history of family past. After all, family is a great continuum linking us like a tag-team relay from those in our generation we know today, to those who remember relatives from bygone generations. If we connect to one part of that continuum, we can't help but connect to the rest of it.

Above: Photograph of the Anton Laskowski family of Brooklyn, New York, sometime before 1917. While some of the people in this picture are my direct ancestors, not all of them are people my family now can identify.

Now Indexing: Adding to the Collection

For every ancestor whose descendants claim, "My surname got changed at Ellis Island," there is likely a naturalization document showing just the way it really was, back in 1901 or 1893. And the more of those other records we can get online, the better it will be for all of us who are seeking the real truth of the matter.

Last night, during one of my regular indexing sessions, I had the opportunity to add to those digitized records by transcribing the pertinent data so that it can be searchable by computer. I had elected to index some records from the collection at FamilySearch.org called Illinois Naturalization Records, 1837 to 1988.

Thankfully, the dates that came up on my batch of ten records happened to fall within the relatively recent time period of 1936 through 1939. That meant, rather than have to squint and slog through chicken scratch handwriting or ambiguous entries, I got to transcribe forms that were almost all typewritten—a welcome change, believe me.

In addition, though the indexing process required me to extract specific elements from the various naturalization forms in the collection, I could easily see that there was a wealth of additional information included on those forms. I could just imagine a descendant, searching through this collection, ecstatic at the surprise of "stumbling" upon more information than originally hoped for, all because of taking the time to click through to the original image, rather than just gleaning the few facts included in the indexed portion.

Many of the records I indexed were from East Saint Louis. The ethnic origins ranged from Spain to Turkey, including displaced Armenians. Because of the time period, I also encountered the after-effect of that awkward span of U.S. history when American women who married immigrants here suddenly lost their citizenship in their own land—and after the change in laws, actually had to apply to once again become an American citizen.

While I admit I do more than my fair share of grumbling about indexing those more difficult to read documents, this round of indexing went through like a breeze. In fact, I was able to double up on the amount I usually do, thanks to the ease of handling this collection.

More important than my own comfort with the process is the fact that somewhere, eventually, someone will find any one of those documents, realize it is an ancestor's record, and find enough information to help them break through a brick wall, learn a wife's name, or discover a birth city in the family's land of origin. And I'm all for spreading cheer like that.

Above: "Spring blossoms," oil on panel by Austrian impressionist artist Olga Wisinger-Florian (1844 - 1926); courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.