Previously untapped research hints

 

                                                              Norfolk where some of my ancestors came from

If you're like me you receive more email messages than you could ever keep up with. If you have Gmail, it's even easier to miss messages as they are divided into three different sections. I tend to ignore anything that isn't in my main messages and even my main messages are too many to keep up with. Emails tend to come from all kinds of different places, from retailers, writing related enterprises, heritage societies, genealogical societies and genealogical businesses like Ancestry or FamilySearch. It can be overwhelming trying to find the wheat among the chaff.

But, since I'm supposed to be doing my planning for an upcoming trip to the FamilySearch Library, I am, of course, now weeding through my emails with a view to eliminating a decent chunk of them. Anything to keep away from what needs to be done. Some of the emails actually look interesting which was why I clicked on one from FamilySearch that suggested they had information on my 5th great grandfather, Jonas Shipley. I'd never heard that name before but it sounded vaguely familiar so, of course, I had to look.

With the FamilySearch hints a rough family line of descent from the named person is given. In the case of Jonas Shipley, he was the father of Francis Shipley. Francis, in turn, was the father of Anne Shibley. Note the change in spelling. No wonder the name was vaguely familiar. I had run across it when looking at the antecedents of Sarah Minister, my 3rd great grandmother who moved from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk to London. Sarah who I had written about last fall.

Jonas Shipley was born in Dickleborough (Dickleburgh) and I'm pretty sure that was Anne Shibley's place of birth as well as that place name stuck with me as well. As easy as clicking on an email hint, I have a line on some research to look into while in Salt Lake City. Now to go through my emails to see if there are other hints that can point me to different areas of potential research. 

Image:

Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0> , via Wikimedia Commons

Resolutions and family history

 

                                                                 Some of the research I've gathered over the years

One piece of advice for genealogists that I've often heard is to be organized. Of course, there are many ways to do this depending on your research methods and the ways that you retain material, whether paper based or on the cloud or anything in between. Above all, the wise genealogist keeps a log of everything they have researched, otherwise they might spend time looking up the same thing not realizing that it is a repeated effort.

Year after year, I've resolved to keep my family history research organized so that I can see what I have already learned and where I need to look next for each family line. It sounds ideal, doesn't it? It also sounds like a lot of work and, to be truthful, being methodical bores me to tears.

This year, though, I need to take stock of where I am with my research because, yet again, I'm planning a trip to Salt Lake City. Of course, I've planned this trip for a while but I haven't yet done my pre-research in order to come up with a plan for where my hunt should focus when I am there.

So I'm starting to drag out the notebooks and thumb drives I've gathered from other research trips to find out what I have already gathered. This all would be so much easier if I had kept my resolution to organize my genealogy. But, then on the flip side, looking at my family history info with fresh eyes can lead to inspiration and maybe a few stories and, ultimately, that's why I do genealogical research. I want to piece family stories together from the data I've gathered. That's what makes it all worthwhile for me. 

New Year wishes

 

Happy New Year

May the path ahead 

be filled with sunshine

Seasons Greetings

 

Best wishes for a 

Happy Holiday

Season

Connections to Scottish clans

 

                                                                 Houses in Portree, Isle of Skye, Scotland

Last week I wrote about one set of Scottish immigrants that I have researched but those were not my ancestors. One of my own family lines does go back to Scotland though. I have connections to the Highlands and Islands, specifically to Islay and Skye. As I know of that link in my family tree, at one point I signed up to receive emails from the Society of Highland & Island History. They hold webinars and I never know when they might show something of interest. This past week there was a webinar about Y Chromosome Testing and the presenter was Alasdair F. Macdonald.

The Highlands with their clan system are an interesting place to pursue Y DNA testing. There are so many stories handed down about clan linages and the clan system still exists in the present day. Finding documentation to corroborate the stories can be tricky though, as Alasdair told us in the webinar. He has been doing DNA research for a long time as he was one of the contributors to Tracing Your Ancestors Using DNA: A Guide for Family Historians. The book was originally published in 2019 but a new edition is about to come out.

One of the clans he spoke about was the Mathesons. I sat up and took notice then as that was the surname of my 3 x great grandfather, Kenneth Matheson, who immigrated from Skye to Prince Edward Island and then to Upper Canada. Apparently there are two main branches of the Matheson family, one from Shinness and one from Lochalsh. That last place name sounded familiar. It's where the bridge now goes from the mainland to Skye so I would have passed through it on my visit to the island.

Apparently, according to the presentation, there is also a connection between the Mathesons and the Rosses. That also piqued my interest as Kenneth Matheson was married to Ann Ross. Maybe there were ongoing connections between the families over the centuries as well. Of course, now I'm starting to dig out the information I have on my Scottish families. We'll see how far I get with that. 

A Tale of Scottish Immigrants in the Maritimes

 

                                                                                 Brass of priest (1540) Thaxted

I sign up for a lot of webinars related to my areas of research. That's probably part of the reason that I get distracted from whatever genealogical path I've been exploring. A recent talk put on by the Scottish SIG of the Ontario Genealogical Society caught my eye as it had the title, Scots in the Maritimes. I have Scottish lines of research and some of those families ended up in the Maritimes, so I signed up.

The speaker, Peggy Homans Chapman, presented a comprehensive view of records available about Scottish migrants in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI. I already knew a lot of the information she covered, like the wonderful books by Lucille Campey, but she mentioned some different and new to me items and databases that I want to explore.

One of the themes of her presentation about where the Scots settled showed that religion had a role to play in who settled where. I had found that in my own research. My ears perked up when she talked about the story of a priest who met boats coming in to Pictou to deter the Catholic Scots from putting down roots there. She thought it was just an old story but I was able to put the names of the priest, MacEachern, in the chat because I came upon that information in a story I covered in this blog.

The story I had about the priest differed somewhat as MacEachern wasn't meeting the newcomers, he advised people already settled in Pictou to move to Antigonish, where the Catholics had settled. this was part of the story I covered when I wrote about John Brack McNeil back in 2020. His story started with the December 14, 2019 blog post Loyalist or just loyal   and continued for six more blog posts in 2020 commencing with The Search for John McNeil. It was interesting to be reminded of this story and the research I had done in those areas of Nova Scotia. Now I'll have to see if I can find some similar information on my Scots who went to PEI.

Sources:

Information about Angus Bernard MacEachern the priest from PEI who came to Pictou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Bernard_MacEachern 

Blog posts related to the story:

Loyalist or just loyal? - December 14, 2019 https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2019/12/loyalist-or-just-loyal.html

 The Search for John McNeil - January 11, 2020 https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-search-for-john-mcneil.html

Other related blog posts:        The Riddle of the Three John McNeils January 18, 2020

Putting Down Roots by Chance January 25, 2020

The Power of Religion February 1, 2020

Notable in Malignant Cove February 8, 2020

A Will Adds Dates to the Timeline February 15, 2020

Scottish Names February 22, 2020

Images:

By Poliphilo - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81903245

A second look at a military record

 

                                                                  The book and my grandfather's military record

Reading is one of the joys of my life. I read widely and sometimes what I read provides inspiration for my family history research. This time that spark was provided by a book about a man who served in the Great War, aka WWI. That man was Harry Palin who was living in New Zealand when he joined the armed forces. Those troops were some of the "lucky" participants at Gallipoli.

The book gave a narrative account of that conflict and named the British ships that were supporting the troops in that theatre of war. My paternal grandfather was assigned to a ship in that war and I remembered someone telling me that he was on Lemnos and Mykonos. Was he also involved in the Gallipoli Campaign?

I pulled out my grandfather's naval record and took a closer look. According to the record, he joined up in June of 1917 and was assigned to the President II and served in Chingford. 1917 was too late for the Gallipoli campaign and besides, the President II was parked in different places on the Thames, such as Chingford, and used as an accounting base. Chingford was also the site of a Royal Naval Air Service airfield was explains the note on his record which read ENGT TO R.A.F. A further search into conscription in WWI, explained his late entry into the fighting forces. It wasn't until May of 2016 that married men were subject to the draft.

So, although checking to see if my grandfather was involved in the Gallipoli campaign turned up negative results, I still learned a lot about the records I already had on hand. They are still confusing though, as they also record that he received the Eastern Medal. Was the family lore placing him on Lemnos and Mykonos correct? It look like I have more searching to do.

Sources:

Imperial War Museums – Lives of the First World War https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/story/28229 

Palin, Michael Great-Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire, Random House Canada, Toronto, 2023

UK Parliament – Conscription: the First World War https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/yourcountry/overview/conscription/