September 22, 2007

Family Tree Research

I am sitting here at work on a Friday morning, bored out of my mind!!! Damn it is only 10:35!!!!

This day is going to drag. I am trying to think of a way I can do more research on my family history while I am sitting here.

I have been trying to do my family tree for a few months now. I have actually gotten a lot farther then I originally thought I would thanks to my sister who introduced me to a wonderful program called Family Tree Maker. The program is linked to Ancestry.com which it awesome! I can type in a persons name hit the little globe button and it connects to the internet and searched for records. Easy right?

Well wrong! Yeah you get to search records but the problem is you get about 1,000 or more search results!! So unless you are lucky and the name is at the top you have to go through pages and pages of results. How quickly you will learn how many people in the US there are by that name or some variation of it. However in the case that you do find your beloved family member you can get all kinds of information.

So back to my family tree… I found that on my Grandmothers side we have a guy who apparently murdered a family that he knew. Story has it that he was going to rob them and wound up killing the entire family. A little slave girl was hiding in the wood box and witnessed the event. The slave girl wound up turning him in a few days later and it lead to his conviction and hanging. According to the story he was one a very few white men to ever be hung back then.

According to the story I have, his wife then changed the children’s last name to that of a man who was hired help living in the house at the time. Wait what? You mean I am not actually related to the person we got the family name from??? Well isn’t that wonderful! So after researching the family name and tracing it back to England I read this story that pretty much tells me I am not even related to him!! Instead I learn that I am possibly related to the guy who killed a bunch of people.

So of course learning this new information has only made me try to search more to find out the truth and learn what really happened. So far I have turned up nothing. I did find another person who had posted a blog stating he had heard the same story I described from his aunt multiple times. I guess the aunt’s grandmother was around when it happened.

Great now I am trying to hunt this guy down and find out more about the story. I am starting to feel like a stalker who is becoming obsessed with figuring out this great mystery of the mid 1800’s. Will it ever end? I have however come to the conclusion that the newly widowed wife and her hired help never officially married but did seem to have one child together. Guess what? That child seems to be the one that I am related to! YAY so it seems that I am not actually related to the murder after all. The problem with this excitement is it might be short lived.

So now I am trying to make sure this story is true and find out what really happened and who I am really related to. At this point I have not gotten very far seeing that I am now in school full time. I have been trying to rely on fellow family tree searchers to give me any information they can.

I will keep you posted on my future findings. By the way it is now 1:11pm hehe

~Shell

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