Letitia "Tish" Richardson

My Genealogical Process - Wrestling the Information into Order

 

When people find out that I wrote a 300-page book based on my discoveries of over 800 ancestors who immigrated to the U.S., they often ask how I found them all.  I suspect people are really asking two questions.  First, how did I go about tracing the family lines that resulted in this astonishing number of found ancestors, and second, how did I test the veracity of these connections?  The answer to the first question is tenacity, blind luck, and a latent sense of feminism.  The answer to the second is that I used to be a practicing lawyer, and more to the point, a law student.  Law students learn to research, to leave no stone unturned in their search for legal precedent that will support their client's case.  Accuracy and documentary proof are essential ingredients to this process, and they form the background of genealogical research as well.

 

Tracing the Family Lines - Fits and Starts: 

 

As I mentioned in the previous post, I think it is profoundly unfair that genealogists and historians often focus on the family surname, which limits ancestral information to the male line.  Little did I know that tracing the lineage of both female and male ancestors to their arrival in North America would result in an explosion of information.  My first attempt, a page on the Dwights, looked like this:

 

 

Hmmm, that didn't work very well.  I didn't have enough room to add much detail or follow any female lines.  How about turning it horizontally?

 

 

 

This produced a more satisfactory result.  Starting with a horizontally aligned, linen-colored piece of paper (to distinguish it from the many other papers I usually have lying around), I drew a horizontal line near the bottom and wrote: David W. Richardson m. Letitia A. DeVillar.  Under the line, I added our birthdates and our marriage date.  I was on a roll!  Above both our names I drew two lines in a V shape and at the top of each V I drew another line and wrote William H. Richardson m. Elizabeth K. Dwight above my husband's name and Alfonso M. DeVillar m. Nina C. Samudio above mine.  Then I added the relevant marriage and birth dates.  I continued this process up the page for another couple of generations and soon ran out of space.  No problem, I started another page. 

 

As the ancestor tree grew and grew, I needed new pages.  By about the 20th page, I realized I had to develop a more sophisticated organizational system.  At this point I started to add each couple's generation so starting with David, I noted his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, 2nd great-grandparents, 3rd great-grandparents, etc.  This was getting even more complicated, especially when I realized I would be going back to 11th great-grandparents in some cases.  I started to label the pages for easier cross-reference and as they piled up, I indicated which page to consult next whenever I ran out of room on a particular family. 

 

At this point, there was no way I could mentally keep track of all the ancestors, so I created a master sheet of all the surnames and where they were located.  While I should have made a nice, neat spreadsheet, frankly, it was faster to hand write the information.  Whatever works, right?

 

When I finally got to the top of the tree, lo and behold, there was a Mayflower ancestor.  In fact, eight of David's direct ancestors were on the ship of 1620.  People often express surprise at this, but I understand it is common to have multiple Mayflower ancestors.  Only 102 passengers sailed on her, and many died during their first winter in New England.  The entire Pilgrim population never grew past 300-400 people, and so there was a lot of intermarriage.  If you come across one Mayflower ancestor it is likely you have another.

 

Too Many Sheets of Paper and No Easy Way to Access Information Quickly:

 

Soon I ran into the limitations of using 8x10 paper and adding lots of facts and anecdotes in the margins – they just didn't fit.  At this point, I went out and bought hundreds of 5x8 index cards in several colors.  Using one color for each generation, I had plenty of space to take notes, record the names of the couple's children, the year of immigration, the ship(s) they arrived on, their recorded activities, family anecdotes, etc.  The list of children became important when it turned out that more than one of the children were direct ancestors.  These cards also came in very handy when I went back in the second stage of my research and began fact-checking.  With the index cards, I had room to write down the sources I was using for my research.  They looked like this:

 

 

Not the Typical Genealogy Research Log:

 

I should add that these hand-written cards are very different in appearance from what a genealogist would use while conducting research for a paying client.  Normally, a genealogist would use a Word or Excel research template, or the newer platform-based logs that are currently being introduced.  Since my use case was different, I needed a different sort of record - one that could be easily sorted according to how I wanted to use it. 

 

For example, I'm currently writing an article about Grissell (Fletcher) [Jewell] [Griggs] [Kibby] [Gurney] Burge, the most married woman in colonial New England.  With the card system, I can easily pull the cards for her parents, her and her husband(s), and her children.  The different colored cards help me keep the facts straight from a generational perspective, and they are easily separated from additional notes I take on the towns they lived in, the families of the non-ancestor husbands, etc. 

 

Likewise, when I write a chapter about a war, such as King Philip's War (1675-1676), I can pull all the cards for men who fought and families who were adversely affected, enabling me to write a richer and broader narrative about the war and our ancestors' role in it.  When I finish the article or chapter, the cards will go back into their proper generational order in my research box.

 

 

 

More About the Research:

 

As I mentioned above, research training, tenacity and blind luck are important in conducting genealogical research.  In my research, I relied as much as possible on verifiable primary sources and reputable secondary sources rather than on other sources.  While family lore and anecdotes are fun, as I wanted to uncover the "true" family history. 

 

Tenacity is important because sometimes you run into what genealogists call a "brick wall."  This is a point at which the verifiable record dies out, and you cannot find the information that makes the family connection.  This is what happened with David's ancestor, Grace (Fairbanks) Bullen.  For centuries her maiden name was unknown, and no one knew she was connected to the Fairbanks family of Dedham, MA.  I conducted a long, frustrating search but after several weeks all I had to go on was an unverified claim in a self-published book.  I called the town historian in Dedham trying to turn up a record or perhaps establish the site of her burial, and while we didn't come up with anything usable, she has been a great help in transcribing ancient hand-written records as in the document I describe below. 

 

One day I found an Accounting of Expenditures Grace's mother, Lydia (Prescott) [Fairbanks] Barron, had submitted to the Court as part of the settlement of her first husband's estate.  By this time, Lydia had moved to Boston, remarried, and was using her new husband's name.  This was why my search, focused on the Fairbanks name and their towns of residency, had not led me to the document sooner.  Listing payments for wedding clothes, a cradle, and doctor's fees, the Accounting established that Lydia had a daughter that lived to marriageable age, married, gave birth, and died.  While the daughter was not named, the Accounting also established that Jonas Fairbanks, Lydia's first husband, was this daughter's father.  Lydia and Jonas only had two daughters, and only Grace was unaccounted for.  Using this document to support circumstantial evidence that the daughter was Grace (Fairbanks) who married Ephraim Bullen, I submitted an article with these "proofs" to the New England Historical and Genealogical Register.  The Register's genealogists fact-checked my research and agreed that Grace Bullen was one and the same as Grace Fairbanks, and they published my article.  (An earlier version of the article is included in the Works section of this website.)  In this case, my research tenacity paid off.

 

Blind luck also comes into play at times.  This occurred when David's great, great-grandfather, Marshall Carpenter, a Brookfield, Vermont resident, died in Ohio while visiting his daughter.  The Ohio records had been lost to fire, and his death was not recorded in Vermont.  I really needed to establish that the Marshall Carpenter who died in Ohio was the same man as the Vermont Marshall Carpenter because this link was critical to proving one of David's Mayflower lines.  The Mayflower Society, a stickler for unshakable evidence, wanted a Death Certificate signed by the attending physician.  Again, I pursued several leads, all of which proved fruitless.  One day, in desperation, I called and left a message with the Brookfield Town Clerk, hoping that she could find some piece of evidence that had escaped the online databases. 

 

The Town Clerk only worked on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am – 3pm, but she followed up with me the next time she was in the office.  When I told her that I was trying to find some record of Marshall's death, she dove into the search with determination.  Some days later she dejectedly informed me that all she could find was a document called a "Transportation of Corpse" from when Marshall's body was returned to Vermont for burial.  She sent me a copy of the document just in case it might be helpful, and it turned out to have exactly what I needed.  At the bottom of the Transportation of Corpse certificate was a standard Death Certificate, including a cause of death and the attending physician's signature, which ultimately satisfied the Mayflower Society and enabled me to establish David's Mayflower line.  I chalk this one up to blind luck, although tenacity may have played a part as well!

 

A Final Piece of Advice:

 

If you want to start a genealogical research project and don't want to hire a professional genealogist, for goodness sake take a course on the topic.  Don't put yourself through the fits and starts that I went through.  This post is meant more as a cautionary tale than as a blueprint on how to properly organize research.   

Starting with Dave's parents: the Dwights and the Richardsons.

 

Researching the Dwight family:

 

I decided to start my research with my mother-in-law's family because we knew they arrived in North America quite early.  Tracing the Dwight family turned out to be deceptively easy.  The first immigrant, John Dwight, arrived in North America in 1635, and the family didn't leave New England for a couple hundred years.  Many Dwights attained notoriety in one way or another, and the family had a reputation for being God-fearing, hard-working New Englanders of the most steadfast kind. 

 

Further assistance came from a 3-volume family genealogy published in 1874.  Apparently, genealogy was quite popular in the late 1800's and lots of genealogical tomes were written, some for wealthy Americans who longed to find royal or otherwise famous ancestry and whose desire for such inevitably captured the attention of charlatans only too willing to pose as legitimate genealogists and create royal ancestry out of nothing.  This was not the case with the Dwights.  The gentleman who penned the book, Benjamin Woodbridge Dwight, was a noted theologian and scholar before turning his attention to the family genealogy.  No scandals or royal ancestors turned up in the book; in fact, the family came across as rather ordinary.  This, however, may have been partly due to the book's format, a rather tedious list of so-and-so married so-and-so followed by a list of all their children, and all the children's marriages, and then then a list of all the grandchildren and their marriages and children, and so on.  This format is typical of family genealogies that begin with one ancestor and trace all his descendants through time.  Note the word "his".  The typical format ignores the history of the female line.  For a woman that means our mothers and fathers, their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc. aren't accounted for.  We are effectively erased from the ancestral story.  (See my article on the law of Coverture under the Works tab for more on this topic.)

 

Honoring the Women:

 

Personally, I have always found it irksome that genealogists emphasize the man and the surname and rarely focus on the woman (with some exceptions of course).  This infuriates me since children are equally the product of their father AND their mother.  I was determined to not ignore the women in the family history, so I traced their ancestry as well.  This meant going backward in time and tracing every person in the family tree.

 

Fortunately, modern databases make it easier to do this, but it adds a lot of information to the mix.  (More on handling that in a different post.)  Anyway, I felt like I was uncovering a much more full and engaging history that honored all ancestors, both male and female.  The bad news was that I was already a year into the research, and I hadn't even started on the Richardsons.  Doing that opened a whole new can of worms.

 

Researching the Richardsons:

 

The Richardsons were English Quakers who had emigrated first to Spanish Town, Jamaica, and then to Pennsylvania.   Samuel Richardson made a big splash in Philadelphia when, soon after landing and calling himself a "bricklayer" in legal documents, he proceeded to buy huge swaths of land, establish several successful businesses, and begin a 20-some-odd year political career, all activities well beyond the reach of your common bricklayer. 

 

This seemed promising, but soon a new glitch appeared.  Pennsylvania was one of mid-Atlantic colonies which also include New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.  New York and New Jersey were settled predominantly by colonists from the New England colonies who brought a New England sensibility to record-keeping, so their records are pretty robust.  The more southern mid-Atlantic colonies were not settled by detail-oriented Puritans but rather by a mix of people from different countries, different religions, and different cultures.  This seems to have led to a less rigorous approach to record-keeping.  Consequently, the records from this region are sparse compared to New England, New York, and New Jersey records.  This posed several problems. 

 

First, to augment the details of a person's life, I had to investigate more obscure resources.  For the Richardsons I researched Quaker meeting house records.  To find out more about the Herrs, who married into the Richardson family, I joined the Lancaster Mennonite Society to gain access to its wonderful records.  At one point I even considered establishing Virginia residency to gain access to its restricted records!  Fortunately, we only have a couple of ancestors there so for the moment I don't need to take drastic action. 

 

A second problem was that having fewer verified records meant that the crowd-sourced ancestry sites had an even greater quantity of bad information as amateur genealogists grabbed any data they could get, verified or not. 

 

A third problem was that it was much harder to figure out what these people were doing, why they were doing it, and with whom they were doing it.  I was still able to conduct the research but there were a lot more frustrating moments and "brick walls" (a dead-end that despite months or even years of research provides no definitive answer). 

 

I 'm still researching several of these particular ancestors and desperately trying to break through the brick walls created by the lack of a female ancestor's parentage.