Family History — Surprises

 I was raised in a family that valued knowing it’s roots.  My father’s family were great genealogists and the family tree was well established.  My mother’s family not so much. It was about the time that my mother became ill that she started asking me to delve into her genealogy, she would like to know more.  

Her parents were not talkers and didn’t share a lot about their younger years so she didn’t have a lot of information.  Her mother laid claim to be “Scotch Irish and French Indian” and her father’s family hailed from Wales — he was, in fact, a first generation American.  Because of the uniqueness of my grandfather being from “recent” immigrants I started with his family. I even ordered a telephone directory from Wales, went to the library and copied names of possible relatives from a Scranton telephone directory and wrote letters because there was no internet.  The effort was laborious and sometimes fruitful and sometimes not but the advent of the internet made it all much bettter.

I am still working on that side of my tree but as a natural progression, I have moved on to my grandmother’s side.  The whole “Scotch Irish French Indian” thing is proving to be somewhat correct but not completely.  It is all complicated by the lack of certain documentation to be helpful in guiding me through a maze of people all bearing the same name.  Whoever knew that “Isham” would be such a popular name and better yet, who looks a beautiful baby boy and says “you look like an Isham”?  You say “Isham” to me, all I see is Popeye.  Anyway, I digress.

The one thing I have always been very curious about is my grandmother’s claim of indigenious person ancestors.  That is one thing, however, that seems to be correct. Her grandmother, who I was lucky enough to find photos of, certainly does look the part.  And, in a youthful photo of her, she looks just like my mother.  And the fact that my grandmother’s grandmother had one of her children on a reservation that was run by Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio would point to that fact as well.  

As genealogy searches go, you don’t ever stay in a straight line, doing all the research on each person completely and tying it up in a neat packages and moving on to the next.  It is like a pinball machine jumping from one person to another, sometimes knocking down brick walls and sometimes creating more As I was journeying through my grandmother’s indigenous line I found myself several generations on and discovered something that I never would have thought possible.

While my 2nd great grandmother did in fact carry indigenous ancestry she also carried some interesting British ancestry as well in the form of the Symes family.  As I followed the Symes line my Ancestry page posted an interesting “possible” connection to one Grace Sherwood of Williamsburg VA fame.

I had never heard of Grace Sherwood until we joined our daughter on a trip to Colonial Williamsburg a couple of years ago.  A performance depicting her arrest and trial as a witch was performed and as a result of seeing that we visited the place where her trial “by water” was carried out — we didn’t know at the time of any possible connection to this person I had never heard of.  However, when I saw the “possible connection” on my Ancestry tree I knew immediately who they were talking about.

As it turns out, the connection is still speculative at this point.  It does look promising though so I will keep an eye out on the research and see what I can find as well as what is added on Ancestry.  However, it might explain why I find this mug so hilariously funny —

I might have to purchase one for myself!  hahahah!