Month: July 2010

Surname Saturday: Love

Posted on by Kathleen

LOVE

The LOVE family name originates in Scotland. They are a sept of the Clan MacKinnon. A sept is an English word for a division of a family, especially a division of a clan. [1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sept] There is a section of my Clans and Families of Scotland book dedicated to Clan MacKinnon. I will just hit a few points for you:

1. Clan Motto: Audentes fortuna juvat (Gaelic: Fortune favours the bold)
2. Clan Slogan: Cuimhnich bás Ailpein (Gaelic: Remember the death of Alpin)
3. The MacKinnons are a branch of Clan Alpin and claim descent from the great-grandson of Alpin, King of Scots.
4. The Clan fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

My Love Branch

Unfortunately, I haven’t found connections back to the actual clan yet. My first Love ancestor is Andrew Love (born: abt 1803). My first record of him is when he marries Agnes Hamilton in Kilmarnock, Scotland in 1828. I haven’t viewed this record myself yet. Their names do match up with the ‘Diner Tree’ I’ve been working on, so I’m just piecing things together until I can get the Microfilms ordered and start collecting the actual birth records. So on a scale of 0-3, 3 being very reliable; I would mark this as a 1. It could really go either way for this record.

My next records are the birth of their children Thomas and Jean Love. Their births are recorded at Paisley Abbey, Scotland. They however are the same reliability factor as the marriage record. So I documented these dates and am using them as a guideline. Andrew and Agnes had five children that I know about.

  1. Andrew Love, born Feb 1832, Scotland; married Ellen Lessler
  2. Thomas H Love, born 15 Feb 1838, Paisley Abbey, Renfrewshire, Scotland; married Christina
  3. Jean Love, born 29 Jan 1841, Paisley Abbey, Renfrewshire, Scotland
  4. Agnes Love, born about 1844, Scotland
  5. William Wallace Love, 16 Feb 1846, Scotland (my 3rd Great-Grandfather); married Jennie Menzies

The family first shows up in America on July 3, 1854 when their ship arrives at New York from Glasgow. Missing from the voyage is the oldest child, Andrew. He was already in New York at this time having immigrated one year prior. What struck me with this is Thomas’ occupation being listed as ‘Grocer’. The Love family will be in the Grocery business for many generations starting from here. After arriving in America, Andrew and his brood will live with his oldest son Andrew in New York City at least until the 1860 United States Census. After 1860 everyone in the family starts migrating to New Jersey.

Andrew and Agnes lived in the Plainfield area of Union County, New Jersey until their deaths. Agnes in 1885 and Andrew in 1889. [2. Records of Births, Marriages, and Deaths of New Jersey, 1848-1900] Their eldest son Andrew would marry Ellen Lessler and they’d have 5 chidren of their own. Their eldest Andrew R Love, was born in New York in 1860. Their next two, James and Margaret, were born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Their youngest two children, Robert and Jennie, were born in New Jersey where the family finally settled in North Plainfield, Somerset County, New Jersey.

Andrew and Agnes’ son Thomas lived in New York until at least 1874, where his fifth child is born. His family would then settle in Westfield, Union County, New Jersey.I have no information on Andrew and Agnes’ daughters after they arrived in America. Jean/Jane disappears before the 1860 census and Agnes after it. Most likely they got married, I just haven’t found a record of marriage for them yet.

Andrew and Agnes’ youngest child, William Wallace Love, is my 3rd Great Grandfather. He was born 16 Feb 1846 in Scotland. He married Jennie Menzies in 1867, and they would have 11 children. Jennie Menzies-Love would die 17 Sep 1890 under suspicious circumstances. The story and family legend goes that they were both drunk and arguing when it went too far. No one knows how but Jennie ended up at the bottom of the stairs, dead. I’ve been told by another descendant that there are a bunch of newspaper articles chronicling the subsequent trial and acquittal of William Wallace Love. I haven’t found any of these articles yet, but I’m probably just not looking in the right papers. If it’s out there I’ll find it. Until then, this remains a family legend. William’s branch settled in Essex County, New Jersey with a few of them going to other places.

Here’s a map of the area the Loves settled in. As you can see, even though Plainfield and North Plainfield are in separate counties, they aren’t exactly far away from each other.

Love Family Links

  • Love Family Tag on Misadventures of a Genealogist blog.
  • Love Family in my website database, 39 and counting! I’ll be making sure all my documents are uploaded today.

Things I Wonder About the Loves

  • Where did Jean and Agnes go? Did they also settle in New Jersey near their family?
  • Were Kilmarnock and Paisley Abbey the family’s origin or were they just stopping points along the way to America?

What are my next steps?

  • Of course my first step is obtaining birth records for William Wallace Love’s children.
  • My second step is to find the marriage record for William W Love and Jennie Menzies.
  • I really want to find the Newspaper Article chronicling the supposed trial. I think it happened in Essex County, NJ, but my contact says it made it to the major New York papers. We’ll see when I go to the library and search Newspaper Archive.
  • I want to verify that Andrew and Agnes are in fact William’s parents. Tenuous census records do not make a solid connection, so if I can find his death certificate to confirm his parents, that’d be ace.
  • I’d like to get back in contact with my Love relations. There were all descended from different children of William and Jennie and it’d be interesting to see what new stuff they’ve found!

Menzies Leaps and Bounds

Posted on by Kathleen

I’ve made some great advances in researching the Menzies line of my family! I’m very excited about what I’ve found. This adventure started when I decided to sign up for a 7 day free trial of World Vital Records. I thought maybe this would be a cheaper way of being able to access the UK records I’ve been holding off on. Well, after a few hours of trying to get some of the image viewers to work, I just went ahead and upgraded my Ancestry.com membership. Even if I only have the World Membership for one year it’ll be worth it to me! I’m still going to check out World Vital Records for the rest of my trial, but I’m just more comfortable with the Ancestry format. I’ll probably do an entry on navigating World Vital Records at the beginning of next week to test it out some more.

Once I upgraded my Ancestry, It was like being let loose! I went right to work. If you’ve been reading for awhile you’ve seen a small amount of progress being made on the Menzies front. You can read that progress by clicking the Menzies tag in the sidebar, or you can just take a quick peek at the more informative entry: Menzies Mysteries. That entry will show you that I’ve found where the Menzies immigrated to America in 1854. They briefly stayed with son (presumably), Alexander, who had already immigrated and set himself up as a ‘Druggist.’

My first find was in the 1851 England Census. With the Menzies immigrating in 1854, this census should be a great start for me to continue “across the pond.”

I found the family (you can click the image for a full size view if you’d like) in Liverpool, England. That is the exact city they sailed from in 1854. From this census, I learned an awful lot. First thing is that John was a Sawyer before leaving England. I don’t know if he picked the profession back up in America, because I haven’t found him beyond the 1860 American Census. What I like about this is that it confirms for me that Alexander is in fact John and Jane’s son. Here he is listed as 21 years of age and an Apprentice Chemist & Druggist. This information lines up perfectly with his 1860 New York information for both age and occupation. This census also confirms the “brother James” mentioned in a letter William wrote to his ‘Dear Sister Jean’. Having such great luck on this level, I decided to test my luck and go for the 1841 census. The family should still be living in Liverpool if the children’s birthplaces here are to be believed.

Once again, I got really lucky! Here are all my usual suspects, except I have a few extras. Margaret was present when the family sailed to America. However she wasn’t listed with the family in 1851. I’ll have to try and figure out if she was married before going to America. If she did that’ll make a possible 3 marriages for her! Helen, aged 10 is a great find for me. In the letter from William he talks quite about about Sister Ellen and her troubles, including her husband Charlie being away when their little son passed away. Charlotte, aged 4, is a mystery to me. This is the first I’ve heard of her. I’ll have to see if she married young, or unfortunately passed away young. Either way something happened to her. She wasn’t mentioned in William’s letter, so I’m assuming she passed away because she didn’t sail with the family to America.

Overall, I think finding these census records makes me fall in love with the letters passed down through the family. Being able to prove these people in the letters actually exist is a great triumph for me. I think I’ll be talking about it for a long time yet!

Overall Goals and Purpose

Posted on by Kathleen

My Purpose

  1. My main purpose in doing genealogy is just to learn more about where I come from. It sounds like every other reason in the world, but before I started doing genealogy I knew next to nothing about my family. We live so far from the rest of the family, that I’ve never had constant contact with anyone but my parents and siblings. All other family, I only see once a year if I’m lucky. So doing genealogy has helped me discover why I am the way I am. Why I love Ireland so much, my love of forms and bookkeeping, things people probably don’t question in their lives.

My Primary Goal

  1. I think my primary goal is just to ‘collect’ relatives. I don’t have a particular need or want to do this professionally. I don’t have any grand ideas of being related to royalty. I just kind of like collecting relatives. In fact, when I first started, I collected all kinds of people. I would research just to research. When I cleaned out my file a few years ago, I removed over 100 people that had no blood relationship to me but were distant relatives of people who married into my family.

Other Goals

  1. To learn the correct way to document my family history. Sometimes I get so caught up in ‘collecting’ these relatives, I may not source things in the correct, uniform manner. So that’s what I’m working on now. Learning the correct way to document and source things.
  2. After watching Roots, I would like to write some kind of family history. I seem to have a knack for picking out things my family will think is interesting without boring them too badly. So I hope to someday write a written history that I can distribute to them myself. Everyone in my family has expressed interest in this website at some point or another, so this is really just an extension of that. I understand people can go either way on the subject of Roots, but I don’t really care about that. For me that movie represented a family journey through life. I would really love to document my family’s journey.
  3. I think Tonia’s Notebook Project is a great idea. I’d like to do my own version of it at some point. Probably when I have a house with an office. ^.^ I think my favorite part about the concept is donating the research to the local library. Imagine a genealogist walking into their local library and finding that kind of treasure trove!
  4. One thing I would really like to get into is transcribing records and putting them online for free. I had ideas of transcribing the US Census for the counties my families originate from. I have never really gotten around to it, but I think once I get my website into a final design, I’ll probably start it. I want to help others be able to access records they can’t get to because of location or price.
  5. Set up a family charity page. One thing I’ve wanted to do for a long time is set up a Charity section. Where people can donate to charities that effect our own family. There are specific issues that effect my family and I’d like to make a small difference in helping the world overcome these things (cancer, scleroderma, diabetes).
  6. Volunteer. This is probably something I’ve wanted to do the longest. When I finally get my driver’s license, this is probably what I will start on first. Whether it be transcribing cemeteries or helping at the local genealogy or historical society. When I was working at the video store, I shared a lot of time with the elderly. I even thought about volunteering at a nursing home and taking down stories of the residents. Once again, I’d need a drivers license for that. I’m working on it though, all I have left is taking Drivers Ed!

So here’s my lifetime goals. ^.^ I just thought I’d get them all down on the record.

Saturday Night Fun: I Write Like

Posted on by Kathleen

No Surname Saturday post this week! Sorry, I was just so busy I didn’t have the concentration to write it up. It’ll definitely go up next week! Instead I’m participating in Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, a weekly series from Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings.

1) Find something that you have written that you are really proud of – the best of your work. Do an Edit > Copy of it.

2) Go to the website http://iwl.me/ and Paste your text into the waiting box.

3) Tell us which famous author you write like. Write it up in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog, or post it on Facebook. Insert the “badge of honor” in your blog if you can.

So here’s mine, I used my Found You Alfred! post about finally partially breaking down my brick wall with Alfred Love.

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

That’s interesting, I’ve never read anything by H.P. Lovecraft, but Wikipedia says he wrote “weird fiction”. ^.^ I’ll take that as a compliment I guess! I do find it funny that a post dealing with the Love family turned up an author named Lovercraft. Especially since I believe nothing is a coincidence!