Oh boy! This was a tough one. There are plenty of people in my family tree I’d love to have over from dinner and conversation. Narrowing down my prospects wasn’t easy. I decided to pick someone from my Dad’s side of the tree since I picked Mom’s side last week.
George Thorward obituary. Taken from Llewellyn Moore’s box of records.
George Thorward
Soon, I will be highlighting my immigrant ancestors here on the blog. That means you’ll be hearing more about George Thorward. I picked him for this prompt because I know he has some stories to tell. I have so many questions for him.
Was his name really George Thorward… George Yohn? Johann Georg Weigel?
Did you emigrate from Germany for political reasons?
Did you and your brother really make up your name and then go in different directions?
Were you close to your siblings?
How many siblings did you have?
Did you all immigrate?
Why did you come to America so young?
What happened to your parents?
Did you share your immigration story with your children or was it a secret?
I can honestly say if George were still around there would be plenty of questions from me and his other descendants!
L-R: Living Descendant, George W. Thorward, Lewis Thorward, George Thorward (4 generations of Thorwards)
I thought long and hard about how I would interpret the prompt this week. I was going to do the longest living male and female. Then I was going to do the longest married couple. Thinking about all those tempted me to look in my old file, so I decided right then and there I was going to poke around my current Do-Over file and see what jumped out at me.
Mary Jane Mays-Jegley
Aunt Janie was my Grandpa Stanley’s half-sister. Aunt Janie stood out to me because at the current part of my Do-Over I am trying to untangle the online theories about her father and his parents. That’s a story for a different day. I’m here to spotlight Janie. She is the daughter of William Harmon Mays and Sarah Elizabeth McDaniels. I’ve talked about them a few times. Here is their marriage record and this is a timeline of William’s life. I also talked about a census entry for Sarah in 1910 that had me curious. More on that later as well. She was born in September of 1906 in Rowan County, Kentucky. After her mother’s early passing, she moved to Clermont County with her father and paternal grandparents.
That is 94 miles away from any other family that they had. That is a massive distance in the early 1900s, especially for rural farmers who didn’t have much. I don’t know what prompted the family to move. It does seem that there was plenty of sicknesses going around at the time, but I haven’t been able to research fully to know if there was an increased death rate in the area. To move so far, so completely away from everyone, it must have been something though.
After moving to Clermont County, William hired Iva Belle Moyer to look after Janie and he eventually married her. Janie married George Jegley in January of 1928 in Clermont County and they had a son. My Grandma didn’t write down all of Janie’s descendants, so I’m going to have a heck of a time finding them all, but I hope they all know how much my mother’s family loved her. I haven’t heard anyone speak an ill word of Aunt Janie.
From what I can tell, Janie was close with her brothers and her sister in law, Emogene. She often wrote letters to Emogene… but more on that later. 😉
Longevity
Aunt Janie lived to be 93 years, 7 months, and 1 day old. She currently has the longest lifespan in my family tree file of 480 people. In addition to that, she outlived the average female lifespan in my database by close to 30 years and the longest living male in my database by 7 years.
This is a special treat for those that followed along all those years ago when I posted The Diary of Llewellyn for 3 years. Many will recall midway through the Diary, my Great-Grandpa Bill started showing up with his future wife. One of their favorite activities to do was dance.
I miss the Diary entries but I love filling in the gaps like this…
In fact, if you search this blog for “we danced” it comes up more than once!
William and Llewellyn Moore, 1972
This is one of my favorite photos because 50 years later and you can tell she still loved dancing with him!
It’s time to talk about my DNA matches again. I’ve been immersing myself in my matches. One of the Facebook groups I am a member of told me that the best way to learn about your DNA is to get familiar with your results. That’s what I’ve been focusing on since it’s way too cold to be outside…
Okay, I probably wouldn’t have been outside anyway. It’s never been my thing.
Where were we?
My Final List of 2nd and 3rd cousins
The last time I posted about my DNA, this chart was where I left things. I was going through trying to identify my public tree matches to see what I could tell about them. Everything is listed in my Excel spreadsheet. While I was going through, I also made a point of adding a star and note to each match that I identified. Boy am I glad I did that now. Wait until I show you this!
That was very clever of me!
To save screen space, I will just tell you I got a bunch of new matches over the holiday. That left me with a lot of stuff to add to my database. No problem, I have a process for that! Well, as you all know new matches don’t usually have trees. That’s okay, I’m sure some will put some up eventually. In the meantime, I can still work with that. For purposes of our example, Let’s say I have a new DNA match named New Cousin. He’s awesome because he chose to share his DNA matches with us and that’s alright in my book.
New Cousin and my Starred Matches
Woah there, that’s a lot, what am I looking at?
I’m glad you asked! Okay, above this text you should see a list of my shared matches with New Cousin. The special treat is that I’ve been adding stars and comments to each match I’ve identified. What you see above is what happened when I clicked that starred matches button at the top of my screen.
When I look at my notes for each person, I started to notice a pattern. Besides the two William and Anna matches at the bottom and my 2nd Cousin match at the top, the list is definitely favoring a Joseph Slusher and Nancy Wade descendant.
I am extremely lucky and cursed.
As well all know with DNA matches, this isn’t a given result for everyone. You have to be lucky enough to have the information given by your matches and then you have to know how to extract as much information from as little information as you can. On top of that luck, there was another little factor that worked to my advantage.
Mays and Slusher Families (Unofficially)
Mays and Slusher Families
It just so happens that three Mays children married three Slusher children. Given the size of the families, before that fact is taken into account, odds were always very good that I would have a lot of Mays and Slusher matches. The interesting part is that most of these matches aren’t coming from the Mays sections of the Slusher tree. My ancestor John Mays only had 3 children survive to adulthood and they only had a few children themselves. Some of these families were very prolific. One grandson of Joseph and Nancy had 20 children! Allegedly, of course, all this could be thrown in the cold, snowy night if my Do-Over takes a dramatic turn. Hopefully not though! HA!
Note: I am using my old file to keep up with DNA match correspondence, though I am upfront with everyone that I am re-entering everything from the beginning.
This new year, I’m hoping to be way more organized than last year. I didn’t do too bad in 2017, but I would really like to stay a little more focused when it comes to writing up my findings or even just sharing information with my family on social media. It feels like I’m sharing the same things all the time with no context.
One cool thing I’m trying to do this year is participating more in writing prompts. 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks sounds like a fun way to start. I’m sure I won’t be posting all 52 weeks, but as many as I can sounds perfect!
Week 01 Prompt: Start
The first week’s prompt has the vague meaning of Start. When I read this prompt, I immediately thought of my start in genealogy. I was doing an eighth-grade project. I don’t remember the specific project but my mother just happened to mention it to my Grandma Emogene. She was visiting us at the time. What I didn’t realize until that moment was that my Grandmother traveled with a copy of the family tree.
The blue binder is the tree and the white binder is corresponding pictures. I’ve talked about it previously in entries. Reminiscing about the Beginning in 2010, Me in 2011 and Fearless Females: Heirlooms in 2011. It’s possible I talked more about it. After blogging for almost 8 years now it’s hard to keep track.
I know that I’ve disproved much of that beginning paragraph, but the basis of the book, the actual family information is more accurate than I expected. It’s only after this recent Do-Over that I realized it. I hunted down the person titled “Me” in the right side picture. Though I’ve yet to research her.
It’s funny, I even remember a great moment with Grandma. I’ve thought about it a lot over the last year. When we were looking at this book, I saw the three sets of twins that Mollie Jane Webb had and I thought to myself that’s a lot of twins! Grandma looked right at me and said, “Well maybe you or your siblings will have twins someday.” It’s strange to say it but ever since that moment I knew twins were coming to us. I was probably the only person not shocked when my brother and sister-in-law announced they were having twins last year.
Not a bad start to my genealogy at all if you ask me. Thanks for giving me my passion for this Grandma!
