Tag: Mays

Surname Saturday: Oy Vey

Posted on by Kathleen

Today, is Surname Saturday over at GeneaBloggers. I wasn’t even going to post again until Monday or Tuesday. Then I watched the newest episode of Who Do You Think You Are? That show is so great to give me motivation to get off my duff and get back to work on my family file. I really do want to clean it up and get it in order. The right way this time. So here I am, spending my Saturday going through census records on Ancestry.com and citing my sources correctly on my website and in my programs. Yes I said programs. I’m a long time Family Tree Maker user but I’m checking out RootsMagic Essentials.

Five out of seven families on this page alone are in my family file. This is what happens when I research my mother’s family. The Whitt, Mays, Adkins, Click, Rowe families of Kentucky all belong to me in some way. They all inter-married at different sections of the tree too. So if I am adding new information in from a record and spy a maiden name of Adkins or Whitt, I know it’s only a matter of time before the tree winds around again. It’s quite interesting and I can’t help but wish I knew the stories behind all these marriages!

Mays

The Mays family that I currently have documented originate from Virginia. There is some talk about a connection to Mays’ that ended up in Texas or other points west, but I haven’t been able to find any proof of that yet. It’s hard enough finding information for what I currently have! The first know Mays relative I have is William Mays, he was born around 1777 in Pittsylvania County, VA. As the family grew, they also moved around. I have Mays family members being born in Floyd County, VA. The family that I have found eventually made their way to Kentucky. I have them living all over, Mason County, Elliott County, Bracken County, Pendleton County, Morgan County. Just about everywhere.

Adkins

The Adkins family first entered my tree when Frances Adkins married my first Mays member, William Mays. I have noted her father’s name as maybe being Moses Adkins, but I have no solid evidence of that yet. Hopefully as I work up my chain, I will finally be able to find a birth or death record for Frances. That isn’t the only place the Adkins turn up in my tree. In fact I have 39 people in my file with the surname of Adkins. All of them are spouses or children of people in my main line. That is without me even trying to research the Adkins family yet. Most of my Adkins people are from Virginia and Kentucky. Where the Mays family is, the Adkins family follows… or vice versa.

Whitt/Rowe/Click

The other families I mentioned are really along the same lines of the Adkins family. They turn up often as spouses of my main families, or each other. I have 12 Rowes, 27 Whitts, and 15 Clicks in my family file. All originating from the same places as the other families.

In Conclusion

Sometimes I think maybe these families came over to America together and just stayed together. I don’t know if that’s the truth as I haven’t found the exact origins of these families yet. It’s comforting that I have a big pool of these families brought together, but it can be so exhausting trying to determine where everyone fits in together. It’s mainly why I let my mother handle this side of the family for so long. So that’s why I say Oy Vey!

Surname Saturday is a Daily Blogging Topic that I got from GeneaBloggers. To participate in Surname Saturday, simply create a post in which you discuss a surname and mention its origins, its geographical location(s) and how it fits into your genealogy research.

Backing away from the ledge…

Posted on by Kathleen

I am having an issue. As I jump into Genealogy blogging with both feet, I also need to remember my responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is to correctly show and identify where my information comes from. So far, I haven’t posted anything that I would consider super factual or important. I take a very tongue in cheek, fluffy pajamas method of life. Trust me when I say that I do actually cite all my sources, and anything in my tree that isn’t cited, is not actual information to me. I do joke about things I haven’t “proven” yet, but I don’t actual dwell on those things.

I was reading some blogs today and it struck me that I might not actually come across as a serious person. I do take my family history very seriously, fluffy pajamas aside of course. My problem is that when I began to really delve into my research, I was 18 years old. So even though I have my sources cited, they aren’t cited correctly. So that’s what I’m doing now. I’m going through one person at a time, and I’m fixing my family tree. I do have the whole tree up on moore-mays.org and I’m fixing it as I go. If I were putting my tree up for the first time, I’d only put verified information in. The problem is when I was 18, I published it out there in the Ancestry.com world. It was a horrible thing to do but it is what it is. The reason I haven’t taken it down is that many people have emailed me over the years about that tree. Even if I were to delete it, it’s still in Ancestry.com’s database. I can’t get it deleted for the life of me. It was almost 8 years ago that I uploaded it there and they’ve changed formats so much that it’s a complicated process to remove it. This is the main reason I’m so hesitant to put another tree on Ancestry.com. I don’t like that people can just merge the trees and then that’s it. Your information is on someone else’s tree and they take it as 100% proven fact.

I’m hoping that when people cite my website address, it turns that accountability back to me. So this is the place people will always have to come to verify that information. I’m sure that won’t always happen. It makes me feel better to know that in case someone gets the information through another person, they can come to me and I can speak with them personally.

This is an example of something I cite as a source. My mother found this online and printed it out for me. However I have no idea where these people got their information. In fact, I don’t even list these in my family file because I don’t know if they are family.

Need I say anything? Sometimes it’s not good keeping these things around, but I do because of my previous bad experience. So now I have it in case a question ever comes up. It shouldn’t but just in case.

This however I will cite. I have an old cemetery deed for the Moore family plot in Brooklyn. We called the cemetery and verified who was buried there. So I will cite it, and then when I go to Brooklyn I will add the proper official citation. They could only verify who was there and not anything else, so I definitely need to get to Brooklyn!

This is murky ground. This along with my Webb-Taylor tree ARE cited in my tree. They are cited as Undocumented Family Records. These are the original “trees” my grandmother gave me. You can even see where she wrote in that Bartholomew Taylor was her great grandfather. These are the trees I’m currently going through and verifying with census and vital records. My problem is that now that I know more about citing sources, I see how badly I did it in the past. It makes me want to just delete all those horrible citations and start again! That’s why I need to back away from the ledge. Even if they are badly cited sources, they are still my only link to my sources. This is where my patience comes in. I don’t usually have patience, but for genealogy I have an unlimited supply. Who knew!

Kids by the Dozen: Nathan Mays edition

Posted on by Kathleen

I have re-written this entry many times. I just can’t seem to grasp the scope of Nathan Mays and his big family without over complicating my narration. Usually when I decide to sit down and do genealogy research, I pick a random family and then I aggressively research that family through the census and any other documents that may be found online. Luckily for me there are a lot of Kentucky vital records on Ancestry.com and then Family Search has Ohio Death Records at my disposable.

The problem that usually pops up is I become limited by not being on site. Soon I hope to be able to start to take genealogy trips over the summer but that doesn’t help me today. When I inherited the information I have on the Mays family from my mother, Nathan Mays was listed with 19 children. Then when I started searching for death records, I discovered 2 more bring the total to 21. Oy!

The problem I eventually ran into was trying to line up all the different census years and compare the children listed. So I went to old school methods. I printed out blank census forms and I transcribed the family for each census.

Before my journey into this family this weekend, I had only found Nathan’s family in 1860 and 1870. However, I was able to find them all the way to 1900 on Saturday! I was excited to see Nathan’s wife in 1900 because it showed me something that immediately helped me.

Rachel is listed of being the mother to 15 children, with 9 still living. Obviously there has been some misunderstandings in the record taking process. Not by the census, they didn’t add relationships until the 1880 census. By whoever had taken an accounting of the children. One thing that I should have taking into consideration was the age of Nathan and Rachel’s older children. Now that I’ve realized it, I can’t believe i missed it. As long as I’ve been doing this, I should have realized that even though Nathan and Rachel were still producing children, that didn’t mean that their children were not. That’s not even taking into account when family members take in children of their family.

This is the 1880 census. As you can see, some of the children are actually Grandchildren. Now I just have to figure out who they belong to. However, this is going to take me longer than a weekend. I know that because it’s Monday and I still haven’t managed to track all those kids down. I’ll get there, but it hasn’t happened yet.

So here’s what Nathan’s family looks like in Family Tree Maker for me right now. I’m hesitant to move Molly and William anywhere until I know where to put them. I was already able to verify that one of the children (Mary I) was actually the daughter of Nathan’s daughter Mary J Mays-McClanahan. Mary J died of a ‘cold’ just 2 weeks after her 4 month old daughter died of an inflammation of the stomach. An incredibly sad story.

Edit: 5 hours after I posted this blog I was able to combine Celia Ellen and Emaline together after scouring the Kentucky records on Ancestry.com. This family is constantly changing. 😉

Mrs. Rowe’s Cookbook

Posted on by Kathleen

Since the last post was about Dad’s side of the family, this one will be about Moms. A few years back, my Mom was getting cookbooks from one of those mail order book clubs. This one was exclusively for cookbooks. This gem came in the mail at some point. I didn’t think anything of it at first. Then a light bulb went off in my head. Hey, the family name of Rowe!

To know the significance of the name Rowe, you have to be familiar with my family tree. Which you probably aren’t. That’s okay, I’ve done my research and I know my stuff! My mother’s family line is made up 90% of the surname Mays. They liked to have children and they didn’t stop at two or three. One thing I realized when I started trying to research the Mays’ was that they are very difficult to research. The surname can be construed as many different things, and it depends on who was spelling it. They were also spread out over a ton of country. They started in Virginia from what I can find, and they spread eventually to Kentucky. When I say Virginia and Kentucky I mean the whole state. So if your name is Mays and you live in Virginia or Kentucky… Hi, I just might be your cousin!

Back to the point. One of the things I realized was that the Mays family had lots of children, but those children married into the same families. So my Mays ancestors married many people from the Rowe, Whitt, Click, and Slusher. That’s just what I’ve proven. Who knows what else! Not to mention those I’m aware of but haven’t found proof of yet.

So when I sat down one day looking through cookbooks, I finally took a good look at what this one contained.

Do you notice that little nugget? The sister of Mildred Craft-Rowe? Bertha Mays. I have to be up front with you. I do not believe in coincidences. Everything happens for a reason and if something eerie happens, then that means listen up it’s important. So my little mind has been agonizing over this ever since. Not only does the cookbook show that the sisters married into both the Rowe and Mays families, it tells me that they are from an area of Virginia that my Mays line was very prevalent.

Even if I didn’t have a maybe family connection to this cookbook, I would still love this cookbook. It not only has lots of stories and photos from the family, it has great down home recipes. I’m going to try some of them very soon!

Visit Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant Website

Get your own cookbook at Amazon.com!

I’ll let you guys know if I ever connect the dots on this mystery. 😉