Dee Burris Blakley (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dee_burris) wrote2012-11-21 08:27 am
dee_burris) wrote2012-11-21 08:27 am
Entry tags:
Random musings...
I started this blog to share - photos, memories, documents, places and people - with other people.
Freely sharing was important to me because of the sharing of information I experienced in the early years of this journey when I asked for information.
On surname message boards. Hard to believe, but I still find posts of my own from 1999 on some of those boards.
Distant cousins found the blog in Google searches. I correspond with several of them still. All the other bloggers were right.
If you build it, they will come.
In the last few months, I've started getting emails that go something like this:
I am making sure that this e-mail doesn't bounce. I am researching a possible family connection in Arkansas. (That's the actual text of a message I found in my inbox this morning.)
I always reply to those, to let them know the email address is still good. Sometimes, there is a distant family connection.
Sometimes, people have seen how Arkansas-intensive my tracks are on the internet, and they just need help with their own trees.
What can I say? I'm a Scorpio, and always intrigued by a mystery.
Even when it doesn't have one of my own surnames on it.
You know how people say that they hope they don't find out they unwittingly married their own cousin?
I've always figured that somewhere downline - closer to my generation - I'd find out someone was a cousin of their spouse.
I decided last week to start looking at my nephews' and niece's families on the *other* sides of their families.
I started with my niece. Her father's surname is Rankin.
Started with her dad and went backward.
After about 3 hours, I sat here grinning like a fool.
Her dad is my 4th cousin, twice removed. The connection starts in 1877, when John James Rankin married Margaret Ann Lemley in Pope County.
Margaret Ann was the daughter of Ephraim Lemley, Jr. and Cynthia Elvira Burris.
So my niece is also my 4th cousin, three times removed.
Of course, I didn't stop with the pedigree.
I'm looking for bits and pieces of information that give the third dimension to the names, dates and places.
Turns out the Rankins (and their allied families) were quite the movers and shakers in Perry County, AR.
And some of its earliest settlers.
The Rankin family will have blog posts of its own.
Freely sharing was important to me because of the sharing of information I experienced in the early years of this journey when I asked for information.
On surname message boards. Hard to believe, but I still find posts of my own from 1999 on some of those boards.
Distant cousins found the blog in Google searches. I correspond with several of them still. All the other bloggers were right.
If you build it, they will come.
In the last few months, I've started getting emails that go something like this:
I am making sure that this e-mail doesn't bounce. I am researching a possible family connection in Arkansas. (That's the actual text of a message I found in my inbox this morning.)
I always reply to those, to let them know the email address is still good. Sometimes, there is a distant family connection.
Sometimes, people have seen how Arkansas-intensive my tracks are on the internet, and they just need help with their own trees.
What can I say? I'm a Scorpio, and always intrigued by a mystery.
Even when it doesn't have one of my own surnames on it.
You know how people say that they hope they don't find out they unwittingly married their own cousin?
I've always figured that somewhere downline - closer to my generation - I'd find out someone was a cousin of their spouse.
I decided last week to start looking at my nephews' and niece's families on the *other* sides of their families.
I started with my niece. Her father's surname is Rankin.
Started with her dad and went backward.
After about 3 hours, I sat here grinning like a fool.
Her dad is my 4th cousin, twice removed. The connection starts in 1877, when John James Rankin married Margaret Ann Lemley in Pope County.
Margaret Ann was the daughter of Ephraim Lemley, Jr. and Cynthia Elvira Burris.
So my niece is also my 4th cousin, three times removed.
Of course, I didn't stop with the pedigree.
I'm looking for bits and pieces of information that give the third dimension to the names, dates and places.
Turns out the Rankins (and their allied families) were quite the movers and shakers in Perry County, AR.
And some of its earliest settlers.
The Rankin family will have blog posts of its own.
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This appeared in the local paper on August 22, 1905:
KEPT SECRET OF MARRIAGE FOR YEARS
It leaked out yesterday that Genevieve A. Peladeau of Emeryville and John J. Brennan, a well known business man of Berkeley, have been husband and wife for nearly three years. They were married November 9, 1902, and ever since that time have kept their secret safe from relatives and friends.
The fact that the young people are first cousins was the objection urged against their proposed marriage three years ago,when they told their relatives that they were engaged. They did not listen to these objections, however, but sent for a special dispensation from the Pope, which is necessary in the Catholic Church, before cousins can marry. This obtained, they were married in St. Patrick's Church, San Francisco, by the Rev. Father Heslin. The bride then returned to her home, where she has since remained.
Their eldest was born 7 Jan 1906.
John was 30 and Genevieve 33 when they married; their mothers were Teresa and Mary McAvoy, children of Bernard McAvoy and Isabella Gallagher. John's father was James Brennan, my gg grand-uncle and an early settler in Berkeley. Genevieve's father was Guillaume Peladeau, who owned the Beaudry-Peladeau tract in Berkeley, Emeryville, and Oakland, Calif. Both fathers came from Canada (but different areas).
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