I was listening to a lecture not too long ago from one of the gals over at Ancestry.com. She was talking about getting stuck and some of the ways to get around your lack of information. One of her techniques is to run family group sheets. She made me start thinking about that in relation to my own family, and even if it doesn't provide me with one single clue for my own stuff, it makes me see my family in a totally different light. Many of us are so focused, that if you look at our family trees you would think that we were all only children, that we were the only child of two people who were only children. It's a wonder if any of us survived at all.
Now I know that all families are special and unique, but we did something really well in my family. Apparently we had lots of sex and that resulted in lots of babies -- heavy on the boy children. Oh, sure, big farm families was kind of the norm, but we not only had lots of children, but we managed to raise them up. The married and then they had lots of children. And up until the John Stout Drake group, we all seemed to be pretty healthy. I haven't found anybody that lived to be over 100, but we had plenty of 80 year olds that were still farming.
Anyway, I've been trying to work my family group sheets, partly because I'm kind of stuck right now, but also I'm hoping to unearth some little tidbit of information along the way. I have also recently spent a week with my children in Alabama and just looking at them and their off spring, I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that we are one of the whitest families in the United States. I find it difficult to believe that we continue to marry folks of English, French, German, Irish and Dutch extraction. I wonder if that might have been what weakened the family. We don't even have any Italians in the family. So I went on a search to find someone in the family that wasn't English, French, German, Irish, Scots, Dutch and so on.
My John Stout Drake was the son of Amos Stout Drake and Catherine Whaley. And John Stout Drake was not an only child. One of his brother was William who married Miss Lucy Alfred. Now, William and Lucy had several children, but the one I've been chasing after is a boy named Jehile Drake. Or Jihle Drake. Or Gehile Drake. And in the 1870 United States Census he was listed as James. James married a gal named Sophia Eagle. Could there be Indian blood there? I haven't really pursued that yet, because I've been busy just gathering the basic information. So here is what I have found so far, although I'm not 100% sure of the info.
I started with the family tree chart that I painstakingly copied down in the summer of 1979. The writing is so tiny, I need a magnifying glass to read it. I've kept this chart and look back on it periodically because I always seem to find new information or it refreshes my memory.
Jehiel A Drake was born 22 Sep 1856. He married Sophia Eagle. They had a daughter, Lucy L Drake. According to her marriage license information, she was born in 1883, in Amboy, Hillsdale, Michigan. On 28 Feb 1903 she married a boy named Carlton A Moore. Carlton was born in Ohio, in 1880. Lucy and Carlton went on to have six children of their own: Helen who married George Annis, Cecil who married Jane Lowry, Hazel, Ronald, Marion and Marietta. I know, I know. I have to see if I can flesh out those kids who are just names. Hard to believe that this family would have 4 kids who never married, right? I mean a house full of grown up unmarried children was kind of common in the 1930s, coming off the depression and all, but not so much at the turn of the century.
Now Jehiel A Drake and his wife, Sophia Eagle had a son named William. Pretty sure he's named after Jehiel Drake's dad, William Drake. We'll go there tomorrow.
Oh, and one more thing before I forget, on the marriage license information, Jehiel A Drake and Sophia Eagle Drake, were married on 21 Jan 1882, in Amboy, Hillsdale, Michigan. They were married by Jehiel Drake's uncle, John Stout Drake who was a justice of the peace. Witnesses to the union were George and Jennie C Priestly. Jennie C Priestly was John Stout Drake's daughter (and Jehiel Drake's first cousin). It's nice to think they were keeping it in the family.
No comments:
Post a Comment