Genealogy Jottings

Archive for the ‘Reed’ Category

Earlier this month the government released the 1950 U. S. census. Genealogists everywhere can look for themselves or their parents and grandparents on this newly available source. The My Heritage website let me know early on that they had indexed my home state of Wyoming.

So, what did I find?

1. I searched first for my mother’s Bentsen family. My recollection of their whereabouts in the postwar years was hazy, and I wondered whether they resided in Wyoming or South Dakota in 1950. I learned they were living in Park County, Wyoming. My mom was a college student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie that year, but she was enumerated with her family. My grandfather owned an electrical shop where he and my grandmother both worked.
2. I suspected that other relatives also lived in Wyoming at that time. I found them, too. My dad’s cousin Alta Reed was living and working in Cheyenne. Dad’s older sister Hazel Reed Barnes and her family lived on a ranch near Glendo, Wyoming.

Since looking up these families, I have learned that I need not wait for additional indexes to be compiled. The government’s website ( https://1950census.archives.gov/) has an OCR search feature. I used that to look for my dad. I found a surprise.

He was enumerated with his mother and two of his brothers at the family home in Loveland, Colorado. The youngest brother Donald Reed was still in high school. Dad and his older brother Harold were working at the local sugar factory.

The sugar factory? I knew that Harold had always worked there, but I did not remember that my dad ever did. He had graduated from Loveland High School in 1945 and promptly joined the Navy. After being demobilized in 1946, he had bounced between college and work for the next eight years.

He was employed at various places during that time to earn enough money for school. He mentioned working at molybdenum mines in Colorado and Montana. He did railroad and telephone company work in Wyoming. When he was attending school for a semester, he would wash dishes in the dormitory dining hall.

But I did not recall that he had ever returned home to work at the sugar factory. Sugar beet farming was a big local industry when he grew up, and I knew he and his fellow high school students were pressed into harvest duty during the war years. But I did not expect to see him back living at home and working at the factory in 1950. Now I have another anecdote for his life story.

Some of my fellow genealogists have told me they do not plan to look at the 1950 census. They say that they already know where their families lived that year. I say, take a look at it anyway. You never know what you might find.

Revolutionary War ancestors provide the key to joining the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) lineage society. I have known since I was a young teenager that I was eligible for membership even though no family member in living memory had joined the organization.

In the 1960’s, my paternal grandmother brought me a family tree compiled by a cousin. It traced my lineage back to Robert Kirkham (1754-1819), a Patriot who served at Boonesborough with the frontiersman Daniel Boone.

Since then, I thought that if I joined the DAR, my membership would be based on that line. It did not work out that way.

In 2020, the 400^th anniversary of the Mayflower landing, I decided to join that organization to preserve my New England genealogical research. When my application as a descendant of Stephen Hopkins was approved, the Mayflower Society Historian contacted me about joining the DAR, too.

My Mayflower line includes a Patriot ancestor, Gershom Hall (1760-1844). The Historian kindly forwarded all the documentation to the DAR for me, and soon I was a member based on descent from Gershom Hall, not Robert Kirkham.

So what about Robert and all that lineage work? It turns out you can submit DAR supplemental applications based on other ancestors.

I decided to go ahead and turn in one for the Robert Kirkham line. At last month’s meeting, I asked my Chapter Registrar about it. She urged me to send everything I had on Robert’s line to her right away. She was eager to begin.

My first step was to look at the DAR database to see whether anyone else in Robert Kirkham’s line had ever joined the DAR. If there were other approved applications, I might not need to submit so much new documentation.

I found that several of Robert’s descendants had joined over the years.

Only one other person had claimed Robert’s daughter Ann Kirkham Reed on an application. That file dated from the 1940’s. The DAR makes clear that older applications may not have been as complete as those required today. I wondered whether I could use what the other person had submitted over 80 years ago.

I contacted my Registrar to ask for advice. She reviewed the 1940 application. The three generations from Robert Kirkham through his daughter Ann Reed and grandson Caleb Reed looked fine. Caleb Reed was my second great-grandfather.

Since my supplemental application would claim through my father’s family just as my original application had, I already had sufficient evidence on file for him and for myself. I would need to submit paperwork for only two generations—my grandfather Owen Herbert Reed (1896-1935) and my great-grandfather Samuel Harvey Reed (1845-1928).

This morning I submitted digital copies of everything the Registrar thinks I need to make my case. She says I can sign my supplemental application at our next Chapter meeting in two weeks.

And then I will wait, and then wait some more for approval. After getting terribly backlogged during the pandemic, the DAR processing time for supplemental applications is taking up to 15 months.

No wonder the Registrar wanted me to get started on this right away.

Families come in all shapes and sizes. Often they have individual members who contribute to society in ways that benefit everyone. Mine, not so much. One could describe many of our relatives as black sheep ancestors, or those who behaved in disreputable or disgraceful ways.

When I found a new branch of my dad’s family this year, I should not have been surprised to find that it, too, is peopled with black sheep. Every one of my dad’s grandparents had skeletons in the closet:

1. Reed. My great-grandfather left his family and squandered his inheritance on fruitless land speculation. A Reed cousin defected to East Germany during the Cold War.
2. Riddle. A distant great-uncle sued his brother over the family farm, leaving his sibling destitute and without means to make a living. Another brother served time for larceny and then became a reclusive sheepherder in Montana.
3. Ryan. Over three generations, these men abandoned their children, either leaving them to be raised by relatives or placing them in orphanages. Some cousins were Nebraska bootleggers during Prohibition.
4. Sherman. These blacksmiths believed in homemade money. Several were arrested for counterfeiting. One was shot and killed in his bed by a disgruntled associate.

As I uncover more of this doubtful legacy, I begin to wonder about the advice our great-grandfather Reed left with his offspring. He told them, “You inherited a good name, now keep it that way.”

Oh, the irony.

Although I have lived most of my adult life in Colorado, I am not a native. One of my granddaughters is the only person in my immediate family who was born in the state.

Yet I have several ancestral ties to Colorado:

1. My father grew up in Loveland. His mother relocated the family from Wyoming after my grandfather, Owen Herbert Reed (1896-1935), died in a truck accident near Brighton, CO. Grandma and Uncle Harold remained in Colorado. Aunt Hazel settled in the Boulder area after stints in Nebraska and Wyoming. Uncle Bob and my dad returned to Colorado to live out their final years.
2. Dad’s second cousin, Cyril Dale Reed (1903-1982), raised his family in Denver and Wheat Ridge. His son Dean (1938-1986), who became a socialist singer known as the Red Elvis, is buried in Boulder’s Green Mountain Cemetery.
3. Dad’s uncle, Thomas Aaron Reed (1894-1966), retired in Cañon City. One of his sons had settled near there after being stationed at Fort Carson during WWII.
4. Dad’s uncle, Robert Morton Reed (1891-1967), took his first assignment as a railroad telegrapher in Denver. He was living there when he registered for the WWI draft in 1917. After his railroad career, he retired in Delta.
5. Dad’s maternal grandmother had a cousin who left his family home in Ohio to settle in Colorado Springs. Samuel E. Sessions (ca. 1849-1907) married there in 1875 when Colorado was still a territory. His children were born in “the Springs” after Colorado became a state in 1876.

I do have some bona fide Colorado roots even though I was not born in the Centennial State. My grandmother arrived here in 1936, and other family members came here, too. Even though I cannot display a Colorado Native bumper sticker, my family has been here a long time.

All year I worked to document my Mayflower lineage. I applied to the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.

As the year wound down, it became time to follow my usual custom and share my findings with my family members.

I wrote a little about what I had learned of the lives of our Mayflower ancestors Stephen, Constance, and Gyles/Giles Hopkins. Then I constructed a descendant report to give to everyone for Christmas.

I listed my paternal grandmother Grace Riddle Reed’s (1896-1976) direct line from the Hopkins passengers. She was the tenth generation of descent.

I doubt that my grandmother even knew she was a Mayflower descendant. Her cousins’ families seemed to be just as ignorant of their heritage. They never mentioned it during the years I collaborated on the Riddle family genealogy with them.

All of us were stymied in our hunt for the parentage of Grandma’s second great-grandmother, Lucy Snow. It was not until a little over a year ago when I saw Lucy’s Mayflower heritage posted on WikiTree that the door to her heritage blew open for me.

With Grandma’s lineage found and charted at last, my Christmas report continues with a list of all my grandmother’s descendants, at least the ones I know about. It ends with the 15^th generation from the Mayflower passengers.

It was time to update this list of Grandma’s descendants. The previous list, The Reeds of Ashmore by Michael Hayden, was published over thirty years ago. People not even born when that book was compiled are now grown and have children of their own.

Now we know that those Reed family members who also descend from my grandmother are Mayflower descendants. I wish we had possessed that information 35 years ago when we were all contributing information for The Reeds of Ashmore.

I hope the documentation I am creating this year will preserve this identity for future generations.

Lineage societies require exacting proof of generational links to a specific ancestor before they grant membership to an applicant. This week I began the process for the Mayflower Society. Right away I found that despite years of research, I do not have the exact documents they want.

This week I gathered papers for the most current three generations in my chain of descent, beginning with myself and my husband/tech advisor. Already I was missing several of the items they require:

1. We have our marriage certificate but not the vital record from the state where we were married. I ordered a copy.
2. I also have my parents’ marriage certificate, but again I do not have a copy of the vital record. I ordered one of those, too.
3. The document I thought was my mother’s birth certificate is something else. It was issued by the Bureau of the Census and simply verifies that her birth was registered in Montana. I sent a request to Montana for her birth registration.
4. For people living in 1900, the Society wants a copy of their U.S. census record for that year. I have it for my grandmother, Grace Riddle, but not for my grandfather Herbert Reed. I have never been able to locate him and his family on the 1900 census. They must have lived in Missouri where he was born in 1896 and his parents were divorced in 1904. Will the Society waive this requirement when I am not applying though my grandfather’s line? Or would either the divorce decree naming my grandfather as a minor child or the 1910 census be an adequate substitute?
5. I do not have a birth record for my grandmother. She was born on a homestead in Nebraska before the state kept vital records. I do not know whether she was baptized. She never had a driver’s license or a passport. Will a combination of census records, her Social Security application, and her death certificate be sufficient to prove her birth date and place?

Encountering these stumbling blocks for 20^th century ancestors makes me shudder to think what I will encounter in documenting earlier generations. I have four more to go before I link up to Thomas Snow and Hannah Lincoln, both proven descendants of Stephen Hopkins. Some of my documentation is pretty thin.

I wonder how many families can run a straightforward line of proofs from themselves back 7 or so generations to a proven Mayflower descendant. I must work with the historian of the Colorado branch of the Mayflower Society to gather enough evidence to complete my application.

Once I execute a preliminary application, I will have two years to submit the final one. It will be interesting to see what they say about all the evidence I have gathered. Will I be able to meet the additional demands I know they will make? This could be a long process.

I have much-needed work to do on my direct paternal line, the Reeds. I keep putting it off as I spend time on other lineage lines where I have even less information than I have for the Reeds. Still, I would love to know where the Reeds originated before they came to America in colonial times.

This week a very distant Reed relative’s message appeared in my inbox. She wants to do more research on our mutual, deeper ancestry. I am thrilled.

Caleb Reed (1756-abt. 1835) was our most recent common ancestor. This cousin wants to carry the study back in time from him.

Caleb came from Morris County, New Jersey and settled in what is now Fayette County, Pennsylvania around the time of the Revolutionary War. His brother Joshua served in the war, and I have his RW pension file.

Sometime after the war, Caleb relocated his family to Shelby County, Kentucky. His grown children later decided to move on from there to different places.

His son Thomas Reed, my ancestor, went to Coles County, Illinois. A daughter, Abigail Shaw, moved to Texas with her family. Caleb himself went with his widowed daughter Rachel Elliott and her sons to Washington County, Indiana. The elderly Caleb lived there with Rachel until his death.

Genealogists find Caleb’s natal family in New Jersey to be a tangled-up mess, partly because there was more than one Reed family in Morris County. My Reed cousin wants to tackle the puzzle, and I wish her luck. I will help in any way I can.

She will begin by studying the Reed DNA. In our branch of the family, both my father and his first cousin carried the Reed surname and took Y-DNA tests before they died. Thankfully, they matched each other. We have this valuable information to work with.

The Reed surname project at FamilyTree DNA will help connect these two Reeds with others of the same line. My distant cousin is contacting as many matches as she can find.

I will keep in touch with her to see what information she can locate. I hope she is good at colonial research. The Reeds seem to love genealogy, and I am glad one is taking the lead to uncover more of our roots.

My paternal grandmother Grace Reed (1896-1976) claimed to know nothing of her own family. She did once give me her mother’s name, Laura Riddle (1853-1933). Beyond that, whenever I asked about her heritage, she would simply shake her head and claim ignorance. She had no siblings around who I could ask for more information.

After she died, I began to research her family in earnest. I learned that her maternal grandmother, Olive Hall (Dunbar) Riddle, was born in Barnstable County, Massachusetts in 1823. I was excited to learn that I have New England ancestors.

Two things came to mind. First, I now had the possibility of a Mayflower ancestor. Second, New Englanders are among the most-researched people on earth. Scholars have compiled lists of names of Mayflower descendants.

At the Denver Public Library, I located resources that included these names.

I found out that Grandma’s Dunbar ancestors descended from Robert Dunbar of Hingham, Massachusetts. He arrived in the colonies in 1653, too late for the Mayflower which arrived in 1620. He may have been a deported prisoner, captured during one of the Scottish uprisings.

The women who married into the Dunbar line had surnames like Cole, Garnet, and Hathaway. None of these names appeared on the Mayflower list.

What about the Hall line? Bangs, Bramhall, Burgess, and Snow women married into the Hall family. Again, the Mayflower list included none of these names.

Some of these ancestors are known to have arrived in the new world later, aboard the Anne in 1623. Edward Bangs and Nicholas Snow were among those passengers.

I went no further with my research. I did not look for surnames of the mothers of the women who had married into the Dunbar and Hall families. I put aside my New England project because I lived far away from there, and I had more recent Midwestern families to investigate. Years have gone by.

This week I was poking around in the WikiTree website where my mother’s Finnish cousins have posted so much of that family tree. I wondered whether I should begin adding my father’s line into this database.

I knew that if I went back far enough, someone else may have already done some of it. I began working backwards to see if I could get a match to a known ancestor. Some of my brick wall guys (Caleb Reed of Morris County, NJ and John Davis Riddle of Mendon, MI) were in there. No one has any more information on them than I do.

Then I found Grandma’s Massachusetts grandmother, Olive Hall Dunbar. Most of her family tree is on WikiTree.

Her maternal grandmother, our ancestor, was Lucy Snow (1760-1795), a name familiar to me. She was the first wife of Gershom Hall (1760-1844), one of my Revolutionary War ancestors. I had never done any research on Lucy’s family beyond learning that the Snows did not arrive on the Mayflower.

Yet there on WikiTree, beneath Lucy’s name, was this note:
Her Snow family lineage goes back to immigrant Nicholas Snow, and his wife, Constance (Hopkins) Snow, a passenger on the Mayflower in 1620.

Remember Nicholas? He was on the Anne, not the Mayflower. But his wife, Constance Hopkins, who was also my ancestor, made the Mayflower crossing.

Can it be true? Have I finally learned of a Mayflower ancestor?

Constance Hopkins and her father Stephen Hopkins were indeed passengers on the Mayflower. If the WikiTree contributor is correct that I am descended from Constance Hopkins, I do have a Mayflower family in my lineage. I have not verified Lucy Snow’s ancestry myself, but I do have good documentation for my descendancy from her.

When I did a cursory search to find more about the Hopkins family, I found even more astonishing information. They have a documented English lineage extending to the 1200’s in the county of Hampshire. What a heritage to stumble upon.

One of these days I will need to look at all this more closely. I should post it all into my database and connect us up in WikiTree. At long last, I hope I finally to have identified a Mayflower ancestor.

Beginning when I was a teenager, I have amassed a tremendous number of genealogy-related books and papers. My home office contains several file cabinets and bookcases filled with materials I use to pursue my research.

A lot of it I inherited a few years ago when my father’s 93-year-old cousin passed away. She, too, was an avid researcher. Her family did not want her library or her work, so I offered to give it a home.

After some time has passed, I have integrated much of our two collections. I am always amazed at what she discovered about our family in the years before the internet. She never used a computer, and all her work lies in paper folders and notebooks. I love digging into them to see what she already had collected when I begin investigating an ancestor.

One of her large boxes, however, remained untouched. Filled with miscellaneous papers, the contents do not fit easily into either of our filing systems. I have kept meaning to empty it one day, but the task seemed daunting. I continued to put it off.

Finally, I have become tired of looking at this box and receiving its silent rebuke. I can no longer procrastinate on the task of cleaning out this box.

I have decided that each evening I am home, I will take one item from the box. Each paper will go into a new or existing file, into the to-do tray, or into the trash. I began this week.

One of the first papers I removed turned out to be a little gem. It was a long-ago letter from a cousin. She was writing about our mutual great-grandfather, Samuel H. Reed (1845-1928), and his activities after his 1904 divorce.

She said he had acquired land in Sayre, Oklahoma that he thought had potential for oil. Fearing that a woman with whom he was involved would make a claim on it, he conveyed the property to some of his grandchildren. Unfortunately, my dad would not be born for another decade, so he missed out.

Following the clue in the letter, I learned that Sayre is in Beckham County, Oklahoma. Family Search has their deed index online. Sure enough, I found my great-grandfather’s name on the index, both when he received the property and when he passed it on to some of my father’s cousins. The public records verify the story told by a relative, and I can request copies of these deeds from the county.

Who knows what else the box contains? At the rate of a few papers a week, it will take me a long time to find out. I hope will find some more treasure in my cousin’s box. Now I have some motivation to clean it out.

One hundred forty years ago, the one-armed explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell drew a long line in the dirt. This survey line, along the 100^th meridian, runs north-south through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. It marked the then-separation point between the arid west and the more humid east.

Powell, who lost his arm during the Civil War battle of Shiloh, explored much of the American West. He observed the climate and was wary of allowing settlement in the dry area west of the demarcation line he had identified. The United States government ignored his recommendations. They encouraged the settlement of the West, and today I, and many others, live on the Great Plains.

Here, nothing much will grow without supplemental water because we receive little rain and snow. Our fields must be irrigated with large sprinkler systems. Our lawns, too, have automated watering. We constantly worry about and squabble over water supplies.

A constant influx of people every year means that the same amount of water must be shared by more and more people. They come here to enjoy our abundant sunshine and to escape what one local politician describes as the lawless cities on the west coast.

My water portion inevitably must be reduced. Just yesterday a few of my neighbors and I walked about my neighborhood with a landscaper who specializes in low-water-use designs. We must do something to rid ourselves of acres of thirsty Kentucky blue grass before our local water department cuts off our supply of water for outdoor use.

Yet even with this bleak outlook, I will stay on because I have deep roots here. My people first came to this land in the 1880’s shortly after Powell published his findings. Both my dad’s grandmothers took advantage of the Homestead Act to attempt farming in the west. When faced with scant water supplies and harsh weather, neither had much success:

1. Laura Riddle (1853-1933) arrived in McCook, Nebraska in 1885 with three sons in tow. They took a 160-acre homestead near her sister’s family in Red Willow County. Later, Laura moved west to another homestead in Hayes County. When 320-acre tracts became available early in the 20^th century, she moved west yet again to Dundy County. Life for her was hard, very hard, and she even had to hand over her only daughter to a sister to raise.
2. Anna Petronellia Sherman Reed (1865-1961) homesteaded alone in Wyoming after World War I. She settled northwest of Cheyenne where she detested the wind and treeless landscape. Life for her, too, was difficult on the homestead. One year, her only crop was a bucket of potatoes. She sold her place as soon as she was able to prove it up and moved back to Missouri.

These women came west because they could not make a living elsewhere. Their families stayed on and remain here today. Despite our challenges with water, we hope our leaders can find solutions to the water supply problem. It helps if we each do our part to conserve.

Powell was right that the Great American Desert presents an inhospitable land. Not many have had success with farming here. Ranching and mining presented greater opportunities. Today, climatologists are observing that the dividing line Powell identified may be shifting eastward from the 100^th meridian due to climate change. Additional settled areas will face the need to adapt to a dry climate as we have. Powell’s observations about the West were correct.