It’s again 80 F degrees today. I’m sitting here with the doors open and the humidity makes me want to take a shower. Meanwhile, Michelle tells me it’s 27 in Bartlesville, they have ice and now a thunderstorm.
Alex has been working on his and Victoria’s family trees and has been able to trace Victoria back to the 1200s. This got me curious about mine, usually I’m so horrible about it so when somebody in my family says I’m related to X person, I have no clue how or I forget. I signed up for an ancestry.com account and started playing around. I figured it would be a ton of work involving a lot of courthouse inqurires, but I was surprised at how easy it was to get started. Their website links to several other databases including repositories of scanned census records, draft cards, and immigration records.
It’s turned out to be an interesting information gathering exercise. 140 year old cursive writing takes a big of eyeballing to read. I’m amused how old census forms actually have a checkbox that says “[ ] deaf and dumb”. My sister has already done a lot of work and seemed to be excited to help me out. We also found the work other relatives did, so I merged those in as well. Friday night I was up until 5 AM reading through records to verify links and googling various names to find more data, then I wound up putting in several more hours on Saturday.
On dad’s side I’ve been able to go back to the 1700s on both maternal and paternal grandfather side. Mom’s side has been harder. From what I’ve been told, her maternal grandmother was an orphan, and the paternal grandparent side dives into Choctaw tribal records. Fortunately we found out one of my uncles has already pieced together the tribal records for a few generations as a requirement to get our Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB).
Many people make assorted intriguing arguments the surname “Wann” could be English, German, Scottish, and even Swedish. On the Wann side, I am fairly confident in the pedigree back eight generations ago to William Wann, Sr, 1755-1820. William seems to be a dead end, as I’ve found many Wanns on message boards looking for information on him and not getting much. Everyone seems to agree he came from somewhere in Germany and died in Tenneesee. In 1777, he married a woman named Ann McGowan, a 2nd generation Scotish-American (her parents came from Scotland to Tennesee). They had many children, one of which married a 2nd generation Irish-American. So, I’m of German, Scot, Irish, and Indian descent.
Ancestry.com has a feature in beta that’ll find famous relatives. Most interesting is that Queen Elizabeth II (yes, of the House of Windsor) is my “9th cousin, 3 times removed” through my 11th great grandmother and her 8th great grandmother. I haven’t verified all the links yet, but it looks like it may hold water. Other interesting (alleged) relatives:
- Samuel Morse, 5th cousin 8 times removed, inventor of Morse Code
- Frank Lloyd Wright, 7th cousin 5 times removed, architect
- Emily Dickenson, 6th cousin 7 times removed, poet
- Helen Keller, 7th cousin 6 times removed, blind/deaf author
- Robert Boyle, 3rd cousin 14 times removed, chemist
- Fran Whittle, 10th cousin 1 time removed, inventor of jet engine
- Jane Austin, 6th cousin 10 times removed, author
- Millard Fillmore, 4th cousin 7 times removed, 13th US President
- Woodrow Wilson, 8th cousin 6 times removed, 28th US President
- Ronald Reagan, 4th cousin 5 times removed, 40th US President
- George Orwell, 9th cousin 6 tmes removed, author
ancestry.com offers this footnote: “Keep in mind–The possible relationship information we show is only as accurate as the member-contributed family tree information found in OneWorldTree. We are unable to verify whether these results are in fact accurate. Of course, that’s part of the fun of family history–digging into the research.” Teases.
