My Tangly Tree....Family Tree That Is

The more I dig into my ancestry the more my family tree branches start getting gnarly and twisted up into themselves.
Meaning, at some point in the past all the little branches start tangling up with the larger limbs they forked off of.
Like what I just discovered this past week when I broke through one of my brick walls.

One of my maternal grandmother's father, or my great grandfather was named John Little Vassar.
Now I have the Vassar branch of the family going back to the 1st Immigrant of that line to Virginia in 1635, 12 generations counting John the Immigrant to me.

Plus I have an additional 20 generations going back from John's wife, Elizabeth Dowe/Dew to William the Conqueror.
But who cares about him, right? 8-)

What I am focusing on is on that Vassar line.
My 5th great grandparents are Nathaniel Vasser(1756-1823),and his wife, Sarah Hudson(1756-1846). 
Sarah's parents were Peter Hudson and Mourning Griffith(or Griffin) of Virginia.  At this point back into this Vassar/Vasser line I only had the pedigree, or the direct ancestor once you get back into the Hudson side of the line, no siblings for anyone. 
And I only have as far back in Hudsons as Peter and 1 further generation back for his wife Mourning Griffith(her parents are John Griffith and Sarah Parrish).

The Vassers/Vassars continue down with Vassars until you get to my grandmother, who married a Harper, my mother who married a Bowman, to me....Sluggy.

That line is well established however there are other offshoots from my maternal grandmother's side that I didn't have much documentation/family tradition coming into this whole genealogy hunt.

One of those offshoots is John Little Vassar's grandmother's family.

John Little's parents were John Alfred Vassar and Rosa Belle Snead(the ancestral line that I am related to Sonya Ann through).

John's mother, Rosa Belle Snead's parents were Lewellen Snead and Rebecca Womack.  It is this Womack line that I have been trying to make headway on.

Rebecca's parents were Abraham Womack(1785/90-1863)and Willie(though some call her Millie)Wade(no dates).

I busted through the Womack brick wall this week with the aid of another researcher to discover that Abraham's parents were Abraham Womack and Tabitha Hudson.

This Tabitha Hudson was born abt. 1760.

Hmmmm.
My Sarah Hudson, in my great grandfather's line, was born 1756.

Hmmmm again.
Tabitha and Sarah both lived in the same geographic area of Virginia.

Well when I discovered that Tabitha's parents were Peter Hudson and Mourning Griffith, I knew I had found Sarah, who married Nathaniel Vassar, Tabitha's sister.

So my 2 x GreatGrandmother, Rosa Belle Snead's 2 x Great Grandparents are the same 2 x Great Grandparents as her husband, John Alfred's 2 x Great Grandparents.
And Rosa Bell's husband is my 2 x Great Grandfather.

This means my 2 x Great Grandparents were 3rd cousins.
My family tree seems to be branching out and then cleaving back together along this journey of mine. lol

I also found this same type of situation in my mother's father's sister's family.

My grandfather Harper had an older sister named Ollie Harper.
She married Joseph Warren Sublett.
I doubt she knew at that time that they were related.

Joseph Warren's 3 x Great Grandfather was a man named Pierre Louis Soblet, who immigrated to Virginia from France(first, by way of Germany, Holland and England)in 1700. Warren traces back through his direct Sublett surname line, from Joseph Warren to William Joseph, to Benjamin Branch, to Matthew Thomas, to Benjamin Sr., to Pierre Louis Soblet.

Ollie's 5 x Great Grandfather was this same Pierre Louis Soblet through her mother's side of the family.....Jennie Vie Tucker back to his mother Mary Jane Mason, back to her mother Elizabeth Weatherford, back to her mother Martha Sublett, back to her father William Abraham Sublett, back to his father Pierre Louis Soblet.

This means my great Aunt Ollie and Uncle Warren were 4th Cousins 1x removed.

Does your head hurt from the math yet?
Mine does. ;-)

Ok, back to seeing dead people for me......

Have you made any interesting family history discoveries lately?

Sluggy

Long Boring Genealogy Stuff...But with Pictures!

Ok, not so long really....but still boring. lol

There are two genealogy areas I work on.

First there is the "near" ancestors....the ones I remember being alive and the 6 or so generations before them.  These 6 immediately previous generations are the ancestors that I hope to be able to link up to genetically when the results come back from my DNA samples I sent off recently into the bowels of a Texas lab.
I got confirmation that they received my "material" last week.
So now I wait, if not very patiently, for the results.

6 generations before my time takes me back to the late 1700's.
In some of my family blood lines, that is far enough removed to transport my ancestral lines to the far off continent of Europe.  In other of my blood lines(mostly on my mother's side), the late 1700's finds these 6 generations already removed to the New World.  Some of that number having been removed to the Americas more than 100 years before that time!

One of my earliest ancestors that has been traced arrived in the Virginia Colony in 1635 with his wife and 1 servant.  So as some of my ancestors were making their way across the sea from Europe, I had 2 blood lines already here for about 160 years.
It boggles the mind sometimes.

And then there are the "far" ancestors.
The ones many MANY generations removed from me and known, stretching back into the Middle Ages in some cases.  I can't possibly live long enough at this point in my life, to research every last person others have "put" into my lines.  I hope that whoever added these folks had some source material to back up their claims but I don't have the time, funds or resources to prove every leaf on the tree of our family.  So I add ancestors who other's claim to be legit to our tree for now.

While the paper trail and quality of research can be spotty at best in this very long chain of ancestors, I take it at it's face value and work to substantiate the claims when I can.  There are many questions and holes but I keep them on the tree until I find enough evidence to counter the claim that their branch belongs on my tree.  Once it's clear the facts don't fit and the blood doesn't match, I perform some pruning and cut them loose.

Which brings me to my Vassar ancestors.
A couple of years ago, at the beginning of my "where did I come from?" quest I found a relative I never knew existed by the name of Reginald Vassar.  He is my 2nd cousin and was, at that time, 90+ years old.  He had been doing Vassar genealogy for many years and had amassed a great file on many generations of our Vassar ancestors.

John Little Vassar and his wife, Lucy Ellen Baker Vassar were my great grandparents on my mother's side.
Reginald Vassar and I share Hugh Wiley & Sarah Anne "Sally" Smith Vassar (my 3 x GGs)as common ancestors. 

Hugh & Sally had a son, John Alfred "Jack" Vassar.  Hugh & Sally had another son, Richard Levi Douglas Vassar.  John is my 2 x GG and Richard is Reggie's GG.

And this is our most "famous" current relative......

I'm not sure exactly how we are related(I need to do the research on that)but we are cousins (X number of times removed), of some kind.  My brother has told me that my mother's cousin Dean has partied with Phil on occasion.
The fact that she is related to Phil Vassar has pleased my daughter to no end, as she is a BIG country music fan. 8-)

And no, we are not related to the folks who founded this......

Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY

But then again, Matthew Vassar's line came over from England in 1796, so we might be connected back in the Old Country. ;-)

But I digress......

Through the work of Reginald, another ancestor Lyndal G. Vessar(who wrote one of the comprehensive books on Vassar genealogy many years ago)and countless others through the years, I have my Vassar line nailed down back to 1595 for specific individuals.  There is general Vassar/Vessar family genealogy going back further to France in the 12 century. 

The surname springs from the Lorraine region of France and came from a landed ranking-Feudal Vassals(one level below a Baron or Viscount).  Variations of the name include VaVassour, LaVasseur, Vossier, etc.
Here is how James Vassar, a poster on an Ancestry dotcom message board, explains the origin of the surname better than myself.....
""Vassar" is a derivative of an Old French military title and an old ancient roman military legionary title. The old french title is "vavassour", which translates as "Vassal of Vassals", comparable to the phrase "king of kings". The ancient roman word is "vavasorrium" (or something like that), roughly equivalent to a captain or a lieutenant, maybe. The vavassour is equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon military-political position of "thane," that is why Vassar is sometimes spelled "Vassal." Essentially and for all intents and purposes a vavassour is a landed feudal knight, or a knight that had land granted to him by his feudal lord. All landed knights were vassals or military servants to their feudal lord, but they were not peasants as some snobs have told me. So, a vavassour is a "knight of knights." I have read a few references were he is referred to as the old wise and senior knight that is in semi-retirement and still gives advise to the younger knights."


Everything was going well for us until 1599, when the Reformed Protestant church, of which these ancestors were supporters, was founded in France. These French Protestants became known as Huguenots.

  Painting,  " An Eyewitness Account of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre" by Francois Dubois


Long story short, this led to the "War of the Three Henrys" and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in which Catholics killed thousands of Huguenots in Paris and massacres of Protestants swept across France after that, which led to a massive exodus of Protestants out of France into neighboring countries like Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Prussia and England.  Though no one knows the true number, I've read the extermination of French Protestants amounted to half a million souls.  That's a whole lot of people by 1572 standards.

Eventually, the Huguenots who remained were forced to convert to Catholicism but about 200,000 chose instead to leave France.


My direct line of ancestors chose to emigrate to England during the reign of Elizabeth I.  Elizabeth, being Henry VIII's daughter(Henry who had founded the Anglican/Protestant Church in England and driven out or killed Catholics and burned and looted their monasteries) was a Protestant herself and welcomed these religious refugees into her kingdom.  She was generous with financial help throughout her reign. 
My direct ancestor was one John Vassar/Vesser.  His parents had fled France after the St. Bartholomew's massacre for England though we have no record of their names as of yet. John was born in Gravesend, England in 1595.  He married an English bred woman named Elizabeth Dowe/Dew.

But there was religious unrest in England after the death of Elizabeth in 1603.   John applied for permission to sail to the New World and signed an oath of allegiance to the Crown & the Anglican Church. The Church of England was the official religion of the Virginia Colony and anyone sailing there to settle had to be certified and promise to conform to the Church's doctrine and practices.  Even Quakers who removed to Virginia from England had to have their children baptized and recorded in the CofE.

According to the ship's manifest, in the spring of 1635, John Vasser, his wife Elizabeth, and their
indentured servant, Wm. Baker, sailed aboard the barque "Alice" with Richard Blake as Master of
the Ship. They departed from Gravesend, County Kent, England. This port was the embarking point
of the London Company émigrés headed to the Va. Colony at Jamestown. (Though the London Company had been disbanded in 1624 and Virginia became a royal province, ships bound for Virginia still embarked at Gravesend.)

While much of my time had been devoted to double checking the facts I could on the Vassar line, recently my attention turned to the line of John Vassar's wife, Elizabeth of the Dowe or Dew family.
I began to trace back the path that has been laid out for Elizabeth's ancestors and it led me into the realm of English royalty.
Now any time I find my ancestors hooked up to famous or infamous characters in history I become suspicious of the motives.

Many amateur genealogists do genealogy to connect to their actual roots.
And then there are the others, who only do this to find famous relations, so they can show off to their friends and somehow feel important since they can claim a link to somebody "Fabulous".

One of my earliest friends in life recently told me she is descended from Lady Godiva.  Of course I didn't ask her for proof or shake my head at her claim but I do wonder where she got this information and if her assertion is valid.

When a fellow Ancestry user who shares ancestors with me, notified me recently about some information that has just come to light about our Baker line, I used this occasion to reach out to a number of other Baker researchers/members on Ancestry to let them know and to invite them to be guests on my family tree and perhaps share information.

Only 1 of these fellow genealogists replied to me so far.
His response.......I will copy it in it's entirety....

"Hi, my Bakers go way back to Sir John "Bloody" Baker who I believe was first Chancellor of the Exchequer for UK. See Bramhall Castle."

Now a person really interested in history and genealogy would have replied either "Yes, let's get together and work on this stuff." or "No thanks....I don't care to communicate with you."

But I got someone who used this opening to brag about his infamous ancestor who did some really dastardly and horrid things.
Add in that this person claims kinship through a supposed Christopher Baker, a son of Sir John Baker.  John Baker and his wives had 2 sons, neither of which was named Christopher.  Perhaps he has information I don't but I am skeptical about his claim, especially in light of the context in which he shared it.

I just get the feeling that this guy does genealogy for all the wrong reasons.

And the rest, they say, is history.
And "it" can wait to be explored another day.





Sluggy


 

My Mystery Peeps

If you are the family archivist, I implore you,  PLEASE LABEL YOUR PHOTOS!

While my mother was pretty good about labeling family photos, I do have scads of photos with no information about them....not the people, the place or the date.  But most of them I recognize the people peering out from those pieces of paper as I knew them at some point in their lives.

But there are some that reach back, way back into the past and I am clueless!

If any of my mother's relatives......the Baker, Vassar, Tucker, Harper branches of our tree are out there reading this, and you recognize this photo or these people, please leave a comment or email me privately!

Here's the first photo......

And then there is this family portrait.....

I believe these are copies of photos my mother obtained at one of the Baker/Vassar Family Reunions she attended back in the 1990's in Charlotte County, VA.  She left no information about the photos or the folks in them.
I am assuming I am related somehow to these peeps but a few names would be nice to know.  ;-)

I also have a copy of a photo from the 1920's or early 1930's(I believe)of my Great Grandmother and Great Grandfather with some of their children(and possibly a few spouses of their children and the children's children(my GGrands grandkids).
I'll post the photo here in case some of my Baker/Vassar relatives are reading this and can help me out by identifying the people I can't.......

My Grandmother is the older of the 2 girls kneeling in front holding babies(the one to the left not sticking her tongue out).
My Great Grandmother is to the right of the really old woman in the center. GGrand is wearing an apron.
Those are the ones I recognize definitely.

I think my Great Grandfather is behind and to the left of the really old woman in the center.
And I believe that the really old woman in the center is either my GGrandmother's Mother or my GGrandfather's Mother.
I believe the younger adult woman  to the left of the really old woman is Louise or Rosabel.
I believe the younger adult woman  behind and to the right of my Great Grandmother is Virginia.
I believe the adult man in front of her with the "prominent ears" is Lealon.
I believe the girl kneeling with her tongue hanging out is either Doris or Lula.
If the baby my Grandmother is holding is my mom, then one of the other babies may be Grandma's youngest brother Barry.....but that would only be the case if this photo was taken after 1934.
As for the men.....I really don't know my Grandmother's brothers by sight, so I don't know which are  brothers and which are spouses of her sisters.

It would have been nice to have had the folks labeled on this picture. *sigh*

So many questions I have! 8-)

Sluggy