Hello family!

My name is Lise and I’ve decided it’s long past time to share all the interesting tidbits I’ve come across while researching my family and my husband’s family.

I’ve been doing genealogy for about 25 years now and it’s as much fun to me as any novel or TV show. Sometimes I think, “You can’t make this stuff up!” What’s also amazing is how different our daily life is today from even a hundred years ago. For instance, minor illnesses today were deadly back then.

My family lived mainly in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ireland, and Germany. A lot of them lived in New York City. When I get tired of looking for them there, I like to research my husband’s family in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, and Georgia.

I have written a couple of books about the family, but there are too many branches to write a book about every one! Our families are a good example of the power of square numbers. We have 21 = 2 parents, 22 = 4 grandparents, 23 = 8 great-grandparents, 24 = 16 great great-grandparents, and so on. When I started doing genealogy, I knew the full names of 3 of my grandparents. That’s pretty normal. Now I’ve found so many ancestors, I could never write a book about all of them. That’s why I’m starting this blog. I would love to hear from you. Please let me know if something I write is unclear.

Also, I will probably be tweaking the appearance of this blog for a while, so it will probably look different the next time I post - my apologies!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AMANDA FUSON

Image
  One of the ancestors we have a photo of is Amanda Fuson. It shows a young woman with blue eyes and brown hair. I include here a cleaned-up, closeup version of the original shown at the end of this blog. She was my husband’s great-grandmother on the Jobe side of the family. Having a photo is fortunate since we don’t know much about her. She lived in a time and place where few records survived, and even fewer were about women, since it was rare that a woman owned anything in her own name or had any occupation other than housework and childrearing. Her life was short, and she experienced loss and upheaval. Amanda’s family lived in the area where the borders of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee come together. Her father William Fuson lived in Wayne County, Tennessee (due north of Lauderdale County, Alabama) in the 1830s and 1840s, but by the 1850s he was living in the northeast corner of Mississippi, in Tishomingo County. [1] The horizontal dashed line on the map is the Tennessee-Missi
Read more

Matthias Ludlow (1802-1879)

  There were so many men in New Jersey named Matthias Ludlow! But this post is about our most recent ancestor of that name. This Matthias was the father of William Todd Ludlow, my grandfather’s grandfather, about whom I blogged on July 29, 2023. I remember when I was about eleven or twelve, my grandparents displayed a daguerreotype of a man on the mantel. When I asked my grandmother who the man was, she said it was one of my grandfather’s ancestors, but she didn’t know which one. Unfortunately, my grandfather was not at home, and although I spent a lot of time with them, I never saw that old photo again, and no one else in the family I’ve asked recalled seeing it. Since Matthias was the wealthiest by far of all that side of the family, I believe it must have been an image of him. I remember my grandfather saying “Matthias Ludlow” in a very dramatic way. Matthias was born in 1802 in New York City, where his father, Ebenezer Ludlum, worked as a mason. [1] From the late 1700s to th
Read more

WHAT WAS REID DOSS’ REAL NAME AND WHEN WAS HE REALLY BORN?: THE MYSTERY OF REID DOSS

Image
  Although Reid has passed away, his birthday is coming up. Curtis remembers his Dad telling him that his name was originally Elster Reid Doss, but when he went into the Army, he changed it to Reid E. Doss so people wouldn’t make fun of him. Also, his wife and children always celebrated his birthday on August 25 th . So, I was surprised when Maye Doss gave me some old papers that included Reid’s birth certificate. I saw that it said he was born on August 26 th and called him Reid E. Doss. I asked her why they always said his birthday was the 25 th . She laughed and said, “I guess we just liked that day better!” Also, Reid was counted in the federal census at age 6 and age 16. Both times, he was called Reid E. Doss. However, when he registered for the draft in 1942, he signed his name as Reid Elster Doss AND he said his birthday was the 25 th . Could the person who filed the birth certificate have been confused about what day it was? It happens to all of us.  Here are a few docu
Read more