Wednesday night, we were at church, and they’ve been doing a Summer Faith Series. The speaker has been Dr. John Parker, who is an English professor. It was actually his first class that got me to thinking about going back to school for an English degree. Every single one of his examples and illustrations came from literature, and the bookworm inside me went a bit crazy. lol.
This week, we were studying hymns that were written by British songwriters. One of the songwriters was Frances Heber (I think it was Frances. I know it was an F name). And Dr. Parker said that the Heber family had been in existence and I believe living on the same estate for nearly 1000 years. That was super cool to me. And Dr. Parker inspired me once again…
I’ve thought in the past about researching my family trees and genealogies. I had to do a project about my family in 9th grade History, and it sparked my interest. But all of that research takes an awful lot of time. Well, after John Parker’s comments, I got to thinking about it again. Micah found an Ancestry.com app for our iPhones. So I played around on it a little bit, adding the names and dates that I already knew on both mine and Micah’s side of the family.
The way Ancestry.com works is that you can add names and info and events and dates for free, but you can’t do any research on the site or see any of their records until you pay for the service. So I thought I would do some of my own research and see how far I could get on my own before I paid to view the records, or start their 2-week free trial. I was getting frustrated at first, because every website I found required payment to view the records. So I just started Googling family members.
The first thing I found was for my dad’s dad. I knew that he worked as an engineer for NASA, so I included that in my search. I came across a scan of a telephone directory for Marshall Space Flight Center dated September 1960 with his name in it. That was pretty cool.
Then I hit the jackpot. The farthest I knew down this particular line was my great-grandmother’s maiden name. No idea of a middle name, date of birth, anything else. I actually ended up searching my great-grandfather’s name and found a document listing her as a Mrs. with his name. The document was the genealogy of a Samuel Alexander Moore, Sr, who was born in 1776. He also happens to be my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. How cool is that? I had the names, birth dates, death dates, and some marriage dates of everyone descended from him, all the way down to my great-grandmother. I actually have a step past Samuel Moore, because it had the names of his wife’s parents. Another kinda funny fact that I found out was that my great (x4) grandfather had 2 sisters whose names were Malinda and Laminda. Haha! We’re going to have twin girls one day and name them in honor of my great (x5) aunts….ok not really. lol.
This whole family lived in White County, TN, just a couple of counties over from us. There’s actually a cemetery there that is apparently named after the Moore family. And luckily, White County has an awesome genealogy website with several census records (for free!). From what I could tell, they were all farmers. The most recent one that I looked at (1900) listed my great-great-grandmother when she was 1 year old.
Also among those census records, I found a few other familiar surnames, one of which is in Micah’s family. Granted, it’s a pretty common last name, but how crazy would it be to find out that our ancestors were neighbors?! Small world, maybe?
So yeah, I’m pretty excited. Just a few Google searches turned up this much. I can’t wait to see what else I can find!! 🙂
Livin' On Love 