Another generation added to the tree!

Thanks to the ever growing snowball that is the FamilySearch indexing program, I've finally managed to track the Albert & Betty Wiggins family back to the 1910 US Census in Tennessee. I'd been stuck at 1920 for years without any new information. I'm starting to think that may have been due to indexing errors in the resources I was using, as well as less than flexible search capabilities.

In April of 1910, the Wiggins family was living in Gates in Lauderdale County. Gates is almost one of those sneeze-and-you-miss-it kind of towns, just south of Halls, in West Tennessee. The family was listed as Wiggin (no s). At the time, in 1920, the family consisted of Albert & Betty, and children Mattie, Pearl, Ada, Joe and Nell. This is wonderful to find as previously I had no idea when Nell was born, and the census placed her age at 7, which puts her birthdate somewhere around 1903.

Also, FamilySearch recently added a more complete index of Tennessee Death Records to their database, not really based on any of the previous efforts, this one abstracts all of the death certificates from 1914-1955. Though this new index, I was finally able to pin down death dates for both Albert and Betty, as well as filling in middle names (Thomas and Jane, respectively), birth dates, burial location (both listed as buried in Durhamville, Albert specifically at Elam, but having been to that cemetery, there was only one Wiggins stone, and it wasn't him, but now I have the funeral home's name and can maybe track that down more definitively), and most excitingly, Betty's parents names! And since Betty died in Memphis in 1937, I was able to pull a copy of her death certificate from the Shelby County Register of Deeds website and see it for myself!

(click to view larger)

Elizabeth Jane "Betty" Jackson was the daughter of Ben and Eliza Jackson, both born in North Carolina. Based on Albert & Betty's oldest child's birthdate and place (Minnie, born somewhere in Tennessee in Aug 1882), that likely places the couples marriage around 1880-1881, probably somewhere in West Tennessee. Now I have to do a little more digging, but it's always exciting to add another generation to the family tree!

I've updated my tree on WorldConnect, so you can follow this link to Albert Wiggins:

Albert Thomas Wiggins 1864-1942)

A year already?

Sadly, an entire year has elapsed since my last entry here. In that time, I completed my transition from Family Tree Maker to Legacy Family Tree. This was a wonderful thing as Legacy does such a great job of keeping me organized. I've managed to clean up dozens of sources, standardize some spellings on place names and even gone as far as printing up a rough draft of my eventual Descendents of Fisher A. Deming book.

In the past year, I did managed to find some deed records for Fisher A. Deming on the Chatham County Register of Deeds website which help support the inclusion of his middle initial. Still no idea what it stands for, but the current front runners are Alden and Adler (though I suppose Ammi might be another possibility as that was a repeated name in the Deming family in Connecticut).

I exchanged correspondance with a few newly discovered cousins from different lines. Two Deming cousins and even a Bolles cousin (Hi Sabrina, sorry I haven't written lately!). The Deming cousins, Jerry Dixon and Billy McClendon have been great help in filling out the Dixon/Deming and Burke/Deming lines that migrated from North Carolina to Texas (and beyond).

The only real news on the Presley/Preslar front is that I only recently figured out how to tie the Dyer County, Tennessee Presley and Preslar lines together. While both lines are descended from John Preslar/Presley (son of Hans Jurie Pressler), the Dyer County Preslar line comes down through John's son Stephen, while the Dyer County Presley line comes down thru John's son Joshua. So, just as most of us thought...we are related back there somewhere!

In another exciting turn of events, I was contacted by a Carpenter cousin (Hi Barry!), with whose help I've been able to tie Mary Elizabeth Carpenter's father John L. back into the rest of the Carpenter clan in Anson County, North Carolina. With Barry's help, I was able to walk back through the census and found that the Carpenters were in Anson County at least as long as the Preslars, usually with in a few miles of each other! I've not had much luck tracking down any of Mary's siblings any farther than 1880, so there's still a lot of work to be done.

As far as resources on the web, the arrival of Footnote.com to the web has been a major boost with their publishing all of the complete Revolutionary War Pension records online along with constant updates to Civil War Service Records from at least 5 states so far. Pricing realities finally caught up with the Godfrey Memorial Library and they had to re-structure their subscriptions, losing access to Newsbank along the way.

Well, that's been a huge relief to get in type, so I'll leave it here and pick up the rest of the recap later when I can actually recall it.