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)

George Robert "Bob" Presley found!

Most unexpectedly, while I was out of town for work, someone fulfilled one of my FindAGrave photo requests for Garden of Memories in Sikeston, Missouri, and in the process added all of the nearby Presley graves as well. The wonderful person then proceeded to transfer all of those listings to me!

As a result, I now know when George Robert (listed as George R on his headstone) & wife are buried:

George Robert Presley (1879-1959)

He, along with the rest of the listings at the same cemetery, have been linked together and linked to the rest of the Presley clan through his parents Thomas & Mary Presley.

Update on Thomas Presley's "missing" children

Since it's been a good long time since I last posted, I've thankfully got a lot of new information!

**Jennie Presley
As it turns out, I was exactly wrong about my great-something aunt Jennie Presley marrying Charles Lumley. As it turns out, she did, in fact, marry Thomas R. Jackson. She and Tom had no children, and according to her death certificate, she is buried in Fairview Cemetery in Dyersburg. I found her obituary and it confirms that, even though there's no listing for her on the Dyer County GenWeb page. I'll have to contact the cemetery to find her stone. Tom was buried in Pleasant Hill near his father. As seem to have happened a lot, all the Presleys are listed as Presslers in her obit, but one thing it does add is that brother Bob is listed again, this time as living in Sikeston, MO.

**Robert George Presley
I recently turned up Robert, long lost Uncle Bob, in the 1920 census in Dunklin County, MO. This gave me a list of his children (as well as a middle name...George...I'd had him as Robert P. Presley, though attempting to verify that, I couldn't find him listed that way in any of my sources...typo, I guess). He next turned up in the 1930 census in Granite City, Illinois, working in a steel foundry along with his bother Claude who I'd found previously. His WWI draft card actually lists him as George Robert.

I've now managed to trace a couple of his descendant lines to the present, I just need to see if I can dig up some sort of contact information for the family. It would seem his children pretty much stayed around the boot heel of Missouri in Dunklin, Scott & Cape Girardeau counties. Still no idea when or where he died, but as I previously mentioned, Jennie's obituary has him still living as of May 1955. He'd be 75 then, so I'm getting closer!

**Emma Presley
With the help of a letter from my great aunt Dru to another cousin of mine, I figured out that Emma Presley really was a sister to my great grandfather, James Richard Presley. As the Dyer County Genweb shows, she married John Bartin Wilson in 1899. However, I can't find John & Emma anywhere in the 1900 or 1910 census, and John has remarried and had children with his second wife by 1920. John & Emma had at least two children, Clarice (who would marry Luther Burns) and Johnny Fred (who also seems to end up near the IL/MO Steel industry in East St. Louis. As it is, I only have the evidence of their marriage for Emma. She was apparently was born after 1880, the 1890 is gone, can't find her in 1910...

I'm speculating that Emma died somewhere between 1905-1912. Unfortunately, she's not listed in any death records, funeral home records or cemetery listings I can find. Given when she likely died, she'd probably be buried in Pleasant Hill, but I have nothing pointing that direction aside from family tradition in that time period. On the upside, Clarice had some 9 children with Luther Burns, so maybe I can track one of them down and ask (though at least three have already died).

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.

WorldConnect Tree update in progress

I've recently changed family tree programs from Family Tree Maker 2006 to Legacy Family Tree. Legacy has a lot more options and details to fill in, so I'll be slowly upgrading my data to better represent my research, I just have to learn all the new shortcuts. Fortunately, once I'm done, my tree on WorldConnect will better reflect additions by showing the date when a person's record was last modified.

The LaMastus Line Lives!

Thanks to an unexpected email from a distant cousin (Hello, George!), I've managed to put a little more meat on the thin bones of the tree of James LaMastus. James LaMastus was one of my
3rd great-grandfathers (father of Ella LaMastus who married George W. Logan in Cross County, Arkansas). I've now added the line of Edd L. LaMastus, brother of Ella to my file at WorldConnect (click the link up at the top). With what my new found cousin told me, I was able to find Edd LaMastus & family in the 1910, 20 & 30 Census. They were living in Telico Township, St. Francis County, Arkansas in 1910. After Edd's wife Betty died in 1918, they appear in the 1920 census in Heber Springs, Cleburne County, Arkansas and by 1930 have relocated to Lynn County, Texas. I'm not sure why, but in 1930, Edd's daughter Lurla Mae is living with the family of Charles & Etta Davenport in Montague County, TX instead of with her family. Ultimately, Edd and sons Ernest & Val moved on to California where I've found all three in the California Death Index on Rootsweb.

I have to admit, I'd pretty much given up on this family as none of my family around Cross County knew what had become of them, so hopefully now we can reconnect and fill in all these blanks. This is the second line this year that had dead ended for me only to turn up in California. Maybe I should just start my research in California and work backwards from now on!

Catching Up

From Lumey (Smith)...

What you see here is the Births page from Lumey (Smith) Presley's bible (seen in the 2nd photo on her Findagrave.com listing). At some point, she was given a new, smaller bible and copied all of this information into that, but had the forethought to hang on to these original pages. For that, I thank her, as this, and the back side of the same page, has been the best documentation I've found for her children, including Bert, who died young. This is the bible that was used as a form of ID when Marvin and Wortham Presley applied for delayed birth certificates with the State of Tennessee.

I've been trading emails with cousin Billy Bivens (grandson of Billie Bivens and Nancy Simpson) and Samuel Alsup, whose Families and Sojourners of Dyer County, Tennessee (1823-1930) WorldConnect file has been hugely helpful to me. Basically, Samuel is compiling a database of all Dyer County related individuals mentioned or listed in all the records and sources he can find, and then tieing them all together as families, citing his sources along the way.
Billy filled me in on what he knew of his great grandmother, Fannie Bivens. After her husband died, she married D. J. Rudder, a Civil War veteran and farmer, and is likely buried next to him in Oak Grove Cemetery in Dyer County. With this information, I helped Samuel to connect some dots in his database, putting the family together from the names he'd found in various records. Samuel's current working theory, based on a Lauderdale County marriage record and the 1870-1920 census is that Fannie is the Frances Lucinda Elder who married a John S. Bivins.
I've also received the Civil War Pension application packets for Thomas P. Presley and Mary Elizabeth Carpenter Presley. Thomas, as it turns out, joined the Union Army during the war and served with Company G of the 3rd Michigan Volunteer Cavalry, who spent most of the war ranging from the bootheel of Missouri down the northern Mississippi and all through West Tennessee along the Mississippi River. He enlisted at Jackson in February of 1863. The packet included a copy of their marriage record from McNairy County in 1866, but shed little light on Thomas' life before the war. Currently, I'm working to find evidence that Thomas was a son of one Joshua Preslar, Jr. who moved from Anson County, North Carolina, and ultimately settled in Henderson County, Tennessee. This direction was suggested to me by Ed Dunn, who has done a lot of work on the Johann Valentin Pressler family, who emigrated to New York, with parts of his family migrating south to the Carolinas and later on west through Tennesse. There is a 10 year old Thomas listed in teh family of Joshua Preslar in the 1850 Anson County census, and by 1870, Thomas is living with wife and children in their own home in Henderson County, TN. No sign of Thomas in the 1860 census after searching both HeritageQuest and Ancestry.com. Thomas was listed on one of his Union service cards as Thomas P. Presler, so things are looking good, but I still have no actual document that specifically ties Joshua Preslar to this particular Thomas Presley.

Fun at the Archives

After two trips to the Tennessee State Archives in Nashville, I've been able to fill in several dates and places and people from the pile of birth, marriage & death records, obituaries, deeds and military documents. Still no idea where either James Gambell or William Murley are buried, but I've got both of their Civil War service records and the Widow's pensions of their wives.

I've been contacted by cousins from both the Murley/Ervin and the Smith/Minton lines.

Presley-Pressley Family DNA Project

Thanks to my great new job and some promotional rebates at Family Tree DNA I was able to order my DNA test kit and join the 36 other participants in the Presley-Pressley Surname Project. DNA testing is growing more and more popular in genealogy circles as people who are stuck in their research look for other ways to determine exactly where they come from and who they may be related to. From the results I've received so far, our Thomas Parker Presley (born 1841 in NC) is likely descended from the same line as the Jackson Pressley (born 1832 in NC).

Keeping in mind that currently these DNA services can only give you information on your direct paternal line (your father, his father, his father's father, etc)The first 12 DNA markers really only confirm or eliminate whether or not your male ancestor is from a particular part of the world from in the past few thousand years or so, so it's a good way to see if that line is Asian, Western European, African, Urasian, etc. The enxt 13 markers greatly increase the precision with which you can possibly match against someone else's results, to help determine how recent your common ancestor was. In our case, me and Kenneth Pressley are a perfect match for all 25 markers, making it a 99.6% probability that we share a common ancestor 24 generations back. The more recent you get, the lower the probability; 99.1% the common ancestor is 20 generations, 97.7% for 16 generations, 94.1% for 12 generations. By the time you get down to 8 generations, it's only 85.9% likely. 8 generations back from me would be the great grandfather of Thomas Presley.

Wow, I'm actually boring myself with all these numbers, so I'll cut this short. Results for the next 12 markers should be in about a week from now, so I'll post more when I get those. I hope more people participage in the project and that more of the existing participants fork over the $$ to upgrade their results. Could prove very interesting.

...and they always remembered my birthday.

     For probably the first 14 years of my life, I was forever receiving birthday cards from my Uncle Hillas and Aunt Eloise Brockett, whom I had never met. They were my Mom's favorite aunt & uncle, yet, even though they didn't die until 1993-1994, I never had the opportunity to meet them. For awhile, every summer, they'd ship us a box of grapefruit & oranges from the trees in their back yard (they lived in Clearwater, Florida), which I thought was awesome.
     Hillas B. Brockett, was born December 22, 1900 in Hardin County, Illinois. The Brockett family had left their ancestral home in White County, Illinois not to much earlier to seek their living elsewhere and would eventually end up in the Brushy Lake and Cherry Valley areas of Cross County, Arkansas. Hillas joined the Army and became the only member of the family to leave home and do something other than farming. He served in a few posts around the country (from his age, he must've joined either during or just after the First World War) and also spent time as a hospital administrator in post-WWII Japan during the reconstruction. He ultimately retired as a colonel and settled in Florida.
     I don't know much about Eloise, yet. My Aunt Elsie remembers her maiden name as Moss, but her grave marker shows Eloise Gates Brockett, so I'm not sure of that's a middle name or maiden name. I'm not sure where they were married, so I don't know where to look for a marriage record. I assume she was a Cross County native, but I haven't done much research on her, so I'm not sure. Having no children of their own, they valued their nieces and nephews.
     Since I never got to meet them, I made a point to visit their grave. After finding their obituaries in the Tampa Tribune's archives thru NewsBank's America's Obituaries, I learned that they were buried in the beautiful Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park in Pinellas Park, FL. They are now listed in Find A Grave and I'll be adding their portraits in the near future.