Tags

, , ,

No, that’s not a typo. I took a week off and headed north to Alaska with the fam. Now it’s time to get back to work.

I’ve made some decent progress this week on my Ballards. I cleaned up Perlina Ballard Simpson Collings’ family information a bit, filling in some of the blanks. There was some interesting family dynamics going on there, especially after she married the second time. In 1850, the four older children from her first marriage were in her household, but the youngest who was twelve was living with Grandma Ballard. Perlina’s oldest two boys both died in their twenties. Joseph actually had a will and it gave the appearance that there was no love lost between the first family and the stepfather. Joseph’s will left everything to his full-blooded sisters and his mother and specifically stated that she was to have control of whatever he gave her, not her husband. Nothing was left to the half-siblings who were still minors in their own right.

The next two children of James and Susannah were Thomas and Sarah. Neither of them married. Little is known about Sarah’s death other than she was still a young woman. Thomas was listed as the head of household in 1850 with several family members residing with him, including his mother and Perlina’s youngest daughter Emma. Thomas died in his early 40s from a “painful illness”1. I haven’t located a will yet, although two of his brothers were tasked with managing his estate through probate.

I’m now working on son #3 William Harrison Ballard. He was actually married twice. His first marriage was short and resulted in no children. His second marriage to Mary McQuiddy was more fruitful with at least eight children born. As I am working through those individuals, I’m a bit frustrated with their son Barnett. Seems he married in 1886 and then he took off to roam the Great Plains leaving his wife behind. There were no children and she never remarried. It’s not clear if they ever divorced–at one time divorces in Kentucky required approval from the state legislature, and both identified as widowed in multiple census records. One newspaper article mentioned that he left for health reasons and he ultimately ended up in New Mexico and West Texas where it is much drier. For a period of time, he did serve as postmaster for one small town.

I also did some cleanup on my tree which explains why I had a decrease in people this week. When I am adding family members from an obituary, it is common for the wife to be listed without her maiden name. I have a bad habit of adding them with “?” as the last name. As you can imagine, I have a lot of women with the last name “?”. I decided to start working through this list and finding their last names. Mixed in with the wives of cousins are the mothers-in-law of cousins. These were added before I made the decision not to include the in-laws in my tree and they haven’t yet been cleaned up. So far I have sorted through the first names starting with “A” and I now only have 5 that I could not assign a last name. I’ve deleted about 150 people. I’ve also run a “floaters” report. It’s 18 pages long. I will be busy in my clean up efforts in the coming weeks.

And for good measure…don’t forget to back up your trees! If you have made a lot of changes, you may also want to go through a compacting process if your software has that feature. It’s been a while since I compacted my tree and it compacted more than 4%!

This week Ancestry gave me three new errors to resolve. I have 5281 errors in the tree–376 possible duplicates, 4299 with no documents, 606 other errors.

  • The first is the wife of a 6th cousin. She recently passed so I was able to add a few references for her.
  • A 4th cousin 2x removed that is a DNA match with no citations. Unfortunately not much could be found about this young girl.
  • A 2nd cousin 5x removed with no citations. I was able to find a couple of references for her.

This week in the past…
I’d like to take an opportunity to celebrate the anniversaries of births, marriages, and deaths of my bloodlines from last week and the week ahead.
405 years ago – death of Francoise Deschallais (11th ggm)
258 years ago – death of Colonel John Quincy (8th ggf)
237 years ago – birth of James Ireland (6th ggf)
201 years ago – death of James Shields (6th ggf)
174 years ago – marriage of Henry Thompson (4th ggf) and his 2nd wife Rebecca Beck
167 years ago – birth of Rebecca Coppock Mattox (2nd ggm)
161 years ago – death of Elizabeth Lowe DeMoss (4th ggm)
108 years ago – marriage of Zeda Mattox (ggm) and Frank Fielden (ggf)
60 years ago – death of Blanche Cox DeMoss Robertson (ggm)

Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 28,019 people
End of Week: 27,866 people
Change = -153 persons
Tasks for coming week:

  • Focus on Susannah Cox + James Ballard, specifically son William Harrison Ballard
  • Review the information in The Other Polks to see if there is anything I don’t already have
  • Continue data mining on Ben Cox and Sarah Piety
  • Confirm the data from Polk Family and Kinsmen has been added for this family and page numbers are noted for easier citation adding
  • Review Coxes of Cox Creek
  • Review History of Mariah Creek Christian Church
  • Review bio of James Ballard, husband of Susannah Cox
  1. Obituary, The Weekly Shelby News, 1 Dec 1852, page 3, column 5, newspapers.com. ↩︎