November 2019

  I've had quite a few clients come to me with stories that have been handed down for generations. Their great-great grandmother was a Choctaw princess. Their several times great-grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence. We're related to Patrick Henry, or William Bradford, or Margaret Sanger. In most of these cases I was able to prove whether or not the stories were true.
   Sometimes these stories have a nugget of truth, but have become a little fuzzy over the years. It's the same with stories in my own family. For example, my Grandpa Reed left extensive notes saying that our ancestor John Reade's father was Adam Reade, who operated a sawmill in Cheshire County, New Hampshire. There's only one problem with that: there's no listing for Adam Reade (Reed/Reid) on the 1810 or 1820 census of New Hampshire.
   It was only recently, working with the DNA matches of a couple of Reed cousins, that I discovered that John Read's wife Katherine Kettering was most likely the daughter of Adam Kettering. My Grandpa Reed named Katherine's siblings as Jacob, Michael, Andrew, Elizabeth, and Margaret - and we have DNA matches to descendants of some of these. There's (always) more research to be done, but it's fairly obvious what happened - Grandpa just got the names mixed up.
    Sometimes, in family history research, we have to let go of those treasured family stories. But you never know what you might find instead - hand written letters from a Civil War soldier, a signature on a document, land passed down through three generations. In my case, it appears as though Adam Kettering died not in Pennsylvania, but in Illinois. More research ahead!