Finding Frederick: Who and where were you before 1841?

Frederick Courtney was my 2great grandfather on my mother's side. He is one of my brick wall ancestors. What I know of him is what I have gleaned from records and documents and a few family lore type clues. After years of searching I know how he lived as an adult in the sleepy little community of Bayou Chicot, Louisiana, but not the full story of his origins. The sum total of what I know of his origins is presented this obituary that we were fortunate to find on a recent research trip to Louisiana.

In an attempt to get some answers, some very gracious male descendants of his male children volunteered for the ydna test through the Courtney surname project. Finally, we would get some answers....or so I thought.

Here in lies my overdue attempt to account for the results we have so far to those who graciously volunteered and those interested cousins standing on the sidelines waiting to hear "the rest of the story."

(click the pic to view a readable version)

The data in the picture above shows our test group on the ynda project managed by Stan Courtney. These are the ydna test results for the 2 kits that I manage, both male descendants of Frederick. One is descended from Henry Davis Courtney, Sr. The other is a descendant of the oldest son, Dr. Franklin W. Courtney.

Think of the series of number like the edges of a set of keys.* Some match up really closely, some don't match up at all. The two in our group match each other really well. If  you review the number sequence carefully you will see that they are only off by one digit at two points along the sequence.

Silhouette vector designed by Freepik

These "keys" clearly are from the same bunch. This analogy will become more clear as you look at these two and compare to the two larger test groups that I share with you below.

Back when we first started to pursue this testing, Stan expected us to fit into the descendant line of Jacob Courtney based on where he settled. His group shows as: 

Group 13 - R1b: U106 > L48 - Descendants of Jacob Courtney b 1761 Germany d 1835 Morgan County, WV

Notice that he was in the vicinity of Shepherdstown in his later years and at his death. Also he was old enough to be Frederick's father. That sounded nice to me and would make a tidy conclusion to our mystery. The results were negative for this conclusion.

If you look at group 13 and compare our data above with the data for Jacob's descendants, you can see there is not a match there at all. In fact, if you take that little strip of data above and compare it to the results of all the Courtney ydna tests, you can see that there is no clear or strong match to any of the groups. We are a little cluster of 2 off by ourselves.

Courtney/Courtenay ydna surname group - https://www.familytreedna.com/public/courtney/default.aspx?section=yresults

What I did get with the results of the kits that I manage is a jaw-droppingly strong match to the Trout/Traut surname ydna study. On both kits, at least 2/3 of the kits reported to match our 2 "y's" claim a connection to an ancestor with the surname Trout, with Johann Wendel Georg TRAUT (1689-1760) being the most common ancestor stated. He was born in Germany and quick research has hinted that some of his children were in the right area of Va/WV at the time. Those male children would have been around the right age to be Frederick's father.

If you take the data strip above and look at the results on the Trout page, esp those of B group, you can see there is no more "square peg, round hole" problem, but a nice smooth fit like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle falling into place. There is definitely a link there. 

Trout/Traut ydna surname group - https://www.familytreedna.com/public/TROUT_DNA_Research_Project?iframe=ycolorized

There is some esoteric connection between Frederick, his mysterious Shepherd ancestor, JWG Traut (and or his sons) and maybe even Jacob Courtney (an adoption or just taking in an orphan boy or an out of wedlock baby somewhere). It all centers around that fairly remote part of Va/WV. I don't know if it will ever be revealed and I am beginning to think maybe Frederick wanted it that way...

It is sad that all we have of his beginnings is what he told his children that they managed to remember. Too bad he didn't leave any written records of his origins - a family bible, letters from home, an ancestor's will, something, anything that would give us a concrete clue to work from.

If these clues exist, I have not found them and I have been researching this puzzle since at least 2003. If you know of some existing clue to the early part of his life (1815-1840 in Virginia/West Virginia) or someone who is searching for Frederick, please, contact me so we can collaborate. It is anybody's guess at this point.

Flimsy clues are all we have right now. This is a mystery that will probably take years or lifetimes to solve. Hopefully as more people test, more will be revealed. 

*The learning curve for understanding genetic genealogy study is very steep. The key concept is a drastic oversimplification to help with first time exposure to these concepts. I am still learning...and this stuff is hard, y'all.

My family tree feels more like family spaghetti!! I need some goals.

Well, I have been soaking up genealogy facts for more than 10 years now. I have stuff in my Legacy file, on Ancestry, in paper folders and photo boxes and albums. Whew!

I have hit the point that I need to know what I have and know where it is. I can't really share my stories right now. There is so much stray data in my head that I can't talk about most of my ancestors without my large file open in front of me. Right now, I don't really feel like I have a family tree - it is more like family spaghetti!!  I know I remember that bit from somewhere......but where??

My goal for now is a complete genealogy reorganization of what I have and how I use it. I must get a better handle on it for several reasons.
1) I want to make more of this blog - it will help me with my other ultimate goals.
2) I have to get all I have learned into small comprehensible nuggets to share with family - otherwise, what is the point of all the time I have spent. I doubt my kids will wade thru all the files that I have accumulated. I need to make sense of it so they will see it is important.
3) I hope to take a genealogy trip in the fall and better organization now will result in better use of time while on the trip.

I have been following along the process of the Genealogy Do Over. It is an organized approach to a massive undertaking and I respect all their efforts. I have learned a tremendous amount about process and organization from the discussion group, but I have also learned that to accomplish my desires above, my process has to take a different path.

So my starting goals are as follows:

• Rename, and relocate genealogy files already on my computer and attach to the appropriate person in my Legacy file.
• Save the documents and images I have found on Ancestry as digital files on my computer and attach to Legacy appropriately.
• Clean up sourcing notations as I work thru the new features of Legacy 8.
• Get my non digital materials scanned, digitized and linked appropriately.
• Create more blog post from the organized files that I create.
• Prepare for the upcoming trip in the fall.
• Find some apps/tools to make it all portable.

That sounds doable, right?

I might be a 1940 census ninja!

Well, all my best intentions to get this blog off the ground went astray right after my first post. Some family illness issues and the not so happy outcome of all that left me very distracted and little time to post.

Things are settling down now and starting to be sorted out so I hope to develop a good blogging routine here.

In the meantime, I have been stealing some moments to browse the new 1940 census images that have just become available on Ancestry.com this week. I have been waiting impatiently for these to come out and just couldn't be bothered to wait for an indexed version to be published.

I have already found 4 of my families just browsing the printed images. That's 1 in Rowan county, North Carolina and 3 in Little Rock, Arkansas.

I found my grandmother and my father and uncle as little boys right where I knew they would be on Caldwell St in Salisbury.

And I didn't just get lucky.

I had a plan.

Using my wide screen monitor to its best advantage, I used the split screen mode. On the left half I had a window open with to Ancestry. com 1940 census search. On the right side I opened a Google map and entered the address for my father's childhood home.



With the Salisbury census data, it was easy to parse out which enumeration district I needed to look at because they were really thourough in describing the N, S, E, W boundries of each district. I was able to narrow it down by looking at about 3 that fit the part of town I knew they were living in. I was paging backwards and forwards through the district, comparing addresses listed on the current page as I went.

I was able to locate them with only a little detailed page searching. The map allowed me to zero in on them quickly and rule out the wrong eds by watching the addresses on my target pages as they got farther or closer. Like that old kids game, I was getting hotter or colder.

I frankly surprised myself when I had found my dad and his family. I never dreamed that I would be successful without having an index to rely on. I was thrilled and it was quite a lot of fun being the detective.

My dad, Bobby B,  age 12, with his brother, my grandmother and great-grandmother in the 1940 census



I wanted to find my Little Rock relatives right away, but I was forced to wait until the Arkansas pages were uploaded. I checked back today and was able to locate 3 of my LR relatives using the same technique.

I never expected to have 4 hits with in 4 days of the census being released.

I declare myself the 1940 Census Ninja!

Feel free to try this strategy if you have a few spare minutes and love noodling around with maps as much as I do.

When you find your family member, be sure to save the census image link to a person or persons in your tree at Ancestry.com or make a note of the url so you can go back to it. I saved the first record to my Grandmother Cleaver in Salisbury this way and it was easy to get back to it.

Happy ancestor hunting!

The Accidental Genealogist

Welcome to my new family history blog. This is something I have been meaning to do for a long time.

I never set out to study genealogy. I was mildly interested in history and logged more that my share of hours as a kid sitting around the round oak dining table listening to the litany of family members and stories, but I never gave it more than a passing thought as I went about my business and raised a family of my own. It just never occurred to me to dig and ferret out bits of history and musty old documents, not my thing.

Then.

One Day.

My sister-in-law presented my husband with a thick packet of papers that traced parts of his family all the way back to the 1500s. I was curious. I was intrigued. I read casually flipping back and forth through the document following the different lines. As I read, I started to recognize places and stories that I had heard around this newer family dining room table.

I started to wonder if there were any long branches like this in my own tree. I had only ever heard talk of family back two or three generations. No one in my immediate family had ever done any formal research, just the usual bits of paper stuffed into the family bible and a couple of old photos here and there. I did have in my possession a couple of memoirs from extended family members and one really good detailed account of my forebears in Louisiana. So I started reading, and charting, and googling, and discovered online genealogy. The more I did this, the more the events that I remember reading about in dusty old books in school became stories about my people. It all came alive and much more important than ever before. The rest is, as they say, history!

So here I am 10 years later, with a database of 3012 relations and stories that must be told to anyone who cares to listen. I have brickwalls and lines that "go back to God" as my cousin exaggerates. I have kings and commoners, colonials and confederates, lawyers, farmers, doctors, and Indians. There are a few tinkers, tailors and tax collectors too.

People say I should write a book and I suppose that if this was 25 or 50 years ago that would be the way to go. Now though, every time I sit down to make some sense out of all this accumulated history I just get overwhelmed and sucked back into the vortex of stories and names and dates.

We are fortunate to live in this age of internet and blogs and hyperlinks. It occurs to me that I should approach this just like the old saying "How do you eat an elephant?"

Of course, the answer is one bite at at time and that is what this blog will allow me to do. Present one story, one family at a time, yet they can still be all linked together in orderly ways by family line or chronology. It will be very much a study in how best to do this and a work in progress so please bear with me.

I will start off with my mother's Courtney line. I have just seen my cousins and tried to explain all that is so fascinating to them but is is just too much to absorb in a hasty long weekend when there is catching up to do and catfish and barbeque to eat. As a favor and labor of love for them, I will try to present all those fantastical claims that I made with the attendant facts so they can see what the crazy ancestor lady was talking about.

Next post will be near and dear to our hearts. It's all about Aubrey and Lucie and their little house on the hill that we all think of as home.