Over at Making Light there is a post about Teresa Nielson-Hayden's forebears going back to Plymouth (I think) and it is amazing how many people commented on that post -- everyone loves talking about where they come from. I didn't feel compelled to come out of lurkdom to talk about my ancestors there but I'm not so shy here.
After my mother passed this January, Dad and the sibs and I went through her things. A green spiral notebook was found that had a handwritten account from 1969 by my great-grandmother about her life. I have transcribed it and would like to do more with the text by researching some of the history of the area where she was born and raised to fill in many of the gaps. The transcript comes to only 15 pages; there's a lot of missing detail. I can fill in some family gaps because I inherited the Bible in which she kept many clippings and notices of births and deaths but nothing about what was going on in that part of Ohio at the times she was writing about.
Gramma was adopted by a family that had taken her father in when he was a struggling youth. When his wife died leaving him two young children that he could not care for he put them in an orphanage but the treatment there was so poor he took them out and placed my great-grandmother with the same family that had taken him in. Her older brother went to live with a relative of the deceased mother. My great-grandmother did not meet him until they were both in their 80s if I recall correctly.
Somewhere at my father's house is a geneological report of the Corwin family. My great-grandmother married a Corwin. I remember my mother telling me that she had gotten this and that the Corwins first came to America in the late 1600's -- a Dr. Corwin from Wales was the emigrant.
Family stories also tell that the Corwin who served as Millard Fillmore's Secretary of the Treasury, a governor of Ohio and a member of the US Senate from Ohio, was an ancestor as well as the Shelby who served as the first governor of Kentucky (my grandmother Anne Pearl Corwin married Howard Shelby). I can trace the right Corwins back to the late 1700's on the internet. I need the documents at my parent's house to know the rest of the story.
On my paternal side we don't have much information but as it is Irish and mostly settled in one or two towns in central Kentucky it is likely they came over in the mid 1800's during the famine from Western Ireland. When we were in Ireland in early July, Dad got a print-out from Bunratty Castle that I believe alleges we are related to the family who were the original Irish occupants of said castle.
So, that's what I know of my family tree.
Posted by Dawno at August 21, 2005 12:00 AM