Summer has not yet arrived on the calendar, but the heat wave we are experiencing in the Bay Area has aided my transition into full Summer mode! With another Midwestern road trip slated for September, lots of on-site research planning is happening at my desk. This year, a perk has been added to my back-east wanderings: my sister Denise and her husband Frank have bought a house in Arkansas! I already miss their former mountain home-base in Bishop, California, but now I have a great place for extended pit-stops on journeys to Cincinnati and beyond, with the added bonus of spending time with my wonderful sister and brother-in-law!
Frank preparing to give Denise "bunny ears."
They are wonderfully insane. Can't wait to see them again!
Dismantling Some Masonry
One of the proverbial "brick walls" with which I have been contending in recent years involves my 2nd great-grandfather, John Thomas "JT" Romans. According to family legend, in 1858 JT's mother Angelina Romans had a late-teenage tryst with a boy named Tom Ford and found herself to be with child. Soon after his roll in the hay with Angelina, Tom Ford left town, supposedly to visit Europe.
The Romans family had a farm in Owen County, Kentucky at the time, and they had a good many neighbors with the surname Ford, who appear to have been rather well-to-do for the area, based on documents and county histories I have found. Perusal of the Federal Census of 1850 for Owen County showed one person named Thomas Ford, the son of Harbin (misspelled "Harlin") and Anna (spelled "Ann") Ford. One of the Owen County histories mentioned that young Tom, his mother Anna, and his sister Laura moved to Frankfort soon after the 1853 death of Harbin Ford so that Tom could attend a private school there.
There continued to be a heavy Ford-family presence in Owen County following the relocation of Harbin's household, and those family ties are the basis for my suspicion that the widow and children of Harbin Ford made a number of 20-mile trips back to Owen County in the years following their move to Frankfort. It is possible that one of those visits provided the opportunity for this Tom Ford to get together with Angelina.
Due diligence required that I search for another possible baby-daddy named Tom Ford, so I dissected 1850 and 1860 census records for Owen County looking for clues that could lead to another Tom Ford but found no one else by that name. A search of census records for surrounding counties yielded only our original suspect living in Frankfort with his mother and sister in 1860.
Other neighbors of the Romans clan included the Martin family. They had a son named Elisha who must have been a generous young man, because he married Angelina in 1860, less than a year following the birth of little JT. In the 1860 census, the household of Elisha and Angelina Martin included JT, with the assumed surname of Martin. It may have been Elisha's intent to adopt and help raise JT. I've noticed that distantly related genealogy hobbyists who have included our Romans family in their trees have assumed that Elisha Martin was JT's biological father, but those of us who are JT's direct descendants have not believed that to be the case.
Thomas B. Ford, left (Register of the KY State Historical Society, vol. 41, p 11)
and John Thomas Romans, right (from a family photo dated 1909)
In 1863, with JT only four years old, Angelina died and Elisha Martin volunteered for the Confederate Army. JT was left in the care of his grandparents, Shelton and Malinda Romans, in whose household he appeared on the 1870 census. When Elisha Martin returned from the war, he married Angelina's younger sister Zilpha and had a number of children with her, including a daughter they named Adeline, which had been Angelina's nickname.
JT's Romans grandparents had passed away by 1880. JT does not appear in the households of either Elisha and Zilpha Martin or Tom Ford in the 1880 census.
In 1882, JT married his first wife Corinthia in a neighboring county. Corinthia died in 1888 without any surviving children that I have located. In 1889 he married my 2nd great-grandmother, Amanda Petty.
JT and Amanda remained in northern Kentucky and raised a large family, including my great-grandmother Daisy. Census records state he worked as a farm laborer then later as a carpenter. JT fell victim to a common scourge of his time, tuberculosis, and died in a TB asylum in Texas at age 62. The informant for his death certificate was either Mrs. or Miss Anna Romans (wife Amanda's name might have been mistakenly written as "Anna," and he had a daughter named Anna), who evidently gave the name "Tom" as his father's name, which was written on the certificate as "Tom Romans." His mother's name was given as "Adeline Romans," using Angelina's nickname.
Next, I embarked upon a deeper study of our suspected paternal Tom Ford, whose full name was Thomas Benton Ford. Mr. Ford continued to reside in Frankfort following his schooling and became an attorney. He was also a published author of poetry and prose, as was his sister Laura. Because he was a man of some notoriety, I was able to find an article about him and Laura in a 1943 issue of the Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society, as well as mention of him and his family in a book entitled Owen County, Kentucky: History and Families. From these and a few other sources, I have been able to glean quite a bit of fascinating information about Thomas B. Ford, but no hints that he had left behind an illegitimate child in Owen County.
The search for DNA evidence of paternity was my next step. Our Tom Ford did marry and by this wife had a son named Ellis, who died as a young adult without leaving any known children behind. Laura Ford married late in life and does not appear to have had any children, either. Tom and Laura were Harbin Ford's children by his second wife. Fortunately, Harbin's daughter Elizabeth by his first wife has had a long string of progeny, the lines of which I have traced down well into the 20th century. Ancestry DNA came to the rescue here, yielding two living cousin matches: One a half 5th cousin (male) and the other a half 4th cousin once removed (female), both descendants of Tom's half-sister Elizabeth!
These DNA matches constitute my first concrete piece of evidence that Thomas Benton Ford may be my 3rd great-grandfather. At the very least, it appears I have located the family of the mysterious Tom Ford. Research continues.
Recent L.A. Jamboree and upcoming Sacramento German Conference
A couple of weeks ago, I made one of my customary treks to the Los Angeles area to visit family and sneak in some research at the L.A. Central Library, one of my favorite haunts (see my article about it in the California Genealogical Society blog: The Genealogy Collection at Los Angeles Central Library). My time was limited, but I had to go check out the feted Genealogy Jamboree that was taking place in Burbank. I signed up for their free sessions on Friday morning, which were terrific, and had a chance to peruse the society and merchant booths.
Besides the free Friday sessions, Jamboree has a free mobile app that is very similar to the one that Roots Tech has. Like the Roots Tech app, you can use the Jamboree app to download all of the handouts from Jamboree sessions, whether or not you paid for or attended any of them! It's important to keep in mind that both Roots Tech and Jamboree make the handouts available for personal use only!
This coming weekend is especially exciting for many of us who do German genealogical research, because we will be enjoying the International German Genealogy Conference, which is being held in Sacramento, only a 2-hour drive from home! Of course, I will be writing about it on this very blog!
Annie
"Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei (Everything has an end, only the sausage has two)." -- German expression
A couple of weeks ago, I made one of my customary treks to the Los Angeles area to visit family and sneak in some research at the L.A. Central Library, one of my favorite haunts (see my article about it in the California Genealogical Society blog: The Genealogy Collection at Los Angeles Central Library). My time was limited, but I had to go check out the feted Genealogy Jamboree that was taking place in Burbank. I signed up for their free sessions on Friday morning, which were terrific, and had a chance to peruse the society and merchant booths.
Besides the free Friday sessions, Jamboree has a free mobile app that is very similar to the one that Roots Tech has. Like the Roots Tech app, you can use the Jamboree app to download all of the handouts from Jamboree sessions, whether or not you paid for or attended any of them! It's important to keep in mind that both Roots Tech and Jamboree make the handouts available for personal use only!
This coming weekend is especially exciting for many of us who do German genealogical research, because we will be enjoying the International German Genealogy Conference, which is being held in Sacramento, only a 2-hour drive from home! Of course, I will be writing about it on this very blog!
Annie
"Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei (Everything has an end, only the sausage has two)." -- German expression
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