I’ve been working on the family of my great, great grandmother, Elizabeth Bennett (1849-1914), who married Josiah Randolph Coppenbarger (1844-1934). I had previously found her brother, Ephraim P Bennett (abt 1841-?), listed as a prisoner in the 1900 census. I looked at the record more closely and realized it was the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri. Online, I found that their records are located at the Missouri State Archives. Last night I watched this season’s first episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?” with Cynthia Nixon via DVR. She traces her female ancestor to the Missouri State Penitentiary!...
As I discussed in Part 1 about Lena, I found that the land being sold and partitioned between 32 members of my family originally belonged to Lena R. Tremlett. But, I’ve never heard of Lena. I decided to search for her on Ancestry and see what I could find. When I searched for Lena R. Tremlett in Missouri, I came up with 4 good hits – 3 death records and an 1880 census. The 1880 census is for John Tremlett, who appears to be running a hotel & whose occupation is listed as rooms provider (unsure of second word), and...
In my GRIP Intermediate Genealogy course last week, Debbie Mieszala discussed Chronicling America in her class about newspaper research. I decided to do a search for one of my more unusual surnames, Coppenbarger, and I got an interesting hit. I found an article that listed not only my Coppenbarger’s, but also some Randolph’s and other names I recognized. I still haven’t tracked down all of the names, but I have done enough to realize that they are children and grandchildren of my fourth great grandparents, William Randolph (1792 in VA – 1867 in IL) & Matilda Kearns/Keeran (1796 in NC –...
Today’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge by Randy over at GeneaMusings is to play Ahnentafel Roullete. The ‘rules’ are as follows… What year was one of your great-grandfathers born? Divide this number by 80 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your “roulette number.” Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ancestral name list (some people call it an “ahnentafel” – your software will create this – use the “Ahnentafel List” option, or similar). Who is that person, and what are his/her vital...