The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-And-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors Read Online Free PDF

Tennessee to southwest Missouri. It was preserved in the manuscript division at the University of Missouri at Rolla. I sent for a copy.

    Figure 1-5 Maps of southwest Missouri, 1831 county boundaries. Greene County was organized in 1833 and was about one hundred miles southwest of Crawford.
    Entry from 15 February 1831: “It continued to snow this day and yesterday a little. This day most intolerable cold. We proceeded on traveling six or eight miles. We met Joseph H. Miller and Lemuel Blanton coming to meet us. Great joy.”
    Joseph Rountree knew the two men who had welcomed him. Therefore, they must have come from Maury County, Tennessee. Once I had that connection and a specific place to look, I could turn to the more traditional genealogical records for more pieces to the puzzle.
    Lemuel Blanton was the son of John D. Blanton, who died in Maury County, Tennessee, leaving a number of children (note that Lemuel's eldest son was John D.). Lemuel had always retained his Tennessee ties, and after his first wife's death, he had returned to Tennessee to marry on 20 July 1839 in adjoining Williamson County, Martha Nicholson. Martha was the sister of the wife of William Blanton, Lemuel's brother. Williamson County was also the home of Lemuel's first wife's family, the Rogerses, and they were among the other families of the area that moved to southwest Missouri. Everything fell into place once the right clue surfaced. The connections were all as they should have been.
    When you take the steps outlined in this problem-solving strategy, one of two circumstances arises. You either hit a dead end as I did with Lemuel in Texas, or the trail becomes wider, the clues more prevalent, the light brighter, and the direction clearer. You know you are on the right track.
    If a dead end occurs, you return to step one and reexamine what you know. If no clear direction emerges, then basic knowledge and assumptions must be questioned, and perhaps a new hypothesis devised. Either the researcher must reanalyze the records already found for clues that were overlooked — as I did with the marriage location and justice of the peace — and/or obtain more pertinent information, as I was able to do with the Rountree diary.
The Phillips Family of Boone County, Missouri
    One more case will illustrate this strategy for solving genealogical problems before we move to specific types of problems in the later chapters. The Phillips family well illustrates a common downfall for so many genealogical researchers, even very experienced ones. Experienced genealogists research the entire family, including the collateral families they are able to identify, as well as the neighbors. They examine all the records they can find, but they still hit a dead end. Their failure results either from neglecting to investigate a faint glimmer of a light that, with just a little more energy, could have become a beacon, or from neglecting to put the records in the context of a community, rather than just in the context of a family.
    Descendants of the Phillips family of Boone County, Missouri, had searched for the family's origins for many years with no success. Hiram, John Y., and Warner Phillips were early settlers in the area of Missouri Territory that became Boone County in 1821. Using family records, land records, associations, newspaper clippings, probate files, and published nineteenth- or early twentieth-century local history books (sometimes known as “mug books”), the family had deduced that the three men were brothers and that Jane Huddleston was their sister.
    The family had accumulated a great many records and I found no reason to believe that their research was faulty. From their work, the family configuration appeared as follows.
What do we know?
    John Y. Phillips was born about 1789, probably in Virginia, as he was apparently the eldest and both his brothers were born there; died of typhoid fever on 24 September 1847 in Boone County, Missouri; married Margaret