52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 9 (March 8-14)
Prompt: Name's the Same#52ancestors
You wouldn't
think there would be too many men named Abraham McCarley. However, in many cultures it is tradition to
name the oldest son after the paternal grandfather and the second son after the
maternal grandfather. That can sometimes
be a good clue in linking generations together. But if a man has 4 sons and all
4 sons name their oldest son after the grandfather, there could be as many as 5
men with the same name in the same area.
How do you
separate out the men and decide which
facts go with which man? I started with
finding out who each man was married to and finding an approximate birth date. Any stray facts that didn't belong to a
known Abraham went into a different column in my Excel spreadsheet. In the beginning, I had 7 different Abraham
columns. Gradually by using a timeline, I was able to move facts from three of
the columns to the other columns, narrowing my Abrahams down to just four. All of them lived in the same general area, and
moved to the next area. Sometimes their moves were as much as 5 or 6 years
apart. Sorting out the land records were
easy when the wife was named with the husband, but some of the land records did
not name the wife. Some of the owners of land were only determined when they
died and I could see which son the land was passed to or if the wife was named
in the will.
One record
which I will probably never be able to assign to a particular Abraham is a
newspaper article in Maury County, TN.
It states that Abraham McCarley took up a brown horse and was
advertising for it's owner. In Maury County at that time, lived Abraham Sr. and
his son, Abraham Jr. as well as Abraham, Sr's grandson, Abraham (son of Thomas
T). It probably wasn't the son of Thomas
T as he was only about 13 at the time. But was it Abraham Sr or Abraham Jr.?
Any time I
have trouble sorting out a genealogy problem, I resort to Excel. If you haven't used it to solve a problem
yet, I recommend it.
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