Ancestors and Family Stories

  Week 21: In The Cemetery – Starr Family In 2018 my wife and I bought a 120 year old farm house in Prairie Village, Johnson County, Kansas.   Not only do we love the house, but we wanted to find out what we could about the family who first owned the farm 160 years ago, and 39 years later, in 1900, built the house we now call home. After visiting Johnson County Courthouse to view titles and deeds and examining two old maps (1878 and 1922) with landowners names on them we found that the original farm owner was a widow by the name of Nancy Hunt Starr. We found the Federal Census of 1860 showed the family of Jacob and Nancy Starr living in Jackson County, Missouri, about 15 miles from where our house is today. Since finding no record of Jacob after 1860 our assumption is he must have died between the Jun 4, 1860 Federal Census and Nancy buying 80 acres for the new family farm on Oct 9, 1861. Nancy died in 1890 and left the family farm to her son, Walter O. Starr. Walter owned the fa

  Week 20: Cousin Bait – Joe Takacs, Linda_L, and Margaret_L Although I have been developing my family tree, my wife’s family tree, and some trees for close friends for over twenty years, I have not run into the term “cousin bait” until this year.   I learned that the purpose of cousin baiting is to attract research cousins. You're looking for people that have information on your genealogy and are willing to share. I have never purposely set out to bait people to contact me, but let me tell you three short stories where in retrospect, cousin baiting has worked out very well for me.   Joe Takacs – My father’s McLaughlin line I joined Ancestry in the 1990s. I discovered message boards and decided to go fishing with my first message in the year 2000. I simply stated that I was researching the McLaughlin, Ford, Cook, and Layton families, all of whom had lived in Manhattan, or in Brooklyn or Queens, on Long Island, New York during the last 150 years. I received nothing, not

  Week 19: Mother’s Day – My Three Mothers Three mothers?   My dad outlived three wives during his life of 99 years.   Mother’s Day always gives me pause to think about each one of these wonderful women and the positive effects each one of them has had on my life. Beth My mother was Elizabeth “Beth” Layton Cook, born in Queens, New York in 1911. She and my dad met in the string section of their community orchestra in Jamaica, New York in 1938. She was 27 and he was 30. She played the viola and he, the cello. They married in the Queens Reformed Church, on Jamaica Avenue in 1939. My dad would tell me later that it was a match made in heaven. Dad bought a small, new house in 1939 at 32 Lloyd Street in Hillside Heights, Nassau County on Long Island, New York. It was a perfect place for me to grow up. It had a back yard with a garden, a picket fence for me to walk along the top of, a sloping roof over the cellar stairs giving me direct access to the roof, and a big Sycamore tree

Week 18: Crime and Punishment   This is the story of my wife’s great grandfather, Matt H. Gormley. He was born in Delevan, Wisconsin in March 1867. His father, Henry Gormley, moved the family from Wisconsin to the boom town of Seattle in 1878. The Gormleys were accorded the status of pioneers in the new city first founded by the Arthur Denny Party in 1851 and incorporated 18 years later in 1869. By 1880, Seattle’s population was 3,500, tripling in size from a mere 1,100 in 1870. Henry Gormley was a very successful building contractor in the city and known by all. The well-off family even found themselves constantly featured in the Society sections of Seattle’s local newspapers. Matt Gormley graduated from the Washington Territorial University in 1886. He had enlisted from the cadets in a volunteer infantry company known as the Seattle Rifles. He moved up through the ranks and was a 1 st Lieutenant in the militia by the outbreak of the Spanish American War in 1898. His unit, Co