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Posts Tagged ‘family tree’

Switching Gears – Family History

Posted in genealogy, tagged , , , , , , on November 24, 2025| 5 Comments »

Switching Gears

I am gearing up for the last “pop-up“ market of the season while other people are gearing up for the big food event. My studio is littered with papers, feathers (yes, feathers), binders, acrylics, markers, and a few Christmas gifts that need to be wrapped and shipped. I have parsley hanging to dry, the last of the garden harvest I will hang this year. I am using this “down” time to catch up on genealogy.

My genealogy has waited for decades to be digitized. I’m not getting younger, and my memory is starting to fade. I have a pretty decent family tree started but I want to get done with the scanning and converting all my files to digital. Photos, old letters, old land deeds, and typewritten memories from my ancestors who also dabbled in family history. Get done with that, then convert my husband’s paperwork to digital.

Whew – I have a lifetime of work ahead of me. At least enough to fill the winter months for the foreseeable future.

I have already scanned all the deeds my mother collected whenever she happened to visit Wisconsin where her people were from. Mom did a lot of leg work, and I am reaping the benefits. She concentrated on the “newest” Americans: the Melrose clan. She never got into the Scotland roots, but I can understand why: every other son was named Phillip or John.

Phillip Melrose begat John Melrose who immigrated to the Americans before the American Civil War. John moved to Wisconsin and sired Phillip George Melrose. Phillip George sired two sons: Dale and John Vaughn Phillip Melrose. Phillip – John – Phillip – John. Dale died when he was young (see Letters From Dale in my archives). John VP Melrose fathered three girls, no sons: Phyllis, Donna, and Mary Lou (my mother). Phyllis was the closest he came to naming another child Phillip.

Mary Lou Melrose 1952
Mary Lou Melrose 1952

That original immigrant bought and sold quite a bit of land in Wisconsin and Illinois.

I came across some deeds that seemed to have nothing to do with my family line: A patent deed to Mary Eliza Drury (1878), Ormal Walker to Harvey Hakes (1889), and Preston King to Hiram Walker ((1860). That latter one is truly a puzzle, but I will get to it in a moment. It was the deed from Hakes to Walker that finally helped me figure it out (I think) because I have a second deed from Harvey Hakes to Phillip Melrose. Same property.

My hypothesis is this: instead of a “Title Search” as we know it in modern real estate transactions, the original deed was presented to the buyer as proof that the seller had the right to sell. I couldn’t find a deed from Drury to Melrose or Walker to Melrose, but those could simply be missing. Things got lost when Mom passed in 1995 or maybe she never acquired those deeds. Makes sense to me.

It doesn’t explain the original land deed from Preston King to Hiram Walker, signed by the 84th President of the United States. On parchment, hand signed, with a seal. Preston King was deeded the land after the Black Hawk War (a nasty piece of history). He was a private who served under Captain Campbell’s Illinois Militia.

I framed it. It has been folded and stored incorrectly for decades. I think it deserves wall space and maybe one day I will solve the mystery surrounding why I own it.

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DNA, Genealogy, and The Vortex

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 23, 2018| Leave a Comment »

I have a group of friends who do genealogy for their families: we refer to the activity, and one particular genealogy site, as “The Vortex”. Once you start, you are inexorably sucked into the web of surnames, birthdates, marriages, deaths, wars, deeds done, and – especially for those of us in the New World – the mystery of our mixed DNA.

I mean, is there really a Cherokee Princess hidden in the 1800’s marriage records? Perhaps we’re Jewish? Was a slave hidden somewhere in our checkered past? Maybe, like the famed Alex Haley, we just want to know how we got here: what slavers, what tribes, what horrors?

I inherited a lot of previously researched material, hand-written or typed and carbon copied (yes, with real carbon paper). Old correspondence. Pages of family history that reads a lot like the book of Genesis: “so-and-so begat and he begat and he married her and they begat…” Cousins. Direct lines. Dates. Some word-of-mouth stories. Legends.

I tried to do a family tree when I was in the 6th or 7th grade, possibly the 8th grade. We came on the Mayflower, there was Native American blood (possibly a Canadian tribe), we fought in the American Revolution, John Brown of Harper’s Ferry was a distant cousin (but close enough to be uncomfortable), we possibly helped on the Underground Railroad, and the Scots side of the family was a latecomer (18060’s)to the USA.

Going through family names and working my way back through the reams of documents and the leaves of hints on Ancestry.com (being careful to weed out those that don’t match – you do have to watch those hints like a hawk!), I could find no Native American. I found English, Dutch, Irish, Scots. Ysseltyns, Van Ysseltyns, Van Esseltyns, and Van der somebody all down one line. Only Melrose (Scots) and Cusick (Irish) for the two heritages I was told my DNA consisted the most of (the most vociferous and latest additions to the family tree). I learned bits of Irish Gaelic from my father, bastardized by his distance from those who actually spoke the tongue. My mother recalled nothing of the Scots, but carried the surname for which we are proud: Melrose.

I can’t even find a tartan for Melrose, which was apparently a lowland Scots name as the Melrose Abbey (wherein Robert the Bruce’s heart is entombed. Think Braveheart).

Truth be told, I haven’t tried to cross The Pond to trace the family line when so much of my heritage is here in the Continental USA. And before I go any further, I am not a Nationalist. My people came here as immigrants, escaping religious persecution, and they established colonies. They married, had children, fought in the American Revolution (on the winning side), pushed westward to Illinois, and fought on the Yankee side of the American Civil War. Only one ancestor – to my present knowledge – participated in any war against Native Americans, and he fought in the Black Hawk War of 1832. He received a land plot for which I hold the original deed, signed by President James Buchanan.

All that aside, I took a DNA test to see where I came from. There’s no Native American. That bit about some Canadian Indian beauty just slipped right through the cracks. No color of any, truth be told: I’m strictly Northern European, English, Irish, Scandinavian.

Specifically: 92% England, Wales, Northwestern Europe. Most of that DNA is Wales & England. 3% Ireland & Scotland. 3% Germanic Europe (probably all those Dutch surnames). 2% Norway.

England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland – those are all countries that were invaded by the Normans (France, more or less) and the Vikings (the Danish, although one could speculate Norwegians as well, since Viking was not a nationality). Just within England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, there was a lot of raiding, raping, pillaging, and – well, there you are.

I’m just freaking pasty white. My ancestry is as old as this country has been a nation, yet I am still a newcomer here. We pushed as far as the Midwest, not migrating any further until the early 1900’s. We arrived on the Mayflower (and before that infamous ship), settled across Connecticut, migrated into Illinois.

I am so sorry I started looking into this family tree stuff again, because I am suddenly finding more “leaves” sprouting on the limbs. The Vortex is sucking me in. I want to trace every family line back as far as I can get before I pay for the International version and start looking overseas. It’s addicting. A little research and you feel the blood of all those women who came before you flowing through your veins.

If you don’t, you’re not truly doing the research. Those women – and men – birthed who you are.

(Sorry, not editing, so this is probably a bit rambling. Sue me.)

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