It's time for Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun , and this week's challenge is to post about our biggest wild-ancestor (goose) chase. Here are the instructions:
1) All
genealogists are human, and most of us have gone on wild ancestor
(goose) chases in our genealogy research career. What was one of the
wild ancestor chases in your research? Explain the situation and how
you (hopefully!) solved the puzzle.
2)
Tell us about your biggest genealogy wild ancestor (goose) chase in
your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.
Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.
One of my dearest friends is from east Tennessee, and is a member of the First Families of Franklin (FFF) lineage society. My mother's people are also from east Tennessee, in the same area as those of my friend, and I think it would be wonderful if I, too, can prove my lineage and join the FFF. The society recognizes descendants of residents of the proposed State of Franklin, which did not reach Congressional approval and died on the vine.
So my biggest "wild-ancestor" chase right now is trying to find evidence of my ancestor Teter Nave's family presence in east Tennessee in the requisite time period. I have been gathering land records for the area in east Tennessee's Carter County. There are several more records I need to obtain, then I need to transcribe and study all of them to see if the information I'm looking for actually exists.
I've been told that DeedMapper is good software for plotting land, especially using the metes and bounds method of land survey. That's the method that states land boundaries in terms of this rock or that post or yonder tree, none of which may have survived the three hundred years since the original survey that appears in these records.
The next step, of course, would be to use this information to apply for membership in the FFF.
If not the grandest "wild-ancestor" chase in my family history research, this one surely is the biggest in scope. I'm nowhere near solving this particular problem. I'll be working on it this year, in the middle of several other projects, most of them genealogical in one way or another.
I've had DeedMapper for years. it's an excellent program to plot out metes and bounds. It doesn't take long before you can work out where the next boundary line will be or when the clerk erred in recording the measurements!
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