Family and Friends Newsletter Friday 15 January 2010

Blogs

- Nancy at My Ancestors and Me recommended the short story “Little Selves” by Mary Lerner – interesting reading, especially for anyone who writes down their memories and has to try to call up those memories and remember how they thought and perceived things at the time.

Transcribing

Two more Henry Lewis articles transcribed.

Research

Norman

This was a big week for Norman research. First, my copy of Garland County Arkansas: Our History and Heritage arrived. It contains an article on my great-great grandfather, Joseph Madison Carroll Norman as well as a few articles on associated families.

Second, I actually managed to finish up basic research on the family of Thomas Frank Norman (the brother, not the son, of my great-grandfather William Henry “Jack” Norman), and this winds up the children of JMC Norman and Rebecca Monk. Next come the children of JMC Norman and Mary Patterson, his second wife. Over the past couple of years my Norman research on JMC’s descendants has continually been hijacked when I get sidetracked by other families. Now this research has been sidetracked a bit by JMC’s own ancestors.

I had seen online genealogies connecting JMC’s father Thomas Norman to a line that goes back to an Isaac Norman of Culpepper, Virginia, but I didn’t know how reliable they were. However, a couple of things have now reversed this thinking. Some random Ancestry and Google searches (just to make sure I had covered all bases) on Joseph MC Norman and JMC Norman turned up an earlier JMC Norman: on the 1830 census for Perry Co., Alabama (my JMC was born in 1833), on an early tax record (indicating that he was a fish dealer; there is another Norman somewhere who was both a fish dealer and a farmer), and in a marriage record with Zella Rogers. Then the article in the Garland County book also gave JMC’s father’s middle name as Stapler – that is one of the families I have seen connected to this family in the extended genealogies. Some digging around produced online transcriptions of the wills of these people, and JMC (the older one) is mentioned in them. With everything put together, this line appears to be legitimate (of course I’ll have to track down the actual documents and verify it). The earlier JMC is the father of my JMC’s father Thomas. Since I already refer to the later JMC as JMC Sr., I am now referring to his grandfather as JMC Sr. Sr. On the Zella Rogers above, I believe she was the second wife of JMC Sr. Sr.; his first wife was Elizabeth Stapler – the histories say she died by 1823, and I think that the marriage record with Zella Rogers would push that date back to before 1815.

Brinlee

Through Genealogy Wise I have been contacted by a descendant of Margaret Leake Brinlee, the oldest sister of my great-grandfather Hiram Carroll Brinlee, Jr.