Merry Christmas
I have shared this photo before, but it makes me think of Christmas when my mother was a young girl. Pictured are Estella Smith, my great-grandmother, and her father, my 2nd great-grandfather, John M. Vorhies. She remembers the day as would her siblings, the parents of my cousins.
Sometimes, especially when I am tired and just sitting around relaxing, I grab my ipad and surf around a little in Ancestry blogs, in on-line research sites and just read random genealogy articles here and there. I have no plan other than to fill time avoiding whatever task I should be doing. Obviously, I am following none of the advice I have learned in good genealogy research.
This is the accidental way I found the ship manifest of the May 1892 arrival of the ship, Oldenburg, into Baltimore from Bremen, Germany with my husband's grandfather, his first wife and two children listed. This was a fabulous discovery which ran contrary to family lore.
Now, I have made another fluke discovery. I have not been working on my blog for several reasons. (O.K. here come the excuses.) I declared in August that Cousins was going on hiatus. It was not my intention to be absent for so long. Several trips, both large and small, as well as some health issues have interrupted the flow of stimulating prose authored by yours truly. Or I could simply comfess that the dog ate my homework.
So, what might this discovery be?
One of the genealogy blogs I read, even when I am not writing, is called Empty Branches on the Family Tree. Its author is Linda Stuffelbean, and I don't think the dog ever ate her homework. She inspires me.
While surfing around randomly one day with no goal in mind, I read one of her posts in which she was discussing the move of a family in her husband's ancestry from Northampton, Pennsylvania to Botetourt County, Virginia. I vaguely remember my Grisso research shows the Grisso family in that area. I started wondering if it was the same time period and if so what if some of our ancestors knew some of the ancestors current genealogist follow. Populations were much smaller back then. I thought it might be a fun exercise to compare dates and speculate about these possible encounters.
Before any of that happened, I read on in Linda's post and was amazingly surprised at a name that appeared in her research. The name was Polly Gresso whose father was Mathias Gresso of Botetourt County, Virginia. Polly had married a Mr. Martin Miller.
Now I have an ancestor named Polly Grisso, daughter of Mathias Grisso of Botetourt County, Virginia who married a Mr. Martin Miller. It must be a spelling error from Grisso to Gresso. There couldn't be another family with a Polly and Mathias who married Martin Miller, could there?
Now I have a project and a mystery to solve.
Stay tuned.
