It's Saturday Night, time for some Genealogy Fun after your frustrating week of finding phantom ancestors in online family trees and trying to keep up with everybody on Twitter, Facebook and Genealogy Wise.
Here is your assignment for this Saturday Night (if you decide to accept it, of course - you can't have fun if you don't try):
1) Let's go time travelling: Decide what year and what place you would love to visit as a time traveller. Who would you like to see in their environment? If you could ask them one question, what would it be?
2) Tell us about it. Write a blog post, or make a comment to this post, or on Facebook, or in Genealogy Wise.
Now, let's see . . . the first thing I have to decide is if I'm going to go with the obvious and ask questions of a brick-walled ancestor or if I'm going to interview one of my more illustrious ancestors. I actually think that I'm going to go with someone that I think is a little more interesting and might have answers and a very interesting story about the brick wall on his line since he's not quite so far removed from it. You see, Stephen Taylor told some interesting stories about his life and adventures in The Good Old Times in McLean County, Illinois which is available full-text in Google books. You'll find his account starting on page 839 and running through page 845.
Stephen's father died too early for him to really hear very many stories first-hand, but he lived near relatives and associates who probably told him all about his father, grandfather, and about their journey to what was then Ohio County, Virginia. His mother and father were married in Washington County, Ohio. The family lived in nearby counties. Stephen himself married in Morgan County. My question to Stephen sometime around the year 1840 would simply be a very open-ended question: Tell me about your Taylor family. He was residing in McLean County, Illinois by that time. Now, I'm taking a chance by asking him that because he could go just about any direction he wished, but being the storyteller that he appears to be, I'm sure that I would get some stories that would help me to positively match his father Stephen who was born in 1780 in New York with the correct Isaac Taylor, his grandfather, who was born ca. 1750. I have a sneaky suspicion that Isaac was born in the Berkshires and migrated along with the Rathbones down to Ohio County, Virginia by way of New York. It's really a shame that I've been unable to locate any service records for his father Stephen who supposedly enlisted in the war of 1812 "at the last call for volunteers" and died of disease in Detroit.
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