On Top of the Blue Ridge

Did your ancestors migrate through the beautiful Shenandoah Valley along the Great Warrior Trail? For many years the valley was a major route for migration and travel between Pennsylvania and North Carolina. This 1751 map shows dramatically how the mountains in Virginia limited westward migration and controlled the direction of travel. Today Interstate 81 parallels the old trails.

Map from Library of Congress

Some of your ancestors, like Thomas Jefferson and like some of mine, may have chosen to live in the Shenandoah Valley or surrounding mountains. Whenever I drive through that area, the beauty awes me and I understand their choice.

Soon, for the first time in his life, my younger brother will spend a few days in the magnificence of the lower Shenandoah. If you are a cousin, do read on to see if one of our shared ancestors lived in this beautiful area. Someday you might even wish to follow the trail yourself.

So, brother, this post is for you!





Near the orange marker at Glen Wilton, John Derrick owned land and it was the area where he died about 1790. It is also where he married Anna Maria Dunkelberger. Here Philip Fry married Maria Magdalena Derrick in 1781. The Fry family migrated on to Tennessee and Alabama. Philip had 25 children and many of our DNA matches are from this line in my father's ancestry.

Switching to my mother's family, the dark red marker is in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, formerly Greenbrier County. Members of the Greaton family were taxed in this area. David Greaton moved on to Ohio and Illinois. His daughter Elizabeth married Lazarus Maddox in Ohio in 1816.

Also in Greenbrier County, John Kelly was born about 1779. He moved on to Tennessee where his  great-granddaughter married Benjamin Franklin Pryor.

The dark pink marker is at the community of Hanging Rock. In this area a large group of Swiss Anabaptists made their home near the end of the 1700s. Today this group is known as Church of the Brethren. Our ancestors and relatives who settled here included members of the following families: Peffley, Rettinger, Gerst/Garst, Bosseck, Graybill, Borndragar, Mangus, and many more. My ancestors moved on to Indiana and Kansas, but many family members stayed in Virginia.

Lastly the purple marker sits near the stunning Blue Ridge Parkway. Nicholas Allee in 1797 was granted 38 acres that adjoined land he already owned. The land is partially described as

... Lying and being in the County's of Montgomery, and Franklin, the greater part thereof, in the County of Montgomery on the dividing Ridge, including the heads of Daniel's Run, the waters of Black water, and bounded ... top of said ridge ...

What amazes me about this grant is that it specifically mentions the Blue Ridge (dividing ridge) and lists the watercourses in a way that the land can be identified within a few miles. The counties no longer have a common line, as Floyd County was carved out of Montgomery County in 1831. The creek named Daniel's Run no longer appears to begin at the Blue Ridge, but its probable course can be seen on topographical maps. Using Deed Mapper software to determine the shape of the property and researching the watercourses,  I believe that it included land that today is part of the Blue Ridge Parkway, including milepost 144.8, the Pine Spur Overlook. I'm looking forward to visiting this site and seeing what my ancestors saw. 

Nicholas Allee died in 1808 and his descendants moved on to Kentucky, Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas. His legacy lives on in hundreds of descendants and his land enchants thousands of visitors to the Blue Ridge each year.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: #20 Christian Peter Bosseck and the Year Without Summer

Why would a parent indenture a baby? Ever since a cousin shared the indenture of Christian Peter Bosseck, that question has nagged at me. I can't find the original record, so I won't share exactly what I've been told. If the Botetourt County records are filmed or preserved in the future, I hope to find and share that indenture.

But let's assume that the researcher shared a true transcription and that the 18-month-old Christian Bosseck was indeed indentured to Jacob Peter in December of 1816.

For some years I've been vaguely aware that 1816 was known as "The Year Without Summer." I've identified some migrations in my family history that happened in 1816 and 1817. Just recently I've learned much more about the impacts of that awful year.

A dramatic book cover caught my eye while I was wandering in a bookstore. It's "The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History," by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman. It's not a hard book, nor is it an easy one. If you see marriages, deaths and migrations in your family history in 1816-1817, you may want to check this book out at your local library. The authors have written about events in the British Isles, Europe, Canada and the United States, as well as the damage and destruction in Indonesia.

In the United States, the summer of 1816 brought crop failures, cold weather and drought. I can imagine that the parents of young Christian Bosseck might not have been able to feed him or their other children. Jacob Peter was a man of some substance in Botetourt County, Virginia. Indenturing Christian may have been his parents' best hope for saving him from starvation.

Christian Bosseck showed up in Montgomery County, Indiana, when he married Elizabeth Rettinger on August 23, 1838. Elizabeth was part of a community of Swiss-Americans who were known as German Baptists, now Church of the Brethren. Members of the community had migrated from eastern Pennsylvania down into the area of Roanoke, Virginia, then to the area of Ladoga, Indiana.

Christian was a farmer and a minister. He and Elizabeth migrated on from Indiana, through Illinois, to Kansas. Again, there was a family community who settled together in Labette County, Kansas.

The Bossecks had eight children, losing two sons in the Civil War and two others as children. Another son served in the Civil War and never married. Two daughters and one son married and gave them grandchildren who soon spread through Kansas and beyond.

Quick drop page from Comfort Zone, ClubScrap

Christian died in 1896 and Elizabeth in 1892. They are buried together in Elston Cemetery, near Altamont in Labette County.

Genealogical Serendipity

SERENDIPITY: the phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for

I believe in genealogical serendipity -- it's happened to me more than once. Today I'd like to take you on a trip back to the technologically different days of the year 2000 when serendipity came to me in a big way.

In 2000, there were no smart phones and no tablets. Most people used desktop computers, as laptops were expensive. PDAs like my Palm Pilot were more common and I had a pager. Remember pagers? If you did have a laptop, internet and e-mail access from a hotel meant using a slow dial-up connection. From our perspective in 2013, that seems like the technology middle-ages!

That year, I spent a week in a hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in mid-December. Ice and snow turned driving into a nightmare. Waking to six inches of snow one gloomy morning, I opted to take a vacation day. The company computers were behaving nicely, and I had my work laptop and pager and cell phone if the boss needed me to dial in for a crisis.

How would I spend the next 16 hours? The vast wasteland of daytime TV was not attractive, especially with the hotel's limited channels. So I decided to trudge through personal e-mail folders and do some clean up.

You know all those e-mails you plan to read someday? The newsletters on crafting, genealogy, technology, business, or home design. Everyone wants to send us newsletters and they just pile up. I use filters on my e-mail -- behind the scenes Yahoo looks at the subject or the sender and drops new email into folders for me. I don't even see many newsletters unless I look at the folder.

That day I decided to just start at the newest genealogy newsletter and go back in time. I opened one, skimmed it, checked any interesting links, then deleted it. Rinse and repeat. After just a few, I saw an item that stopped me.

A gentleman named Jeff had created a website that was an electronic copy of an old family book on the Pefley family. Hmmm. I had seen that name before. I looked at the family tree that I carried in my Palm Pilot and there it was. A family member (a collateral line) had married a Pefley. I did want to find the death and burial information for the parents of Mary Hannah Bosseck Pefley.

These books on a particular surname are very hit and miss, but I had time. That slow dial-up made the website unusable. I e-mailed Jeff and he kindly sent me a copy in Word format right away.

Paydirt 

I searched for the name Bosseck inside the book and was puzzled at the first find.

• [person] 663 -- Elizabeth Rettinger (dau. of No. 7) married ... Christian Peter Bosseck (see No. 1424). Issue ... Mary Hannah Bosseck ... (Perhaps others).

Wait a minute. Why is Elizabeth Rettinger in here as a daughter of someone and where are all the other Bosseck children? I'm just looking for information on Mary and her husband. I remember my utter bafflement. I searched for the next match on Bosseck.

• [person] 1424 -- George Mangus Pefley (son of No. 1324) married ... Mary Hannah Bosseck ... (see No. 663) ...

My head was spinning. I went back and forth between the two, the only references to Bosseck in the book. Finally I took out a piece of paper and started to draw a bit of a tree, following the son of ... and daughter of ... links to parents and beyond.

The Tree Grows

When I reached the top, I was amazed. I had five new generations to add to my tree. I, myself, was a descendant of Nicholas Pefley, person number one in the book. Mary had married her second cousin once removed!

I had not been looking for anything other than where Mary had died so that I could find her grave and maybe an obituary. I was looking simply for the graves of her parents, my 4th great-grandparents.

Not only did the book provide a place of death for Mary and five new generations, it also yielded a Revolutionary war veteran (DAR-worthy) and an understanding of the ethnic and religious roots of this Swiss-German branch of my family, along with their migration patterns.

I visited Mary's grave in eastern Kansas the following year. The graves of her parents, my ancestors, are two markers away from hers.

Pefley photo courtesy of Julie Wollard Trout. Recollections digital kit by Joanne Brisebois Designs for Digital Scrapper (formerly Scrapper's Guide)

 

 

The Cycle Continues

I added Mary's husband's ancestors to my database, as well as my own ancestors. That recently paid off. I was able to suggest this book to another person to further their research on one of George Pefley's ancestors named Graybill.

Thanks to a miserable snow day and a genealogy newsletter, serendipity brought me a book I would likely have never looked at otherwise. And serendipity allowed me to pass it on when I saw the name Graybill and the location Ladoga, Indiana, in the tree of another researcher.

Watch for those gifts -- I know the universe has some for each of us.