52 ancestors in 52 weeks
Here is a challenge initiated by Amy Johnson Crow
At her website Amy Johnson Crow states:
You’ve worked hard on your genealogy. You’ve made some fantastic discoveries. But what do you actually do with it? Those discoveries don’t do much good just sitting in your file cabinet or on your computer. That’s where 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks comes in.”
As the holidays are over and we enter a new year, it is time for new beginnings. I think Amy’s suggestions for writing about ancestors are great inspirations to bring our genealogy a step further.
I joined this challenge and just received the first email from Amy with lots of interesting input to get the creativity flowing. As I plan to write a lot about genealogy anyway, I may not be doing the challenge every week.
Amy mentiones several ways to share your writing. If you would like to share your writing with the internet community, I am happy to publish it on this blog. While it is interesting for us to learn about the ancestor you have got a lot of information about, it might be writing about an ancestor that you don’t know much about that brings you the greatest rewards. Having the names published online and picked up by the search engines, might make connections you never knew about. One example is how I “met” my cousin Janet Swanson. You can read her story in Crossing oceans – bridging my heritage.
If you find this interesting, head on over to Amy Johnson Crow’s blog and join the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge.
Martin,
That’s quite a challenge! And I might just try it. Here’s one, who happens not to be Norwegian. My gg grandfather Moses Jewett was b. in, probably, either Massachusetts or New Hampshire; his father was, I think, Enoch Jewett, b. 1757, and his mother, Lydia Pike. One story I have about Moses is that he served with George Washington at Valley Forge during the winter when they nearly starved. Washington sent Moses and others from New England back to that area to collect maple sugar for the troops. During that trip, they passed through Hollis, Hillsborough County, New Hampshire. Moses decided then that after the war, he would return and settle there. I can’t prove this lovely story, but in 1812, he married a woman named Eunice Andrews, b. 1792, place and parentage unknown, in Hollis. They had two sons in Hollis, and sometime after 1814, they moved to the frontier town of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio; another child was born there in 1816. Their final child was my g grandmother, Eunice Jewett (we call her jr. to distinguish her from her mother) in 1828. The mother died in 1835; Moses remarried to Adaline Athearn, who had Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, background, in 1835. Moses died in 1850; Adaline long outlived him.
My challenge with Moses is finding his connection to the family of Maximilian Jewett, a native of West Riding, Yorkshire, a Puritan, who came with a group and their minister to Essex County, Massachusetts in or about 1638. They founded the town of Rowley in 1639. Tracking the Jewetts, who mostly descend from Maximilian and his brother, is very complex because first names got repeated, and they intermarried with the same families. For instance, in the 1850 census, my g grandmother, Eunice Jewett, was living in Iowa with an Enoch Jewett, his wife, and their children. This Enoch appears to be an uncle to my g grandmother, and thus a brother to Moses. So far I haven’t proved that, either.
Can anybody help? I do have a copy of the book of the 1909 Jewett Family History, @2017, but it doesn’t appear to include new research that would help much.
Hello Doris
Thanks for visiting my blog and thanks for sharing your story. Very interesting! I am sorry that I am not able to help you with this one. Hopefully someone will pick up on it and be able to help you.
You must be doing SOME work on those 52 ancestors, Martin. Especially now that you have discovered that Inger Lise and I are cousins! And closer in relationship than you and me!
Hello cousin
Actually, Inger Lise had this one branch on her family tree that she had not work much on. As we recently had a question from another family memeber I sat down and filled in some blanks and suddenly my genealogy software made a connection we were not aware of. Great fun!