Isaac Humphrey and his descendants in The Genealogist

More than ten years ago I heard a cliche come to life. On my first genealogical road trip (to Licking County, Ohio) I overheard a library visitor ask a genealogy society volunteer where the book of her family was kept.

A week ago the cliche came to life again, but in a much better way. The new Fall 2014 issue of The Genealogist arrived in our mailbox, and it included the first installment of a full account of the ancestors and relatives of my mother-in-law's great-grandmother Sarah Mehitabel Humphrey Coleman Bliss, researched and chronicled by William T. Ruddock of Michigan.

TG is published twice a year by the honorary scholarly American Society of Genealogists. Among other things it specializes in family accounts that are too long for any other magazine to consider. The descendants of Isaac Humphrey (1748-1829) are numerous and obscure and include multiple generations of men named Isaac. They gave my daughter and me multiple migraines when we struggled with the family back when we had fewer internet resources and less expertise.

Isaac's daughter Sarah married John Russell (4 children) and stayed around Stephentown, Rensselaer County, New York (a crossroads village for several lines of ancestors). Daughter Asenath married William Dixon (6 children) and went west to Lorain County, Ohio. Son Lemuel married Sarah Allen (6 children) and went north to Warren County, New York. Some of Lemuel and Sarah's children went to Wisconsin.

The article covers female lines to the grandchildren and male lines to the great-grandchildren. If the numbers of descendants in this first installment are typical, it may be a year before I get to see the whole "book" of this family, but it will be worth the wait.




William T. Ruddock, "Isaac6 Humphrey of Stephentown, New York, and His Descendants" [part 1], The Genealogist 28 (Fall 2014): 202-222.

Harold Henderson, "Isaac Humphrey and his descendants in The Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 October 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

January in Salt Lake: new workshop, new practicum case, new talk

Genealogists don't hibernate during the winter -- we go to Salt Lake City for the APG Professional Management Conference, immediately followed by the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy!

Here's where to find me speaking in Salt Lake City in January 2014:

• Friday afternoon January 10, as part of the Association of Professional Genealogists' Professional Management Conference, a workshop: "The Story of the Story of Jethro: The Making of an NGSQ Article." Registration for the PMC is cheaper if you sign up before January 6, if you are an APG member, and if you are a full-time undergraduate. (Check out our great lineup even if this workshop is not for you.)

A finished article in a top-tier genealogy publication normally shows some ways of cracking a tough research problem. But it necessarily omits much of the research, writing, editing, and agonizing that went into its creation. Workshop attendees will review and discuss the logic, structure, writing, omitted research, and more of a recent article in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. Not all professionals will write for NGSQ or similar publications, but the writing and thought habits needed for such articles make other genealogical writing and editing easier.

• Tuesday-Wednesday, January 14 and 15, as part of the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy's Advanced Evidence Practicum, a western Pennsylvania problem from the 1800s: analyze and correlate evidence to prove or disprove a family story and determine parentage. Don't be spooked: The early-bird discount for SLIG registration ends October 31! 

•  Tuesday evening, January 14, a talk open to the public as well as SLIG enrollees (for a fee): "Reading Genealogy: Why Not Follow the Best?" An introduction to and sampling of the five top genealogy publications: NEHGR, NYGBR, NGSQ, TAG, and The Genealogist. They're all hard-core, and they're all different.

I hope to see you there -- especially for the last one, where I'm scheduled against Judy Russell and Kimberly Powell!



Harold Henderson, "January in Salt Lake: new workshop, new practicum case, new talk," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, no. 1267, posted 27 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Recycle your writing!

One way to increase your writing output without adding a large amount of work time is to recast the underlying material into a different form. It occurred to me that -- in addition to news about the community (who got credentialed, which genealogy business has bought another), there are basically three kinds of genealogy writing:

(1) technical -- proving identities, relationships, and lineages. Usually this kind stands alone only when it's an especially difficult problem, or in a client report. But it is the foundation for everything else. Examples are in every issue of NGSQ, NYGBR, NEHGR, TAG, and The Genealogist. Each one may contain fragments of stories (#2 below), but they are only present insofar as they provide evidence to construct the proof.

(2) stories -- telling the life stories of ancestors and lineages. This is the stuff all genealogists and many non-genealogists crave, often even when the stories are terrible and sad. Without #1, the stories may get distorted or attached to the wrong people, but this is the payoff.

(3) instructional -- explaining how to accomplish #1 and #2. This is the meat of most popular genealogy magazines (the ones whose titles always start with a number), professional publications (like the APG Quarterly), many blogs (such as Kimberly Powell's at About.com, or Archives.com's expert series), and much of the traffic on genealogy mailing lists and social media discussions. Technology tips fit here too. (Theoretical articles, of which genealogy has few so far, are at the high end of this range.)

Of course all of these are far more valuable when they cite their sources.

Here's the point. Each family or part of a family provides material for all three kinds of writing. Years ago I found my Gedney ancestors on a New Orleans ship list from the 1840s, where their surname had been written "Kidney." That was a humble kind of technical finding (#1), and of course could play a part in an instructional article or talk (#3). But there are hints of stories there as well (#2): my recently wed great-great grandparents, William Flint and Mary Gedney, were on that cramped boat for two months with their extended family, and it seemed likely that her father bankrolled the emigration. Then again, I could tell those stories better if I did just a little more research . . .





Harold Henderson, “From England to St. Clair Via New Orleans: William and Mary Gedney Flint,” St. Clair County (Illinois) Genealogical Society Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2003):141-44.



Harold Henderson, "Recycle your writing!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Midwesterners in the latest Genealogist

The Genealogist, published twice yearly, is one of the less well known of the top five US genealogy publications. The Spring 2013 issue includes two articles chronicling Midwesterners -- and Marjean Holmes Workman's article makes a significant revision in the Burris family: "Robert James Burris" and his wife "Susan Rebecca Miller" were not two people but four -- brothers who married sisters. In this first of two segments, this family of Burrises inhabited at least nine Ohio counties (Franklin, Madison, Ross, Hardin, Fayette, Van Wert, Marion, Paulding, and "Piqua" [Pickaway!]), eight Indiana counties (Jay, Adams, Jefferson, Grant, Allen, Montgomery, Hamilton, and Henry), and one county in Iowa (Guthrie). It pays to keep up with the latest research!

In the first installment of Gale Ion Harris's account, the James and Lydia Waters family were mainly in Kentucky but also in Clermont (now Brown) County, Ohio, and Bureau County, Illinois.




Marjean Holmes Workman, "The Family of Joseph Burris[s] of Maryland and Madison County, Ohio: Discovering an Unrecorded Marriage," The Genealogist 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 51-74.

Gale Ion Harris, "Descendants of James1 and Lydia (Guyton) Waters of Harford County, Maryland: Ohio River Valley Families," The Genealogist 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 75-98.



Harold Henderson, "Midwesterners in the latest Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

"I" and "we" in genealogy writing

This year's Ohio Genealogical Society conference in Cincinnati sparked some good discussions, including one that came out of Ohio Genealogy News editor Sunny McClellan Morton's Friday morning talk. Like many of us, she's trying to encourage new writers to take up the pen or word processor as the case may be.

I admit to being a bit surprised that there was anything to discuss. There are many kinds of good genealogical writing, and the first person can be effectively wielded in most of them.

. . . Except at the top of the pyramid. In the five most scholarly magazines -- NEHGR, NGSQ, NYGBR, TAG, and The Genealogist -- the first person singular or plural is out of bounds, I think reasonably so. The focus there should be on the methods, the records, and the people being researched -- not on the researcher's false trails and travails. Having journals like this is one of many factors that will make genealogy more respectable as an intellectual endeavor and not just a harmless obsession of geezers. Also, once you get the hang of it, leaving yourself out of the picture actually makes it easier to tell one story, without having to shift back and forth from the story of the past to the story of your attempt to reclaim the past. Scholarly accounts deliberately suppress process details because the logic of proof is often very different from the travelogue of discovery.

But this is not the only way to tell these stories, and it is not always even the best way. For one thing, up-and-coming researchers have a natural hunger for accounts of how it went. A research find can look very different in the heat of battle (or more likely in the courthouse basement) than it does in a polished article. And nothing prevents such accounts from being well-written and well-documented.

So, pretty much everywhere else -- in commercial popular magazines, in trade publications (APG Quarterly), and in quality mid-level publications (such as NGS Magazine, Ohio Genealogy News, and many state publications) -- I would expect good editors to be open to the possibility of using first person to tell a solid genealogical story. (I blogged about a couple here; Sunny has been publishing research travelogues under the heading "Genealogy Journeys" in OGN.)

Many people may find it more natural to write in the first person at first, and I'm in favor of any approach that will get more of us writing (as opposed to dying with file cabinets full of uncommunicated discoveries). But writing WELL in the first person is much harder than it looks, for at least three reasons:

(1) All storytelling and all writing is about selection, and when you write about your own experience you have to do all the selection. You know too much. (In an interview-based article, for instance, both the interviewee and the interviewer filter the direct experience, so that the result of the interview has already been winnowed down considerably from the raw experience, making it easier to craft a readable narrative out of it.) It can be hard to see the forest because you know so much about each individual tree -- but if you tell all, the reader will quit rather than figure it out.

(2) First person can tempt us into careless writing. As beginners we often rely too much on adjectives and adverbs, and on general ones at that. First-person may make it harder to realize that we are emoting vaguely, rather than painting a clear picture.

(3) First person poses a special technical problem in genealogy. We then have at least two separate narratives going: our own research chronology, AND the life we are researching. It takes considerable skill and experience to keep both stories on track, separate, and memorable.

These caveats aside, I think first person opens realms of possibility. Some of the most memorable genealogy or family history books I have ever read use it: Leonard Todd's Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave; Martha Hodes's The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century; and (in a somewhat different and slightly less documented vein) Ian Frazier's Family. I found them impossible to put down, and well worth rereading and learning from. It's true, these are world-class writers. Few if any of us can use the first-person tool as well as they do, but that is no reason to banish it altogether from our toolbox.




Harold Henderson, "'I' and 'we' in genealogy writing," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Josephus Waters Family in The Genealogist

One of the greatest services a genealogist can do for colleagues and researchers everywhere is to publish results that distinguish families that are easily confused -- especially ones involving a common name or one that's hard to search for. In the fall issue of The Genealogist, Gale Ion Harris takes up the family of pioneer surveyor Josephus Burton Waters (1750?-1826?) of Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky. He has also described, and will be describing further, the apparently unrelated but nearby Isaac Waters family. I hope more of us will be inspired to publish our "wrong" families, and not leave their evidence on the cutting-room floor!

Seven of Josephus's children had children. The author notes that there may be a few more unidentified, and still succeeds in locating 54 grandchildren. Many family members stayed in Kentucky; others dispersed to Texas, Louisiana, Oregon, and California, as well as various Midwestern counties: Marion and Jefferson in Illinois; Jennings in Indiana; Highland, Clermont, and Brown in Ohio; Jackson in Missouri; and Scott, Washington, Taylor, Wapello, and Lucas in Iowa. For reasons not made clear the author sometimes rested content with derivative sources for wills, deeds, newspapers, and court records, but other Waters family researchers need not look this spirited gift horse in the mouth, as enough information is available for them to fill in those omissions.



Gale Ion Harris, "Josephus Burton Waters of Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky: A Pioneer Surveyor," The Genealogist 26, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 272-93.


Harold Henderson, "Josephus Waters Family in The Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Weekend Wonderings: What Genealogy Periodicals Do You Actually Read?

I do suspect that the famous top five genealogy journals are more revered than read, but would be happy to hear otherwise. FYI they are National Genealogical Society Quarterly (NGSQ), New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (NYGBR), New England Historical and Genealogical Register (NEHGR), The American Genealogist (TAG), and The Genealogist.

For more popular fare, I tend to prefer NGS Magazine and NEHGS's American Ancestors to the commercial publications. With state and local publications, I tend to be inconsistent because (from my point of view) most of them are. This is not a slam on them, it's a slam on us because we don't write enough.

What do you look forward to reading and why? (Especially things I haven't even mentioned!)


Harold Henderson, "Weekend Wonderings: What Genealogy Periodicals Do You Actually Read?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Timothy Bush (1735?-1815?) and Descendants in The Genealogist

Michael Thomas Meggison and R. Andrew Pierce have given the fullest account yet of the prolific family that gave rise to the two US Presidents Bush, in a 73-page article spread across the three most recent issues of The Genealogist. Unpublished work by Elaine Bush Prince helped frame their account. Previous published works focused on the male line of Presidential descent only.

This is the kind of article (or book) that we all more or less dream of writing for our families; sadly, for many of us it remains a dream. Seeing a living, breathing, lengthy example like this may provide the inspiration we need.

The authors begin by discussing the intricate and still unresolved question of Timothy Bush's parentage, where the minimal direct evidence is ambiguous and not enough indirect evidence is yet available to reach a conclusion. Note to interested researchers: "A thorough search of Windham County court records before 1754, including files, might turn up further evidence of him." In his documented later life Timothy lived in Connecticut, Vermont, and western New York.

For Timothy and his wife Deborah House, the article documents ten children, 36 grandchildren, and 122 great-grandchildren. (Female lines are not followed as far as male lines.) Eight of their children married: to Nathaniel Willis Seaver and Abner Chamberlain; Abigail Marvin; Hannah (nee Porter) Preston; Lydia Newcomb; Maria Chamberlain; Cyrus Hamilton; Amy Yeomans; and Lavinia Barnes. Descendants lived in New Hampshire; Maine; Massachusetts; Kansas; New York City; Cleveland; Cincinnati; Philadelphia; San Francisco; Kansas; California (beginning with the Gold Rush); and several counties in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. Various descendants served in the Revolution, War of 1812, and Civil War.

Stories are plentiful. Grandson Rev. George Bush had a stormy tenure in an Indianapolis Presbyterian pulpit in the 1820s. Grandson Obadiah Newcomb Bush died aboard ship en route between Acapulco and Panama in 1851. Great-grandson John E. Roberts died of wounds incurred at the Battle of Gettysburg. An interesting indirect-evidence argument as to the parentage of Lydia Bliss, wife of grandson Timothy Bush, is condensed into a footnote.

There's plenty to learn here even if your family tree has sprouted no Bushes.



Michael Thomas Meggison and R. Andrew Pierce, "Some Descendants of Timothy Bush of Connecticut, Vermont, and Western New York," The Genealogist 25 (Spring 2011): 35-55 and (Fall 2011): 233-56, and 26 (Spring 2012): 102-32.

Harold Henderson, "Timothy Bush (1735?-1815?) and Descendants in The Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Revolutionary patriot Stephen Simmons in The Genealogist

Of the five most highly regarded US genealogy journals, The Genealogist publishes by far the longest articles. In the Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 issues, Dan W. Olds chronicled the parents and descendants of Stephen Simmons, who served in the Revolution from Connecticut and died near the banks of the Wabash in southeastern Illinois in 1835. The article occupies 57 pages (some books are shorter), and even so it followed the descendants of only three of the five children of Stephen Simmons and Mabel Hunt who lived to maturity.

The family moved west from Windham County, Connecticut, to Greene (then Albany) County, New York, before 1790; on to Scioto County, Ohio, about 1807; and to Wabash (then Edwards) County, Illinois, before 1820. The stories about Stephen, from a variety of sources, suggest a versatile and interesting person to know -- unless perhaps you were a sheriff delivering a court summons. One reported that Simmons "ansearede it by riding out of hearing."

The article rests in part on several wonderful sources -- Simmons's own declaration for a Revolutionary War pension in September 1832, a transcript of the family Bible record, and a collection of family letters from the Gunn family (into which one daughter married) 1808-1862. Most lines are carried to Stephen and Mabel's grandchildren, and two families of great-grandchildren are given as well.

The logistical challenges of managing such an extensive project have to be imagined, as it's so smoothly done. My only disappointment was that the article often cites marriages to index entries rather than to the original records -- an odd choice given that Illinois marriages are readily obtained through the relevant county or the Regional Archives Depository system. Citing derivative sources when originals are available does not seem in keeping with the publishing society's stated goal "to advance genealogical research standards," but perhaps there's more going on here than I know about.


Dan W. Olds, "Stephen Simmons (1765-1835), from Connecticut to Illinois: A Revolutionary Soldier and his Family," The Genealogist 25, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 169-199, and 26, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 133-160.


Harold Henderson, "Revolutionary patriot Stephen Simmons in The Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Sergeant John Smith in The Genealogist

We all get to cheer whenever another John Smith is pulled out of the swamp of ancestral ambiguity -- and that's what Gail Blankenau does in the lead article of the Spring 2012 issue of The Genealogist, a twice-yearly magazine published by the American Society of Genealogists.

This Revolutionary veteran left no birth, death, pension, land, probate, or cemetery records -- but he did leave four notebooks of a journal of his four years at the war. (In addition to hard fighting, as first sergeant he was involved in training the Rhode Island regiment of black soldiers.) Historical information is brought in to good effect, as are eight children and 37 grandchildren.

Two Smith sons settled in Washington County, Ohio; a grandson continued on to Alabama, where a great-grandson ended up fighting against the country his great-grandfather had helped establish.


Gail Blankenau, "Sergeant John Smith of Rhode Island, With Descendants Early in Washington County, Ohio," The Genealogist 26, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 3-23.


Harold Henderson, “Sergeant John Smith in The Genealogist,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post.]

Bookends Friday: The Genealogist and "Empire of Liberty"

I really should just pony up for a subscription to The Genealogist, possibly the most obscure of the top-echelon genealogy magazines. The other day I came across a free library duplicate of the Spring 2003 issue containing an excellent and lengthy article by Cameron Allen, "Lucinda Depp and Her Descendants: A Freed Black Family of Virginia and Ohio," a companion to an earlier article tracing the white Depp family from Powhatan County, Virginia, to central Ohio.

The black Depps were freed under an 1801 deed of emancipation (effective on the death of the grantor and wife), and John Depp's 1829 will, probated in 1831. Allen writes:

The most startling fact in the settlement of Depp's estate was the extreme expedition with which it was accomplished on the heels of the death of his widow, Elizabeth. Her will, made on 7 January 1835, was proved on 2 February 1835 in Powhatan County. In just two weeks from the probate of her will, all the land left to the freed slave family was sold and all the slaves not freed by the will of John Depp were sold on 16 and 17 February 1835. That has to be a record! ... Quite obviously the four projected grantees under the will had decided [ahead of time] ... that they would not take title, but, rather, sell their interest through the executor of the will and take the cash to start a new life elsewhere.

About the time I read this I had just finished Gordon S. Wood's magisterial (and to me very informative) Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. One of his major themes is how the high-minded cosmopolitan visions of the Founders generation morphed into the bumptious, militantly provincial, and rather raw democratic enthusiasm of the next generation. (Just compare the characters of George Washington and Andrew Jackson.)

A tragic part of that story is that in the 1790s there were some good reasons to think that slavery was on the way out, in part because it grossly contradicted the ideals of liberty that had animated the American Revolution. Virginia slaveholders were less willing to break up families; Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and other southerners deplored the institution's injustice; new evangelical Baptist and Methodist denominations stood against slavery; the College of William and Mary conferred an honorary degree on the British abolitionist Granville Sharp.

It was a false dawn. A combination of technological changes, fear that the black revolution in Haiti might spread, and a few actual slave conspiracies turned things ugly. The evangelicals backed off; in 1806 a new Virginia law required freed slaves to leave the state; and the ideology of racism was reborn to justify the repression.

In this context it comes as no surprise that the white Depps' estate was probated in record time and that the black Depps had already planned to leave their home for free soil. Virginia's loss was Ohio's gain. History can illuminate genealogy.

Methodology Monday in Evansville, Indiana

Tom Jones says we should spend as much time trying to figure out what to do with our sources as we spend finding them in the first place. I agree, while noticing with some embarrassment that almost every post to this blog has been about finding sources, not what to do with them afterwards.

I'll try to spend at least one post a week on interesting examples of methodology in tough cases. They may not all be from the Midwest but this one is. And since I won't unravel every detail of the reasoning, hopefully you'll be inspired to consult the original.

The semiannual Genealogist is perhaps the least well-known of the three or four top-ranked genealogy periodicals. I'm sure Fall 2007 is not its current issue, but it's the most recent one indexed in PERSI. Lead article is a 40-page monster by Stephen Alden Ralls, "The Lost Second Family of Colonel Hugh McGary Jr., Founder of Evansville, Indiana."

Polly (Blevins) McClain McGary had three McGary children in the early 1820s in Indiana. Everyone agrees Hugh McGary was the father, but which one? Hugh McGary Jr. of Evansville, Vanderburgh County, Indiana? His nephew Hugh McGary of Sangamon County, Illinois? Or his other nephew Hugh McGary of Arkasas and Missouri? And for that matter, who was the Hugh McGary who married Polly McClain in Vanderburgh County 7 September 1826...after two of those three McGary children were born?

The nephews had been favored because a fairly reliable 1889 county mug book from Arkansas identified this Huge as one who had served in the Black Hawk War -- both nephews had done so, but their uncle Hugh Jr. hadn't. But one nephew stayed in Sangamon County and his probate mentions children of two other marriages but none of these three. And the other nephew was only 13 at the time of the first McGary child's birth.

So Ralls pieces together a mosaic of evidence that makes the case that Hugh Jr. and Polly had two children born prior to this marriage and a third born after, at least one of these while they were both married to other people. Both were tried separately for adultery in the local court in 1825 (specifics not available) and not convicted. After that episode and one day after her divorce from her first husband, who had been elsewhere for some years, they took out a marriage license.

Ralls analyzes the evidence in the form of five arguments that Polly's first husband McClain was the father of the three children, and ten rather stronger arguments that Hugh Jr. was. He sniffs out a coverup from the very fact that Hugh and Polly's marriage is mentioned in no local history until the year 2000: "Since a marriage is a significant life event, since Hugh had been a very important person, since histories typically document important events of important people, and since this marriage is the last definite record of Hugh's presence in Vanderburgh County before disappearing, then it seems clear that its absence reflects an intent to conceal." (page 159) IOW, Hugh was a good ole boy and the other good ole boys protected him as much as they could.

For a masterful marshaling of indirect evidence to reach a conclusion that no record states in so many words, this story is hard to beat, even with the gaps and uncertainties, and the lack of a letter or other window into the minds of the participants. The genealogical summary traces 24 "new" grandchildren in Hugh Jr.'s descendant lines.

Ralls, Stephen Alden. "The Lost Second Family of Colonel Hugh McGary Jr., Founder of Evansville, Indiana." The Genealogist 21(2): 131-171.