Favorite Photo of Percy and Marguerite ~ 52 Ancestors #2

I am participating in this year's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks writing challenge from Amy Johnson Crow. Each week has an optional writing prompt and this week's writing prompt is Favorite Photo.

I have shared many favorite photos on this blog (the tag Wordless Wednesday brings up those posts). Today's photo is of my great-grandparents, Percy Earle Hunter and his wife Marguerite Lysle.

Ya gotta love that hat! I wonder how heavy it was.

This was taken while they were vacationing in Atlantic City. (They lived in Pittsburgh with five daughters who were born between 1899 and 1907.)

The photographer was Myers-Cope Co., 1635 & 1521 Boardwalk, Atlantic City. By exploring the Atlantic City directories at Ancestry.com, I can narrow down the dates that this photograph was taken to between 1909 and 1913. (In 1908 and in 1914, Myers-Cope Co. was at only 1635 Boardwalk.)

However, since I know that they were in California in 1912, when they were listed in the California Voter Registrations for that year, why they were in California, and also that they were back in Pittsburgh by the fall of 1913, I believe this photo was taken between 1909 and 1911.

Tuesday's Tip ~ Family Tree Maker Color-Coding

I'm late to the game in blogging about this feature of the new Family Tree Maker (which came out in the early summer for the Mac). I've been meaning to share the following find for several months.

As soon as I got my file opened in the new version of Family Tree Maker, I wanted to try out the new color coding feature, which I had read about from other bloggers.

At the Tree tab on the People workspace, select the person whose ancestors you want to highlight.

Click the color coding button above the editing panel. Click a single color (or a color group) for the type of individuals you want to apply color coding.

I selected each of my grandparents in order, and selected All Ancestors (1 color) and applied the one color that I have used for years for each of my grandparents' lines:
Pyle - blue
Adsit - pink
Copeland - green
Hunter - orange

When I scrolled through my index of names and got to the Tuttle surname, I was surprised to find the colors for three of my four grandparents appear. I already knew that my paternal grandparents, Charles Pyle and Elizabeth Adsit were related in several ways, including through the Tuttle surname. However, Abigail Tuttle, whose parents I hadn't found yet, had a green circle, indicating that she was an ancestor of my maternal grandfather. This 7th great-grandmother of mine was married to Philemon Warner, and I had only recently found her while researching the Warner line.

Following shows my direct-line Tuttle ancestors. (If I hadn't used the Filter feature to narrow down the indexed names to my direct ancestors, there would have been too many to capture in a screenshot.) I have since determined Abigail's parents and how she is related to the immigrant Tuttle ancestor.

Thomas Tuttle of Woodford, Northamptonshire, England, was the father of Richard Tuttle, who died in 1589. Richard was father of Simon Tuttle (1560-1630), ancestor to three of my grandparents, and whose sons, John (1596-1656) and William (1607-1673) emigrated to the colonies. They are both my 9th great-grandfathers. See the Surname Saturday post for the details of my ancestral lines.

How My Interest in Genealogy Got Started ~ 52 Ancestors #1

I am participating in this year's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks writing challenge from Amy Johnson Crow. (I also participated in 2015.) Each week has an optional writing prompt and I may not necessarily write about a direct ancestor, as there are so many interesting people in my extended family tree!

This week's writing prompt is "Start," and as some readers may know, my interest in genealogy started with finding the copy of Orange Chapin's The Chapin Genealogy: Containing a Very Large Proportion of the Descendants of Dea. Samuel Chapin (Northampton, Massachusetts: Metcalf & Company, 1862) in my parents' library. My father was an only child and inherited lots of great family history material from his mother.

Now this is an 1862 genealogy - a secondary source (with many errors). However, there are several "Family Record" pages at the end and they include birth, marriage, and death dates for my grandmother's family.

This is one of those end pages:

The left-hand page includes births for the following:
James M. Adsit
Spencertown, Columbia Co.
New York, Feb. 5, 1809
  [my second great-grandfather]

Arville S. Chapin
Ludlow, Massachusetts,
June 9, 1820
  [my second great-grandmother]

Florence Wheeler 1878-1883
  [my grandmother's cousin]

Charles Chapin Adsit Jr.
Chicago July 3rd, 1892
  [my great-uncle]

Elizabeth Adsit
Chicago, June 18th, 1897
  [my grandmother]

Charles McAlpin Pyle Jr.
New York, June 16, 1924
  [my father in my grandmother's handwriting]

The right-hand page includes marriages for the following:
James M. Adsit
Arville S. Chapin
Chicago, Ill. Jan 21,
1841
  [my second great-grandparents]

Ezra I. Wheeler
Belle F. Adsit
Chicago Jan 7, 1868
  [she is a second great-aunt of mine]

Charles C. Adsit
Mary B. Ashby
Louisville. Married Oct 30, 1890
  [my great-grandparents]

Charles McAlpin Pyle
Elizabeth Adsit
Chicago, March 1, 1919
  [my paternal grandparents in my grandmother's handwriting]

I have written a Surname Saturday post showing my four lines of descent from Deacon Samuel Chapin.

Accentuate the Positive Geneameme for 2017

Geneablogger Jill Ball, of GeniAus, suggests that genealogists celebrate the positives for the past year. My 2017 successes are listed below:

1. An elusive ancestor I found was 5th great grandfather, Oliver Davenport. See Surname Saturday ~ Davenport of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

2. A great newspaper article I found was in the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal which mentioned my paternal grandparents before they were married.

3. A geneajourney I took was visiting Pittsburgh at the end of August for the FGS (Federation of Genealogical Societies) Conference, where I visited a couple of cemeteries, finding many of my maternal ancestors, as well as visiting the house my mother grew up in.

4. An important record I found was a marriage record for my 7th great-grandparents (John Davenport and Hannah Warren) from the Massachusetts Town and Vital Records. As I noted in this blog post, it's very important to look at the original record, especially in this database.

5. A newly found family member shared information about her branch of the Pyle family. She descends from William Scott Pyle, the brother of my second great-grandfather, James Pyle.

6. A geneasurprise I received was the death certificates for my great-grandparents, Lowell Copeland and Ethel May (Greeley) Copeland. They died in Princeton, New Jersey, and a friend in a local genealogical society happened to be researching in New Jersey and obtained digital images of these for me.

7. My 2017 blog post that I was particularly proud of was this one where I had to share that the daguerreotype I received last year from my second cousin was not an Alcott.

8. I made many new genimates who participated over the summer in the Boston University Certificate Program in Genealogical Research (OL24) with me.

9. A new piece of technology I mastered was the new color-coding feature in the new version of Family Tree Maker. I will be blogging about the discovery it helped me make soon.

10. I joined the APG (Association of Professional Genealogists) and the NEAPG (New England Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists) after I completed the B.U. Certificate Program in Genealogical Research.

11. A genealogy event from which I learned something new was the FGS Conference in Pittsburgh in late August. (See #3.) I attended a few sessions with a Pennsylvania focus where I learned about resources specific to Pennsylvania.

12. Blog posts that taught me something new were posts about DNA. A new-to-me blog is The DNA Geek. My other favorite DNA blogs can be found at my DNA Resources page.

13. A DNA discovery I made was the amount of DNA each of my sons inherited from their four grandparents. Again, another blog post that needs to be written!

Lowell Copeland

14. A brick wall I demolished was confirming the parents of my 4th great-grandfather, Noah Davenport. (See #1.)

15. A great site I visited was Dead Fred, where I found a photograph of my great-grandfather, Lowell Copeland (at right).

16. A new genealogy/history book I will enjoy is Val Greenwood's The Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy. 4th Edition, which I received for Christmas and have yet to explore.

17. It was exciting to finally meet the many professional genealogists at the FGS conference (see #3) this summer.

18. I am excited for 2018 because I hope to have more time to research and blog about my more recent findings.

Thank you, Jill, for this wonderful idea and...

Happy New Year to all!

Daguerreotype ~ Not an Alcott

In August 2016, I shared images of this daguerreotype that my second cousin sent to me. I wrote two posts about it: Tuesday's Tip ~ Analyzing a Daguerreotype and (Almost) Wordless Wednesday ~ Is This Eliza May Wells?

The photographer's imprint in the lower left-hand side of the case: A. H. Knapp, 123 Wash. St., indicates that this was produced in Boston in the 1850s.

Even though I theorized that this was an image of our common second great-grandmother, Eliza May Wells, my cousin was convinced that it was an image of Louisa May Alcott's sister, Anna (Alcott) Pratt. (You can see an image of Anna here.)

It should be noted that Eliza and Anna and Louisa were related. Eliza's grandmother, Elizabeth Sewall May, and Anna's and Louisa's mother, Abigail May, were sisters: daughters of Joseph May and Dorothy Sewall. I explained the maze of relationships in my post: Cousin Louisa May Alcott.

On December 1, there was a newspaper article in the Boston Globe about another image of Anna Alcott Pratt that had come to light entitled: Never-before-seen photo of Louisa May Alcott’s sister found in old album. The article mentioned the name of the executive director of Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House, Jan Turnquist. I contacted her through the website and she kindly replied with a phone call to let me know that no, this woman is not a member of the Alcott or Pratt families.

Therefore, until another images comes along to help us out, I'm returning to my original theory of who this is: my second great-grandmother, Eliza May Wells (20 Aug 1839 - 18 Sep 1880) who would have been 16 years old in 1855. She is the only woman in my database born between 1830 and 1840 who was likely to have been in Boston in the 1850s for a photograph.

Of course, she could be a collateral relative who may not be in my database.