Well, I had hoped Jim Harbaugh would have stayed at Michigan, but I can’t blame him for leaving. I’m just glad he didn’t end up with the Falcons. Best of luck to new head coach Sherrone Moore.
A Genealogy Find
The other day I popped over to Ancestry to do some work on Oldest Son’s line. When I searched his maternal grandfather, I got a hit to a family tree with some extra people that I didn’t have.
Like an extra seven generations’ worth.
The kind of exciting part for me was that much of it was properly sourced and documented. That can be somewhat rare on sites like Ancestry. Far too many people will see a person who matches what they expect to find and add that person to their tree without doing any other research. That ends up confusing things for other researchers, especially when there’s no documentation.
Even better for me was that I sent a message to the tree owner via Ancestry, and they responded. I’ve mentioned before that that’s not all that common.
There are two Phebe Fultons in this new tree, born to John and Calista Fulton. One seems to have been born in 1854 and died in 1855. The other was born in December 1860 and died the day after she was born. (Interestingly, one of Phebe’s older sisters died the same day she did. I’ve found no indication of a shared illness or some other tragedy.) But while there’s a photo of 1860 Phebe’s headstone, there’s no documentation of 1854 Phebe.
It’s my understanding that it wasn’t unusual to “reuse” baby names if a child died extremely young, as may be the case here. The younger Phebe wasn’t quite a year old, so it doesn’t surprise me that the family might have called the next daughter Phebe.
Stories
But this find generates even more questions.
From my early research on Ancestry and FamilySearch, I knew that much of Les Fulton’s family was from Washington County, where I grew up. Out of John and Calista Fulton’s (Les’s great grandparents) children, three of them left Salem Township. One died in Wood County, West Virginia, which, even though it’s in another state, is just across the Ohio River. That’s not such a big move. Another ended up in Ross County, Ohio, about 110 or so miles from Lower Salem. Again, that’s not that huge of a move. It was still a few days’ travel in the mid-19th Century, at least by horse. I’d guess it was a decent day even by train.
Jane Fulton, though, the second oldest daughter, born in 1844, ended up in Hazelton, North Dakota, by way of stops in Iowa City, Iowa in 1883, and Sibley, Iowa in 1896. Her husband, John Hoskins, was born in Ohio as well. What led an Ohio farmer to move that far west and north? They lived in Ohio in 1880 and had four children according to the census that year. Three years later, they were in Iowa. He’s still listed as a farmer in the 1900 Census at age 62.
I’d love to find out more about Jane Fulton Hoskins and her husband John Hoskins. That’s the stuff that’s almost more important to me than the names and dates. I want to know the why and the how. I’ve traveled with small children before. I know how difficult it can be to drive a couple of hundred miles with kids in modern times. I can’t imagine moving over six hundred miles with four young kids in the 1880s.
The Hoskins lived in Lower Salem in 1868 when their second child was born, but by 1870 had moved across the state to Brown County. Just two years after the third child was born, they were back in Lower Salem and stayed there for ten or so years. That seems like a lot of moving even by today’s standards. John Hoskins was a farmer. I can’t imagine why he’d move so much, and especially why he’d end up in an area that seems pretty inhospitable.
And More Questions
As I peruse the tree, I find still more questions. Calista Douthitt, John Fulton’s wife, was born in Ohio to parents John Douthitt and Phebe Littlefield. John was born in Ireland around 1787, and Phebe, born around 1799, (where have we seen that name before?) apparently came from Maine, according to Ancestry.
How in the world did they meet? I don’t know enough about immigration arrivals in the late 18th century, so I wonder if John Douthitt landed in Maine. It seems unlikely, but I really don’t know much about arrivals. And I don’t yet know where in Maine Phebe lived. If she lived in the southern part of the state and John landed in Boston and found work north of there, they could have connected in Portsmouth or Dover, New Hampshire.
It’s not lost on me that my great-great-grandfather was in the same general area in the late 1860s.
John and Phebe’s first child was born in Washington County, barely two months after they were married there. I discovered an online copy of History of Washington County, Ohio: With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches (1881) when researching the townships, and now I want to see how much of the Fulton family is mentioned there.
I’m almost overwhelmed with questions about John and Phebe though. Did they meet in Maine somehow? Did both families make their way to Ohio, and they met and married there? The RanSumner Ancestry tree doesn’t have any documentation for John before 1820 nor does it list his parents. So curious.
And I keep finding interesting names along the way. I had high school classmates named Douthitt and Kesselring, and both of those names appear in the Fulton line.
So many questions. But that’s what keeps me digging.
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