Author: Becky Thames-Simmons
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The ongoing, seemingly impossible search for Oliver Edwards’s origins Oliver Edwards, who was born about 1813 in Virginia and who died before 24 Sep 1897 (when his death was announced) is an almost complete mystery to me. He was my 2x great grandfather. You’d think someone that “recent” wouldn’t be that hard to track down.…
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Descendants of James Flanagan (d. 1752 Louisa County, Virginia) are indebted to Bob Flanagan for sharing his knowledge of our family history. At the end of his report, he invites researchers to make additions, corrections, and substantiations. Bob’s report appears to be dated about 2005 or so, so my comments bring the information up to…
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I created these spreadsheets out of a real need to be able to sort and analyze information. I added columns for county, state and locality, so multiple places can be entered on the same spreadsheet. These are useful when you need to extract data from multiple census pages so you can analyze them properly. There…
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The wife of Rev William Thames Return to Title Page/Table of Contents 7 Oct 2022 – I’ve had this on my list for so long, thinking it would be an impossible task because no one had found Lucy’s maiden name during all these decades. This past Monday, I decided to go ahead and start tackling…
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William left some clues for us in 1877 William is one of the early Thames men for whom we don’t know parentage, exactly, but evidence points to him being the son of Thomas Thames (son of Joseph Thames and Martha Newberry) by his first wife (name unknown). Because he was a Union loyalist during the…
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Yes, there’s a ton of free records online at FamilySearch.org that you won’t find by using their Search feature. These records are primary sources like deeds, court records, probate, tax records, vital records, and the like that haven’t been indexed yet. Here’s how to find the records FamilySearch has for a given location, such as…
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The background Before Ancestry.com, there was Rootsweb.com. Rootsweb allowed you to upload a gedcom to make it publicly available. And you could do the same thing on the FamilySearch.org website. But you couldn’t edit them. Then, in 2006, Ancestry launched the feature allowing individuals to create their own family tree on the website and served…
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Return to Table of Contents In light of the fact that we now know James Flanagan had two sons named James, I believe his will warrants closer examination. This is my work in progress (isn’t all genealogy permanently “work in progress”?), which I’ll update as I find new information. Louisa County, VA Will Book 1,…
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Let me just preface this by saying I did not set out to find errors in previously published genealogical work. I simply love maps, history, and genealogical research. But I did find an error, and below are the results of my research. The land grant map below was prepared in DeedMapper (Direct Line Software) using…
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Thomas Thames c1700-1758 – New records for a Thomas Thames have been discovered. Do they belong to our Thomas?