Cousin Conclave

This photo (click to enlarge) was probably taken around 1940 on the farm of John George and Margaret (Jehu) Branch in Horatio, Pennsylvania, near Punxsutawney. A couple of George and Margaret's grandchildren have identified themselves in the photo: Clarence Milo Branch's daughter is seated in the back row at right, and his younger son is seated in the first row at right. They believe most if not all of the other nine children are their Branch cousins, but they could not identify them definitively.

George and Margaret had 14 grandchildren in all, 12 of whom had been born by 1940. (The oldest of these was born in about 1924, the youngest in about 1936.) Clarence's older son does not appear to be in the picture. So the rest may well be children of George and Margaret's children Richard Branch, George Branch, and Sarah Ball. (Their youngest son, Harry, didn't marry until 1942.)

Let me know by comment or e-mail if any of those faces look familiar. Whoever they are, it's a great picture!

The Uncle So Nice They Named Him Twice

Okay, so I actually don't know how nice Jehu Jehu was. But as of last week I now know something about Mr. Jehu, who was Clarence (Miles) Branch's uncle--a brother to his mother Margaret Jehu Branch (1877-1971). I found the picture above (click on it to enlarge) among Blanche's Branch's photos. It was labeled on the back "Grandpa Jehu Theater in Pennsylvania." I'd made a few half-hearted attempts to find out more, but had no luck until I heard from a cousin whose father is a Jehu--Miles Branch's last living cousin on his mother's side.

This man, who is 92, is a son of Albert Jehu (1881-1972), Margaret's younger brother. I spoke to him and his daughter last week, and he had the nicest things to say about Margaret, whom he called Aunt Maggie. He grew up in Sykesville, Pa., about 16 miles from Horatio, where Margaret and George Branch had their farm. He remembers taking the train to visit his aunt and uncle, where he always enjoyed himself. "Every day there was like a party," he said. He remembers Margaret as someone who liked to laugh and who baked bread for him.

At left (click to enlarge): We thought the woman at left in this picture was Margaret Jehu Branch, and her nephew agrees. We don't know who the other people are, but the Jehu cousins think the young woman next to Margaret looks like a Jehu.

He said his Uncle George was good to him, and he remembered playing with his cousin Harry Branch in the mines on the Branch farm. (Miles, 19 years older, had already left home.) He remembers George walking him to the railroad tracks at the end of his visits and waving his lantern to get the train to stop and pick him up.

Now, back to the theater picture, which must have been taken in 1920 or shortly thereafter, since the movie advertised at right is The Kentucky Colonel, which was released in 1920. Our cousin recognized the man standing in the center as being his uncle Jehu Jehu (1867-1935). He said that Jehu owned the theater, and that his father (Jehu's brother) Albert owned a pool hall next door. "All the Jehus were salesmen," he said, adding that Richard Jehu (1846-1919), the father of Jehu, Albert, and Margaret, had been a fishmonger in Wales and, in addition to mining coal, also sold fish in Pennsylvania.

For the record, Richard Jehu and his wife Elizabeth Thomas came from Wales right after the Civil War. Richard's father was also named Jehu Jehu, and his mother was Mary Jervis. After his parents died, Richard and his six living siblings emigrated to America. Most of them settled around Scranton, Pennsylvania, but Richard and Elizabeth went to Sykesville, near Punxsutawney. In addition to Jehu, Margaret, and Albert, they had two more daughters: Mary Jehu (1872-1966), who married William Platt, and Elizabeth Jehu (1879-1965), who married James J. Jeffries.

I won't lie to you--I love accumulating the facts and dates and data about my family. But it doesn't really come alive until you hear memories like those our cousin shared about his Aunt Maggie. That's when you start to be able to paint a picture of those who came before us and how they shaped the people we do remember.

One last picture (click to enlarge): This was taken at George and Margaret Branch's farm, some time in the late 1930s. At least some, if not all, of the kids in the picture are their grandchildren.

Salathiel, Jeroboam, and More

You can hit a brick wall pretty fast when you try to research a surname as common as Jones. Our Jones line disappears into Jackson County, Alabama, in the 1820s, when our ancestor William "Billy" Jones was born there. We know that Billy's father was born in South Carolina, but we do not know his name. A cousin who has been doing genealogy research for years has tried to track down Billy Jones's father, and while she's not found anything close to definite, she has found some possibilities. My favorite is a man named Salathiel Jones who lived in Jackson County at the right time, was born in South Carolina, and had a son around Billy's age. I'd love to have a Salathiel in the family, wouldn't you?

Thinking about Salathiel reminds me that there a bunch of cool and/or weird names in my family history. Here are a few favorites. Depending on which side of the family you're on, some of these may be in your tree too. Feel free to consider them if you're planning a family:

Jeroboam Howard (b. 1759): an ancestor of George Bailey Paxton on his mother's side. Jeroboam, like Salathiel, is an Old Testament name. (At left is King Jeroboam, from the first book of Kings.) Those were big in the 19th century.

Jehu Jehu: C.M. Branch's great-grandfather. There were at least three generations with this identical first name-last name combination in his mother's Welsh family.

Grizzie Riddle (1826-1876): Billy Jones's wife. The name Grizzie was not all that uncommon among the Scotch-Irish; it derived from Griselde, a name that appears in the Canterbury Tales. Still, I'll give five bucks to anyone who honors the family legacy by naming their daughter Grizzie.

Ferdinando Thayer (1625-1713): an ancestor of Cal Jones via his father's mother, the source of my only New England ancestors. Ferdinando was an early settler of Mendon, Massachusetts, and, it is said, a renowned wrestler. I don't know anything about the origin of the name, but it definitely sticks out amid a bunch of Isaacs and Thomases in the Thayer family.

Argyle Blackstone (b. 1650): also from way back in Cal Jones's grandmother's family, but from a Virginia line. This one always sounded like someone from a romance novel--kind of a Rhett Butler type, maybe.

Charity Grubb (1687-1761): an ancestor of Cal's other grandmother. The name Charity appears many times in this Quaker family, but "Charity Grubb" sounds like a name for a soup kitchen.

Johan Andersson, aka Stalkofta (1627-1685): a distant ancestor of Cal's mother. Johan came to America as part of the Swedish settlement called New Sweden (later Delaware). He became known as "Stalkofta"--or "steel coat"--among the other Swedish settlers, apparently because of his habit of wearing armor when hanging around the fort. He took the name as a surname, and it was gradually anglicized to "Stalcop," a name still seen frequently in the Southern U.S. Any of you who are unsatisfied with your current surname might consider a favorite article of apparel: "Bob Fleecepullover," maybe, or "Karen Haltertop."

Gruffydd Nannau (b. 1568): a Welsh ancestor of Clara Paxton via Levi Overholser's mother. The Welsh names always look like someone was typing with their eyes shut--and sound like something from Star Wars.

Anybody out there know some good ones I left out?

Lancelot Branch, 1836-1907

Having a name like Branch in your family tree—well, I've made my point already. There are only so many "tree-branch" jokes you can handle. Anyway, for this second blog piece, I'm going to talk about what I know about Lancelot Branch, the immigrant ancestor of the Branch line of our ancestors.

I was told about Lancelot years ago, but didn't have anything on paper about his existence. I had begun to despair when I discovered online, at about the same time, a relative who had information from his death certificate in Pennsylvania and a baptism record from an English church that appeared to be the same person. Since then, largely thanks to the efforts of more diligent relatives in the U.S. and England who have tracked down old documents, I've learned enough to make the barest sketch of Lancelot's life.

The story starts in the village of Staindrop, County Durham, in the north of England, where Lancelot Branch was born to George and Sarah Branch on March 22, 1836. He was baptized on April 17 of that year, according to parish records. (At left is the parish church in Staindrop.) We as yet know little about his parents. His father was listed in parish records as a "husbandman" and sometimes as a "laborer." George Branch's family appears to have come from nearby Yorkshire, and there are other Lancelot Branches in previous generations that we might assume are relatives.

For some reason, Lancelot doesn't show up with his parents and siblings in the 1841 census, when he would have been five years old. Nor does he ten years later, but the 1851 census also tells us why: at the age of 15, Lancelot was working as a farm laborer in Morton Palms, some 20 miles away. This confirms something his granddaughter Sarah Ball once told me—that Lancelot had a "falling out" with his father and left home at an early age.

The next we know of Lancelot is not until December 1866, when his marriage to Elizabeth Charlton—a coal miner's daughter—was recorded in Tynemouth, near Newcastle. Lancelot's occupation is also listed as coal miner, the job that would soon take him and his family to America.

Lancelot and Elizabeth's first child, Sarah Jane, was born just under nine months later and recorded in Tynemouth. She may have been named for Lancelot's mother. We know he was fond of the name—when his eldest son John George Branch had a daughter many years later, Lancelot came to the house, put a five-dollar bill in the infant's hand, and told her parents "Her name is going to be Sarah Jane." (And it was—the aforementioned Sarah Ball.)

Two years later, in 1869, Lancelot arrived in the United States without his wife and child, according to a ship manifest. In the 1870 census, he was found in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, living in what must have been a rooming house for coal miners.

In my experience, most such migrations in families in the 19th-century were part of larger family moves, accompanied by parents, siblings, and/or in-laws. But Lancelot seems to have moved on his own; none of his siblings or their familes moved to America. So although the name Branch is not all that uncommon in the U.S., it is not likely that most Branches you meet are closely related to our line.

In March, 1871, the same year that Lancelot filed his request for U.S. citizenship, Elizabeth and Sarah Jane arrived at the Port of New York aboard the S.S. Minnesota. (This was before Ellis Island, so they would have been processed at Castle Garden at the tip of Manhattan.) A year later, Lancelot and Sarah had their second child, John George Branch. He was presumably named for his two grandfathers, John Charlton and George Branch, but he was always known as George.

It would appear that Lancelot and Elizabeth spent all of their American years in Pennsylvania, except for one quirky fact: in four successive censuses (1900—1930), John George Branch's state of birth is listed as Indiana. Other sources, including his death certificate, say he was born in Pennsylvania, but someone in his household insisted otherwise. So it's possible that the family moved briefly to Indiana after Elizabeth and Sarah arrived in America. (There was coal mining in that state by the 1870s.)

[UPDATE 11/16/07: By the way, I have considered the possibility that George was in fact born in the town or county of Indiana, Pennsylvania, which is in the coal mining region, but it's hard to imagine the same misunderstanding happening between householder and census taker four decades in a row.]

Lancelot became an American citizen in Somerset Co., Pennsylvania in the centennial year of 1876.

Lancelot and Elizabeth had at least four more children: Thomas James, born in 1875, Elizabeth, born about 1876, Maggie, born about 1879, and Joseph, born about 1883.

By 1880, the family was living in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, where Lancelot bought a farm in an area called Horatio, not far from Punxsutawney. Elizabeth died some time in the 1880s, and Lancelot married again, to a woman named Rachel, in about 1887.

Lancelot died of pneumonia on December 7, 1907 at the age of 71. He was buried on his farm.

About Lancelot's children: I know that John George Branch—possessed of none of his father's wanderlust—stayed on in Horatio, took over his father's farm, and lived there until he died in 1940. He and his wife, the former Margaret Jehu, had seven children and fourteen grandchildren. Thomas James Branch married Annie Haddick; they had 12 children. Thomas was a mining superintendent in southwest Pennsylvania. I am in contact with some of Thomas's descendants, but I have yet to find out any more about the three daughters or about Joseph. (If you know something, contact me via the comments.)

I don't know much about England in Lancelot's time, but it strikes me that he achieved the American Dream that many immigrants sought at the time. He did not become rich, but after years in the mines, he was able to get a piece of property for himself and his family—something that perhaps wouldn't have been possible in England for the uneducated son of a farm laborer. With so little to go on in terms of information about Lancelot, it's kind of touching that after so many years of hard work, the occupation on his death certificate said "farmer."