Lesson 1 - Do your own research!

This is my first journal entry. I decided that it’s important and helpful for me to write down all of my experiences during my genealogical research. And unfortunately, I start this journal off with some disappointing news.

Ever since I started researching and putting together the family tree, I had thought Neverson Haywood Bone’s mother was Adaline Elizabeth Baker. Well, I was wrong. She was his stepmother! His actual mother turns out to be Elizabeth Barnes. I can’t believe I just realized this, especially after all of the hard research I did last week to try to find out who Adaline’s parents were (which I found out by the way, and hadn’t known since I put her name in the tree).

I’ll explain how all of this confusion got started. First of all, Neverson Haywood Bone is my great, great grandfather. And from my research, I knew that Philamon Bennett Bone was his father. Now, Philamon had two wives. His first wife was Elizabeth Barnes, and they got married in 1839. His second wife, of course, was Adaline. Well I found someone’s family tree online who was researching these same individuals. This should be my first lesson…do not take other people’s word as the truth! I must prove the relationships myself! Well, I made the mistake of believe what this person said, Adaline was the mother of Neverson, to be true. So I put that down on my family tree and thought everything was fine.

Then as I was going through the Bone line, researching and verifying that I had correct dates, sources, and names, etc, I stumbled across something that I hadn’t realized yet. Philamon married Adaline in 1867. Now that fact is pretty significant considering that Neverson was born sometime between 1851-1853! (not sure on the exact year considering three different sources say completely different things.) But one thing is for sure…how could Adaline be his mother if she didn’t even marry his father until 1867? And this is the 1800s we’re talking about. I know people who move in and have kids and they don’t marry until after the kids are born, but this kind of stuff didn’t happen back then. And furthermore, that’s like 17 years later anyway! LOL.

To further add to the confusion, I mistakenly thought when I read the 1860 census that “Elizabeth” was really Adaline. See…Elizabeth is her middle name. See my confusion? And lots of people went by middle names. I know my grandma did. And there are a ton of Elizabeths let me tell you.

More proof that I failed to realize before is that in that same year, 1860, the census says that Adaline was living with her parents. Well I remember seeing that and thought, well of course she still was, she didn’t marry Phil until 1867. DUH MELODY! I should have realized it then but with so many dates, sometimes it’s hard to keep up. How could she be living with her parents and have her 9 year old son live in another house at the same time?

So anyway, looks likes I’ll have to delete some names from my tree. At least I didn’t get too far into my research. I would have been really mad if I hadn’t realized it until after I had gone and published my results.

BUT, on a much lighter note, I do have some good news to report. And speaking of results to publish…I’ve been toying around with the idea of putting up a website of sorts, you know, to display my research with the rest of the family. Well I found a great website that basically does all the work for you. All you have to do is upload your gedcom, which you can download from your family tree at ancestry.com. And it’s also password protected too, so I don’t have to worry about people looking in on it until it’s all finished. Or if I choose, I can let only some people see it and give them a visitor password. I uploaded what I had so far. It’s pretty cool! I can’t wait to finish it! Or can you really finish genealogy? It seems to just go on and on and on. :)