Climbing Our Family Tree

Occasionally as you're researching a family tree, you'll come across a family with daughters that never marry. It's possible sons may never marry as well, but somehow that doesn't seem to create the same questions in our mind. When a woman doesn't marry, particularly in the days when a woman didn't have an easy means to support herself outside of marriage, it's easy to start wondering what happened. Were there just no eligible men for her to marry? Did she have some physical difficulty that prevented a gentleman from seeking her out? Was she caring for family members, and so didn't have time to pursue a family of her own? There are lots of questions, but rarely answers, because the truth is that unmarried women just don't often make it into any of the records that tend to be kept by society and found by researchers. They often just end up names on our family tree, but not much more. I'm sure we have some in our tree as well, but it is hard to tel...

The prompt for "The Old Homestead" in this writing series had me a little stymied. When you do family history research, you naturally tend to focus on people and their lives. Their comings and goings are part of your consciousness. They live in an area, and then they move away or pass away, and leave very little behind them. I've come across a few interesting folks in my research that have had family living in the same house and on the same land for 300 years. But I've never come across that in my own family. Whether it was because of a wandering spirit ... the kind that shaped this country as it grew ... or whether it was just hard times, it seems like our family was always moving. Moving from one house to another, or one town to another, or one state to another. So I was having a hard time coming up with anything that I tend to think of as an old "homeplace". Still, there were houses I knew of that were in pictures and had a place in the mental storybook...