Untangling the Vines

This past week I have been fairly busy going through my husbands DNA matches and trying to make sense of what I found. In the process I have found a lot of tangled vines that are going to take some work in untangling. Thus the reason for this post topic.

I am sure most of us who have been doing this for any length of time will discover at some point or another that they have a lot of common surnames. Names such as JOHNSON, MILLER and SMITH as well as JONES are quite a few that come to mind.

But what do you do when you not only have a common surname but a common first name as well? Research this week has turned up a gentleman named Henry WIMER. As I set out to conduct my research I ran across four possible wives for this man. The more I dug the more confused I got. I finally was able to come to the conclusion that there are two men with the name Henry WIMER. Both look to have been born about a year apart and both were born in Pendleton County, West Virginia. These are my husbands relatives. It is going to be necessary that I sort out just how these folks connect. That is going to take a lot of time and effort on my part. If you are in a similar situation there is a wonderful online article published HERE that might help you formulate how to conduct your own search.

As to what I have done in this situation. I have created two documents. One for each gentleman and I plan on forming a timeline as suggested in the article for each one. With the two of them having similar years of births as well as the exact same location it may prove hard for me to discern between the two.

The first Henry WIMER that I have located which I believe is my husbands relative was born about 1793 in Pendleton, West Virginia probably Dry Run area. I show a wife for him by the name of Elizabeth THOMPSON. They were married 25 September, 1817. It looks as though his parents are Henry WIMER and Catherine LONG. There is another Henry WIMER who was born about 1794 in Pendleton, Highland, Virginia. His fathers name is said to have been one Phillip WIMER and I have seen his mothers name stated as either Sarah SIMMONS or Sarah Catherine HARPER. I believe this second Henry WIMER is also a relative of my husband as he has HARPER and SIMMONS relatives in this line as well. I have also see the WIMER surname spelled as WYMER.  I note there are marriages between a Henry WIMER and a Susannah JUDY as well as a marriage record between a Henry WIMER and a Margaret MILLER. I am in the process of untangling all of these vines. As soon as I have them sorted I will post the corrected and sourced information to this blog.

If anyone out there has ties to this family and has documentation as to which one is who, I would appreciate hearing from you!

Successful DNA Confirmation

Today's post is going to be about some recent successes we have had in our quest to finding my husband`s roots. As you are aware,( if you have been following my blog) my husband was unsure as to who his paternal grandparents were. We can now say with  great certainty that due to his DNA results we have confirmed that the woman he called Grandma was indeed his biological grandmother.

You should have seen the look on his face when we finally had that confirmation. It was like this huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. And now, for the rest of the story.

That was just the first of many successful endeavors that we hope to encounter in the coming weeks. Our search into his Grandmothers roots has turned up some promising leads as to who his grandfather may have been. We are still a ways out from finding anything definitive as yet but there are some common ancestors that are beginning to now surface. I have to say that had he not tested at 23andMe we might never have found this connection.

I have added some additional information to his page here, that lists his Paternal Grandmother's family line. I do have a few more names that I will be adding to that page in the coming days as time permits. We can now cross off our earlier theories regarding his Grandmother and move on to actually ruling out the woman he knew to be his Paternal Great Grandmother. If we are able to rule her out then we know which generation to specifically look for his Paternal Male ancestor. It is going to be a step by step elimination process as we work through this family line. I will update as I know more.

My CLICK Ancestors

My family has lots of connections to the CLICK family from the Mountains of Eastern Tennessee, namely the Bat Harbor area in Cocke, County.

Carolyn WHITAKER has developed a wonderful website that tells about some of this Click Clan and their ties to the novel "Christy" by Catherine MARSHALL. It seems the novel Christy was written about some of these CLICK family members. Check out her site HERE.

My 2nd Great Grandmother Elizabeth WRIGHT daughter of Clayton WRIGHT and Anna SNIDER. First married Preston Whitfield CLICK, son of George Lewis CLICK and Margaret Peggy JONES.

Grandmother Elizabeth and Preston CLICK had one daughter born to their union. Her name was Julie Ann CLICK. Cousin Julie Ann married Amos ACORD. son of Richard Hamilton "Ham" ACORD and Sarah LAMBERT. Now, Julie Ann was my Great Grand Aunt, but she married my 1st cousin, 2x removed so this also makes her not only my aunt but my 1st cousin, 2x removed by marriage! That would also make Cousin Amos, my Great Uncle by marriage. Uncle Ham ACORD as the family called him was my Grandmother Elizabeth's brother! So in a sense Julie married her cousin.

Grandmother Elizabeth had a sister Nancy WRIGHT who married one William CLICK. Therefore Nancy and William were my Great Grand Aunt and Uncle.  Now William was also a son of Margaret Peggy JONES and George Lewis CLICK and brother to Preston, who married my Great x2 Grandmother Elizabeth.

Elizabeth and Nancy had another sister, one Mary Ann WRIGHT, my Great Grand Aunt, Mary married one Harvey E. CLICK also a son of  George Lewis CLICK and Margaret Peggy JONES.

Now, Margaret A CLICK a daughter of George Lewis and Margaret Peggy JONES-CLICK married one Miles Walton WRIGHT. Miles was my 3rd Great, Grand Uncle. Miles was a brother to my 3rd Great Grandfather Clayton WRIGHT and they were sons of Richard WRIGHT Jr and Caroline Cary Kara KITTRELL. So that made Margaret CLICK my 3rd Great Grand Aunt by marriage.

So, as you can see there seems to have been lots of intermarriage between my ACORD, and WRIGHT family members and the CLICK family.  When Preston W. CLICK died, my Great Grandmother Elizabeth WRIGHT relocated with her father and some more family to Hamilton County, Illinois where she met and married my 2nd Great Grandfather Martin Van Buren ACORD son of Job Jacob ACORD and Mary Polly HARPER.