Celebrating the Marriage of Sarah Rowan and George Washington King

My paternal Great-Grandparents were married on this date 121 years ago in 1897.  While not a wedding photo, this is the earliest photo I was able to find:

Certificate of Marriage, Brooklyn,

I hereby Certify, that George Washington King and Sarah A. Rowan were joined in Marriage by me, in accordance with the Laws of the State of New York, in the City of Brooklyn, this twenty eighth day of November 1897.

                                                                                             Attest- W. N. Ackley, Rector, St. Andrew’s P. E. Church
                                                                                           Residence- 291-47th St

Witnesses: George Macbeth and Lillie Sullivan

                               Of the Groom:                                                  Of the Bride:                   
                              George Washington King                                  Sarah A. Rowan
Residence:            32-1st Ave., Brooklyn                                        61-57th St.
Age-                      19                                                                      18    
Color-                    White                                                                 White
No. of Marriage-    first                                                                    first
Occupation-          Machinist
Place of birth-       Brooklyn, New York                                          New York City
Father’s Name-     Louis A. King                                                    John W. Rowan
Mother’s Maiden-   Sarah Barry                                                     Sarah A. Hughes
    name
We, the Groom and Bride named in the above certificate, hereby certify that the information given is correct to the best of our knowledge and belief.

At the time of their marriage, George’s father and both of Sarah’s parents were no longer alive.  Sarah’s father had died just 9 months earlier.  George’s mother, Sarah Barry King, was the only parent alive.  Was she at the wedding of George and Sarah?  I looked at the names of the witnesses and don’t recognize the names as family members. I wonder if they were friends of the bride and groom or distant family members? 

When I reviewed the blog post What can you find in Grandma’s Scrapbook? about George & Sarah’s 50th wedding anniversary, I do see in one of the newspaper accounts, the name Mrs. Mamie MacBeth.  Is this the wife of witness George MacBeth? 

Searching and searching for information on St. Andrew’s yielded no results. I was only able to find several references to the Rector listed on the marriage license, in The Churchman, a Weekly News-Magazine in 1897:

In the article about George and Sarah’s 50th anniversary I can see that they were remarried by Rev. Robert B. Hall of St. Andrew’s Church. So, I know that the church was still around in 1947 when they celebrated their anniversary.  I decided to go to Google Maps to see if the church is currently there and found:

I wonder if the church was torn down to make way for Interstate 278- the Gowanus Expressway? The Gowanus was originally started in 1939 and widened from 4 to 6 lanes between 1958 and 1964. Unfortunately, there is no church for me to visit.  I wonder if I will one day be able to find a photo of the church?

If you have any corrections, additions or stories to share I look forward to hearing them.
Enjoy the journey,
Debby

3rd Blogiversary-Debby’s Family Genealogy Blog

Saturday, November 24, 2018

A look back at the last year-

• Over the past year I have created and published 50 blog posts.  This was one of my goals and I accomplished this despite working full time.  YEA!!
• All time History Page Views- 79, 284  (about 25,000 more than last year)
• Subscribed Followers – 17

A review of my posts for this past year shows:

• most viewed blog post this past year was DNA Chromosome Mapping with 2531 page views!  Wow!
• second most viewed post was entitled Riverhead, New York Soldiers in the War of 1812 with 920 page views.
• third most viewed was a post entitled A Lot More Questions Than Answers-The Life of Ann Meenan Rowan with 760 page views.

Research Accomplishments:

• One of my goals for last year was to publish a book of my blog posts and I was able to accomplish that. How exciting to see all the research for a year published in to one place in a book format I think my greatest research find this year was a series of posts I did about my paternal 2x great-grandfather John W. Rowan and locating his Civil War Records.  I started with a family story in Who Was the Civil War Veteran? then Is It the Right John W. Rowan, Civil War Veteran? and concluded with Civil War Records of John W. Rowan. To be able to start with a handed down story and find the truth in it was amazing!  More to come on this subject.
• A major accomplishment for me this year was to be able to find the information and prove to the Society of Mayflower Descendants that I am indeed a descendant of John & Priscilla Alden of the Mayflower. My perseverance and research skills were validated!  I received word this week, a few days before Thanksgiving.  The official certificate hasn’t arrived yet.  This was one of my goals for the past year.

Honors:

• After attending the Celtic Connections Conference 2018 in Boston I wrote a blog post entitled Celtic Connections Conference-Pathways to Our Past.  A link to my post was published on the Celtic Connections Conference website.
• I presented, for the first time outside of San Diego County, Carrie’s Letters: Brining Ancestral letters to Life at the Sacramento German Genealogy Society and made some wonderful new friends I hope to see at the International German Genealogy Conference in June.  Be sure to register.  I have.
• I wrote my first piece, a speaker review on Kitty Munson Cooper who presented in October, for the San Diego Genealogical Society Quarterly newsletter.

What I’ve learned:

• Develop a research plan when you have a specific question you want an answer to.
• Citing my sources definitely helps me remember how and where I learned information about an ancestor.
• Look for county or town ‘Centennial Books’.  I keep finding interesting tidbits on my ancestors since many of my lines go back to the 1600 & 1700s in America.

My goals for this next year:

• To publish at least 50 posts while continuing to work full time. 
• Obtain a military headstone for my paternal 2x great-grandfather John W. Rowan.
• Make the stories of my ancestors’ lives be more than just dry facts. Being able to research the time period or location where an ancestor lived helps me understand their lives.
• My Dad continues to give me ideas for researching.  He is challenging me to see how far back I can go and determine the previous land owners for our family duck farm.   I think this research might make for an interesting presentation one day.

My frustration continues to be that there never seems to be enough time and money to do as much research as I want.

A VERY SPECIAL THANK-YOU TO ALL MY READERS!  I enjoy the comments you make and/or questions you ask.  I’m always looking for new directions to search or information that is questionable and needs verification. 

My updated Surname word cloud:



Another great year for me as a blogger.  Looking back shows me I have accomplished more than I thought I did.  On to new discoveries and new cousin connections while also enjoying the great ones I have already made :)

If you have any corrections, additions or stories to share I look forward to hearing them.
Enjoy the journey,
Debby

Gena Philibert-Ortega Presents

Gena Philibert-Ortega presented 2 informative talks Saturday at the San Diego Genealogical Society.  Gena is an author of articles and books, speaker, blogger and genealogist with an emphasis on researching women’s history and lives.  Gena kept us engaged with examples of some of the interesting things she was able to find out about women.  Throughout both presentations Gena reminded us that researching our female ancestors is different then researching our male ancestors. 

Gena’s first presentation was entitled was entitled Wives, Girlfriends, Widows, Exes and Mistresses: Documenting Women.

Gena showed us some great examples of how events in our ancestor’s lives produce a variety of sources of information that we may not have thought of.  Gena talked about using genealogy databases, vital records, libraries/archives, digitized books/articles, using finding aids and relationships to locate information.  She also talked about not using the general ‘search’ options within databases but to search for a particular ‘type’ of record and then search within that record.

• I wanted to use some of Gena’s suggestions to see what I could find on Hannah Petty Warner from my last blog post.  Searching in Ancestry using the Card Catalog and taking a chance, I searched Presbyterian Church records and was able to locate the baptismal records of 4 of Hannah and Daniel’s children including my direct line ancestor James:

• I also now know that the family attended the local Presbyterian Church.
• Searching in Google Books for “Hannah Warner” I stumbled upon a book entitled The Descendants of Andrew Warner published in 1919. While the ‘Hannah’ I was looking for is not the Hannah I found in the book, Andrew Warner IS my 8th great-grandfather and this is an amazing find! 

Gena’s second presentation was entitled Her Name Was Not Known: Researching Your Female Ancestor’s Life.

During Gena’s presentation she talked again about how elusive our female ancestors may seem but we can still find out so much about them if we know how to search.  She discussed the five aspects of a Woman’s life that need to be considered when you are researching to help develop a better understanding of your ancestor: the woman herself, her family, the locality where the woman lived, the time period she lived in and information about her neighbors and community (FAN club-friends and neighbors).  When searching have a list of Keywords to search, such as all the variations of a woman’s name, a location, etc. and search each one. 

• If I go back to my post entitled Bible Records for Hannah Petty Warner and use some of Gena’s considerations for researching her what can I find to add to Hannah’s story?  I decided to look at the 1800 US Federal Census in a different way and I believe I find Hannah living with her son David Warner (her husband had died in 1787) based on her age at the time of the census.  If this is correct, I can tell by the census she was living in Riverhead, that her son Benjamin and family were living close by as where families named Woodhull, Corwin, Benjamin, Tuthill, Terry, Reeves, Youngs, Wells, etc.  These were her neighbors and coincidentally other family names I might be researching for other family lines.  This is good information to know.  Her son James, my direct ancestor, was living further away but in the same town.  I previously wouldn’t have looked at the Census since usually it’s hard to find women before the 1850 Census.
• Riverhead, founded in 1792,  had a total of 1498 inhabitants in 1800.  This all adds some more information to Hannah’s life story.

Gena gave us some amazing suggestions for searching for women by the records that were created around their lives.  Already I am realizing first hand that women’s records and information about their lives are available just not in the same way we search for our male ancestors.  Gena reminded us that “Thinking outside the proverbial genealogy box will assist you in finding clues to those ancestresses lives.” 

If you have any corrections, additions or stories to share I look forward to hearing them.
Enjoy the journey,
Debby

Be sure to check out Gena’s website Gena-Philibert-Ortega and her blog Gena’s Genealogy.  Gena has authored the books From the Family Kitchen: Discover Your Food Heritage and Preserve Favorite Recipes  and  Cemeteries of the Eastern Sierra. 

Bible Records for Hannah Petty Warner

In the summer I was able to locate a Will for a Daniel Petty in Suffolk County, New York that while copying, thought was probably the correct one.  I was looking for Hannah Petty Warner’s father.  This is getting back to the late 1700s and records are scarce, to say the least.  Somehow, I knew that Hannah Petty Warner had a father named Daniel Petty.  Unfortunately, this was before my days of citing my sources.  I believe I found the information on a Family Search tree about 20 years ago. As I tried to figure out if the Will was for the correct ancestor, I decided I should take a step back and see what I could first find out about his daughter Hannah.

Hannah Petty Warner is my paternal 5th Great-Grandmother:

At the Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead, New York I was able to find copies of pages from the Cottage Bible that belonged to David Warner and then his son David T. Warner.  David Warner was one of the 10 children of Daniel & Hannah Warner and brother of my ancestor James Warner.

On the pages I find the following:



Hannah was born 16 April 1737, I believe to Daniel and Hannah Paine.  I have no other record of her birth other than this account written in the Family Bible by her son David.

Hannah and Daniel Warner were married 16 December 1756.

Hannah and Daniel had 10 children: Daniel, Nathaniel (died at age 15), James (my 4x great-grandfather), Deborah, John (died at age 9), David, Benjamin, Hannah (died at age 2), Hannah (died at age 2), and Mehitable.

Hannah, her husband Daniel, and her family lived through the Revolutionary War.  What must life have been like for them?  How did they survive?  From the book A History of Mattituck by Rev. Charles E. Craven, I learned:

• British troops were encamped in Mattituck.  Many officers were quartered in houses of local people.  The farmers were required to give large portions of their grains, crops and all their hay and straw to the invading Army.  There were stories about the British soldiers committing outrages on defenseless local people.  Some families removed themselves to Connecticut during the War with some returning and others not.  Many of their farms will pillaged by the soldiers and many lost their land.  Young men left to fight in the War.  The families that remained were compelled to swear allegiance to King George.  Men were made to work for the army and if their loyalty was in question they were beaten and sometimes killed. There was a small pox epidemic during this time.  The British troops left Long Island in 1780.

Hannah died 19 July 1814 at the age of 77 years.  Hannah is buried in Jamesport, Suffolk County, New York. 



There were no newspapers at the time of Hannah’s death so there is no Obituary to further tell her story.  The Church records of the time reprinted in Craven’s book begin with Baptisms in 1751 (after Hannah’s birth) and the Death records end in 1809 (before Hannah’s death).  Thank goodness the family had a Bible to record the life events of the family for without this it would be difficult to know of this early family history.

If you have any corrections, additions or stories to share I look forward to hearing them.
Enjoy the journey,
Debby
More about the Will I located for Daniel Petty next time.