GRAVES FAMILY BULLETIN

 

A Free, Occasional, Online Summary of Items of Interest to Descendants of all Families of Graves, Greaves, Grieves, Grave, and other spelling variations Worldwide

 

Vol. 10, No. 3, Feb. 25, 2008

 

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Copyright © 2008 by the Graves Family Association and Kenneth V. Graves.  All rights reserved.

 

Information on how to start a free subscription to this bulletin and how to be removed from the subscription list is at the end of this bulletin.  If you received this bulletin directly, then you are already subscribed.

 

Visit the GFA web site at https://gravesfa.org

 

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CONTENTS:

 

** General Comments

** New Genealogy and Greaves/Graves Ancestry in England

** Mitochondrial DNA Testing Supports Connection

** DNA Test Results With No Matches

** Changes to the GFA Website

** Photos from Reunion in Williamsburg, VA in June 2007

** New Websites for Identifying People in Family Pictures

** Revolutionary War Pension Application Project of William T. Graves of Charlotte, NC

** The Wayback Machine

** To Submit Material to this Bulletin & Other Things

 

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GENERAL COMMENTS

 

This is being sent from Bradenton, Florida, where Sarah and I are enjoying a month of warm weather, away from the snow and cold of New England.  It contains some of the new developments in our Graves/Greaves research project, plus other items of possible interest.  Your help and suggestions continue to be appreciated.

 

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NEW GENEALOGY AND GREAVES/GRAVES ANCESTRY IN ENGLAND

 

Genealogy 972 for John Greaves and Jane Bottomley of Oldham, Lancashire, England has been recently compiled and added to the GFA website.  Many of their descendants emigrated to Ontario, Canada, and some settled in the U.S.  This part of the family is undoubtedly related to other families already on the website, and research as well as DNA testing is very much needed to find the connections.

 

A new section of possibly-related genealogies for Greaves Families of Lancashire, England has now been added to the Charts page of the GFA website.  These include genealogies 81, 273, 318, 388, 398, 454, 611, 659, 773, 894, 913, 943, and 972.  Only gen. 81 has a descendant who has been DNA tested, and research and testing is very much needed.

 

When I looked at census records for Lancashire, especially for 1841 and 1851, I found that there were many Greaves families living in Oldham, Royton, Ashton under Lyne, and elsewhere in the immediate vicinity.  Someone needs to catalogue all the Greaves families in the area, search baptismal and other records, and try to determine how they are related.

 

In addition to the families in Oldham and vicinity, the same process needs to be done for many other areas of England.  I would very much like to hear from volunteers who might be interested in pursuing this.  This is an essential part of our efforts to find how the various families are related to each other and to find the specific connections of families in the U.S. and elsewhere to families in England.

 

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MITOCHONDRIAL DNA TESTING SUPPORTS CONNECTION

 

Application to Genealogy 169:

Iris Horne of Waxahachie, TX recently told me about how she used mitochondrial DNA testing to confirm her descent from Thomas Graves (born by 1724, lived in Orange Co., VA, descended from Capt. Thomas Graves of VA, genealogy 169) and Elizabeth ‑‑‑‑‑‑.  From census records, Iris found that she was apparently descended from their daughter Elizabeth Graves (b. 1752) who married Zachariah Sims.  She worked with Amanda Dicken of Russellville, AR, who is descended from Frances Graves (b. 1760) who married John Wait, another daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Graves.  They found descendants of both sisters through all-female lines and got mtDNA tests for both.  The test results matched exactly, proving that they share a common ancestor, and giving strong support to the belief that the common ancestor was Elizabeth, the mother of the two sisters.

 

You can see the DNA test results on the Mitochondrial DNA Test Results page of the GFA website.  On that page (and also in the Capt. Thomas Graves of VA summary section of the Charts page) are links to the female lineage charts.  These results are on the chart for John5 (descended from Capt. Thomas Graves via John2, Thomas3, John4).

 

One of the other many uses for this approach would be to confirm the daughters of this Thomas and Elizabeth Graves who were not named in his will.  This would be Henrietta Graves, b.c. 1769, m. Mr. Hudson, and Mary Graves, b.c. 1770, m. Mr. Haynes.

 

Another application might be to determine whether Elizabeth who married Thomas Graves could have been a daughter of Thomas Sims.  If a known daughter of Thomas Sims could be found and a descendant of an all-female line could be found and tested, then that test result could be compared to this one.  If they did not match, then the suggestion that Elizabeth was a daughter of Thomas Sims would be disproved.

 

Application to other families, Genealogy 116:

There are undoubtedly many, many other situations where testing mtDNA for two descendants of direct female lines where the ancestors were suspected to be sisters could be helpful.  I have just been looking at another for Barb Mikesell who believes her ancestor, Emily Graves, b.c. 1832 in Ohio and married Charles Dunlap, was the oldest daughter of Isaac Graves and Mary Ann Courtney.  Isaac was descended from John Graves of Frederick Co., VA, genealogy 116.  If a direct-female-line descendant of one of the other 8 daughters of Isaac and Mary Ann could be found and tested, and that result could be compared to the test result on a direct-female-line descendant of Emily Graves, that could disprove or support the other evidence that has been found.

 

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DNA TEST RESULTS WITH NO MATCHES

 

There are a number of Y-DNA test results for Graves/Greaves descendants that do not yet have any matches.  The possible reasons for this include: (1) name change, (2) adoption, (3) illegitimacy, (4) not enough family members yet tested, (5) other.  For most of these non-matching test results, only one descendant has been tested, so there is no way to know whether the tested individual is truly representative of his family or not.  In these cases, at least one more descendant should be tested, preferably someone who is not closely related.

 

The genealogies that have presently been tested and have no matches are the following (arranged by haplogroup):

Haplogroup E

68 – Graves Family of Yorkshire & Mickleton Manor Gloucestershire, England

366 – Joseph Graves and Elizabeth Brazier of TN

789 – Enos Graves of Coleridge Twp., Randolph Co., NC

Haplogroup I

59 – Thadeus Graves and Mathilda Beeman of NY & IA

133 – Joseph Graves and Rachel Pratt of Framingham, MA

185 – John William Graves and Sarah May ------ of Leeds, Yorkshire, England

208 – Bela Curtis Graves and Dorothy Wallace of VT, NY, OH & IL

316 – Thomas Greaves and Martha ------ of Holmfirth, Yorkshire, England

592 – Edward Greaves and Mary ------ of Nottingham, England

624 – George Robert Graves and Mary Frances Kennedy of TN & TX

745 – Jacob Grieve of Stannington, Northumberland, England

785 – Thomas Graves of Dublin, Ireland

916 – John Graves and Annie ------ of Canada & IL

919 – Leon Graves and Rosella ------ of Quebec, Canada, & Worcester Co., MA

938 – John Greaves and Ann ------ of Tanfield, Durham, England

Haplogroup Q

768 – George F. Greaves and Caroline Matilda Bandy of Yorkshire, England & Wichita, KS

Haplogroup R1a

904 (known illegitimacy) – John Grave and Mary ------ of Crosthwaite, Cumberland, England

Haplogroup R1b1

32 -- Campbell Graves of VA & Giles Co., TN

60 – John Graves of Bassingham, Lincolnshire, England

69 – William B. Graves and Elizabeth ------ of NC & IN

81 – John Greaves and Anne Jackson of Horsehedgefold, near Oldham, Lancashire, England

165 – William Graves of Dover, NH

228 (1 matches, 1 doesn’t) – Greaves Family of Beeley, Derbyshire, England

886 (1 matches, 1 doesn’t) – Thomas Greaves of Kirkby Overblow or Spofforth, North Yorkshire, England

934 – Robert Greaves and Sarah ------ of Alfreton, Derbyshire & Calverton, Nottinghamshire, England

 

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CHANGES TO THE GFA WEBSITE

 

Website page for Current News of family members

By clicking on the History/News tab at the top of any page of the GFA website, and then clicking on the Current News tab, you will see current news stories about family members.  Recent stories include rodeo champions Stockton Graves of Oklahoma and Lee Graves of Canada, Cheryl Graves and family involved in musical theater in Delaware, the passing of Robert Graves who introduced bingo to Cumbria, England, the family of businessman James W. Graves of Clay Co., AR, basketball players Kyle Graves in British Columbia, and the 3 Graves brothers of Butler University in Indiana, and the election of John H. H. Graves as president of the board of directors of Luray Caverns Corp.  New stories are added frequently.  I always appreciate information about news I have missed.  Help in finding out the family connections of the family members in these stories will also be appreciated.

 

Other, more significant changes to the website are being worked on.

 

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PHOTOS FROM REUNION IN WILLIAMSBURG, VA IN JUNE 2007

 

Many people at the reunion in Williamsburg, VA took photos and videos, and many of them offered to share with others.  At least one attendee, Beth Reedy, descended from Capt. Thomas Graves of VA uploaded her photos to the smugmug.com website. You can access them at http://believesinfairies.smugmug.com/gallery/2976382#163997597

 

If any of the others who attended have photos or videos online that they would like to share, let me know.

 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with SmugMug, it is worth looking at. To store your pictures and videos on their website, you pay an annual fee of $40/year for a Standard account, $60/year for a Power User account, and $150/year for a Professional account.  In return you get unlimited storage for as long as you belong, ability to store and view in high resolution at large size, no ads, private group sharing, and many other features not available on free sites.

 

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NEW WEBSITES FOR IDENTIFYING PEOPLE IN FAMILY PICTURES

 

Lost and Found Photos

The Jan. 21 issue of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter has an interesting article on a new website, currently in the testing phase.  The name of the website, started by Photo Grafix, is "Lost and Found Photos."  Quoting from the company's announcement: “Many customers have asked us if we could identify photographs they inherited from relatives or rescued from the garbage dump.  We have also met skilled and generous people who have helped others confirm locations, dates, and sometimes names of people in those kinds of photographs. The goal of Lost and Found Photos is to facilitate such connections.”

 

This is a free service. Registration is only required for posting photos.  For more information, go to http://www.lostandfoundphotos.net.

 

Automated Photo Matching/Identification

At www.myheritage.com you can upload a picture of yourself or a relative and find which celebrity you resemble, create a morph of the celebrity and you, or find which parent a child resembles more.  They write: “MyHeritage.com is one of the world's first services to apply advanced face recognition technology to personal photos and family history; and it's free.”

 

According to a review at http://family2point0.wordpress.com/2006/06/02/my-heritage-family-and-genealogy/:

“MyHeritage.com automatically learns from every new face it is taught, so after a few examples it will recognize all your family and friends. It can be set to auto-tag faces recognized in high probability.

Associating faces with family trees is great fun. After doing so your family and children can click any face in any photo to see all photos of that person, or the family tree of that person, or their own family relationship with that person.”

 

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REVOLUTIONARY WAR PENSION APPLICATION PROJECT OF WILLIAM T. GRAVES OF CHARLOTTE, NC

 

William T. (“Will”) Graves of Charlotte, VA (descended from genealogy 169 via Thomas Graves who married Ann Davenport) is involved with a Revolutionary War pension application project.  For more information, see http://www.southerncampaign.org/pen/.  He would like to ask everyone interested to participate by submitting their transcriptions of applications filed by veterans of the Southern Campaign.  Listing on the site is free.  The goal is to create a fully searchable database containing the pension applications of all the veterans (or their widows) who either fought in some phase of the Southern Campaign or who lived in one of the southern States (which are defined as GA, SC, NC or VA) when called to serve in the War.

 

Will Graves also published a book in 2002 titled James Williams: An American Patriot in the Carolina Backcountry.  “James Williams (1740-1780) was the highest-ranking patriot officer to die from wounds suffered during the American Revolutionary War battle fought at King’s Mountain, South Carolina.”  The book points out the overlooked importance of the battles in the south and the role of Williams as one of America’s many heroes in its fight for independence from Great Britain.  This is a print-on-demand book available from Amazon or essentially any bookstore.  However, he has been working on a new, expanded edition for several years, so is not pushing the existing version.

 

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THE WAYBACK MACHINE

 

I am constantly trying to figure out how the GFA website can be made better and more helpful.  As part of that process, I wanted to see some of the information that had been on the website several years ago, but I no longer had those pages.  Then I remembered about the Wayback Machine.  This is a website from Internet Archives at http://www.archive.org that many of you may find helpful and interesting for many purposes.  They not only archive web pages, but also music, video, text, etc.  For the Graves Family Association website, their historical “snapshots” start on Dec. 5, 1998 and go through the present (with about a 6 month delay).

 

On their site, you can browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported, but may be in the future.

 

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ABOUT THIS BULLETIN:

This bulletin is written and edited by Kenneth V. Graves, ken.graves@gravesfa.org.  Ken Graves was also editor of the Graves Family Newsletter (no longer published).  This bulletin will contain announcements and news of special interest to Graves descendants with Internet access.  It will not contain queries, genealogies, photos, and the kind of in-depth articles that used to appear in the Graves Family Newsletter.

 

TO SUBMIT MATERIAL TO THIS BULLETIN:

Send any material you would like to have included in this bulletin to ken.graves@gravesfa.org.  The editor reserves the right to accept, edit or reject any material submitted.

 

TO JOIN THE GRAVES FAMILY ASSOCIATION:

If you do not already belong to the GFA, you can join by sending $20 per year to Graves Family Association, 20 Binney Circle, Wrentham, MA 02093 (more details on GFA website).  Payment may also be sent electronically via PayPal by going to www.paypal.com and sending payment to gfa@gravesfa.org.  Benefits include access to the “members only” section of the website, membership directory, and help with learning more about your Graves/Greaves family.  The purpose of the GFA is to bring together as many descendants as possible to work toward learning more about the Graves/Greaves families, to help other descendants, and to instill pride in our ancestry.

 

COPYRIGHTS:

Although the contents of this bulletin are copyrighted by the Graves Family Association and Kenneth V. Graves, you are hereby granted rights, unless otherwise specified, to re-distribute articles to other parties for non-commercial purposes only.  Do not re-distribute the newsletter in its entirety.

 

TO SUBSCRIBE OR UNSUBSCRIBE TO THIS BULLETIN:

To subscribe to this bulletin, send an e-mail message to ken.graves@gravesfa.org.  Please include your full name.  Your postal mailing address and information on your Graves/Greaves ancestry would also be appreciated, although not essential.

 

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