GRAVES FAMILY BULLETIN
Vol. 15, No. 10, Sept. 17,
2013
A
Free, Occasional, Online Summary of Items of Interest to Descendants of all
Families of Graves, Greaves, Grieves, Grave, and other spelling variations
Worldwide
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Copyright
© 2013 by the Graves Family Association and Kenneth V. Graves. All rights reserved.
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CONTENTS
**
General Comments
**
GFA Facebook Group Growth
**
Why DNA Test?
**
How Autosomal DNA Can Help African Americans (and Others) Find Their Roots
**
Interesting Research of a Derbyshire Greaves Family
**
How to Know Whether a Vital Record Exists
**
Using Middle Name As Given Name
**
Finding Records in England
**
Updates to the GFA Website
**
To Submit Material to this Bulletin & Other Things
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GENERAL
COMMENTS
The
summer is winding down in the northern hemisphere, and spring is just around
the corner for those of you south of the equator. Whatever the season and the weather wherever you are, I hope
you are making progress with your genealogical research.
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GFA FACEBOOK
GROUP GROWTH
I
commented in the previous GF Bulletin that our GFA Facebook group has shown a
sudden spurt in growth. It is apparent
that it is filling a need for communication among Graves and Greaves
descendants. Since I have been
keeping track of the membership, I decided to share my graph with all of you. The recent upward curve in membership
can be clearly seen in the graph below.
For any of you who don’t belong to the Facebook group, might like to
join, but don’t know how to find it, just go to the GFA website and click on the Facebook link
at the top right of the page, or click here.
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WHY DNA TEST?
For
those of you who are unsure of the value of DNA testing, or who just haven’t
done it for whatever reason, Roberta Estes has written a very good article
in her DNAeXplained blog. Among
the 15 reasons she lists are: because we can, to discover whether we are
related paternally (via Y-DNA) to others of the same or similar surname, to
find out about our ancient ancestry, to find cousins and ancestors on all
family branches, to prove paternity, to learn more about our health traits, and
many more reasons. She also provides
links to other sources and previous articles she has written.
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HOW AUTOSOMAL
DNA CAN HELP AFRICAN AMERICANS (AND OTHERS) FIND THEIR ROOTS
In
an article
of Aug. 25, 2013, on her blog Your
Genetic Genealogist, CeCe Moore shared some interesting and helpful
information about the value of autosomal DNA testing. The article is mainly about one person’s successful
experience with DNA testing. This
African American man’s search for his ancestry started with a talk by Alex
Haley, the author of Roots. Then,
much later, the results of his AncestryDNA test revealed that his ancestry was
almost equally divided between Europe and West Africa. He wrote, “It led
me to my ancestors from England, Ireland, France and other places. There was a
Mayflower passenger. There were ancestors I shared in common with George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson and even President Obama.”
NEW TOOLS
The
other important feature of this article is that it mentions some new tools for
finding and analyzing autosomal DNA matches. CeCe finds AncestryDNA (the name for the autosomal DNA test
on Ancestry.com) especially helpful, partly because of the large number of
trees attached to the matches, and partly because of the new
search filters provided by Ancestry.
Also
mentioned was a tool called “Jeff
Snavely’s Chrome extension for AncestryDNA downloads of match lists” that
allows you to scan all matches, and then search, compare or download the
data. This is an extension to the
Chrome browser. It doesn’t work
with any other browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc. Chrome is available free from Google by
clicking here. After your matches are scanned, you can
use the search box to select and group matches by username, ancestral surname,
or information in the notes field.
It also facilitates the transfer of all match data to a spreadsheet for
further analysis.
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INTERESTING
RESEARCH OF A DERBYSHIRE GREAVES FAMILY
As
a member of the Guild of One Name Studies (GOONS), one of the benefits is
occasionally receiving obituaries and sometimes other stories of Graves/Greaves
family members in the U.K. I
recently received the article shown below about a Fred Greaves, a miner from
Killamarsh, Notts., who received the Victoria Cross in the First World War.
Although
I wasn’t sure that this was something that would be helpful to me, I
immediately checked the 1911 census for England and Wales on Ancestry.com, and
found him as a coal miner in Barlborough, Derbyshire.
I
then checked other census records, and also found much information about this
family in submitted genealogies. I
searched for connections to other genealogies on the GFA website and found that
this part of the Greaves family is not included in any existing genealogy, so a
new genealogy (#405) has been created.
It is almost certainly related to other genealogies in the same area of
Derbyshire (Killamarsh, Eckington, and Sheffield), including genealogies 568
and 978. If anyone can find more
information, especially how this family is connected to the other families of
this area, that would be of great help.
Also, finding living male descendants of these genealogies with the Greaves
surname and getting them to take a Y-DNA test would be very helpful.
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HOW TO KNOW
WHETHER A VITAL RECORD EXISTS
An article
in the Ancestry.com blog of Aug. 15, 2013, discusses the issue of how to find
whether a vital record exists. The
article suggests looking on the Family History Wiki
on Ancestry.com. There is a link
to it at the bottom of the Learning Center tab. For instance, if you are looking for a marriage record in a
specific county, you can go to the Wiki to find information for that county and
find when marriage records started being kept in that county, and what
information should have been in that record. If you find that a marriage record should exist, you can
search for it on Ancestry.com, on FamilySearch.org, and elsewhere online. If it can’t be found online, then you
will know that you need to look on microfilm at an LDS Family History Center,
in the county courthouse, the state archives, or elsewhere. The article also suggests watching
Crista Cowan’s What Genealogy
Records Exist? on YouTube.
When you go to view that video on YouTube, you will see a list of other
interesting videos on the right side of your screen. You can also search on YouTube for other videos of possible
interest. (For instance, search
for genealogy, autosomal DNA, etc.)
VITAL RECORDS NOT ONLINE
A
recent discussion of finding and using records that are not online was in the
American Ancestors newsletter, The Weekly
Genealogist, Aug. 14, 2013, from the New England Historic Genealogical
Society in an Ask a Genealogist
article by Rhonda McClure. If the
needed document cannot be found online, the recommendation is to check on
FamilySearch.org to determine whether it is available on microfilm. If it can’t be found either online or
on microfilm, the next step is to check various libraries, archives, court
houses, churches, and other places where the document might have been created
or stored.
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USING MIDDLE
NAME AS GIVEN NAME
There have been many times when I and others have
seen more than one given name for a spouse or other person and wondered whether
the references were really for one person or two people. I have noticed that especially in the
late 1800s and early 1900s in America, the men in my family and many others
tended to use their middle names instead of their first names. The article in the next paragraph
discusses an example of that practice.
In an article in The Weekly Genealogist
newsletter of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, Sept. 11, 2013, Bette
Wing of Byron, New York wrote: “Many
of my ancestors were early Massachusetts colonists who left for Canada in the
1760s. Most settled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and
Labrador. After much researching, I finally realized that most of them used
their middle names for everyday life and used their given names on official
documents. For the longest time I thought an ancestor had two wives, Elizabeth
and Rachel. Finally I discovered the wife's name was Elizabeth Rachel and she
was known by her middle name. Once I found that key, it opened many doors. I
found middle name usage common in Newfoundland, Labrador, and Nova Scotia, and
much less so in New Brunswick. Apparently this was a common practice throughout
the 1800s and it included the Irish, Scottish, and English populations. Hope
this helps another researcher.”
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FINDING
RECORDS IN ENGLAND
Finding
records in the U.K. and especially in England is a complex subject for which
there is much instruction in printed books and on the Internet. However, Donna Graves of Ontario,
Canada, recently posted a tip on the GFA Facebook page about one helpful source
of help. It is The National Archives in Kew, in
the London Borough of Richmond, Surrey, England. This is the UK government’s official archives, “from
Domesday Book to websites,” with 1 billion archived pages now available online.
The
website provides research guidance to birth, marriage and death records, adoptions,
divorces, medieval and early modern family history sources, military personnel
records, occupational records, census and electoral registration records,
records relating to immigration and emigration, and much more. You can see some of this on their Looking
for a person? page. Some of
the records are not at the National Archives, but at other locations, as noted
in their guides.
One
place to search for actual records on their website is on their Discovery
page. About 5% of their records
can be downloaded, and 95% are in paper form only. The paper records can be copied and sent within 14 days. Since I am especially interested in my
Greaves family in Northamptonshire, I entered Greaves and Northamptonshire in
the search box, and got 22 results.
These included:
·
Will of Thomas Greaves, Rector of Benefield, Northamptonshire, June
1676
·
Will of Robert Greaves, Yeoman of Syresham, Northamptonshire, 2 Jan.
1759. (It is possible that this
was the Robert Greaves, son of Thomas Greaves and Elizabeth Garner, in
genealogy 47.)
·
Will of Eleanor Graves, Widow of Brackley, Northamptonshire, 26 Oct.
1837
·
East v. Greaves, Plaintiffs, mentioning Frances Greaves, spinster, 1698
·
Discharge papers of Thomas Greaves, 1828-1852
·
Will of James Greaves, Farmer and Dairyman of Greatworth,
Northamptonshire, 14 Oct. 1693
A
search for Greaves in Buckinghamshire (where some of these genealogy 47
families moved) listed several wills that are online for the family of Thomas
Greaves and Elizabeth Danser in Haversham.
As
many of you already know, another good place to search for records is on the FamilySearch website. I did a search and found many records
for genealogy 47 family members on that site. If you have not used this website recently, you will see
that you now have to setup a login ID and password, but it is still free.
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UPDATES TO THE
GFA WEBSITE
Additions
and updates made since the last summary in the June 17 bulletin include the
following genealogies.
New
Genealogies
405
-- John Greaves of Eckington, Derbyshire, England
411
– Thomas Greaves and Mary Ann Salthouse of Derbyshire & Liverpool,
Lancashire, England
Revised
Genealogies
33
– Matthew Greaves and Isabel Burton of Hampsthwaite, Yorkshire, England
83
– Samuel Graves of Lynn, MA
102
– John Graves of NC & Blount Co., AL
169
– Capt. Thomas Graves of VA
226
– James Graves and Sarah Attaway (or Carson) of Wilkes Co., GA
319
– Mary Graves and George Swan of KY & IL
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ABOUT
THIS BULLETIN:
This
bulletin is written and edited by Kenneth V. Graves, ken.graves@gravesfa.org.
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BULLETIN:
Send
any material you would like to have included in this bulletin to
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ASSOCIATION:
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the contents of this bulletin are copyrighted by the Graves Family Association
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