RootsMagic – A Deck of Ancestors

52W Mark V – Week 16: Daniel Cook

This is Daniel Cook.

No, not the kid who starred in the eponymous Canadian children’s show that aired in the mid-naughts. (Did we ever decide what to call the first decade of the 21st century?) I mean my Great x4 Grandfather, Daniel Cook.

Daniel was born on December 14, 1769 in Preston, Connecticut, to Isaiah Cook and Mary Palmer. Daniel was the third of eleven children – nine boys and two girls – all of whom were born in Preston.

Daniel has deep New England roots going back four generations on his father’s side, in both Connecticut and Massachusetts. His maternal grandparents were also born in Connecticut, but don’t know much, if anything, about his maternal great grandparents.

However, a quick look at FamilySearch shows that shows a tree on Daniel’s maternal side going back at least five generations on most lines. Until I look at the sources supporting the connection to the individuals identified in that tree, I won’t be adding them to my database. I know if I did that now, it would be another six weeks before I even return to drafting this post, so instead I simply created a “Person To-Do Task” for Daniel in my RootsMagic database. At most, I will mention that the tree on FamilySearch indicates that on his mother’s side, Daniel’s ancestry also goes back at least three or four generations in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

This tree on FamilySearch shows some of the ancestry of Daniel’s maternal grandparents, Samuel Palmer and Sarah Andrus, none of which I’ve verified or checked sources.

Somehow Daniel came to be acquainted with Miriam Fellows. While she too was born in Connecticut, she lived about 100 kilometers away in almost the opposite corner of what is now the state. Nevertheless, meet they did, as they married in Preston on April 1, 1796.

After they married, Daniel and Miriam did not reside in Preston for long. By 1798, they were living in Kingsbury, New York, almost 250 kilometers from Preston. I do not know the motivation for the move, but based upon the 1800 census, Daniel was not alone. Three of his brothers – Ephraim, Chester, and Samuel – are listed as neighbours living in Kingsbury.

Extract from the 1800 US Census, showing brothers Daniel, Ephriam, C(h)ester, and Samuel Cook.

All six of Daniel and Miriam’s children were born in Kingsbury. It appears that only two survived childhood and the teen years, including my Gx3 Grandfather, Henry Lyman Cook.

Daniel lived the rest of his life in Kingsbury. He died there on July 12, 1825. Daniel died intestate and the court appointed his son Marvin and brother Chester as the administrators of his estate.

Letter of Administration of Estate issued by the court after Daniel died without a will.

52W Mark IV – Week 1 (Part One): In The Beginning

And now for something completely different

This week’s prompt for Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors Challenge might be “In The Beginning”, but as I enter the fourth go-around (after two earlier failed attempts), the Challenge is hardly new to me anymore. In fact, as I wrote last week, my participation in the Challenge has begun to result in diminishing returns. Looking at the list of this year’s prompts, I see many topics on which I’ve already written – some of which I think I’ve exhausted. So this year I’m going to do something different.

This year I’m going to be literal with the “52 Ancestors” challenge and write about 52 ancestors, a different one each week. I’m also going to frame it around the playing-cards theme I established with the title A Deck of Ancestors and my very first post of this blog in January 2022, More Than A Full Deck.

I have selected 52 ancestors that I have divided into four suits, with each suit starting with my great grandparents and working my way back to all of my great great great grandparents. In order to have 13 cards for each suit, I’m treating each married couple of great grandparents as a single card. I’m afraid I wasn’t very creative in making up the suits. I simply went with the initial of the surname of each of my great grandfathers, so the suits are “V”, “K”, “B”, and “L”. The cards for each suit match the colours I assigned to each of those lines in my RootsMagic database.

^{The four suits, with the number of each person within their suit.}

The only downside to this plan is that I have a wealth of information for the individuals who fall within the lower numbers of each suit, while I have very little for many of those who are at the higher numbers. I already know weeks 51 and 52 will probably be incredibly short posts.

That said, I see a few of the prompts for the 2025 Challenge are either relatively new to me. Others might be repeats, but I still have plenty of ideas for them. As a result, from time to time I might jump back into the Challenge as set up for this year, and create entries for those prompts that truly inspire me.

Happy 2025 and Happy 52 Ancestors Challenge!

52W Mark III – Week 50: Chosen Family

As Amy noted in describing this week’s prompt for the 52 Ancestors Challenge, family isn’t just those to whom you’re genetically related. Many might add that it goes beyond just people. I know lots of people who consider their pets as part of the family. I suggest you can go beyond that, especially if you’re a child. For many children, a favourite stuffie can be as much a part of what they consider to be family as any living creature.

Our youngest definitely considers his favourite stuffy, Vivi, to be part of his adopted family. Not only that, he has created a whole “biological” family for her! Of course, he knows it’s not real and that Vivi is just a toy, but he has a very active imagination, wonderful creativity, and a lot of empathy.

Mere moments after unwrapping Vivi – she still had her tag on her!

He received Vivi from my youngest sister as a gift for his fourth birthday. The moment he tore off the wrapping paper and I caught a glimpse of Vivi, I did not think much of her. Of course, our little guy took to her and hugged Vivi right away. At that time, he had been forming strong attachments to a “favourite” stuffie that lasted only a matter of weeks. Looking at Vivi, I figured that pattern would would continue and she’d be quickly forgotten. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Vivi has been by our son’s side since he got her. He is connected to Vivi the way Linus is connected to his blanket. Our son has created a whole world, history, and back story for Vivi. He named her very quickly after receiving her. I thought he could not have chosen a less likely name. Later, he gave Vivi a surname – “Okayer”, which is pronounced “Oaker”. Over time, he had named Vivi’s birth parents. Vivi is a “Specktogosaurus”, a species of dinosaur of our son’s own imagination. In video games, he creates characters that are named Vivi or Okayer.

Hibernating for the winter. She was in for a huge surprise when it came time to vacuum.

I was not understating it when I said our son has created a whole biological family for Vivi. Like his big brother, our son has developed an interest in genealogy. Not as passionately as me or his brother, but he is interested nevertheless. He enjoys sitting in beside me for portions of the monthly online meetings of the BC Genealogical Society. He loves to join me on trips to the BCGS library. His big project is trying to find a genealogical connection to his best friend, who he has known since pre-school. His other project has been to build a database for Vivi’s family tree.

Our boys share a home computer. One of the first things I installed when we got it was a copy of RootsMagic for our eldest. About a month or so ago, our youngest asked me if he could use it as well. Of course! I sat down with him and walked him through the basics, starting with a brand new database. I thought he was going to track our family, or the research he’s done of his friend’s family (which is pretty impressive for a nine-year-old!). Nope, he wanted to enter Vivi’s family.

Vivi’s genealogical information, with his birth parents and adoptive parent (owner).

The family group for Vivi’s biological parents. I hadn’t known Vivi was a middle child!

Last week, he asked his aunt where she bought Vivi. Could he be looking for an addition to her family? No, he just wants to know that there is a place where there were more Specktogosauruses and that Vivi hadn’t been alone. I then reminded him that we had once seen another Specktogosaurus at the Calgary Airport.

52W Mark III – Week 41: Most

Five or six years ago I presented on the topic of “Law and Genealogy” at a continuing professional development conference. In my PowerPoint presentation, I used several examples from my own research to illustrate several of my points. For example, to illustrate one of five parts of the Genealogical Proof Standard, I used an image of the citations I used in support of the date of the birth of my great grandfather, Johannis Albertus van der Fluit (1894-1932).

What struck me at the time was how many sources I had for that one fact – 17 at the time. If memory serves, I think that was one of the reasons I chose this fact to demonstrate the point. Heck, I could have used this image to illustrate the principle of conducting reasonably exhaustive research!

That slide has stuck with me, so with “Most” being the prompt for this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge, I got to wondering which ancestor in my family tree has the most sources. Not necessarily the best, or most reliable, or bear the most evidentiary weight – just most. Unfortunately, my software won’t provide the kind of statistics I’m looking for, so I manually went through the entries for all my direct ancestors up to and including my great grandparents.

The most heavily sourced of any fact for this set of ancestors is the April 13, 1919 marriage of my mother’s maternal grandparents, Milton Leo Burgess and Hazel Nelson, with 22 unique sources cited.

Not far behind is the list of sources demonstrating the marriage of my father’s maternal grandparents, Adrianus Komen and Elizabeth Bakker. I have cited 19 separate sources for their marriage that occurred on April 7, 1921.

Returning to Hazel Nelson, I also have 20 separate individual sources for her birth, which occurred on December 15, 1899.

However, where I can find the most sources is in the two folders of electronic documents I’ve gathered that are all vying for my attention. There is also a banker’s box of documents that also need to be written up. Unfortunately, I hate preparing source citations as much as I love genealogy!

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And now for something completely different

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