Johann Gottfried Hauer (John Godfrey Howard) Family Line
Dead Ends in Genealogy - I've Hit Another One!
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by Carolyn Ann Howard
Nobody likes to be stuck in their family tree, but I most certainly am - all the time - and if you're my cousin, so are you. I wish our ancestors would have left more bread crumbs for us to pick up. And probably if you had asked them at that time, they would've scoffed at their great-grandchildren wanting to learn more about them.
What is frustrating about the world of genealogy is how complacent we - all of us - become with so-called "facts." I'm just as guilty as everyone else. For example, my family ran around in circles for years trying to solve the Joanna problem.
Here's the Joanna problem: Abraham Howard's first wife was Joanna. Joanna died young and after that, Abraham married Mary Ann Toles. Then I met my wonderful cousin, Greg, who is also from Abraham's line. And guess what? I realized his family was using the same equation for Abraham's brother, Elias. Elias's first wife was Joanna. Joanna died young and after that, Elias married Katy Vader.
Mystery solved and look how easy, but it wasn't easy until Greg told me it was. Abraham's first and only wife likely was Mary Ann Toles. Mary Ann outlived her husband. Joanna's stone in the graveyard says she was the wife of Elias.
How did this get so mixed up? Just that we're human and make up stories about everything, even if those stories are wrong.
One so-called "fact" is that Susanna Harwick's parents were Magdalena Meyer and Conrad Harwick. My theory is that they're likely related somehow, but these two just aren't old enough to be Susanna's parents. It's not that that it isn't a possibility, but it feels quite doubtful, especially since we have the baptismal records, and they just don't match up. I spent the last few days working on a theory that Conrad Harwick was Susanna's brother, but I couldn't prove it and came to yet another dead end.
Ancestry uses algorithms to suggest potential parents to their users. Because so many people have Susanna's parents as Magdalena and Conrad, these are also Ancestry's recommendations for her parents. But it's just an algorithm. Nothing more.
Another route I've been working on is Godfrey Howard's friendship with the Brust family. What an interesting time to have lived, pre-Revolutionary War. I have read that some in the Brust family were loyalists, which means they were loyal to the crown, Great Britain. Godfrey was a Hessian soldier from Germany who was hired to fight in the Revolutionary War on the side of the U.S. After the war was over, many of the loyalists fled to Canada. Hessian soldiers also were outcasts. Did this friendship lead the two families together to escape their labels? Click on photos to enlarge
I've also been reading, studying, and trying to understand Rensselaerwyck. This is the area where Godfrey Howard originally lived in New York. It was a large tract of land given to the Van Rensselaer family. The Van Rensselaer family then leased the land to farmers and were kind and generous landlords. Did Godfrey lease land from the Van Rensselaer family? I have yet to find any evidence that he did, but it is an extremely interesting study. Hopefully it doesn't lead to another dead end!
What is frustrating about the world of genealogy is how complacent we - all of us - become with so-called "facts." I'm just as guilty as everyone else. For example, my family ran around in circles for years trying to solve the Joanna problem.
Here's the Joanna problem: Abraham Howard's first wife was Joanna. Joanna died young and after that, Abraham married Mary Ann Toles. Then I met my wonderful cousin, Greg, who is also from Abraham's line. And guess what? I realized his family was using the same equation for Abraham's brother, Elias. Elias's first wife was Joanna. Joanna died young and after that, Elias married Katy Vader.
Mystery solved and look how easy, but it wasn't easy until Greg told me it was. Abraham's first and only wife likely was Mary Ann Toles. Mary Ann outlived her husband. Joanna's stone in the graveyard says she was the wife of Elias.
How did this get so mixed up? Just that we're human and make up stories about everything, even if those stories are wrong.
One so-called "fact" is that Susanna Harwick's parents were Magdalena Meyer and Conrad Harwick. My theory is that they're likely related somehow, but these two just aren't old enough to be Susanna's parents. It's not that that it isn't a possibility, but it feels quite doubtful, especially since we have the baptismal records, and they just don't match up. I spent the last few days working on a theory that Conrad Harwick was Susanna's brother, but I couldn't prove it and came to yet another dead end.
Ancestry uses algorithms to suggest potential parents to their users. Because so many people have Susanna's parents as Magdalena and Conrad, these are also Ancestry's recommendations for her parents. But it's just an algorithm. Nothing more.
Another route I've been working on is Godfrey Howard's friendship with the Brust family. What an interesting time to have lived, pre-Revolutionary War. I have read that some in the Brust family were loyalists, which means they were loyal to the crown, Great Britain. Godfrey was a Hessian soldier from Germany who was hired to fight in the Revolutionary War on the side of the U.S. After the war was over, many of the loyalists fled to Canada. Hessian soldiers also were outcasts. Did this friendship lead the two families together to escape their labels? Click on photos to enlarge
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| 1767 Map of Rensselaerswyck Public Domain, via Wikipedia
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© 2022 by December Moonlight Publishing, LLC
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