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I’m currently going through Morgan County, Tennessee, county court minute books page by page, looking for mentions of my various ancestors (& their families) who lived there in the 19th century. In that process, I’m finding occasional entries for free people of color and enslaved people living in the county. Because it can be so difficult for their descendants to trace them, I’m going to share the entries here as blog posts in the hope that researchers will find this and that it’ll be helpful to them all in some way. Here’s the first one:

Robert Bush this day presented an instrument in the form of a petition in the words and figures following (to wit), State of Tennessee Morgan County To the worshipful couty [sic] of Morgan County now sitting your petitioner a citizen of Morgan County humbly represents to your worshipful body that he is the proper owner of Rebecca a slave for life about the age of thirty two years and that she is his wife and the eversence [sic] the time of their marriage she has demeaned herself chastely and prudently as a wife and a slave and that he knowing that life is short and death sure and your petitioner having passed the meridian of life is desirous that she shall not descend or become the property of any other person he therefore petitions your worships to examine the premises and take such action as will liberate and make her free as your petitioner in duty bound will ever pray this 1st day of April 1850.  [signed] Robert Bush.  Upon the back of which is the following endorsement is made Granted by the Court.  John Williams, Chairman

Source: Morgan County, Tennessee, County Court Minutes, 1848-1861, Robert Bush entry, April term 1850, pp 88-89, FHL #978835, item 1, image 51.

I’ve just posted the second ancestor bio on this website, this time of my grandfather, Harry Lee Rowland. And yet again, this turned out to be a very enlightening experience. I thought I’d done all my research on Harry, had lots of dates and places and names, as usual. But when it came down to weaving together a story about his life, I realized that there were gaps in my knowledge, especially in terms of coming up with either facts or hypotheses about why they lived where they did and why they moved when and where they did.

And what was really amazing to me is that these were gaps I’d never even noticed before — and I’ve been working on my family genealogy research for over 30 years!

My grandfather died when I was only 6 months old, so I never knew him, but I certainly heard lots of stories about him from my grandmother and dad. After writing this short bio, I feel that I know him a lot better now and appreciate all the struggles in his life and how he overcame them, just as his own father (my great-grandfather) did.

So thanks again to Yvette Hoitink, the Dutch genealogist who started examining how thorough her own personal research was (and then issuing her “Level Up!” challenge) and thanks to Dick Eastman who wrote about this in his weekly genealogy newsletter!

A couple of months ago, I read a fascinating blog post by Yvette Hoitink, a Dutch genealogist who decided to apply the principles of the Genealogical Proof Standard to her own family tree research. She developed an Excel spreadsheet and code to assess where she was in her work.

Once she filled in her 7-generation chart, she said she found it shocking to see where her personal research wasn’t at the professional level she would provide for clients. And she challenged her readers to do the same.

So I did. And yes, it was shocking, especially for the more recent generations. I supposed those are not filled in as much because these are people I actually knew or had heard a lot about by parents and grandparents who actually knew them. But I hadn’t filled in a lot of the blanks, especially in building a solid chronology of their lives and then writing up what I’ve found.

So I’m working on improving that, beginning with my great-grandfather, John Woods Rowland. You can see his initial bio here and also here (on my free WordPress site). There are still some blanks because records aren’t available online (which is how I need to find them at the moment). But it was a great start and really enlightening to see where the gaps were in his life story.

If you read this, please let me know what you think of the bio. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.