Now that I’ve concluded this project, I remain amazed that so much information was so easily accessible. I know I had to work through some conflicting records and still have unresolved questions. And nothing is 100% certain when AI and human beings are involved, no matter how perceptive or well-intended each of them may be. But I believe in what I discovered and what I wrote. If I find out later I was mistaken about something, I’ll write about that too. Not as a correction but as a continuation. “Finding out” is what this was all about.
Here’s a few other things I kept out of the main parts to cut down on my digressions (see, it could have been worse):
My relatives sure did move around a lot. And it neither started nor ended with the ones who crossed the Atlantic. Those that did sail over initially settled in various locations in the original colonies. But eventually, someone packed up and headed out. In my online research, I found example after example of people in my family tree who were born in one colony or state but died in another, in some cases over a thousand miles away.
Aunt Willanna’s story of the Love family (Part 2) is to a great extent a chronicle of relocations from the early 19th century to the late 20th, journeys by horse, wagon, river ferry, railroad, and automobile; by individuals and whole families; from Georgia to Missouri, Pennsylvania to Kansas, on to Oklahoma and beyond. Some made it all the way to California, including an actual Gold Rush 49er and my cousin Annie’s parents a century after that. If you count extended family, we went coast to coast.
My latest 23andMe genetic analysis (Part 3) traces this urge to go west further back. At some point, the Europeans represented in my DNA felt the need to cross the channel to England, where they influenced the DNA my ancestors carried to America, which was ultimately passed along to me. But go back even further, to the timeline covered in my National Geographic DNA test (Part 1). Something drove my pre-historic relatives to slowly make their way from the Caucuses to Western Europe where my barely-historic ancestors emerged.
I’m up for believing that same biologically-determined restlessness played at least some part in my move from Oklahoma to New York City. I know I went east instead of west, but still….
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I still don’t know when the Golds and Conners on my Dad’s side of the family arrived in America. Or what accounts for my Irish genetic content. These might be unrelated inquiries. But if they are two parts of the same question, and at least some of my Golds and/or Conners were from Ireland, the ones who came here had to have done it before the early 1800s. But so did the Atlantic crossers from every other branch of the family I was tracking, some of them arriving centuries before 1800, and I was able to identify them. Why do the Golds and Conners remain elusive?
I asked my sister-in-law, Nancy, about this. She’s a much more committed family researcher than I am and has spent a lot of time trying to uncover her family’s Irish past. She told me that centuries of historical documents were lost when a massive fire destroyed Ireland’s national public records office in the 1920s. I looked it up. It’s now known as “The Four Courts Fire” and it happened in 1922 during the Battle of Dublin. There were other incidents in the 19th century that wiped out significant amounts of Irish genealogical documents, some inadvertent, some deliberate. Which means that the best sources for records dating before 1800 are local churches, with their long-maintained baptism, marriage, and death registries. But you have to know the right location from which to start, and often have to inquire in person. Nancy’s research into the Lyons family has stalled because she doesn’t have specific hometowns to work with, and the Lyons name is so common that it’s not feasible to track down all of the possibilities.
Conversely, I have a friend here who learned a lot about his Irish family because he knew they were from Armagh and Galway. He also tells me that the English used to change Irish surnames when they found the Gaelic too hard to spell or pronounce. If there wasn’t an obvious Anglicization, they’d go with a color. Gold, maybe?
There is another possible reason I can’t pin down my Golds and Conners, in Ireland or elsewhere. The connections linking the earliest generations of my family were based on miraculously available, centuries-old official records. But surely not everybody in the 16/17/18th century warranted an official record keeper’s attention. What if you weren’t a prominent citizen, a land owner, a registered ship’s passenger, or a royal appointee who, eight centuries after your death, inspired a Wikipedia page?
Realistically, what are the odds that everyone in my direct family was a somebody? In the great drama of history, perhaps some of my ancestors were extras.
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In Part 1 of this project, I wrote about the possibility of having Jewish heritage and that my Uncle Geno used to imply that the family name “Gold” was originally Goldberg (or “farb” or “stein”). And I wrote that a recent DNA test showed that I am not one bit Jewish. Still, there are quite a few Old Testament names in my family: Solomon, Levi, Simeon, Isaac. The most striking is the name of my great great grandmother (Mummum’s mother). In Willanna’s story (Part 2) she’s referred to as Milkey Montgomery, but her given name was Milcah, which means “Queen” in Hebrew. The original Milcah was the wife of Nahor, Abraham’s brother (Genesis 11:29).
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Aunt Willanna’s story (Part 2) spends a lot of time in the 19th century, yet there is no mention of a Love family member fighting in the American Civil War. But I did have direct relatives involved in the conflict. There’s the Colonel, Robert Eli Gray, introduced in Part 3. He and other members of my mother’s family were in the Confederate army. It’s understandable. That line’s American experience was entirely in the South. At the time of the war, my Gray family lived in Arkansas, where my grandmother was born two generations later.
As if to balance things out, the men in my father’s family who fought in the war were all Union soldiers. Also understandable. They were from Pennsylvania and Illinois. There were casualties on both sides. Robert Eli’s battle wounds cost him his left leg and two lefthand fingers. On Dad’s side, George Washington “Wash” Gold (age 36) and his son, John Riley Gold (age 18), enlisted together in 1862. Wash died a month later from typhus. John Riley survived the war and died in 1924.
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I had to make some additional changes to Mummum’s story at the beginning of Part 3, the result of a friend asking me to share the original Daily Oklahoman article about her return to sight. I didn’t have a copy in hand. For that matter, I’d never read it myself. Why would I need to? I knew the story. Or thought I did.
I found the article online and read it before forwarding it. I was right about how she got her vision back, except that it happened in October 1963, not December. Where I was way off was with the timing of her descent into blindness. According to the Oklahoman, her sight began deteriorating significantly in 1938 and she was virtually sightless by 1942, not 1948 as I originally had it.
Which meant I was way off on the year Dad went to live with Mummum. When did that actually happen? I found a story from 1937 in The Purcell Register archives in which Arthur and Helen Elder, and their children Russell, Joanne, and Charles (Dad), came to Purcell to visit Helen’s parents, Charles and Myrtle Gold. An item from a year later refers to Dad as living with his grandparents.
Which means he was sent away from his family to help his grandmother in 1938. He wasn’t a teenager when it happened, as I first reported, which would have been impressive enough.
He was five.
I went looking for what DNA and genealogy could tell me about my origins, and was thrilled to encounter generation after generation of remarkable people: confidants of kings, knights, land barons, cross-ocean and cross-country adventurers, ambitious cattlemen, builders of towns. But look at the person who both genetically and genealogically is as close to me as it’s possible to be. He was his blind grandmother’s companion, helper, navigator, interpreter of the visual world when he was barely more than a toddler.
As my family, friends, and anyone who ever worked with me knows all too well, my Dad’s most enduring directive was, “Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.” When I say it, I hear it in his voice, not mine.
But that’s what he had to do himself. Starting before he was in kindergarten.
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Finally: Aurora, MIssouri. In addition to being a central location in Part 2, including where Mummum was born, it’s the home of Aurora Maize. According to the park’s website, in addition to a five-acre corn maze, it offers a cow train, hay rides, a giant jumping pillow, Twin Spin, a mechanical bull, Boxer Jocks, and more. It’s not immediately obvious to me what “Boxer Jocks” is (or are). I tried looking it up and all I got was a bunch of underwear ads.