Surname Saturday: Curtis

So we get to look at another of the more common surnames in my research.  Although it is not among the top 100 surnames in the United States today (according to the Wikipedia article linked in a previous post), it is one that is still pretty easy to recognize and even at the closest relation, was among the earlier settlers of New England.  The youngest in this line in my research was my sixth great grandmother, Jemima Curtis.

Surname Saturday: Cotten

With this week's surname study, we return to the American colonies and take a look at my tenth great grandmother, Dorothy Cotten.  It should be no surprise by now, but this line is yet another where I only know of one person with the surname.  However, what I do know is not yet fully verified to reliable primary sources.

Surname Saturday: Benedict

We're back to a surname again of which I know only one person in our direct ancestry lines.  Today we'll look at my wife's sixth great grandmother, Hannah Benedict.  I did do some searching around this week and found her only in Ancetral File and in the one book that I mentioned recently about referencing.  Who is this mysterious woman?

Surname Saturday: Burton

This post has turned out to be the surname post that has taken the longest to write so far.  It's not that it was entirely difficult, but when I sat down on Monday evening to start working on it, I found that there were a number of connections in Ancestral File that I didn't have in my database yet.  These connections linked a couple of different Burton family members that I knew about, extended my ancestry back a couple generations and brought several descendant lines down to listings for living cousins.  The big caveat here is that the data was in Ancestral File; I've found a few incorrect records there in the past (like records showing a child's birth a year or two after the mother's death, or a mother who only lived ten years), so I generally treat anything in Ancestral File as unconfirmed, but it does give me many more leads for research.  So, let's take a look at the ancestry starting with my 5th-great grandmother, Sarah Burton.

Surname Saturday: Birdsey/Birdseye

Okay, it's another Saturday, so it's another surname.  Today we'll look at one that connects at my 8th-great grandmother, Joanna Birdseye.  Being so many generations ago, and judging by past Surname Saturday posts, you might be able to guess what region this surname connection starts in and where it goes after that, and you'd probably be right.  So let's look at it.

Surname Saturday: Beach

Okay, time to alternate back to one of the lines on my side of the family.  This week, we will look at one of the most heavily researched lines in my family.  It connects back to some of the earliest settlers of Massachusetts Colony and continues all the way to close family members who are still living today.  There are quite a few researchers looking into this line from the early-1800s back to the 1600s, possibly due to the line's connection to Sir Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill), so this will be a fairly long post with nine generations listed, but there seems to be one universal stumbling block when we go back far enough.