Television is replete with advertisements for Ancestry.com, “Every family has a story” is their moto.  The truth rings through attracting a wide base of customers to its cause, the rediscovery of family.  Ancestry.com is not the only genealogical online player, but they are the elephant in the room with over three million subscribers and access to billions of historical records. Genealogy making history personal.

THE ONLINE GENEALOGICAL BEHEMOTH

The company was started as a genealogy magazine. It evolved into an online information base business with several online branches developed, bought, and sold along the way – MyFamily.com, FindAGrave.com, Newspapers.com, RootsWeb, Family tree Maker, Family Origins, AncestryHealth, AncestryDNA.  Two of the founders were Brigham Young University graduates – Paul Brent Allen and Dan Taggart.  They left the company in 2016 when the company sold to a private equity firm for $1.6 billion. Both went on to other things – Paul starting new things. Dan having a much rougher go with middle age. Their former company has since been bought by another investment management group for $4.7 billion.

GENEALOGY AND RELIGION

Genealogy has a big appeal to the Latter-Day Saints – Utah-Mormon group – for its religious connotations.  The success of online genealogy companies owes to appealing beyond the LDS crowd. Selling the idea the motto of Ancestry.com inspires, truly making genealogy speaking to personal history.

Religiously, for Mormons, the only thing that matters are the genealogical trees – an attempt to find everyone.  For the rest of us, it can be the trees, puzzles onto themselves to be sorted out.  But the stories are what can really drive us.

FAMILY STORIES

With increased mobility of families beyond the past localities, stories can be left behind.  I know in my own case, with parents and grandparents gone, some of the stories told I remember only partly.  Some, simply forgotten.

My mother’s side of history is solidly recorded through hard work of my aunts and uncle, all members of the LDS church.  A 700-plus page book already recorded the lineage of my maternal grandfather’s family back to the 17^th century.  Personal history was already laid out in her family by the genealogy.

My father’s side requires a little more online sleuthing, along with personal knowledge of the lands where they settled and graves, they rest in.  Websites like those run by Ancestry.com definitely help.  The actual stories, the lives led by family members before us, are a bit harder to discern.  Many stories are there, but online sleuthing is in order to discover them.

PERSONAL HISTORY

One Memorial Day, as a child, my Dad drove us to a little cemetery. It lies in a forest next to the little hamlet of Bellfountain, Oregon.  I remember seeing a lot of graves with names of families other than my own.  The whole thing did not make much sense.  Other visits to similar cemeteries on the other side of the Willamette Valley made even less sense as none of the names were our direct family. But here is where patience comes in. Names from my maternal grandmother’s family, actually do have something to do with the story.  Family history thing is something taking time or religious duty. Or other family members with a passion to know or learn the stories.

I returned to that graveyard just outside Bellfountain the other day on my way to check out Fort Hoskins.  The cemetery was almost as empty as the first time we came on that Memorial Day long ago. There was one other lady looking in vain an ancestor in the overgrown confusion.  Luckily, for me, the ancestors I were looking for were right up front near the entrance. Some were among the earliest graves dating back to the late 1840’s and 1850’s.

FURTHER SLEUTHING

Graves are just the start of the hunt.  Sleuthing further in the quest to reveal personal history through genealogy, I discovered three out of four branches of the paternal family were among the early pioneering families coming to Oregon between 1846 and 1855. They came to Oregon in the 1850’s taking out Donation Land Grants in the Willamette Valley.

Donation Land Grants were free land the Federal government offered to potential emigrants to settle in the Oregon Territory.  Before September 1851, you were eligible for 320 acres of land – 130 hectares or a half square mile.  Married couples got 640 acres – a whole square mile of land.  Those coming after December 1851 still got land, 160 acres for a single person and 320 for a married couple.  I am sure the announcement led to a lot of quick marriages. One of my ancestors seems to have taken advantage of the extra land, marrying in 1850. He was 38 and his wife was 17.

Like a lot of Oregonians to come to Oregon in the late 1840’s, some of the men in the family decamped for awhile hitting the gold fields of California.  Others went later to Idaho. Many returned to Oregon with needed cash to get their farms rolling.  The farms became more profitable as they could sell their production to the mine regions or as Finn J. D. John writes, “mining the miners”.

BEYOND THE FAMILY TREES

And with personal history, one story leads to another, so it seems with genealogy.  Wikitree, another site now owned by Ancestry, served as an excellent point of reference. Some of my ancestors were written up in detail by hardworking folks interested in genealogy before my searches.

Of course, holes in the stories need to be worked out.  The story of the family ancestor with the family name coming to Oregon in the 1880’s needs to further work.  Parts lie here and there online – maybe they are just waiting for me to move beyond the paywall of Ancestry.com? 

OUT TO OREGON AFTER THE WAGONS

My father’s grandfather, William, came west from the upper northwest corner of Ohio – Nettle Lake. Family circumstances made life hard for him after his mother died of diphtheria at age 42 and his father remarried. Not getting along with the new stepmother, he was shunted off – as were his other twelve brothers and sisters – to live with another local family. Both of his families were strong believers in the United Brethren faith. William got enough education to become a UB minister.

philomath college

Philomath College, a few miles west of Corvallis in the middle of the Willamette Valley was an early site of higher education in Oregon. A wagon train of people sharing the United Brethren faith came to Benton County in 1853.  In response a need for a school from the settlers, Philomath College and the town of Philomath came about in the late 1860’s. Philomath selected as meaning from Greek “lover of learning”.

In response to a call for teachers and ministers, William came west. By this time in the 1880’s, a rail connection existed to Portland from the east – 1883 was the first year – and he used the train in coming west.

William became associated in some way with the school in Philomath either ministering, teaching or both. Through another teacher, Thomas Gragg, he met his wife, Bettie (known as Betsy), marrying in 1892.

Thomas, who graduated from Philomath College in 1882, taught mathematics at the school as well as becoming principal in 1894, until 1897. Then he went east to teach at the main UB college at Huntington, Indiana, Central College – today’s Huntington University. Eventually, in 1912, he would return to Monroe, a few miles east of Bellfountain.

WAGONS OH!

Thomas and Betsy’s father was Joseph Gragg. He had come out to Oregon in 1852 with the Croxton families from Schulyer County, Illinois. That wagon train fared poorly on the Oregon Trail with many deaths due to disease – “mountain fever” and cholera. The survivors ended up making rafts in The Dalles area and rafted through the Columbia Gorge. The Croxtons would move south of the Willamette Valley ending up in Douglas County and Grants Pass. Joseph, 25 years old at the time of the journey, ended up near Bellfountain marrying Lovina Buckingham, the daughter of another pioneering family.

Papers left by Joseph have been collected at the University of Oregon covering his experiences on the trek west, a journey to Idaho mines in 1863 and general life experiences living around Bellfountain with his connection to Philomath College, as well.

further sleuthing

Genealogy uncovered more personal history as I discovered Lovina’s father, Herman, bringing his family out on the Applegate Trail in 1846 (Lavina was born in Iowa in 1843 as the family began journeying westward from Preble County near Dayton in Ohio). They were part of the first party to use a southern route to bypass the dangers involved in going down the Columbia River.

Led by Levi Scott, the Applegate proved to be as perilous as the Columbia River Gorge. The way through the many mountains of southern Oregon proved especially tough. Herman’s stock died by the time they reached the southern fringe of the Willamette Valley. He built a raft to float down – north – from the confluence of the Coast and Middle forks of the Willamette River just south of today’s Eugene-Springfield. The raft hit a snag along the journey and tore apart. The family lost everything except their lives.

The journey proved too much for Herman’s wife, Betsy, however. She died in 1847 shortly after reaching Oregon. Herman ran a store in Oregon City before remarrying a year later to Lovina enabling a double up on the land in their DLC. The land grant lies just south and west of Bellfountain. Herman served a year with the Oregon Territorial Legislature in 1855. Remains of a store are found at the intersection of Bellfountain and Dawson Roads – the heart of Bellfountain. The store was run by Augustus Buckingham, a half-brother of Lovina.

MORE SOURCES LEADING TO MORE STORIES

Those who came over on emigrant wagon trains enjoy their history inscribed online at a great website.  You can learn a lot of the history of Oregon, as well as, about potential family members involved as Manifest Destiny played out by the actual participants.

Another fascinating discovery was online access to the actual donation land grant maps.  Here, you can see where those ancestors actually settled after making their long journeys into the unknown.

Philomath College lived until the years of the Great Depression – 1929.  The building is the home for the Benton County Historical Society today.  My visit to Bellfountain took me fifteen miles north to the old college to see if I could easily discover anything more about my great grandfather.

The Historical Society rotates exhibits, so this day there was nothing relating to the actual purpose of the building. The curator asked me if I had looked at their online exhibits.  I had but they were too general for what I was looking for – history of teachers or students.  They do offer to answer questions one may have in their non-circulating collection, but then the key is to ask the right question.

FURTHER BACK

Of course, one can go further back than the 19th century. In my father’s father’s side, it goes back to someone who came to North America in the early 18th century, probably from Ulster-Northern Ireland. The family name is Scottish coming out of the western islands of Scotland. A family castle can is predominately visible if you take the ferry from Oban to the Isle of Mull. The clan centered on Mull but could also be found on islands nearby extending as far south as Islay.

On a visit to Scotland a few years back, I had the opportunity to visit Mull and a couple of castles belonging to branches of the clan. There were several interesting stories of clansmen going forth to do whatever clansmen do – pillage is one of them. Those stories are for another post. Suffice it to say, it was fascinating to see how far the family – and this is just the name branch – has come. At the ferry counter in Oban, I was asked to show my passport. When the man at the desk saw my name, he said, “Ahh, you’re going home are ya laddie?!” And sure enough, most of the men waiting for the ferry looking like my uncle.

other stories from the paternal branches

From my father’s mother side there are more stories as genealogy reveals more personal history. There are Sheltons and Millers who came to Oregon also claiming DLCs in the Scio area of the Willamette valley. Stories just as interesting lying hidden for another day.

My father and his mother were both born in Scio. As a child, my father used to take the family down the valley to see the “sites” in and around Scio, though the visits usually centered around visiting with relatives. Luckily, for my sister and I, Thomas Creek was there to be explored while the adults talked about older times.

There even used to be a Miller Reunion that took place outside of town each summer – the Millers were the family of my grandmother’s mother. The reunions gone now, so I have to recourse to the internet to attempt to recover some of the history lost to time.

OTHER STORIES WAITING THEIR TURN

My maternal side reveals the pioneering history of LDS emigrants coming from England to Utah. As well as stories like being in on the capture of Jefferson Davis at the end of the Civil War. Or life in early 20^th century San Francisco.

So, if you forgot those stories your parents, grandparents or others once told you, there is hope at recovering some of them.  Genealogy is just history on a more personal scale.