Yet Another Confession: I Used to Practice Casual Genealogy

I’ve got a different sort of confession to make in this blog post. It’s about how I got hooked on genealogy, but came to control my addiction.

At first, you see, I didn’t take it all that seriously. Of course, as an extension of my love of history, I’ve always wanted to know more about my particular family’s history. Like other white privileged people, I enjoyed my connections to First Families of Virginia. I was a history major in college when Roots was published in 1976, which was about when a new wave of people started to look for the Kunta Kinte in their family tree. At the same time, I blew it off because I knew any two of us have a shared ancestor if we go back far enough. They say everyone who descended from Europeans is related to Charlemagne, right? 

From time-to-time BC (before computers), I would indulge in a little casual genealogy. I would dabble in library research or have a conversation with family members. It wasn’t until around 2000, with so much material online, that I began to use the computer to capture and record my findings. For example, I found an article online, Climbing the Family Tree, that had been printed by the Daily Press on 4 February 1973. The article reported on the Hudgins family of Mathews. I was so excited to add all of the names and dates to my family tree on Ancestry.com! Soon after that, I asked my mother to go with me to visit a cousin, who gave me several sheets of paper with a genealogy of the Foster family. Likewise, I added the names and dates to my family tree without question.

They were just placeholders, I thought. But life got busy and I put genealogy aside. Meanwhile, my Ancestry.com family tree was exposing itself, making its content available for all to see and copy, replicating itself over and over. (Now that I know better, I feel so dirty.)

I wrote a novel that was selected by the Mathews Memorial Library as its 2005 "Read it Mathews" book. While in Mathews for various book talks, I ran into a chorus of “I’m related to you” and “You’re my cousin.” This caused me to go back to my Ancestry account and from my records produce an article, Mathews Connections, for the Gloucester Genealogical Society’s journal, Family Tree Searcher. Soon thereafter, Becky Foster Barnhardt, head of Genealogy & Family Research Services at the Mathews Memorial Library, took me to task for a statement I made about Richard Foster marrying . . . oh dear . . . actually, I’m not going to finish this sentence for fear it will be copied by someone mistaking it for the truth. I had repeated something from the old family history I was given by my cousin, as mentioned above. Becky was right, of course. I had been to the Isle of Wight Clerk’s Office and found no for-sure documentation, but the old genealogist might have been on to something, so I mentioned it. It was a no-no, but Becky should be proud of my restraint. There was even more to the old family history that I actually checked out and discovered was a total fabrication. So, I had stopped with Richard Foster and the unmentionable thing. Thank goodness, or Becky would have had my head on a plate.

In 2007, I published Images of America: Mathews County.
While spending many nights in Mathews to do research, I felt my ancestral ghosts all around.

A few years later, genetic genealogy was making a splash. I realized that my father was getting old and if I was ever to figure out how we were connected to the Lewises of Warner Hall in Gloucester, I needed to send his spit to Family Tree DNA. I did, and what a surprise. Dad was a Haplogroup I and the FFV Lewis family of Gloucester is a well-documented group whose descendants are Haplogroup R. Not even close. In fact, even more surprising, Dad’s DNA is related to a variety of people with surnames other than Lewis, especially people with the surnames Evans and Webb. I wrote about my findings and the article, Applying Genetic Genealogy to FamilyHistory Research, was published in the Gloucester Genealogical Society’s journal, Family Tree Searcher, in 2008. I read with great interest Adapting to the New World  and learned that 75 percent of 17th-century Virginia immigrants were indentured servants. The other 25 percent were younger sons of the gentry, for the most part. They came because of the opportunity, not because they really wanted to. I don’t think I would have left England back then unless I absolutely had to. Three months on a small boat crossing the Atlantic to who knows what? No thank you. Some came to hide family secrets or because they were in trouble with the law or some other scandal. It is no wonder that while I can trace many of my Mathews ancestors back to an early or the earliest immigrant, I’ve yet to find a single thread connecting any one of the hundred or so back to the Old World. I started a Family Tree group called Early Chesapeake to see if I could make some connections, but no luck yet.

Soon enough, I was discovered by a group of Foster descendants in the Family Tree DNA Foster Surname Group 8.  They were looking for a person with documentation to a Foster listed in the Kingston Parish Register. I raised my virtual hand. Richard Foster and wife, my 5th great grandparents, had a son, Peter, my 4th great grandfather. His birth and baptism are in the Register. I have a male cousin in Mathews who I convinced to have his spit analyzed. From this we know that all of the Foster descendants in the FTDNA Group 8 are related to documented Kingston Parish Fosters, my direct ancestors. Since Becky is descended from other Mathews County Fosters who didn’t know if they were related to my Fosters, it looks like we now have proof that we are cousins.

However, Becky would be quick to note that we don’t have the actual documentary proof that would allow us to connect the dots. All we know is that this guy named Richard Foster (an earlier Richard Foster) came to the Virginia colony in 1635 from who knows where. In addition, a guy named Richard Foster, the same or yet another one, patented land on the Severn River in Gloucester. Several generations later, a guy named Richard Foster shows up in Gloucester’s Kingston Parish, now Mathews County. That’s all we know for sure. Yet “mythologies” on paper and online have my 5th great grandfather Richard Foster descended from Medieval peerage.

While I started out as a genealogy hobbyist, only dabbling in genealogy when the mood struck me, events and time have brought me to a new, safer place. I now practice self-control when genealogizing and posting to Ancestry.com or my blog. Yes, the older I get and the less life gets in the way, the more I have become addicted to genealogy. But now I spend more time pruning myths and adding documentary fertilizer to my growing family tree. I get more joy when moving beyond names and dates to puzzling together stories about my ancestors and the community and times in which they lived.

In 2019, thankfully before COVID, my husband and I traveled to England, Scotland, and Wales to visit the lands from whence my ancestors came. I was making inferences based on records that were hundreds of years old and my DNA estimates. I took the well-documented and the reasonable assumptions in hand and made an itinerary. 

In two weeks, we traveled in a 1,500-mile circle. We began by taking the Great Road North. The Virginia Armisteads hail from Kirk Deighton (left), so we went there. The Forsters (Fosters) of Bamburgh in Northumberland have been “claimed” by descendants of the Virginia Fosters, so we went there. When I arrived at the Castle, the guides could see me coming: yet another American who wanted to claim them. Never fear, I told the well-informed docent. I had read Dorothy Forster and The Steel Bonnets. She was relieved. I went to Scotland, visiting some sites where the border reivers roamed. My DNA says I am more than one-third Scottish, but I don’t know which ancestors in particular the DNA sprang from. My sister and her sons are redheads, so it makes sense. 

I visited Kirkby Lonsdale, a sweet little market town where Thomas and Susan Garnett were born and wed before they came to Jamestown.  I don’t have any documentation to say we’re related, mind you, but my ancestors were very likely of their sort. I went to towns in Mid Wales. Before my trip, a genealogist from the Powys Archives kindly informed me of towns in Wales with the most Lewises, Evanses, and Webbs. The graveyards were filled with names that made me blink twice. The names! I thought I was back in Mathews. Wales was hauntingly familiar. 

We rounded back into England via Gloucester and Bristol, towns from which many of my ancestors must have said goodbye to the Old World. I imagined them sailing down the Severn River past Milford Haven. Familiar names, familiar territory, indeed.

This post was inspired by Becky’s posts to the Mathews Genealogy and History page on Facebook where she discusses errors in the Daily Press column on the Hudgins Family I mentioned above. Thank you for your hard work and admonitions, Becky. I had poked around the Hudgins mythology several times and could never make it work, so pruned it well before my trip to the UK. Your systematic refutations should be part of a booklet of Mathews Mythologies, one that also includes the Foster tales.