Genealogy Research – Why I do what I do – Part 3 – My mother’s family

For a long time I had not done a lot of research into my mother’s family, the Pierpont family. The Pierpont Family Association has been doing research for nearly 100 years and the family tree is well documented back to the origin of the family name 1000 years ago. The descendant tree is available online and contains the names of several thousand of my relatives. So I had little incentive to do further research beyond that.

However, following the death of my mother, I thought I would extract some of the information from that large descendant tree just as it related to me. In that process, I noticed the names of some of the spouses of my ancestors that looked a little familiar to me from my personal knowledge of the history of the town I grew up in – Wolcott, CT.  I decided to follow these non-Pierpont names to see if they were related to the people in Wolcott history. The first one I followed showed me that I was related to the person for whom the elementary school I attended was named – Amos Bronson Alcott – and that the common person in our family tree was John Alcox – one of the earliest settlers in the town back in 1731. This intrigued me and made me want to do further research.

This is a new type of research for me. It’s not just building out an ancestor tree – going back through successive generations and finding the parents of my ancestors one generation at a time. It’s also not building a descendant tree – finding all the living relatives who are descended from one of my ancestors. This is trying to find any “cousin” relationship between myself and someone else.

First I had to complete building out my own ancestor tree for my mother’s side of the family. Not just the family name going back (the family has been in CT since the late 1600s in New Haven), but all the spousal branches as well. In the years from the late 1600s until now there have been plenty opportunities for marriage between families.

Then I would choose a person from Wolcott history and try to build out their ancestry to see if it crossed with my own. If I would find that their great-great-grandfather was the same person as my great*6-grandfather, then they would be my 3^rd cousin, 4 times removed.

This is also making the history of the town come alive for me. Learning the names of the founding members of the Mattatuck Drum Band from 1767 is one thing. But knowing that they were all your cousins (two first cousins, one second cousin) makes it much more real. It also makes sense of some of the events from town history (such as when you realize that the son of one of the important persons in town is marrying the sister of the pastor of the church).