Genealogy Story – Tracing the Russell Family

It’s taken me several years to complete my research into my family tree on the Russell side. There have been several phases to this research, so I’d like to summarize all of them.

Phase 1 – Personal knowledge

The first few generations are pretty simple. I had firsthand knowledge. I knew my father and grandfather and my father had often talked about “Grampa Louis”. I did not know him myself as he had died two years before I was born, but he was fresh in my father’s mind – as my father had lived with him for many years until his time in the Pacific in WWII.

Phase 2 – Inconsistent information

At this point I had gotten a membership in ancestry.com and started my research. There were a couple of well-populated family trees showing that the father of Louis Russell was Walter J Russell, and showing Walter’s family. However, I wanted to do more than rely on these trees, so also looked at census records, etc.

Unfortunately, there was much information in the family trees that was suspect. One of the main problems was that Walter’s parents, Silas and Hester Russell, had a practice of having their grandchildren spend the summer with them on their farm, and the summer was when the census was taken in those times. And when their own children were of appropriate age, they used to send them to work on neighboring farms as well. So I spent a great deal of time sorting out who were the children and who were the grandchildren. In the end I was able to add two more generations to the Russell line.

Phase 3 – Original research

The next few generations required a bunch of original research. There were no other family trees representing prior investigation by others. And I had hit the “brick wall” of 1850 before which the census records did not record everyone in the household, but simply the name of the head of household and tic marks for each person in the home in gender and age-range categories.

This was quite challenging as I had to look at all the records for the entire county the family was in, locate all the Russell families, and then identify which family was the right one and if the tic marks from one census to the next matched what I knew about the person I was looking for. It took quite a while, but in the end I managed to add two more generations to my tree (Silas’ father, Caleb, and Caleb’s father, John).

Phase 4 – Back to England

Having worked through perhaps the most difficult area, I finally encountered some other family trees that had followed the Russell line from Massachusetts into New York. Getting back to Massachusetts was key as the birth/marriage/death records were recorded in each town/county in Massachusetts and so the line was pretty well documented. New York did not record things at that level of detail.

This took me not only back to the initial Russell who came to America in the early-mid 1600s, but a couple of generations back into England. But once getting out of America, the records were quite different and I thought I was going to quickly lose the “trail”.

Phase 5 – English family line

For the first time, my research was going to take me outside the bounds of ancestry.com. I found another online source that documented the Russell family (since they were “upper class” in England). For each person it showed their parentage, their siblings, and often other things about them, such as why they had been knighted and by whom.

I was able to use this resource to go from the 1600s back to the first of the family name who came to England as part of the Norman invasion in 1066 (and a couple of generations before that). Finding the origin of the family name was especially exciting. But I also found a couple of other useful clues along the way, particularly some notes that the part of Normandy the family came from had been conquered by the Vikings in the early 900s.

Phase 6 – Viking heritage

I took the earliest names and did some Internet searching into the Viking history of Normandy. I was surprised to discover that the family members immediately preceding the origin of the family name in the early 1000s were in fact related to the Viking leaders who conquered Normandy in the early 900s.

Again, using non-ancestry.com resources, I was able to trace the line of these Viking (kings?) back from son to father (e.g. xxxx Ivarsson is the son of Ivar yyyy). This line of research went all the way back to the original king of Sweden who was born in the early 200s.

Final Phase – Turkish roots

Stumbling across something I did not know before, I learned that Sweden was conquered by the Turks in the 200s (they weren’t called Turks back then, but were from that area of Asia (Mesopotamia, etc.). Records from back then are somewhat incomplete and the dates are only approximations, but it appears that the family came from a line of kings.

This also meshes with some research that was published recently that the gene modification for blue eyes is reported to have happened in the Middle East several centuries ago. So the fact that the Scandinavians are blue-eyed, and my Russell ancestors (including myself) are also blue-eyed is consistent with my Swedish roots having come from that part of the world.

It’s been an exciting journey through all these phases, and it’s taken a few years from start to finish, but I am pleased with the results.