On a couple of occasions over the past few weeks I’ve felt
challenged to see if someone with the Russell surname was related to me. Since
I’ve been able to track my Russell ancestors back to the origin of the family
name nearly 1000 years ago, this is just a matter of tracking the other person’s
ancestry to see if it intersects with mine.
Sometimes it’s obvious that there is no easy connection. For
example, the actresses Jane Russell and Roselind Russell both track their
ancestry back to Ireland. I really would have liked to find a connection to
Roselind Russell because she was born in Waterbury, CT – the same place that I
was. But I have not yet been successful in finding connections between the
Irish Russells and the English Russells that are in my family tree, so I wrote
those off as something I don’t have the time for now.
Similarly, I have not tried to follow the family trees of
individuals such as comedian Nipsey Russell or basketball great Bill Russell as
I’m not sure how to follow the genealogy lines of African-Americans.
But in other searches I have been successful. I saw a quote
that was attributed to the English philosopher Bertrand Russell and wondered
about any connection. He is descended from a long line of English Royalty
(Earls and Dukes) which is fairly well documented back into the 1400s. From
that point I was able to refer to a resource that I have on the Tudor line of
Russells and take his family tree back to the 1100s. It was finally there that
it intersected my own family line. So I have now established that Bertrand
Russell is my 17th cousin, 6 times removed – certainly not a close
connection, but a connection nonetheless.
More recently, I had a meeting with a man in NY who said
that he had a Russell connection in Dutchess County NY which is where my
Russell ancestors lived from the late 1700s until the late 1870s. I thought
surely that would be a great connection. I started by locating his father’s
obituary which mentioned his Aunt Thelma Russell (her married name). I was then
able to find another obituary for Thelma’s sister-in-law which gave the name of
Thelma’s father-in-law, i.e. the Russell ancestry. From there it was simply a
matter of tracing census records back through several generations. I thought I
hit a snag in just a few generations when I found that the next generation back
was born in NJ and he was married to someone from RI. So that line of Russells
did not move to NY until after my relatives had left that area and moved to CT.
But I decided to continue on anyway and was rewarded when in
the next generation I found that they had come from NH. At that point I was
pretty sure that I would find a connection because I knew that my Russell
ancestors who had come to America in the mid-1600s and lived in Andover, MA and
some of them had moved just a few miles north to NH. I was able to eventually
make a connection back in Andover, MA. So instead of this gentleman from NY
having a connection to me in Dutchess County, NY, I found that his aunt (who is
still living but has severe dementia) is my father’s 8th cousins. Again,
not a real close connection like I hoped I would have found, but a connection
nonetheless.
The study of genealogy and how it intersects with geography
as people move and with history in terms of what was going on at the time is always
very interesting to me.
There are many (understatement) Russell's living in the south who may have passed their names onto slaves making some African connections. The was I was able to get by living in Alabama is that with a name like Russell I could pass myself off (once I had a good enough accent) as someone who had moved away as a child and had come back.
ReplyDeleteUpdate 12/27/17 - Recent research has uncovered the fact that my great*6 grandfather, Robert Russell, was not a migrant from MA to NY. Rather, he was an immigrant to NY, likely from Scotland, around 1750. Since it is nearly impossible to trace the Russell family back through Scottish history, I cannot say where they were before that. However, Scottish tradition is that they are descended from the same Baron de Rozel in Normandy as I earlier throught. In any case, my connections as noted above are affected.
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