Sunday, September 18, 2016

Famous and not-so-famous Russells

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.


2 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. Update 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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