One thing that can often be difficult when trying to trace your family
tree is where there are two individuals with the same name who are born around
the same time. Sometimes these two individuals can get confused with one another
and you will often find that a “composite” person has been put in someone’s
family tree. I’d like to relate two such instances that I’ve had to deal with.
William Coughtry
I was recently connected with a distant relative by a DNA match in
Myheritage.com. She had a partial family tree that indicated that her
connection to me was likely through her grandmother being descended from one of
my distant Russell ancestors for whom I did not have much information. The
Russell family at that time lived in Dutchess County NY and her grandparents
lived just a county away in Albany NY. After getting in touch with her and
finding out what she knew about her grandparents, I tried to follow her family
tree back a few more generations as well as see if I could add onto my family
tree in order to connect our two trees and verify just how our DNA match came
to be.
Her grandfather was named William F Coughtry and her grandmother was
Mary [Hutchins] [Coughtry] Cellery (she was married twice). Beside finding
William in a number of census and other records, some before his marriage to
Mary and some afterwards, I found a couple of family trees built by others. But
something was confusing, including the existence of two entries in the 1920
Federal Census. What was going on? Was William a bigamist? Or might there be
two different individuals?
It appeared to me that there were two different individuals, both named
William Coughtry, both with the same middle initial, both living in Albany,
both born around the same time, both of whom married a woman named Mary whom
they later divorced (although the two Marys were slightly different in age),
both of whom worked for the same industry, and both of whom had similar
occupations! Talk about being confusing! Now, how to figure out which records
were for which of the two men, and, more importantly, which were for the
grandfather of my distant cousin.
Basically, I had to ignore William and look at what else in each record
I had – such as address, who else was living in that household, etc. I couldn’t
even use the age of William since it is well known that census records are
often off by one or two years and that was the age difference of the two men. It
was confusing enough that I had to build a spreadsheet to keep track of all the
various records where William had been mentioned and what other facts I could
ascertain about the circumstances of each.
In the end I had a total of 13 records – from the federal census of
1900, 1910, 1920 (two of them), 1930; NY census of 1892 (2 of them), 1915, 1925;
a street directory (2 of them), and draft records from WWI and WWII. Of these,
10 were from the William I was not concerned about and could be tied together
by street address (although he moved twice), the names of his siblings (both in
his early years and later when he moved back home following the death of his
first wife), and the name of his daughter Marion who was born about the time
that his wife passed on. Only three records were for my cousin’s grandfather –
tied together by one of the census records from 1920 where her mother and
aunts/uncles were in the family, one of the two street directories on the same
street as the 1920 census, and the duplicate 1892 census where that William’s
siblings did not have the same names as the other William.
It was a pretty complicated process and I ended up actually knowing
very little about my cousin’s grandfather since he appeared in so few records
(essentially only the three instances where there were two Williams). What a
complicated mess this was.
I still have not been able to verify the connection between Mary
[Hutchins] and the individual I believe to be her mother, Mary [Russell]
Hutchins, in my family tree. Because my cousin’s grandmother was born after
1880 and the 1890 census records were lost in a fire, she only appears for the
first time after she is old enough to be on her own and is a servant in Albany
before she married William Coughtry. But I haven’t stopped looking.
Robert Russell
I have written earlier (*1) how there was some confusion in many people’s
family trees about my great*5 grandfather, Robert Russell. Many individuals had
him born in MA, then migrating to NY. But the existence of two separate wills
showed that there were two individuals and the Robert Russell who was my
ancestor had immigrated to NY around 1730 from Scotland. He was an illiterate
farmer and the one in MA was a literate man whose ancestors had come to the Massachusetts
Bay Colony around 1630 from England.
When I made that discovery, which also helped to confirm my DNA
results, I was a little disheartened because the English branch of the Russells
could be traced back to the origin of the family name in Normandy and from
there to their Scandinavian roots (*2). While the Scottish Russell Clan also
claims ancestry back to Normandy, there are no records of exactly how that
lineage can be established (*3).
But besides my tracing my Russell ancestors on my father’s side, the
name Russell appears in the family tree on my mother’s side as well. My great*6
grandfather, Joseph Pierpont, son of Rev. James Pierpont the founder of Yale,
married Hannah Russell, the daughter of Nodiah Russell, a fellow minister in
Connecticut. I decided to trace that Russell line.
The New Haven Russells were not part of those who settled in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, but came to New Haven directly from England when Nodiah’s
father, William Russell, made that trip in 1639 when he was about 27. William
was descended from the Russells in England who were part of the upper class
Russell family, including several Dukes and Earls. This line is also traceable
back to Baron Rozel from Normandy.
So, while I thought that I had lost my documented connection through my
father back to Normandy and all I had left was some claims from the Clan
Russell in Scotland, it turns out that I still have such a connection – but through
my great*6 grandmother, Hannah [Russell] Pierpont!
Notes:
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