Back in 2015, I wrote about a cousin connection that I
thought I had found between my paternal grandmother, Vera [Levy] [Russell] Rogers,
and her second husband, Charles Rogers (*1). The basis for my research was that
my grandmother had a Rogers in her family tree and that was also the last name
of her second husband. But the connection that I found was not in the US, but a
few generations earlier in England.
It was near the end of 2018 when I joined a Mayflower Facebook
group and discovered that there had been much research on the Rogers family and
my research had been faulty because there were several individuals with
identical names around the same time period. So, I added a disclaimer to my
blog and just pushed it aside.
In the interim, I have done a lot of research and expanded
my own ancestral family tree back to all the immigrant roots so I had a lot of
material to work with. Thus, I decided to take up the cause again and look at
my step-grandfather in more detail to see if I could find any other connections
to him. This is a fairly involved process since I now have over 10,000 individuals
in my ancestry.com tree, so expanding one branch involves checking for
duplicate names each time I add someone. But here is what I have now found.
Grandfather Cousins
The first connection I found was a man named William Phelps
(1599-1672) who immigrated from England to Windsor, CT in 1630. He was Charles’
great*7 grandfather. But William was also my great*10 grandfather (and the
great*8 grandfather of Erskine Russell, Vera’s first husband). This meant that
when Vera divorced Erskine and remarried to Charles, she was marrying the 8th
cousin, once removed, of her first husband. That was an interesting fact to me,
but not the connection I was looking for.
Tirrell/Tirrill/Terrill
After following several more ancestral branches, and dealing
with names that change in spelling over time, I found myself on a branch where
the individuals started out with a spelling of “Tirrell” or “Tirrill” but which
changed to “Terrill”. This kind of spelling change is frustrating when looking
for duplicate family names.
I end up looking at one of my great*8 grandfathers, Roger
Terrill (1616-1682). Roger was born in England, immigrated into Roxbury, MA in
1632, then a few years later moved to Milford, CT where he married in 1638. He
and his wife, Abigail Ufford, had several children, three of whom started
separate family lines that connected to me.
Down one of these lines, Roger Terrill was the great*6
grandfather of Charles Rogers. Down another he was the great*6 grandfather of
Vera [Levy], and down a third he was the great*7 grandfather of Harold
Pierpont, my maternal grandfather. This gave me not only the connection I had
been looking for, but another bonus connection as well.
First, I can confirm that when my grandmother, Vera,
remarried, she was marrying her 7th cousin – several generations
less than the incorrect connection I had written about five years ago. But this
also means that when my parents married, my father was marrying his 8th
cousin, once removed, an even closer connection than I had documented for them
previously (*2).
Changes in spelling, often involving alternate vowels or
double/single letters, is a fairly common problem in genealogical research when
phonetic spelling was often used because people were not literate. Whether it’s
the Tirrell/Tirrill/Terrill here, the Russell/Russel in my paternal line, or
the Pierpont/Pierpoint/Peirpont/etc. in my maternal line (*3), it’s something
that we have to account for.
Notes:
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