edminster.org

A couple of years ago my Aunt Peg entrusted me with several boxes of family photos, documents, mementoes, etc. At the time I was working on the family’s ancestry for an upcoming family reunion. I was pretty new to the family history quest, but I had a long, abiding love of American history and had a couple of years of PhD coursework in American history and American religious history.

Primary documents were one of the things that made history intriguing for me. I loved – still love – the power of a note, a letter or a diary to bring people back to life. It was this love that made my Aunt’s sharing of the family documents so exciting – the contents of those boxes allowed me to see history’s people…my family’s people…my people brought to life. After nearly three years, I’ve spent a great deal of time with these people, but many of them are still unknown to me.

As many genealogists, who are fortunate enough to be entrusted with this kind of treasure, can tell you, this sort of inheritance often brings as many questions with it as it answers. Among the serveral boxes of photos and portraits, I found as many unidentified as not. Perhaps my favorite picture remained a mystery until recently. It is a formal portrait of a large family seated in front of a modest, but well-tended home. The faces and characters in this portrait intrigued me from moment one.

Three years of going over and over these materials made the difference. I was going through electronic copies of some of the photos when I came across this one, which I hadn’t looked at in a while. I immediately noticed one of the women in front. My little internal voice said “Oh, look. That’s Ella Jane Pike.” Just like that. No fanfare, no epiphany. Like I should have known all along.

Knowing who Ella Jane was unlocked several other individuals in the portrait. The matriarch and patriarch in the middle are Jotham Pike and Elizabeth Seavy. Jotham is Ella Jane’s father from his first marriage to Mariah Ballard. The couple in the front to their right with the young boy are Albin Edminster, Ella Jane (Pike) Edminster and their son, Charles. I am almost certain that the girl in white in the back row with the black belt is Hannah Pike, and I’m reasonably certain that the youngest girl in white (over the left shoulder of the seated woman holding the boy) is Rosa Pike. I’m also certain that LuLu Bell is among the girls in white, but can’t be certain which one she is. At this point, all others are a mystery.

Given the age of Charles Edminster in this portrait, it would have been taken in 1883 or 1884. That means that if this portrait was taken at the home of Jotham and Elizabeth, they are on the Pike property that was on Route 77 just east of what is now Greytown Hills Road.

Hopefully, in another three years, that little inner voice will casually announce the identification of some of the others in the portrait. I’ll be awaiting with feigned indifference.

Perhaps my biggest success in the last serveral months was the identification of Joseph Wells Hutson’s parents. This has been a mystery as long as I’ve been at this, and I finally cracked it with the assistance of some notes my father took over 40 years ago. Dad had a single reference to the “W.” in Joseph W. Hutson standing for Wells. When I asked him about it, he said that my grandmother, Mary Marie (Hutson) Edminster, must have told him that’s what it stood for.

Last year, I “discovered” that Joseph had a brother and a sister living in Crawford County of whom I had never been made aware. My father also was unaware of their existence. George Hutson (married Viola Bump) and Carrie (Caroline) Huston (married James Elbert Docter) both immigrated at about the same time, all settled in the same area, and all named children after (or like) their siblings.

After a great deal of searching, I found Samuel Hutson who had married Fanny Wells in Brighton, Sussex, England. They had two children, George and Caroline, whose ages matched those of the Crawford County brother and sister. The 1861 England Census lists a Samuel (Jr.) Hutson in this family, whose age matches Joseph’s age. A christening/birth record provides the final piece of information. In this record Samuel (Jr.) is christened “Joshamuel”, according to Ancestry’s transcription. Fanny’s father’s name is Joseph Wells. Joshamuel is either a hybrid of Joseph and Samuel or Joseph Samuel Wells Hutson may very well have been Joseph’s full name and either the transcription or original recording of the christening record is in error. I’ve requested a scan or image of the original record, but I’m certain I’ve finally located Joseph’s family in England. Samuel and Fanny had at least two other children, Catherine and Mary Jane, whom I have not done much with yet. Samuel also has a daughter, Mercy, from a prior marriage. I hope to be able to expand this line further now that I have made the jump across “the pond”.

Although it has been another long interval between posts, I haven’t been idle on the genealogical front. Much of he work I’ve done lately has been supportive of individuals already contained in the tree. I’ve added a number of headstone images to individuals. There are also a number of free-floating headstones (not as scary as it sounds) which are for individuals not contained in the tree, although I know the families are connected to us in some fashion. Connecting them is on my To-Do list.

I’ve also expanded the tree in a few areas. I’ve filled out some of the vital statistics information on the Docter family and expanded on the family connections there. This effort was helped along by my visit, late last Fall, to the Miller’s Station Cemetery, which allowed me to firm up some lines and dates. I’ve also filled out some detail and added individuals in the Geer and Smith portions of the family.

You will also notice (or not) that new images on the site have their metadata embedded, meaning that information about the picture/scan is now part of the file itself. So when you grab an image from the site today, there’s no more wondering next year why you grabbed the thing in the first place (unless you edit the image with something that strips the metadata).

The only setback I’ve experience recently is that part of the Amy family line has been called into question by another researcher with ties to this family. It seems that Thomas Amy’s father may not have been Micah Amy, Jr. — Micah Jr.’s Thomas may be resting for eternity in Minnesota. I’m still trying to determine the truth of this one way or another, but even if this proves true, I’m guessing it won’t alter the tree much. If Thomas is not Micah Jr.’s son, there’s a good chance he’s the child of one of Micah Sr.’s other sons. More on this as it developes.

Yes, we’ve all heard the warnings about assumptions, but I guess sometimes some of us need a real-world reminder.

My family and I recently went to Crawford County, Pennsylvania to visit my father and his wife. We had a good time, and I took the opportunity to visit some sites of personal genealogical interest.

One of my missions was to track down the grave of my great great grandfather, Joseph Hutson, whom I’d found out was buried in the Miller’s Station Cemetery. When my father and I arrived, we discovered that the cemetery was quite a bit larger than we’d expected. I don’t know about you, but I can get turned around in the smallest of cemeteries, so this wasn’t necessarily going to be an easy task on my best day.

We set about looking for what we thought would be a modest, probably granite headstone among the hundreds and hundreds of plots. Because of our expectations of what we would find, both my father and I missed the headstone on our initial search. I was beginning to think that I had gotten bad information about the location of Joseph’s burial, when I noticed a Hutson marker, bigger and more prominant than I had expected. This, of course, has made me question other assumptions about Joseph and his family. Was Joseph wealthier than I had thought or did he simply purchase a headstone not indicitive of his means? Hopefully, I’ll be able to answer this at some point.

In any event, I found headstones for scores of other relatives/ancestors in this cemetery (Amy, Docter, Smith, Dine, & Hammond families), so it was a fruitful excursion as well as a good reminder about preconceptions.

The mechanical work of integrating WordPress and the TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding) software is, for the most part, complete. However, there’s still a lot of work to do just to get my research in a format with which I’m happy.

Currently, I’m working on embedding metadata in all of my photos and scans so that information about what the photos are, where they were taken, and other pertinent information is actually part of the file. I’m also taking advantage of TNG’s ability to associate media with individuals. As the project develops, you should be able to look at the information I have about an individual and also view all associated photos, headstone pictures, documents, etc.

There will be a lot of other little projects that will make information on the site easier to find and easier to use. If you have suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them. If you’re a family member and would like to be able to view information on the living members of the family that I’ve accumulated, please e-mail me.

Welcome to the newly designed Edminster.org. I’ve switched to a WordPress framework to make updates easier and, hopefully, more frequent. My intention is to keep track of my progress here, both as a means of record-keeping and to let family members and other interested parties know what great family secrets I’m uncovering.

If you’re new to the site, it might be worth looking at About this site. This page may let you know if there’s anything of interest to you on this site. If you’re familiar with the site, you’ll notice that most everything is gone. It will be back in the next week or two next three or four weeks, and in better shape. Please bear with me.