Hello to all you family researchers. I wanted to begin a column which will give you updates as to current genealogical happenings and discoveries at the Society.

About a year ago in 2019 the Society received a couple large photo albums from the Robert’s family, whose family history has ties to the Dougherty and Gutchess families. It was a wonderful gift full of labeled images. Joyce Biss took the albums and began to sort out who was who, and she began a Dougherty family tree on Ancestry.com. In addition to making it easier to create and view a tree, the Ancestry hints and links help to fill out the missing parts, and as the trees are public, other family researchers can use them. After seeing how successful this was I took the plunge and started the Port Byron Family Tree. This was something I have been wanting to do for years. I used the King family as the core and began to work out from there. Since then I have started other smaller family trees as questions have popped up and I have wanted to answer a question or two. And then as we find that magic connection to the Port Byron tree, it is easier to plug them into the larger project. So In addition to the larger Port Byron Tree with the King family, we now have trees on; the Wilt, Stilwell, Devore, Kerns, Dougherty families. And that doesn’t include the other family histories we have started as notes. I have 64 family folders on my computer desktop where I continue to research and find items. I like to tell my wife that I am finding answers to questions no one has asked.

This past weekend I was working on the Stilwell family and, by happy accident, I ran across a family history of the Shotwell family on Google Books. So I plugged in the relevant Shotwell generations and realized that the Shotwell family had married into the Randall family a couple times. The name Randall rang a bell as it was the maiden name of Clara Barrus’ mom, Sarah Randall. Was there a connection? It took a bit, but yes, the families are related by a grandfather and different grandmothers.

We are always happy to help you with your family queries. Send them to lock52hs@gmail.com.

Mike