Names

Several years back, I became completely obsessed with online genealogy.  If you haven't tried it, visit Ancestry.com and use their free service.  Type in the name of a forebear a couple of generations back, preferably an unusual name and not "John Smith."  If you get a "hit" and find that someone else has already entered your family's info on the world family tree, it's very easy to get hooked!  It's like treasure hunt, and you become consumed with seeing how far back you can get!  I met all kinds of distant cousins, got packets in the mail containing photographs of people, headstones, houses, homesteads, and all around had a wonderful time.  Ultimately, I kind of got stuck, but this was after finding literally HUNDREDS of family names and tracing a number of my lines to people who were born before 1700, and several before 1600.  Through my grandmother's Goodloe line, one enterprising soul had traced the Goodloes back to somewhere around 1400, with a surprising amount of detailed birth and death dates and burial places.

Anyway, one of the most entertaining parts of this was learning some of the delightful names of some of my ancestors.  I thought I would share with you some of my favorite ancestresses:

Sophronia America Chappell  (Sophronia was my great-great-grandmother, and is my favorite of all the names!)

Betsy Breedlove

Sally Featherston

Paulina Thomason (they pronounced the "i" in Paulina as a long "i."  The original Paulina must've been much loved, because the name went on for four generations.)

(The three above were grandmother, daughter and granddaughter.  All had lovely names, to my ear.)

Other favorites I came across were Cecily Osbaldston, Alydia Anderson, and Lydia Ederington.  I could go on all day--I found hundreds of ladies with beautiful names.

One of the oddest names I found was a woman named Barnaby Roberts.  Barnaby??  Another odd name was one Easter Burch, born 1671.  You can't help but wonder if somehow "Esther" was misspelled on a document.

Though not an ancestress, the oddest of all was one poor man with the name Payne Payne.  The most horrifying?  My ancestor Richard Cheney, born 1620.  I decided not to investigate THAT line too closely.

My "prize find" was my many times great grandfather Robert Thompson of South Carolina, a Revolutionary War hero known as "the first martyr of the American Revolution."  He was one of the "Regulator Boys" (an organized group of rebels protesting lack of representation, extortion and oppression by the British colonial government) of South Carolina, and was shot to death by the British Governor Tryon, while returning from a meeting in which he tried to negotiate a peaceful resolution between the British troops and the 2000 or so Regulators.  Pretty interesting!