In 1976, Carroll Mendenhall Leonard put his ten years of genealogical research into a book of 645 pages that covered the family history of the Grigsby and Leonard families. It was a masterful undertaking, involving travel all over the midwest to county courthouses and graveyards, and included a voluminous correspondence with the living members of the families.
And while my husband's family only took up the first thirty pages of the huge book, it was enough to give us a leg up on family history research. It was on Carroll Leonard's shoulders that we reached for the connection that would take us from Stephenson County, Illinois to the shores of Virginia.
Caroll Leonard traced the Grigsby family from present day California back to the birth of Moses Grigsby in Kentucky in 1797. He stopped at that point, unable to find a further ancestor.
My husband and I, impressed with our ready access to information from the comfort of our own computer desk, took up the chase. Like most new to the field of genealogy, we started out indiscriminately collecting names and dates from sites like the Church of the Later Day Saints Family History Library. (Today it is called the FamilySearch, and has far more bells and whistles than it had during the 90s.) And while the information was intriguing, and took us all of the way back to the Doomsday Book, it didn't feel quite right to me. Birth dates did not align with marriage and death dates. An uncle here seemed to be a grandfather there. The family trees were contradictory and confusing. Names weren't enough. I wanted documents. Birth certificates, marriage licenses, burial records.
Fortunately, we had a good friend who had been researching family history for years and Jeff sat down with me and went over the problems with our first time efforts. With his wife, the four of us made frequent trips to Salt Lake City for visits to the Family History Center of the Mormon Church. That place is amazing. Floors of information. Books, maps, microfilm and now computer databases with lots of room to spread your discoveries out and take notes or make copies.
My husband's family is very old in America. Which means it is easily (comparatively) traceable - the language is all English. Of course, it was complicated by the surnames of Brown and Miller, which are like dandelions on an Illinois summer lawn.
But the Grigsby family seemed to be much easier as we assumed there would be fewer people with that name. Which was a silly assumption, but we were still greenhorns. After many months of painstaking research, we thought we had the connection between Moses Grigsby, who was the oldest member of the family that Carroll Leonard had been able to verify, and the Immigrant John Grigsby who founded the American branch in 1662.
There is a National Grigsby Family Society (NGFS) which had a genealogist who supervised the carefully documented history of the Grigsbys in America. We could, and did, join, but only as associate members because proof of our connection was all based on conjecture.
Quick thumbnail sketch of the family: John Grigsby, originally from Maidstone area of England, sailed to Virginia in 1662 where he settled, amassed land, a wife, and family. When he died in 1730, at the age of 107, he left land and property to all six of his children, one of whom was James, who was born in Stafford County, VA in about 1686. James' son Samuel was born in 1724.
And that is where, within our branch, the genealogist of the NGFS stopped, unable to find conclusive proof that Samuel had a son, also named Samuel, born in 1765, who migrated to South Carolina where he stopped for a while with his cousins before heading west to Kentucky. During their extended stay in South Carolina, his Virginia-born wife, Franky (Frankey) Cornwell had five of her eight children, including Aaron, who was the oldest son.
In Kentucky the family stopped for more than twenty years, and it was there that Moses was born in 1797. Franky passed away in 1810 and Samuel married Elizabeth Strange in 1818 and had seven more children. They moved across the Ohio River into southern Indiana.
I'm going to stop here for a moment to make clear that Samuel Grigsby did not cross from South Carolina to Kentucky with only his wife and children. Families traveled in groups, some quite large, as they migrated westward. A search of graveyards and census records revealed other families named Grigsby, Cornwell and Strange in the same general area. Some of the Grigsbys were cousins, brothers and nephews of "our" branch of the family.
(One such was Reuben Grigsby, who moved with his sons, Aaron and Nathaniel, to Spencer County, Indiana where Aaron and Nathaniel attended school with Abraham Lincoln and Aaron married Lincoln's sister, Sarah. See About that Grigsby tombstone that calls Democrats Traitors for more information about Nathaniel.)
Moses Grigsby
1797-1865
Moses turns up in the 1840 census in Edgar County, Illinois, which is in the middle of the state, just west of the Indiana border. Interestingly, a James Strange does the same. Interesting because of the marital connections we found between the Strange and Grigsby families. Carroll Leonard suggested that James was the father of Delilah Strange, who married Moses Grigsby.
Credence is given to that by the fact that when Moses moved to Stephenson County in northern Illinois, James Strange did the same. Moses' older brother Aaron, also married a Strange girl, Mary A Polly, known as Polly. Aaron moved his family to Stephenson County and had land near Moses and John Strange. Their father's second wife was Elizabeth Strange. Aaron married Polly in 1813, in Garrard County, KY. Samuel (the father) married Elizabeth in 1818 in Lincoln County KY, and Moses married Delilah in 1828 in Orange County, IN, where his father and Elizabeth had settled.
None of this proves that Moses was the son of Samuel. Or that Samuel was the great grandson of the first John Grigsby. But the coincidences of the marriages and the family connections were strong enough for the NGFS to add us as associate members. Because we lacked documentation tying us to the Virginia Grigsbys, we were denied full membership.
And that was where we hit our brick wall for a few years. Until I heard that the NGFS was conducting DNA analysis of family members. As associate members we had to pay for our own testing, but it was simply done and submitted to Family Tree DNA.com. After receiving our results, I poured over them on an excel spreadsheet, comparing them to a few known descendants. I know nothing about DNA, but I knew enough to compare one set of figures to another. It looked to me that his profile was only off by one or two numbers out of a possible 67 markers. An email to the NGFS genealogist got no response. We put the info in a file folder and moved on to other ancestors.
Then, from a quarterly news bulletin, we learned that the NGFS board had authorized funding to further analyze some of the collected DNA samples. It was a happy surprise to learn that Ed's DNA was one of those included for the additional testing. Family Tree DNA tested for 111 markers, instead of the earlier 67, and though I am no expert on DNA analysis, the additional markers can result in closer matches over a shorter period of genealogical time.
As an example, at 67 markers, a genetic distance of 1 would mean that the chance of a common ancestor within four generations is 50%; within eight generations it is 90% and within nine generations the chances rise to 95%. With 111 markers, the generations decrease so that the chance of a common ancestor within three generations if 50%, six generations is 90% and seven generations is 95%. The ability to determine how closely two people are related increases with the number of markers that are analyzed.
Ed's DNA analysis, at 111 markers, was a close enough match to that of proven family members that our branch of the family tree is now accepted as a bona fide descendants of Immigrant John Grigsby.
In my husband's case, DNA proved helpful because we had access to the DNA of known descendants of the American Grigsby family for comparison purposes. In my case it is, sadly, less helpful. Although I know my father's family history, I know little about my own mother. That she claimed that her father was an American Indian and that she was raised, not by her own mother in Washington state where she was born in Pasco, but by a foster family in North Dakota. After they were wed, my parents visited her mother who was living in Bellingham, WA. Rumors of her native American roots have persisted, aided by her absence. So last year I had my DNA analyzed, forgetting that mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to daughter. My DNA reflected the European roots of my maternal grandmother, but told me nothing of my maternal grandfather.
DNA can be helpful in genealogy research, but you do need to know exactly what it does and does not reveal. It can give you a very broad brush background, but if you want to use it as we did, to bridge a gap in records, you need to have access to the DNA of a known descendant with which you can compare it.