My Family Names & Family Research Priorities

This is a list of names in my family tree, an overview of my geneology research priorities, and a bit about my motivations for geneology research. To see my complete family trees, sans living people, you need to be on ancestry.com. I am posting this here so that my family names and geneology research comes up in people's online searches for similar family information, in case they have information I need (or I have information they might find useful).

At right are the names in my family tree going back to the 1700s. You can faintly see a number at the end of each string of names - this is the number of DNA matches that I have found on Ancestry.com for each of these family groups as of July 2023.

I color-coded my family for each DNA relation on ancestry.com based on each of my great-great grandparents. That would mean there would be just eight colors. However, I also put the families of one of my great-grandmother's into two groups instead of one, in order to solve two big family mysteries, using DNA matches. 

What's not included here are more family color categories - I have even more for DNA matches that I know I'm related to, and are all related to each other, but aren't related to these family groups. What's also not in the graphic or the text below is the category I have for the biological family of an ancestor who was adopted.

These are the names in my family going back to my great-great grandparents, that are also represented in the graphic at left:

My maternal grandfather's line, indicated by two different shades of green, is the most well-documented and, clearly, the one with the most kin that love Ancestry.com. There was also intermarrying twice among his ancestors (cousins marrying cousins), so my DNA connections tend to show BOTH dark green and light green connections.

To get even more specific:

Family names of my eight great grandparents:

• Maternal: Denton, Culver, Walker, Perrin
• Paternal: Beasley, Morris, Cravens, Conley

Family names of 16 2nd great grandparents: 

• Maternal: Denton, Culver, Walker, Perrin, Higginson, Gibson, Bradshaw, Mansfield
• Paternal: Beasley, Smith or Schmidt, Morris, Figgins, Cravens, Day, Conley, Fogle

Family names of 32 3rd great grandparents that I know of so far & excluding the 16 aforementioned (though “Smith” may become “Schmidt”):

• Maternal:  Sheffer, Mosely, Gibson, Bradshaw or Bratcher (not sure if it's different than the other Bradshaw already in my tree). Wilson, Hollifield
• Paternal:  Cauthen, Wells, Fulkerson, Butts, Mills, Gates, Mullins, Clayton,

Family names of 64 4th great grandparents that I know of so far & excluding the 32 aforementioned:

• Maternal: Whitledge, Jones, Green, Gordon, Busby, King, Tipton, Ferguson, Benson, Faucett (not as may names because this is where Gibson/Dentons show up again - intermarrying)
• Paternal: Kinkade, Messinger, Flake, Bower or Bauer, Clark, Ford, Phillips, Wireman, Price, Smith, Miller, Hart

Family names of 128 5th great grandparents that I know of so far & excluding the 64 or so aforementioned:

• Maternal: Thornberry, Harrison, Schafer (was Sheffer), Stockwell, Archer, Terry, Doster, Duncan, Clopton, McKinley, Melton, Lyman, McCooley, Key, Lacey, Bedford
• Paternal: Moritz (was Morris), Gussaler, Osbourn, Oliphant, Pile, Zook, Baldwin, Williams, Shanklin, Price, Malone, Carpenter, Clark, Cole, Goodwin

My Research Priorities

I've spent years on Ancestry.com, subscribing for six months and then taking a year break each time. My primary goal was to trace each of my family branches back to the country, and maybe even the city, from wence they came to the Americas. I gave up because almost every branch goes back to the early 1700s or the 1600s, and without a professional genealogy researcher, I'm never going to find these first settlers or colonists or indentured servents or whatever they were.

I also really wanted to map my Beasley line. Which has turned out to be the earliest dead end for all of my geneology research.

My next goal was to figure out a paternal mystery on my maternal great-great grandmother's line, the Walker line. Which I did - but in doing so, I ended up with two more paternal mysteries on my hands, one of which I have written about here, regarding the Mansfield family of Alabama.

Also, I want to

• find the names of all of my 64 4th great-grandparents (14 left to find!).
  
• find out every family member that fought in the Civil War, on either side.
• figure out who my ancestors were that enslaved people.

Thoughts

The more I study ancestry, the more I see that there's no such thing as race, that we are all mutts. All of us. And there is SO much artificial construction in what gets defined as racial groups. And, yes, people have differences in their hair, skin, builds, shape of the face, vulnerability to disease... but not mental, emotional or creative capacities based on race. In short, racism is stupid.

I'll be frank: I don't like the idea of people choosing their identity exclusively through their ancestry. I cringe at people making comments that their ancestry somehow makes them more "in tune" with land or water, or specific land or water. Or people imply that they have a "special connection" to some kind of music because of their genetics. The culture you identify with absolutely influences you, and the culture you grew up with definitely conditions you to like, even love, certain things. So does your life experiences, which may be unique to you, different from others brought up in your culture. So does just what make you YOU, without any obvious ties to your genetics or your environment. And as you encounter other cultures, through food, music, books, dance, movies and more, you are going to be further influenced to like, or feel a connection, to something. It's why I love seeing a Japanese American singing Bluegrass. Or a Black American singing Italian opera.

Also, I am not my genealogy. I am me. I cannot take credit for the accomplishments of my ancestors nor be condemned for their sins. I inherited only names and DNA from anyone older than my great-grandparents: no property, no wealth, no specific traditions, and not even much in terms of family stories or lore, not beyond my great-grandparents. The more I've studied genealogy, the more I see these people as very interesting strangers. I sometimes envy people who have had so much passed down in their family - but sometimes, I'm glad to have been born into a blank slate (or a "blank-ish" slate) and able to define myself.

My other history-related pages & blogs:

About James Vernon Cravens, also known as Jack Cravens, of Henderson, Kentucky, my paternal grandfather.

Uncle Pearl

Tips for using ancestry.com

Ancestry drama (what my ethnic breakdown is according to Ancestry.com)

Rethinking "indigenous" & DNA results

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