Adventures in Genealogy
This is about the pursuit of a clue which ended up getting me absolutely nowhere, but which turned out to be fascinating all the same.
I was attempting to determine whether a certain person was a collateral ancestress of mine, one Alfaretta Pugh who was born in Illinois about 1858. I also knew of intermarriage between the Pugh and Wishow families, and I found an Alfretta Wishow born about 1873. Alfaretta is a pretty unusual name, so might there be a connection here?
Not necessarily. It turned out that there were quite a lot of Alfarettas starting around 1847. The name featured in a song called "The Blue Juniata" written by Marion Dix Sullivan in 1844; "bright Alfarata" was an Indian maiden who dwelled by the river, which is in western Pennsylvania. The song became a huge hit in its time (you can google all this).
The two things I found fascinating about this were (1) naming a baby after an icon of popular culture is nothing new -- although naming it after a grandparent is much more useful from a genealogical perspective :) (2) history had been romanticized after less than 90 years: the vicinity of the Juniata River had featured in some bloody raids and battles between American colonists and Shawnee and Lenape Indians in the French and Indian War, in 1755-56.
It just goes to show, you never know what you're going to find until you come across it.
I was attempting to determine whether a certain person was a collateral ancestress of mine, one Alfaretta Pugh who was born in Illinois about 1858. I also knew of intermarriage between the Pugh and Wishow families, and I found an Alfretta Wishow born about 1873. Alfaretta is a pretty unusual name, so might there be a connection here?
Not necessarily. It turned out that there were quite a lot of Alfarettas starting around 1847. The name featured in a song called "The Blue Juniata" written by Marion Dix Sullivan in 1844; "bright Alfarata" was an Indian maiden who dwelled by the river, which is in western Pennsylvania. The song became a huge hit in its time (you can google all this).
The two things I found fascinating about this were (1) naming a baby after an icon of popular culture is nothing new -- although naming it after a grandparent is much more useful from a genealogical perspective :) (2) history had been romanticized after less than 90 years: the vicinity of the Juniata River had featured in some bloody raids and battles between American colonists and Shawnee and Lenape Indians in the French and Indian War, in 1755-56.
It just goes to show, you never know what you're going to find until you come across it.