Genealogy

My mother, Katherine Louise Wall C., was gifted in languages and was very interested in genealogy. She was fluent in English and Spanish and German, and could follow the Latin mass in the Catholic church, having had 5 years of Latin in high school and at SWTSTC, now Texas State university. She found, along with others, about a thousand of our ancestors. When I got started, I had the advantage of the use of computers. I used Ancestry.com to find another thousand or so kinfolk, including aunts and uncles, which are hard to show on paper after a generation or two or three. On the computer, that's not a problem.
Some of the highlights of our genealogy: 6 or 7 or 8 Mayflower ancestors. I found some that I've lost. A legend that we are descended from Jefferson Finis Davis. I've searched high and low, and couldn't find the connection. Our grandchildren are descended from an English duchess through our daughters-in-law. The duchess, Margaret Beaufort, is the great-grandmother of King Henry VIII. One daughter-in-law is descended from the duke, and the other is descended from her second husband. One daughter-in-law is descended from the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams. Roger Williams and Oliver Cromwell have a common ancestor, Elizabeth Cromwell. Some of the children took her surname and some took her husband's, Morgan Williams. There must have been a little set-to there. In my family, my mother's maiden name is Wall. This name goes back a longish way to some Thomas Walls, and then a male Wallis, who was married to a female Wall. I'll try to get the details straight, some time. We are descended from King Edward III. One time, I offered to try to trace the lineage of one of my college roommates, and was able to find he was descended from King Edward IV. One more king than I had. When you hook on to one king, you get a bunch more, because they liked to keep it in the family. Yesterday, I typed in my ancestors reputedly going back to Adam. A friend of my mother's, Antoinette Yokum, had sent her a partly handwritten, partly typed genealogy going from King Edward III back to Adam and Eve. Of course any real genealogist would have to see more proof than I have, but I typed in all into my Reunion genealogy program, based on something a math prof at UT said, years ago. He said he didn't care how you proved a theorem, or something. He just wanted to get his hands on an answer! It's a lot easier to prove something than to come up with the thing originally.
In my wife's family, a long-lost cousin read something about me in the Waco paper. She figured out who we were and got in touch with us. We got together several times, meeting at the Stage Coach Inn in Salado, roughly half-way between Austin and Waco. On one such get-together she gave us a long genealogy, going back from Gail's father's mother to about 1200 AD. Then, a few years later, a lady in Arizona that I had met on-line came up with an even more extensive lineage of Gail's father's father's family.
Well, that's enough for today, 13 July 2009. I need to go get some exercise. Dixon WC