52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

          When I was growing up, our aunts and uncles from Philadelphia area would always get together for Thanksgiving, either at our home in NJ or at my grandparents in Atlantic City. And after our Thanksgiving meal, we all would join around the piano and sing Christmas carols. It was such a special time. And what reinforces those memories is the fact that our dad recorded these songfests on his reel-to-reel tape recorder. Well, these 70 year old tapes survived, and now have been digitized and shared, so we can listen to them anytime. I still can hear Uncle Cliff’s soaring tenor voice, and my Poppop Wilbur playing the piano. Those are some of the sweetest memories of Christmas Carols and a religious tradition I have. Just to illustrate - Poppop knew all the songs - no sheet music needed  My maternal grandfather, C. Wilbur Harley (Poppop) has roots that go back many generations (to the early 1700’s) in the Mennonite and Brethren communities in sout...

         Maybe it was because I felt like I was the one to uncover some of the details of her life 100 years after she died, or maybe it was because she is buried in an unmarked grave in the Hinch Cemetery on Hinch mountain, but for whatever reason, her story has stuck with me, and I felt compelled to share it for this week’s theme.   Who was Pearl? What was her story? Well, she was one of my dad’s first cousins, but there was no other information on this pedigree chart that a second cousin had sent me a   couple years ago. All her 5 siblings had birth and death dates, as well as marriage information listed. But not Pearl. There was the name of a spouse, but that was all. I flagged that page, and planned to continue with comparing this new document to my tree, but I couldn’t let Pearl’s missing information rest. Her name on the page kept calling to me. What I gradually uncovered is still with me. I knew her parents’ and siblings’ names, so ...

“You know,“ said my 3rd cousin Gordon Reed, “Wilson is one of the oldest names in the valley.” He told me this about 5 years ago, as we drove over a small stream called Wilson’s Branch, while driving up and down the mountains in the Sequatchie Valley. It was the first time I had heard the Wilson name in this area, but for some reason I tucked it away in my memory. A couple years after that, I was “doing genealogy” for my dad’s Tennessee heritage, and I came across the name Greenberry Wilson. What a Name! Greenberry! I had never heard that first name before. Don’t you love it? I went on to discover that he is one of my 4th great grandfathers. I had no idea. The creek we drove across a few years before was named for him over 200 years ago. Revolutionary War patriot           Greenberry Wilson was most likely born in Buncombe county North Carolina around 1755. It’s believed his heritage was Irish.   He might have been married twice, but the records ...