Welcome to my family history blog.

In 1985 my sister and I started planning our parents 50th Wedding Anniversary. I decided I wanted to honor them and the families that came together through their marriage to create our family. After the anniversary my sister wanted to join in what had become for me an exciting hobby.
We decided that she would take the paternal line and I would concentrate on the maternal line. It’s been 29 years and be have both learned a lot.
2014 is going to be the year I get truly organized. While I’m working on the stacks that need purging, filed, or organized I thought I would tell the stories that I have found during my searching. Hopefully my sister will take turns with me and share the stories of the ancestors she has met during this process.

Story 1       John Lyle Dougherty
John Lyle is our maternal great grandfather. Our grandmother…….
This is already complicated. Maybe I should actually start with the cast of characters

Grandma Dougherty was a very large character while we were growing up. Grandma & Grandpa Dougherty did not live close but we (my sister & I) spent a month or so with them every summer until we were teenagers. Grandma was good at telling us stories. Often these stories were about her family (the Heap’s) that lived back on Staten Island in New York.

“My mothers family are the Booth’s,” she reminded us,” and we are not only related to the man that shot Abraham Lincoln (John Wilkes Booth) but to the man himself.”
She went on to say that she had a cousin that came from England to attend the wedding of a cousin (or niece) of Mr. Lincoln. This information is just one of those tidbits that I never forgot and when I started this search I wanted to prove. Well in all my searching I have never found any connection to either man.

Story #2

My grandmother went to the Salvation Army thrift store at least once while we were visiting each summer. She always wore white gloves, and a hat, a lady of her era.

She would rummage through the stacks of clothing looking for sweaters that she could use the yarn from to make her hooked rugs. She was a true recycler. She had the rugs she made throughout her home and we all had one at one time or other. I loved them. She would then go through all the silverware looking for true ‘silver’ ware. And last she would look at all the dishes looking for hand painted china and she also looked for “good pieces’ of crystal. When grandma got home the first thing she did was dump all the silver and dishes she had bought into hot soapy water and then take off her gloves and wash the gloves in the same soapy water. My collections and my sister’s collections include some of her finds.

Story #3
“You know about the Booths, did you know that the founder of the Salvation Army was one of our relatives.” This was an explanation of why she always went to the Salvation Army thrift story, better known to all of us in the family as the ‘U know where!’
I do not know who coined the term but my money’s on grandma.

My search to verify a connection to William Booth founder of the Salvation Army has again produced nothing.

Return next week to find out about the civil war connection