Thanks to the translation feature in Google Books, I was able to learn new information about my ancestor the insurrectionist, Jan Van Coppenolle. He is a 14th great-grandfather on my father’s side who lived and died in the later half of 15th century. Jan is known in some historical accounts as the “Demagogue of Ghent” as he was the bourgeois dictator of that city for … Continue reading My Ancestor, the Insurrectionist – pt 3

Montécheroux is a small village in eastern France near the Swiss border. My father’s great-great-grandparents, Jean Baptiste Francois Xavier Gaume and Marie Elise Favier, were born there in the early 19th century. Elise’s mother’s ancestors had lived in the village since at least the late 17th century. Before the French Revolution, the town was part of the seigneury of Clémont and was ruled by the … Continue reading More on the Montécheroux BMD Records

In an earlier post, I discussed the death record of my fifth great grandfather Jean Germaine Voisard, the mayor of Montécheroux, France from 1815 to 1826. In the record, Jean’s mother is named only by the initials NN. This means that neither of the witnesses knew her name. One of the men was a grandson. Her name was Jeanne Antoine Jourot, and she died when … Continue reading Ancien Régime

Jean Germain Voisard was the mayor of Montecheroux, France from 1815 to 1826. He was a fifth great grandfather on my father’s side. As the “maire” of the commune he was first and foremost a bureaucrat whose main responsibility was enforcing the regulations of the “Code civil des Français” – also known as the Napoleonic Code. Msr. Voisard was born in 1754 and he was … Continue reading The Napoleonic Code

Geneanet.org is a genealogical website headquartered in Paris, France. It differs from ancestry.com in that Geneanet is a collaborative site where the members share in the effort of building family trees and supplying transcriptions of registers, both civil and parochial. The site has been around since the mid-nineties, and I was a regular visitor twenty years ago. At Geneanet, I could connect with fellow researchers … Continue reading A Well-Regulated Militia

I love mining old newspapers for family history bits and pieces. Here is today’s haul. Death of an Old Lady Here is the obituary of my great, great, great-grandmother, Elise Faivre, that appeared in the Stark County Democrat (Canton, Ohio) on Thursday, October 29, 1891. Sixty-one grandchildren… Imagine that! In the text below, I have corrected misspelled surnames. Mrs. Frank Gaume died at the old … Continue reading Bits & Pieces

This is more on the Dakota war of 1862 and the Minnesotan white community’s response towards the uprising. My O’Malley ancestors were living in Mower County, Minnesota, then. I am trying to get a feel for how people in their community responded to the uprising by members of the Dakotan tribes. From what I have read so far it seems that the feelings of the … Continue reading A Final Solution?

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I am working on a rewrite of Gathering Leaves with the working title of “Gathering More Leaves.” Since I started my retirement in August, I have made considerable progress on the book. I have completed about half of what I estimate will be two dozen chapters, and I am now up to the part of the story where … Continue reading The Overlooked

On October 3, 1862, my great-great-grandfather, Francis Gaume, enlisted under the name Frank Gaume, at the age of 17, as a Private at Mansfield, Ohio, in Company “I” of the 19th Regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry (OVI). During this time, the state of Ohio was in a panic over the possibility that Confederate forces would soon invade. The Governor of Ohio had offered a … Continue reading The Nineteenth Ohio Speaks

Here is an excerpt from Gathering Leaves, A Brief History of Montécheroux, France: My French-speaking ancestors, who lived in eastern France and western Switzerland, were neither citizens of France nor of Switzerland until after the French Revolution. They came from the region that today is within the French department of Doubs and the modern Swiss Canton of Jura. The area is approximately midway between the … Continue reading A Brief History of Montécheroux