Wrapping up the Cullins

Is a genealogy ever finished, well no – there is always more to discover. I’ve had the feeling, though at this point in my life it is good to do some ‘wrapping-up’ of the family lines. It wasn’t difficult to decide which line was first as these people (in a ‘6^th Sense’ way) have tugged at me and called to me for years. And, in a more down to earth way – be it an email from a distant cousin, or a little tidbit in an old faded newspaper the Cullins have been persistent.

It hasn’t been an easy journey. It has been 64 years since I first learned of my Great Grandmother Hannah Cullins Shaffer. No one talked about her after she died of cancer at the age of 55 in 1921. My grandfather wouldn’t mention his mother. My grandmother tried to get him to open up but he stayed as closed as a threatened clam – which makes one think that there were unhappy memories. Grandma hinted at that, but I can only speculate. Then Hannah’s mother, Amanda Cordray Cullins, I was told came from a tragic family living under a dark cloud, including a house fire where everything was lost. 

Dorcas Cullins, Hannah's sister

The Cullins and Cordray families were from Ohio, but Amanda was a puzzle. I was pretty sure Amanda came from Muskingum County, which was her husband’s birthplace, but to which Cordray family did she belong? She fell through the cracks of the 1850 census where she should have been named. She wasn’t yet married to William C. Cullins and she wasn’t listed with any Cordray family. She was about 16 and my guess is that she hired out to another farm as a mother’s helper and wasn’t counted with them.

To move on with the line I had two possibilities – either Amanda was the daughter of George Washington Cordray or his brother Andrew. At first I thought it was George and put that option on my tree, however that was a mistake and misleading to others who might have copied my work as I still had no proof that Amanda was George’s daughter. I kept looking and years down the road I found that ‘one little thing’ that confirmed her father to be Andrew and not George.

That one little thing? It was one of those little gossipy news items in a Fayette County, Iowanewspaper that told us that ‘Amanda Cullins had a visit from her sister Charlotte.’ It was Andrew who had a daughter named Charlotte. For a time Charlotte and her family lived in Fayette County but they’d moved on to South Dakota. Mystery solved.

William C Cullins, Hannah's father

Hannah’s Cullins family goes back to a Revolutionary War Soldier, John Cullins b 1705, originally from Ireland and with whom our families’ members can join the DAR or SAR if they wish. This is an established DAR line. Recently ancestry.com has added ‘Thrulines’ to our trees that show our DNA matches for each person back to our 5^th great grandfathers. That would be to Edward Cullins b 1727, the son of the Revolutionary John.

I’m very near to compiling and printing this information for my family with the help of ancestry.com’s ‘Life Story’ feature that adds significant events that occurred during their lifetimes.

Where from here with the Cullins? Last week I found the feature on ancestry’s DNA pages that helps me color code cousin groups. Wow, the group for Cullins, Cordray and a couple other allied families has 93 cousins of varying degrees. Those are just the ones with public trees who share information. There are so many more with private trees, or who have disconnected their trees, or haven’t built their trees yet. What to do with that cousins group?! I’m thinking about contacting the 93 to see if they would like to have a cousin’s Facebook page for sharing, friendship, and family reunions.

As for my Cullins family I have a choice, I can develop each allied family, as I have for the Cullins – filling out our information on our Muskingum County Ohio lines – or, I can pick a different family entirely. The thing is I recently fell into another Cullins rabbit hole when I received an email about their Delaware roots. Delaware? What! 

Father’s Day 2013

Since the ancestors on my tree (www.ancestry.com) are marked with a picture of the flag of their home state (most often the state in which they died) it proved to be a fairly easy task to identify my Ohio pioneers. 

They range in degree from 2^nd to 6^th Great Grandparents, with the majority as 4^th GGs. In the end there was a total of 18 families – 9 Ohio pioneers families on my father’s side and nine on my mother’s – each family with siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles. That is an amazing number of people living, working, breathing in the early air of Ohio – a state I’ve only traversed on the turnpike (once) and train without a stop, and a trip to Bowling Green State University where my Florida son, scholarship in hand, spent one freezing semester before leaving the lake effect snow behind for a Florida State degree.

Most of those families came from more easterly states where they had been even earlier pioneers. They were English, German, or Irish. They were the children of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, or South Carolina pioneers seeking land of their own to farm, seeking greener pastures, or abolitionists shaking off the dirt of a slave-holding state. All of them were American citizens, most with roots going back far beyond the Revolution to the earliest settlement of the colonies. Ohio was the Wild West – raw and new – the Promised Land for this new generation of Americans.

With 18 families identified I moved to making a list of ‘to dos’ – tasks to be completed for each family for their entry in our Ohio pioneers book. That I do this and stick with it is absolutely essential.  I love to research and I could get totally absorbed in that work on one or two families and find myself in December and a long way from completing my intended project.  The list may change over time but if I do the tasks, ticking them off as I go, I should be able to finish in time for Christmas – I hope!

Which family to start with? That choice was totally random. I picked a family from my father’s side – it seems right as today is Father’s Day. And, it actually involves two families – John Cullins, Sr. 1758-1837 and his wife, Rebecca Jane Beatty 1770-1843; and John Cullins, Jr. 1791-1856 and his wife, Dorcas Meredith 1800-1882. I made a file for John and Rebecca, looked at what I have on ancestry.com for them – increased it as much as I could and moved on to researching other sites on the Internet. I’m off and ticking through the ‘to do’ list!  Ohio by Christmas or bust!

Ohio Pioneers



. . . and so it begins. Our pioneers in Ohio. The dream has been this for decades – to pass along the stories of our family to my children; and to do it by not only personal, specific accounts, but through literature – the well-love and carefully researched historical novels, histories, biographies, and autobiographies that I’ve read along the way.   

This is not to be a linear path from, let’s say, 900AD to the present. The books were and are read in random order. Last year I was inspired by the Medieval power couple, Sir William Marshall and Lady Isabel de Clare, through the well-researched, well-imagined stories of Elizabeth Chadwick in two historical novels: The Greatest Knight and The Scarlet Lion.  When I first picked-up the books I knew that the couple were on our family tree. Looking closer at the spider-web of family connections I found, much to my surprise, that the Marshall family is very significant to the make-up of our family. No fewer than five lines from four of the Marshall daughters found their way down to our present-day family. I’d have to say that my children and grandchildren have a strong claim to the Marshall legacy. It is one to be proud of and to cherish.

http://elizabethchadwick.com/

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I started by buying new copies of each of the Chadwick historical novels as Christmas gifts for my 4 adult children and 4 adult grandchildren. Then I set about the labor of love – compiling an individualized account that displayed their descendency from William and Isabel.

I hope that each of them will come to treasure the gift and use those three books as the start of their family history library and keep them through their life-times and pass them on to their children.

I have four younger grandchildren and two great grandchildren who didn’t receive copies but it is my hope that their parents will see that they have an opportunity to read them. This year one of those four grandchildren, Maia, has reached the age of 10 and is a reader. She will receive her personalized copies. And so there will be nine. . . ‘Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise!’ as they once said back in Ohio territory. . .