Henry H Williamson 3rd Iowa Cavalry

One of the mysteries about Henry Williamson for me (besides the identities of his parents) is why, when he was no longer bound to the Beale family, did he go to Iowa to serve in the Civil War? I haven't ordered his military records yet as I did with Levi Thompson, but I do have some documentation from the national veteran's home and from his obits. He really did serve Iowa, and then move right back to Indiana to live out his life.

Here you can see his record with the home for volunteer soldiers with living relative Ida Thompson (my second great grandmother). In 1910 he is listed in the Census living with his daughter Maud R Williamson Griffin in Alexandria. The listing clearly says his mom was born in Indiana and his father was born in Kentucky (unlike the death record). Nothing  that would point me to a connection to Iowa.

What was he doing there? Did he have family in Iowa? Was it a random move just to get away? It's hard to know without more documentation. This record shows that he enlisted in Garden Grove, but that doesn't have to mean he lived there. Perhaps I can order his state records from Iowa to get more info. I also should make a better search for his pension records (assuming he has a pension from the $8 listed as his pension in 1895 and his pension certificate number 695421).

Defining Boundaries...or the Blind Men and the Elephant

To date, I've learned much more through regular paper channels about my family. Getting documentation is actually helping me solidify DNA testing, not the other way around. It's probably because it's so early in this game, there just aren't enough people who know enough about their trees to make any educated guesses.

When I contact matches, usually they are the only members of their families that have tested. So I am in a minority in that case because I can definitively place a match on my mother's or father's side. So far though, I have amazing clues that seem to add up to something, like the odd amount of Stinsons/Stevensons in some of my matches trees. But without a clear paper trail leading me to them, I have not the slightest idea where they might fit in.

To me, that means I need to be creative about finding more possible paper records for family members and also I need to help define the boundaries of my related families. Obviously the best next step for me would be to test either a grandfather or grandmother, but I have none of those left. So now I intend to feel around the edges of those people to see if I can get a picture of what they might be like.

Like judging the size of a planet by noting it's gravitational pull on things around it.

On my paternal side, I have these four family groups defined by my grandparents. My grandfather is Finks/Thompson and my grandmother is Seelye/Campbell. I am lucky to have a living sibling of my grandmother and even luckier that he has agreed to test. So, I can define the Seelye Campbell line in a chunk.

Nicely I've gotten some recent nearer matches that appear to me to be on my Seelye/Campbell side. One on the Seelye side in the form of a Beadle who matches with a third great grandparent Beadle family. The second is a match on the Campbell side which carries a nice big chunk of the X for my dad. My dad's X is an exact copy of one of my grandmother's X chromosomes and so that maternal match makes complete sense. The common ancestors are third great grandparents to my father, The Abbes.

So getting my dad's Seelye uncle tested may help bring all of that together and may help tie up many other matches as well. Hopefully he shares enough DNA in common with my father to split some people off into respective family groups.

Next, I need to help define the Thompson Finks family. My grandfather has no siblings that I know of, so we're going to attempt to get a first cousin of his, on the Finks side, to provide their DNA. Because it's a cousin it likely will not be as good a match as the Seelye Uncle, but the hope is that we can identify some of our Finks matches and help tie them up.

Last but not least, the Thompsons can come from a number of sources, most second cousins of my father. It may be possible to pull together at least one other direct descendant of Levi Thompson for testing as well as living Williamson relatives, but they will require a bit more work as they have not all been identified.

It's good to remember that when I'm looking at results, I can help define Seelye matches, but I can also use the same results to define those who are NOT Seelye matches.

As an example, if my father matches up with the Finks tester on chromosome 2 220000 to 320000 and he has another match in roughly the same spot on chromosome 2 (an overlapping segment), but they do not also match the Finks tester, they then are not a Finks/Thompson match and are on the side of the chromosome inherited from the Seelye Campbell family. Whether they match the Seelye tester or not.

We can use one test to define it's unknown opposite.

Then we'll do this "The Hard Way"

The Y DNA test results came in for the other male Thompson branch and we're not a match. What does that mean? Well, at the most basic Y test we're very dissimilar. My results are odd and as I've been told there are 10s of men like me. My distant cousin has one of the most popular patterns in Y DNA, at 12 he has a thousand plus of matches. We're both members of R1b, which is very popular in Europe but that is probably the end of our shared Y time together as it's likely we're separated by thousands of years.

Yes, but what does that mean. Well that is both simple and complex. Very simply, I was hoping to confirm our Y line with a distant relative match. In this case we share common ancestors Albert Thompson and Ida Williamson who were born around 1870 and 1874 respectively. Albert would be the person confirmed. So on the simple side, somewhere between Albert and both testers (me and my cousin) there is a break in the Y  line. A non paternal event. With only two of us tested it's not possible to show where that happened, but I do know, without at doubt that my father and I cannot genetically represent the Thompson family with scientific  certainty.

That's the simple part.

Now the complex part. Counting Albert's children, there are three generations of Thompsons where the break could occur. I don't count because I know from 23 and me that my dad is a match for me. So I can eliminate that as a possibility.

What I can't eliminate is that our DNA may not represent Albert Thompson or Ida Williamson at all. Since I've tried to make use of DNA in finding answers...well..there may not be the kind of answers I was looking for there.

At every generation then, you have to wonder if something went a bit off.

That, of course, is the reason I'm here at all. ABSOLUTELY something was a bit off! What I've found and documented here is a generational fifty two card pickup. These people were all over the place, disappearing, reappearing, moving to Arkansas...that's right Arkansas (It's Kansas for pirates...try it out). It's like trying to track leaves in the wind. So, yes, I was hoping for an easy move forward here, but in the typical fashion of my family, we'll do this "the hard way".

What have I got going for me? Well, my grandfather had no siblings..so not much on this end. I need to shore up the Michigan Thompsons by testing someone closer to home for me, like a first cousin or better an uncle. Basically, that would be verifying my grandfather. Since he has no siblings we couldn't go much further. If there was no match there, then we have a beer.

The Indiana Thompsons have a couple of male lines off of Francis, so we would set about matching them up to verify Francis. If they don't match each other then...beer.

Since we know my Y signature has no matching Thompsons, we could also just follow up on a Y test for the Indiana Thompsons, refining them to see that they maintain their Thompson matches among the thousands of others in the mix. Thereby identifying Levi Thompson's family..Goal!

Also, since I have not been able to identify likely Thompson matches at 23 and me, but I do have several that I believe to be really decent Williamson matches. I have to consider that the break in the Y line happened right there with Albert and his sons. In that case, the testing at 23 and me should move forward and I would think of the Indiana Thompsons, not just as my Thompson family, but also as my closest Williamson family and the most likely people to have large genetic overlaps for Williamson matches.

The hard way.

Over the past years, on this blog, I've tried to keep track of success and failure. It's a place to keep notes and ideas and might be useful to someone else on a journey. I've spent a lot of time wondering if we really do represent a Thompson line at all or if we've got a name of convenience or some other random thing.  My point is that I've had time to become accustomed to not being very Thompson-ish genetically.

When I found that I fairly closely matched with the Knowltons, I worked with them to try to identify possible Knowltons who could have provided my Y. I was asked what I would do if I found out I was a secret Knowlton. I thought about that, what it would mean, and I decided that I would be excited to learn about my  Knowlton roots, but then I would go right back to following the Thompsons and trying to figure them out.

It's because, life is both simple and complex. I could be a secret Knowlton, but you would have to dig to find those genetic influences in my life. The Thompsons are my family, whatever befell them also was passed to me in common language, tone, humor and culture. Without knowing it, we have things in common, inherited through the shared experiences of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and children that have an impact on our daily lives in ways that cannot be scientifically measured.

Trying to fill in these gaps and identify these families, is one way I honor them. I have to believe that I can get up and face the world because on some level, they did too. Whether they were good, bad or worse, I feel like they deserve to be known. It's a cruel mean world and what we've been given, through years of pain and suffering, is an ability to look at our certain doom, and laugh at how stupid it all is.

I told my son that the idiot British bar song tubthumping was our Thompson family song. Not just because of the references to rampant drinking, but because we get knocked down and we get up again. He got excited and said "it's because we're hard to knock down right dad!" and I said "No! Man, I get knocked down all the damn time. It's easy to knock me down. I get knocked over by the cat..I get UP again...you see. You'll get knocked down, but you get up again...that's the part that matters...you get up..never mind".

Anyway, we don't match. Am I shocked? No. The hard way is the Thompson way. Of course I don't match up with hardly anyone and he matches up with all of Europe. That's the Thompson way..if it wasn't uphill, both ways ...you know, what would I do?

I have to continue to be a Thompson because I don't know what else to be. I don't know how to be a Knowlton or an Elmer. I only know how to do things the hard way.

Henry Williamson Death Record

I had a small victory in getting the death record for 3rd Great Grandfather Henry Williamson. I could not get my hands on the death record for Rosa Blades unfortunately. The state of Indiana performed the search but came up with nothing.

For reference here is my path to Henry Williamson through Ida Williamson Thompson

me -> my dad -> Charles Thompson -> Ray Thompson -> Ida Williamson -> Henry Williamson

Here is the path to Rosa Blades through Albert Thompson husband of Ida Williamson:

me -> my dad -> Charles Thompson -> Ray Thompson -> Albert Thompson -> Rosa Blades.

I was specifically looking for documentation of the mother of Rosa Blades who I only know as Elizabeth. I was also looking for information on the two Susannas in Henry's life, his wife and his mother. Here is the death certificate I have from Henry:

It came along with a warning that the paper was of a bad quality and that the scan was the best they could do. I was able to find an example of one of these documents online and tease out what it says.

The lines that concern me the most are those devoted to family. Near the top you can see a Susanna Maynard. The label on that field is Name of Husband or Wife. So I have speculated that Henry's mother was a Susanna Maynard, but it now appears that his wife is Susanna Maynard.

His father is listed as William Williamson and it says he is from South Carolina. Which is odd because Henry, in 1880 says his father is from Kentucky and his mother is from Indiana. This fits with what I know about the Williamson family. Several of Haman (Hammond) Williamsons sons were born in and around Floyd Kentucky. I also have two overlapping autosomal genetic relatives at 23 and me with family history that goes back to Kentucky. One of them, has family members that live right near the Williamsons with Williamsons appearing in their official documents.

All of that evidence, circumstantial or not, leads me to believe that the death certificate is in error. Hammond Williamson does have a son William who is living with him in 1850 when Henry and his mother and siblings are listed by themselves, but Hammond's son William is 10 years younger than Henry's mother and of course still listed with Hammond in 1850 rather than with Henry and his mom.

Both of Henry's parents would have been long dead before either Ida Williamson or her sister Maud were born. It's possible they didn't know who was Henry's father or where he was born. Since Henry was bound out, there may have been very little tying him to the other Williamsons. The circumstances of the binding of the children is unknown to me and I've often wondered why they were bound out with so much family around. William Williamson does disappear before 1860, which is fitting because in the 1860 census Henry is already bound to the Beale family.

It could be that Henry's children did not know anything about his parents. It could be that I have the wrong family assigned to Henry Williamson and that he doesn't belong to the Floyd Kentucky Williamsons he lives right next to. What I do know is that several of Hammond's sons disappear around the same time, which would create a glut of Williamsons without stable family lives.

Henry's mother is listed as Not Known and Not Known. I know that her name is Susanna and that she was born in Indiana.

Susanna Maynard ties into the Maynard family and may explain why Henry's mom and brothers are buried along with the Maynards in Holson cemetery. Henry may have buried them in his wife's family cemetery. Henry is Susanna's second marriage. Her first is to Reuben Nelson who was the father of her first set of children. In one census the Nelson children are listed as Williamsons, but that is corrected in later census records.

The Maynards are fairly well documented, in online trees there is a daughter Susanna listed who is born at the right time but with no death date. I believe that Susanna is probably very hard to track because of her marriage to Reuben Nelson and then to Henry Williamson. She would be a relative of Moses Maynard and part of the fairly well documented Maynard family...which also runs into Kentucky for a generation or more.

I had hoped this information would shed more light on some of my genetic matches but so far, there are no silver bullets there. Only implied ties to Floyd Kentucky and very old matches to relatives of Alden Williamson (ancestor of Hammond) which could be false positives.

Still I am further. Although I still don't have a clear tie to the Swindell family pictured in the 1927 pic, I do have a tie to the Maynards that would explain some of the burials.