I love wills. They tell so much about a family.

Here's a probate file on my paternal fifth GGrandfather, Jacob Babbitt. His part in this probate book begins near the bottom of the left-hand side and continues to the second page. Click once on the image to enlarge, and click once again to return to this page:

Source Citation  Will Records 1803-1931; Will Index 1804-1895; Author: Warren County (Ohio). Probate Court; Probate Place: Warren, Ohio.  Ancestry.com. Ohio, Wills and Probate Records, 1786-1998 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.

Jacob was born March 12, 1769 in Mendham, Morris County, New Jersey when it was British America. His death date is August 5, 1823 in Warren County, Ohio where he was living with other family members who had joined a group of Shakers.

Yes, Shakers. The first I have found in my family tree.  Go ahead, google it to learn of this religion. I don't believe Shakers exist any more.

Jacob and (most likely) his wife Alice Sarah Craft Babbitt had joined the Shakers along with eight of their ten children in the year 1817. I say maybe because I've no proof Alice was with Jacob when he left their Pennsylvania home to join an Ohio Shakers group. I don't know Alice's death date either. Just that she was born about 1765 in Pennsylvania. Do you?

Are you to related to this Babbitt family? Well, thankfully one of their children didn't become a Shaker or we wouldn't be reading this. Why? The Shakers did not believe in having children. 

                          http://www.midpointedigitalarchives.org/digital/collection/p16488coll13/id/594/

What a lifestyle change! Can't help but wonder what the Ohio Shakers thought upon meeting Jacob and Alice Babbitt and learning they had ten children. Then again, they may have also come from large families. 

If you know more of the Babbitt family's Shaker experience, please forward to me.

Glad you stopped by!

          100 years ago young American males were required to register with their local draft boards. President Wilson was sending "Yanks" to Europe to aid the British and French in their fight against the Germans. A middle-aged Harry Houdini answered the call, and appeared at a New York City office. 

          Check out his middle name:

          Source:  The New York Public Library's tweet two hours ago, woot! 

Did you catch this story trending today from Science magazine? Researchers have been studying millions of family trees in online databases. (You didn't think your ancestry was private, did you?) 

Scientists culled data from a whopping 5.3 million family trees "spanning 13 million individuals who lived between 1650 and 2000." Two fav highlights of mine:

• From 1650 to the start of the 19th century, the average married couple in Europe and North America were fourth cousins.
  
• According to the study's results, genetics contributes just 16 percent of what is necessary to see old age, as opposed to the 25 percent found in other studies.

Ancestry updated their 1940 U.S. Federal Census database this week. With what, I don't know. They occasionally update census records but don't detail what's new. However I will still enjoy running my family's names through to see new additions--if any. Send me your relatives' names/locations too and I'll share their census pages (privately). 

My Wiser family once lived in Liberty County, Texas. The Liberty Vindicator newspaper has been digitized and made available online. 

This took only a couple of mugs of coffee to locate in the search engine. Plenty of cousins named: Weiser, Wiser, Barrow, Abshier, Harmon, Faulk, Reavis, Bond and Carr. 

I'm always SO happy to find photos of ancestors. Please meet Reese Morgan. Born 25 October 1808 in Uniontown, Fayette County, Pennsylvania to William M. Morgan and Nancy (Rees) Morgan--both from Pennsylvania, his family moved to Illinois in the late 1820s. They were among the first settlers of La Salle County. 

Reese served in the Black Hawk War in 1831, enlisting as a private under J. Adams' Company, 5th Regiment, Whiteside Brigade. He enrolled at Pekin, (then Livingston County), Illinois. One family historian writes that he was "in Stillman's defeat and remained in the service until hostilities ceased," being discharged in 1832. 

An account of Stillman's Run: https://fromthehistoryroom.wordpress.com/2015/07/25/eyewitness-accounts-of-stillmans-defeat/

He married Rebecca Reeder and operated a sawmill business in La Salle County, Illinois. He served as county treasurer and assessor from 1848 to 1852. Rebecca and Reese had nine children.

In 1852 he and 16 year old son Philander  "crossed the plains to California with ox teams and spent three years prospecting and mining, returning to Illinois in 1855." Oh, what stories they might have told! Young Philander also returned and later fought for the Union Army, 76th Regiment, Illinois Infantry. One record I found indicates he served as a "teamster" in the Civil War against the rebels.

Reese continued to farm, and died in Strawn, Illinois in 1878. FYI to family: Our Aunt Helen was Reese's great-grand niece. She descended through her mom's McCormick line.

Source:  I'm grateful to "harveyg2" who  originally shared Reese's photo to Ancestry in 2014. 

          I love a good naturalization record. Sworn to and signed by the petitioner herself. How often have YOU seen your second-grandparents' signatures? Or their handwritten "X."  Declarations Of Intent help fill in the blanks on a family's dates of birth. Often but not always, full legal names are shown. A researcher's dream! Names of ports of entry and departure from countries. Passenger ships identified that can easily be googled to locate photos of now-destroyed vessels. 

          And birth places. Just when you think your ancestors hailed from one country, you discover no, it was from another place. A surprise ethnicity! A DNA analysis might SUGGEST where your ancestor lived, but the all- important paper trail, baby. That's what tells you WHO came from WHERE and WHEN. I'm still reeling from a 1759 document bearing my maternal 6xG-Grandfather's name with his birthplace as Stockholm--not in Germany.

          Yesterday my sisters and I wondered if homes once lived in by long-ago family friends and neighbors had suffered property loss due to California's wretched fires. Old city directories on Ancestry provided their addresses to then plug into maps on news media websites now showing evacuated areas. Curious about some of these old friends--peers of my parents with whom we've lost contact, I continued to run their names through census and vital records. 

          I was surprised to learn of one friend's husband who has a burial record indicating service in three wars. Three! WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. 

          Another friend's family was once forcibly moved to a concentration camp in Wyoming in 1942. The Heart Mountain War Relocation Center was a "barbed-wire-surrounded enclave with unpartitioned toilets, cots for beds, and a budget of 45 cents daily per capita for food rations." This same 16 year old American citizen, born in California, spent a year in a hell-hole dump of a camp with 10,000+ others--many who were also citizens. Their homes and businesses forfeited, they left home with only a few suitcases. Their new camp was poorly insulated, offering little warmth against a Wyoming winter. While it may have interrupted our friend's education, she went on to pursue a medical degree and became a well-respected physician. I wish I could hug her, and apologize for the racism shown to her family by our government. 

          Another family friend's grandfather, I learned, immigrated from the Netherlands to the U.S. in 1888. It is his record which prompted this post for those unfamiliar with naturalizations. See Mr. M. De Groot's 1917 Declaration of Intention and Petition for Naturalization from the US District Court, Southern District of California, County of Los Angeles. 

          Difficult to read? Here's a short extraction, beginning with the Declaration of Intention:

Martin DeGroot, age 45, painter by occupation, 142 lbs, brown hair, brown eyes, was born in Nieve Nildrop, Netherlands on 9 November 1869. I now reside at 1648 West 55th St., Los Angeles, CA. I emigrated to USA from Liverpool, England on a White Star Line ship. My last foreign residence was Amsterdam, Holland.

I renounce forever all allegiance to Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands. I arrived at the port of New York on the 10th day of March 1888. I am not an anarchist or polygamist. 

/s/  (his signature)

Declaration of Intention No. 1980 filed this 11 Jan 1917.

          And, The Petition for Naturalization:

I declared my intention to become a citizen on 1 Dec 1914 in Los Angeles. I am married to Anna DeGroot, born 22 Dec 1874 in Hargs (sp?) Sweden, and our three children are:

     Lillian, born 3 Apr 1894, Grand Rapids, Michigan;

     Mabel, 16 Nov 1895, Sparta,  "; and

     Ethel, 10 Dec 1897, Grand Rapids, " .

I have resided continuously in USA since 20 Mar 1888, and in the State of California since 15 Sep 1906.

Source:  U.S., Naturalization Records, 1840-1957 via National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Washington, D.C.; Naturalization Records of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division (Los Angeles), 1887-1940; Microfilm Roll: 64; Microfilm Serial: M152

          Ancestry.com has this reminder for those searching for their family's petitions:

                 However, from the time the first naturalization act was passed in 1790 until 1906, 

                 there were no uniform standards. As a consequence, before September 1906, various 

                 federal, state, county, and local courts generated a wide variety of citizenship records that 

                 are stored in sundry courts, archives, warehouses, libraries, and private collections. After 

                1906 the vast majority of naturalizations took place in federal courts.

          After 1906, Petitions required signed Oaths of Allegiance. In this instance, Mr. De Groot swore he was not an anarchist nor a practicing polygamist. Now. Isn't THAT interesting. To my knowledge none of my anarchist friends have plural marriages. While these alleged travesties of 1917 may not have been practiced in common, either one or the other ideology might easily tempt an unwitting citizen. Best to stop 'em at the border, is the familiar cry. Perhaps one or two in your family slipped through? [insert silly face emoji here] Send me your immigrant ancestors' names, and let's see.

     “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

--  William Faulkner, Requiem For A Nun

I'm guessing this was taken on a Thanksgiving Day in the mid-1990s because I recognize Helen's green shirt from when she once visited us on the prairie about that same time. I think they are at Nancy and Larry's home.