Written by Karen Zach
I distinctly remember my first restart regarding this wonderful hobby of 50 years. Sometimes after working on a specific family for a long time, the brain is stuck and ya’ get stuck in a rut, so literally, ya’ need to go to the beginning of the game and “start all over again!”
I’d never really thought of a restart, but I’d been doing genealogy for about three years collecting about everything on all my lines (well, the ones I had at that time – that’s quadruple-folded and probably by more yet) gathering even something that might be important in the future.
My four-drawer high filing cabinet was full to the gills, stuffed with thousands of pieces of paper I had copied or items people had given me, letters I’d written, and such. These were for direct ancestors, one of their children or some long lost cousins I’d yet to discover.
Not thinking as much to restart as to weed unnecessary items out, I began with my Barker file. There were pages of copied WPA files, so I went through those, adding what I could to my family group sheets. This was back in the day about 40 years ago when no or few (none really good) computer programs existed, just FYI!
Looking back that may have been a mistake as I’m sure now I could place almost all of those people into my 325,000 plus individuals in my Legacy program (had Family Tree Maker for years but when the scare came they were folding, hubs immediately panicked and transferred everything to Legacy. Give me FTM any day but that too is another story). At that time, though, I needed to purge unnecessary files and that I did! Today, paper is somewhat easier to see and contemplate choices but the same thing your search takes five minutes to find in the piles of paper can be found on Ancestry (or family search or …) in a couple of seconds.
So, I finished up the Barkers and went on through recording, purging, regrouping, “Then I found my exciting find in the Thompson file!” This is hub’s family but we both claim each other’s family lines.
His Lyman Thompson’s wife was May Ann but we had no maiden name. I had been collecting information on anyone in Noble County with the last name Thompson or anyone from Columbia County NY or upper PA from where he hailed. Crazy, I know, but right there sitting in my Thompson file, in an article of Virkus’ Compendium of American Genealogy, it said that Lyman married his Thompson cousin. So, if she was a Thompson, who oh who could be her father?
Well, I had him sitting right in that file, as well. Burgess Thompson buried in a small cemetery near where Lyman and Mary Ann are buried. I knew she had a brother Lyman (yep and married Lyman as well) so that would make sense that it all went together.
Took me several years to find the wife and neither have I cracked further but I do know today that his wife was Annie Coppe whom he married in the Claverack Reformed Church in Columbia County NY October 20, 1806. He was 20; she 17.
Lyman Thompson’s side goes back to Francis Cooke who came over on the Mayflower and I suppose Burgess’ probably does too since Lyman “married his Thompson cousin, Mary Ann”, but I’ve yet to connect them – okay, so maybe I should just restart, huh?
