You mean we’re related?

by Suzanne G. Beyer

The first email arrived November 9, 2011, shortly following the television show, Investigation Discovery “The Will,” where my Great Uncle Art Hadley’s estate was featured. The email was addressed to my husband, Don. It was from Greg Green, a friend and neighbor of 15 years. It read:

BTW, tell Sue I am a Gay. Seriously! My great great grandmother was Florence Mabel Gay.

I laughed wondering, “Hmm, how many more people will emerge from the woodwork wanting to claim some of my Great Uncle Art’s multi-million dollar estate!”

My co-written book, “The Inventor’s Fortune Up For Grabs” by Suzanne G. Beyer and John S. Pfarr, caught the producer’s eye at Investigation Discovery, nine months prior to the episode’s appearance. The production crew filmed and interviewed my cousins, our attorney and me to create the dramatic show about who would inherit my great uncle’s fortune.

Jokingly, Greg asked, “So, am I a part of the will?”

There came a flurry of notes to me throughout the day, as Greg proceeded to unravel our family heritage. One email read:

John Gay, who immigrated to America from England in 1630, is our shared grandfather. I descend from his first son, Samuel, and you, from his second son Hezekiah.

I could only trace my grandfather’s family back to my Great Great Grandfather, Joseph F. Gay, born 1818, who had ten children. However, Greg’s research was quickly unraveling a story which united us as --- Cousins!

No, Greg wouldn’t get any of Art Hadley’s fortune, since Art was on my grandmother’s side of the family, not my grandfather’s. There was nothing in this for Greg except that genealogy and history are Greg’s passion. Another email arrived.

Some more on John Gay, and a surprise! John Gay was a Puritan who came over from England between 1630 and 1633, and settled for a while in Watertown, Mass. Soon after, coastal towns were in fear of Indian attacks and he petitioned the King to establish a couple villages inland to act as buffers. In 1636, John Gay and 30 families paddled up the St. Charles River in dugout canoes to the Indian village of Tiot. There they established the town of Dedham. John Gay signed the original charter.

This email continued:

Dedham today is known for having the oldest wood structure in North America, a house built in 1637 by one of those original founders, Jonathan Fairbanks. It is almost certain, given the community structure at the time, that John Gay helped Jonathan Fairbanks build his famous house. They certainly paddled the St. Charles River together and established the town together.

Now, why would Greg or I care about this Jonathan Fairbanks guy!

Greg discovered a book on-line, “The Early Records of the Town of Dedham Massachusetts, 1636-1659.” The book revealed information about Dedham that rang a bell with Greg.

Greg knew that our mutual friend, Randy Fairbanks, traveled to Dedham on a family vacation to visit the oldest wood house built by his ancestor, Jonathan Fairbanks.

In 1637, the town was created through the collaboration of John Gay (then spelled Gaye) and Jonathan Fairbanks (then spelled as Fayerbanks, Farebanke, and Fearbanks.)

So, now, not only were Greg and I cousins, but Randy’s ancestor, Jonathan Fairbanks, worked with our GGGGGGGG Grandfather, John Gay. Greg’s next step was to search on line for records for The Gay Family.

Can I come over to your house soon? asked Greg in an email.

He reminded me of a kid on his birthday who wanted to dash to his friend’s house to show him his new toy.

I telephoned, “Hi COUSIN! Come on over!”

He arrived holding a batch of papers which we immediately spread over the kitchen counter.

I knew the Gay family history back to my Great Great Grandfather, Joseph F. Gay, who started a woolen mill in Tunbridge, Vermont. Following a flood that wiped out the mill, the family moved to Cavendish, Vermont, where Joseph’s sons created Gay Brothers Woolen Mill on the Black River. This served as the family business, with my grandfather, Leon S. Gay and his brother, Olin D. Gay running the mill from 1913 until its close in 1953.

As Greg and I looked through the papers strewn on the kitchen counter, we ventured back in time, excitedly scribbling a make-shift family tree whose roots traced to John Gay. Not only were we long-time friends and neighbors, but now also cousins ---one amazing twist of fate!

Suzanne G. Beyer co-authored the book, “The Inventor’s Fortune Up For Grabs” by Suzanne G. Beyer and John S. Pfarr. www.theinventorsfortune.com

Searching for the Golden Nut How to find your interesting ancestors for free

by Greg Green

Everyone has ancestors. And some are even worth knowing about. Each of us is the product of pieces of genetic code passed down from thousands of grandparents, and we have an innate curiosity to learn which of this material is worthy…or at least interesting. This is why ancestor hunting has become a multi-million dollar business in this country. (Many colonial towns on the east coast employ genealogists just to handle the flood of requests for ancestral information.) So whether you have been enlisted as the family historian, or you want to know whether you had a grandfather that fought in the Civil War, there is enough information today on the internet to allow you to crawl way out on a family tree branch and find the ancestors of interest, the Golden Nuts, hidden there.

There are two general reasons that people dig into their family’s past: to build a family tree, or to look for, or connect with, ancestors of some historical note. Personally, I find the former as a tool to accomplish the latter. Trying to build a complete tree starting with you and going into the past can be fun, but it can soon become impractical. Since you have all the very same ancestors as your parents, you have twice as many as either. Go back only seven generations and you have well over a hundred grandparents on your tree, not to mention thousands of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Mathematically, any one of this nation’s founding fathers could easily have a hundred thousand descendants (except George Washington, who has zero). Thus, any one branch of your family tree has more than enough nuts for one squirrel to find, so searching for the interesting ones, the Golden Nuts, is the more fruitful approach.

Golden Nut hunting begins with a clear objective. In the example presented by Suzanne, my object was to find that ancestor common to us both. A couple of years ago I successfully hunted the Green side of my family for grandfathers that fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars. The latter search led to lots of wonderful surprises showing the intense philosophical struggles my family fought with pioneering, religion, nation-founding, slavery, and civil war. (I managed to do this all for free).

Let’s begin the search!

Once you have your objectives, you need a few limbs of the family tree as starting points. Family trees can be found in family bibles, family websites, and from subscription online resources such as Ancestry.com, or free ones such as Familysearch.org. If your objective is to find when your ancestors came to America, then you might be interested in Ellisisland.org, various slave manifests now found online, or colonial town records. The latter I have found extremely useful.

About every hundred years or so colonial towns publish books on the history of their town (or county) that contain family histories of the more prominent citizens. Many of these books can be fully or partially read online by searching Google Books. It is no longer necessary to travel and then spend days searching town libraries and records for valuable information. If you know a few names of your ancestors, and know where they lived, then you have the pieces needed to conduct a full online search.

My search engine of choice is Google. Google is a powerful tool, especially when you know how it works. When you type in a name to search, it will give you a list of websites associated with that name ranked by how often that website has been visited before in some respect to your search. So, if you are looking for an obscure ancestor from the past, he/she may actually be on the net, but several pages back in your search results. The trick is to combine, combine, combine. In the Google search box match names with locations, years (especially birth, death, and marriage dates), events, and other persons. When you find a Golden Nut, use it as a search parameter in finding more.

One pitfall of note: Our ancestors did not have a copy of a 1,000 Baby Names, thus they tended to recycle the same given name over and over. There are so many Alexanders, Stevens, and James in the Green family tree that tracking one can be like tracking a goat across a sheep pasture. It is easy to get side-tracked. Remember that the history you are looking for predates the internet. Much of the information you are looking for that is actually on the net is going to be obscure. Finding this information is like unlocking a safe, you just have to come up with the right combination.

In our search for a common ancestor, both Suzanne and I had partial family trees that got us back to Gaysville in Vermont. From Gaysville records I learned that the Gays came there from Dedham, Massachusetts. A simple Google search of Gay Dedham Massachusetts revealed the presence and history of a founder named John Gay. Tracing forward from him (using Dedham history books) I was able to link up with both my and Suzanne’s side of the family and determine that John Gay, who came to America in 1630, was our common grandfather…our Golden Nut. Crawl out on a branch and find yours!

MORE INFORMATION

Ancestry.com

Familysearch.org

Ellisisland.org

Google Books

Greg Green is a Seattle-based, full-time wildlife ecologist and part-time journal editor, writer and photographer. Many of his writings and research have focused on historical ecology, the study of pre-European contact habitats based on historical reports and pioneer journals. From this discipline, Greg has honed historical record-searching skills that he has cross-applied to searching his own ancestry.