Genealogy Reviews Online

The Hunt for Daniel Cone (1626-1706) - Separating Facts From What You Want to be Facts

As I was researching my 8th great grandfather Daniel Cone, I discovered all sorts of information in family trees, on genealogy websites, and other places on the Internet about his life that made me excited I was his descendant.  Finally, I thought, I have an ancestor who participated in some truly extraordinary events worthy of a book or movie.  Someone who fought for his country against overwhelming odds.  Someone who experienced adventure, then tragedy, and finally in the end rose up to become one of the founding fathers of a town in Connecticut. 

Here's what I learned during my Internet research coming in bits and pieces from a variety of sources:  Daniel Cone was born in Edinburgh Scotland around 1626 and was originally named Daniel Mackhoe (various spellings were McHoe, MacHoe and others).  By 1650 he was an officer in the Scottish Army and fought for Charles II against Oliver Cromwell, and his New Model Army, at the pivotal Battle of Dunbar in the fall of that year.  Cromwell won the engagement and sent 5000 of the captured Scots, to include Daniel, on a Bataan style death march south into England where only 3000 of them survived.  After a horrible imprisonment where hundreds more of these captured Scottish soldiers died of starvation and disease, Daniel was sold as an indentured servant and sent to the new world on a ship called "The John and Sara." Once he arrived, he was put to work in a Massachusetts iron mill, and after his indenture ended, he moved to Connecticut and helped establish the new town of Haddam.

These are truly wonderful stories.  The only problem is I've found no proof any of them are true.  With the exception of the new town he helped create, I found no documentation tying Daniel Cone to any of the events other researchers have linked him to.  Where the heck did all of these cool "facts" come from? 

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My Greatest Genealogical Mysteries - Revealed (not solved) by Family Tree DNA

It's been almost two years since I last wrote about Family Tree DNA and thought I'd check in and explore how I'm doing so far (You can see my first post about FTDNA here...just don't laugh because it was also my very first blog post).  It looks like FTDNA is now up to over 204000 records as of July 17, 2008.  My haplogroup was updated and is now E1b1b1b2 because the Y-chromosome tree changed.  FTDNA has also added some cool maps allowing you to pinpoint where potential DNA cousins come from...Here are my 25 marker Y-DNA and high resolution mtDNA maps.  I still have no matches I would call a verifiable genealogical possibility.

While my Y-DNA test has enlightened me somewhat on the origin of my paternal family, it has also puzzled me.  According to my haplogroup, my paternal family is of North African origin (Berber specifically).  This makes complete sense because of the Muslim expansion across the Mediterranean into Spain and Southern Italy.  Most of the matches I've received come from people with Spanish or Arabic sounding names completely in line with my haplogroup and my understanding of the history of the Mediterranean world.  The puzzling part is represented by the red markers as shown in the 25 marker Y-DNA map in the link above.

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My Greatest Genealogical Mysteries - How Did He Find All of Those Young Wives?

Young Wives of Domenico Aggazio (1844-?).  This is one of those situations where I will never know the true story, but it would be fun to know more.  My paternal great grandfather Domenico Aggazio apparently was the source of a small population boom in Southern Italy.  Between 1869 and 1903, Domenico had 3 wives (not at the same time) and, at last count, sired approximately 11 children.  There actually could be more because I haven't gone through all of the records yet.  Everything I know about Domenico comes from the civil records of San Giovanni in Fiore - a little town in Calabria.  I'm hoping Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org gets this town's records online and indexed so I can more accurately sort out Domenico's marital and paternity issues.

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My Greatest Genealogical Mysteries - Sentenced to Prison, but for What?

Crime of Franklin E. Zaring Sr.  My maternal grandfather apparently was not a very nice guy - at least when he was drinking.  When he was 21, got my grandmother pregnant, married her in 1920 when she was only 15, and my mother was born about 5 months later.  Now I know people got married at a young age in the early 20th century, but there's a big difference between a 21 year old man and a girl of 15.  My grandmother also discovered he was an abusive alcoholic.  In fact the only thing I remember her telling me about him was "he got really mean when he was drunk."  He abandoned my grandmother and her two small children in the early 1920s and disappeared (both in real life and in government documents) on and off throughout the years.  For a long time I had nothing on this man between his 1937 application for a social security number and his death in 1964, but I soon learned more about him than I really wanted to know (not really...I want to know everything, but what I did learned was a shocker.)

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My Greatest Genealogical Mysteries - Illegal Immigrant or Not?

I was in my idea booth recently (a hot steamy shower) trying to think of a topic to write about, and for some reason, I started thinking of various mysteries surrounding some of my ancestors.  These thoughts weren't necessarily about brick walls, but about events in my ancestor's lives where I just scratched my head and wonder what the heck happened.  Over the next few days I plan on writing about a few of these characters.  I'm not sure how many I will get to because we are leaving early Saturday morning for a week long vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and I don't know how much time I will get to work on this series.  I'm hoping to have some quiet time where I can just sit back, listen to the ocean waves, and write.  So here we go with the first installment...

Canadian Border crossing of Antonio Agazio.  My paternal grandfather was born in the town of San Giovanni in Fiore located in Calabria, Italy in 1884.  He boarded a ship in Naples sometime in 1900 and immigrated to Canada - there's a story behind this too, but I'll save it for another time.  A family story has him traveling with a slightly older cousin (my grandfather was about 13-14) and entering North America somewhere in Canada.  He then worked in the Canadian timber industry and eventually crossed the border into the United States.  I don't have any official documentation showing this as fact, but in his citizenship paperwork from the mid 1920s he says he arrived at the port of Quebec, traveled by train across Canada, and crossed into the Untied Stated by ferry at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan in July of 1901.  He goes on to say he traveled to Spokane, Washington and I assume his intent was to look for work.  Nine years later he shows up in the 1910 census as a railroad worker in Idaho's pan handle - a short 74 miles from Spokane.  This is all good information, and it's probably true, but the only documentation I have is what he wrote in the Citizenship documents about 25 years later.   

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