Sanford and Son

Sanford and Son

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 4 Theme: Someone I'd Love to Meet

Joseph Guyot
Generation 7
My 2nd Great Grandfather

Rigsby - Kienlen - Dunsford - Guyot

I'm sure some of you remember the old tv show Sanford and Son starring Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson. According to Wikipedia, it ran from 1972-1977. I remember watching it, although I was born in 1965 so I was pretty young. For those of you who don't know, Fred Sanford and his son were  junk dealers. I don't remember his son's name, but I remember thinking he was handsome. That's about all I remember of the show.

1972 Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson Public Domain Image, Wikimedia Commons

So why am I reminiscing? A few years ago I hit a brick wall with my great grandmother, Josephine Dunsford, nee Guyot. I could not connect her to any of the Guyot families in St. Louis. Where did she come from?

Years ago, my dad mentioned that he had always been told that my sister's Godfather, Robert Appel, was a cousin but he didn't think it was true. Like many things I hear, I filed that away in "the vault", otherwise known as my brain.  When I started working a bit harder on my Guyot ancestry, I came across a newspaper clipping:

The McPherson Daily Republican, McPherson, Kansas  10 Dec 1892

My first thought? "I really want to be related to this guy!"
This was published in many different places in the U.S., especially in Kansas. Just a bit of interesting news, I suppose. But what made him miserly? Was he a greedy old guy like the Dickens character Ebenezer Scrooge? 

As it turns out, I am related to this Joseph Guyot. He is my 
2nd Great Grandfather, and I'd really love to meet him. 
The story is a bit convoluted but, thanks to an obituary and some DNA testing, it has been confirmed. I also got to remove something from "the vault". My sister's Godfather was really my dad's half cousin!

Joseph Guyot, my Great Great Grandfather, was a man of mystery. I may never know what he was really like, but I like to think he was a bit like Fred Sanford - a man who was just trying to get through life in his own way.

The Abraham Lincoln Connection

The Abraham Lincoln Connection

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 2 Theme: Challenge

James Elmore
Generation 9
My 4th Great Grandfather

Rigsby - Kienlen - Aden - Holland - Hartman - Estep - Elmore

Most of the time I really enjoy researching my family history. Sometimes, however, I encounter frustrating challenges. I have decided to write about one of these for this week's entry:  James Elmore.

James was born about 1821 in Kentucky, possibly in Green County. At some point, many people with the surnames Elmore and Strader moved from Green County, Kentucky to the New Salem area of Illinois. Many New Salem residents later relocated to nearby Petersburg in what is now Menard County, Illinois. For those of you who don't know this, New Salem was also home to Abraham Lincoln. The town has been partially reconstructed 
and is a now tourist site. 

( New Salem, Illinois, April 2018; Original photograph by Leslie D. Rigsby)

There were several families who intermarried quite a bit and used a lot of the same names. There is no easy way to sore them out. To make things even more challenging, EVERYONE with online trees assumes that Conrad/Coonrod Elmore, living with James in 1850, was his father. There is only a 15 year difference, so I am hesitant to believe this. Also, no one has a source for this information. I currently have three different Elmore family

 trees on Ancestry.com and I am attempting to sort them out. 

Hopefully I will be able to merge them at some point.

I am challenging myself to work on this in 2019, and I hope to finally be able to break through this brick wall.  

Last May I went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to find Civil War pension records for other ancestors. I was fortunate to also find Elmore records from the Black Hawk War. One of the documents I found for a man named Travice Elmore (one of several Travis/Travice Elmores) was signed by Abraham Lincoln. THE Abraham Lincoln!

(National Archives, Washington D.C. - now relocated from bounty land file so current location unknown.)

Like any good researcher, I knew that this should have been separated from the rest of the Bounty Land file and put in a special place. I notified the staff and I felt like I had discovered the tomb of King Tut! The staff were just as excited to find this as I was! I had already learned that my Elmore family had known and interacted with Lincoln. 

Now I want to find out how well they knew him. 

I do not know how I relate to this Travice Elmore. I have not identified the parents of James Elmore. The information I have is scant, but I will keep searching for more.

What follows is all I know of James Elmore, my 4th Great Grandfather.