How Did I Get Here? My Amazing Genealogy Journey

If you would have asked me a few years ago if I thought I would ever be able to figure out who my paternal 3rd great grandfather was on my father's side of the family, I am pretty sure I would have answered No. Well, thanks to DNA and my great grandmother's marriage license I now know the names of my 2nd great grandparents and 3rd great grandparents. On my post  Great Grandma's Name Was Ella. After That It Gets Complicated , I featured my great grandmother Ellen "Ella" Kerr Smith Dixon's marriage license to her second husband William Dixon. On it, it revealed the names of her parents, Henry Kerr and Tina Murphy of Sampson County, NC. I wrote about how DNA testing confirmed that I was indeed researching the correct Kerr family in Sampson County in my post,  DNA Proves I've Got The Right Family! For this post, I'm going to review what I know so far about my 3rd great grandfather, Jacob Kerr. 1) It appears he was born around 1820 based on his ...

I've been taking a break from researching my Goodrich family branch the last two days to review a copy of a cemetery census that I obtained a few years ago. The census is for Mt. Olive Church Cemetery in Riverdale, NC. Riverdale, NC holds a special place in my heart because I know this where some of "my people" came from. My 3x great grandfather Mortimer Mitchell purchased property in this area in 1878. That same property remained in the family until it was sold in 1998. For more information about that property, check out my post  Mappy Monday: Now I Know Where To Go .  Well anyway, I felt the itch to check out this census again and I am glad I did. Now I have a better sense of who the people were who lived near my ancestors. These were neighbors and fellow church members. They were there to help my ancestors in their time of need. They laughed with them and they cried with them. The names on this list just mean more now. Knowing their stories will help me further fles...