52 Ancestors 2026: A Source I Want to Understand Better – All of Them?

 

With the internet age, genealogists have been able to accelerate their research as never before. There are so many websites and so many records available at the touch of a few keystrokes. Some resources remain behind paywalls, but many libraries—including FamilySearch Libraries—subscribe to library editions of these sites, making record gathering much more accessible. All of this access presents a new challenge: How can we make the best use of each resource, especially as they continue to add new features? This is the story of my own journey—what I've learned and what I still hope to learn.

When I started this endeavor 30 years ago, the tools were fewer and easier to master. I had a paternal pedigree chart that had been prepared for a probate case, a collection of Fast genealogy books, and family recollections that helped document several branches of my tree. I also had the advantage of living near a (then-called) Family History Center and Washington, D.C. Using Ancestral File, I discovered well-researched pedigrees that reached back to the earliest days of New Amsterdam and New England. From there, I found even more detail in published family histories housed at the Library of Congress. The National Archives yielded census records and Civil War pension files, although transcribing documents and making photocopies required considerable time and money. Even so, we were already moving beyond the days of traveling to county courthouses or writing to distant archives for copies of vital records.

And now? Online family trees of varying quality are everywhere, with Ancestry (Library Edition) and FamilySearch being my primary resources. But that's only the beginning. Census records are now searchable online. Countless genealogy books and county histories have been digitized and made available for download. FamilySearch has digitized millions of court, land, probate, and vital records and is using large language models to transcribe handwritten documents, making full-text searching possible—and leading to some remarkable discoveries. Artificial intelligence tools such as Gemini's NotebookLM can now help organize and analyze large collections of records and research notes.

How does one keep up with all this technology? FamilySearch produces excellent instructional videos, and numerous YouTube channels help researchers learn new techniques. Do I know how to use every tool? Certainly not. For example, I still find census searches easier in HeritageQuest (through my library subscription) than in FamilySearch, so that's one area I'd like to understand better. I also have library access to Fold3, but I sometimes struggle with its search interface. And I keep telling myself that I should learn to use the Periodical Source Index (PERSI) at the Allen County Public Library more effectively. I've watched the tutorials—I just haven't taken the time to give it a thorough test drive.

With the explosion of genealogy tools over the past three decades, it's difficult to imagine what the next 30 years will bring. Whatever comes next, there will always be people willing to teach the rest of us how to use these new resources. As for me, I think it's time to spend a little more effort mastering the tools already at my fingertips.

52 Ancestors 2026: Leisure Time – Making a Joyful Noise

 

So many of my ancestors came to colonial America in search of religious freedom. They were a godly bunch, imbued with the Protestant work ethic, so it can be difficult to imagine what kinds of leisure activities they enjoyed. But they did not work all the time. Sundays were reserved for worship and family, and although liturgical music could sometimes be controversial, it remained an important part of religious life. What hymns could be sung? Were musical instruments allowed? It is fascinating to trace how worship music evolved within the different denominations and across different periods of American history.

We do have a few clues. My Huguenot ancestors were undoubtedly familiar with the Genevan Psalter, and the singing of Psalm 137—translated into English as “By the Rivers of Babylon”—may have saved the life of my 8th-great-grandmother, Catherine Blanchan DuBois, when she was taken captive by Indigenous people in 1663. The Psalter was central to Reformed worship, as many Reformed Protestants rejected hymns that were not direct biblical texts. The fact that Catherine and the other Huguenot captives could recite the psalm from memory shows how deeply these songs were woven into their faith and daily lives.

My Puritan ancestors brought English psalters with them but soon produced their own American version, the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in British North America. 

Interestingly, few of its settings are still sung today, whereas several tunes from the Genevan Psalter—most notably the Old Hundredth (“Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow”)—remain familiar in churches around the world.

Eventually, however, cracks began to appear in the Congregational Church's commitment to exclusive psalm singing. The influence of Isaac Watts, Charles and John Wesley, and the growth of Methodism introduced hymns that drew on broader biblical themes rather than the Psalms alone. Their descendants embraced this richer hymnody, with New England spiritual songs emphasizing repentance, redemption, and personal faith. By European standards these colonial and early American hymns may have seemed primitive, but they reflected the folk traditions and homespun character of the New World.

Perhaps the most distinctly American expression of sacred music came from the Shakers. Some of my Banta relatives were among the founders of the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Their worship featured joyful, energetic singing and movement. “Simple Gifts,” indeed.

As my ancestors' religious traditions evolved, so did their music. Westward expansion and the growth of Baptist and Methodist churches brought new styles of worship, including the gospel hymns of the nineteenth century, such as “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

Music clearly mattered to my ancestors. They took their day of rest seriously, just as they took their work seriously, and I suspect they approached worship with the same dedication. As a member of my church's chancel choir, I have had the opportunity to sing music from many different traditions, and I have found great joy in making “a joyful noise to the Lord.” I like to think that my forebears would have understood exactly what that meant.

Photo: The Whole Booke of Psalms, Stephen Day (dated 1640) - Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25799917

52 Ancestors 2026: A Record I Read Differently Now – A Second Reed-ing

 

Sometimes you try to break through a brick wall only to become dismayed by what you find between the cracks. That is what has been happening with my maternal Reed brick wall: my 3rd-great-grandfather, John Reed, born in Virginia in 1793 and later transplanted to Muskingum County, Ohio. When I began this latest effort to break through the wall, I was excited to find records that mentioned both John Reed and a William Reed, with John serving as administrator of William's estate. A brother, perhaps? A record that would make me happy and proud? Time to dig.

Before I describe the search and its outcome, though, this is really two stories: one about my search for John Reed's lineage and another about a new research tool I'm using—Gemini's NotebookLM. I'll write more about NotebookLM as I become more familiar with it and, hopefully, as I get closer to breaking through this brick wall. For now, however, this progress report contains enough drama on its own.

To tackle this particular problem, I have been using FamilySearch's Full Text Search to gather court cases (with so many involving my John Reed, I should have been prepared for the shocking findings) along with their transcripts, saving images to both my FamilySearch Source Box and my own computer. As I collected names from what became the Reed family's ever-expanding FAN club—or perhaps "circle of litigants" would be more accurate—I began following those families to see how they were connected.

A brief primer on NotebookLM: a notebook is a collection of documents that Gemini analyzes together, allowing it to identify connections, summarize evidence, and suggest conclusions with citations back to the original sources. Into my notebook have gone pedigree chart reports for families of interest, court case transcripts, probate records, deeds, timelines, census data, research notes, FAN-club information, and more. At this point, the notebook contains about over a dozen records, including a document with transcripts from more than one hundred images. Sorting through all of that manually would have been a nightmare. With AI, it takes only a few seconds.

My first clue that I might be able to reconstruct John Reed's family came from discovering that he had administered the estate of William Reed, who lived in the neighboring county. William was born in 1811, so perhaps he was a younger brother? The good news was that I learned much more about their relationship. The bad news was that, as I read the records more carefully, John looked less and less like the family hero. William died in 1852, and when his children came of age, they believed that John had used their inheritance to benefit his own family. At the same time, William's probable pedigree suggested that he and John were not brothers after all.

But it gets worse.

John—and, after his death in 1872, his estate—became entangled in a web of lawsuits.

William's heirs sued John for gross mismanagement of the estate. That case was followed by a series of lawsuits and countersuits involving John, his sons, the administrator of his own estate, and several sons-in-law. Did I mention that two of John’s daughters married two Miller brothers? Or that after his first wife, Sarah Harrison, died, John married the Miller brothers' mother? Or that another son-in-law eventually sued John's estate, even though John had spent his final months living in that son's home?

At best, John was a poor estate administrator. At worst, he was a liar, a fraud, and a thief.

Here is the conclusion reached by Gemini after analyzing the records:

Summary of Findings

The dealings between John Reed and the William Reed estate demonstrate that while they were not brothers, they were deeply and hostiley intertwined. John used his authority as administrator to transfer William’s assets into his own extended family network (via Daniel Sims), leading to a judgment of "unfaithful administration" that was still being litigated and settled years after his death.

On the positive side, there has been plenty of material to work with. As ChatGPT told me, "Family harmony rarely generates records."

So, the records I had hoped would lead to a breakthrough instead revealed much more about John's character than his lineage. Even so, the research was far from wasted. I was able to clean up numerous records, make several merges, and reconnect parents with their children in FamilySearch. What first appeared to be a promising clue led instead to a collection of court cases that cast John in a decidedly unfavorable light—but they also taught me a great deal about an interconnected group of families.

The search continues. I still hope to identify John's parents, but even if I haven't solved that mystery yet, I've uncovered a fascinating—if somewhat sordid—family story along the way.

Note: The top picture is the old Muskingum County courthouse, which was replaced in 1870 by a new Courthouse, which may have been built to accommodate all of the cases against John Reed. Or so it seems.

Photos:

By Unknown author - Marker #7-60 Second Capital of Ohio. Remarkable Ohio - a project of the Ohio Historical Society and Ohio Channel (before 1874)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36544028

By Tristan Blatt - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51849568

52 Ancestors 2026: A Hard Choice – Should I Stay or Should I Go?

 

For my ancestors, crossing the Atlantic Ocean was not the end of their migrations. It did not take long before they left the East Coast for the trans-Appalachian frontier, enticed by promises of abundant land but often unaware of the dangers they faced as they encroached upon lands inhabited for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples. Tensions rose even higher during the American Revolution, when the British armed Native nations and encouraged attacks on frontier settlements.

The Conewago Colony of Pennsylvania, where my paternal Dutch/Huguenot ancestors lived, faced a difficult choice. Their families were growing, but farmland was not. Should they remain in a community increasingly surrounded by German and English settlers, dividing their farms into ever-smaller parcels until they became unsustainable, or should they move west? Some relocated to the Shepherdstown area of Berkeley County, Virginia (now in Jefferson County, West Virginia), but that only delayed the inevitable. Soon they heard of the abundant land in Kentucky and of the route south along the Great Wagon Road through the Shenandoah Valley and then west on the Wilderness Road. They had already migrated from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Would this simply be the next step in their journey?

Because the decision was so consequential, one of the colony's patriarchs—my 5th-great-grandfather, fifty-six-year-old Samuel Duree (or Durie)—volunteered to join a scouting expedition to Fort Boonesborough and the surrounding Kentucky country. The party departed Shepherdstown on March 1, 1779, and arrived safely on April 7.

One interesting coincidence is that, only days before Samuel's party reached the fort, another group led by Joseph Starns, which included my maternal 6th-great-grandfather Frederick Starn, was ambushed by Shawnee warriors while returning to Virginia. Only Joseph's son, Jacob Starns, escaped. But that's another story for another day.

Samuel selected land near White Oak Spring Station in Mercer County, Kentucky, then returned to the Conewago Colony with encouraging news: there was good land, and plenty of it. One migration party, led by Hendrick Banta, settled near the Falls of the Ohio (now Louisville region). Samuel's group arrived in March 1780 and established themselves near White Oak Station, close to Fort Boonesborough. Among them was my 4th-great-grandfather, Peter Cossart, who settled near Hart's (or White Oak) Spring, about a mile from the fort.

The promise of new land in Kentucky, however, came at a terrible cost for the Durie family. During an attack near Samuel's son Petrus's newly built cabin in Mason County, Petrus, his sister Angenitie, and two brothers-in-law were killed, while Petrus's wife escaped with their children. Later, another son, Hendrick, was killed during an attack on White Oak Station. Samuel's son-in-law, Peter Cossart, my ancestor and husband of Marie Durie, was killed while gathering blackberries in the summer of 1781.

Life on the Kentucky frontier was harsh. Although the end of the Revolution eventually brought peace with Native nations, it also brought increasing numbers of settlers, competing land claims, and the expansion of slavery into Kentucky. The once close-knit Dutch/Huguenot community gradually began to disperse. Many families remained in Kentucky, but others—including members of the Banta family—helped found the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill. Still others, including some Banta and Cossairt families, moved north around 1800 to Turtlecreek Township in Warren County, Ohio.

For the Conewago Colony in general—and for Samuel Durie's family in particular—the decision to stay or go was anything but easy. Yet those choices became part of the larger westward movement that shaped both American history and my own family's story. Earlier migrations from New Amsterdam to New Jersey and Pennsylvania had been relatively peaceful. The move to Kentucky, during the turmoil of the American Revolution, proved to be far more costly.

Photo: 

Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap by George Caleb Bingham, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

52 Ancestors 2026: The Ancestor Who Stays With Me – Susannah Shattuck and Her Puritan Life

 

My family timeline is populated by many unforgettable ancestors, but I keep returning to my 8th- or 9th-great-grandmother, Susannah Shattuck. There are so many facets of her life that illuminate both New England history and my own family story.

Susannah was the daughter of William Shattuck, who emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s or early 1640s (some of the dates remain uncertain). William established himself in Watertown, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and over time the Shattuck family became part of the circle later known as the Boston Brahmins. Many of William’s descendants were physicians affiliated with Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. One of the family’s greatest contributions to public health, however, came not from a physician but from his 3rd-great-grandson, Lemuel Shattuck. A businessman, politician, historian, and researcher, Lemuel’s interest in accurate records and vital statistics led him to help found both the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the American Statistical Association. He also helped reshape the 1850 U.S. Census and authored a landmark sanitary survey of Massachusetts that contributed to major public health reforms.

For me, though, it is the life of my direct ancestor Susannah that remains most compelling. I have written about her before while exploring the biblical and virtue names favored by Puritan families, but there is much more to her story.

Susannah was the oldest child of William and his wife, also named Susanna, and was born around 1643. By the time she married in 1661, at about eighteen years of age, she had helped raise eight younger siblings—experience that would serve her well throughout her life. She married Joseph Morse, who lived on an adjacent property and was about six years older. They wasted little time starting a family, with their first child, Susanna, arriving about nine months after their marriage.

Their family grew steadily, with six children born at intervals of two or three years. Two things stand out. First, all of the children survived into the eighteenth century. Second, they bore the biblical names typical of the period: Susanna, Hester, Joseph, Samuel, Mary, and Hannah.

Joseph was not as fortunate. He died in 1677 at the age of forty, leaving thirty-four-year-old Susannah with children ranging in age from fifteen to three.

In an era when mortality was a fact of life and life insurance did not exist, widows and widowers often relied on family, community, and remarriage. Susannah was no exception. In 1678, just a year after Joseph’s death, she married John Fay, a widower five years her junior. John’s first wife, Mary Brigham, had died two years earlier at the age of twenty-seven, leaving three surviving children.

The oldest Morse daughters, Susanna and Hester, undoubtedly helped care for their younger siblings and step-siblings. Over the next eight years, Susannah and John expanded their household with four more children: sons David and Gershom, followed by daughters Ruth and Deliverance. Three more biblical names—and one virtue name.

When Deliverance was born, Susannah was about forty-three years old. The name may have reflected the Puritans’ sense of deliverance to a land where they could freely practice their faith—or perhaps Susannah’s own deliverance from childbearing.

Sadly, the couple’s happiness was short-lived. In 1690, only four years after Deliverance’s birth, John died at the age of forty-two. Once again, Susannah found herself responsible for a large and complicated household. Her unmarried daughters Mary and Hannah Morse, along with her stepdaughter Mary Fay, likely helped raise their younger siblings and half-siblings. It was truly a blended family.

For five years Susannah managed on her own, supported by family and community. Then, in 1695, she found companionship once more. Thomas Brigham, brother of John Fay’s first wife, had recently lost his own wife, Mary Rice, who died in May 1695 after bearing ten children, seven of whom survived. Thomas’s widowhood was brief; just two months later he married Susannah.

Once again, Susannah embraced the challenge of helping raise a large household of children. By this time, her youngest daughters, Ruth and Deliverance Fay, were old enough to assist. Susannah and Thomas had no children together, and eventually they experienced what might be called their empty-nest years.

Susannah died in 1717 at approximately seventy-four years of age. Thomas followed eight months later at age seventy-six. Together they had witnessed the transformation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from a struggling settlement into an established society.

Readers may notice that I describe Susannah as either my 8th- or 9th-great-grandmother. That uncertainty is not due to missing records but rather to pedigree convergence. The lines of two of her children eventually merged. A daughter from her first marriage, Hester Morse, is my 8th-great-grandmother, while a son from her second marriage, David Fay, is my 7th-great-grandfather.

Nor was this the family’s only convergence. The final blended household produced another connection when Mary Fay, Susannah’s stepdaughter, married her first cousin Jonathan Brigham. Meanwhile, Susannah’s daughter Deliverance Fay married her second cousin Jonathan Shattuck.

It appears that all of Susannah’s children survived into the eighteenth century. Given the relatively close spacing of the births, could these have been her only children? Did the family enjoy remarkable luck, exceptional health, or enough economic security to avoid some of the hardships faced by their neighbors? We cannot know for certain.

What I do know is that Susannah’s story stays with me. Learning about life helps transform the Puritans from historical caricatures—often portrayed as stern and joyless—into real people who loved, married, grieved, blended families, and persevered through life's many challenges. She almost sounds like one of us.

Picture: 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Puritan, 1899, Art Institute of Chicago

52 Ancestors 2026: Possibilities – So Many Research Choices!

 

My ancestors faced many choices throughout their lives: whether to stay put or migrate (most chose to migrate, obviously), whom to marry (usually someone from within their community), whether young men should go to war, and what occupation to pursue (anything other than “farmer” would have been a major departure). But this prompt makes me think less about their choices and more about the many possibilities and decisions I face in my own genealogical research.

When reading family narratives or watching shows like Finding Your Roots, I am often struck by the excitement people feel when they discover ancestors three or four generations back. My challenge is somewhat different. Many of my American lines extend 300 to 400 years into the past. In FamilySearch, I examined my calculated heritage eight generations back—roughly to the time of the founding of the United States—and found that about 82% of my ancestors were already living in what became the United States. As a result, I face an embarrassment of riches. (Math note: twelve generations back gives us 2¹², or 4,096 individuals—and all the people in between!)

The challenge, then, is deciding how to approach my research and which lines to pursue. A few years ago, I developed a plan: start with my paternal side, work through each great-grandparent line, confirm known lineages, focus on my brick walls, and then move “rightward” across my tree (or fan chart, depending on one's preference). That approach worked reasonably well until I encountered my first major brick wall. After spending too much time banging my head against it, I set my research aside for a while.

The decision to tackle brick walls one at a time proved to be a significant time sink. Last year, however, encouraged by the Generations Café site, I started my blog. The need to write stories forced me to look beyond my brick walls and search for interesting narratives elsewhere in my tree. In the process, I began making progress on several lines that had long resisted my research attempts.

By digging deeper, I was able to see migration patterns more clearly and learn more about my ancestors' families and communities. I explored records that I had previously overlooked, such as the agricultural census schedules, and gained a richer understanding of the times in which my ancestors lived.

New tools also opened up new possibilities. FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search allowed me to uncover records that had effectively been hidden for decades, providing new insights into people, places, and events. Artificial intelligence tools became an important part of my research and writing process as well. I used ChatGPT to help gather, organize, and evaluate disparate pieces of information, generating hypotheses and possible conclusions that I could then assess using my own experience and judgment. Trust, but verify.

With so much progress made in 2025, I expected 2026 to be a year focused primarily on confirmation and tree maintenance, and a blogging hiatus. Some of that has happened. I have added substantial documentation to FamilySearch and corrected numerous entries. Yet my locally maintained tree remains largely unchanged.

For that change of plans, I blame a flood of newly available land and probate records and the resulting expansion of several family lines. Much of my effort has gone into improving my portion of the collaborative FamilySearch tree, adding notes, sources, and explanations for future researchers. As a result, local tree cleanup and pension-file indexing are still waiting for me.

But sometimes opportunities are simply too tempting to ignore. My planned writing hiatus has yet to materialize. Instead, I continue to feel the urge to document new discoveries, liberally interpret each week’s prompts, and keep the momentum going.

52 Ancestors 2026: A Place that Matters – Bermuda

 

So many places and so little time! One unusual place has appeared in a branch of my family tree that I have only recently begun researching more deeply. That place is Bermuda. Why a tropical paradise and vacation destination extraordinaire? Well, it wasn’t by design.

Last year, I wrote that I was interested in researching the Cloud family line, and in the process I discovered a remarkable origin story that began in the earliest Quaker settlements of Pennsylvania. Unsurprisingly, these Quakers were dissenters who came to America to escape the reach of the British Crown and the Church of England. But they were not the only troublemakers in my family tree.

My 11th-great-grandfather, Stephen Hopkins, began life as an adventurer. Drawn to the Jamestown colony by the promise of land after a period of indentured service and the opportunity for a new beginning, he left his young wife and children in England and set sail for Virginia in 1609. He traveled aboard the Sea Venture, which carried the incoming governor and much-needed supplies for the struggling colony.

By circumstances that seem almost Shakespearean—think The Tempest—the ship was blown off course by a hurricane and wrecked on the shoals of Bermuda. The survivors faced a difficult choice: remain on the island and establish a new settlement, or salvage materials from the wreck and continue on to Jamestown.

Although the governor insisted that the voyage continue, Stephen argued that because they were no longer in Virginia, the terms of their indenture no longer applied. He became involved in a rebellion against the governor, was sentenced to death, and then successfully pleaded for mercy. In the end, he and the other survivors completed the journey to Jamestown.

Stephen remained in Virginia for several years before deciding he had had enough. He returned to England, where he found that his wife had died in 1613. Left to raise their children, he remarried around 1617/18 and started a second family.

One reason Jamestown may have lost its appeal was the colony’s leadership. Many of its English gentlemen were more interested in extracting wealth than in building a sustainable community. Early hopes of finding gold and silver came to nothing, and the colony struggled with starvation and poor planning. Wealth would eventually come through tobacco cultivation, while labor demands would tragically be met through the expansion of African slavery. Stephen, however, witnessed only the colony’s hardships and shortcomings.

He could have remained in England and lived a quieter life, but adventure called again. This time he joined a group of religious separatists who had fled to the Netherlands and planned to establish a colony farther north. These settlers were, of course, the Pilgrims.

Their ship, the Mayflower, also sailed off course, eventually landing at Cape Cod rather than their intended destination. Stephen’s previous colonial experience proved invaluable. He participated in the exploration parties that searched for a suitable settlement location, eventually helping to select Plymouth.

Before landing, the settlers drafted the Mayflower Compact, establishing a more egalitarian system of self-government in which each male settler had a voice. The Compact differed significantly from the structure of the Virginia colony and reflected the values of a community determined to govern itself. Combined with the Pilgrims’ strong work ethic and religious convictions, it helped the colony survive its difficult early years—even if Massachusetts was no Bermuda.

We cannot know how much Stephen’s experiences in Bermuda and Jamestown influenced the creation of the Compact, but he was one of its signers. His prior experience also helped foster good relations and trade with Indigenous peoples, relationships that were crucial to Plymouth’s survival.

Stephen prospered in Plymouth as a tavern keeper, though he occasionally found himself in trouble because his establishment attracted rowdy patrons and because he was somewhat more tolerant of such behavior than religious authorities preferred.

So Bermuda appears to have been the place where Stephen’s independent streak first became evident. Yet I cannot help but think that his brand of troublemaking—questioning authority, challenging established hierarchies, and insisting on fair treatment—was part of a larger spirit that contributed to America’s longstanding discomfort with rigid class systems and helped lay the groundwork for the rebellion that would come more than a century after his death in 1644.

Pictures: 

"Stephen Hopkins, his wife and daughters, Damaris and Constance, with their son Oceanus" By Edward P. McLaughlin - https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/70795q878, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=173082245

Mayflower Compact: Transcription by William Bradford (1590-1657) - Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=847329