52 Ancestors 2026: Working for a Living – A Doctor in the House

 

For most of my family’s history, this prompt would have been an easy one to answer, as I have written often about farm life. But while researching the Curry family, I came across some interesting finds regarding Nicholas Ray, another brother-in-law of Robert Curry.

I have yet to find a marriage record for Nicholas Ray and Mary A. Curry, but the Ray family appears in the 1850 census in the household of George and Amanda Cunningham, Amanda being Robert’s sister. George was a blacksmith, but Nicholas gave his occupation as “Physician.”

He may have been only an in-law, but having a doctor in the family could not have hurt. Was he educated in Europe or trained at one of the growing number of American medical schools? So far, there is no evidence of either. I did locate him again in the 1860 census, still listed as a physician, but this time in a different household and without any family members.

What happened to the family afterward is less clear. Mary and two of the sons—Atella and Annibal (or perhaps Atilla and Hannibal, or maybe one was actually a daughter named Anabel?)—seem to disappear from the record. Another daughter, Louisa, shows up in Illinois, where she married Mathew Thompson, and later appears in Iowa. From Louisa’s death record, we learn that Nicholas was born in Kentucky and that Louisa's mother’s maiden surname was Curry, also born in Kentucky. The informant, Louisa’s daughter Anabel, did not know her grandmother Curry’s first name, suggesting that Mary may have died young and that Louisa had been separated from much of the Curry family.

This is where it gets interesting.

In A History of Northeast Missouri, we learn that Nicholas was among the Kentuckians who helped found the town of Madison in Monroe County and that he served as its first physician. Records show that he was also appointed postmaster in 1846.

Yet Nicholas seems to have encountered some trouble despite his apparent standing in the community. In September 1848, he was indicted by a grand jury for practicing medicine without a license and posted bond the following day. At his circuit court trial in April 1849, he requested a jury trial, but the state dropped the charges and assessed no court costs.

Exoneration.

The fact that he was still practicing medicine at least eleven years later suggests the episode did little damage to his reputation. Whether formally trained or largely self-taught, he provided medical care on the Missouri frontier when few others were available. Perhaps competitors hoped to push him aside, but he clearly had enough community support to prevail.

Aside from some land sales in the 1850s and his appearance in the 1860 census, Nicholas then seems to fade from the historical record. The last mention of his wife Mary is in an 1854 land transaction. With surviving records so incomplete, much remains unknown, but his work was important to that young settlement, and his part in the Kentucky-to-Missouri migration remains part of its history.

Book:

Williams, Walter, ed. A History of Northeast Missouri, The Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago, 1913

52 Ancestors 2026: Another Break in the Wall

 

I recently made major discoveries about the family of my 2nd-great-grandfather, Robert M. Curry. It was the story of a family from Mercer County, Kentucky, making the all-too-familiar westward move to Monroe County, Missouri. Piecing that family together using both old and new research tools was a satisfying project, and I was ready to dust off my hands, call it a day, and mark the week’s work complete.

As it turns out, though, there may be even more surprises waiting for this researcher.

I recently visited the local public library to check records available through Ancestry Library Edition. While reviewing Robert’s siblings, I found a marriage record for Susan Curry and Hiram Cunningham in Monroe County, Missouri, dated 6 November 1853. Susan had appeared in the 1850 census but then seemed to vanish from the record.

While searching for additional Cunningham information, I found another Curry-Cunningham connection: Elizabeth Curry and Andy Cunningham, married 16 December 1841. Elizabeth? That was not a name I had previously encountered. Could she have been the young girl marked only by a tick mark in the 1830 census and then missing from later records?

Unfortunately, Elizabeth and Andrew appear not to have had a long marriage, as Andrew remarried in 1847 after Elizabeth presumably died. However, they did have a son: George Washington Cunningham.

As a researcher, I wondered whether there was enough evidence to place Elizabeth within the Curry family. I believe there is. George’s 1886 marriage record names his mother as Elizabeth Curry. In the 1900 census, George reported that his mother was born in Kentucky. Various Cunningham families also appear within the Curry FAN network (more on that another time). Most importantly, the 1841 marriage record names Samuel Curry as the father of the bride. The fact that Elizabeth does not appear in Samuel’s later estate records could simply mean that she had already died. Taken together, these clues make her inclusion in the family quite plausible.

I was fortunate to find many more records for Hiram and Susan Cunningham, though they introduced a possible misidentification. I located Hiram in FamilySearch, but his wife was listed as Susan Sanders, and the couple was living in Mercer County, Kentucky. Dead end? Perhaps not.

The marriage record attached in the sources was the Monroe County, Missouri, marriage of Hiram Cunningham and Susan Curry—not Susan Sanders. In addition, the sources included death certificates for four of their children. Three listed the mother’s maiden name as Curry, while only one gave the name Sanders. It is entirely possible that the informant for that one certificate simply provided incorrect information. Secondary records often contain such errors.

We now have records for Hiram Cunningham in two counties—Mercer County, Kentucky, and Monroe County, Missouri—that were already connected by migration and family ties. Are there additional records linking Kentucky’s Hiram to Missouri? Yes. Several Monroe County land transactions in the late 1850s name Hiram and his wife Susan. There are also no competing records for another Hiram Cunningham in Missouri during that period.

It seems very possible that Hiram moved west to an area where his cousins had settled, married a woman whose family was connected to both Kentucky and Missouri, and later returned to the Bluegrass State. Susan died before her husband, but the widower later remarried—Artimesia Curry Gabhart Bennett, a cousin of the Missouri Currys.

With so many ties between the Curry and Cunningham families, it is very tempting to identify this Susan as Robert Curry’s sister. But one more promising source remains.

Hiram J. Cunningham served in the 9th Kentucky Cavalry in the Union Army during the Civil War, and both invalid and widow pension files exist for Hiram and Artimesia.

It looks like another trip to Washington, D.C., may be in order.

One last thing: Why spend so much time digging for records about a couple of 3rd-great-aunts when there are so many other avenues to pursue? First, all of these clues can help create a more complete picture of the Curry family and the close ties they shared with neighbors who may have migrated alongside them. Second, we often encounter brick walls when researching maternal lines, and perhaps someone else will make a breakthrough by building on these records.

52 Ancestors 2026: A Quiet Life – Getting Away

 

As a city kid, I was always surrounded by noise—people talking (even when they were indoors and the windows were open), cars passing by, and sirens of every kind. That was not the case out on the farms, especially in the days before steam- and diesel-powered equipment. Out there, the sounds were more likely the lowing of cows or the crowing of roosters. I imagine that when my ancestors first made their way to the prairies of southwestern Missouri, they heard mostly the wind and the songs of birds.

I am hard-pressed to identify which of my ancestors truly lived a “quiet” life. There were daily farm chores, large families, and children constantly underfoot. Perhaps some of them stepped outside at the end of a long day and looked up at the stars, but they also viewed those wide-open prairies as land to be claimed and cultivated. Earlier pioneers saw the great eastern forests as sources of lumber and wilderness to be tamed, clearing trees so they could establish farms. Relations with Indigenous peoples, at times cooperative through trade, could also turn hostile, and dangers from wildlife such as bears and cougars were never far away.

For me, respite from the noise of daily life came from parks and campgrounds in landscapes long since settled. I have written before about camping, but there were other opportunities as well. As the City of Buffalo grew into an industrial powerhouse, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were commissioned to design a park system. It included parkways linking the Niagara River to various parks, with the crown jewel being Delaware Park, complete with a lake, wooded paths, and open meadows. It was along those parkways and in the parks that we played football, and where I spent time “in nature,” watching birds and learning to identify wild plants and trees.

Later trips to places as distant and remote as Algonquin Provincial Park offered moments of real solitude. More recently, parks and trails have been as close as my own backyard, where I would head into the woods on a brisk winter day, often with a young child strapped into a backpack.

I do not know how my ancestors felt about “getting away,” but my descendants have certainly continued the tradition.

52 Ancestors 2026: Unexpected – An Appreciation of Amy’s Prodding and Prompts

 

Genealogical research is full of twists and turns. Sometimes it’s a shady character, a surprising connection to deep history, or an unexpected migration. There have been plenty of such examples in this blog, but what surprised me most this year was how much my blogging and writing led to new discoveries.

I originally thought the weekly prompts from Amy Johnson Crow would be useful for quick summaries, while I spent most of my time breaking through brick walls and adding more and more names to my tree. Instead, the prompts pushed me to explore new territory and dig deeper into ancestors and families I thought I already understood. They also encouraged me to examine the broader context—the times and places in which my ancestors lived. Three areas I explored in particular were early settlements, migration patterns, and a deeper look at farming life in Barton County.

When it came to early settlements, I knew I had ancestors in New England and New Netherland, but writing these posts led me to dig further into the details. “New England” turned out to encompass a variety of Puritan families. I learned more about the Salem Witch Trials, naming conventions, and discovered that I descend from some of the earliest immigrants to Plymouth Colony (the Mayflower) and Massachusetts Bay (Winthrop’s fleet). I also explored my Huguenot line through family histories and narratives about the early days of New Amsterdam, as well as my early Quaker ancestors in Pennsylvania.

Of course, my ancestors were all immigrants, but their migrations didn’t stop at the coast. Early generations moved into the interior of the Thirteen Colonies, and later generations pushed even farther west. I had learned about routes like the Wilderness Road and the Oregon Trail in school, but they became far more meaningful when I realized that my own ancestors had traveled them. One unexpected discovery was the central role that Kentucky—first as a territory and later as a commonwealth—played in so many of my family lines. Perhaps that connection explains why I was drawn to the Bluegrass State for my education, even before I knew of my Kentucky roots.

With all these migrations, many of these once-distant family lines eventually converged in Barton County, Missouri. While I had long collected census data for these families, the depth of information found in those records—especially the agricultural schedules, along with land, probate, and death records—revealed far more than I had expected. These sources provided not just names and dates, but insight into daily life and the interconnected nature of these families.

In the end, it is hard to point to just one unexpected discovery—there were many. What surprised me most was how much progress I made simply by writing. The process kept me engaged, encouraged deeper research, and led me to explore topics in ways I might not have otherwise.

Not a bad year at all.