52 Ancestors 2025: Wheels

 

This is less a story about wheels than about the lack of them.

The Cossart side of my family arrived in New Amsterdam by ship, mostly from the Netherlands. Seeking new farmland, successive generations moved westward during pre-colonial times—first to New Jersey, then to Pennsylvania, settling in the Conewago area east of Gettysburg. This mixed Huguenot/Dutch community was linked by family and religious ties. They stayed together during colonial times and remained close when the American Revolution began. Many were patriots; young men joined local militias, and my ancestor, Francis Cossart, was active in the Committees of Correspondence and served in the Pennsylvania legislature, helping to craft the state constitution.

With the Revolution came the opening of lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, though not with the full consent of the Indigenous peoples who had lived there for generations. Daniel Boone had explored beyond the Cumberland Gap and established the Wilderness Road into Kentucky’s Bluegrass region. He and his brother Squire encouraged settlers from the colonies to emigrate west. The “Low Dutch” colonists took two routes: one down the Ohio River to the area now centered around Louisville, and one through the Cumberland Gap via the Wilderness Road to the region near Fort Boonesborough. My ancestors chose the latter.

A group of families left the Conewago colony and spent time around Shepherdstown in Berkeley County (now West Virginia) before making their way to Fort Boonesborough, Kentucky around March 1780. Their journey wasn’t by wagon (the Wilderness Road was more trail than road) so they packed their goods onto horses and traveled through dense forest. The group settled in the White Oak Spring Station area in 1781, building cabins and establishing farms.

Among these settlers was Pieter Cossart and his family. He had married Maria Durie, whose extended family included several Durie (or Duree) households as well as the Demarests (Demaree, originally Des Marets) and Bantas. But these were dangerous times. The British supplied weapons to Native American tribes resisting the loss of their lands. One attack on White Oak Spring Station in March 1781 killed four of Maria’s siblings: Petrus, Angenitje, Hendrick, and Daniel. Petrus’s wife managed to escape with their three children. Pieter Cossart himself was killed the following summer while out picking blackberries.

This was an era when travel to the frontier wasn’t along roads—it was over rough trails or waterways, and only in well-settled areas did actual roads exist. These were precarious times, and as the frontier moved west, so did the violent struggles between European settlers and Native Americans. This part of American history cannot be forgotten. At the time, colonial society largely believed in the settlers’ superiority, though some European and American philosophers viewed Indigenous people as living in a kind of natural state, free from monarchy, which influenced Enlightenment thought.

Coming from a family of early European colonists, stories like these are woven throughout my genealogical record. They are complex and difficult but important to understand, as we reflect on the times and acknowledge the errors of the past.

Wilderness Road picture: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1797882

52 Ancestors 2025: At the Library

 

It seems that libraries have been part of my life since the days of Harold and the Purple Crayon, but for genealogists, they are truly indispensable.

My first serious genealogical research took place at a local FamilySearch (then Family History) Center in late 1994 or early 1995. Armed with a blank pedigree chart and a flyer handed to me at an Oktoberfest celebration, I opened the door—and they showed me how to begin. Soon, names started showing up in the International Genealogical Index and the Ancestral File. The skeleton of a family tree began to take shape.

I had names, but I wanted more. Living in the DC area gave me access to some of the nation’s best repositories: the National Archives and the Library of Congress. The latter is truly a font of information, and many mornings I trekked into the city to look up published family histories, making copies of the relevant pages.

Now, in a new century, libraries have expanded—if not physically, then virtually. My local library subscribes to several databases, some of which I can access from home, others only on-site. These services are also available at local FamilySearch Centers. But the granddaddy of them all is out west in Salt Lake City: the main FamilySearch Center, with rows of computers and plenty of helpful volunteers. On my visit last year, they introduced me to the new full-text search features on the FamilySearch website.

After 30 years of genealogical research, I can say libraries have proven their worth. In exploring vast stores of information, I’ve hit dead ends that wouldn’t budge—but I’ve also had those “Aha!” moments, when a computer search revealed a new lineage, later confirmed by a publication. To get the most out of a visit, here are a few tips:

• Plan ahead. Write down your questions or the topics you want to focus on. A notebook is a big help. Also, some libraries may have restrictions on what can be brought into their research rooms.
• Bring what you need. For me, that includes the notebook with my research plan and notes from earlier sessions.
• Pack your electronics. A laptop or iPad makes things easier. Keep genealogical data in a cloud service along with your local database.
• Take detailed notes. Record what worked and what didn’t. Jot down names of possible relatives, dates, and locations—sometimes those clues can be followed up at home.
• Know how to save your finds. You can often email information to yourself. Downloads may be limited to local access, so thumb drives can be hit or miss, and not very secure. Logging into your cloud storage usually solves the problem. Just remember to log out!
• Ask for help. Volunteers are usually available and eager to assist. They may not be professional genealogists, but they bring valuable experience and knowledge.

There’s a lot more to be said about online repositories, but nothing quite compares to the atmosphere of a library and the extra resources that come with an in-person visit.

52 Ancestors 2025: Institutions - Finding Relatives (or Not)

A few weeks ago, while researching my grandfather’s story, I started looking more closely into his “step-family.” The 1940 census showed that Stephen Reed was living in St. Joseph, Missouri, with his identified wife, Margaret, and her two daughters: Dulcie, who was 20 and listed as married, and Rose, age 15. To learn more about this new family, I began digging further.

I discovered that Dulcie later remarried, and Rose appeared in the 1950 census living in a residential nursing home. I also located her death certificate from 1973. Census records labeled her as “unable to work,” but there’s no clear explanation as to why. What we do know is that by 1950, she was no longer living with family. This prompted me to explore the types of institutions that existed at the time for adults with special needs, whether due to physical or mental impairments.

Historically, Americans who were infirm, physically disabled, or mentally challenged, young and old, were often kept out of sight, either housed by family or placed in almshouses. Some were cared for by religious or charitable institutions. A significant change came with the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, which provided assistance for older Americans. This spurred the development of more independent residential homes, and it appears that Rose was living in one of them.

The 1950 census lists her as a lodger in a nursing home operated by a widow named Aletha Wells, who lived there with her father, Wayne Urquhart (also widowed). The home was a large Victorian brick house, formerly the Henry Mayer House, likely typical of older residences that had fallen out of fashion and were subdivided into boarding arrangements. Although the federal government had started providing grants for hospital-affiliated nursing homes a few years earlier, homes like this remained common.

The Wells home had 13 lodgers. With the exception of Rose, who was just 25, the others were all aged 75 to 93. This type of institution resembled a rooming house more than a modern nursing facility. Residents lived in individual or shared rooms, used common bathrooms, and likely ate meals prepared by a hired housekeeper. Medical care would have come from local doctors making house calls. The round-the-clock nursing care we now associate with nursing homes typically didn’t exist outside of hospital-based institutions at that time.

The Wells nursing home faced challenges after 1950. Wayne Urquhart died in 1952 and Aletha in 1956. After her death, the home likely became nonviable, leaving the lodgers to find new arrangements. Some may have found other boarding houses, some may have transitioned to more formal care facilities, and some were probably taken in by family. That last option appears to have been Rose’s fate.

At some point after 1950, Rose returned to live with her mother, Margaret Branstuder Stephenson Blanton, and stepfather, Oscar Blanton, in St. Joseph. She died there in 1967. Margaret passed away in 1974, and her sister Dulcie in 2007. We still don’t know the nature of Rose’s condition, but clearly she needed support, whether institutional or familial, for much of her adult life.

One of my goals in exploring this branch of my grandfather’s extended family was to learn more about Rose and ensure that her story was not lost. Through census records, death certificates, and FamilySearch entries, I’ve been able to help restore her rightful place in the historical record.

52 Ancestors 2025: DNA – New Mysteries

My previous interactions with DNA were all in the lab—learning the structure of the bases, snipping strands, and isolating them from bacterial fermentations. But these “blueprints of life” have become a powerful tool for genealogists, too. So, my wife and I took the plunge: we ordered his-and-hers 23andMe kits, spit into the tubes, and sent them off and eagerly awaited the results.

Her results arrived first and weren’t especially surprising. With grandparents who emigrated from the region now known as Poland (a country that technically didn’t exist in its modern form in the early 1900s), it was no shock to find her DNA was nearly 100% Eastern European—mostly Polish, with a significant Lithuanian component. (Comment: “We paid $50 to find out I’m Polish?”)

Given how fluid the borders have been in that part of Europe, it makes sense that her genetic matches spilled outside modern Polish boundaries. But the results did solve one mystery. When her maternal grandfather arrived in the U.S., the ship’s manifest listed him as “Hebrew.” That was likely a clerical error, as there were no Ashkenazi Jewish markers in her DNA.

My results, however, answered a few questions, and raised a few more. As expected, my background came back as almost 100% Northwestern European, primarily British and Irish. Maybe that explains why I get misty-eyed when I hear bagpipes or old English folk songs, and why I find comfort in drab, rainy days.

But one unexpected result caught my attention. With so many known ancestors from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, it was puzzling that there were no genetic markers tied to those regions. Perhaps those lines were simply diluted over time. There were, however, markers associated with the Rhine River region—fitting, given the prominence of the Rhenish Palatinate in my genealogical research.

The real surprise? My German ancestry appears to be primarily Bavarian. I haven’t found any records of Bavarian immigrants in my tree (at least not yet) so it’s back to the records to explore some German lineages in greater depth. Perhaps I need to be on the lookout for Anglicized surnames that could provide clues.

I haven’t yet started comparing my results with those of various cousins, but that may be the next step. One thing’s for sure: this isn’t the end of the DNA story. Our children and grandchildren now carry this genetic legacy forward into the next generation, and maybe they’ll be the ones to unravel the remaining mysteries.

52 Ancestors 2025: Oldest Story

 

One of the things I’ve been learning as I dig deeper into my family history is that some ancestral lines trace their American origins back to the early 1600s in New England and New Netherland. Yet these stories were never passed down—those early immigration tales simply faded from family lore. Even many of the migration stories, including trans-Appalachian journeys, just trail off somewhere.

Another thing I’ve discovered is that some earlier genealogical research took fanciful turns. I can’t possibly have that much royal blood in my veins! Message boards often post warnings about early 20th-century genealogists-for-hire who told clients what they wanted to hear, latching onto prominent names here and there. One tree on FamilySearch even went all the way back to Adam and Eve—though my genetic tree places “Eden” firmly in Africa.

But one family line seems to have preserved its stories: my maternal grandmother’s family, the Fasts. They were immigrants from the Rheinpfalz (Palatinate) region in what is now Germany. After arriving in America, they settled in Frederick, Maryland, and later in southwestern Pennsylvania. I’ve written previously about one noteworthy member of the family, Christian Fast, but for the most part, they were ordinary farmers descended from modest villagers. Still, their story managed to survive through the generations.

Maybe the annual family reunions, held in two family centers in Ohio and Missouri, helped keep those stories alive. Or perhaps it was the work of a few dedicated family historians who wrote down what they knew and gathered records. In any case, these stories, dating back to the 1700s, remain part of our family’s living memory.

They also serve as a reminder of the pitfalls of incomplete stories or sloppy research. For years, it was assumed that the “Fast” surname originally was “Faust”—a name loaded with literary and cultural baggage (think: Doctor Faustus, a Faustian bargain). One family historian from the Ohio branch even changed his surname to “Faust” and published a well-known book found in many genealogical libraries: By Way of Rotterdam by Wirt G. Faust.

The story went that Nicklaus Faust (later anglicized to Fast) married Cadarine Danner and emigrated from Zweibrücken to the New World. But since no records could be found in Zweibrücken, despite repeated searches, another cousin, Robert Fast, found a more likely candidate while on a business trip to Germany. He located records for Nicklaus Fast of Göcklingen, who married Catharina Dörner of Ilbesheim. They sailed to America on a ship that also happened to carry a man named Nicklaus Faust—hence, the source of the confusion.

Of special note: one privately published Fast genealogy observed that John Jay Fast, the great-grandson of Nicklaus, married Hannah Robbins Day, described as “of New England stock.” Hannah’s Puritan New England roots open up another fascinating set of stories—fodder for a future set of blog posts.

52 Ancestors 2025: Choices—Tracing the Many Lives of Stephen Anthony Reed

 

This week’s exploration took me deeper into the life of my maternal grandfather, Stephen Anthony Reed—the only grandparent I ever met. While I remember him vaguely, his legacy within the family was more complicated. He and my grandmother, Ruby, divorced in the 1930s, reportedly due to his infidelity. Family lore says he was a car salesman who once gave a car to a girlfriend, even though the family had modest means.

The 1930 census places the Reed family in St. Joseph, Missouri, with Ruby, their daughter Ruth (my mother), and sons James, and twins John and Joseph. By 1940, Ruby and the children were living with her parents, Orin Taylor and Nellie Mae McWilliams Fast—a sure sign of the family fracture.

Since my first genealogy goal of the year was to trace the Reed line, I began with Stephen and also looked him up in the 1940 census. He was still in St. Joseph, now living with a new wife, Margaret L., and two stepdaughters: Detrie O. Wilcox and Rose M. Stephens. The names were unfamiliar. I assumed Margaret had been previously married to a man named Stephens and began searching records under various combinations, but came up empty-handed.

Then came some intriguing clues: a 1961 Wyoming marriage certificate listing Stephen’s wife as Verla, and mid-century city directories showing that he owned a roofing company in Nebraska, managed by Verla. The marriage certificate indicated both Stephen and Verla were previously married but widowed.

Still determined to find out more about Margaret, I returned to the 1940 census and reexamined it closely. One daughter, listed as Rose M. Stephens, was also recorded elsewhere as Rose M. Stephenson. The handwriting was difficult, and the transcription had been slightly off, but this provided a new clue. I eventually located Rose in the 1950 census—living in a convalescent home in St. Joseph and unable to work. Her 1967 death certificate confirmed she was the daughter of John Tipton Stephenson and Margaret Branstuder. She was also living in a nursing facility that was part of the local public health department.

This led to a breakthrough: Margaret’s older daughter, “Detrie,” was actually Delcie Oleta Stephenson, who had married Ralph Lewis Wilcox in 1936 in Nebraska. She later appears as Dulcie O. Stephenson Hord, confirmed by a FamilySearch tree and a Find-A-Grave entry.

Piecing this together: in 1930, Margaret Branstuder was married to John Stephenson (update: but she and John were not living together). Sometime between 1930 and 1935, Stephen Reed and Margaret left their respective families and began a life together. In the 1940 census, Margaret and Stephen were living with her daughters. They had resided in Plattsmouth, Nebraska in 1935. Rose, then 15, was not in school, and Delcie (Dulcie) was working as a waitress, though married, with no husband in the home.

By 1950, Stephen was in a new relationship, living in Norfolk, Nebraska with Verla Catherine Fultz Verbeck. Though listed as married, they didn’t officially wed until 1961, as confirmed by a Wyoming marriage certificate. Verla had been previously married to John Edward Verbeck, who passed away in 1955.

This research opens up new questions: What became of Margaret Branstuder after 1940? What were the circumstances of her and Stephen’s relationship—and her disappearance from the record? While Dulcie and Rose left some traceable paths, Margaret’s trail fades. As for Stephen, the records suggest a life of frequent moves, multiple relationships, and occupational shifts—choices that left its mark on those around him.  

There's more to uncover, and it’s a reminder that genealogical research is often less about static facts and more about untangling the complex stories behind the names. The search continues, with questions for both archives and family memory.

Addendum: I was able to pick up some of Margaret's trail. Here's an update.

52 Ancestors 2025: Language in My Family Tree

 

Although many of my ancestors came from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, other languages were also well represented in my genealogy. For this topic, I could write about my 5th-great-grandfather, Christian Fast, whose parents came from Germany. He grew up in Maryland and Pennsylvania, speaking both English and German. When he was captured and adopted by the Delaware Indians after a failed attack, he no doubt learned their language as well. His German skills played a crucial role when he later escaped captivity and returned home—only to find that his parents, seeing his native dress and war paint, struggled to believe he was truly their son.

But I’m especially interested in my Dutch and French-speaking ancestors who settled in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. In the 17th century, the Dutch Republic (Netherlands) became a refuge for persecuted Reformed Protestants from France and Spanish-controlled Belgium (Wallonia). Many of these refugees had French names like des Marets, Durie, DuBois, de Ruine, and Sohier, while others had Dutch names like Banta, Van Horne, Van Neste, Rutgers, Terhune, Helling, and Brickers.

One of the earliest immigrant couples in my lineage was Joris Jansen Rapelje and Catalina Trico, who were married in the Walloon Church in Amsterdam on January 21, 1624, and sailed for the New World just four days later on De Eendracht. Within 40 years, New Amsterdam had become a multicultural trading city, but Dutch remained the primary language.

That changed in 1664 when British warships arrived, and New Amsterdam became New York—with English as the official language. Over time, the French-speaking settlers intermarried with their Dutch neighbors, adapting to their surroundings. As they migrated westward, their communities became known as “Low Dutch” colonies, following familiar migration patterns from New York to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. By the 18th century, English had largely replaced their original languages. When the Cossart/Cossairt line settled in Ohio, they became less insular, intermarrying with English-speaking neighbors, fully integrating into the American melting pot.

And back in New York? The city remains a global destination for immigrants, continuing to enrich its culture with new languages, traditions, and foods—all in pursuit of the American Dream.

Word cloud generated using data estimates and historical research with assistance from ChatGPT.