#52Ancestors

Over the past couple of years, there has been a genealogy blog movement 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks. I always wanted to join in, but I am no good at creativity and writing, so I never did.  This year, however, Amy Johnson Crow is providing writing prompts!  So, it’s now or never (in my mind). This first week the prompt is simply, “Start.”  She tells us that this can mean anything we want it to mean, so I take it as what got me started in genealogy in the first place. Here’s my “Start Story” if you haven’t heard it.

It was the year 2004, and my husband had just accepted a job transfer from the metropolis of Cincinnati to a small town called Port Huron, Michigan.  He was actually working across the river in Sarnia, Canada, but we decided to maintain a residence in the US.  He would commute across the border every day, and, still, it was his shortest commute ever! As I struggled to find employment in a small town we took temporary residence at a friend’s rental house out in the country.  We didn’t have access to high-speed internet there, so internet usage was at a minimal.  I found it best to be online between 2:00 and 5:00am when traffic was lowest and I could get faster speeds.  So one day after watching commercial after commercial on tv and remembering those “shaky leaf” ads I decided to pop the name of my great great grandpa Percy Archibald, into Ancestry.com. 

What I knew about my family up to this point is that we are southerners – Mom’s side was all from Pensacola and surrounding areas, Dad’s side was from Jacksonville and southern Georgia.  My grandpa Edward Archibald Rountree was still alive, and he had told me that his grandfather’s name was Percy and his mom and dad were Walter Scott Archibald and his wife Olivia. I typed this information into the Ancestry search engine, and one of the first queries to appear showed a census (1870) with Walter and Olivia married with their children Frank, Alfred, Alice, Percy, Elizabeth, and James living in Port Huron, Michigan.  Here was my great great grandfather living in the same small town I had just moved to 134 years later!  Using the information provided in this census report, I have since been able to trace the Archibalds back quite a ways.  It turns out Walter was a lumbering man and had moved his family from Nova Scotia to Port Huron in the 1860s.  They stayed here for a few years, then went to Alpena Michigan, followed by Essex, Ontario, and then down south where Percy stayed in Waycross, Georgia. The family continued on to Center Hill, Florida. Using local sources at our public library, I was able to locate his home address in Port Huron, and when my grandpa came to visit, I took him on a tour of the town and included a really odd stop – the back entrance to the community college bookstore.  He humored me and got out of the car to walk around.  After a few minutes, I told him that this was where his grandpa lived as a kid.  

Needless to say, this misplaced southern girl found she had some northern roots after all, and I was hooked.  I needed to know more about Percy and his family; and then, of course, I had to delve into the other families, too. It's been 14 years now, and I'm still loving it!  Learning about my past and my family's past, how they lived, why they did, what they did and the choices that they made all leading up to my great little guy Jeremy.  He wouldn't have been here if just one little thing didn't happen exactly as it did. 

The picture below is my grandpa, Edward Archibald Rountree; father, Michael Edward Rountree; me and my son, Jeremy Fain Mathieu.