Dear Josephs People,
I’m back in the archives. Seven years of research has yielded some amazing finds, mountains of tidbits, and great stories about our family. My biggest challenge for a while has been putting it in readable form. So far I’ve made three false starts, organizing the material chronologically, then by region, and then by the ship they came in on. All three approaches died of unnecessary complication. Abandoned manuscripts litter my computer. Charts spill out of drawers. Books have colonized my office, multiplying in the night. (And I’m not even counting the e-books).
Now I’m taking a different tack and working one family at a time. This is a logical and time-tested way of presenting genealogical material, but: since I’m interested in the American story of our immigration, and since nearly all the Josephs ancestors came here 300-400 years ago, that’s a lot of families! About 8,000 people, in fact, counting back from John and Lyman’s generation. And that doesn’t include any of their interesting brothers and sisters and what they might have got up to.
To make the project manageable, I decided to make the starting point further back in time and break the narrative into parts. So I’m looking at the story of our fathers’ four grandparents: Lyman Colt Josephs, Alice Vernon Wilson, John Magoun Pearson, and Kate Stott. Each one has a completely different profile, a wildly different set of stories of how he or she came to be. And by focusing in this way, I’m starting to see patterns emerge.
Case 1 is Alice. (I don’t know why I started with her; she was just there.) I’ve identified ten key immigrant families that make up her background, and it turns out they come in four flavors: Fancy English Royalist (Virginia/Maryland); German Quaker (Philadelphia); Simple German Farmer (Monocacy); and Very Wealthy Merchant (Baltimore). Haven’t heard of Monocacy? Ha! Me neither. It was an important German settlement in the Monocacy Valley of western Maryland, near the present-day Camp David. They provided some of the best troops in the American Revolution.
Already I can see that this profile is vastly different from, say, the Pearson strain, where they wandered New England and every time they crossed a stream put up a new mill. Or the Hartford crowd, some of whom were such religious zealots they thought the Puritans didn’t go far enough.
Anyway, I’m having fun and just wanted you to know that the project is back on its feet.
— Kate yr. genealogist