John Davis was a sea dog, one of the Elizabethan sailors who establish the English as Kings of the Sea. As an explorer he searched for the Northwest Passage and the strait between Greenland and Canada is named for him. He captained a small ship against the Spanish Armada. Forced back from an attempt to circle Cape Horn, he may have been the first European to sight the Falkland Islands. He was killed by pirates off the Malay Peninsula in 1605.
Having a sea dog in the family is almost as good as having a pirate and so many subscribers to Ancestry.com have done their best to link John Davis to a Massachusetts Davis family that arrived during the Great Migration (1620-1640). If you follow your “leaves” back along the Davis line you’ll eventually reach the sea dog. Something didn’t seem quite right to me so I did a little independent research and discovered, as far as I could tell, that Davis didn’t have the son needed to connect with the Puritan immigrants. Checking the member generated files at the LDS FamilySearch.org, it was clear that those pedigrees had been done without the wishful thinking at Ancestry and so the lack of a link to John Davis was easy to see. That’s a point for the Mormon site.
On the other hand both Ancestry and the New England Historic Genealogical Society were much more helpful in unraveling a more recent family mystery. My father believed that the immigrant ancestor for the Hands family was a man named Abraham Hands who arrived in 1865 from England, probably Wales. Before the advent of computer genealogy all I was able to do was connect Abraham to my great grandfather, his son Frederick but with little supporting data. Thanks to Ancestry.com I was able to access British records that showed Abraham’s birth, marriage, and four children, Sydney, Herbert, Frederick and Mary. What I haven’t been able to discover is what happened to Abraham after the kids were born. Did he come to America with his family? Did he die in England? At this point, the data seems to support the idea that he became a vampire sometime around 1860.
Since my dad was right about the family coming from Wales, I hoped he was also right about arriving in 1865. Ancestry.com has online, but unindexed, the crew and passenger lists for all ships coming into Boston harbor for most of the 19th century. Although these records are unindexed when you click on a ship you get the original document and, in a box below, someone’s typed best guess of the names in the old handwriting. I looked at the dozens of ships that entered Boston from January through August and could now write a treatise on shipping traffic at the end of the Civil War, but I couldn’t find my old Abe.
Holding off on more shipping records, I thought I’d try the sons. Yesterday, I tried out my new subscription to the NEHGS website and quickly discovered they had a proprietary searchable database of members of the Masons. Turns out both Herbert and Frederick were Masons, and I discovered that Herbert died in September, 1918. My dad was named for his recently deceased uncle in January, 1919. I also used the NEHGS site to uncover the marriage records for Herbert. There I discovered he married the sister of the girl who would marry his brother Frederick.
Returning to Ancestry.com I quickly uncovered the census records for Herbert in 1880, 1900, and 1910. Ancestry gives you a summary and then lets you go to the actual record. The Mormon site does not have the actual record available for 1910 and that as it turns out is crucial. By 1900 Herbert had become a doctor quite a change from the dry goods clerk of 1880. Even more remarkably his wife had become a doctor as well. Ancestry, but not the FamilySearch site, has a database of deceased Massachusetts doctors from 1804 to 1929. There I learned that Herbert had begun attending the brand new College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1880 and graduated in the first class in 1882. More research discovered that the college was a not quite fraudulent, but decidedly third rate medical school that went out of business around 1918. Fortunately for her Anna Hands was still going strong in 1930 so we don’t know if she graduated from the same school. More frustrating the census of 1910 lists Herbert as a GP, but Ancestry’s copy of the original record is too blur to determine what kind of “specialist” Anna had become. Worse, if you relied on the index entry at FamilySearch.org you would never learn that either was a doctor. I was hoping FamilySearch would have a better scan of the original to determine Anna’s specialty in an age when women doctors were still rare.
Summing up, Ancestry.com seems to be ahead in providing databases and online access to records while the subscriber generated family trees at FamilySearch.org seem to be more accurate. The tutorials for both beginners and advanced genealogists are good at both sites with an edge to FamilySearch.org.The New England Historic Genealogical Society subscription gives you several unique databases and has a strong collection of sources on early New England. If your research focuses here, the $80 membership dues is a good investment. Ancestry charges $159 a year for a membership that focuses on the US and $299 for a world wide membership. You can pay Ancestry quarterly. I’d recommend starting with the free FamilySearch.org (and check out Cyndi’s List for more free sites) to see how far you can get with your family tree. If you catch the research bug, then you can add a for pay site
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