Some Genealogical Ramblings

Monday Morning I posted a real letter to someone named Richard Carville Hands in Canby, Washington. It was spooky to write that name since it was my uncle's name and he has been gone for close to twenty years. If my genealogical research is correct, this Richard is my second cousin.

Here in Easton we make much of the fact that from 1803 until 2007 there was always at least one Oliver Ames living here. The persistence of family names is common in many families not just the rich ones so it can be a useful thing in genealogical research. Here's the story in my family.

The earliest member of the Hands family I've been able to track down was a Welsh butcher who was born in 1800 and died in 1849. He had a son named Abraham and others named William and George. None of those names persisted in the family. Abraham born in 1827 died in 1863 from a fall; his story was told in an earlier blog.

Abraham had Frederick born in 1857, Herbert and Sydney. Sydney stayed in England while Herbert and Frederick emigrated to Boston and became citizens of the USA. Frederick married a woman named Mary Coleman (interestingly, but not too surprisingly Frederick's sister was also named Mary). Mary Coleman was a very proud and probably forceful woman-she got what she wanted. Her mother's maiden name was Mary Carville. When the now Mary Hands gave birth to two sons they were given the first names Coleman and Carville.

Carville Hands had three sons James (first name from his wife's father), Herbert Carville Hands (the immigrant Herbert had died just before this man was born), and Richard Carville Hands. Herbert became my dad (my first name was my mother's great grandfather's).

Coleman Hands was three years older than Carville so his first child, another Frederick, was born in 1913. Six years later my dad arrived. Sometime in between Coleman moved to Chicago and the Massachusetts and Midwestern branches lost track of each other. Coleman's son Frederick became a focus of my research as mentioned in an earlier blog. We followed him through the 1930 census and through college at the University of Illinois where he became an engineer.

Ancestry.com lately made the 1940 available to researchers and that allowed me to track Frederick to Akron, Ohio where he worked for a "rubber company" probably the one with the blimp. In 1940 he and his wife had a son who they named Richard Carville Hands. So 140 years after the first Richard was born the family had two, but how did it happen? My uncle the other Richard C. was born in 1929. Did Carville keep in touch with Coleman and his son Frederick? Was the Midwestern Richard named after his Massachusetts cousin? Did Carville name his youngest son for the great-grandfather who had died fifty years before he was born? It could have been chance, but remember that the two oldest boys both had "inherited" names.

My grandfather died in 1953 predeceasing Coleman by 24 years, and my dad never mentioned the other branch of the family. After getting Richard's name from the 1940 census, it was relatively easy to trace him and his father to the Pacific Northwest. Getting the address to mail the letter? There's an app for that. So, with a little bit of luck, some family mysteries will be revealed. Or maybe I'll be inheriting a family feud between Coleman and Carville that goes back a hundred years. Thought that only happened on my mother's side of the family!