He is my 8th cousin once removed through our shared ancestor John Pike.

Jerry Milo Johnson to President Bill Clinton

He was famously born on February 12, 1809 in a one-room log cabin on the Sinking Spring Farm in Hardin County, Kentucky.

He saw military service during the Black Hawk War as a captain in the Illinois Militia, where he served for about 3 months.

Although his Lincoln ancestors arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts in 1637, where many of my ancestors were also living, it looks like it was in New York and New Jersey that our families connected.

He is my 6th cousin 3 times removed through our shared ancestors Richard and Penelope Stout.

– daughter Mary Stout and James Browne
– daughter Sarah Browne and Richard Salter
– daughter Hannah Salter and husband Mordecai Lincoln
– son John Lincoln and Rebecca Flowers
– son Abraham Lincoln and Nancy Hook
– son Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks
– son is Abraham Lincoln who became President.

Jerry Milo Johnson to President Abraham Lincoln

It is a dynamic website that displays information and photos about people from a database (rather than the “old-fashioned” approach of static html files for every page).

I was reminded this weekend that there is a great report section, allowing easy creation of reports from the databases on a variety of topics.

I remembered that I have a report called “Military Service“, that lists all of the people in my database that have served in the military.

Unfortunately, I have done a poor job identifying and tracking those people who have served. (For example, my dad isn’t listed, and he retired from the Navy after more than 20 years of service).

First, I need to use a standard convention for tracking the “event” of military service (I have been using a mixture of about 7 different events).

Second, I need help finding out from my cousins and aunts who they can remember.

Third, I am going to use Fold3 and Ancestry.com to look up older relatives’ data.

If you know of anyone who served in our military (or in any government service), please let me know.

In school, in Boy Scouts, and in my spare time I learned about the history of Connecticut, and its founding. It still fascinates.

My best friend Noel’s mom was a State Rep, and she often took us to Hartford with her while she worked.

On the way into Hartford along Rt 2, we traveled over “The Founders Bridge“, which always impressed me with its link to history and grand-sounding name.

The Founders Bridge, Rt 2, Hartford, CT (wikipedia)

It turns out that 7 of the 163 men and women considered to be The Founders of Hartford are my direct ancestors.

• John Purchas (Purkas)
• Giles Smith
• Henry Wakeley (Walkley)
• Rev. Thomas Hooker
• William Kelsey
• Thomas Scott

Founders Monument in the Old Burial Ground (flickriver.com)

The 163 people are considered the founders, as they are listed in the Book of Distribution of Land as those who settled in Hartford before February 1640.

There is an interest group called The Society of the Descendants of the Founders of Hartford, which I had a brief thought to join, but the $300 dollar fee is steep, and the requirement of “is of good moral character and good reputation” (although I believe I qualify) is off-putting.

Only a few of the volumes we have, like this one for the 7th Infantry, provide detail about the equipment issued to soldiers. This example includes socks, shoes, shirts, pants, and a rubber blanket. Ms 101722

A letter of support from Amos Laurence to Abby Smith for refusing to pay her taxes to the town of Glastonbury. Ms 38267

They have been adding new content since 2007, and there is a LOT of material in there.

The site highlights new additions to their physical archives, and does a great job explaining why each document is so important to our history.

I am combing through it now to find a couple of easy matches to my ancestors, but I think it is going to take months to get through just reading the backlog.

Great resource.

The photo is in an old family photo album owned by Milo Napier Johnson, of Haynes and Harrisville.

The photo was taken by Fred Card.

Class photo @ Johnson Schoolhouse in Haynes, Alcona County, Michigan, 1910

When I was back in Harrisville in 2003, we toured all of the old farms and homestead out in Haynes Township with Bob Merkel, and visited the schoolhouse.

Johnson Schoolhouse, 2003

It has a new job, but looking pretty good for its age.

2 years ago I switched both work and home computers to Macs, which presented a problem in that Legacy does not offer a Macintosh version.

I solved this for a while by using Wine Bottler to create a Mac app using Wine and Legacy, which fakes a Windows virtual server on a Mac. This worked, but crudely. The copy/paste keys were intermittent, and the output gedcom file was rife with bad entities (mainly /par strings instead of actual line breaks).

Cleaning these gedcom files before importing them into my web site admin took an hour or more each time, and the quality of the cleanup was never good.

I realized I needed to do something because I had not updated my family tree online in over 9 months. Totally due to the software issues.

Over Thanksgiving I tested out 5 new Mac-based software packages to help me manage my data. I decided to purchase Family Tree Maker by ancestry.com, as it had decent ui, good integration with online data sites, and acceptable source treatment. The $70 price tag made me think twice, but I decided it was necessary.

The initial import went great. I spent about a week entering new and corrected data (catching up on the months of helpful emails from relatives). And then it crashed.

And would not restart.

Family Tree Maker would start, place an icon in the dock, switch the menu to the app, and then die before any window appeared. Dead.

I went through all of the help files online, including Troubleshooting issues with Family Tree Maker for Mac. I sent in 2 tickets with their tech support (who did nothing but refer me to the online help files). And spent 10s of hours trying and retrying their steps. No luck. I finally sat down with google and OS X Mountain Lion: The Missing Manual, and figured out how to completely delete the software and start over from scratch. The help files were incomplete, and required the removal of more cache and settings files in the OS to eradicate the software and restart clean.

Besides the plist files mentioned on the above article, I also removed all mentions of ancestry and family tree maker from the following folders:

Birch Evans Beyh

He was the junior senator from Indiana from 1999-2011. Before that he served as the governor of Indiana from 1988-1999, and Indiana Secretary of State from 1986-1988.

His father was also a senator.

Senator Birch Evans Bayh, III is my 11th cousin through our common ancestor Thomas Hull

Jerry Milo Johnson to Senator Birch Evans Bayh, III

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For anyone not aware of his career, he is an acclaimed actor, and lately an outspoken political activist and humanitarian.

Richard Gere

My personal favorite Gere movie has to be An Officer and a Gentleman, followed closely by Pretty Woman.

He is my 10th cousin once removed through our shared ancestor George Hull.

Jerry Milo Johnson to Richard Tiffany Gere

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Walter Palmer House
(image from walterpalmer.com)

Now it appears I was one of those families.

Walter Palmer was born about 1690 in Nottinghamshire, England.

On April 24, 1629 he sailed from Gravesend, Kent, England on the ship Four Sisters with his 5 children and his brother Abraham. They were part of Higginson Fleet, six ships that included The Mayflower (of Pilgrims fame) as well as The Talbot, The Lyons Whelp, The George Bonaventure and The Lyon.

“Now in this year 1629, a great company of people (The Higginson Fleet) of good rank, zeal, means and quality have made a great stock, and with six good ships in the months of April and May, they set sail from Thames for the Bay of the Massachusetts, otherwise called Charles River. The fleet consisted of, the George Bonaventure of twenty pieces of ordnance; the Talbot nineteen; the Lion’s Whelp eight; the Mayflower fourteen; the Four sisters fourteen and the Pilgrim four, with 350 men women and children, also 115 head of cattle, as horses, mares, cows and oxen, 41 goats, some conies (rabbits), with all provision for household and apparel, 6 pieces of great ordnance for a fort, with muskets, pikes, corselets, drums, colors, and with all provisions necessary for a plantation for the good of man.”
– (The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith – London 1630)

They landed at Salem, but did not stop there, instead heading south into the wilderness to take up land at Mishawam, where a smith named Thomas Walford was already living. The following year it would be organized into a township called Charlestown, named for the King.

Walter Palmer built the first dwelling house in Charlestown on two acres of land he was assigned in the newly settled township.

A few years later he moved on and helped settle Rehoboth, Massachusetts where he was held in such regard that he was elected the first representative to the General Court of Plymouth.

In 1652 he was persuaded by his long-time friend William Chesebrough to help settle and hold the area called Wequetequock (wickity-wock) east of the newly settled town of New London, Connecticut.

Walter bought 300 acres of land from Governor Haynes on the east side of Wequetequock Cove and with his son-in-law built his house looking across the cove to Chesebrough’s house on the west bank. Soon he owned more than 2300 acres of land, extended all the way to Pawcatuck. The area is still called Palmer’s Neck.

He is buried in the Wequetequock Cemetery, alongside fellow settlers Chesebrough and Thomas Stanton.

Walter Palmer Wolf Stone
(from findagrave.com)

It is said that he was 6’5″ or so, and weighed well over 250 pounds.

I also found there is a Walter Palmer Society, for his descendants. I am going to try to join.

He was my 11th great grandfather.

Jerry Milo Johnson to Walter Palmer

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