Genealogy

Fair warning, I was a history major and I enjoy researching genealogies and I'm about to completely nerd out on you.

So something that's bothered me for a while is my family's complete lack of knowledge on where we came from, on both sides. I mean, I have the names of great-great grandparents and such, and I have a family reunion book from my mom's side that goes back about 6 generations, but it's not much. For one thing both sides of my family have been in Texas for at least 4 or so generations, and the 6 or so back that I have found are all still located in the Southern United States, namely Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Florida, and such.

And now, since I'm no longer a student of anything but life, my inner researcher/investigator has needed a project. This is always something that has intrigued me and bothered me, so at Christmas, I picked up as much information as I could from my parents and my sister, Melaina, who had done some research for a college project. It's all pretty great, but since I didn't have any sources listed (Melaina, where is your works cited page?!) I decided to start from scratch. Luckily, Melaina did her research well, and everything she had, back about 5 generations, was correct.

So after checking out all that stuff through google searches of obituaries, cemetaries, census data, and any marriage/birth/death records available, I was kinda stuck. I started trying to search the Dickenson name, and I found a bunch of them located in Wise County (we STILL have family living there...) but I couldn't find much. My great-great-grandpa is Thomas H. Dickenson, but I haven't found anything yet about his parents or where they came from. His wife, named Texanna, I don't believe was born in Texas, but moved here with her parents, William and Jane Molloy (Irish surname) who were both supposedly born in SC. I can't find any more information on them.

So I moved on to my mom's side. Since I had that family reunion book, I have a lot more information, even if it only goes back about 6 generations. However, I had a "breakthrough" a couple of days ago. I started researching my maternal grandmother's ancestors and found a veritable trove of information. I started searching my mother's mothers mother's family (great-grandma) and found so much. All of my sources come from the internet, namely free genealogy forums where people essentially list as much information as they know about their families or can find in family documents or Bibles.

The majority of the information I found was on both sides of my great-grandmother's paternal grandmother's family. Through all this, which I won't bore you with, I found two instances of the first family members in America.

As far back as I can tell, there was a John Ederiche born in Middlesex County, England around 1500. There are also wills filed in Middlesex County by people named Ederiche (or variations) all the way back to 1395. Through time the name changed from Ederiche to Etheridge to Ethridge. My greatX10-grandpa (great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandpa) was named Thomas Etheridge and was born in Dec of 1604 in Tottenham Parish, Middlesex County, England. He immigrated to Norfolk, Virginia around 1640 and received 200 acres of land (sorry the source link I have for this is broken and I can't find the page again). He likely brought with him his wife and two oldest sons, as you received 50 acres of land for every person you paid to get here. Thomas' fourth son is Marmaduke Etheridge, born in Norfolk around 1647. Marmaduke had John, who had Willis, who had William, who had another Marmaduke, who had another John, who had Margaret, who married and had Thomas Mark White, who had Ruth White, who married and had Mary Hunter, who married and had Melinda Gunnels, who married and had me! So, in a surprise of all surprises, my family is English.....

While it was fun to find all this out, I wanted to see if we came from anywhere other than England, and I found something! Remember Margaret from the list up there? Well her mother was Anna Maranda Davidson, whose mother was Elizabeth Kuykendall. Elizabeth's father was Jonathan Kuykendall, whose father was James Kuykendall, whose father was Matheus Van Kuykendall, whose father was Luur Jacobsen Van Kuykendaal, whose father was Jacob Luursen Van Kuykendaal, whose father was Luur Something-or-Other. This Luur was assumed to be born around 1590 in Wageningen, Netherlands! His two sons, including Jacob Luursen, arrived in America in 1646 as workers on a ship for the Dutch West India Company. Jacob Luursen adopted the toponym "Van Kuykendaal" and fathered nearly all the various Kuykendall/Kirkendoll/Coykendall's in America. Anyways, he settled around Fort Orange, New Netherlands, which is now Albany, NY. (http://freepages.folklore.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sturnbo/files/kuykendall/kuyg02.htm#14684)

So, dear siblings, you can now say you're at least 1/4096th Dutch, 1/4096th English, and 12th generation Americans! And Mom, if you're reading this, that would be 1/2048th Dutch and English, and 11th generation American.