Found a home on Geni.com

I figured out that a great way to share Genealogy information and especially old photos is through Geni.com. Look me up at Geni and you will find what I've been doing lately. I've also found that locating new branches of my family tree is the easiest through Ancestry.com's search engines. My family tree there is actually the most complete.

I think I figured out the origin of my dad's name - Francis Smith Dane (in his case, the third). There were no Francis Smith's on our family tree, so I had originally thought that it was a combination of a longstanding Dane first name Francis with one of our ancestral last names, which was Smith. This is not in keeping with family naming tradition, though. For every Marcia Winter Anderson, there was always a Marcia Winter. (this tradition carried on to Marcia Winter Anderson Dane, my great aunt). So, there must have been a Francis Smith, and sure enough, there was. Francis Smith was a congressman from Maine in the 1830's and 1840's, and a very well-respected one. He would have been a contemporary of Joseph Dane, who was also in congress, though a bit earlier. Joseph was the great grandfather of Francis Smith Dane I. I don't have any anecdotal evidence to support this, but it seems highly plausible given the naming conventions in our family.

By the same token, I discovered that Peter Thacher Smith, who is on my Dane side, was in fact named after Reverend Peter Thacher, who is an ancestor on my paternal grandmother's side. Peter Thacher was influential in the training of Reverend Thomas Smith, Peter Thacher Smith's father. As Grandma Edie (Thacher) used to say "we're all cousins."

A little more progress

Haven't heard back from the guy with the Dane stuff yet.

Found out some additional information about the following family names on my tree: Sargent (turns out the painter Thomas Sargent was the brother of my ancestor), Goodwin (quite a bit of information here, actually), Waite (which I had as Waight), Jameson, Wendell.

The Wendell one was cool, because it appears that the same source material was used by Annie Edmands when she put together the written family tree book that I have. She clearly used information that is directly out of the diary of Reverend Thomas Smith (who is also a direct ancestor). But she missed or ignored the Wendell information. Elizabeth Wendell married Peter Thacher Smith, Thomas Smith's son. The Wendell information goes back four generations from Elizabeth's father to Evart Jansen Wendell who came from East Friesland to Albany, NY in about 1645.

By the way, have I mentioned that I LOVE Google Books! I am getting so much great stuff from these old Genealogy and History texts that they have scanned. Keep it up, Google. Coincidentally, my wife's cousin Maria is an employee at Google and has been doing some of the scanning.