We're all cousins Part 3

As I wrote recently, my grandmother used to say about her family and my grandfather's family that "we're all cousins." Both of their families were establishment New England families who had known each other and inter-married. I've used a picture of Edie and her Thacher cousins for this post. Edie didn't know the exact relationships, but I have been able to establish at least three crossovers between Edie's family tree and Duke's. They are both descended from Priscilla Mullins and John Alden, John Sherman and Martha Palmer and Edward Winship and Elizabeth Parke. There may be other connections as well.

When I started looking into my wife's family, I didn't have any idea that we would also be cousins. But I figured out that, in fact, we are. First I found a crossover between my family tree and hers in the Middle Ages. Quickly thereafter, I determined that her family was one of those early establishment New England families as well and that we're both descended from Mayflower passengers Richard Warren and Elizabeth Walker

Though it seemed similarly unlikely, I have always wondered if I would find a crossover between my Mom's family and my Dad's. I knew a lot about my Dad's family tree, but my Mom's has been a work in progress for the past several years, and as far as I knew they were Midwestern farmers or New York Dutch (to coin a term). I had a breakthrough recently, though, as I found the Foote family, so I've been tracking that family back through its Massachusetts history. Not surprisingly, the further I went back, the closer to a crossover I came, until finally this week I discovered Elizabeth Wheeler (Breed) along the Foote line. The name Wheeler was familiar to me immediately, so I continued up her family tree to her parents, Thomas Wheeler and Rebecca Sayre. I already had them in my family tree file as one of my Grandma Edie's ancestors through their son Timothy Wheeler. Eureka!

I counted back the generations and Timothy and Rebecca were eleven generations back from my Dad and thirteen generations back from my Mom. So that would make my parents tenth cousins, twice removed! I don't know what the mathematical likelihood of these connections is, but that's a subject for another post. Not as unlikely as we often think.

Finding the Coonradts

I recently went back to link to my research into the Coonradt family and I realized that I wasn't satisfied with what I had originally written. To remedy that, I'm going to do a recap.

So, it started way back when I first asked my Grandpa Conrad about his family tree. He told me that the family name hadn't always been Conrad. It used to be "Koonradt" he said and that it had been changed to Conrad when the family came west to Iowa. Over the years I had looked for this name online but never found anything to connect to my family.

At some point in 2009 I got onto one of my regular genealogy kicks and I was looking at new sites. I believe I was newly on Geni.com and I started searching on variants of Koonradt. When I did, this Coonradt page came up at a different site, WeRelate.org. Naturally, I followed the links at the bottom which promised more detail on the Coonradt family tree. Did they ever deliver! A treasure trove of Coonradt family names. Naturally, I read through all the names on each page to see if any looked familiar. I paid particular attention whenever a Harry or Henry came up since I knew my great great grandfather had been Harry Conrad.

Under the Willhelm Coonradt family, I found the following grouping:
F.3. Daniel Coonradt, b.1830 Grafton N.Y., CIVIL WAR.
G.1. Edgar Coonradt, Moved to Iowa where he raised a large family. (History incomplete)
G.2. Harry Coonradt, (No history)
G.3. Clarence Coonradt, Harkimer, N.Y.

It was so lucky that someone knew enough about this family to know that the boy named Edgar had gone to Iowa. More on Edgar later. But the other details all seemed like a good start - I knew my great great grandfather Harry Conrad had to have been born around 1860 and it seemed likely that his father was born in 1830.

So I went off to Ancestry.com. Quickly, I want to tout Ancestry.com and what they've done with the US Census records. There you can very quickly find the relevant record using their search function and then look at the actual handwritten census document. Extraordinary! So try it with Daniel Coonradt, born 1830 and you'll find the same thing I did: in the 1860 federal census, this family appears in Luzerne, Pennsylvania:
Daniel H Coonradt, age 30
Cordalia Coonradt, 26
Clarence Coonradt, 5
Edna Coonradt, 3
Hendrick Coonradt, 1

This family certainly looks pretty close, other than the location. Always look at these census records carefully, though. On the second page, it lists the individual's place of birth. For Daniel Coonradt: New York. Exactly the same age, same place of birth and with at least one son with the same name. I wasn't concerned about Edna being missing because I'd noticed that the Coonradt page included very few female names. And Hendrick/Harry - a nickname? Seemed pretty likely.

Two other records also come up in the search results on Ancestry: two civil war records, one for Daniel Coonradt from New York, and one for Daniel H Coonradt of Pennsylvania.

So the next things to check on was to follow this family in the census records and see where they turn up next. Daniel doesn't appear in any of the other census records after 1860. What about Cordalia? So type "Cordalia Coonradt" into the search engine at Ancestry.com for my next revelation. You'll find if you look through all the search results a pension record for Daniel H Coonradt where the dependent is listed as Cordelia Coonradt. Underneath her name is the name "Bailey, C.S." with the notation "Gdn" - I took this to mean "guardian". Below in the detail, it lists two dates of application: February 26, 1866 on the line "widow" and December 18, 1867 on the line "minor". Sadly, now we know why Daniel doesn't appear in the 1870 census - he died in the war.

But what about this Hendrick Coonradt? I started on Ancestry.com with Hendrick Coonradt and then Harry Coonradt but quickly became frustrated. I couldn't find either one matching the family I'd found above. However, if you search on "Harry Coonradt born around 1860" the records for Harry Conrad out in Iowa start popping up pretty quickly, matching up with the information my grandfather had given me - lived in Waterloo, Iowa, wife named Grace, etc. That's my Harry Conrad, all right.

At some point I left Ancestry and entered "Hendrick Coonradt" into Google. You have to use all the resources at your disposal, after all. Lo and behold, the following page came up in the search results: http://www.pagenweb.org/~luzerne/orphan1.htm It's a listing of children at a Civil War soldier's orphanage. You find not only Hendrick Coonradt, born in 1859, but also Edgar C. Coonradt, born in 1861. Blammo!! Can you hear all the pieces falling into place? Hendrick and his younger brother Edgar were "orphans" - young children whose mother had just lost her husband in the war.

I made two other connections through Geni.com. The first was Dave Young, who is a Coonradt descendant on another line. After I told him some of what I'd discovered, Dave said that all of this sounded right, and that I should compare notes with another descendant named Dick Conrad. Dick is the great grandson of Charles E Conrad. As it turned out, Hendrick Coonradt wasn't the only member of the family to change names upon coming west. His brother also made the change, from Edgar Charles Coonradt to Charles Edgar Conrad. Not only did he give me this information, Dick also had a letter from Harry to brother Charles in 1914. I have transcribed that letter here. The letter doesn't contain any revelations, but it does tie the family together nicely, including Cordelia's remarriage to Charles Rosengrant and the two half-brothers that Hendrick and Edgar grew up with. Following these folks through the subsequent census records was a project that occupied me for several days.

Dick also sent me the portrait of Daniel Coonradt in his Civil War uniform that you see above.

The People I Met in My Genealogy Research, Part 3

My grandfather’s story is probably all too common in genealogy research. Grandpa was born Leighton Clay Conrad, but he always told us that the name Conrad was an Americanization of what he understood to be a German name, Koonradt. That’s the spelling I remember him telling me, anyway. The way I remember it, he told us that the Koonradts had come to the Midwest through Pennsylvania, which might suggest that they were Pennsylvania Dutch. In any case, Grandpa didn’t know how far back the name had changed. When he helped me fill out my first family tree, he could remember back only two generations, through his father Leo and grandfather Harry. I still hope to one day research the Conrads further back from Harry, but I know it will be difficult since they lived in the rural Midwest, whereas I live in California. Some day… (see below for update!)

Grandpa’s other side is even more interesting and even more clouded with mystery. Apparently, Grandpa’s mother Daisy Murray had kept a secret throughout her entire life – she was half Indian. Grandpa’s twin brother Harlan discovered this fact only after Daisy had died. From there, the story gets muddled and garbled by distance and poor communication. As you might remember me mentioning earlier, Grandpa didn’t get along too well with his twin brother, at least by the time I came along. And whatever information Harlan had only came to me secondhand through Grandpa, so there isn’t much there and I’m not real sure of any of it.

Grandpa was sure of one thing, his Indian ancestry had been from what he called the Iroquois tribe. According to Grandpa, his grandmother, Louisa, whose maiden name I do not know (see update below), was a full Indian and her ancestors had come across North America through Canada past the Great Lakes and then down into Iowa. Which of the five tribes of the Iroquois did we come from? I don’t know. Where did they live? What were their Indian names? Don’t know, don’t know. My mom suspects that her Uncle Harlan probably had quite a bit more information, but he’s long since died and she hasn’t had any contact with his family since she was a kid. Such is genealogy research. I hope to find Harlan’s progeny one day and compare notes.

Unlike his mother, Grandpa was extremely proud of his Indian heritage once he was aware of it. He often sent part of his small Social Security income to Indian charities back in the Midwest. I have often wondered if his remembrance of the information on his Indian heritage was a colorful exaggeration, as many of his stories seemed to be over the years. But I’ve got little else to go on for his family tree, so I hope his stories are at least partly true. I know that finding a trace of Louisa will be a difficult task. It’s probably a job for more of a professional historian, but if I get the chance I’ll do the best I can.

If nothing else, I’m glad to be aware of my own Indian heritage, as small a percentage of my makeup as it may be. Now I find that my own daughter has what some call the mark of the Indians – two blue spots on her bottom (also known as “Mongolian Spots”). Of course, these spots originate on her mother’s side but I still look at them with pride, our shared Indian background.

Update, as of 2009: I have made some great headway on this part of the family tree. I found the Koonradts that Grandpa had told me about, but it was actually spelled "Coonradt". The change came when young father Daniel Coonradt was killed in the Civil War, leaving behind three sons. Two of those sons came west to Iowa, taking on different names along the way - Hendrick Coonradt (pictured above) became Harry Conrad and Edgar Coonradt became Charles Edgar Conrad. The pictures I have online of Daniel Coonradt and Harry Conrad both come from Charles' descendant Dick Conrad, another great friend that I've met over the internet through genealogy. In fact, I haven't updated my Rootsweb family tree with this information, only my Ancestry one. I'll try to do that before too long to make sure everyone has access to this information.

I also have new information on the Murray side of the family, where I have filled in one additional generation of Murrays and a couple more generations of Louisa's family, who turned out to be named Thoroman (or Thoroughman). I have yet to locate the Indian background however, nor have I made contact with any of Harlan's descendants. I am fairly certain that the Indian background is not on the Thoroman side since this family is well documented. It would be more consistent for it to be the Murrays, who came to America from the Montreal area. Intriguingly Montreal is part of Iroquois country, and Joseph Murray, Daisy's grandfather is listed at times as fur trader. Though my cousin Scott Conrad and I have both researched these families, so far neither of us has found convincing evidence of the Indian story. Something for later, I hope.

Ancestry.com if you have an account there: family tree starting place

If that doesn't work for you, start at Rootsweb here: Starting place #2. For more detail, click on "Display pedigree in text format".