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English Royalty?

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Henry I of England

I recently found out that one or more of our ancestors (for Anderson descendants) are possibly descended from royalty. I did not believe it at first because I’d already seen a lot of ridiculous claims in the familysearch.org tree. But looking into it more, it does get believable. There are several books about royal ancestors of American immigrants and several of our ancestors are in those books. Today we are going to learn about Christopher Branch.

Christoper Branch has a very well documented history. Why is that? Well, Christopher Branch is our ancestor and also the third great grandfather of President Thomas Jefferson, and Presidents’ ancestries are generally well researched. We have common ancestors with other presidents too: Harry Truman, Barack Obama, Lyndon Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and Vice President Dick Cheney. Others are claimed but good evidence is not there.

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Virginia: The Melting Pot

I am constantly amazed at the diversity of mother’s ancestors. Arriving in America from as early as the early 1600s, they were English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, Dutch, German, French, Welsh, and maybe one Native American. They came together in what I’m calling Greater Virginia.1 The other colonies don’t seem to have had this much diversity, with Pennsylvania and little New Jersey may be being the most similar.

“The “melting pot” began to boil in the colonial period, so effectively that Gov. William Livingston, three-fourths Dutch and one-fourth Scottish, described himself as an Anglo-Saxon. As the other elements mingled with the English, they became increasingly like them; however, all tended to become different from the inhabitants of “the old country.” By 1763 the word “American” was commonly used on both sides of the Atlantic to designate the people of the 13 colonies.”2

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Visiting Friends and Relatives

I recently ran across this newspaper clipping and thought others might enjoy it. This was published in the Olathe Mirror on Mar 25, 1920. Although I never remember going to Olathe, it is only about 30 miles from Riverside. Carolina Renner was the youngest child of Louisa Mary Truskey and John Peter Brenner. She was the baby of the family, born when her mother was 49, 24 years after the first child Bertha.

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The Scotch Irish and the American Revolution

In my genealogy journey I have noticed something about the American history. My maternal ancestors immigrated to Virginia and Pennsylvania. It became clear to me that history was written by New Englanders because the early days in Virginia and the southern Appalachians are not very well documented. After a while I discovered (recognized) my Scotch-Irish ancestors and started reading about them and learned the amazing secret that without the Scotch-Irish the Revolutionary War would probably not have succeeded.

Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, 1775
Oil painting by John Turnbull completed in 1786

This blog post is about the Scotch-Irish (or Ulster Scots or Scots-Irish) and their significant contribution to America during the Revolutionary War.

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Recipes

I thought for the holidays it might be fun to write about a few family recipes. So I’ve decided to remind people about the Brenner Ridge recipe booklet, offer some recipes from my grandma Elizabeth (Brenner) Klamm, Aunt Carolina (Brenner) Renner, and a recipe from a cousin in honor of my mema Dessie (Kimsey) Anderson.

First, if you are interested in old recipes, I encourage you to download and look through the Brenner Ridge recipe booklet. My husband scanned it and I put it together and OCRed it, so you can read and copy and search the booklet. It has some traditional German recipes and some that were “modern” at the time it was written, but are now also old. Besides the recipes I’m going to put in this post, one of my favorites is the recipe for the all-important pickles, always on the table before meals when Grandma had company. Also hand-written into this copy is a recipe for Mexican Wedding Cakes from Carolina (Brenner) Renner, because she knew I liked them so much.

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John Ratliff – Mystery Life

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If you are descended from Samuel Anderson, you are descended from John Ratliff (ca 1805-1847), my third great grandfather.

It seems that when you “go west young man” you get forgotten back home. [Footnote the quote below re brick wall] So when someone decides to write down the names of the children of your parents, well, you just aren’t there! So John Ratliff moves to Platte County Missouri and apparently pretty promptly dies. Who was he? Who was his wife?

It was all about land…
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Independence Day

A couple of days ago I decided to see how many of my ancestors had participated in the Revolutionary War and I found 12 ancestors. My guess is there were more, but some of my ancestors I don’t even know their names and in other cases there is very little information about them. The way I found them is by finding which ancestors had been used for joining the DAR is Daughters of the American Revolution or the Sons of the American Revolution. You can join such organizations if you can prove you are descended from a qualifying ancestor. Note, these are all maternal ancestors. My father’s family did not come to America until the early 1840s.

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Native Americans in the Riverside area

In this blog post I want to cover some history of the area that I and my grandparents and great grandparents lived in. First, what was there for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived, who was there just before they arrived, and then a bit about the arrival of Europeans.

Not all of this would be considered genealogy, but it is my history because I wandered around in the Indian mounds, often walked the plowed fields after a rain in search of arrowheads and potshards, and participated in a Shippee dig on the Renner property in 1954 at the age of 13. The photo below is of some of the items I found walking the plowed fields after a rain, mostly arrowheads and potshards. Lower left is the grinding stone used for grinding grain.

Judy’s treasures

My great aunt Carolina (Brenner) Renner encouraged the exploration of the prehistoric site on her property and several excavations were made during her lifetime. Gary Brenner was the driving force behind the creation of The Renner-Brenner Site Park, as is explained on his website here: https://www.rennerbrennersitepark.com/

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Finding Nancy

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If Samuel and Dessie Anderson are your grandparents or great grandparents, Nancy (McGee) and Washington Ratliff are your ancestors too.

George Washington Ratliff (~1831-1889) (who was generally called Washington) is my second great grandfather, maternal grandfather of my grandpa Sam Anderson. There are a series of sad stories on this side of the family involving early parental deaths leaving the children without parents. George Washington’s father John Ratliff died in 1847 and apparently his mother was already dead because the children were put into guardianship of first William Bowlin, then after he died, his wife Elizabeth Bowlin. We have no knowledge of the connection of the Bowlin family and the Ratliff family.

Grandpa Anderson’s parents and grandparents

So we find him and his siblings for some years in census records as living with the Bowlin family. Then he grows up and marries and has his own household. But who did he marry? All we know, again from census records, is her name was Nancy1. I had been unable to find out any more until recently. All we know about Washington Ratliff’s wife is the name Nancy and an approximate birth date, both obtained from census records.

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Witches, Records, Stories, and Lies

I ran across again a story that appeared very believable that one of my ancestors was tried as a witch in England. A number of apparent sources were provided and various other bits of information about my ancestors. Since I try to prove what I put in my tree, I looked into his sources and could find none of them. So I looked further and discovered that apparently someone had made up a lot of events about this ancestor, his parents, his early life in Virginia that has been propagated into almost every family tree involving this person, but apparently no one else can prove what he wrote!

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