Surnames

I write this blog for my family and others that may be interested in our ancestors’ journey through time. With this blog I concentrate on the linage of Filson, Hunter, Manuwal, Zimmerman, Coplen (Copeland), Severns, Rodabaugh and Hynes. I concentrate only on the deceased and will only use the names of the living, if I have permission. Our journey starts in Indiana and will move to Ohio. From there the journey is a surprise. I hope to write this blog chronologically, but I get easily distracted and excited about my findings, so I may jump ahead. Some post will be about a particular person, some may be about a place, some may be about a historical moment in time that our ancestor experienced first hand. Also, I may include some of my own personal experiences. Remember it is not the destination, but the journey that is the exciting part. So I invite you to take this journey with me and I look forward to your comments and insights. I also look forward to other distant family members joining this forum. I will try and stay on topic, but sometimes the most exciting thing about genealogy is how I came to find a piece of treasure.

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First a little background on how I came to have this obsession: It was 2010 and I sat down on a Friday evening to do some channel surfing when I came upon the show "Who Do You Think You Are?" The show tracks the ancestral lineage of a celebrity with the help of genealogical experts. On this night it was Sarah Jessica Parker. Her journey took her to Massachusetts, where she found out her tenth great grandmother was accused of being a witch in Salem. It made me curious to see if I could find any witches in my lineage. When I enrolled on Ancestry.com, I realized I had been sucked into a marketing scheme but figured I would subscribe for a month and then cancel my account. It took me about a year before I cut the cable because the website had so much information. When you start doing genealogy you are told to start off with what you know and what is known by others in your family. Then you look for evidence to confirm the information and along the way you track your sources. While working on your genealogy you need to work backwards through time. So you will research and learn about someone's death before their birth. The first sources you seek are primary records, i.e. death, marriage and birth records. Many states only started requiring vital records in the early 1900s. Sometimes they are hard to acquire so then you look for secondary records. One of the best sources for secondary information is the United States Census. The U.S. Census has been performed since the early 1800s, in the early census records only the head of household is named and the number of people in the house. Therefore, you can never be sure you have the right family. Starting in 1850, it was requiring that every person in the household be recorded. This is a wonderful thing for genealogist. For more information on the federal census visit:

http://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/fast_facts/

I will not go any further in depth about being a genealogist but I will let you know about the resources as I go along. They are too vast to explain in this post.

Oh, and by the way, I still haven't found any witches.

Welcome to my Blog

I am Shelley Filson-Bechtold, born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1957. I have five siblings and we are all Air Force Pioneers. While others would refer to us as Air Force Brats, we were in no way spoiled by the Air Force life so I prefer to think of us as pioneers. We moved every two or three years in and out of different schools and even moving between multiple houses in one city. Yet, we persevered and went onto adulthood and now I reside in California with my family of four. I hope you enjoy my blog about my Northern Ancestors.