Idle hands are devilish tools.
Well, whoot! Someone’s finally gone and done it.
A few minutes of down time at work; a news story about a U.K. archeology dig and a Google Map search to see where; a whim to check out Templeton Burn on my new pen pal’s recommendation; piddling, I find a Templeton Court in Glasgow that one Monteith Row dead ends into. I wonder, “See if anything’s turned up on Allie Monteith?” And The Google came up with the above in the first couple of results!
Now, see, I’d been searching online all around Allie only a few weeks ago — following her brothers, cousins, “Woodward” and the lot — to see if I could discover who her parents were, or maybe some indication as to when she moved where, or anything! (Oh, gosh, now that I’m linking to a blog entry about one such person, I see it was 11 months ago. How could it have been that long?!)
Of course I’d scoured the free precincts of Ancestry.com at the time, but not a lot turned up that I wasn’t finding otherwise. (I don’t subscribe anymore.)
Sheesh! So there she is, now: tantalizing me with possible info on her parents. Maybe dates or places of marriages?
I’ve known for years that there was one gedcom at Ancestry that mentions her, but I haven’t been able to get any particulars — even when I was a subscriber — and the researcher has never responded to messaging.
I need to look before I buy … it’s only such a little info I need …
It looks like I’m going to have to get by the LDS Genealogy Library and use their free access to Ancestry tomorrow, just to make sure.
A greeting outta thin Ayr …
Got an email from a very, very — very distant “cousin” in Scotland. It’s exciting to hear from folks that reach out. Doubly so from someone living within 3 miles of Templeton Burn (a little creek).
2012.01.23 UPDATE: Well, the good news is I haven’t heard from my Ayrshire correspondent since my reply. The first time I wrote back, my email was returned undelivered. It had gotten caught in his spam filter and bounced back. This time, I wrote from the same “@templeton.net” Webmail, and it apparently got through.
Ah, the holidays.
Father Christmas holding court.
Shame that I was too distracted & busy to take advantage of the freebie one- or three-day offers from Ancestry.com to mine their databases. But I did get a cool turntable-to-USB device that’ll let me listen to my old 33 1/3 LP albums once again. Yusef Lateef, it’s been too long!
The almost-meditative monotony of “Browse”*
Sunday with genealogy and the laptop.
* Browse — as in “browse images of census records.”
I’ve scanned the LDS collection of the 1890 Census of Union Veterans and Widows of the Civil War for three or four counties of Wisconsin and three counties of Ohio so far this weekend. It’s almost like spending time accomplishing something.
Actually, I found myself wondering if this page after page of scanning for a familiar surname, the rote copying of the soldier’s record onto a pad and fitfully considering how I’m going to compile this record in a way that might be useful, was a real, actual, productive use of my genealogy research time.
Shortly after wondering that, I realized that my wandering mind was a quiet murmur of disconnected ideas, memories, mental pictures … kind of like I used to experience while mowing Dorothy Wooden’s lawn for clothes money when I was 14 years old. It’s not really a meditative state. I feel no closer to cosmic realization for having indulged fifteen hours of my life flipping through hundreds of grainy, grey images of 120-year old handwriting. But it is a comforting routine that holds the promise of some fine nugget of historical gold, though this weekend’s exercise yielded no new riches.
I thought I was getting a sense of the national-origin mix of the upper Midwest at the end of the 19th century. It seemed to me that more English (versus Scotch-Irish and German) were in the stew by the fin de siècle. The English, and other northern European, Welsh, and what-not. That the melting pot of America (and perhaps a more mobile, railroad-enabled populace) was well on its way to working its “assimilation” magic by 1890 seemed evident. Of course, that’s just anecdotal. I just have the earliest rosters of property owners in and around old Trumbull County from before 1820 to compare.
The whole question of whether taking a mental break from life in order to “browse” census scans is a good use of my time, much less productive, is for a later day. Right now I have “fun with spreadsheets” to get into and make me think I’m being “creative”. (Ha-ha.)
Pin-balling around the genealogy searches.
This screen in front of me can quickly become the flickering lights and ringing bells of an arcade game — a stream-of-consciousness carom from thought to link to link to thought, then trailing down to a flipper with a whip back up into another zig-zag through the bumpers of data points scattered around the Internet. It was a photo of a headstone in a discussion thread notification that got me started. The name on the marker, “Rhoda Templeton Wright,” didn’t pan out to have any connection to my family though all three names appear in my database. But the search turned up a reference to Hiram C. Templeton, who it turns out has a Civil War record to be found.
This surprised me a little bit, since I had thought most of the Ohio Templeton men were either too old or too young to have seen service in that conflict. That is, with the notable exception of Robert H Templeton, who fought with the 26th Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry at Chancellorsville and at Gettysburg, only to lose his life after Chattanooga as Sherman advanced on Atlanta.
Turns out, even Michael Templeton has a “Draft Registration” or some-such record, scanned and in an Ancestry.com database.
Bouncing around the search engines, there appears to be another couple of Ohio Templetons, more Wisconsiners and perhaps a trail from Ohio to Michigan. I may have even found a whiff of a trail to my long-suspected Indiana Templeton kin. But, since I’m not an Ancestry subscriber anymore, it’s looking like a couple of trips to the LDS Genealogy Library is in order.
This just might be the opening of that pandora’s box of the Civil War I’ve been putting off all this time.
It’s great to be asked.
“Austintown” cover.
It was Friday that I discovered that I was called out in the “Acknowledgements” of a 2007 history of Austintown, Ohio, written by Joyce Pogany. I recall Ms. Pogany’s research assistant emailing me, asking for references to our Templeton ancestors being among the first settlers of the valley in eastern Ohio, back before 1798 or whenever I asserted in my bio of William Templeton. I think I might have even talked to her on the phone, but my memory is pretty fuzzy going back six- or seven years. I provided the bibliographic references and links on the Internet she could reach immediately, and followed up with downloaded text files of the more-or-less oral history from a reunion weekend of folks that knew the early settlers. Come to find out, the info I provided comprise the first paragraph of Ms. Pogany’s book, near as I can tell.
The origins, y’know.
It’s nice to be asked about what I’ve learned.
I’m wondering what else I can do with my research.
I was asked to rate a Wikipedia entry last evening. I’m checking Wikipedia all the time and such a thing as a pop-up asking me to contribute just because I logged on and looked something up at the same time … well, it’s never happened before.
Wikipedia, “fun with Dictionary,” chasing etymologies of words after I find out how to spell them, searching my way deep into old, old books that’re out of print but saved for posterity by Google Books. Heck, I’ve even mucked around in the old stable of Medieval Scots word finders. Seems I’m into one reference resource or another every couple of hours through my day. But the only online source that’s asked me to rate their work is Wikipedia.
That’s kind of ‘special’.
“Ah, the benefits of membership,” I thought for the heartbeat it took to realize that I wasn’t actually signed in, just then, and that as far as Wikipedia is concerned, I was just Joe Blow.
“Well! That’s even kind of neater. The collective is really serious about stepping up the feedback loop.”
And then it occurred to me that, apart from correcting one village reference from an Irish location to the proper Scotland place in an obscure Wikipedia article, I haven’t originated a single Wikipedia entry or joined in expanding upon others’ contributions since I signed up and logged on, now some years ago. In other words, I haven’t put my “contributor” status to use at all.
In fact, I haven’t been a contributing citizen of the Wiki World wherever I’ve found it, even though I was anxious to be an “early adopter” of the idea of contributory history … the “new paradigm” of collective Master Narrative writing.
Perhaps I need to see a self interest in throwing stuff out into the “edited” noosphere of the logged, dated, annotated histories. And in so doing, expose myself to the nit-picking maelstrom criticism that comes with positing an observation — always imperfectly researched, thought out, or expressed — into the popular draft of our Master Narrative of History.
- - -
Be that as it may, the other day I was wondering to myself if there is a market for some sort of history of pre-Reformation Scots law practice. Maybe something “humanized” by an heroic Templeton at the center of the story about the development of the modern profession of “lawyer.” Or, maybe using an ancestor as the subject of a landmark case. (I’m thinking Roger Tempiltoun or Andro Tempilton that was Maxwell’s capo who was the central figure in a case that went a way towards establishing the authority of the central government’s court and law [the King’s Court] over the common usurpation of legality by thugs of local Lairds, back a few generations before Roger came onto Edinburgh’s legal scene.)
Oh, yes, there’s stories to be told, there, but I’m not sure I’m up to the bullet-proof research needed to make it more than an interesting (to some, I hope) anecdote.
150 years ago yesterday & today our country broke.
Inside Fort Sumter, April 12-13, 1861. Harper’s Weekly, April 27, 1861.
On this occasion I can link you to the few Civil War stories from the family saga that I have up on the Web, as of now:
Robert H Templeton, Wisconsin infantryman at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and with Sherman on his way to Atlanta.
Samuel Kirk Robins was also with Sherman and of course other places in the western theater of the war including Vicksburg and Chattanooga.
Then there’s the Reverend John Monteith that I haven’t gotten a proper biography done for, yet, but having agitated against slavery and run an underground railroad stop on the Oberlin branch, deserves a mention.
It may be time, as well as timely, to collect documentation and stories of the family through that great schism in our nation’s history.
We’ll see.
Odds & ends.
We’re burrowing down on those First Generation (historic-record speaking) ancestors in the American Colonies, right now. In otherwords: we’re on the trail of the Monteiths.
In this instance, the church father, John Monteith, Daniel’s brother and uncle of the celebrated Rev. John Lenox Monteith*:
Rawlinsville, in the eastern part of the township [Martic township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania] is
credited with a population of about two hundred, has
two stores, a hotel, and a church. It has a good
school, and is the centre of a thrifty agricultural
population. … The Methodist Episcopal
church at Rawlinsville is an active society. The
building, a frame structure, was raised in 1875. The
original trustees were John Monteith, Elias Aument,
John Hart, Jacob Hart, H. L. Thompson, Abraham
Creamer, Samuel Drumm, Lewis Volrath, Washington
Drumm. The church is now in the Mount Nebo circuit. It
has a Sunday school of about 140 members.
It seems that Daniel’s younger brother (and also a Revolutionary War veteran), John, had taken an active role in establishing his Protestant faith from early-on in life.
That focus of the family upon the establishment of the church’s place in frontier communities was very important to the Monteiths and those that were their close friends, apparently. After all, Daniel — the more “civic-minded” brother that pursued political office and Court standing — maintained his official letter of membership in his brother’s Hopewell Presbyterian Church in New Bedford, Pennsylvania, and chose to be buried there. And, it’s interesting that between the Streators and the Montieths, from about 1775 through most of the 19th century, the Templeton family married into families of preachers and lay deacons that could debate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin with the best of ‘em.
* That’s from “History of Lancaster County” by Dr. Frederick Klein, 1924, as excerpted by Sam Kelly, http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/ROBINSON/2002-02/1012846190 2011.03.19
Another side note from back when:
“John Cobb, purchased from Isaac and Mary Beach, May 15, 1788, and the survey of which property was made by Lemuel Cobb, May, 14, 1788. The homestead was sold by William Ripley Cobb, and the other heirs to John Moneith, of Newark, New Jersey. John Cobb was born in Parsippany, New Jersey, September 5, 1755; married, August 8, 1819, Elizabeth Shaw, and died June 1, 1858. Their son, Andrew Bell Cobb, died January 31, 1873.”
A Hint as to Daniel Monteith’s parentage origin:
Sarah Leackey [Lecky or other variants], Daniel’s Scots-born wife, was birthed in or around Dundee, Scotland. Just up the coast is Menteith, a neighborhood up the way, and Dundee is on the Fourth — the estuary of the river that bounds the ancient earldom of Menteith. And, when I say “Earldom” in the olde Perthshire, I mean an ancient Pictish family group that probably fought off the Romans, back when that was fashionable.
Did I tell you I found THE ‘Maestre’ Niel Campbell?
In my original published ‘biography’ of Maestre Gilberto de Tempilton I extrapolated that the warrior friend of Robert the Bruce was also the educated “Maestre” Neil Campbell. Now, I find, there were apparently two contemporaneous Neil Campbells that were “clearly” kinsmen, back in the day.
Best known to history is Sir Neil Campbell, son and heir to Colin Campbell, who was one of Robert I’s closest associates and military commanders, who was the only one I’d found when I first published the original version of Maestre Gilbert de Templeton’s biography.
But the other day, I learned that there was a second Maestre Neil Campbell, a cleric that was an auditor for Bruce the Competitor along with his probable cousin Neil (the Bruce’s lieutenant and close confidant) and relative of that Neil’s father, Colin.**
This educated religious man was also the political confidant and probable steward of a Great Lord on the peninsula just above the Isle of Bute, back when The Bruce was making his escape to that snowy isle of Ireland’s northern sea, back when the king of England had a large bounty on the Bruce’s head, and the Isle of Bute and its northern peninsular headland made all the difference in the future king’s escape.
This “cousin Neil, the priest” was yet another probable Continentally-educated man, so the suppositions about Maestre Gilbert are merely reinforced by this discovery. The fact that he was a similarly situated university-man and Patriot on a friendly shore also buttresses our suppositions about Gilbert Templeton allegiances and role viz. powerful lords back in those volatile times.
** Barrow, G.W.W., Robert Bruce and the Commuinity of the Realm of Scotland, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1965. p. 397 - or 406, in my copy.
Nineteenth century photography didn’t always catch the “essence” of a person.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
We’re told that the stern, stiff-necked gentleman above had a delightful sense of humor. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him in this picture, but as a younger man he was an unabashed adventurer and not afraid to live outside the law, to boot. He must have been a fascinating conversationalist since he was an educated university man back when few from the frontier of Central Pennsylvania even finished the local, crude pastor’s schools; and we know that he was a compelling public speaker.
He was the Reverend John Lenox Monteith, son of Daniel Monteith and nephew to our Allie Templeton (nee Monteith).
John was recruited right out of Princeton Theological Seminary (now Princeton University) by Governor Lewis Cass and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to bring Protestantism to the wild & wooly (and largely Catholic) burg of Detroit. That was in the summer of 1816. Monteith rode a horse out from New Jersey, making the trip through the forested expanse of the western frontier in only fifteen days!
Within a year of his arrival the Reverend joined with his Catholic counterpart in Detroit, Father Gabriel Richard, to found an institute of higher learning that grew to become the University of Michigan with Monteith as its first President. He also ran the local lending library.
Like his kin among the Ohio Templetons, he was staunchly anti-slavery. His abolitionist feeling was deep and evidently more urgent, however, and sommers ‘round the mid- to late 1830s (our best guess) he made a trip to Utica, New York, where he mixed with other Abolitionists, and met the important activist Theodore Weld. Monteith returned home to become an early affiliate of “Weld’s Seventy” — a group of committed and active public speakers against the scourge of slavery, and as in the Reverend’s case, secret agents of the Underground Railroad.
Upon his return to the Great Lakes, Monteith moved to Ohio and took a position in Elyria, near enough to the Lake so’s a tunnel from his home to a mooring on the lake could be the last leg on the Oberlin trace of the Underground Railroad.
So don’t let the stern, judgmental mien in the picture above fool ya. The guy was a wild man, in his own Presbyterian minister kinda way.
