Ancestor Approved award

Thanks to Rootdigger for honoring Travels with Books with the Ancestor Approved award!

The Ancestor Approved Award asks that the recipient list ten things you have learned about any of your ancestors that has surprised, humbled, or enlightened you and pass the award along to ten other bloggers who you feel are doing their ancestors proud. Here are the 10 things I have learned from my ancestors.

1. Surprised to learn that my ancestor Joshua English had another brother, Thomas. Fellow researchers (and I) had thought Thomas died as a baby because of a confusion with his father Thomas' death.

2. I thought I would never learn why my distant aunt, Elizabeth, never married even though outnumbered by men in a colonial settlement. I was astounded to find out that she had run away and married at a very young age (about 15 in 1751) before immigrating; and humbled that she probably spent the rest of her life not knowing if her estranged husband were alive or dead.

3. Delighted to get a copy of a photograph of my great-great-grandmother, Armecia White English, wearing her Quaker bonnet. I'm just a couple of generations away from that traditional garb.

4. Both humbled and proud, if that makes any sense, that I grew up with Quaker heritage and in the English family, because the odds are against it. There was just one son (among daughters) who died at 34, who had one son who died at 40, and one of his sons immigrated to S.C., and only one of his sons (out of 4) did not leave the Quakers, and so on.

5. That son in S.C., Thomas English, kept his peace testimony through the Revolutionary War, even though all of his brothers decided to fight.

6. Humbled at how the women in our Maness family perservered all alone. At 16, my g-g-grandmother had her only child after her husband left forever. Her mother outlived two husbands. And her little sister was later widowed with nine children (she remarried). These women stuck together and survived and reared their children.

7. Humbled at how hard some people have it. A Wall cousin in Missouri lost his wife and baby within two months. He may have lost an earlier wife, but I'm not sure. He had a stroke later in life and died in a nursing home.

8. Happy to break through a brick wall when I finally found my g-g-grandfather William Lassiter's parents. Apparently he was so much older than my g-g-grandmother that nobody in the family knew enough about him to fill out his death certificate.

9. My family was surprised when I told them about Uncle Wiley Wall (1851-1942) and his family in Missouri. Apparently he had visited N.C. so often, probably by train, that they thought he had always lived here.

10. Humbled by how nice people are: like the librarians and archivists in Ireland who helped me with copies, the couple who picked me up and opened the library for an extra day's research, and the lady who let me see inside her house because my relatives once lived there.

Here are my ten picks for Ancestor Approved blogs:

Amy Coffin's We Tree
Tonia Kendrick's Tonia's Roots
Trent Briles' Briles Information Network
Tina Lyons' Gen Wish List
Jennifer Hudson Taylor's Carolina Scots-Irish Blog
Craig Manson's GeneaBlogie
Deborah Large Fox's Irish Family Research site
Julie Cahill Tarr's GenBlog

I don't know if these bloggers' will accept because of their format, but I really enjoy
Loretta and Susan's Two Nerdy History Girls
and Maureen A. Taylor's Photo Detective