This blog is brought to us by fellow historian Thomas Keenan. I am very excited to have our second guest blogger and most especially because he isn’t related to me and didn’t have to write this!
I hope you enjoy this and if you have any questions I will be sure our new friend gets them.
Hello everyone,
I want to start by thanking Marrissa for letting me be a part of her wonderful blog to post about my family’s connection to Pine Township.
I recently discovered Pine History Blog while doing research for a book on my family’s history that I am writing. In particular, I came across Marrissa’s posts on the first families of Pine Township in the course of gathering information on the family of George Wallace, who settled in the area at the end of the eighteenth century and is buried in a private cemetery there.
I should back up a bit before I dive too deeply into the Wallace family. George Wallace has been a bit of a mystery to me for some time now. For as long as I can remember, members of my family have maintained that our family was related to the explorer, Daniel Boone.
Daniel Boone, 1820.
Now, over the years that I have done genealogical research, I have come across plenty of instances where historical facts and records are stretched to create family connections with historical figures or events.
In writing my family’s history, my primary goal has always been to remain faithful to the objective historical record rather than striving to fit the facts into an interesting story.
Before I firmly committed to including the Boone connection in my book, I wanted some sort of verification to back it up.
My starting point was the research performed by some family members years ago. The asserted connection came through the marriage of Timothy Ward (b. 1793) and Rebecca Ann Wallace (b. around 1798).
There are records to support my family’s line back to Timothy and Rebecca, and even further back along Timothy’s line. Rebecca’s parentage, however, was more nebulous. One family history in my possession listed her parents as a George Wallace and Sarah (or Sally) Boone, with Sarah being the Boone descendant. Exactly how Sarah was related to the Boone family was not perfectly clear, and the details of George’s and Sarah’s lives were few. This did not leave me with much.
Nevertheless, I soon found some corroboration for the story. While researching the line, I came into contact with a distant cousin of mine from a segment of the Ward line that had branched off from my own a couple of generations after Timothy and Rebecca.
That branch of the line also had maintained the tradition that they were connected to the Boone family – through none other than the parents of Rebecca Wallace Ward, George Wallace and Sarah Boone.
In my next post, I discuss how I “found” Rebecca’s father, and how I discovered my family’s connection to Pine Township.
Pine History Blog 