Sometimes I am the Queen of sidetracking.. That's partly why I start much of my writing with a pencil and a pad of paper - too many things to distract me on the Internets. There's always the temptation to see what's on the front page of Reddit.
But I digress. (See? Even without the Internet, I get sidetracked.) One of the aspects of my sidetracking carries over to researching genealogy. More than once, I've found myself exploring not just direct ancestors but their siblings, their wives, and eventually their great grandchildren who lived just this past century. Information that isn't necessarily critical to my family tree - but very interesting nevertheless.
So one day I focused on the family of one if my paternal great grandfathers, Benjamin Jackson, Jr.:
I knew some things about his family. I was also familiar with many, many mistakes about his family on Ancestry. Unfortunately, while Ancestry is great at disseminating genealogical information, the website also great at disseminating plenty of completely erroneous genealogical information. Benjamin Jackson Jr. is listed as his own grandfather on far too many public trees (do people ever even check what they copy & paste onto their trees??).
One of the things I learned about Benjamin was the name of his mother. I already thought that I knew her name was Lorena Toney Jackson up until I found a scanned copy of his death certificate. Poor Benjamin had died in his forties from tuberculosis. His father answered the particulars for his death certificate including the mother's name which was America Coleman not Lorena. It turns out that Benjamin Sr. married America first and they had two children before she died sometime before 1870.
As I had the opportunity, I explored more on Benjamin Jr.'s siblings and half siblings. Toney Beauregard Jackson, the baby of the family, was the last sibling I focused on and the one that I found the most information.
Ancestry's search tends to bring back everything but the kitchen sink. I figured with a name like Toney, I'd be seeing every Tony and Anthony on the east coast returned in searches. So instead of starting with Ancestry, I Googled Toney instead; not really expecting anything except maybe an obituary. Toney Beauregard Jackson didn't return any hits to speak of. But Toney B Jackson had a scholarship fund established in his name at the Citadel, a South Carolina military college.
Not one week before, I had the opportunity to see a college portrait of my father's brother - in his Citadel uniform. This was getting exciting.
So ok, time for that Ancestry search. Several pages into it was a Yearbook picture with more than a passing resemblance to my father and wearing a now familiar uniform. Hello Toney.
Finding a photo on Ancestry, other than a headstone or a photocopy of a census page, is actually an uncommon experience for me. It's funny how I'd always mentioned the Glover resemblance (something with the eyes and eyebrows) that people could see in my family. Glover, because I always associated it with my father and therefore "Glovers". Looking at Toney though made me realize the obvious fallacy of that. It was the Jackson resemblance all along.
