In case you missed it, here’s Part 1: I Forgot My Memory Quilt. For anyone who’s intrigued with the idea of a quilt stitched with old T-shirts, you might find the following of interest.

This process describes what I did four years ago to create my quilt with memorystitch based in Omaha, Nebraska. This may or may not be current or applicable now. Other vendors may well be worth considering. I did not.

Preparing A Memory Quilt

The Easy (Alternative) Way

1. Select the T-shirts you wish to sacrifice for the greater purpose.

2. Do this:

   

3. Enclose the order with the volunteered T’s and ship them off. You’re done.

My Way – Six Steps

1. Selected the shirts.

2. Measured the graphic or text part of each shirt to verify sizing.

3. Arranged the shirts on a grid as desired (using photos, not the actual shirts).

4. Took a photo of the grid to enclose with the order to ensure proper arrangement.

5. Cut the shirts in half as explained in the instructions.

6. Shipped the shirts at my expense.

My Way – Implementation

Disclaimer: In retrospect – four years after the fact – I have to admit this is pretty control-freaky embarrassing.

Shirt Selection

I selected a few more shirts than needed, but … just in case.

Measurement

I cut out an L-shaped, slightly-over-an-inch wide square ruler out of cardboard to provide a ‘frame’ for each panel to approximate the overall overage required for each panel.

I ‘framed’ the two-sided ruler on top of each shirt to check the sizing for any shirts that might cause issues from either being too large or that were too close to the collar (approimately two inches).

Note that I only cut one ruler, not one for each panel. The usage of the ruler is to align it such that the outside edges of the frame enclose what I would want to be seen on the quilt, after folding and stitching; anything more than that is fine.

For example, if the “River of Dreams” image would’ve been large enough to force the “World Tour 1993-1994” down below the bottom of the vertical frame, I would’ve had to consider replacing that shirt with another.

For each of the 30 shirts I used the square ruler to verify the image sizing, then photographed each individual shirt.

Arrangement and Photo

With some assurance that my chosen shirts would work, I moved on to the arrangement in the 6-row, 5-column grid.

For the arrangement, I cropped each of the photos to the same sized square. Using Photoshop I made my first pass at arrangement the shirt panels in the grid. By the third pass I was satisfied.

Now I was ready to rip and cut my treasured T’s in halves, per the instructions.

But even after that I wasn’t through. Simply providing one visual ‘map’ of my quilt to the vendor wasn’t enough to leave absolutely no room for doubt as to my desires.

The vendor had their order instructions; I had mine. I’m not proud of it, but I actually sent this in with my bundle of T-shirts.

My Experience Four Years On

1. I was pleased with the vendor and the outcome, especially the cost, which with a 40%-off after-Thanksgiving sale was only $112 for the king-size quilt.

2. I purchased the idea of the quilt, I think, moreso than the quilt itself. By that I mean after five decades, I had kept all these T-shirts because they meant something to me over and above their torso-covering functionality. I really bought into the story-telling or memory-remembering aspect of the T-shirt quilt; not so much to use it, but to have it. And then, realistically, to leave it.

3. These past few days of remembering-I-had-forgotten I had the quilt caused me to re-think what the purpose of having it was, or will be. Since receiving it four years ago, I’ve only unfolded it fully four or five times. Not until Tuesday night did I ever actually make my bed to accommodate using it. It’s too big for my bed. After I write the stories that I wanted to remember … I’m not sure what I’ll do. Maybe folding it up and storing it is as good a solution as any.

4. All in all, I’m glad I did it and that I have the quilt. I’d recommend it worthy of consideration.

Next up: In Part 3 I’ll begin to recount the stories wrapped in the shirts. You might consider following or subscribing to my “Lived Stories” no-charge publication.

Subscribe now

This represents the key visual bit of a chain of one-thing-leading-to-another this morning (the Fixx is/are in my head at the moment). And it’s seasonally as well as genealogically pertinent, so here goes.

Four years ago about this time I ordered a Memory Quilt from the good folks in Omaha, Nebraska, at memorystitch. My sister had mentioned something about a local woman who sewed pillows from old clothes but she couldn’t remember the woman’s name. I got online and found the memory stitchers in Nebraska instead.

Since I randomly thought about it early this morning, and remembering I had semi-intentions of mentioning it for the past three years, and since it is already December, I want to post this in time to benefit anyone who might be interested. So for now I’ll just show you mine and then hit SEND (or whatever the button’s called).

But there are several more “Lived Stories” I want to tell that are represented on this 78”x92” expanse of soft blue velour on one side and the remnants of thirty 15” squares of worn tshirt-sides on the other. There are a few holes and an embarrassing amount of dried paint. A few are indecipherable to the eye, but exceedingly meaningful to me as they span a full fifty year period of my life.

My Memory Quilt

You might consider following or subscribing to my free stack (is that what this is called now?), “Lived Stories.” (See how I very unobtrusively wove that branding message into the text? Somebody said I should.)

Semi-snarky preface:

If I were writing this to be read thirty years from now as representative of a certain strain of thought-and-language now prevalent in the 2020's, I'd put it this way: "I feel that despite the author's blatant misogyny (the B-word X 3!!!), this story deeply impacts me."

Now back to me, Steve, now ... this one was personal for me. Reading “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” now for the first time as someone who's always identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald more than Ernest Hemingway, I was stopped cold reading several passages that expressed sentiments I could've written, and in fact have written, about myself throughout the last three decades.

For the first time, I could personally relate with Hemingway.

Hemingway: "For this, that now was coming ... " By my count, Hemingway uses the word now 25 times that demarcate not clock or calendar, but the temporal awareness of specific experiences of now. In this early phrase, he projects a future final now as imminent, not distant.

My experience: In early 1992, I had been seeing a therapist for about eighteen months for a combination of marriage, work, and self crises. While reading The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy, I was brought to extended tears when I read the following passage: “I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man, still waiting for my real life to start."

Hemingway's "that now" immediately invoked my indelible memory of Conroy's "one day."

Hemingway: "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well."

My experience: About a year into my post-divorce "real life," I signed-up for a then-popular, 4-day, limited-break, seminar/workshop/encounter thing. While pondering a homework assignment that was supposed to summarize in one minute a certain self-reflective insight, I decided to write a one-minute poem. From my frustrations at trying to produce that simple assignment, I gleaned a self-insight that parallels Harry's hesitation predicated on "until he knew enough."

I put it this way:

"... I finally acknowledged that I didn't want to finish it, Because I couldn't make it good enough" to ensure that "you see nothing of me if it's not good."

"I want to see you as your first draft, Complete with mispelled words and freely-formed constructions. But I want you to see me as completely edited, fully redlined, ready for print and ready for rave review."

Hemingway’s Harry admits to falling for a succession of ever more wealthy "rich bitches."

With the self-assured tongue-in-cheekiness I can only now fuzzily recognize as my own, I titled one of my early-adopter online dating profiles (which for more than two decades I treated as creative writing exercises), "Willing to be kept."

Which leads right-write into Hemingway’s: "It had begun very simply. She liked what he wrote ..."

That was always my intent with the dating profiles – my best-foot-forward was, to my mind, my best first shot at making a good first impression.

Postscripts:

I was struck by the sentiment expressed not by Hemingway as Harry but from the mouth of Julian, "The very rich are different from you and me." Maybe Julian had read Nick Carraway.

After reading Harry's sense that he had "seen the world change," I could not read the rest of the story without contemplating how differently I would have read this story in college than how I was reading it at this now, and that at this now moment I am also preoccupied with how much "this" world of now has changed during my five decades as an adult.

And finally, after reading just the first page, I wondered to myself, is that what started the he said/she said trope?

I ended that first part with a pretty clear hint as to how I softened up that uncertainty about Ella’s parents:

Hint: think DNA.

Not for the faint of heart, short of time, or intolerant of attitude. But after 36 days of being held hostage by this story, I’m breaking free and letting go of it. It’s the story of what I did and, as the kids say these days, I have receipts.

But before we get into segments and centimorgans …

Please note that the Hint above did not say:

think only DNA.

Before I could seriously concentrate on solving the who question, I needed to better understand the where and when considerations. And that understanding would require some plain old genealogy gumshoe detective work.

To establish the geographic context for investigating Ella’s unknown parentage, here’s what I refer to as Ella’s Known World. (Or if I wanted to explicitly make this a drama, which I don’t, you could think of it as the scene of the uncertainty.)

See the inset at lower right to situate the area within the state.

Location can be important; sometimes it can be determinative. Of the seven children in Burr and Ella (Latimer) Henry’s pre-nuclear family, all but one were born, lived and died in the area highlighted above. The lone exception was my great-grandfather, Lorenzo, the first child, who ventured out west ending up just across the Texas border with New Mexico.

The only documented facts we know about Ella reside within the rounded square on the map above:

1. Per Texas county marriage records, she was married to Burr Henry in 1880 in Paris, Lamar County.

2. In the 1900 and 1910 census (plural), she, Burr and their family lived near Lone Oak, Hunt County.

3. Burr died in 1916.

4. In 1920, two weeks after the U.S. census was taken, Ella died in Celeste, near Leonard, Fannin County, in the home of her second son, A.H. (Hamilton, or “Uncle Bud”).

5. Ella and Burr are buried together in the East Shady Grove Baptist Cemetery two miles west of Leonard.

Clarksville in Red River County is shown to the east of Paris to indicate the location of the other Ella’s city of birth, life and death.

Mount Pleasant in Titus County, south of Clarksville, is shown because it holds a clue for Ella’s inferred, highly-probable mother, who doesn’t make an appearance in this part of the story.

Throughout the summer and into September of 2019, I completed quite a bit of “field” research and study. I drove to libraries and cemeteries in Paris (Lamar County), Clarksville (Red River County), Bonham (Fannin County) and Greenville (Hunt).

Fortunately, towns like Leonard and Lone Oak had celebrated their centennial years in the late 1800s and had published genealogy-friendly books explaining the history and families throughout the first hundred years. That’s where I found these:

A page from my notebook for my September 11th outing to Fannin and Lamar counties:

My primary focus for all of the library work was the Latimer family and, to a lesser extent, Burr’s Henry family. By mid-September, I had read and absorbed enough of the general history about the Latimer’s to finally convince myself that Albert H. Latimer was not Ella’s father (nor Mary Ann Gattis her mother).

At that point, I deleted Albert and his third wife, Mary Ann Gattis, from my family tree. Ella was left an orphan so far as Ancestry knew.

Back to segments and centimorgans

I mentioned previously that I received my Ancestry DNA results in August 2018. Skipping a lot of details that could rationalize and even justify my inactivity on the DNA front, I’ll just say it and own it – I didn’t do anything but glance and wave at DNA matches for almost a year.

On the 19th of August, 2019, I wrote an email to my sister that documented my first engagement with Ancestry DNA tools. Six months earlier (February 2019), Ancestry had released the beta version of three brand-new DNA application tools:

• Common Ancestors

• ThruLines

• Groups (aka, the little colored dots)

It goes without saying, but of course it goes better with saying … timing-wise, I could not have been more fortunate than to be able to say I’ve never not-known Ancestry Common Ancestors, ThruLines and Groups. That is, once I began to apply them.

My email explained to my sister that I had just started grouping my known DNA matches (mostly from Common Ancestors). I proudly attached my (meager) work product:

It wasn’t much, but it gave me a focal point from which I could start to show some progress and start learning. I was soon fully immersed in analyzing my DNA matches, having been baptized by some soon-to-be well-known-to-me luminaries in the field. In another email to my sister ten days later:

The Barefoot Genealogist (apologies to Crista Cowan for articulating my first impression, since tempered by acclimation), Blaine Bettinger, DNA Painter (Jonny Perl, who, to a newbie like myself, could be easily mistaken as “a whole organization”) … in hindsight I probably couldn’t have chosen a better group for my initiation into DNA and shared matches. Within a couple of weeks I came to appreciate others like Dana Leeds, Leah Larkin, Kitty Cooper, Evert-Jan Blom with Genetic Affairs (foreshadowing foot-stomp!), and several others on YouTube.

I also discovered FindAGrave.com. By searching the site for Latimer graves, I developed a sense for the concentration of where Latimer ancestors were buried. Searching both maiden and surnames who died before 1960, there were almost 200 Latimers forever residing in the counties northeast of Dallas. About eighty percent of those were concentrated in the three northern counties bordering the Red River – Red River, Lamar, Fannin – and Hunt, bordering Fannin to the south.

Not coincidentally, they overlapped nicely with Ella’s World.

September 26th and Genetic Affairs

For a variety of reasons, I had mothballed my Facebook account in 2014.

In September 2019, I reactivated it for one and only one reason – the Genetic Affairs Facebook Group.

Genetic Affairs is the creation of Evert-Jan Blom from the Netherlands. Like Jonny Perl, EJ Blom had a personal interest in his own family history, especially from a DNA standpoint. Whereas Jonny’s background was computing and programming, EJ has a “PhD in Molecular Genetics with a strong focus on Bioinformatics,” per his GeneticAffairs.com about page.

In 2018 he launched his first genetic genealogy tool, AutoClusters, that

groups shared DNA matches into clusters, helping users to better understand their genetic connections.

Once again, my timing was fortuitous in that by the time I realized I had a need, there was a solution waiting for me.

After learning about the AutoCluster tool from several YouTube videos, I joined geneticaffairs.com in order to run my own cluster scenarios. After connecting my Ancestry tree to Genetic Affairs, I could go onto the geneticaffairs.com website, enter the range of centimorgans I wanted to cluster, identify a family group or groups I was interested in, then press a button to order the cluster.

After a few minutes, I’d receive an email that included one HTML file with a folder of supporting data at the chromosome level. When you opened the HTML file, it displayed this mesmerizing animation that showed the actual clustering process. It’s hard to explain or show the animation, but here’s what the completed output looks like, anonymized:

The blurred left and top axes list all 76 matches I had in my tree with whom I shared from 50-250 cM. Each list is sorted first into the predicted group (or cluster), then sorted by most centimorgans shared to fewest.

Here’s the full Latimer group cluster, number 5 in brown, that includes 19 shared matches that meet the 50-250 cM criteria:

NOTE: The solid diagonal line of darker blocks simply shows each person as their corresponding match along each axis. The top axis isn’t shown in the lower image.

The fact that these nineteen matches are all grouped into one cluster suggests they all share at least one common ancestor. The matches might share one or both 3rd great-grandparents (4th cousins), or 2nd great-grandparents (3rd cousins).

The AutoCluster tool also provides tabular details about the nineteen matches such as that below. The number in the “people” column indicates how many people each match has in an attached Ancestry tree; “% Confid” indicates the degree of confidence the tool’s calculation has that the match belongs in the cluster – not whether the Range is THIRD_ , FOURTH_, half or removed COUSIN).

To me, this was all … interesting? I wasn’t sure how the pieces all fit together – did they all represent just one solution, i.e., one set of parents, or multiple pairs, or could they even be wrong for some reason? About the best I could do was to look closely at the matches, check their Ancestry trees (only four of which proved to be helpful), and start looking at the matches I shared with these nineteen and, as applicable, add them to my Latimer Group/dot.

If I knew then what I’ve learned since, I could’ve interpreted this differently. More on that later.

The most benefit I derived from the AutoCluster tool at the time was realizing that I needed to understand the ascending trees associated with as many of the shared matches as possible. And when I say understand I mean not only accept what’s in my shared-match-cousins’ trees, but possibly to even build out their trees solely for my purposes to reach their equivalent generation to Ella’s parents, my 3rd great-grandparent generation. And beyond if need be.

It dawned on me that, rather than solely searching for Ella’s parents, I was actually looking for an entire family – who were Ella’s DNA siblings?

Putting it all together …

On October 24th, I looked at my Ancestry ThruLines again. Ella was still parent-less at my 3rd great-grandparent generation. In the absence of a father and mother in my tree, ThruLines apparently had no basis to project who my 3rd GGPs might be. (Now six years later, this is not necessarily the case on Ancestry.) A confounding factor was that my cousins who shared Ella as our Common Ancestor all still showed Albert H. Latimer as her father and Mary Ann Gattis as her mother.

For the next couple of weeks I burrowed back into my Ancestry matches. I made an extensive list of shared matches, starting with the nineteen matches in my GeneticAffairs cluster. As I started doing my own manual ‘cluster’ (in the form of an Excel spreadsheet), it became obvious that my second and third cousins who shared Ella also shared DNA with a sizeable group of other matches.

Unfortunately, not many of those matches had trees that extended as far up the branches as I needed, but I had to start with what was known.

In my notebook I sketched out some of the trees of my “Cluster 5” shared DNA matches. I started on October 25th with these four (which turned out to be only the first three):

The Fran match was my best lead in that she had a tree that went up to Ella’s generation plus the next older – through Katherine Mary Latimer who married George W. Welborn. Katherine’s parents were shown as John Latimer and Elizabeth (Snoddy) Latimer. That sounded promising, and the information for Elizabeth was that she was born in Tennessee and died in Lamar County. Fran didn’t have much on John Latimer, however.

Next, tiffanynicole6 had what was likely the same couple in her tree although the names were slightly different - John Lattimore and Eliza Snoddy. The dates made sense and her tree indicated John was born in Arkansas and died in Red River County, Texas – next door to Lamar County.

Then Rebecca, who also descended from Eula Lee Welborn – same as Fran – showed a completely different set of parents for Eula Lee. Something was off.

The next day I sketched out my notes a little differently, trying to reconcile the generations for Fran, tiffanynicole and me (top half), then with Rebecca and a fourth match, Leah, on the bottom. Fran, tiffanynicole and Rebecca all descended from Katherine Mary Latimer (b. 1854 in Pike County, Arkansas). Leah, however, descended from Hiram Latimer (b. 1875 in Texas). Could Hiram and Katherine Mary be siblings, or more likely first cousins given the twenty-one year age difference?

I found two other matches that I similarly sketched, marygary and B.S., both of whom descended from James Robert Isom Latimer (JRIL, b. 1857 also in Pike County, Arkansas). So now it seemed as though the Latimer-Snoddy union had at least two, possibly three lines of succession.

Like the good folks from “Jaws” needed a bigger boat, I needed a bigger piece of paper. A roll of brown butcher paper worked nicely.

And about this time, as an experiment I added John Latimer and Elizabeth/Eliza Snoddy into my tree as Ella’s parents just to see what the consequences would be. (bold for emphasis)

Within a couple of days, I sketched out Ella’s known descendants on the bigger canvas. I noted the amount of centimorgans (cM) I shared with each second and third cousin, noted by the red dots and green numbers. Of seven siblings, I was fortunate to have shared DNA matches that descended from six. (The only sibling for whom I did not have any shared matches was, ironically, Ella Marion Henry.)

I had to wait for Ancestry’s ThruLines to propagate the effect of adding John and Elizabeth/Eliza as Ella’s parents. Once I had those ThruLine results, I manually added them on the butcher paper after doing a quick confirmation on each separate line of descent. Several of the ThruLines projected cousins overlapped with the GeneticAffairs predicted cluster names.

Again, the red dots and green numbers noted my own shared matches, although “SES” isn’t visible on this bottom part. ThruLines had identified two more children of Latimer-Snoddy, and also showed Hiram as a sibling, not a cousin.

On this first pass, I didn’t note that the first two Latimer-Snoddy children were born in Arkansas in 1857 and 1859. The other three were born in Texas in 1866, 1870, and 1875.

This was looking promising. Ella was born in November 1861.

November 2019

Now I was moving out of the discovery phase and tiptoeing into confirmation, verification and if need be, falsification. A first step was to manually cross-reference the matrix of matches, inspired by the Genetic Affairs AutoClusters.

Note that these relationships are independent of any tree; whether or not I had any idea where they belonged on the tree doesn’t affect the fact of these shared DNA matches.

*Caveat: This doesn’t necessarily mean that all identified matches share the exact same DNA – it just means they all share some common DNA. For example, although I haven’t yet proved it, I suspect my higher match with “LL” below (97/7) may be the result of shared DNA through a different family line.

In the top section, I show the shared matches of myself, my daughter and sister to our 2nd and 3rd known cousins who share Ella as a common ancestor. The numbers show the amount of cM and number of segments we each share.

You can see the evidence of random inheritance at work among myself, daughter and sister … I’m the only one who shares DNA with “LL;” my daughter and I share DNA with “AB” but not my sister; and my sister and I share DNA with “JC” but my daughter doesn’t.

The lower section shows thirteen matches with our newly-predicted 3rd and 4th cousins. Note that my sister and I each share measurable amounts of DNA with all thirteen, but not the same DNA. In fact, the only match we even share the same amount of DNA with is “JH” at 51 cM across 4 segments.

And moving over to our 2nd and 3rd cousins, each of the six shares DNA with at least three of the 3rd and 4th cousins. One, “LS” (with whom I’ve corresponded, we share the same great-grandparents) matches all thirteen.

Now I felt comfortable enough to formalize the butcher paper trees into print. On November 3rd, here were the results, this time with my actual cousin relationships annotated in green:

On November 8th, I ran another Genetic Affairs AutoCluster that produced similar results for the two highest-value matches among my 3rd and 4th cousins. This time, it projected (or confirmed, I’m not quite sure which) a tree relationship.

Everything seemed to fit. Ella’s birth in 1861 was entirely possible given the nine-year gap between Elizabeth/Eliza’s second child (James R.I., b. 1857 in Arkansas) and third (Julia Ann, b. 1866 in Texas, post-Civil War).

But I had some nagging questions that I might be missing or overlooking something obvious in my analysis, especially concerning my AutoCluster tool results and interpretation.

Inquiry to Genetic Affairs User Group on Facebook

Although I’m not a regular Facebook user, on November 11th I contacted the user group that is, or was, the go-to place for understanding the analysis tools at geneticaffairs.com. I introduced the “Ella issue” and then shared an abbreviated version of the merged pedigree diagram.

I asked if there was anything obviously wrong, or if there was any more analysis I could do with available tools to confirm Ella’s fit into this family.

I received two pertinent replies:

Commenter 1: I think you are making this too complicated. If you, JC, AB, LL, KM MC and LS all show up as common matches in most or several of the various match lists of KD, EJ, FJ RA CT ACA, AG, etc… AND not in any (or many) other cousin groups, then you are done.

Commenter 2: If you found 3rd cousins of MC and LS on the Snoddy side (descendants of Elizabeth’s siblings) that would be slam dunk.

I verified that was the case to Commenter 2.

Commenter 2’s reply: That’s pretty conclusive that you descend from Elizabeth’s parents, which is independent of John Lattimer (sic).

November 14th

As further confirmation, I ran another AutoCluster report. Below is a re-creation of the “Latimer” cluster. I’ve edited the left column to replace the names of shared matches with either “Ella Cousin-” or “J&L Latimer-” preceding the initials and shared centimorgans for each match. (Don’t ask me why I used J&L rather than J&E … that statute of limitations expired long ago.)

As conclusive as this seems, there’s still the lingering mystery of … why? what? who? when? where?

And as for the title metaphor … applying DNA tools can grow your tree, develop a broader network of related cousins, and help correct not-so-obvious errors in specific branches.

The story continues; the proof marches on. Thanks for your indulgence.

Postscripts

(1) I asked my only surviving maternal uncle to provide a sample to AncestryDNA. Results came back in December 2019 and provided even more confirmation of this analysis. Here’s my uncle’s ThruLine report of shared matches with Common Ancestors decending from Elizabeth Snoddy’s father, John Robert Snoddy (my uncle is the good-lucking young guy under Elizabeth H. Snoddy):

Note: J.R. Snoddy is my uncle’s 3rd great-grandfather, my 4th. And Ella’s inferred maternal grandfather.

As a bonus, I get a ThruLines prediction for my 6th great-grandparents on both my Latimer and Snoddy lines, as well as all other of my maternal lines.

(2) Six months after I completed the DNA portion of Ella’s story, Ancestry pulled the plug on allowing Genetic Affairs to pull data from Ancestry trees and match lists. Dana Leeds herself lamented the impact:

(3) But then just like that, six years later ... it doesn’t quite justify the 36 days it’s taken me to produce this post, but somewhat ironically, a fitting way to conclude it; from Dana Leeds’ 7 March 2025 newsletter:

Link to Ancestry video on YouTube announcing new Matches by Cluster. If the link doesn’t work, search on the Ancestry YouTube channel for Using Ancestry DNA to Power Family History | RootsTech Demo. The Clustering Tool is the last two minutes of the video.

SCREENSHOT ONLY - not a live link. But it looks familiar, doesn’t it? If there’s any justice in the genealogy world, Evert-Jan Blom should be banking it.

Before 2018

My two grandmothers died within eight months of each other in 2002 (my maternal, “Mom,” at age 89) and 2003 (my paternal, “Grandmother Stockdale,” a month shy of 96).

Following their deaths, my younger sister and I ended up with an unexpected repository (just shy of a trove) of both family’s photographs, albums, scrapbooks, scraps, and various other I-wonder-why-she-kept-these. Credit to my sister for, even then, starting to compile what would become the roots of our Stockdale-Armstrong tree.

My only contribution in the subsequent years was to scan and attempt to organize these genealogy ‘assets.’ By the end of 2003 I had scanned representative collections of the best of the photos and copied them onto two CDs for distribution (meaning the U.S. Postal System) to our few cousins on our respective sides of the family.

Please take my word for it that the Howdy Folks graphic above, created by Grandmother Stockdale in the 1930s, served as the background label of the “Stockdale Family Album” CD, equivalent to that for the Armstrong’s. (And with that, the ‘organizer’ admits he can’t find the expletive-deleted thing.)

I should also say that what limited family-beyond-grandparents history I knew prior to scanning all this stuff was the fact that I knew Grandmother Stockdale’s maiden name was Eitelman. I also knew that I got my middle name from my great-grandfather, Edward Eitleman. And I knew that the Eitelman’s came from Germany, probably before 1900.

And I distinctly remember going to their house in Fort Worth, Texas – the same house I would learn later was the birthplace of my father, his sister, his brother, and their mother. I associate rye bread with bacon for breakfast with both my great-grandparents and Fort Worth.

I knew this about my great-grandparents because I was fortunate enough to actually know and remember them – even without the photos.

Until six years ago, that was all the family history I knew and more than I really needed.

August 2018 and My DNA Test

Here’s where I credit my sister for staying with the family tree effort through the years. She started with an early pre-online version of Family Tree Maker in the 90s, then moved online with Ancestry around 2010.

In 2018 she ordered an Ancestry DNA test and, not that I knew anything about it – or cared – a couple months later she ordered one for me. My results arrived that August.

That was August of 2018 when I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My sister lived outside of Fort Worth in Texas, where I’m more or less from.

That same month, I: a) gave notice to leave my job after months of internal conflict; 2) put my house on the market; and 3) started moving stuff into storage since I didn’t know for sure what I was going to do next – retire, look for another job, stay in New Mexico, move back to Texas, crawl under a rock and dig? I gave a passing glance at my DNA results and put them in a file to look at … whenever, and wherever, they were unpacked.

Whenever came along in early 2019 after I had moved all of my stuff from storage in Albuquerque back to Texas. Wherever turned out to be the guest room in the home of my said sister and her husband. That’s when I finally looked closely at not just my DNA results, but the family tree that my sister had maintained all these years on Ancestry.com.

And a couple of absorbing questions arose that propelled me on my way down this family history road and onto what’s become a rather passionate personal obsession.

1. Had I Married (and Divorced) My Cousin?

I married my high school sweetheart in 1978. We had one child, a daughter, and divorced in 1993. Neither of us remarried. Because of our wonderful daughter (superlative adjectives resisted), we’ve been able to maintain a familial-ish relationship despite our differences.

I vaguely remembered a conversation that she (my ex-) and I had with my Mom Armstrong back in the ‘70s. As I recall we were sitting in Mom’s kitchen in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and Mom casually dropped that her granny’s last name was Latimer.

Which also happens to be my daughter’s mother’s maiden name. What a coincidence! Life proceeded.

But in early 2019, living with my sister and having her walk me through her/our family tree, it occurred to me that if Mom’s maiden name was Latimer, I must be related to a Latimer – other than the Latimer I had married. Hmm.

I was hooked. My future beckoned.

My sister had documented the Latimer branch of Mom’s tree as:

As I started to work on my own Ancestry tree, I quickly realized that Albert H. Latimer was a big deal! In addition to having had (at least) three wives and (at least) nineteen documented children, and warranting a “Famous Memorial” on FindAGrave, Albert Latimer was one of the fifty-nine co-signers of the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence – 4 days before the Alamo. A true “Texas Patriot!”

So I had bragging rights for at least one of my tree branches! And I had the answer to the first necessary question as to whether my ex-wife and I shared a Common (Latimer) Ancestor. I was off and runnin’ up that ancestral hill!

But … the more I tried to document the relationship connecting Albert Hamilton Latimer with my grandmother’s granny Ella Latimer, the more inconsistencies appeared.

My 2nd great-grandmother Ella Latimer Henry was known and well-documented within the family. I have the bible presented to Ella, with an inscription by her son (“Uncle Bud,” as Mom referred to him), six weeks before she (Ella) died on 16 February 1920.

I’ve been to the small, hidden-from-the-road church cemetery outside of Leonard, Texas, where Ella and my 2nd great-grandfather Burr Hamilton Henry are buried. The cemetery is just thirty-five miles from Lone Oak, Texas, where Mom was born.

So I was confident I had the right Ella Latimer and Burr Hamilton Henry as my 2nd great-grandparents. And my Ancestry DNA match results supported that conclusion because I had close 2nd-3rd cousin matches whose trees showed Burr, Ella, and their seven children – same as my tree. (Actually, then it was still technically my sister’s tree that had “inspired” –ahem– my tree. Before I branched out on my own … rim shot!)

Ancestry showed those matches as sharing Burr and Ella as our Common Ancestors. And the Ancestry ThruLines projected Ella’s parents to be Albert Hamilton Latimer and Mary Jane Gattis. So that must be right, right?

Except they were not, in fact, right. Or even correct.

I had stumbled upon the discovery that there were two Ella Latimer’s documented as being born in either northeast Texas or western Arkansas in 1861 – mine was born 16 February 1861, whereas famous Albert’s Ella was born five weeks later on 25 March 1861. Beyond the name and birth year, nothing was the same.

My Ella married Burr Henry on 2 June 1880 in Paris, Lamar County, Texas, per county records. The other Ella married Wade Parks in Red River County, Texas, on 7 August 1885, most likely in Clarksville – only 30 miles due east of Paris, Texas.

My Ella Latimer Henry died in 1920 and is buried outside of Leonard, Fannin County, Texas – see above. Ella Latimer Parks died thirty-six years later in 1956 and is buried in Clarksville – 90 miles east of Leonard – see below.

So I was convinced that my 3rd great-grandfather Latimer was not the “Texas Patriot” Albert Latimer. I didn’t have a clue, at that point, how to get past this identity confusion that rippled back into my ancestral history. So I couldn’t work back up the tree to figure out if my daughter was, indeed, her own 4th, 5th, or 15th cousin.

Now I, and my commonly-ancestered 2nd and 3rd cousin descendants of Burr and Ella faced a second vexing question.

2. Who were Ella Latimer Henry’s parents?

To be continued.

Hint: think DNA.

• how/why colonists would travel between Philadelphia and Baltimore after 1775 (two-part);

• Quaker ‘shorthand’ markings in 18th-century Monthly Meeting minutes (two-part).

My AI tool of choice was the ChatGPT application for Mac using the Sequoia 15.2 operating system. The following recounting starts with my prompt question using the standard ChatGPT chat format, a short description of the context for my question, and then ChatGPT’s response in italics.

Then my response to … its …. response.

Prompt 1a. “During the revolutionary war how much was the area between Philadelphia and Baltimore affected?”

Context: My 5th great-grandparents, Thomas Stockdale from Bucks County, Pennsylvania province, and Mary Patrick from Baltimore, were married on the fifth of December 1776. Thus documented the minutes of the Gunpowder Monthly Meeting Society of Friends (Quakers) just north of Baltimore. Fifty-five Friends of both families witnessed Thomas and Mary joining hands, including at least one recognizable couple who traveled to Baltimore from Philadelphia, Thomas’s sister, Hannah, who had married Abel Fitzwater. Others were likely to have made the journey.

So I wondered … were those people crazy? There was a war going on, or so I’ve read.

ChatGPT’s Response (summarized)

Philadelphia’s Role and Impact:

1. Political and Strategic Hub: … largest city in the colonies, Continental Congresses, Declaration of Independence … viewed by British as key target, captured in 1777 …

2. Occupation and Hardship: … from September 1777 to June 1778, British troops requisitioned supplies, damaged property … strained loyalties among the people.

3. Valley Forge: … northwest of Philadelphia, not a battlefield but place Continental Army encamped, underwent significant training and discipline …

Baltimore’s Role and Impact:

1. Temporary Capital: In late 1776, the Continental Congress fled from Philadelphia to Baltimore to escape the advancing British … temporary capital from December 1776 to February 1777.

2. Military Support: Baltimore’s port played an essential role in supplying the war effort … hub for shipbuilding …

3. Relative Safety: … never occupied, but faced the economic pressures of war.

The Corridor Between Cities:

1. Military Movements: … the area between was frequently traversed by troops, supplies, and communications. Key roads, such as the King’s Highway (modern U.S. Route 1), were vital arteries for the war effort …

2. Local Population: … towns in this region saw an influx of troops and endured requisitions of food, livestock, and supplies by both American and British forces … residents often found themselves caught between loyalties …

3. Havre de Grace and Chesapeake Bay: … a critical resource area … British naval forces patrolled the bay … brought fear and destruction to some parts of the region.

Overall Impact:

• Economic Strain:

• Divided Loyalties:

• Strategic Importance: … [this] area was always under the shadow of war, even if not always directly engaged in conflict.

I was pleased with this general overview information, but I especially locked onto the mention of the King’s Highway – the 18th-century “Express Lane” through the colonies, as it were. Then I asked a follow-up question seeking a broader perspective:

Prompt 1b: “How would American colonists have traveled from Bucks County PA to Baltimore?”

Overland Travel (Most Common): … by horseback, wagon or foot, well-known roads and trails, Kings Highway primary route from Charleston South Carolina to Boston

• From Philadelphia … south to Chester, Pennsylvania, crossing into Delaware and Maryland; stops might include Wilmington in Delaware, Elkton in Maryland and Havre de Grace to reach Baltimore.

• Alternate Route … to avoid major roads due to conditions, tolls or military activity; one route westward to Lancaster Pennsylvania, then south to York, then on to Baltimore. Travel time: by horseback: 3-4 days (~30 miles/day); by wagon 5-7 days

Water Travel: … boat down the Delaware River from Bucks County to Philadelphia … down the river into Chesapeake Bay, portaging from river to bay, then boat to Baltimore Harbor. Travel time: 1-2 days depending on wind and water conditions

Combination of Land and Water Travel: combine travel by wagon or horseback to board ship from Philadelphia Baltimore via Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay.

Challenges and Considerations:

• Road conditions due to rain and mud

• Multiple Bridges and Ferries

• Cost, ships and wagons more expensive

• Dangers – bandits, British patrols and risk of accidents

Conclusion

Most travelers from Bucks County to Baltimore would have taken the King’s Highway, stopping in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Elkton, and Havre de Grace before reaching Baltimore. Horseback or wagon travel was the most common method, though water routes were an option for those with access to boats.

Now, I admit there’s nothing that’s surprising or informative that I couldn’t have found on my own using non-AI resources … like the Apple Maps app.

But I don’t believe I would’ve considered the land/water combination option. The AI response suggested something like this, perhaps something like this (if the red line was actually on the water all the way to Chesapeake Bay):

In my judgment, that’s a solid B for ChatGPT … especially considering that from start to finish (not including my own tortured map-making-marking) no more than 5-10 minutes.

Prompt 2a: In Quaker handwriting during the colonial period in America, what did "afores." mean?

In my attempt to transcribe the happy occasion of my 5th great-grandparents’ marriage ceremony, I had a hard enough time going word-by-word to faithfully (something of a pun, if you make the connection) type letters that were written by hands 249 years, 1 month, 25 days ago. I wasn’t in the mood for abbreviations, and worse. Here’s what I was dealing with:

Before I move on to the response, notice that I’ve only marked two instances of afores. I had a good idea of what that meant. But check out the three marks in between those two, the checkmark with the back-facing curly-que thing – look at those as either letters or words and ask yourself, “what keys do I press for that?”

ChatGPT’s Response

Yep, they were all aforesaid’s. Don’t get me wrong, I love that at least these two and probably a handful of other of my paternal lines were Quakers (at least for a time) because you really can’t beat the documentation. And in peeking at a few other Monthly Meeting marriage reports, it does look as though there’s a lot of boilerplate, if you’ll excuse the metaphor, so once you transcribe one it’s almost like you’re one-and-done except for the names. And dates. And witnesses.

But there was a second abbreviation that I wanted to clarify:

Prompt 2b: In colonial days were male sons named after their father designated as “Dim” instead of “Jr”?

Check out this example in the list of witnesses, two named William Amos, with one annotated with what looks to be Dim as suffix:

ChatGPT’s Response

(In a word) … No. If you came across “Dim” in a colonial document, it may be a transcription error or an abbreviation for something else. Do you have a specific example in mind?

To which I replied: It's written after the name of a man and above the "m" in "Dim" there is a small enclosed circle.

ChatGPT again:

The abbreviation “Dim” with a small enclosed circle above the “m” is not a common designation for “Junior” or any typical colonial naming convention. However, a few possibilities could explain this notation:

1. “Ditto” or Abbreviation for “Same”

• In some colonial documents, “Dim.” (or similar markings) might have been used as an abbreviation for “ditto” or “the same,” indicating that the person had the same name as someone previously mentioned.

To which I replied, to myself more than Chat, what it could designate is that there were two men there with the same name, whether they were necessarily the same family or not. This would avoid a misconception that the recorder erred, to make sure the count reconciled.

Overall I was pleased and not quite as skeptical about AI, at least in these four specific ChatGPT implementations.

Those good vibes lasted until this morning when ChatGPT failed massively. I’m pondering that one.

My sixteen surnames in Ahnentafel (1=Self; 2=Father; 3=Mother; 4=Father’s Father; etc.) order: Stockdale, Smith, Brogdon, Scott, Eitelman, Wöelfle, Wesson, Proctor, Armstrong, Ballard, Bacon, Short, Henry, Latimer, Morris, Dagley.

Places of birth

• Indiana – 3; Stockdale, Smith, Scott

• North Carolina – 1; Brogdon

• Ohio – 3; Eitelman, Wöelfle, Wesson

• Kentucky – 2; Proctor, Short

• Mississippi – 2; Armstrong, Dagley

• Missouri – 1; Bacon

• Arkansas – 1; Henry

• Texas – 3; Ballard, Latimer, Morris

Final resting places

• Indiana – 4; Stockdale, Smith, Brogdon, Scott

• Texas – 8; Eitelman, Wöelfle, Wesson, Proctor, Henry, Latimer, Morris, Dagley

• Oklahoma – 4; Armstrong, Ballard, Bacon, Short

Marriages

Paternal

STOCKDALE, John Nelson; born 1844 in Fayette County IN; died 1924 in Tipton IN; married Letitia Angelette Smith in 1863 in Tipton IN.

SMITH, Letitia Angelette; born 1844 in Hamilton County IN; died 1929 in Tipton IN; married John Nelson Stockdale in 1863 in Tipton IN.

BROGDON, William; born 1845 in Davie County NC; died 1923 in Tipton County IN; married Mary Jane Scott in 1868.

SCOTT, Mary Jane; born abt 1848 in Indiana.

EITELMAN, Michael Andrew; born 1855 in Cleveland OH; died 1943 in Fort Worth TX; married Elizabeth Wöelfle in 1876 in Cuyahoga County OH.

WÖELFLE, Elizabeth; born 1855 in Cleveland, OH; died 1920 in Fort Worth TX; married Michael A. Eitelman in 1876 in Cuyahoga County OH.

WESSON, Miley Barton; born 1843 in Chillicothe OH; died 1910 in Fort Worth TX; married Alice Bush Proctor in 1880 probably in Springfield MO.

PROCTOR, Alice Bush; born 1860 in Danville, KY; died 1887 in Fort Worth TX; married Miley Barton Wesson in 1880 probably in Springfield MO.

Maternal

ARMSTRONG, George W.; born 1852 in Tishomingo MS; died 1916 in Duncan OK; married Martha Frances Ballard in 1882 in Eastland County TX.

BALLARD, Martha Frances; born 1865 in McLennan County TX; died 1938 in Walters, OK; married George W. Armstrong in 1882 in Eastland County TX.

BACON, Robert John Payes; born 1848 in Missouri; died 1917 in Grady County OK; married Sarah M. Short in 1872 in Stoddard MO.

SHORT, Sarah M.; born 1852 in Kentucky; died 1919 in Marlow, OK; married Robert John Payes Bacon in 1872 in Stoddard MO.

HENRY, Burr Hamilton; born 1856 in Bentonville AR; died 1916 in Fannin County TX; married Ella Latimer in 1880 in Paris TX.

LATIMER, Ella; born 1861 probably in Texas; died 1920 in Fannin County TX; married Burr Hamilton Henry in 1880 in Paris TX.

MORRIS, John Thomas; born 1844 in Titus County TX; died 1908 in Lone Oak TX; married Mary Ann Dagley1865 in Hunt County TX in 1865.

DAGLEY, Mary Ann; born 1847 in Tippah County MS; died 1924 in Lone Oak TX; married John Thomas Morris in Hunt County TX in 1865.

I’m looking forward to sharing some of my family stories, better understand the wonders of DNA applied to genealogy, and contribute to the community.