It’s Saturday night and for the first time in months, I actually have time to play along with Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun over at Genea-Musings.
Tonight’s mission is:
1) What year was your paternal grandfather born? Â Divide this number by 100 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your “roulette number.”
2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ancestral name list (some people call it an “ahnentafel”). Who is that person?
3) Tell us three facts about that person in your ancestral name list with the “roulette number.”
4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook status or a Google Stream post, or as a comment on this blog post.
5) If you do not have a person’s name for your “roulette number” then spin the wheel again – pick a grandmother, or yourself, a parent, a favorite aunt or cousin, or even your children!
1) My paternal grandfather was born in 1906. Dividing by 100 gives us 19.06, rounded to 19.
2) The person with that number on my ancestral name list is my great-great grandmother Jane Summerville (1851-1884).
3) Three facts about Jane:
- She was the daughter of Christopher Summerville and Elizabeth Humphreys. She was actually the second of their daughters to be named Jane. Her elder sister died on board the ship that brought the family to Canada in 1846.
- Jane married Harrison Thomas (1846-1878) in Sharon, Ontario, on June 9, 1874. They had two daughters – Gertrude Ethel (1875-1971) and Maude Evelyn (ca. 1878- ca. 1879). Harrison died on December 5, 1878, leaving Jane a widow.
- Jane moved to Uxbridge, Ontario in 1879 with Gertrude to keep house for her brother John who had been widowed earlier in the year. Her younger daughter, Maude, had died in March. His son Herb was twelve and Gertrude was devoted to him her entire life. While in Uxbridge, Jane developed a close friendship with Dr. Joseph Bascom and his wife, Anna Workman. Anna’s cousin Tom Workman had married a cousin of Harrison Thomas’. When Jane died in 1884, the Bascoms adopted eight-year-old Gertrude.
