{"id":1418,"date":"2020-06-14T17:30:34","date_gmt":"2020-06-14T17:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/?p=1418"},"modified":"2020-06-14T17:30:34","modified_gmt":"2020-06-14T17:30:34","slug":"the-caribbean-connection-an-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/?p=1418","title":{"rendered":"The Caribbean Connection…An Update"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Last week I blogged about my strange experience looking for my Hollingshead family going from England to Barbados to Pennsylvania\/New Jersey.\u00a0 I was desperately searching for a document to show proof that my ancestor, Daniel, was the individual in all of those locations.\u00a0
Some odd happening occurred \u2013 a dream, an undelivered email, an internet site popping up after the electricity had been turned off\u00a0 \u2013 put me back on track.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what happened this week\u2026
Although the member of my local genealogy association that I had reached out to for help in connecting with a presenter\u2019s email was returned as undeliverable, I used the same email address and reached the person I was seeking a few minutes later.\u00a0 She responded she was unavailable but when get back with me soon.
I\u2019ve signed up for a British seminar online that I found by \u201clooking small\u201d as instructed in my dream. It\u2019s scheduled for Friday and I\u2019m eagerly awaiting it.
Being impatient, I had a hunch that the dream meant more than just the upcoming lecture.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know why I did the following, but I did and I\u2019m glad of that.\u00a0 I decided to check Ancestry.com hints for Daniel.\u00a0 I don\u2019t use the hint option very often.\u00a0 I do sometimes if I\u2019m starting a new search for a client but for my own tree, not so much.\u00a0 In case you aren\u2019t aware, your Ancestry hints never really leave you.\u00a0 If you click \u201cIgnore\u201d that isn\u2019t the same as delete \u2013 which isn\u2019t an option.\u00a0 When you Ignore, it simply goes to the Hint section and is placed under that heading.\u00a0 The other categories are Undecided and Accepted.\u00a0 Accepted hints are all those that are showing in your Facts section, Undecided are those you can\u2019t make up your mind about after you\u2019ve reviewed it.\u00a0\u00a0
In my Undecided section, I had about 15 hints and most were completely wrong \u2013 wrong locations (like Ohio and I was searching before there was even an Ohio territory), wrong time period (like the 1900\u2019s and I needed 1600-1700\u2019s), or wrong names (like Hollins).\u00a0 There were 2 interesting hints, however, that I clicked on and both were from a DNA relative I\u2019ve corresponded with in the past.\u00a0 I trust her work and she always uses citations!\u00a0 The hints were notes she had taken from old texts she had found in her local library.\u00a0 Lucky lady, she lives close to an awesome research library.. I wanted to find the original books to check her notes so I did a Google book search (on Google, click the \u201cOther\u201d box and then click \u201cBooks\u201d is the easiest to find and lo and behold, this is what I discovered:
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Alfred Mathews. History of Wayne, Pike and Monroe Counties, Pennsylvania.  Philadelphia:  R. T. Peck & Co,1886, p. 1156.

Even though this is exactly what I\u2019m looking for regarding the route of immigration, there is no proof, other than that Stroud J. Hollinshead, a likely descendant, shared the info for his personal biographical sketch.  Sigh!  He even got some of the facts wrong.  The second paragraph is a hot mess; How could Daniel, the first ancestor, be killed at the Battle of Blenheim and then hold public office in Sussex County, New Jersey?  Quite a feat, I say.  The date of birth is off by a few years.  Didn\u2019t mention the first wife, Ann Alexander, from whom I\u2019m descended but does mention their child, Mary, as the daughter of the second wife, Thomasin.  Mary married a Duer; according to this bio, so did Mary\u2019s stepmom after the death of Daniel.  Hmm, but something isn\u2019t quite correct there, either.  Thomasin was a female and the information states she married a Jane Deuer.  I suspect they meant John as this would have been the early 1700\u2019s.  
Then I found the following interesting story:
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Rev. John C. Rankin, DD.  The Presbyterian Church in Basking Ridge, NJ. Jersey City:  John H. Lyon, 1872., p.7.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>\n\n\n\n

I knew Daniel was flipping property but I didn\u2019t know that he had sold to a James Alexander of New York.  That peaked my interest as his first wife was an Alexander and I\u2019ve not been successful in locating her family.  So I read up on James Alexander and Lord Stirling.  The family liked to hide among other Alexander families in Ireland and France where they fled after picking the wrong political side in Scotland.  Scholars haven\u2019t been able to sort through all the stories the family told in the documentation they left behind of who was related to whom as the same individual\u2019s tales changed from time to time.  Then, there\u2019s the whole timely topic of race relationships.  Lord Stirling made his money partially from the slave trade while father James was alive and didn\u2019t object.  My Daniel, however, appeared to have not been in favor of slavery.  He brought a slave family with him to New Jersey but it appears there was manumision.  I told myself (no proof here!) that Daniel was empathetic as he was purportedly an indentured servant, though others felt this showed he was of the Quaker faith.  Yet, as I learned more about James Alexander, I discovered that Daniel\u2019s second wife Thomasin left several slaves to her children when she died so the couple may not have the same shared beliefs or, I\u2019m completely wrong about Daniel. More research definitely needed.
The Presbyterian Church reference provides another important clue.  Some believe that Daniel was Quaker but I\u2019ve found nothing to support that.  He and his children were baptized in the Church of England in England and Barbados,  Some of the Alexander land was later donated to the Presbyterian Church.  That\u2019s not surprising since James was a Scott and probably of that faith.  Further reading informed me there were no Quakers in the the area when Daniel relocated there.  If he had been a devout Quaker, he would have likely settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania as the Duer\u2019s initially did.  This would explain why I\u2019ve never found a Quaker record for Daniel.
Although all of this is interesting to my research, the last weird occurrence happened while I was reading online.  My husband and I share an office and he decided he was going to clean his workspace.  He is a piler and I\u2019m a filer \u2013 he has piles everywhere and I have everything sorted in a variety of devices (handing file folders, in\/out baskets, file cabinets, tubs in folders, etc.).  As I was deeply involved in an old text my husband said, \u201cIs this yours?\u201d  He was holding a CD.  I haven\u2019t used CD\u2019s in I don\u2019t know how long so I shook my head no.  \u201cShould I toss it?\u201d  he asked.  \u201cWhat\u2019s on it?\u201d I replied.  \u201cThe theme song of Pirates of the Caribbean.\u201d  I thought he was kidding me.  \u201cYeah, right.\u201d I said.  \u201cSeriously,\u201d he replied.  He thought I had recorded it to help me with my search.  (Photo above \u2013 you can see it\u2019s scratched so it\u2019s not new.) Nope, wasn\u2019t I but somewhere in the great beyond there\u2019s a tech savvy spirit with a sense of humor who is helping me along.  Keep it coming!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I blogged about my strange experience looking for my Hollingshead family going from England to Barbados to Pennsylvania\/New Jersey.\u00a0 I was desperately searching for a document to show proof that my ancestor, Daniel, was the individual in all of those locations.\u00a0 Some odd happening occurred \u2013 a dream, an undelivered email, an internet … Continue reading “The Caribbean Connection…An Update”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[857,858,82,854,856,855,859,572],"class_list":["post-1418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-relationships","tag-ann-alexander","tag-cd","tag-duer","tag-hollingshead","tag-james-alexander","tag-lord-stirling","tag-pirates-of-the-caribbean","tag-synchronocity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1418"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1419,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418\/revisions\/1419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}