RLP 261: Malissa Welch – Correcting Incorrect Parents

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 261 Malissa Welch Correcting incorrect parents Welcome to research Like a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited Genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at FamilyLocket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a Pro A Genealogist Guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion Volume Research Like a Pro with dna. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (42s):
Today’s episode is brought to you by find a Grave dot com. the best place to search online for burial information for your family, friends and famous people at Find A Grave, you’ll find details about cemeteries and individual memorials for the people buried in those cemeteries. Hello, everybody Welcome to research. Like a Pro today.

Diana (60s):
Hi Nicole. how are you doing?

Nicole (1m 3s):
Fabulous. And you, what are you working on?

Diana (1m 5s):
Well, I was returning to my Hopson Milner through line that’s incorrect for Cynthia Dillard and looking at some of the matches there again and doing some work on evaluating those, trying to see why people are continuing to have him as a possible father for her in their trees. And it’s so interesting because now with the new side view technology, you can see which side, not only your DNA matches on, but also all the, the shared matches with them. So you know, one of my key test takers is Lucrecia, who I’ve talked about before. And she has some of these odd through lines and I was looking at those again and it was very interesting because the Dillard Roon line is on her maternal side and a lot of these matches were on various sides.

Diana (2m 0s):
So say for instance she had a match and I was looking at shared matches between her and this match to see if they were part of a genetic network and half of them were one side and half of them were the other side. They weren’t even all the same. So anyway, it was just a little interesting to see how that was playing out.

Nicole (2m 20s):
Such a great use for side view to help us find these through lines that have both sides and clearly that’s wrong.

Diana (2m 28s):
Yes. And one of them had a whole different common ancestor suggested for this group of matches. One of them only had two shared matches and they were really small. Just so many different scenarios. So it’s always kind of fun to go and try to disprove as well as prove an ancestry through line. So anyway, So I was So. I was revisiting that a bit,

Nicole (2m 50s):
Right. Well we’re excited for this month we have our Research Like, a Pro case study with Alice Childs. She’s an accredited Genealogist on our team who will be be sharing her case study who were the parents of David r Matheson. And she will be talking about his immigration from Nova Scotia to California where he later married and had children and died young at age 42. And then discovering who his parents were because like it always is, there’s a lot known about his later life and not much known about his early life. So it’ll be neat to see how she used D n A to identify his ancestral family. And of course our Research Like, a Pro study group is this fall and registration is ongoing. So if you’d like to join us, please register.

Nicole (3m 31s):
We’d love to have you and we’d love to have those with experience with your Research Like, a Pro process. Join us as a peer group leader with complimentary registration and you’ll be responsible for giving feedback to about five or six other peers. And please join our newsletter to receive updates about our new content and any sales or discounts that we have going on. We’d love to see you at some of the upcoming conferences, the Association of Professional Genealogist conferences coming up in October. And they have a virtual option and then they have the in-person option in Salt Lake City. So that would be fun to see you there.

Diana (4m 7s):
Well, let’s get to our topic for the day. Today we are going to talk about Correcting, a set of incorrect parents for Malissa Welchers, who is one of my great great grandmothers and has been a Brick wall or was a Brick wall. And we have since broken through part of her line and we’re just gonna talk all about how we made some mistakes as baby Genealogists. We were pretty good, I feel like Nicole as we were analyzing and putting our family trees together. But this one was a tricky one and I think that we have some logical reasons for why we attached the wrong parents to poor Malissa.

Diana (4m 51s):
And I had written about this previously and I think we probably even did a podcast about this previously when we were talking about her, but she is one of the Ancestors that you worked on and actually figured out the corrections. So it’s always fun to talk about her since she’s one of our Ancestors we both researched.

Nicole (5m 11s):
Yeah. And part of the tricky part was confusion about what her name was. So that can often be why there is a a question.

Diana (5m 18s):
Absolutely. And we’ll talk about that a little bit later in this podcast.

Nicole (5m 22s):
Right. Well, early in the Welch research, a distant cousin had sent us some scanned pages from the Harris family Bible. And that Bible included a lot of helpful births, marriage, and deaths. So this was wonderful because before that time period there weren’t very many births recorded. And this was on the frontier in the American West. So a family source, like a family bible is so providential. And the Bible pages listed Melissa’s birth and death dates. So that was great. And her marriage to John c Harris and the birth of her children. So it said that Malissa Welch Harris was born on 10 September, 1844. Soon after her birth, her parents, George and Lucinda Welch began their migration from South Carolina to Pickens County, Alabama.

Nicole (6m 8s):
They probably took the old federal road from Georgia and Alabama for part of the time. And this was like a modern day highway for our Ancestors. Of course, the road wasn’t paved and would’ve been muddy in the rain and dusty and dry weather and then deep ruts in the road would’ve made for a bumpy road and many people probably walked rather than riding in the wagon.

Diana (6m 27s):
Well, sometime after 1850, the Welch family migrated further west to Texas. And by 1865 Malissa had made her way to Burleson County, Texas where she married John c Harris. She had four babies in the next five years, Martha, Margaret James and Millie Jane. And then sometime between 1865 and 1870, they moved to the neighboring county of Milam where the whole family was enumerated for the first time in 1870. Millie was one of those situations where she was born in December, six months after the enumerator visited the Harris household. So she’s not listed in the census.

Diana (7m 7s):
So Malissa and John Harris just joined all of my other paternal relatives who ended up in Texas by about 18 60, 18 70. And those years are tough researching in Texas. You know, if you think about it, it was the end of the Civil War. Things were a mess, records weren’t great and they moved around a lot, don don’t think we have one of our ancestral couples in Texas who just stayed put in the same county where they originally moved to. They were moving all over the place, usually within, you know, one or two counties. They didn’t move like to the far east or the far west or south, but they did move.

Diana (7m 47s):
And so it made it tricky. In fact, do you remember this marriage record we couldn’t even find because we didn’t even think to look in Burson County. It just popped up as a hint on FamilySearch one day after my dad had looked for it for years. I had looked for it for years and it’s cuz it was in a whole different county. So

Nicole (8m 4s):
I was just thinking about that because we didn’t know they lived in Burleson at all. And who knows why they went there to get married. Maybe John lived there, maybe Malissa lived there, maybe they worked there, who knows why they went there. Maybe there was a family member who lived there and they wanted to get married at their house. Who knows. But all we had known was that they lived in Milam County in Robertson counties and didn’t realize that they had gone there and how providential, you know, it’s funny to use that word twice in one podcast, but it, the Family Bible and the FamilySearch hints both were very providential for researching this family. They were.

Diana (8m 41s):
And I think we sometimes now take it for granted that these hints pop up on Ancestry or FamilySearch, but back when we were doing this research, that wasn’t the case. You know, you really had to go up and look through the microfilm maybe for each county. There just weren’t as many things online. And so as it gets easier and easier, maybe we get a little bit lazy because we think everything should be there as a hint for us and it’s not

Nicole (9m 8s):
Well. And I think those merit records must have just barely been indexed because it’s not like we hadn’t searched in the databases for Texas marriages and stuff. So it seems like it had just recently been added when it showed up as a hint, you know?

Diana (9m 21s):
Absolutely. And we do have so many more things now that are indexed, which is wonderful. You know, we add to that body of indexed records every day as well as digitized records every day on FamilySearch. So it’s pretty neat.

Nicole (9m 35s):
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Nicole (10m 16s):
So start your search today at find a Grave dot com.

Diana (10m 19s):
Let’s talk more about the time in Milam County of the Harris family. You know, Malissa continued having children. She had four more children, Parlee Dove Bell and Sophia. A lot of girls here and you know, we have mentioned Margaret Cinderella before, which I love. They all had really fun middle names and that was always one of my favorites, the Margaret Cinderella. It’s just fun too. Look at names and I love the, some of these names, they’re just beautiful,

Nicole (10m 49s):
Right? I was thinking like Parlee, I had never heard that name before, doing family history research, but it was so, so much more common in the 18 hundreds,

Diana (10m 58s):
Right? And Bell, I think Bell’s another one that’s fun that we have a few bells or Isabelle’s in our family history. But the family at this time, you know, you think about what it would’ve been like 1880 in Texas and it was agricultural. John was working as a farmer and it’s kind of fun because there was an agricultural census in 1880 and they were supposed to report what they produced in 1879. And So I took a look at that and they made 300 pounds of butter. 200 dozen of eggs were produced from a hundred hens. That’s a lot of gathering of eggs and making butter, which would’ve been something Malissa would’ve been doing along with all of those children.

Diana (11m 44s):
So, you know, it’s just fun to look at those agricultural censuses and see exactly what was going on on this homestead.

Nicole (11m 52s):
That’s so great. Well, in 1885 Malissa bore her son Sam. And on December 29th, 1886, her last child doc. And that’s my second great-grandfather and your great-grandfather. Well sadly, Malissa died just one week after Doc’s birth on January 5th, 1887. and you know, reading this now, I just, I have researched Melissa’s early life so much that it never even crossed my mind that she died right after Doc was born. Cause I haven’t really focused on that time of her life. But how sad. Well, doc never knew his mother and perhaps that was why years later he reported her name as Lizzie Welch on his sister’s death certificate.

Nicole (12m 35s):
His own death certificate stated Elizabeth Welch as his mother. He died at the Eastern State Hospital in Nita, Oklahoma where he had lived for the past 17 years. And the informant for his personal information was hospital records that Doc would’ve provided, although the name Elizabeth conflicted with the name of Malissa on the marriage record, the 1870 and 1880 censuses and the family Bible pages, we just reasoned that those were nicknames or perhaps a middle name. So we used the name Malissa Elizabeth Welch in our family tree database.

Diana (13m 12s):
Right. It just seemed to make sense. You know, she had middle names for all of her children, why wouldn’t she have a middle name? And Elizabeth maybe seemed more like a formal name and she just went by Malissa or Alyssa. You know, it’s just one of the things we do. We try to figure out names best we can. Well Doc was my great-grandfather and So I had started with his information. I had that death certificate and saw that Elizabeth Welch and we reasoned that she’d be in the 1850 census. All of her later life said she was born in South Carolina and there was a perfect candidate for an Elizabeth Welch in 1850 in the family of Meredith Welch and Susannah Welch.

Diana (13m 56s):
So we attached them as her parents. She was the right age, the right name, the right location. And we continued working on Meredith Welch, but really could not make any progress on the Welch line. So that was one of those we just put by the wayside to pick up later.

Nicole (14m 15s):
Seems so logical. Well, returning to this research later on, I decided to work on the Welch family and I, I gathered up what we had on Meredith Welch. We had all these pages that I had printed from a researcher who sent us information about the Meredith Welch family. And this time around I did another search in the 1850s census for instead of Elizabeth Welch, I looked for Malissa Welch because I had noticed that she went by Malissa in all of her early records in the marriage and in the censuses. And sure enough, I found a Malissa Welch living with George and Lucinda and several siblings in Alabama. And so when I researched all those siblings and I found that they also migrated to Milam County, just like Malissa had, where she married John c Harris in that area and they lived there in the 1870 and 1880 censuses.

Nicole (15m 8s):
I’ve really started to feel that this was the right family for Malissa. Additional research found Melissa’s mother to be Lucin Drella Keaton. You know, the 1850 census just listed her as Lucinda. But then I had found a probate record for William Keaton listing his daughter as Lucin Drella. And so that was exciting because we knew Margaret Cinderella probably was then named after her grandmother. And it really made me love the name Cinderella even more as a middle name for Margaret. Well this Centrella Keaton was the daughter of William Keaton of Anderson District, South Carolina. And this opened up great new avenues for researching the Welchs and the Keaton and furthering the Welch and Keaton line.

Diana (15m 53s):
Yeah, I think this just really speaks to learning by experience and also this whole idea that we deal with a lot of migration, really tracking the family. Where did everybody end up and finding all those siblings there in Milam County was huge. But we didn’t realize that at the time. We just didn’t know that was a strategy that you could use. And Welch, I don’t know that it’s that common, but it’s also not a really uncommon surname. So sometimes you don’t make the connections, even when you see the same surname on a census or in the same area. You sometimes just think, oh that’s just another family.

Diana (16m 33s):
You know, it’s just some of the beginner mistakes that we made. But when you finally put that together, it all made sense. I think when pieces of the puzzle fit together, we kind of know that.

Nicole (16m 45s):
Yeah, it’s so interesting now to think back on that. And now, you know, if I were working on this again, I would want to follow forward Meredith Welch’s daughter Elizabeth and see what happened to her because you know, Tracy and her forward in time could reveal that she had a different family and children and you can kind of eliminate her as a candidate for our Elizabeth slash Malissa. But one of the main things we did was decide that her name wasn’t Elizabeth. We decided that through some other records we saw that her name was listed as Lizzie, not actually Lizzie, but that it was just kind of a misunderstanding. And ours branch of the family that it said Lizzie and, and who knows who the informant was for Doc’s death certificate.

Nicole (17m 25s):
I mean it said hospital records, but it could have been a relative who gave those hospital records in the first place. So we don’t really know for sure who was the person providing it. But yeah, I think yeah, after we realized that her name and all those early records was Malissa, that really helped us to focus in on searching for a Malissa instead of an Elizabeth.

Diana (17m 44s):
I think that those two could be mixed up so easily, Lizzie versus Lizzie and going to two different first names. It really speaks to not just taking one little record or one piece of information and then hanging your hat just on that, trying to gather up everything. And when you see conflicts like this was a major conflict than name, you’ve gotta do more research and you’ve gotta do more analysis of what you feel like would be the best information. And obviously the family Bible pages is where her name was. Malissa is really good as well as those censuses, you know, those were things that were created during her lifetime, whereas the death certificates were later by children that didn’t know her.

Diana (18m 33s):
You know, doc never knew his mother, even though he was the informant of his sister’s death certificate and he put Lizzie on there. So very interesting. And it’s possible, even if Doc was giving the information to the hospital, he could have said Lizzie and they wrote in Elizabeth,

Nicole (18m 50s):
You know? Yeah, that’s true. That’s probably what happened. Cuz you know how many times that happened to your dad with his name being Bobby and not Robert. People would just write down Robert, assuming Bobby was a nickname.

Diana (19m 1s):
Exactly. And he’s in one of the censuses as Robert, he was not Robert. So that’s another thought that we sometimes just don’t know if someone keeping the record just the sites to put their own spin on the name because they know better Obviously’s. So

Nicole (19m 17s):
True. Well I had to go look up Meredith Welch on FamilySearch now and just see, has anyone figured out that family? It was always such a Brick wall. We tried so hard to figure out who these people were and trace them forward or backward with no success. This Meredith Walsh and Susannah and they had a few children including Elizabeth and still looks like it’s a Brick wall there. I don’t see any progress made on adding information about that Elizabeth Welch born in Sumter County, South Carolina and anytime past 1850 So I wonder if she’s passed away as a child or if no one has researched her life going forward.

Diana (19m 54s):
And she very well could have passed away as a child or she could have married and be going by a totally different surname. And if there’s no marriage record it would be really hard to track her. Often those records where you figure out the maiden name come from records much later in life. Like when a child dies who has a death certificate and they name the mothers maiden name. So sometimes in those instances it could be easier to work backwards from known information. Yeah. Which is what we usually do than tracing a person forward, particularly a female if they change names and you just have no idea. Yeah. There’s no marriage records saying who she is anymore. True. Because there’s would be a few Elizabeth out there to research.

Nicole (20m 36s):
Yeah, that’s interesting. On this family that I’m looking at, you know, Meredith Welch and apparently he was married three times and it looks like Susannah Welch died after the 1850 census. And it looks like he may be married another wife again and had a child who does appear on the 1860 census, but only just with his mom. So it makes you wonder what happened to the father and all of the siblings because Elizabeth Wedge would’ve only been 15 and I wonder if there was just some kind of plague or something that came through and the whole family passed away, who knows. Or maybe they went to live with relatives and she took on a new surname.

Diana (21m 14s):
Right. We had that happen where they’re just listed under the name of the head of household and they basically become lost in the census.

Nicole (21m 22s):
Right. Yeah. And although I’d love to trace them, I would wanna use DNA and since they’re not actually my relatives, it would be pretty hard. It would just be neat to be able to say, and look, this is definitely not the right person because she grew up and got married to someone else and blah blah, blah. Exactly.

Diana (21m 38s):
I

Nicole (21m 39s):
Agree. don don’t feel like we need that with this case because we’re so confident in seeing the whole family move together and associate with each other their neighbors on several censuses. We have Melissa’s mother living nearby her in 1970, then we have all the D N A matches, which was really neat to be able to put that all together later.

Diana (22m 1s):
Well, and I think going back on the Keaton line and being able to connect that as well was really helpful. Yeah. And the, the naming patterns, you know, the Cinderella, the loose Cinderella, that’s really key that that’s an unusual name. Yeah.

Nicole (22m 16s):
And one note on that name is that someone else had transcribed the probate record for William Keaton and had just put the name Illa instead of Lucin Rilla because the handwriting was difficult to read. But when I read it, I knew I was looking for a Lucinda as the wife of George Welch. And so it was clear to me that it was Luc Rilla. Yeah.

Diana (22m 35s):
Which often happens because we know our family, we know what we’re looking for and the names become clear to us. Whereas someone who’s indexing or doesn’t know them, they’re about as clear as mud. And I’ve had many of those in instances where I just don’t know who the heck we are looking at. Well, if I were to take on this project with Meredith and they have an alternate name, Meredith Welch, there are a lot of siblings named here. And I would really look at his siblings and see if there was a migration pattern following forward because if Elizabeth did survive, you would think she would be going with her family. Maybe there would be something that would pop up about her.

Diana (23m 15s):
So there are lots of avenues for research, but I agree with you with the DNA evidence, we don’t need to worry about it anymore.

Nicole (23m 22s):
Well hopefully someone will figure out the rest of this research since we have abandoned it and moved on with our correct family. And

Diana (23m 30s):
I will note that George Welch is still a mystery. Yeah.

Nicole (23m 34s):
Still have challenge there.

Diana (23m 36s):
Melissa’s father, we still do not know where George exactly comes from or exactly where he fits in with all the welches in South Carolina. So, I,

Nicole (23m 46s):
Wish there were many.

Diana (23m 47s):
Yes. There’s more to do there for sure.

Nicole (23m 49s):
Yeah. And this is another case, just like my Dire project, where the trees are all tangled and there’s all kinds of different fathers attached to different welches at that time period. And it’s just because there was not a lot of direct evidence, there’s a lot of clues and people have put the clues together in different ways and leading to different family makeups and, and I have DNA matches going back to all kinds of different Welchs, but at certain points in the tree, I just have to realize their tree is probably just like kind a guess. So it’ll be another case of having two do a lot of documentary research to straighten things out.

Diana (24m 26s):
Right. And one of the things we could do would be to find a descendant of the Welch and do Y DNA testing. You know, find someone who could do that for us because Malissa had some brothers and perhaps one of them, you know, had that paternal line continued down. So that could be something in the future. Maybe there’s mitochondrial DNA test taker out there that comes straight down through Malissa. I mean, she had a ton of daughters. There should be someone that could do mitochondrial testing for us, but that wouldn’t really help us with George Welch. That would just give us information on the Keaton, which we already know. So

Nicole (25m 2s):
Yeah, and the Keaton, we were able to extend back one more generation, but that one still needs to be worked on too. And they were all living there in the south during the Revolutionary War, so it’d be neat to be able to figure out did any of them serve in the revolution. There was a William Keaton that did, but don don’t know if he’s the same one as ours. There’s a lot more to be done and it’s exciting to think about the possibilities for future research. And I have traced down some candidates for Y D N A testing on the Welch line. So it’d be nice to get that done. In fact, I sent out a test to one of them and he never took it. So I need to contact him again. She’s already thought about and see if he wanted to do that or what happens.

Diana (25m 40s):
So yeah. Well you’re already a step ahead.

Nicole (25m 42s):
Yeah, well I was gonna use it for my certification portfolio, but then I just decided that I wanted to work on something that was a little bit more solvable. So I could actually turn in my portfolio. So

Diana (25m 54s):
Good idea.

Nicole (25m 55s):
Chose a different one.

Diana (25m 56s):
Well, it’s been fun to talk again about Malissa. I think everyone needs to have a case like this in their family tree where you have to correct something because we learn so many lessons from it. Sometimes we learn the most when we, when we do an IT Oops and attach the incorrect information and then get to go back and figure it out. Hopefully everybody listening has some ideas about what you could do if you have a similar situation or just enjoyed listening to us talk about our mistake. So have a great week everybody, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Nicole (26m 28s):
Bye-bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email in box each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each of you and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.