RLP 358: Jemima Griggs and Joseph Knight Sr

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 358: Jemima Griggs and Joseph Knight Senior. 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 genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.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.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (48s):
Hi Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (50s):
Doing great. Just been working on artificial intelligence stuff and been making some really cool discoveries, so that’s been exciting. How about you? What have you been doing?

Diana (1m 2s):
I am working on trying to figure out the common ancestral couple of my Gephi graph clusters. And I am working on, you know, trying to find connections to Henderson WeatherFord’s birth family. And what I am finding is a lot of disconnected trees and I’m not finding any common surnames or locations in this, you know, I have about five clusters to explore. And so the first cluster I started on, I was hoping that really quickly I would find something and what this is telling me is that nobody knows this far back who their ancestor is or this could be like his mother and have no idea of a surname there.

Diana (1m 44s):
It could also be Clemsy Cline’s family and her mother, I have no idea of her surname, you know, ’cause this is the Weatherford-Cline graph. So anyway, I’m about to start on another cluster today, I’m hoping maybe I can find something there. But we’re talking, you know, early 1800s, late 1700s that I’m trying to find a family and they’re in the south. So we’ll see what happens. My future research might be just to continue working on these clusters or look for a Y-DNA Weatherford tester. I don’t know. But you’ve had situations like that, right? Where you just look and look for a most recent common ancestral couple and you just can’t find anything.

Nicole (2m 26s):
Yeah, I’ve had that and when I realized that it wasn’t coming to fruition, I just kind of decided, okay, I need to work on the matches of a different test taker because I think this particular test taker has a segment that goes back really early to like colonial times and I wanted to find a group of matches who had closer common ancestral couples. So that strategy helped and I found a different test taker who descended from the research subjects who had a cluster that went back to the hypothesized family that I was looking for for. So that was great.

Diana (3m 1s):
Interesting. Yeah, I do have, you know, myself and another test taker for this family. And so the problem is, well I could use my own matches to those are gathered that I could use for a Gephi graph. But the other test taker, I haven’t gathered those so I couldn’t do a graph with those. But I could explore and start just looking for groups that are further back on the Cline-Weatherford clusters or groups because on Ancestry I, I have a really good group of all the descendants of Clemsy Cline and Henderson Weatherford. So I could start working with shared matches.

Nicole (3m 37s):
Yeah,

Diana (3m 39s):
And I maybe will do that, but first I want to really make sure that I really can’t identify any of these clusters. And the fun thing has been that I have been using AI, been using Claude to really quickly gather the surnames, you know, by opening up the tree and then doing a screenshot, throwing that into Claude and then pasting that into Airtable. So gathering the surnames has been really fast and easy, which is fun.

Nicole (4m 3s):
That’s great. Sometimes it doesn’t show the whole surname. It’s annoying to me because it cuts it off. But I think they’ve been trying to fix that on Ancestry

Diana (4m 12s):
So far it it has been good.

Nicole (4m 15s):
Nice. Well for today’s announcements, we have a new upcoming webinar for our webinar series on June 10th from Beth Snyder and she will be talking about Discovering the Shrader Family through a Family Reunion Photograph. So this will be fun, it’ll be something a little different. She says that Lawrence & Leona Salsow, her husband’s grandparents had an old picture among their belongings from a family reunion. They also had a numbered list of the names and an overlay of the picture with the number of each person in the photo. The original objective was to determine how everyone was related and when the picture was made. And Beth ended up meeting a new cousin who helped with her research and so she named him as a co-researcher in her report.

Nicole (4m 59s):
He did additional work that she didn’t include in the report, but which took the line back a couple more generations. So we’ll be hearing from Beth and her cousin in this webinar on June 10th. And so topics will cover Nebraska, Census Records, and Old Photos. So this should be an interesting webinar and as usual, the research report written by the author will be shared as the handout. So we hope you’ll join us. Also, the next Research Like a Pro study group, begins August 27th. Registration will start on May 21st at 10:00 AM Mountain time and registration ends August 21st. So be thinking if you’re going to join us and if you’d like to be a peer group leader, just submit a research report that you’ve written to us that we can evaluate that and you can join our newsletter to receive our weekly newsletter on Mondays that includes podcast episodes and new videos, new blog posts that we’ve come out with, including any coupons that we’re running for sales.

Nicole (5m 57s):
So be sure to sign up for that. And then also we have two upcoming conferences that we’re being part of at the National Genealogical Society Conference on May 22nd through the 25th in Louisville, Kentucky. We will be there presenting and taking classes and enjoying the conference. And then we will be teaching at the Texas Institute of Genealogical Research on June 16th through the 20th. This is a virtual institute course and the course that I’m coordinating is called Integrating AI into Genealogical Research and Writing. And we have a great team of instructors including my mom, Diana, and myself and several others. So it’s going to be a fun week. Students will need to be bringing a writing sample that they’ve already created about their research or a family member and then we’ll be using that for several different things and we’ll be working on transcription of documents with AI and all kinds of things that we can use AI for in our research and writing.

Nicole (6m 53s):
Alright, today we’re talking about Joseph Knight Senior and Jemima Griggs. So Joseph Knight Senior and his family were instrumental in Joseph Smith Jr’s work to translate the Book of Mormon. So this episode is part of the series that I’ve been working on of understanding my ancestors in the context of religious history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And so this time I decided to learn more about Joseph Knight Senior who was one of the people who was well known in the church’s early history for his support of Joseph Smith. And I learned this week that Joseph Knight is my half third cousin, eight times removed, not that close, but interesting.

Nicole (7m 33s):
So the ancestor that he was a cousin of is my paternal grandmother’s fourth great-grandmother, Jemima Griggs. And so I decided to study both Joseph Knight and Jemima Griggs and to learn more about their common ancestor and their involvement with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the 1830s. So this went along with the weekly study from Come Follow Me about Doctrine and Covenants, sections 12 through 17 and section 12 of the Doctrine and Covenants was given to Joseph Knight Senior when he was wondering how he was supposed to help with the church and what his duty was.

Nicole (8m 13s):
Reading that section and thinking about Joseph Knight Senior, I wanted to know if I was related to him. So to learn more about my relationships to individuals involved in the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints I found a group in the Relative Finder application, and if you haven’t heard of Relative Finder, it’s a really fun app that was created by the BYU Family History Tech Lab. It’s at RelativeFinder.org and it has famous people like Presidents of the United States, celebrities, authors, SC Science people, that kind of thing. And it has the option to create custom groups.

Nicole (8m 55s):
And so someone had created a custom group called LDS Joseph Smith Papers that shows if you are related to anyone mentioned in the Joseph Smith Papers so you can search for particular people like the Knight family. So that’s what I used and that’s how I found out my relationship to Joseph Knight.

Diana (9m 12s):
Relative Finder is so fun and I know we’ve used it before for family history fairs and had people see who is related to a president of the United States and we gave little awards for everything. It was just really fun. So I haven’t used that for a while. I think this is such a great use to find anyone in the Joseph Smith Papers. Well, and you’re really smart because you used your son’s FamilySearch account so you could see relationships both on your side as well as your husband’s side. And so in doing that, you saw in relative finder this connection through Jemima Griggs father, Nathaniel Griggs and common ancestors, William Patton and Mary Digby.

Diana (9m 54s):
And then you saw in FamilySearch that you share another common ancestor, which is John Knight. So there’s another neat feature in relative finder, and that’s the way, the ability to find all the ways you’re related to someone and it’s called the Connect Tab and you can see your relationship with a person in the FamilySearch tree by using their ID number. And then you can also find the relationships between two individuals using both of their ID numbers. So, still in your son’s account, you added the ID of Joseph’s Knight Senior and saw that there are 23 common ancestors between them. Oh my goodness, that’s so many and most of these were from early colonial times and were interrelated, but you know, sometimes we just don’t explore those really early times, especially if we know the ancestry.

Diana (10m 43s):
Most of them were from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s, which is very cool. The closest relationship between Nicole and Joseph Knight Senior was through John Knight Junior who was born 1630 in England and died in 1714 in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Nicole (11m 3s):
Yeah, that was really eyeopening to me to see that there are so many common ancestors with a particular person in history. And I think it’s also really eyeopening for our DNA research too to think about there are going to be multiple ways we are related to our matches. And we always hear about this as a caution when we’re looking at finding a common ancestral couple. And just because you find one common ancestral couple doesn’t mean that that’s the person who actually contributed the DNA to both of you. For example, if this is actually correct, which I haven’t validated it, but if there are actually 23 common Ancestors between me and this Joseph Knight Senior, then imagine all of Joseph Knight Senior’s descendants, and if we share DNA, how do we know which common ancestor it is that contributed that DNA?

Nicole (11m 52s):
So we have to just be so careful to not assume that the one common ancestral couple that we found is the one that contributed the shared DNA that we have.

Diana (12m 1s):
That is just an excellent point. I think we run into that the further we go back on our tree.

Nicole (12m 8s):
Exactly. And so this, this exercise was focused on common ancestry in the 1600s, so it’s going back much further than we usually go for autosomal DNA, right. But I think sometimes, like you were saying at the beginning, when you can’t find a common ancestor for a cluster that seems like there are recent, you know, like from this 1800s forward, then it could be that that segment of DNA is just one that was passed down intact from the colonial times and did get smaller and smaller. Like we sometimes think, you know, there’ve been articles written about how these segments of DNA just once they reached like a about a 10 to 20 centiMorgans size, they don’t really get broken down anymore.

Nicole (12m 52s):
They just keep getting passed down. And there’s been articles called sticky segments that talk about this, but that’s not really the right word. It’s just that the chance of some smaller segment getting recombined and like made smaller goes down when they get to a certain smaller size. So it’s just an interesting thing in genetics and we don’t fully understand the implications for it for genetic genealogy other than that these segments could be older than we think. So if a bunch of people are sharing a 10 to 20 centiMorgans size segment, it could be that their common ancestor is back, you know, 10 to 20 generations and not just six to eight generations.

Diana (13m 31s):
Right. And I feel like we’re learning more and more about how those segments are passed down as we continue to work with DNA.

Nicole (13m 39s):
Yes. It’s so interesting, well, talking about the Knight ancestry and how we have that common ancestor who was John Knight Junior born in England and died in Massachusetts. So let’s talk about that. So Joseph Knight Sr. and Jemima Griggs, who is my ancestor, were both descended from John Knight and because they descend through different wives of John Knight, they are half third cousins to each other. And full third cousins would have both second great-grandparents in common, but they just have one second great-grandparent in common and then two different great-grandmothers.

Nicole (14m 21s):
Well, John Knight, an aged man died December 1st, 1714 in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He was born about 1630 in England, the son of John Knight Sr. and Mary who migrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. John Knight Sr. was considered one of 109 founders of Watertown, established in 1630 and was received into the town church in 1636. It’s amazing to me that there are records about this that survived ’til today. John Knight was likely born in England and then came to the colony with his parents when he was a very young child.

Nicole (15m 6s):
He was a cooper, church member, and was married five times. His first wife was Ruhamah Johnson, who he married on April 25th, 1654. One of their five children, Elizabeth Knight, survived to adulthood and was the great-grandmother of my ancestor, Jemima Griggs. John Knight then married Abigail Stowers who passed away, then Mary Bridge on June 22nd, 1668 Mary Bridge. His third wife was the mother of Samuel Knight, the great-grandfather of Joseph Knight Sr. After Mary’s death, John Knight married Mary Clements, who died after four years, then he married Sarah Rollins Holsworth.

Nicole (15m 50s):
So it’s really interesting and sad to look at this early colonial family with such a high mortality rate. So many wives dying, so many children not surviving to adulthood. There just were only a few that survived. When John Knight Jr. died in 1714, he was 84 years old, so he actually had a pretty long life, which I guess is what enabled him to have five wives.

Diana (16m 48s):
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Diana (17m 30s):
Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription. So now let’s talk about Joseph Knight senior. Samuel Knight’s, great grandson was Joseph Knight Senior and he was born November 26th, 1772 to Benjamin and Hannah Knight in Oakham, Massachusetts. He lived in Windham County, Vermont when he married Polly Peck at 1795, and they moved to Chenango County, New York, then Colesville, New York in 1811. He was a landowner. And in 1826 he hired Joseph Smith Jr. as a laborer. Joseph Knight Sr. owned four farms in Colesville, a grain mill, and two carding machines which prepared wool and cotton for spinning. And his son said, my father said Joseph Smith was the best hand he ever hired. And Joseph told him and his father that he had seen a vision that a personage had appeared to him and told him where there was a gold book of ancient date buried.

Diana (18m 11s):
And if he would follow the directions of the Angel, he could get it. My father and I believed what he told us, I think we were the first after his father’s family. Well, Joseph Knight Sr. and his family were loyal friends who helped Joseph Smith Jr. while he was translating the Book of Mormon. And Joseph Smith Jr. wrote, he was very kindly and considerately brought us, a quantity of provisions, in order that we might not be interrupted in the work of translation. Knight gave the Smiths a Barral of Mackrel and some Lined paper for writing some nine or ten Bushels of grain and some five or six Bushels taters and a pound of tea.

Diana (18m 56s):
Joseph Knight Senior asked Joseph Smith Jr what the Lord wanted him to do. And the revelation that came in May, 1829 as a result is now Doctrine and Covenant section 12. And this section is similar to others that were given to hire on Smith and Oliver Cowdery, where the men are encouraged to assist in a great and marvelous work that is about to come forth. And it includes harvest imagery that would’ve been very familiar to a farmer. Knight was encouraged to keep my commandments and see, to bring forth and establish the cause of Zion. He was baptized into the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints on June 28th, 1830 by Oliver Cowdery and moved to Jackson County, Missouri in 1831, then Nauvoo, Illinois in 1840 where he was ordained a high priest and he died on February 2nd, 1847 at Mount Pisgah, Clark County, Iowa.

Nicole (19m 34s):
Right. So he passed away before the movement of all the church members to the Salt Lake Valley. So he wasn’t there. Now let’s talk about Jemima. So Joseph Knight’s third cousin, Jemima Griggs was born in 1753 and christened on 11 February, 1753 in Roxbury, Massachusetts. So she was the daughter of Nathaniel and Mary Griggs. And on September 12th, 1775, she married John White in Roxbury. Her first child was named John Griggs White. And I love how a lot of these colonial people used the mother’s maiden name as the middle name for their children. I’ve seen that quite a bit with this time and place.

Nicole (20m 16s):
It’s a really good clue that you’re on the right track if you’re finding the mother’s maiden name. Yes. Well, Jemima went on to have 10 children in all, and I think she might have died soon after her youngest son was born in about 1803. And supposedly her husband John White, died in 1802. But I found that there’s a little bit of information lacking in her family search profile. So more research is needed to understand what happened with their deaths and her life and her family. So that’s something I put into my future research to do. Well, Jemima’s son, John Griggs White joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints after moving to the Kirtland Ohio area in 1835, he later moved to Nauvoo, Illinois and then migrated west with the Aaron Johnson Pioneer Company in 1850 with his wife Lucy Miranda Bailey White, son, Joel White, and Joel’s wife, Fran Ann Thomas White.

Nicole (21m 17s):
So I wanted to create a picture to represent Jemima for this blog post that I wrote about her. And so I asked ChatGPT to create an image that could represent her after uploading the images of John Griggs White, her son, and the picture of Joseph Knight because they actually had kind of a similar style of people sitting at a desk. And so I just used the prompt create an image after the style in these uploaded images for Jemima Griggs, a mother of 10 children when she was 35 years old, and she lived in Roxbury, Massachusetts in about 1785. So it created an image that showed a woman sitting in what looks like a colonial household with kind of a chair that looks like it could be from that time period made of wood and a candle on a candlestick and a basket with some linen in it, perhaps like a bread basket and like a feather pen in the background and some crockery.

Nicole (22m 15s):
And she’s wearing a big bonnet. Her clothing looks like colonial style kind of one of those brown dresses with a bunch of white in the collar and buttoned down. And of course, because it’s a ChatGPT AI image, it looks kind of waxy in the face and kind of the facial features are a little bit overly perfect. But I still liked it and it didn’t look like an actual photorealistic picture, which I feel like is important because when I create illustrations for family history purposes, I don’t want them to look photorealistic because I feel like that has the risk of people assuming or thinking that that’s a real picture of the person.

Nicole (22m 56s):
So I usually opt to go with more of like an art style or some kind of drawing look, pencil drawing, watercolor or something like that.

Diana (23m 7s):
Well, I think that’s really smart because I love this image, but you’d never mistake it for an actual picture. You know, no one would ever take and say this is, this is her photograph from, you know, 1785, which would be impossible. So good job on that. Well, let’s kind of wrap this up. Many settlers of the Massachusetts Bay colony migrated west in the early 1800s to New York and Ohio. And these were some of the first people to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And they were descendants of these early colonists in Massachusetts. And as we’ve been talking about, among them were Joseph Knight Sr. who was a close associate of Joseph Smith Jr, and John Griggs White, the son of Jemima Griggs White.

Diana (23m 53s):
And, you know, as always, once you dig into a family or an ancestor, you discover there’s so much more research that can be done, and especially on this life and family of Jemima Griggs White, you know, more research could really help with understanding her children’s birth and death dates in places as well as her husband’s death dates and places.

Nicole (24m 14s):
Right? Yeah, it’s interesting sometimes where there’s a profile that seems to have a lot of information, but then some things are missing. So for future research, I want to find an original record for Joseph Knight Senior’s birth in Oakham, and the link in his profile on FamilySearch doesn’t work anymore. It was supposed to go to ma-vitalrecords.org. So I think that this is just another case of a government website where they used to host like an index or images for vital records for the state of Massachusetts has changed. And so it’s probably hosted at a different site or maybe they just pulled the funding for it, who knows? But it’s kind of interesting and sad to see how fleeting these state and county websites can be with vital records and things.

Diana (25m 0s):
Right. Really a good reminder to us to always download the record, have a citation that can hopefully lead us to finding where it is now housed, you know, if they’ve changed the website. So something more than just a URL. However, the URL could be used in the Wayback machine, perhaps it could find, you know, the old website before they reorganize. And I’ve used that before, you know, on Internet Archives. So I just have to really keep good records.

Nicole (25m 29s):
Right. So that was on Joseph Knight, Sr. The other future research ideas I had were for my direct ancestor, Jemima Griggs White, and I want to determine why there is a 1778 death record for a female married to John White in Roxbury when Jemima Griggs White supposedly had children up until 1802 and died about 1803. I think the death record was probably attached to Jemima in FamilySearch. I think it’s a derivative and I think it just probably belongs to a different John White and his wife. It didn’t name a wife, it just said John White’s wife. So it’s really hard to evaluate, but to me it seems like probably a situation where it’s somebody of the same name having a record attached.

Nicole (26m 13s):
So I’ll have to figure out where that belongs and detach it. I also want to find an original record for John Griggs White’s birth in Roxbury and then determine when Jemima Griggs actually died. Her FamilySearch profile states that she died in 1803 after the birth of her son Joel in 1802. But then there’s that source attached to her death for a Mrs. John White who died in 1778. So that source, again, it’s causing confusion. Then I also want to determine when Jemima’s husband John White died, his family search profile says 1802, but there are not any sources attached and then there are not any death dates for Jemima Griggs’ children.

Nicole (26m 53s):
So all of the children need to be researched and figure out like what happened to them and when they died. So there is quite a bit of work to do on this family.

Diana (27m 2s):
Wow, that’s great. And how fun that you found another connection, and I think it’s so fascinating that so many of these ancestors we’ve been talking about in these podcasts were from that Massachusetts Bay Colony. I don’t think you had any idea that you had so many connections there.

Nicole (27m 17s):
Yeah, it is interesting to see that they all kind of migrated over to the New York area and as we’ve done the research on our ancestors in the South, we of course know that the early colonies of Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, eventually people went to the nearest states that were west as they started to look for more land. And I think that’s exactly what happened up here in the Massachusetts Bay Colony where people were expanding their families, the children wanted to get their own land, they went west to the next state over, so they were moving over to New York and then eventually moved over to Ohio and then of course all of the members of our church went over to Utah, which is where a lot of our ancestors ended up settling.

Diana (27m 59s):
Right, right. Well thanks for doing all the research on this and for sharing it with us. It’s always so interesting to learn about the migration and the motivation for people. You know, we talk a lot about land being the motivation for our ancestors that moved west, but in this case it was religion and you know, sometimes we may not realize that could be a connection. So you know, people did migrate in groups and a church group very likely could be the reason why an ancestor moved. So it’s always good to keep our minds open to possibilities. Well, thanks everyone for listening and we will talk to you next time.

Nicole (28m 42s):
Alright, 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.com/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 inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.