Category Archives: England

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Might a New Clue = A Chink in a Brick Wall?

I had a breakthrough on one of my lines over the weekend. I found a passport application for my paternal great-grandmother Ida Champ Ferris, which listed her birthplace as Brownsville, Penn. (Her name was mis-indexed, which is why I’d never come across it before.) I had always thought that she was from the Philly area because that’s where she went to college, but turns out that she was born closer to Pittsburgh. I don’t know much more about her parents except that they came from England shortly before she was born. Hopefully this new information will lead to more clues about them!

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Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Ancestor Name Roulette

Dear Reader: Do you think you are related to the individuals listed in this post? Please drop me a note! I love hearing from cousins and others researching my family!

Yay, I finally have a chance to play again! Here’s tonight’s challenge, as set forth by Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings:

1) What year was your paternal grandfather born?  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!

My paternal grandfather was born in 1873 and so my roulette number is 19. That is my great-great grandmother, Sarah C. I think that the ‘C’ might stand for Champ — her daughter’s middle name was Champ.

Here are three facts about Sarah:

1) She was married to George Ferris.

2) She was born around 1821 in England. She and George eventually made their way to Iowa.

3) It appears that Sarah and George adopted a son — the 1880 census shows them with three children at home and one is denoted as “Adopt Son.” I’ve never seen such a notation before.

Image from Ancestry.com