Year: 2013

Mom’s grandmother’s maiden name was Velma McCord, who was born in Corinth in the northern part of Mississippi in 1881. Her father was Rufus Chapman McCord who was born near Moulton, in the northern part of Alabama. There were a bunch of McCords around Moulton, but they seem to have left, many moving to Corinth, but others going to Tennessee. I’m not sure what the draw to Corinth was, but there was another family of McCords there as well which may be unrelated or at best distantly related. Rufus’ father was William J. McCord who lived in Moulton for a while, but was born in Tennessee. He had a family bible, which like many family bibles, was used to write down important family information like births, marriages, and deaths.

William really took this seriously, or at least people in his family did. The text of what was written can be found on web pages here and here, part of a project by a McCord now living in Georgia to put all of the McCord bible information in one place. William McCord’s bible is a treasure trove of information. Some of this information is available through public records like the census, marriage licenses, death certificates, etc. as well as some gravestones that have been indexed, but this is a ton of information about the family all in one place and very complete. And it is pretty accurate as well, confirmed with some of that other information when it is available.
Continue reading “The McCords”

For some reason I got the genealogy bug and I have been doing a lot of research the last couple of weeks. I want to get as much done as I can and then stop. It’s like putting together a puzzle, but I don’t want to make a career out of this puzzle.

I’ve been able to come up with a few different resources that have turned out to be pretty helpful and just want to list those.

One great resource is ancestry.com. A lot of people do genealogy and share their family trees there, plus they also have a ton of resources that are easy to look up. If you know a person’s name and the county they lived in, you should be able to find stuff out about them, which is pretty amazing considering a lot of the records are around 100 years old. You have to pay a monthly fee to use the best features of ancestry.com (some of it is free), but you can get a two-week trial which I am making good use of. And lately I am finding that familysearch.org’s Search feature (as opposed to its Find feature which is used to find people) is good for getting some of the same records as Ancestry has.
Continue reading “Genealogy Research”

This week I started doing some research on the internet on my ancestors. This started by finding out about Dr. Eugenio Sierra and then I started trying to connect the dots in between. While Sierra was from Spain, another branch of the family goes back to Scotland and the name Grant. I knew Grant was a Scottish name and that the Grants were a clan in Scotland. So this Scottish heritage goes back to the 1800’s when Alexander Grant comes to New Orleans from Scotland. He is my great great great grandfather. I’m thinking he had some money because he bought a couple of sugar plantations around New Orleans (in Plaquemines Parish, which is famous for being so devastated by Hurricane Katrina; hurricanes caused problems for Grant as well), ran stores in New Orleans, and owned a bunch of property there. He certainly had a house in New Orleans, though it isn’t there anymore. Here is a picture of the house, taken in the 1930’s:

Continue reading “Alexander Grant, Sr.”

This week Mom sent me an article she had seen in the Athens paper about ghost tours in southern cities. One of the cities was Pensacola, which is a very old city. Here is a quote from the article:

Roberts’ favorite stories include the story of Pensacola’s Dr. Eugenio Antonio Sierra, who was buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery in 1849 after he lived to 99. Dr. Sierra used a guillotine to perform amputations on patients in his home office.

Mom pointed out that Dr. Eugenio Sierra is my great great great great grandfather. He was born in Spain and settled in Pensacola when Florida was still a Spanish colony. For some reason that gave me the bug and I was off to the internet to do some research. I found a lot of Dr. Sierra’s descendents, but then got kind of stuck connecting them to me. Eventually I found all of that, got some help from Mom, and went to Family Search a genealogy website run by the Mormons. The Mormons are big promoters of genealogy and Family Search has information from tons of scanned historical records. Plus the internet in general is easy to search and find stuff out, including from a lot of genealogy websites. I will post more later, but I have been putting in records of my ancestors (not much of it was there already, though it isn’t always easy to match up with existing data). I still have nothing on Mamaw’s family yet.

You can do a family tree which always seem to take up way more room than they need to. And Family Search does that right with lots of pop-outs and collapsing information, plus the ability to pan around the tree. But Family Search has another graphical way of seeing all of this: the fan chart. The top part of the fan chart is your ancestors (they save a lot of space by doing away with all of the siblings). And the lower part can be your descendants, but since I don’t have any of those at the moment, I don’t have a lower section of the fan chart. One of the funny things is next to my name on the family tree is a blank spot that says “Add Wife” as if it were that easy. And even though it is Mormon, you can’t add more than one wife, but there are ways to deal with people who get remarried. I don’t think you can have same sex marriages yet though (I can’t add a husband).

So here’s my chart, which you have to click on to be able to read any of it: