| CLIMBING THE BROWN
FAMILY TREE
by: Brenda Brown Lasko Chapter 1 How It Began and Where It Has Led. When I began to search for the roots of my family in America, I found out two things very quickly. First, they seemed to be here forever and second, there was never a shortage of Browns in any generation. What the Browns may have lacked in other things, they made up for in numbers. If asked what got me interested in this research I would have say the main reason was the way I was raised. My family had a deep respect for the older generations and I can thank them for keeping the family history alive by talking about the "old folks" whenever anyone would listen. I always loved to hear their stories when I was younger and I feel as if I knew some of the people I've written about even though they were gone long before I came along. It is my dream to keep them alive for the generations to follow. The second thing that got me interested in genealogy was the family tree started by Mrs. James Brown, the wife of one of the descendants of Isaac Graham Brown, whom I knew as Uncle Ike. She had placed an ad in the local newspaper in the early 1960's looking for descendants of the George Brown family. The ad was answered by my cousin Beverly and her mother, and an exchange of information began. When the first family group sheets and beautiful, hand-drawn family tree arrived I was fascinated. Countless hours were spent around the kitchen table with my dad and grandfather talking about who the people were on those papers. I was hooked and knew when I grew up I wanted to do this too. I have many wonderful memories of time spent listening to the laughter that filled our kitchen when someone would recount another funny family story about our ancestors. For a number of years I did very little but think about starting the task of finding the information we were missing about older generations of our family. When my own children were big enough to be out from under foot I got serious about the whole thing. With copies of the papers sent from Mrs. James Brown, I started to look for the people listed there. When I found a tombstone in Grandview Cemetery for Barbara Crist, one of Abel Brown's children, I was elated. She had been laid to rest over 120 years before I stood at her grave but I felt as if I had known her. After seeing how badly the tombstones were deteriorating from age and vandalism, I realized time was running out for gathering the information we were seeking. With the help of friends and family I began a systematic search of every cemetery I could find and recorded the inscriptions on the tombstones. We compiled a listing of several of the old settler's burial sites but in some cases too much time had passed to save the information once held on those tombstones. Many of the very old cemeteries have been abandoned for decades and so very little of them remains. The natural elements have worn away inscriptions and in many cases most of the stones themselves are completely gone. A combination of nature, vandalism and indifference continues to erase the evidence of the existence of many of our ancestors. I do regret that I didn't get a chance to record the Old Dover Cemetery before it was all but destroyed. Several other things have made the search for information difficult. One problem is the large number of Browns with the same first names. It seems as though they all had a fondness for certain names and followed the tradition of naming children after honored family members. It is not unusual to find the grown children in one family all naming their own offspring the same names their brothers and sisters named their children. In one generation you can find several John, Abel or Lydia Browns who are all first cousins and nearly the same age. In addition to this, they often married women with the same or similar first name so it can be quite a task keeping the family groups straight. A major problem is finding the maiden names of the women and tracing the daughters once they marry. If you don't already know who the daughter married, she disappears with her new last name. Another complication in this type of research is the spellings and misspellings of surnames. I have found more than a dozen ways the name Gates has been spelled. The original surname was spelled "Goetz" but it can be found listed as Gaits, Catts, Gatts, Kitts, Gatz, Citts and a half dozen others. The spelling varied from census taker to census taker, who often had trouble with the pronunciation of the name when he called on the family during his count. In early America most of the people the census taker visited could not read or write and one must remember many of early Americans spoke less than perfect English. There was a mix of many languages spoken at that time so even if the family could speak English it was often with the accent of their native tongue. The census takers had to spell the name the way it sounded to them, and as a result, Stuckey became Stookey, Starkey, Stukey and so on. You will find the same spelling variations in all the public records. I'm thankful that most people could spell Brown although I have found it as Browne and Brownne. (I completely lost all of our Browns in the 1830 census index of Ohio. There were almost no Browns listed as living Belmont County but when I rechecked the index I found them listed under Browne, the way the census taker for most of the Townships in Belmont County had spelled it.) Even with their errors and misspellings, the Census Records have been a valuable tool for tracing a family. About every 10 years since 1790, the United States makes an attempt to count the people living within its boundaries. Early census records give little information, other than the name of the head of the household and the number of males and females of certain age groups living in the house. This makes it nearly impossible to locate the family of a child you are researching if you don't already know the father's first name. Starting in1850 the census listed the names and ages of all the people in the household which made it much easier to find vital information. Each census provides additional pieces of the story. Some ask for the individual's place of birth, occupation, value of property, place of parents birth, and other assorted details. Each is different and can give you a missing piece of the puzzle if you are fortunate enough to find your family in the census records. I was exceptionally lucky most of the descendants of Abel Brown remained in the same locality so were pretty easy to find. (These records are made public after 70 years and I am looking forward to the release of the 1930 census in a few years.) Although there is no way the complete story of our ancestors personal history can ever be retold, there are ways to find pieces of the story. This is what I have attempted to do in this book. I have used public records, family histories and historical facts about the period they lived to piece together a story of their lives. Most of our ancestors were not famous so little has been published about any of them. It seems only the rich or notorious were mentioned in the recorded history of America. Our family, for the most part, was neither. They were honest, hardworking, simple people who helped form the backbone of our country. To find information about them requires a little digging into something other than history books and census records. It is amazing what can be learned about a person's life from the public records they leave behind. Things like wills, land records, marriage records and even tombstones can help tell the story of a family group from a past generation. One of the most interesting sources of information are the oral family histories that have been passed down through the years. They may not always be factual but they certainly add a personal touch that would be missing otherwise. Each family branch on the tree has its own distinctive stories and I wish I had copies of them all. It would be interesting to compare the way the tales vary after they've been passed along different routes. There have been other Brown family histories that trace Abel's family and a few have claimed to trace it back several generations farther than my records. I haven't found any proof for most of the claims and I was able to disprove a few theories. I was still left with too many possibilities to even make a good guess so I have based my story on what we do know and will stick as close to the proven facts as possible. Index 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Epilogue
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