Posting Member: Jenn… & Mark, sort of. I’m typing, he’ll add in his 2 cents as per usual.
Topic: Wow, we’re on a roll!
Family Name Associations: Morris
Location: I’m in Barrie, he’s just leaving Maple, Ontario
Mood: I’m on a discovery high.
Music:
Just as a completely off track tangent, I can’t think of a better song to be listening to while we’re hunting through records looking for the very elusive Morris family. Taylor Swift is amazing, and I simply adore the Civil Wars!
Okay, so, breakthrough at about 12:02 am. While shuffling documents and adding records to the tree during our renos (To which I have to say, Mark is amazing, because he’s done everything I’ve asked with the site! We still have the new banner and CSS to upload, maybe this weekend. But it’s really coming together and it looks awesome!) I discover that we’re missing the first name of a woman in the Berry side. A C Morris’ wife. Popping into the tree to check it out, I realize the reason we’re missing the name is that we have the woman on one Census from Kansas in 1895 and it’s almost impossible to read. This is the only blank of it’s type in over 3000 people! Must… stop… to… explore…
I really was supposed to be uploading records today, but really, will anyone miss the thousand records and obits I need to file? Not for one day… Not really… Right?
Now, I know, I even say… Take a step back. Refresh your mind… And take a look again after you’ve given it a while for those records that just boggle your mind… But this just snowballed the second we figured out ‘S’ was actually an ‘L’. Nameless because Lou. Sothie or Sottie because ‘Lottie’ and… After that amazing breakthrough, I actually had to get some sleep. I dreamed last night in census records.
I couldn’t have pounced on this tree fast enough this morning, I’m sure the kids were wondering why they were getting pushed out the door in such a rush! I didn’t check in with Mark until I was sure I had more of a link… But first things first, Lottie Morris married and had a daughter named Iris Elizabeth. Through them I managed to find out that Alvin C Morris (Lottie’s Father) had been living with them when he died. We’ve managed to track Alvin now as having lived with his son Roy, and in an Odd Fellow home in Oklahoma before coming to live with Lottie.
We’ve got branches to investigate for Roy later with his descendants…. But even more so, we have Alvin’s name. Alvin C Morris… And therefore we were actually able to go back. And WOW… Back we’ve gone!
Alvin C Morris was son of William Winslow Morris, born in Pike County, Illinois. He was one of at least 10 children. His mother’s name was Mary Frances, her last name is a bit of a mystery as I’ve now see it 3 different spellings on 3 different records. Metry, Metrey or Metz.
Oh, but it doesn’t stop there! Mark quickly stumbled on the 1850 census for Emily and John Morris, to which William belongs. We believe that in Illinois we’re also going to be able to place John’s brothers Jesse, William and possibly Thomas. But then we found something absolutely surprising… Glenda Subyak’s transcription of the Pike County Atlas from 1872 and 1912 about John Morris.
This was like… Finding gold, I have to say. I have NEVER found two paragraphs that pretty much sum up two generations of a family from 1780 on. I didn’t even think it was possible to cram that much information into such a small space!
Curiously, in these paragraphs, it mentions that two of John’s children were residing in Kansas. Perhaps Alvin C ended up heading out to live there with family after he married our mysterious ‘Lou’. One thing for sure? This is the fastest growing branch I’ve ever seen! And now I have even more reasons to muck around in Illinois graveyards… Road trip anyone?
Ps. Book we NEED
Morris Migration: A Saga of Forebears and Descendants By Anne Morris Metz
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