Genealogy. The logo of Columbia, Maryland, where I live, is a "people tree." It could be the logo for any genealogist. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents. Four generations per century. Go back a thousand years, and you have more ancestors than there were people on earth. Sooner or later, every single one of us is a cousin to all the rest.
Browningsville, Maryland. Here my father was born, here his great-grandfather Day settled after his service in the Revolution. Here dozens of farmer neighbors joined the local militia units en masse in the Revolution, and here they had their children and grandchildren. Here many of those children and grandchildren intermarried, doing their courting no farther than you could drive a horse and buggy on a Sunday afternoon, and now we have....Browningsville Connections.
Browningsville is in the northwestern corner of Montgomery County, Maryland, near the border with Frederick County.
Ancestor Tables
On the Family Tree Maker site, I have a page also called Browningsville Connections. From this site you can proceed to an "ahnentafel" or ancestor table, which now, via a dubious link or two, goes back to some shadowy medieval people in Wales.
Another version of the ahnentafel is posted right on this site, in text format, with links to the biographical pages below. This ahnentafel is usually the most up to date. It is broken down into historical periods as follows:
Check the bottom of the file to see when it was last updated.
Ancestor Biographies
Before the Revolution.
William Beall of Long Lookt For. The land tract "Long Lookt For" was located between Browningsville and Lewisdale on the map, above. Janice Taylor's research has produced the information we have, contained in tax records and a bill of sale after his death. Despite the frequency of names like William and Alexander, the family of William Beall of Long Lookt For doesn't connect with the larger Beall families in Maryland who trace their ancestry to Alexander Beall or Col. Ninian Beall. While the "down-county" Bealls pronounce their name "bell", the Long Lookt For Bealls pronounce the name "beel".
Daniel Lewis was a neighbor and contemporary of William Beall of Long Lookt For. He founded Lewisdale, shown on the map, above.
An "almost ancestor" is Kittimaquund, Tapac of the Piscataways, whose daughter Mary married Giles Brent. The latest research show it is Giles' brother Edmund who had a daughter Katherine, who married Richard Marsham; they had a daughter Sarah who married Basil Waring; they had a son Basil who married Martha Greenfield; they had a daughter Sarah who married John Duckett; they had a daughter Rebecca who married Edward King, father of John Duckett King of King's Valley.
Another puzzle is Catherine, wife of Francis Walker. Was she Catherine Ball, the son of Richard Ball? Some genealogists show such a relationship. This page discusses the pros and cons.
European Ancestry. With the advent of the internet, collections of European Ancestry are more and more available. Some such collections link to names of my ancestors, and if the collections are true, my mother and father are very distant cousins, with Charlemagne, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in AD 800, as their common ancestor! Because it takes a different type of research skills to verify such collections, however, I am not including much European ancestry information on this site.
Revolutionary War Era.
Alexander Beall. Son of William of Long Lookt For, he fought in the Revolution, and was my great-grandmother's great-grandfather.
Charles Miles lived in the Clarksburg area, and had children by three wives. Those descended from the first, Elizabeth Pool, may well be fourth cousins five times removed to Abraham Lincoln, through Elizabeth's Shipley ancestors.
George Walker, founder of our branch of the Walker family, is featured in a Memorial Sermon I preached at a Walker-Scanlon family reunion several years ago.
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Post-Revolution.
George Walker of Mendelssohn Terrace was my great-grandfather. This page has pictures of him, his wife Rachel Browning Purdum, and the house built in 1880 still occupied by descendants.
I have listed my interests in the DAY, MARK, BEALL, LEWIS, WALKER, BOYER, PURDUM, KING, MILES and LAYTON families with the Montgomery County section of the Maryland Gen Web which is part of the U. S. GenWeb Project, which in turn is part of the World GenWeb Project.
Databases
In order to research my own ancestors, I have developed databases of all the Beall, Walker, Day, and Lewis information I can find in Maryland, before 1800. If you are interested, send me an email and I'll email you the databases. All are in MS Word, except the Beall database, which is still in Wordperfect 5.1 (but you can view it with MS Word). I put the lines of descent and your own contact information in the database so that it's there in case some future researcher finds that he or she shares with you a common interest.
Genealogy Web Sites
Here are some other Genealogy web sites and forums of interest
Ancestry.com contains extensive information available on a paid subscription basis, but still makes available a number of family tree files free for viewing and downloading.
Genforum contains forums by family name and geographical entity in a very easy to use format.
The Mormon Family Search site contains an amazing quantity of linkages to European families. These are as submitted and therefore have not been verified, but make a good beginning for research -- or just good fun.
