Climbing the family tree

I am fortunate in that I have extensive files on family genealogy. There are some branches of my family about whom I know a great deal and can trace back hundreds of years. Others are less certain and harder to trace and can only go back a few short generations before the records vanish entirely. It is these ancestors for whom I know so little that I want to try to trace, but without knowing where to turn, that's a bit difficult. It's not impossible, just more difficult, that's all. Of the ancestors who I do know a lot about, it's pretty amazing to find out that the earliest ones I know of came to America in the early 17th century. On my father's side, there were two who came from England in the 1630s, Thomas Sayre and Christopher Foster. Sayre's date of emigration is unknown, but he may have been here as early as the late 1620s. Foster came over as an indentured servant on the ship "Abigail" in 1634, with the Winthrop Fleet of religious separatists. Both Foster and Sayre would eventually leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony and emigrate to Long Island, to Southampton. It was their children Daniel Sayre and Hannah Foster who married and brought the two families together. In the 18th century, my ancestor David Sayre fought in the Revolutionary War with the Essex Rifles, 1st New Jersey Militia. He married Hannah Frazier and ended up in Meigs County, Ohio, where he died on July 11, 1826, just one week after the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and 50 years and one week after the Declaration of Independence was signed. It's pretty fascinating knowing things about your family history, but equally frustrating not knowing certain things. Another part of my paternal ancestry that is a bit of a mystery is my paternal German ancestors, the Wagners. I found a family tree that my grandmother gave me that was recorded at Letart, Ohio by W.J. Bowie (whoever that is, I do not know) and is dated November 8, 1881 that lists some of my Wagner ancestors as being Friedrich Jacob Wagner, no birth or death date, Matthaus Wagner, died 1796, and then Johannes Wagner who was either born in or emigrated from Giessen, Germany in 1792. It's hard to read this record and I would need some help in transcribing it to figure out what it really says. But I am nonetheless glad to have it and I suspect my grandmother must have given it to me when I last visited her in 1976. She died 10 years later. She gave me quite a lot of genealogical information since she belonged to the D.A.R. and the Colonial Dames.

Genealogy is a very addicting hobby to be sure but it can lead to a lot of uncertainty when finding your ancestors becomes difficult. We have some old family stories that have been handed down that I've tried for years, and with no success, to verify. One old story tells of how our maternal Irish great-great grandmother, Annia Noria Gately, came over on a fishing boat with her family and the village priest who read "the good book" to them on the voyage, which assured their safe arrival at someplace called "Portsmouth, Massachusetts", which I have been unable to find, even on historical maps. My suspicion is that it was actually Portsmouth, New Hampshire where they made landfall, but that was not a known immigration port, according to people there to whom I have spoken. Still, it is possible that they came on board a ship that docked there, and perhaps came in steerage. I can find no ship's manifests from Portsmouth that list any passengers from the mid 1800s. So that's a bit of a dead end. I also remember hearing a story about our four times maternal great grandfather who was supposed to have been a British Naval Captain in the War of 1812 who was captured at Portsmouth, NH and made a prisoner of war. Upon the war's end he apparently decided to stay here and upon so doing, "forfeited substantial land holdings in England", according to one old family letter. Well, try as I may to find a Captain George Henry Williams in the British Navy in the War of 1812, I can find no record or trace of his existence. He married someone named Georgianna Ball who was purported to be the daughter of the Governor of New Hampshire, but when I researched it, there was no Governor named Ball. The closest match would be John Bell, who became Governor in 1828, far too late for a daughter to have married Captain Williams, whose son George, Jr. married in 1836. I would like to know more about Captain Williams, like where in England he came from and who his parents were. But I can find no census records for him, so I am quite puzzled. I've found records of his son George, Jr. and his grandson William, my great-great grandfather. Census records indicate that William's father George was born in New Hampshire so I know that we have family roots there, but beyond that, I am stumped and will have to keep hunting for more family records. Maybe when my car is finally paid off I can afford to join Ancestry.com and do some serious online research. That's only about a year away, so in the meantime I will continue to try to find what I can when time avails itself and use whatever free resources are available. In the meantime, to quote a favorite character from the movie "Shakespeare in Love", "I don't know, it's a mystery!"