(adjective) to be deeply curious about the roots and branches of your family tree.
Writing my last post on DNA testing results made me realize that I hadn’t shared one of my most exciting finds on this blog! So here I am, fixing that.
I found a WPA Federal Writers’ Project interview with one of my ancestors' brothers!!!!!
Whew, okay. Honestly, I cannot even begin to tell you how excited I was to find what I am about to describe to you. It’s like hitting the jackpot, winning the lottery, finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But let me back up a step.
Fam, it’s been 8 months since I sent away my DNA samples and 7 months since I received the results, yet somehow I haven’t posted anything about it! Don’t worry, they weren’t earth shattering - I’ve just been busy. In fact, in many cases, my Ancestry.com test results did just what I hoped they’d do: confirmed connections that I already had in my family tree. And it’s been really cool to see both the family history and my own research corroborated in that way!
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| Advertisement for the Arlington Hotel, found in the Atlanta City Directory for 1896, p.9. Archive.org. |
One of the things I find enthralling about family history research is trying to picture what my ancestors everyday lives looked like, going beyond the dates and pedigree charts to try to see the world they walked through. So when I discovered that two of my maternal great-great-grandmother Scoatney Scott’s brothers, James Solomon Scott and Daniel Scott, worked at the Arlington Hotel in Atlanta in the mid-1890s, you know what I had to do! Down the rabbit hole I went, and here’s what I’ve found so far.
Solomon Scott is one of my 3x Great-Grandfathers. He is the father of Scoatney (Scott) Cooper, partner of Cherry (surname unknown) and then of Nellie Little. Put differently, he is the father of my mother’s mother’s father’s mom. And like others in this generation, he saw a seismic shift in American life: the Civil War and the transition from enslavement to freedom that it brought.
Solomon Scott → Scoatney Scott → Noah Cooper → Elnora Cooper → Mom → Me
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| Solomon Scott's "mark" in the 1867 Return of Qualified Voters and Reconstruction Oath Book for Hancock County, GA. (Ancestry.com) |
The process of writing a blog post often forces me to go back through my research to double-check my research steps, assumptions, and conclusions. If I’m going to be wrong publicly, I’d at least like to be wrong earnestly! Sometimes a new idea will occur to me, and I’ll test it out, or I’ll try an unlikely path, just to be sure. Often this all lands me right back where I was, but, sometimes, fascinating things pop up. And that’s what happened when I was preparing to write my post on the probable death of my 4x great-grandfather, Solomon Scott.
Way back when - in 2016 - one of my maternal uncles took a DNA test. I wrote, "The Genetic Genealogy Hunt Has Started!" Lol. I posted some notes from his results, and then...nothing. I was in no hurry to do my own testing.
But, six years later, I have finally taken my first two tests!
My last three posts have all been connected. When I wrote of Borden Scott’s graduation from Meharry Medical College, I wondered if anyone from his family had ventured to Tennessee to attend, but noted that his father had likely already passed away. The next post followed up on this topic. What about his mother, Nellie Little Scott – was she still alive at the time of his graduation, in 1908? I needed to write about Lula Scott Crew’s correspondence before I could get to that. Which brings us to this post.
