Be able to name all 16 of my great great grandparents

John T. Vaughn and Margaret Woodburn are the parents of my great-grandmother Julia Ann Vaughn. At this point, I don’t know a whole lot about these two GG grandparents, other than their names and that they were lived in Indiana. I do know that one or both of them died when my great-grandmother Julia was fairly young, and then she was sent to Kansas to live with one of her uncles on the Woodburn side of the family. And that is where she met my great-grandfather, Mansir Stewart.

I don’t know that much about this set of GG grandparents, but thanks to the obituary for thier son (my great-grandfather Tom Temple) I do know their names. My great-great grandfather was named John Thomas Temple, and his wife was Jane Temple. The obituary doesn’t mention her maiden name. They homesteaded in Lincoln County Missouri, having moved there from North Carolina in the early 1840s. Once they arrived in Missouri, they suffered a number of tragedies in rapid succession (again, according to this 1916 obituary for their son which I have.) First, the wife Jane died from an illness shortly after arriving in Missouri. They had a daughter who also died from an illness. Then one of their sons drowned. Then , in 1848, the father left on a wagon train to go to California and “was never heard from again”. When he left, he sent the remaining two children (boys aged about 6 and 8) to work and live at his neighbor’s farm. Fortunately, the brothers were able to live with the neighbor until they were adults and got married. Incidentally, the two brothers (James and Tom) married two sisters.

Life was certainly hard back in those days!

Whew! Six of the GGG’s down, ten to go…some of these are going to be very tough!

The second set of my great-grandparents which I have found out quite a lot of information about are named Eliphalet Stewart and Lucy Tilley. (Ohmygosh is “Eliphalet” a unique name or what? Another aside….there are quite a few men from New England with that name and they all seem to be related!)

Anyway, my GG Grandfather Eliphalet Stewart was born in New York state sometime in the early 1800s. His wife, Lucy Tilley, was also born in New York State, and they were married in the town of Grafton, New York on June 5, 1830. According to one biography which I found on the Internet, Eliphalet died in Oklahoma and was reported to be 97 years old when he died. Eliphalet and Lucy had nine children, one of whom was my great-grandfather named Mansir Stewart. They left the state of New York and moved to Kansas sometime before 1850. Lucy passed away in Kansas in 1850.

This is the branch of my family that I can trace back the farthest. Lucy Tilley is also related to the Cutler family, and there were lots of people in that family in the early colonial days.

When I started researching my family history, I was so lucky to stumble on several other researchers who had done a lot of work on this branch of the family! Especially, researching the surname SMITH is very hard! But a couple distant cousins of mine sent me huge databases and practically dumped the Smith family history right in my lap! I was SO lucky!

W.W. Smith and his wife led very interesting lives. They were born in southern Ohio and were among the first group of people who homesteaded in southern Illinois. They arrived in Brussels, in Calhoun County (which is just across the Illinois River from St. Louis) in the early 1850s. They had a large family, I believe it was about nine children. Their first child, Dr. George Bruce Smith , is my great grandfather.

W.W. Smith served in the Civil War, along with several of his brothers and cousins, many of whom all travelled to Illinois together from Ohio. Bill was captured and spent quite a few months at the infamous Andersonville Prison. He apparently contracted some kind of sickness there (Maybe pneumonia) and although he survived the war, he was always sickly after that. He was also a travelling preacher for the Methodist church. He died in 1881 in Illinois.

My great great Grandmother Amanda Smith remarried after his death to a man named William Love. She continued to live in the town of Brussels Illinois and lived to be over ninety years old.

At one point, I had almost one thousand names in a Family Treemaker database….but then that computer died and I sort of lost interest in researching my family history. I hope that this goal will re kindle my interest in the family genealogy, because I learned some very interesting stuff!

The most interesting thing I found so far was that my grandmother had been divorced once before she married my grandfather! gasp The divorce occurred in 1902 and must have been quite the scandal. When I discovered this, and I asked my mother about it, she had never heard a word about it! But it certainly explained why my grandmother was pretty much estranged from her family for her entire life.

So without futher adieu…...