Kentucky Genealogical Society (KYGS) WikiTree Challenge Highlights

Question

Hello WikiTreers!

WikiTree Challenge #11 is now complete. We spent a fun and collaborative week working together to build up an impressive list of ancestors based on the seven starting people chosen by the Kentucky Genealogical Society (KYGS). We were challenged with finding ancestor records from areas that have had record losses or no online access. Once again, our group of researchers did a fantastic job of tracking down family members and documenting them on WikiTree.

The week seemed to fly by, but WikiTree members managed to add or connect more than  39,468 relatives within seven degrees for the seven starting people! All of the seven lines were connected in unique ways to the global tree, with some being connected through multiple branches. 

Altogether, more than 128 WikiTreers made 18,390 edits to connected profiles in a record breaking week! Groups were quickly formed to tackle the more difficult lines, with emphasis on vital records and probate. 

MVP: Patty LaPlante

Top Bounty Hunters: Judith Fry & Sandy Patak

Team Captain: Kathy Nava

All contributors ● Scoring explanation ● Research resources ● Connections to all contributors 

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Our seven starting profiles: 

1. Jesse Hilton Stuart (1907-1984), Poet Laureate of Kentucky, with a final CC7 of 9,516!
2. Alice Spencer (Geddes) Lloyd (1876-1962), founder of the Alice Lloyd College, with a final CC7 of 2,801.
3. William Loftus Sutton M.D. (1797-1862), advocated for Kentucky's first vital statistics law, with a final CC7 of 12,924!
4. Josephine Kirby (Williamson) Henry (1846-1928), suffragist; social reformer, instrumental in the passage of the 1894 Married Woman's Property Act, with a final CC7 of 2,128.
5. Margaret Willie (Arvin) Sissons (1879-1947), Kentucky's most highly decorated female veteran of WWI, with a final CC7 of 4,328!
6. Cora (Wilson) Stewart (1875-1958), paved the way for adult education by opening her first Moonlight School in 1911 in Rowan County, with a final CC7 of 7,163!
7. Alberta Odell Jones (1930-1965), Murdered civil rights worker, with a final CC7 of 608.

Comments

Interesting Connections:

This year, 2023, is our "Year of Community Connections." So, we're looking for interesting connections between our starting people, and utilizing MyConnections, between starting people and others in their community. (Any time you are on a category page, you'll see a green MyConnections button in the corner. Click it to see how you are related to everyone in the category.)

Here are some of the connections we found this week:

• Isaac Errett was the manager and founder of the Christian Standard, the 1st of its denomination in the United States, and he was a close friend and the funeral orator of US president James A. Garfield.
• Kinchen Davis Little 1830-1910 had a plantation on the Oconee River in Putnam County, Georgia. A bird-shaped mound, created by Native Americans, was present on a stony ridge, built from white quartz rock. The bird was 102-feet-long, from head to tail.
• Cora (Wilson) Stewart (1875-1958) has a relative at degree 6, Leslie Obadiah Fultz. He was murdered as part of a feud between Stamper & Fultz families in 1878. Feuds were not just limited to the Hatfield & McCoy families. Eastern KY could be a dangerous place in late 1800s.
• Archelous Craft (abt. 1749 - 1853) - 4th great grandfather of Jesse Hilton Stuart was in the American Revolutionary War as a Private in North Carolina. He was a centenarian and died at the age of 104. According to an article from the Pine Mountain DAR Chapter, there is a family story that Archelous split a hundred fence rails on his hundredth birthday.
• Robert "Bob" Stewart's sister-in-law, Hazel (Sprouse) Adkins (1909-2002), married one of the three DeAutremont brothers, Ray, who was wanted after a failed, deadly train robbery attempt in southern Oregon in October 1923. The marriage was in 1925; Ray used an assumed name on their marriage record and fathered two children with her, before being finally apprehended four years after the robbery. Hazel lived with her parents while her children grew up and eventually remarried.

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More Interesting Discoveries:

• William Herbert Murphy (1855-1929) Co-Founder of Cadillac and Lincoln Automobile Companies. Murphy was the lead financial backer of Henry Ford's first gasoline powered vehicle, a delivery wagon, after Ford took Murphy on a 3-hour drive of a prototype. Their visions for the future of the automobile varied and Ford would eventually leave the company but allowed to retain the rights to his name. With Ford gone, Murphy would immediately rebrand the company to the Cadillac Automobile Company.  It was named after French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who had founded Detroit in 1701.
• James Claiborn Jones (1826-1914) is 6 degrees from Cora Wilson. He was notable, and called "Old Claib Jones," a "Famous Gunfighter in the Old West." His occupation? A lawman.
• Granville Martin Semmes II (1927-2012) is the Original Founder of 1-800-Flowers (and 6 degrees from Margaret Sissons). He had the idea while in the shower. He was friends with both a florist and an executive with a telecommunications company. The number 1-800-Flowers was already taken so Semmes flew to Wisconsin to purchase it from the current owner. The business would eventually floundered and assets bought by current owner (and prominently in current commercials) Jim McCann. Both Semmes and McCann claim to be the Founder.
• Charles Lunsford Neville Buck was an author and had several of his stories adapted into plays for the theater and also as silent movies. He also wrote under the pseudonym Hugh Lunsford. He grew up in Kentucky except for 4 years spent in South America with his father who was serving President Grover Cleveland in Peru.
• 6 Degrees from Alberta Jones, James Mathews (1872-1944)'s obituary reports that he was a "Star" in the Negro Baseball League and played for the Owensboro Black Stockings.

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Watch the Highlights Reel on YouTube to see more! 

Answer 1

I enjoyed every minute I worked on this Challenge.

Comments

Thank you, Stanley!

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Thanks again for participating Margaret! What a fantastic week it was!

Answer 2

I trust that, whilst this review was going on, careful attention was being paid to correcting the common mistake (due to US biassed genealogy software) of placing people in Kentucky when they were actually in the English county of Kent. This is particularly annoying when the dates involved were over 100 years before Kentucky even existed! I have found several ancestors in my tree who suddenly went to Kentucky when in reality they probably never travelled more than a few miles from their village in rural Kent.

Ask yourself, does it seem likely that a woman born in Kent marries a man in Kentucky but ends up in a grave back in her birth village?

I have also detected some other misattributions of place names where major cities (such as Rome Italy) get substituted for less well known towns (or even whole countries - Romania for example). Please check for accuracy and plausibility before committing data to this site.

Comments

The situation you describe is likely a manifestation of bad autocomplete choices by one of the early genealogy software packages. Some of the errors can be amusing (such as the numerous people from all over the world who supposedly went to "Y, Somme, Picardy" to die), but the errors permeate online family trees, and they can be difficult to eliminate.

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Hello Peter. Thanks for your astute observations. Did you find challenge profiles that contain errors? Or, are you just hoping to bring awareness to it for Kentucky researchers?

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Mainly to draw attention to the problem.

I was hoping that anyone who finds an ancestor supposedly in Kentucky in the 1600s (it didn't become a state till 1792) would dig a little deeper into the sources quoted.