William Cooper (abt. 1800)

Born about 1800 in Newton Township, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, United States

Ancestors

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Biography

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Birth

1800, Newton Twp, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania^[1]

Research Notes

• Family Search Profile - William Cooper son of John Cooper and Jane Jack Cooper lists a possible census return for 1860.
• His father's profile, John Cooper has Will Abstracts; John Cooper, wd 1805, wp 12 Aug 1806, but William is not listed among the children.
• He is listed as a child of John and Jane in the Josiah VanKirk Thompson Journals, see below for further explanation of this item.

Sources

1. ↑ Guill dec.ged

• Thompson, Josiah VanKirk. The J.V. Thompson Journals. Vol. 2, unknown, early 1900s. p. 160.

  In the early part of the 20th century, Josiah VanKirk Thompson of Uniontown, PA, spent a considerable amount of time and money researching the genealogies of various early Pennsylvania settlers, most of whom were originally in the Cumberland Valley. His intent was to publish a book containing the ancestry and descendants of his Revolutionary War forbearers and he was a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, and had several lines listed with that organization. Included in these genealogies are the descendants of Thomas Thompson, a son of John Thompson and Mary Wilson and the brother of John Thompson who married Susanna Laughlin. Among other lines recorded are Scroggs, Blain/Blean, Jack, Carruthers, and Laughlin. He also hired a professional genealogist, Gustave Anjou, to assist in the search, primarily in obtaining the pre-American ancestry of the lines he maintained, e.g. the early history of his Carruthers line in Scotland. Anjou's work has subsequently been found to be flawed and some researchers claim that he was fraud.
  Thompson was a wealthy coal entrepreneur and a major figure in Pennsylvania's coal and coke boom of the late 19th and early 20th century. He lived in a large mansion, once named Oak Hill (and now Mount Saint Macrina ), and kept Albert Gallatin's Friendship Hill as a summer home. As coal prices fell, his fortunes declined and he was eventually forced into bankruptcy. His wealth, coupled with his interest in genealogy, gave him the time and resources necessary to compile these notes.Thompson travelled throughout Pennsylvania and the surrounding area, interviewing everyone he could find connected with the early settlers, and in the process generated what are today called "The J.V. Thompson Journals". These journals consist of 28 volumes, each about 600 pages in length, legal size, specially bound and all hand written. He began his extensive project in the late 1890s and was still recording in the journals the day before he died in 1933. By that time, he was blind, penniless & estranged from his son. Much of the information in the last two volumes was dictated to his wife or step-daughters.'
  These journals have been filmed by the LDS church and are available in the Family History Library and to Family History Centers worldwide. The notes are not easy to research. They are not indexed (there is a sort of very rough index which can be seen on the old CD-ROM version of the catalog or on one of the films, (Author unknown. Posted. available for download, at archive.org, https://archive.org/download/Volume2_201903, retrieved 16 Jan 2022)

Acknowledgements

• WikiTree profile Cooper-2595 created through the import of O'Bryan Family tree.ged on Sep 6, 2011 by Tim Tropeck. See the Changes page for the details of edits by Tim and others.
• Cooper-10480 was created by Dwayne Jack through the import of jeremiah jack.ged on Jun 3, 2015.