There'll be Good Days and Bad Days but Always Try to Learn Something from Both!

How many of you try and think of the old sayings your heard your elders use?  My "Aunt" Bonnie Mitchell used to say, "There'll be good days and bad days but try to learn something from both."  Aunt Bonnie was a very wise woman!

For 30 years, I have been looking for my 3rd Great Grandfather on the Jones side of the family.   I didn't know his name, I only knew that my 2nd Great Grandfather, Francis Marion Jones, was born in Clark County, Ohio in 1828.  

I had heard may folk legends about my 3rd Great Grandfather from older relatives, long dead now.   I had written some of them down.   I was told that this ancestor was a shoe cobbler and that he had immigrated from Wales to America.   Jones is a very common name in Wales so I thought that was reasonable. I had heard that he was a veteran of the War of 1812, and that is why he had named his son, my 2nd Great Grandfather, Francis Marion Jones, after the War of 1812 hero.

Based on this information, I had always looked at the ship's lists of Welsh immigrants trying to find him.    I had looked for Francis Marion Jones in the Clark County, Ohio 1850 census but had never found him.   I had run down just about every source of information to no avail.

This this past Wednesday, I decided to do something I had never done before.   I simply put the name Francis Marion Jones and the birth year 1828 into the search window of Ancestry.com.   Why hadn't I done that before?   Why had I always given his birthplace as Wales?  To my great amazement, several family trees including Francis Marion Jones appeared on the screen.   I recognized a couple of them as being submitted by distant cousins whose names I knew but who I had never met.

I began to carefully look through these family lines and I learned how absolutely important it is to compare your information, census information, and family traditions to make sure you are following the right line.

I believe one of my cousins to have the right information while I believe the other to have made assumptions and many inaccuracies.   The line the second cousin is following is not correct and is not our family.   This cousin somehow added a child to the family of Francis Marion Jones that was never mentioned in any of my material and whose birth date was not feasible.   My cousin had used work supplied by a family member of this child, to complete the Jones line.   How I wish it could be so, because the line included some very important Massachusetts families who were judges and ministers and Mayflower descendants.   One branch even went to Montreal and Quebec and would have given me some French Ancestors.   But it was not to be so.

The first family tree I looked at is the one I believe to be correct.  Francis Marion Jones is the son of Richard and D. Jones, who were living in Mad River Township, Clark County, Ohio when the 1850 Census was taken.     They were both born in Virginia and Richard is shown to be a War of 1812 veteran.

I will continue this writing and give all the information and include photos of Francis Marion and his wife Roxanna Eaton Jones in future writing.   In genealogy, there will be good days and bad days, but this writer has learned something from both---don't jump at conclusions---check facts.   Have a great weekend!