An obsessive day hunting William Bush son of Catherine Franck
I started out this morning on a small task for my mother, one i’ve not completed, which was looking up the Family Tree DNA testing for my grandfather ($169 for Y-DNA37 or $119 for Y-DNA12). This reminded me that i needed to follow up on a discrepancy in the genetic genealogy on my paternal line. We’re part of the Bush Surname project. It’s turned up a discrepancy in the claims of B-038 and B-055, that *might* be interesting.
To that conversation, i went back to what i am sure of in my ancestry. Judge James Bush [22 p PDF] is the earliest ancestor in the line that i can trace by linking to first sources like graves and wedding registers and so on. He’s also a rather prominent member of the settlement of Early County.
It’s tracking down anything about James’ father William Bush [16 p PDF] that is the great challenge. One hint is that this William Bush is a half brother to General Blackshear. The link with the Blackshear family is also documented in the Memoir of General Blackshear:
The other clue i have is from the cemetery survey where James is buried, which notes James as “Son of Lieutenant William Bush Revolution soldier and wife Mourning.”
There seem to be several William Bushes in the area where Catherine Franck married a Blackshear after her first husband died. There is debate over whether the William who married Mourning could be the half brother of David Blackshear.
I suppose, if there were some who have strong paper documentation to the the Bush who married Catherine Franck, some of this question of which William could eventually be settled.
Until then, i await Google’s book scanning project to continue with works from the 1800’s in hopes that bound volumes of probate court and marriage registries might put relevant documents in my digital reach. Indeed, i could head off to libraries on the other side of the country, but for the moment, this day of online searching is the investment i can make.
May 1st, 2010 at 4:44 pm
[...] written before about “An obsessive day hunting William Bush son of Catherine Franck [I178],” where i document the brothers William [I184] and John Bush [183], sons of Catherine Franck, [...]
June 30th, 2010 at 6:25 am
[...] My relation to the Francks is through their daughter Catherine who married a Bush, and my father’s copy of Hardy Bush’s will from the the NC archives seems to support Catherine (or Katherine) marrying Hardy Bush. When Hardy Bush died, she remarried into the Blackshear family, and General David Blackshear’s memoirs recount her three children William, John, and Mary. William Bush is father of James Bush, settler of Early County, Georgia. [...]