I started a wonderful first post on the intentions of this blog and the research I'm doing now, but I had to look up the word "disseminate" so I opened a new tab in Opera (my browser of choice) and went to thesaurus.com, found the word, then wanted to check a census record on ancestry.com and so opened another tab, found the information, then decided I had too many tabs open and accidently closed the "new post" tab here. Duh. So I'll repeat myself, but it will seem stale to me because I've already said it once.
The intention of this blog is to keep others informed of the progress of my genealogical research, dissminate the information collected, and in the hopes that others researching the same names will be able to add to my own information. Instead it will probably end up being just another place where I write what I want whenever I want to write. I hope not. I have plenty of other places for that sort of thing. I need to leave this blog alone and use it only to write about genealogy, a subject I'm totally obsessed with.
It started with the title that popped into my head:
Googling for Harry Oglesby
Nice title, huh? Yeah, I thought so too.
I was Googling Harry Oglesby because he was the son of William Oglesby and his wife, Sarah "Sallie" B. LNU (Last Name Unknown. That's a huge family in my database. There are many LNU's, or "Unknown"s in my family. They tend to be females married to the males I'm researching. I hate that women lose their maiden names when they marry. It makes them so hard to find!). William Oglesby was the brother of my great-grandfather, Morgan E. Oglesby. I have no idea what the "E" stands for and probably never will. Maybe it was just an initial because they ("They" being peoples of the 17th century.) did that sometimes for reasons that probably made a lot of sense at the time, but which seems totally stupid to me now. It's not like there were hundreds and hundreds of Morgan Oglesbys around and he needed to be made unique.
Anyway, I'm digressing....back to the Oglesbys.
So Morgan and William were two of the children of Daniel and Nancy Sprague Taylor Oglesby. These Oglesbys are a sneaky lot. Daniel appears out of the foggy mists of time in Gallatin, Illinois where he marries Nancy Taylor in 1848. Where was he before? Was he married before he married Nancy? It's entirely possible that he was because in 1850, the first census I find him in, he's 45 years old. That's pretty old to be taking a first wife. To add to the mystery, he claims on the 1850 Federal Census of Union Co., Kentucky, that he was born in Virginia. That's possible because there are tons of Oglesbys in Virginia and they're quite well documented. Then, probably just to infuriate me, he claims in subsequent censuses (or censui) that he's from Tennessee. Morgan's death certificate states that his father was born in Tennessee. I don't know what to believe. I haven't been able to find out for sure because I can't really track Daniel before 1850, he not having any of my future ancestors with him at that time. And to make matters worse, Daniel refuses to be Googled.
I have a theory that Daniel was not a wonderful father. I base this theory on the fact that none of his descendants I've been able to find have named any of their sons after him. Naming a child is a sacred thing, and naming a son is even more so. Your name follows you for all of your life and indentifies who you are. Naming your son after your father is a way to keep your father immortal. None of the sons of Daniel Oglesby I've found so far have immortalized their father, hence my belief that Daniel wasn't a good guy.
But I've found William Oglesby, the son who sprang from his loins in 1853. Born in Union County, Kentucky, I think, he was the second child born to Daniel and Nancy. I think he was the second child. I don't have proof of his birth or record of his death, which would give me a difinitive year of birth. I only have census records to go by and most of them say "abt. 1853", which means almost nothing.
Wait a minute...
I was trying to look at ancestry.com for the dates and names of places and people I'm posting about, but they went suddenly wonky on me, so I used Family Tree Maker's wonderful "search the web" function to look it up and found a "One World Tree" entry for William and Sarah. It has the exact dates of his birth and death, and I'm sure it's him because he died in Krebs, Oklahoma, which is where I found him. Whoa. This is exciting.
More later.
