Karen (Gibson) Fleming

Problems/Questions Profile manager: Karen Fleming [send private message]

warewendy at cloud.com - Please contact me regarding John Turkington. Your email address is bouncing and I cannot reply to you. 8 Apr 2015

Biography

My initial foray into genealogy was a 5th grade project, in which I drew my first family tree. I have seriously been researching my family history for the past 20 years. My day job is a scientist and professor at a prestigious research institute. Accordingly, I love the investigative nature of genealogy that relies on fact searching and instinct.

My roots run deep in the history of the US tracing back to Joel Gibson, the revolutionary war veteran who died in Henderson, KY. My dad is a direct male descendant of Joel, and his DNA analysis suggests this Gibson line likely originally came from the north of Ireland. His mother's side was Roman Catholic and first came to American with the original settlements in Maryland.

My mom's ancestors were German farmers, mostly devout Roman Catholics, who emigrated from the Bavaria region of Germany. Both sides first immigrated to Pennsylvania where they were farmers, coal miners and later steel workers. To this day, surnames most likely related to me continue to live in coal country, PA. Her direct ancestors subsequently pioneered Indiana, probably in response to the 1862 Homestead act. Her paternal grandfather has a sprinkling of Irish (Dublin area) in her ancestors, too.

My husband's family is a 20th century immigrant story from Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland and the Trois Rivières region of Québec. The Irish line is protestant, Scots-Irish whose diaspora that extends to many regions of the US as well as England, Australia, and New Zealand. But the history of this line is hard to trace earlier than the 1850s because of limitations in the Irish records. On the other hand, the French Canadian line, which was Roman Catholic and well documented by the Drouin collection, goes back to 16th century France.

Surnames I'm mainly interested in include:

Virginia & Maryland --> Kentucky:

GIBSON WEDDING TURNER HARMON SHELTON STONE HOLMES FLOYD CROSBY THOMPSON MATTINGLY SHANKS

(Mostly) German Catholics in Pennsylvania and Indiana:

GETZINGER MARGRAF SCHEIBELHUT REICHTER RÖHR WOLFE THALER KLEIN/KLINE SCHWENTER ZWEYER

Irish Catholics in Indiana, Michigan and Canada:

HUGHES YOUNG SHEPHERD MAHONEY

Scots-Irish Protestants from Co. Armagh, N. Ireland --> Connecticut and Astoria, NY:

FLEMING TURKINGTON FORDE CONN MATCHETT JACKSON HECKLER NEWELL COLE

French Canadians from Québec to Massachusetts and RI:

GREGOIRE LUSSIER LACOUTURE

My Philosophy

Our family history belongs to all of us, which is why I put the publicly documented information in WikiTree. As a scientist I respect the need for proper documentation, and I include it whenever I can (given time constraints - this is my hobby not my job). I recognize that these documents are not free. Before the advent of the internet, many family researchers spent significant sums of money to travel and obtain documentation. Some folks now are resentful that their hard work is being distributed "for free". I would encourage them to share their research because it would be a shame for the wonderful stories of our family history to be lost when their time here on earth is up. Widely sharing ensures that everyone's research will be put to good use. I am more than happy to give credit to researchers for their contributions and would not hesitate to include such citations if anyone wants me to include their findings or photos.

I also appreciate the "hints" that can come from family trees and even oral history. For this reason I do include names of people even if they are lacking in key documentation. The relationships of these folks should be taken in this manner – as hints of what might be.

I have a love/hate relationship with Ancestry.com. While it can be a wonderful source for many documents, I do not heavily weight trees from Ancestry.com for several reasons: (1) many people are not primarily involved with the oral history of their families and simply "copy" the trees; and (2) many people do not have a paid subscription (including myself), which means that the validity (or not!) of an Ancestry tree cannot generally be independently evaluated. To be clear: I have no problem with people using trees as a guide, but I do not consider them to be hard, primary (or even secondary) sources for information, and I dislike it when they are cited for that purpose.

Living People

Living people are excluded from publication on my trees. Please get in touch with me if I have mistakenly included any living people, and I will remove them. WikiTree has provisions for hiding the information of living people, which is in accordance with good genealogy practice.

DNA

DNA analysis can be a powerful tool for confirming or discovering relationships. My husband, his uncle, my parents and I have all had our autosomal DNA analyzed by 23andme.com. We are all also on GEDMATCH.

Relationships to US Presidents

I just did this for fun and am amazed at how many of them are cousins. These relationships were calculated using the Most Recent Common Ancestor tool that Wikitree provides. These presidential relationships are accurate to the extent that the ancestral trees for the relationships are also accurate.

1. George Washington: Ninth cousins six times removed. MRCA is Sir John Spencer II.

2. John Adams: Seventeenth cousins four times removed. MRCA is Sir Hugh "1st Earl of Winchester" le Despenser.

3. Thomas Jefferson: Ninth cousins eight times removed. MRCA is Richard Corbet.

4. James Madison: Ninth cousins six times removed. MRCA is Thomas Brydges.

5. James Monroe: Eighteenth cousins five times removed. MRCA is Sir Walter de Burgh, the 1st Earl of Ulster, Lord of Connaught & Munster in Ireland.

6. John Quincy Adams: Eleventh cousins seven times removed. MRCA is Thomas de Westcote.

7. Andrew Jackson: No relation

8. Martin Van Buren: No relation

9. William Henry Harrison: Eleventh cousins six times removed. MRCA is Peter Empson of Northamptonshire, England.

10. John Tyler: Fourteenth cousins three times removed. MRCA is Robert Markham of Lincolnshire, England.

11. James Knox Polk: Fourteenth cousins six times removed. MRCA is John Plantagenet, Duke of Lancaster of Gaunt, Flanders.

12. Zachary Taylor: Eighth cousins six times removed. MRCA is William "of Weston" Sheldon of Warwickshire, England.

13. Millard Fillmore: Thirteenth cousins four times removed. MRCA is Sir William of Dunham, aka Boothe of Barton, Lancashire, England.

14. Franklin Pierce: Twelfth cousins four times removed. MRCA is Robert Markham of Nottinghamshire, England.

15. James Buchanan: Twelfth cousins eight times removed. MRCA is John Plantagenet, Duke of Lancaster of Gaunt, Flanders.

16. Abraham Lincoln: Twelfth cousins four times removed. MRCA is Sir Marmaduke Constable of Yorkshire, England.

17. Andrew Johnson: Fifteenth cousins four times removed. MRCA is Sir William Gascoigne of Gawthorpe, IX, of Yorkshire, England.

18. Ulysses S. Grant: Fourteenth cousins twice removed: MRCA is Sir William Darell, Esq. of Wiltshire, England.

19. Rutherford B. Hayes: Fourteenth cousins five times removed. MRCA is John Wentworth, Esq. of Yorkshire, England.

20. James A. Garfield: Thirteenth cousins once removed. MRCA is Henry "of Newbury" Brydges of Gloucestershire, England, a member of the English Parliament.

21. Chester A. Arthur: Twelfth cousins four times removed. MRCA is Sir Marmaduke Constable of Yorkshire, England.

22. & 24. Grover Cleveland: Thirteenth cousins, four times removed. MRCA is Sir James Berkeley, the 1st Lord Berkeley of Gloucestershire, England.

25. William McKinley: No relation.

26. Theodore Roosevelt: Fourteenth cousins twice removed. MRCA is William Skipwith of Lincolnshire, England, a descendant of the Magna Carta surety barons.

27. William Howard Taft: Tenth cousins three times removed. MRCA is Sir Thomas King of Essex, England.

28. Woodrow Wilson: No relation.

29. Warren G. Harding: Eleventh cousins once removed. MRCA is Edmond Thomas of Kent, England.

30. Calvin Coolidge: Twelfth cousins twice removed. MRCA is Henry "of Newbury" Brydges of Gloucestershire, England, a member of the English Parliament.

31. Herbert Hoover: Thirteenth cousins twice removed. MRCA is John Kinge of Essex, England.

32. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Eleventh cousins three times removed. MRCA is George Hamby of Lincolnshire, England.

33. Harry S. Truman: No relation.

34. Dwight D. Eisenhower: No relation, which I find interesting because I've been told that my grandfather was his doppelgänger and often mistaken for President Eisenhower.

35. John F. Kennedy: Eighteenth cousins twice removed. MRCA is John Plantagenet, Duke of Lancaster of Gaunt, Flanders.

36. Lyndon Baines Johnson: Sixteenth cousins. MRCA is Sir Robert Throckmorton of Coughton Court, Warwickshire, England.

37. Richard M. Nixon: Fifteenth cousins. MRCA is Oliver Hyde of Berkshire, England.

38. Gerald R. Ford: Eleventh cousins once removed. MRCA is Nicholas Stephens of Wiltshire, England.

39. Jimmy Carter: Fourteenth cousins twice removed. MRCA is Elizabeth Parr, Baroness Vaux of Harrowden, grandmother of the sixth queen of Henry VIII.

40. Ronald Reagan: Fourteenth cousins. MRCA is Sir William Spencer of Northamptonshire, England.

41. George Herbert Walker Bush: Twelfth cousins once removed. MRCA is Col. Joseph Raleigh Croshaw of Kent, England.

42. Bill Clinton: Seventheenth cousins twice removed. MRCA is Sir John Throckmorton of Warwickshire, England, a member of Parliament.

43. George Walker Bush: Twelfth cousins twice removed. MRCA is Col. Joseph Raleigh Croshaw of Kent, England.

44. Barack H. Obama: Ninth cousins twice removed. MRCA is Mary Wells of Norfolk, VA, daughter of Richard Wells, a wealthy immigrant from England who was a member of the Maryland General Assembly in 1654.

45. He that shall not be named.: Thank Goodness no relation.

Relationships between my husband and Canadian Prime Ministers

Many French-Canadians share ancestors.

Justin Trudeau: Eighth cousins. MRCA is Hilaire Limousin.

Stephen Harper:

Joe Clark: No relation

Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Seventh cousins once removed. MRCA is Hilaire Limousin.

Sources

First-hand information entered by Karen.