This week I've been working on a complex part of my family tree, and it centers on my 3rd g-grandmother, Margaret Ann Hickman Lacy Burch. Margaret had a genealogically confusing life. She is something of a brick wall; I haven't identified her parents yet. She had 8 children with her 1st husband, Job Lacy, then after his death remarried and had 2 children with Joseph Burch. Two of her children with Lacy married siblings of Burch... which makes my head spin every time I think about it. And that's not even considering the sad and shocking manner of her death (murdered by Joseph Burch, who then committed suicide. Their youngest son, my 2g-grandfather found them after the fact). Going through the notebook and some loose papers my mother-in-law collected from 1995-2010 when she was working on my genealogy, I found 4 loose photocopied, annotated and highlighted pages from two separate pieces of correspondence, that I sourced as follows:
* Photocopied correspondence from descendants of [[Lacy-2513 | Miles Lacy]] and [[Lacy-2520 | William James Lacy]], (one set typed, one set handwritten) (typed from Roy E. Lacy a grandson of Miles?) in Theodora Brown Chapman's notes, possibly from her 1990's research or possibly a correspondent of Charmie Granger Maffett from 1960's-1990's.
As I worked my way through them, and I'm not done yet, I realized I had stumbled on a treasure trove. I think they must have been from my grandma's research in the 60's-70's, when she was exploring her heritage to see if she could get into the DAR. I know she corresponded with some of her cousins during that time and I have copies of some of those letters as well. It looks like it was before the age of widespread home computer use. But I just don't know and my grandma is no longer around to ask.
Both sources had lists of Margaret's children with Job Lacy and at least mentioned John S. H. Burch, her youngest child and my ancestor. The handwritten notes had a more complete listing and also is one of the few sources I've found for John's older sister Eliza, or Lizzie Burch, who married John Buchanan. I have very few sources for her but this confirmed what I was able to put together from my Ancestry account. For some of the branches of this part of my tree, FamilySearch doesn't have much at all, and Ancestry gets confused by duplicate names. And honestly, John Burch married Hulda Burch, daughter of Martin Burch, and they were probably second cousins, so it was already confusing enough. This gave me the confidence to enter Eliza as a sibling for John, and confirmed the multiple Lacy/Burch intermarriages that I had been hesitant to connect before. So I have been busy with my family soap opera in Mercer County, Ohio and grateful to the people who took notes at the courthouse a long time ago, wrote it down and passed it along.
