Cousin's Treasure Chest

On Monday of this week, a cousin who has done many years of work on our family visited with my Mother. I was able to be there and took the opportunity to scan many documents he brought with him. Almost all were things I have not seen previously. One of these is the death certificate for my great grandfather, William Rich Bowen. This also gave me confirmation of William's parents. It was like opening a treasure chest to see all of this information at one time. I will be looking forward to visiting with my cousin in the future to scan more documents and photos.

Volunteers Help With Grave Matters

One of the wonderful things I like about genealogy work is all the new friends you make who exchange information. Most of these new friends, I will never meet in person. But, thanks to the internet, we find each other through common interests and exchange data, pictures, stories and hints. A truly amazing aspect of this is how many people will volunteer their time and resources to go to cemeteries in their area and take photos of grave markers for those too distant to do it themselves. Grave markers can be a very useful source of information. The efforts of those who do this is very much appreciated.

Correcting the Record

Frequently, while doing my research I find mistakes in the various databases of information that Ancestry.com is able to link me to. Most often, the mistake is due to a transcriber incorrectly reading the information on a scan of an old handwritten document. These can be pages in a census book, death certificates, marriages licenses, etc.

Ancestry.com provides the ability to submit comments and corrections. They review what you submit and if approved, it becomes available to all who view that item in the future, hopefully saving them the same frustration I encountered.

Today I received one of many emails I have received from Ancestry.com telling me that corrections I have submitted have been approved. Most of these were correcting names, dates of birth, names of spouses.

Long lost cousins

I really enjoy the emails I receive from folks who discover they have a family connection with me or my wife, Dee. In this morning's email was one from a woman who's paternal great grandfather was a brother of Dee's paternal great grandfather, but is from a line I had almost no information about. Now we will exchange information. It is a lot of fun.

Tonight I got a nice surprise

Tonight I got a nice surprise, an email from someone in Colorado who is a distant cousin. This woman has done a lot of work on our Bowen family. I have been trying to contact her for months. We have been emailing back and forth tonight. Her great grandfather was a half brother of my great grandfather, William Rich Bowen.

Thanksgiving Dinner Guest

In an online group I follow that discusses the Bowen family, someone posed a fun question today:

"if you could have one of your ancestors with this surname join you for
Thanksgiving dinner, which ancestor would you invite? What questions would
you ask him/her?"

This is my reply:

 I would invite William Rich Bowen

He was my great grandfather. I never knew him.

He was apparently born in Huntland, Franklin County, Tennessee on April 15, 1859.

Much of his life was spent in the area around Fayetteville, Lincoln County, TN., and later the separated Moore County.

He married a girl named Queen Anne Smith in 1886. They had six children including my grandfather Rawls Coston Bowen.

Rawls eventually moved to North Carolina, eventually settling in Durham, NC.

William Rich and Queen Anne appear to have moved around living with various of their children, including some years in Durham, where Queen Anne died and is buried.

William Rich moved back to TN and lived for some time with a daughter, and later moved to live with a son in Toledo, Ohio, where he died on October 12, 1931 and is buried.


I would love to ask him if he could confirm the ancestry I have for him, or shed some light on this line of Bowens, and how they came to Tennessee.

Oh my darling, Clementine!

Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling, Clementine!
Thou art lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorry, Clementine


The old song says it well. I have a Clementine Bradley in my family tree, and she seems lost forever.

The bulk of five generations have been fairly fast and thanks to ancestry.com, fairly easy to fill out in my tree. But having done that, I am now going back and trying to confirm that I don't have limbs spliced on that don't belong.

The 1860 census of Lincoln County, Tennessee lists a Clemente Boren married to a Daniel Boren. They have several children including a William Boren who is one year old. My family name is Bowen. This appears to be an example of a frequent problem with old census records. The census taker wrote down what he heard when he asked for names. Often, the one providing the information could neither read nor write, therefore the spelling of a name was difficult to verify. This often led to family names being changed for future generations.

I have concluded with some confidence that these people are actually Daniel and Clementine Bowen. I also believe Clementine's maiden name was Bradley. This is based on a marriage record of a Daniel Boren marrying a Clementua Bradley January 9, 1842. The 1860 census lists Clementine's place of birth as "Geo", which I interpret to be Georgia. Her age is given as 41, which would put her birth around 1819-20. Beyond that, I know little else about her.

I had jumped to the conclusion that I had found her parents, a James Bradley and Emelia Horner Bradley. But, there is a problem. This couple appears to have a daughter named Clementine N Bradley, but born in 1833, and marrying an Issac Julian in Missouri, where they seem to have remained.

Much of the information I have was taken from other family trees on ancestry.com. As is often the case much of this information is difficult to confirm and different sources frequently conflict.

So, I am trying to sort out which of the Clementines, if either will remain in my tree.