The interesting people you find in your history

I am still working on the Tatman family. I figure I will give it another week or so before I move on. It is not that there is a shortage of information because there isn't. In fact, there is an abundance of information readily available on the internet about them.

The key with genealogy is to do alot of the work yourself to make sure you have the right information to start with and then you can post your family tree online and let the cousins out there find you and help add to it. Right now, I have about 1,100 descendants of James Tatman (born 1744 in the Virginia Colonies) and his wife Sarah Murdock. So, I would say it is coming along just fine.

Every now and then you run across famous people in someones tree. My father in law Bill has a few of them. One being Daniel Boone. Yup, that Daniel Boone! The other is the fellow below. His name is Stanley Foreman Reed. Stanley is related to the Tatmans by marriage.

Here is a portrait of Stanley:





Stanley Foreman Reed was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court. His biography follows:

"Stanley Foreman Reed of Kentucky was nominated as the sixty-ninth Associate Justice of the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 15, 1938, succeeding Justice George Sutherland. He served on the court for 19 years under Chief Justices Hughes, Stone, Vinson and Warren. He wrote 231 majority opinions, 20 concurrences and 88 dissents. After his retirement on February 25, 1957,he served briefly as Chairman of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Commission. He died on April 2, 1980, at the age of ninety-five.

Reed, son of Dr. John A. Reed, a practicing physician, and Frances (Foreman) Reed, was born December 31, 1884, in Minerva, Mason County, Kentucky. After a public school education, he entered Kentucky Wesleyan College and was graduated in 1902. He went on to Yale University for a second bachelor's degree, conferred in 1906. He next studied law successively at the University of Virginia Law School, at Columbia University Law School and at the Sorbonne law faculty in Paris, without ever taking a formal law degree at any one of these institutions. After returning from Paris, Reed was admitted to the Kentucky Bar in 1910 and established a law practice in Maysville, Kentucky. In 1912, and again in 1914, he was elected to the Kentucky Legislature as the representative from Mason County.

During World War I, he served as a First Lieutenant in the Untied States Army. He served as a first lieutenant in the Army during World War I. Later he served as General Counsel for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation by appointment of President Hoover. As special assistant to the Attorney General, he argued the Gold Clause cases, 294 U.S. 240 (1935), before the Supreme Court. Beginning in 1935, he served three exciting years as Solicitor General. After losing the NRA case, 294 U.S. 495 (1935), and the AAA case, 297 U.S. 1 (1936), he successfully defended the Tennessee Valley Authority Act in Ashwander v. TVA, 297 U.S. 288 (1936).

Among his opinions as an Associate Justice were United States v. Rock Royal Co-operative, 307 U.S. 533 (1939); United States v. Appalachian Electric Power Company, 311 U.S. 377 (1940); and Morgan v. Virginia, 328 U.S. 373 (1946). He voted with the unanimous court in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Died at 96 years. Services were held at Trinity United States Methodist Church in Maysville, Kentucky, prior to his interment in the Maysville Cemetery on April 8, 1980 [449 U.S. XXXVII (1982)]."Biography courtesy of the following website: http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/lib_hist/courts/supreme/judges/reed.html

Sidetracked....now back on track

I got a little side-tracked while working on the Tatman family. I remembered that the largest part of my wife's family were the descendants of one James Logan Colbert (1721-1780). James Logan was a Scottish trader who was born in the Carolina's and came into the Chickasaw Nation to make a living with the tribe. He ended up marrying three Chickasaw wives: two full blood, and one half blood. All of his descendants make up the Chickasaw part of my wife's family. So, i had to copy down the info we needed before I forgot to do so again.

If you haven't checked out the links on the left side of this blog, do yourself a favor and check out Kerry's amazing Chickasaw site

http://www.chickasawhistory.com

For more info on the Colbert's and James Logan's descendants check out the direct link

http://www.chickasawhistory.com/colbert/

Kerry has done alot of research into that family, and my research uses his as a guide line. In general, I don't trust too many people's online family trees. Alot of them out there appear to be only collecting names rather than finding the information on the actual people. I have seen a few sites that claim to have more than a million people in their trees, which is next to impossible if you want to have any degree of accuracy in your research. Most of the time, the names and dates are passed off as fact, and are wrong, but keep making their way into more and more trees.

My intention with the family tree has been, and always will be, to have the most correct information possible with all available resources of quality.

So, now that I got the information down that I need, it is back on to the Tatman family

The Ratchford Family

The Ratchford family falls under my wife's side of the tree. Pearl Cornelius Ratchford was born on January 29, 1905 in Oklahoma, possibly within the Chickasaw Nation. More on that in a minute. Pearl is my wife's Great Grandmother. She married a man by the name of Hindmon Herbert Harris and they had 5 children, including my wife's Great Aunt Johnnie as well as my wife's Grandfather, Hindmon Cedell Harris.

When I first started looking into the Ratchford's, I only had the names of Pearl and her parents and that was about it. Through my recent searches on the internet, I was able to trace Pearl's family back to 1724 in Clover, South Carolina.

What I found interesting was that even though I knew that Pearl had married into the Chickasaw Nation by marrying Hindmon Herbert, I just found out that she was quite possibly of Chickasaw descent herself. It appears that Pearl's grandfather James Ratchford moved his family to Oklahoma and the Chickasaw Nation sometime before 1895. Pearl's Aunt Emma Ratchford (father's sister) married Augustus Aclin on October 2, 1898 within the Chickasaw Nation.

Now, here is where it gets a little wierd. You know, inter-marriages and such. The Augustus Aclin I just mentioned who married Pearl's Aunt Emma Ratchford? Augustus Aclin was living in the Chickasaw Nation with his family when he met Aunt Emma Ratchford. Augustus Aclin had a sister who was also living with the Tribe. Her name was Maude M. Aclin. Maude married William Franklin Ratchford and there you have Pearl's parents!!!!

I have sent an e-mail to the Chickasaw Nation asking about the Ratchford and Aclin families and am awaiting a response on the Dawes Roll #'s for each member of the family.

For those of you who don't know what the Dawes Rolls were, they were Tribal Rolls of every member of the five civilized tribes (Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole) that were removed from their original lands by the Federal Government and sent to live on lands approved of by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Most of the Ratchfords were farmers, although a handful were Presbyterian Ministers and the majority of them stayed on the East Coast through out the years. Some however, did manage to make their way to California, but their number is small. Like most white families of their time they also owned their fair share of slaves. Most of the "Slave schedules" listed on Ancestry.com list plenty of Ratchfords as owners of slaves.

Other families that married into the Ratchfords and thereby became grandparents in one generation or another to my wife were Aclin, Freeman, Davis, Campbell and Carroll.


Here are Pearl's Ratchford ancestors:

Her parents were William Franklin Ratchford (born 1868 in Caroline Township, North Carolina) and his wife Maude M. Aclin (born in 1872 in Arkansas)

Grandparents: James G. Ratchford (born 1838 in Walton, Georgia) and his wife Margaret F. Davis (born in Tennessee in 1847).

Great Grandparents: William Ratchford (born in North Carolina in 1788) and his wife Mary who was born in 1812 in North Carolina.

Great Great Grandparents: Moses Ratchford (born January 15, 1755 in Clover, South Carolina) and his wife Mary Campbell, who was born on November 9, 1760 in South Carolina.

Great Great Great Grandparents: William Ratchford (born in 1724) and his wife Mary Carroll who was born in 1725.

* * * * * * *

Next up: The Tatman's (Update) Ummmm.....,okay, I just looked into the Tatman family briefly and it might take me a few weeks to get a handle on this family. Like the Incardona's, Harris', Colberts' and Van Keurens' (among a few others) on our tree, the Tatman family is massive. I have all of the known ancestors I can find. The catch is finding the descendants of all those ancestors, where possible. So, give me a few weeks before you see another update here, okay?