In doing family history research you'll find that some families are very forth coming with all their information, have nothing hidden and you can fly back generation after generation with relative ease. Some, like the Rudes' line, make you beg, borrow, plead and offer organs on the black market for information. Lately I have had a run of the former so my reading list right now looks like this:
I think we will start with book number 1. That pretty little number on the bottom. That lovely book would be a copy of the "GENEALOGY OF THE DUTTON FAMILY OF PENNSYLVANIA, PRECEDED BY A HISTORY OF THE FAMILY IN ENGLAND FROM THE TIME OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR TO THE YEAR 1669; WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE DUTTONS OF CONN". Don't ask me why they are shouting the title but had I been the one who had done all that original research, I might be shouting too. John Dutton is my ninth great grandfather via Richard Allen. This book actually starts with Odard/Hodard seating himself at Dutton after coming in with William the Conqueror. I look forward to confirming or debunking the information found within
The next book in the stack is a gold and black and titled "Horton Genealogy; or, Chronicles of the Descendants of Barnabas Horton, of Southold, L.I., 1640". Apparently Mr. Geo. F. Horton wasn't as excited about his work as Gilbert Cope was judging by the complete lack of shouting in the title. :-) This work started with Barnabas Horton, born in 1600 and dying in the good ol' future U.,S. of A in 1680. His headstone still stands and is able to be viewed on Find A Grave (https://findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Horton+&GSfn=Barnabas&GSbyrel=all&GSdyrel=all&GSob=n&GRid=8265754&df=all& in case you're interested) Again I look forward to confirming all the details and in this case it should be slightly easier since he appears to have been very well documented as a person of interest.
Now, to the bright orange book on the top. Depending on what side of the family you come from you've probably been muttering to yourself about why I didn't start at the top and to please just hurry about because who cares about the other two. Well, without further ado. "Do broowe dring". This book is very different from the other two for a couple of reasons. 1) It's not in English. 2) It's a work of fiction. 3) The reason this book is of interest is not who it is about but who wrote it. The author of this book is Julius Johannsen and not just any Julius Johannsen but THE Julius Johannsen. A couple months ago now I was contacted by a gentleman asking if he could use some of the photographs I had previously posted in relation to Julius Johannsen with a novel they were printing had been written by the same. Having had no such knowledge of Julius ever writing a story I informed them they had to have had the wrong Julius because he simply couldn't have been our Julius. After a couple e-mails back and forth it was confirmed that our Julius had in deed been the author of the story. The story was originally published in a news paper by the name of Nordfriesische Rundschau in 1932. "It was made ready for print by Peter Jensen, a famous North Frisian writer, who corresponded with Julius Johannsen (they came into contact, as Johannsen financially supported a charity action in after-war Germany that Jensen had organized). Jensen also published two letters by Johannsen (Julius Johannsen from Clinton-Ohio, who had a wife from Sylt!) to him in the newspaper. In one of them Johannsen tells that he wrote the novel in the winter 1929-1930 when he had to rest because of a sore leg and had nothing else to do." I hope to share more about this in the coming weeks so stay tuned. Now I'd better go turn off that bubble machine ...
