The Amelia Island Genealogical Society will hold its regular monthly meeting at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, August 21, 2018 at the Community Room of the Fernandina Beach Public Library, 25 N 4th St. Dennis Partridge will present King Philip and His Tribe. Many families have a story of an ancestor who was Native American. Proving this fact has always been elusive, but for a genealogist, the legend piques  curiosity, and elusiveness, interest. Researching a Native American (NA) ancestor, however, can be confusing and time consuming, sending the researcher down a rabbit hole of incomplete record sources - made more difficult, by the specificity of the documents for each tribe - or at least, that's how researching a NA ancestor is spun to new genealogists. In truth, one discovers a NA ancestor, at first, just like you research any other ancestor, one generation at a time. The evening's talk revolves around personal research into the ancestors of Partridge's grandmother Della Grenier (Greenia) and his main research tenet: “Nothing is what you think it is, until you can prove it is!” Partridge managed to discover various lines of ancestry for Grenier - research that he had not previously pursued due to the lack of accessible records. His great-great-grandmother's family was a most colorful family and have a remarkable story to tell. The facts and records surrounding them will introduce the audience to Native Americans, coureur des bois, gypsies, "River Rats," eugenics, racism, and poverty as it affected a whole community of “outsiders” in upstate Vermont. This talk however is more than just a story, it’s a concrete example of the FAN principle of genealogical research (family, associates, and neighbors).

Dennis N. Partridge has been conducting personal research into his family since 1980. In 1996, in the infancy of the Internet, he morphed into a web developer bringing with him his passion for genealogy. Today, Dennis owns and operates AccessGenealogy (https://www.accessgenealogy.com/), one of the largest, privately owned genealogical websites online, well-known and frequented by Native American family researchers. Dennis also serves as Research Coordinator for the Amelia Island Genealogical Society.

Public welcome.