Dennis Partridge

The webmaster has been busy this past month adding additional volumes of the Nassau Genealogist to our online collection. Recent additions include biographies, obituaries, newspaper excerpts, several articles on the Goodbread family. These all came from volume V of TNG which were published back in 1998. Please take a look at them when you get the chance if you have Nassau County ancestors. The Nassau County Genealogist: Online Table of Contents Too often genealogists think military records are only there to provide information on your ancestors military service. They are there for that, but as we like to emphasize, they often can provide the genealogical record you need but just cannot find elsewhere. Pension files are often what we like to point researchers to. I discovered a Bible record (or a non existent town record) in my 5th Great-Grandfather Zebulon Crane’s Revolutionary Pension record. It wasn’t even for his family, it was for his wife’s family, but that record helped verify the relationships which I thought were correct but could never positively prove. This month I accidently discovered another source of military records, the Southern Claims Commission Files. If you know me and my family you realize that I would never have need of these for my own family records, My ancestor’s are just a bunch of Yankees that go back to the Mayflower and French-Canadian back to the founding of Quebec. But I was working on updating my Tennessee Genealogy website where I have had an index of these

The first week of July always greets us with celebrations around the founding of the United States and the hot and sultry Florida weather. While I enjoyed the celebrations, especially our neighborhood fireworks show, I am definitely ready for some cooler weather. In the mean time I’m hibernating in my house while working on genealogy. One of the tasks I took on this month was straightening out the ancestry of an Abel Partridge of Ward, Massachusetts, whom most genealogists recorded as the son of Eli Partridge and Rachel Sheffield who resided in Medway, Massachusetts and Chesterfield, New Hampshire. I found however, that he wasn’t their son, he was the “supposed” son of Abel Partridge and Hannah Cheney of Medfield, Massachusetts. In this instance the “supposed” is how this child was listed in the published vital records of Medfield, Massachusetts, and it implies he was born out of wedlock. Worn, torn, and mutilated, by 1850 the original Medfield vital record books usefulness were nearing the end. Yet the original records would be copied three times over the next 50 years, first by a town clerk in 1850 who was able to consult the books before they were singed, then by two separate committees, one in 1876 created after a fire at the town hall almost burned the records, and the final in 1903, which resulted in the publishing of the Medfield Vital Records “tan book.” As I reviewed these multiple copies doing that “reasonably exhaustive search of all records” we’re suppose