In spite of being sheltered at home, Saturday Night Genealogy Fun seems to roll around at approximately the same pace as it did before we self-quarantined. I am making this comment because a friend posted her new reality of 2020 – February had 29 days, March had 300 days and April will have 5 years in it! Thankfully, I am not finding that to be true.

Randy Seaver has issued this week’s SNGF mission:

1)  We sometimes find we have questions we would love to discuss with our ancestors – the who, what, when, why and how questions that might help with our genealogy research.

2)  Which ancestors would you like to talk to?  What questions would you ask?

My ancestral choices would vary over time, depending on who has become the current most frustrating, or interesting, ancestor for whom I have questions.

Here are my 2020 choices:

1. Johannes Stoppelbein, born c1600 in Germany. I would love to interview him because he is the earliest Stufflebean ancestor to be found. In fact, he is the ONLY man with that name in that time period and the surname actually has a translatable meaning – STUBBLE LEG. I would love to know if he had a deformed leg of some kind, whether by birth or accident, and, if so, what the name of his father is. In terms of Y-DNA, that would give today’s Stufflebean descendants, a potential new surname group to belong to without any non-parental event happening.

2. I would love to talk to all of my Slovak 2X great grandparents to learn about their parents, siblings and grandparents. Church records in the villages begin in the early 1800s, so there are no records to provide information on earlier generations. I have the names of a handful of 3X great grandparents because they lived into the early 1800s, but not much else.

3. William Sturgill is my husband’s 3X great grandfather, proved by preponderance of evidence. I would love to ask him about his first wife, and mother of his children, her family, and learn about all of his own children. He left very little in the way of a paper trail, from Ashe County, NC to Grayson County, VA to Wythe County, VA and on to Lawrence County, OH before reportedly dying in Arkansas or Missouri in a saw mill accident.

4. My 2 earliest New England brick walls are the wives and families of Loyalists Walter Stewart and Robert Carlisle. I would dearly love to know who their parents were, when and where each was born, and what the maiden names of their wives were, along with their birth dates and places. They have persistently kept that information to themselves!

5. Lastly, I would also love to know the maiden name of the wife of Thomas Burnham (1673-1748) of Ipswich, Essex, MA. Her given name was Susannah and I have spent many many hours poring over Burnham primary records in Essex County trying to glean clues as to her surname. I’ve eliminated all the possible Susannahs born in Essex County or Boston in that time frame. I would really like to interview Susannah and learn all about her family.

Those are my top choices for now. I am always on the lookout for new clues, but these five are long standing brick walls.

Thank you, Randy, for this week’s challenge. 🙂