A staggering number of matches! About 2700 are 4th cousins or closer the rest are distant cousins which have their own importance if you want to discover all your roots. Since I am 74 my fourth cousins lived around 1800, by following the distant path I found out my earliest relatives to America came in 1621 and immediately married into a Mayflower family. The pilgrims and those who came in the next 50 years are very well documented. Although we are Catholic some of my ancestors became Quakers, and Quakers kept very complete records too. If your family came between 1620 and 1750 there is a very good chance you will find at least one historically important figure in your line and lots and lots and lots of cousins.
I can trace my Scottish family back to misty myth, full of Chieftains, saints, and kings. This may explain why I am so political and completely unimpressed with power and authority. This is also where “we have always been free men” comes from as the response to why we are so often intransigent. My Scottish side is responsible for so many DNA matches, I am descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages second only to Ghengis Khan for progeny. Well that, and a thousand years of cousin marriages. Marriages within a closed group are called endogamy, while not necessarily incestuous marriages they are close enough to concentrate genes and can make tracing your ancestors using DNA relationships more difficult.
My family has something for everyone. I hope to share stories about some of the more interesting relatives from the FBI Special Agent who was on the grassy knoll when JFK was shot to the Quaker abolitionist aunt who nearly bankrupted her husband traveling south to buy slaves only to free them and send them off to Canada in the underground railroad. It is the lives of your family, the good the bad and the ugly, expect to be surprised.
One of the surprises for me was the immediate family of my 2x great-grandmother. Her father Harrison Burger was married three times and had 22 children, my line comes from his third wife Mary Elizabeth Swearingen. His second wife Narissa Laws ran off to become the third wife of a neighbor Jordan Rousey Jr. One of my 2X great-grandmother’s brothers married a daughter of Jordan Rousey Jr and another sister married a grandson of Rousey. They share my DNA but I don’t share their’s, they are what my Grandmother would call “shirttail relations”.
The Rouseys lived for multiple generations about 50 miles from each other in Boyle and Casey Counties with occasional stays in Lincoln and Pulaski County. The family while scattered all over the country are still plentiful in those counties. Their yearly reunion attracts more than a thousand people every year.
From the Randolph Enterprise October 1908.
SIXTH SENSE HS STRANGE INTUITION HELPED FUGITIVE EVADE LAW. Escaped Convict Successfully Eluded Detective Twice, But Failed to Heed Third "Hunch" and Was Captured. Frankfort, Ky. The man with the sixth sense, who knows from intuition that he is being chased Is to be released from the penitentiary on parole. His name is William Rousey and he is serving a sentence of 21 years having been convicted in Boyle county of manslaughter for the shooting of one Mastin. The killing was a neighborhood feud and both men were using revolvers when the fatal shot was fired. Rousey comes of a noted family. Hi,s grandfather had seven sons. Of the seven only one met a natural death, the others being sent into eternity by bullet or knife wounds. All of the seven are dead, the last, Micajah Rousey, having been killed at Junction City by the marshal. Will Rousey is a nephew of Micajah Rousey. He has another cousin in the prison here who was convicted of killing an old man named Kiser in the courthouse at Danville. After Will Rousey had been convicted and sentenced to the penitentiary he appealed his case 'to the court of appeals. While that appeal . 'was pending he broke jail at Danville, sawing the bars in two and getting away. The man who escaped with him was captured, but Rousey seemed to have been swallowed up. He was a member of the Railway Trainmen's union and carried a card which would pass him on any railroad in the country. In this way he was enabled to make quick jumps about the country. Walter Fitzgerald was jailer of Boyle county, and he and Tom Helm, then chief of police, went after Rousey. Months passed and the people had forgotten that such a man as Rousey existed. More than a year after Rousey 's escape he was arrested in a small town in southern California. He was brought back and when the court of appeals affirmed his case he was brought to the penitentiary here. During the year that passed after his escape, Helm was on the trail of Rousey and twice was within two hours of him, reaching a town only that length of time after Rousey had gone. The chase was from Illinois to southern Arkansas and back four times and then across Texas and New Mexico into California. During this time Rousey never had positive information that anybody was after him. He received warnings in some mysterious way. He says some thing told him Tom Helm was after him and would come to the town in which he happened to be at that time, As soon as this feeling came upon him, without questioning it, Rousey would leave. On the day before he was arrested, Rousey said, he was sitting by the railroad track In the yards where he was employed. He said the old feeling which said to him plainly: "Tom Helm is coming here after you," came over him. He said he went at once to the foreman of the yard and asked for his pay and also for a pass to Canada. This was on Thursday. The foreman persuaded Rousey to wait until Saturday and work the week out. The failure to obey the warning caused Rousey to be caught just at the edge of what would have been safety, and he went to the penitentiary, where he has made a good record.
Next diary I will explore more of the Rouseys and what caused the feud that left so many of Jordan Rousey Sr’s sons, grandsons, and nephews dead. The Rousey gang terrorized middle Kentucky for more than 50 years and were front-page news throughout the country, more famous than the James Gang at the time.