Long-Lost Cousins United Through Surprise Discovery

Cousin Debbie tickling   the ivories.   (Click on the image to see   a larger photo.)

I’ve been bitten by the genealogy bug and have been reading books and documents about my ancestors — and many other people’s ancestors as well. (I won’t mention some of the skeletons I’ve found.)

Blame it on Debbie Joslin, doting wife of the renowned Crest guitar picker, Larry Joslin. I was at their home one evening making music and Debbie brought out a book she wanted me to see. Darned if it didn’t have several pictures of folks named Edwards.

Debbie said, “Maybe we’re related.”

You see, the pictures were taken in Iowa in the 1850s. Which is where my great-great granddaddy Anderson Edwards and his family lived before moving to eastern Washington. Turns out that Debbie’s grandmother’s maiden name is Edwards and her ancestors are also from Iowa.

Later, Debbie introduced me to her Aunt Beverly, the family genealogist. Sure enough, she had family in Iowa, and before that the Clinch River area of eastern Tennessee (near Cumberland Gap), and before that Wales. Her family history was very similar to my own family’s westward migration, but as I recalled, my ancestor didn’t land in New York until the end of the Revolutionary War.

Debbie’s ancestors had come some 30 years earlier. I figured that if we were related, we had to go so far back into Welsh history that there would be no records of it.

Joining the Westward Migration
However, I have to face the facts of growing older. My memory, like our president’s isn’t what it used to be. I had confused a few dates. The year I was thinking my fifth great-grandfather arrived in New York was actually the year he left New York for Tennessee — 1783. Tennessee had just been opened to settlement after Daniel Boone and others had blazed a trail to the Cumberland Gap and what is now the Nashville area of middle Tennessee. It turns out that a group of Edwards brothers emigrated from Wales to America in the 1750s. My ancestor, Jonathan Edwards (not to be confused with the New England preacher), and Debbie’s ancestor, William Edwards, were two of those brothers. Their offspring then moved from New York to the Claiborne and Hancock counties region of eastern Tennessee, settling near the Clinch and Powell rivers in and around what became Sneedville.

From what I can tell, that isn’t exactly hospitable country for farming, and in 1851 several families built flatboats, drifted down the Powell to the Tennessee River, through Tennessee to the Ohio River, caught a steamboat to the Mississippi, and disembarked near the Missouri-Iowa border. From there they travelled by covered wagon to Decatur County, Iowa.

My great-great-grandfather Anderson Edwards was a bit of a wanderer, and after at least one trip to the gold fields in northern California and Nevada, he moved his family to the Pacific Northwest. They settled initially in eastern Oregon, then southeastern Washington, where he built a grist mill in St. John in 1879. Eventually, my clan wound up in Seattle. Debbie’s side of the family hung out in the Midwest a while longer, then moved to the Southwest — first Arizona, then San Diego.

Carrying on the family’s wanderlust tradition, I moved to San Diego in 1981 and met Larry and Debbie at — where else? — a damned ol’ fiddle contest. But it was another 15 years before Debbie and I discovered that we’re cousins. As I told her husband, it’s a good thing she didn’t marry the wrong Larry.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
Speaking of family trees, my buddy Kenneth Brank has been contributing to his family’s genealogy as well. One of his nieces in North Carolina (just a short hop over the Smoky Mountains from where my family lived in Tennessee) had asked him to recall stories of the family.

He told her a few things, then advised her that if she should come upon an Edwards somewhere, she should let sleeping dogs lie. “I am sure she will find some fiddlers, and that alone will be bad enough,” Brank told her.