Righting the Wright Connection

Okay, I have been at this blogging experience for about a week and I am finding myself getting impatient to get moving into the things I really know. But it is important to set some background first. I started my membership in Ancestry.com I believe about one and a half years ago. It was a typical start, I wanted to look something up and Ancestry so nicely offers you a two week free trial so of course I accepted and of course I forgot to cancel after my free trial and had the automatic account deduction that paid for a year subscription. Well, now that I had financially invested I had to get my monies worth or is it money's worth. Doesn't matter. For those of you who have paid their way into Ancestry.com you know that for what seems like a lot of money you can have access to this huge world of United States records and data. For more money than I could justify in this life time I could add to that the world data. On my mother's side, my ancestors go back to the old country very quickly. My great grandparents were all immigrants so for now, my mother's genealogy is ignored, waiting for the day that I feel I have exhausted the US files and must move on to the old countries or I win the lottery, inheritance from a long lost uncle or this blogging suddenly makes me a wealthy woman.

Now my father's side, that is a different story. I have gotten very few of his lines back to the country of origin. I am not sure in my lifetime I will ever get back far enough to feel I have satisfactorally found my roots. So for now I can stay busy in US documents.

 I was so excited when I started in Ancestry.com, all of these lines finished to way back when completed on other trees, relatives available just for the picking. I followed the trails, adding long lines to my family tree like a squirrel gathering nuts. Only it was not really like a squirrel, more like lemmings following blindly right over the edge. I now had built a family tree full of misinformation. I had thought there was some sort of control, as if there was some wise wizard making sure that the data was real and accurate. I started contacting some of the owners of the trees I had connected with to find that they had no idea where researcher zero was, the original poster of the data and where the verifications were. So I have been having to go back and correct the wrongs. I think I have more mistakes then I have actual relatives on my family tree. I have been tempted to dump it and start over but have been afraid of permanently losing important finds. So as my first word of wisdom - do not blindly go into that grove of trees and start picking. Ask questions, do some research on your own and try to add quality for others to follow. Hopefully that will be exactly what my tree will become. But for now even if you pair up with my data, tread cautiously and ask questions.

My first faux pas from gathering bad data: I followed the Carr line which connects to the Wright line with Weitzal's daughter Clara (Clarissa). I found this branch that connected back to Nicholas Rice, a Revolutionary War patriot and an active geneology family. I was elated. I had family. I belonged somewhere. Only the connection had a wrong turn at William Mitchell Carr. This was the lineage of a different William Carr - what did I tell you about those Williams, it is so easy to start following a crossed line because of similarities in age and birthplace. Anyway, I had contacted the Daughters of the American Revolution to see about joining. They in turn got me in contact with Betty, the reasearcher for the Tri-Cities Washington branch who was to help me verify my line. She,  who was the best part of all of this since she has helped me so much in understanding how to do genealogy, found the error. My actual Carr lineage was just as exciting, but it stopped just short of being able to find the patriot so did me no good as far as joining the DAR. Betty then asked me to look at another line which is how I started getting so involved with this Wright-Hills-Taylors.

The line on ancestry.com goes from Weitzal, to Jonathan Wesley Wright to Solomon Wright. From Solomon it leaves North Carolina and picks up in Pennsylvania amongst the Quakers. With Solomon in North Carolina we do not have a name for Jonathan Wesley's mother and there is not a complete sibling list. But we know that Swinfield Wright and Solomon Wright (and others but that is where I will stop for now on this posting) were brothers of Jonathan Wesley. Negetha Gourley Powers connected a Solomon Wright in Pennsylvania with the Solomon Wright in North Carolina in her book the Wright Connection. She did have a bit of a caveate in that it is possible that this was not the right Wright, but it seemed the world that was connected to Jonathan Wesley Wright wanted to accept this as fact. The PA Quaker Wright had this wonderful history that went back to William Penn through John Scarborough, to the Pickerings of Salem MA, There were Virginia colony connections and Puritans. It was a cornicopia of American lore. I was part of history. And then, the shoe fell. Damn those DAR women and their need for proof. Betty is good at her job. With just a quick contact and $80 in fees she was able to disprove the Wright Connection. It sits there so easy to access at Burke County Historical Society in Pennsylvania; the family bible, the Quaker Meeting Minutes. the will. Solomon Wright, Quaker, died in Pennsylvania, they have records and gravesites. He did not have a son by the name of Swinfield. He had a son named John but not Jonathan.  His children were born, lived and died in Pennsylvania, not in North Carolina. So I had to greive the loss of so many generations of family history. I had to give up on the dream of being part of the founding fathers and accept that yes, I am a hillbilly.