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Found in the Records: The Murder of Cato
The Murder of Cato Colonel’s Island, Liberty County, 1846 There are some days in my research when I dedicate an entire afternoon to a single FamilySearch collection for one county, hoping that by moving page by page, front to back, something overlooked will finally emerge. Names like “Baker” or “Thomas” can become almost impossible to
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Tracing Eliza: From Harris Neck to New York
Part III: Movement, Constraint, and Adaptation Finding Eliza Huguenin Thomas Magill in the Record In this third part of my second great-aunt Eliza Huguenin Thomas Magill’s life, I return to a question that has followed me through every document and every attempt to piece her together: how do I find her within the record that
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Chasing Shapeshifters: John W. Magill
Fragments of a Family Story About a year ago, I began creating folders for individual family members, gathering whatever evidence surfaced as my research intensified. What started in 2023 as a vague, single folder—with a Word document summarizing what I thought was my family tree—quickly unraveled. That document went through multiple rewrites, additions, and hard
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What the Record Keeps: Following Eliza Huguenin Thomas Magill
The Names That Return In my previous post on “Cousin Rosa,” I introduced her as the daughter of Eliza Huguenin Thomas and John W. Magill. As I have noted in earlier writings, tracing female ancestors often requires the application of different guideposts than those typically employed for men. It is precisely this challenge that made
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Unraveling Cousin Rosa: A Genealogical Puzzle
Tracing family history often feels like assembling a puzzle with missing pieces—and sometimes a few pieces seem to belong to an entirely different puzzle set. One of the most elusive figures in my ancestral search is Eliza Huguenin Thomas Magill, the eldest sister of my second great-grandfather, Edward Jonathan Thomas. Like her sister, Mary Jane
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The Life and Shadows of Mary Jane Thomas Gaden: A Story Waiting to Be Told
If I were a fiction writer, I’d already have a novel on my hands. This story has all the elements: a strong protagonist, mystery, wealth, betrayal, spiritualism, social reform, crime, and ruin. But it’s not fiction—it’s the real-life story of my 2nd great-aunt, Mary Jane Thomas Gaden. And I’m piecing it together, fragment by fragment,
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