Gertruida's Cousin

With scheduled consultant duties at the Family History Library and no patrons, I checked in to FamilySearch to see what it had for me. There was a birth record belonging to a possible ancestor. It was in Amsterdam and I thought, "Well, I'm not that good with Dutch records or the language so I'm not so sure if I can confirm this as a good source."

Grandma Cotter Calls to Me

We're heading to Edinburgh on our next Mormon Heritage Association tour of Scotland and Wales in a few weeks. My wife and I are going a week early as a celebration of my retirement. I had planned to travel down to Durham for some Vaughan family visits, but something besides just the longer drive nagged me to stay in Scotland.

We were going to rush through some of my wife's ancestral villages in Scotland just the other side of the Firth of Forth and then swing up through the Highlands just to say we've been. But now, I've planned for a few more days in the Lowlands. Grandma Cotter has been prompting me.

The Mitochondrial DNA is passed from Mother to children unchanged and can be traced on the maternal line back for a very long string of generations. My results show that my mother's mothers' mothers come from Scotland. And Elizabeth Cotter (1787-1860) is along that line.

She was on my FamilySearch Family Tree and married to Thomas Fletcher, who we believe to have been in Lord Nelson's decisive naval Battle of Trafalgar. But with the MtDNA, she is the one who was clearly a Scot.

FamilySearch was all messed up for her. My Ancestry.com research had a lot of good information and I still went to some original sources to dig out her birthday of 29 November 1787. She was born in Carriden Parish, now Bo'ness when it was in Linlithgowshire also called West Lothian. That's a lot of confusion right there!

My Father-in-Law in the Millennial Star

This blog is intended for my ancestors who are not Vaughns/Vaughans or closely connected thereto. But as I've been married to his daughter for 38 years, I think I can stretch to post my findings of my father-in-law in the Millennial Star, the British publication for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1840 to 1970. It had a good run.

The main problem is that as I am not a direct descendant, it will do no good for me to post this on FamilySearch memories. Maybe I can get his daughter to do it in 3rd-hour family study tomorrow.

While out of order, the first one here is a classic:

This is the Cornerstone laying for the London Temple from the Millenial Star of June 1957.

But back to Elder Kimball's arrival in the British Mission:

Gertruida's House

My eldest son, A-2, is in Amsterdam for work. That's Nike-Europe HQ. On video talk with his family Sunday night, we talked about him going to the Netherlands. My Granddaughters thought he was going to "Neverland."

I remembered late last night that I had told him I would send the info on where my 2nd-Great-Grandmother, Gertruida ter Bruggen was born in 1859. I had it plotted on Google Maps from the Dutch census information. I awoke this morning to his email with pics from his visit there!

Gertruida is the one who bore a striking resemblance to my second daughter, A-4. There is that surprising connection and the fact that I knew her daughter, my Great Grandmother, Maria Mourina Roman Wheelwright (1883-1972). Her middle name, Mourina, is from her Dutch family. When I was very young, she would lovingly tease me with two, porcelain kissing dolls, a little Dutch boy and girl. She would hold the Dutch boy and say it was me and in her other hand, the Dutch girl was my girlfriend. Those were sweet hands.

My son took these pictures this morning at 282 Bloemstraat, 1016 LK, Amsterdam: