Branchscapes, The Blog, 1635 to 2025. 390 years.
“Branchscapes” is a blog about the genealogy of the Branch family of North Carolina with forays into our English origins, immigration to Virginia, and subsequent dissemination into the various parts of America. Generally, this group of Branches eventually populated the southern US and that is who we will concentrate on. However, recognize that but is a separate group of Branches from New England with a similar storied past. Sometimes these New England Branches even migrated south as well. This blog is about the Southern Branches and that is plenty big enough to untangle.
I hope you will learn something useful from these posts. Fair warning: I will likely offend some people with my opinionated genealogical research. I will call some errors out. Ancestry and the other online services have created the opportunity for some of us to easily construct very erroneous family trees and then those errors are compounded and perpetuated over time. When I first started research, I had all my Ancestry trees made “public” until such time that I found an error. Then to my horror, I found that many other people copied my tree without really looking at it. Since then, I resolved to really strive to find the most accurate parts of the Branch family story. As a result, I really like to debunk genealogical errors and sometimes that may even involve me circling back on my own research. I hope to educate more than I offend.
Research into family trees is easier than it has ever been. Sometimes I have found errors that really were a product of publications of their eras. All sources weren’t available. All items are not transcribed. Many transcription errors survive. Many errors of assumption survive.
Today we can, sometimes, access scans of original documents online and that is a miracle! There is less need to travel to distance archives to source materials. Fabulous and diligent authors have made deeds and wills available to us. I am grateful for all that research and knowledge and strive to find the facts or at least the best circumstantial evidence. Absolute proof is not always findable or easy.
I do want to insert a disclaimer here: I try to generate and ESTIMATE a birth and death date for each person because this is sometimes the only way to distinquish between that William and this William. Most of the time I have to APPROXIMATE because there is no recorded birth date or death date in the recorded history. Births may be estimated based on other transactions such as tesifying in court or buying land. Birth age is estimated relative to other siblings. Most of these dates are relative based on records that are available. In frontier areas, wheither Virginia in the 1600’s or Tennessee in the early 1800’s, hard and fast records either were not done in institutions that lasted or were lost over the decades. Sometimes simple illiteracy in reading or writing attributed to people citing different birth years or birth places in census records. Likewise death records where survivors are asked for the deceased persons parents sometimes results in “unknown” or “mama” or simply errors of facts; your widowed grandson-in-law may not know the family parentage.
It’s a bit silly when someone asks about a birth certificate or marriage certificate for a long lost relative in the early 1800’s. Or a photograph from 1780 — before the camera was invented. You can’t find what never existed in the first place. And many a person that existed have no paper trail to find. Sometimes we have to use some forensics on paper records to extrapolate a family’s trail through life. Years ago, someone seemed to equate the growing fascination with genealogy with a search for royal or prominent blood. Bull! We just want to know where we came from. We want to know how our people flowed through history. Let’s get to know the Branch family here.
I am Dawn Branch King, located in Eastern North Carolina, near the sites of many of these Branch migration routes. This blog is the result of my many years of genealogical research. First, I started with my own line and then I decided to try to untangle the Branches that were throughout Virginia, North Carolina, and the South in order to inform my own search. I have learned a lot. I hope I can convey this info to you.
Any comments? dawnbranchking@yahoo.com
( Cover is the 1775 map of Southeast Virginia and Northeast North Carolina (Library of Congress)
Written March 02, 2022, date maybe altered to facilitate blog layout.