I recently wrote a post about our little
Rode Trip to New York and in that post I kind of half promised to tell the story of my moms family line. Now my mothers maiden name is Jones and with a last name as common as that we didn't expect to get very far when doing our genealogy searches. (Note here, don't waste your money on an Ancestry.com subscription, I mean unless you're rich and like wasting money....then by all means do as you please). Fortunately for us, we already had 1. A lot of names and information and 2. The family stayed in relatively the same area, making it much easier to track things down by census information. My Great Aunt who is now 92 and her older sister had at one point started doing some research and she was able to give us some names and dates as reference points.
It's funny how we as people always hate the multitude of questions they ask on Census records, but when we look back, oh it is so wonderful to learn the little details! Now I'm thinking I'll write another post soon on how to research your ancestry for free, but for now I will simply share a few sights that can get you going. My top 3 are probably Familysearch, FindaGrave and Rootsweb. Now there are a lot of sights that you have to pay for, like Ancestry.com and Fold3. My advice is to not bother with those for as long as possible, and if you find any information that only those sights have put it on a list and when you've got it all together and you have a not too busy month get a months free trial and research all those at once for free. But I digress ....
Ah yes, the Jones family line, we have traced it back to the 1600's and a man by the name of Teague. No one seems to know to much about Teague, there is some conjecture that he was the son of Christopher Jones (captain of the Mayflower) but there's really no proof, also there is some possibility that he was half Indian (leaving the possibility of an illegitimate son of C. Jones, though not likely). At any rate he lived in the area of the Plymouth Bay colony, at Chatham and Yarmouth, and though there is no record of his marriage it is believed that his wife was a woman from the Wampanoag tribe. There are however records of Teague, mostly court records however as he was often in trouble.
Next in line is Josiah Jones and his wife Elizabeth Berry (daughter of Richard Berry, friend and fellow trouble maker of Teague). These two lived in Yarmouth and later move to East Greenwich RhodeIsland and seemed to live rather respectable lives. Their son Seth (first of many by that name) married Priscilla Hamilton they had a son who they named Josiah and he married Sarah Place. Their son the second Seth was born in 1763 in East Greenwich, he moved to New York and married Nancy Carr ( who there is very little record of. Seth and Nancy had at least 7 children, two sons who they named Seth Nelson and William Jones. Seth Nelson Jones was born in Otsego county NY and married Calista Yager. They had a son who they named Seth Eugene and he married Frances Amellia Wellman ( another long family history). Together they had six children, William, Howard, James, Alice, Lulu Bell, and my great grandfather Warren Benson (who as the story goes, owed his interesting name to the stove). He married Anna Marie Wiese who's family had immigrated from Germany and they had 4 children Seth (my grandfather), Lorenz, Emma and Ruth (who we visited last month). My grandfather Seth Eugene Jones married Rose Mary Feeley and together they had three children of which my mother is the youngest.
So there you have it, a rough history of the Jones over the past 400 years.
