A twist on the one name study

One name studies (ONS) are a method used by genealogists to learn as much as they can about all the branches of a particular surname. This can be really useful to understand migration patterns and how people connect to each other. So basically, you study everyone with a given surname, usually limited by place and time. For example I could study all the people named Smith in colonial America, if I wanted to punish myself. :-)

I don’t want to punish myself, but, frankly, King is at least as much of a hassle to try to get a handle on. There are so many King families in America; there are several distinct groups, and they don’t really even have the same geographic origins. There are German Kings/Koenigs, Irish Kings, Scottish Kings, English Kings, French Canadian Kings who may or may not be known as Roy/Roi, Jewish Kings, African-American Kings. The name just doesn’t really tell you much of anything about the family.

This is contrasted nicely with my mom’s maiden name, which is Marceaux. Every Marceaux on this Earth is descended from one guy who came from France to Louisiana in the late 1700s. The x on the end of the name is a giveaway; there are plenty of Marceaus in France and elsewhere without the x, and they are probably related too somehow, but Marceaux is ALWAYS the right people. Everything is so nice and neat; you know that, no matter what, by the late 1700s, you are going to end up at Francois Desgravier Marceau in southwest Louisiana if you are trying to extend a Marceaux line.

My King side, on the other hand, has so many possible paths to take to get to the immigrating ancestor, which is kind of my end-goal here. Even with the King project being quite popular on FTDNA, it’s not really possible for me to easily break all the King groups down into discrete entities so I can try to see which we might fit into. This is made considerably harder by the commonness of the name; I only very rarely find a King tree that goes back to pre-colonial times and is well-sourced and unlikely to have any conflation of multiple people with the same name. So even if people have their earliest known ancestor on FTDNA, there’s always a very good chance that their lines are wrong. Both of my closest Y matches have earliest known ancestors on there that cannot possibly be correct (or if they are correct, it was a lucky guess, not research with sources proving each step). People moved around a lot, too. Suffice it to say—King trees are an absolute mess, generally, and I trust none of them. :-)

My brick wall ancestor, Aaron King, is, at least, not named William, James, or John. Don’t get me wrong—there are a good number of Aaron Kings in America by 1800. Today, there are tons. But Aaron is a far easier name to search for than William! The number of Aaron Kings around before 1800 is small enough that I could probably feasibly research all of them.

So that’s what I’m going to do. A one name study, but instead of studying a particular surname, I’m going to research every single Aaron King I come across in America around the time when my Aaron King lived. Some of them are certainly relatives; perhaps one of these Aarons I’ve already researched is mine and I just don’t know it yet. In any case, it will be really helpful to me to get a deeper understanding of the connections (or lack thereof) between the various King branches. Building out the tree for these Aarons and understanding where they came from and where they went can only help me understand more. I can start to try to rule out branches and reason about which group makes the most sense to connect to my own family. Maybe it will lead me to the answer, maybe not, but I feel like this is kind of the next logical step in my perhaps-somewhat-unreasonably exhaustive research. So I guess, if anyone needs a specialist on dudes named Aaron King, I’ll soon be the leading expert on that… haha.

The first Aaron King I’m going to deep-dive on here is Aaron Osborne King of New York City. He is the one I see pop up most frequently in the newspapers when I search for “Aaron King”, so he seems as good a place to start as any! Also, I like that I have some clues that my Aaron may have come from New York, so perhaps researching this person is a bit more likely to be fruitful than others might be.

I found a nice little overview of biographical information about Aaron O. in an edition of the biographical register of Saint Andrew's society of the state of New York published on the Internet Archive.

I can’t find him or his parents on Wikitree, so I am going to create a profile for him and work on connecting this branch to the world tree. I find that documenting there as I go really helps me focus my efforts; I’m prone to going off on tangents, but when I do this I know I can at least find what I was looking at earlier easily when I get lost. :-) I’ll start by entering the information from this source, with the caveat, of course, that better sources confirming everything should be found—these biographies are not infallible! But for now this is my starting point. Now I can start digging through the newspapers sources I have found relating to Aaron O. and confirming this information and hopefully finding more!

I was able to find newspaper sources for basically all of the information in the biography. I was also able to find a date of death for Aaron O! Seems unlikely that this is my Aaron because he looks to have been in New York throughout his life, but I’m not done researching him yet. Who are his parents? Siblings? Spouses? Kids? :-) My next step is to create profiles for the family members I already know about from this preliminary research.

I created profiles for both of Aaron’s wives and for his parents, so I can link siblings. Something I noticed that is very interesting to me indeed is that his mother was supposed to have been named Lucretia or Letitia Osborne. This reminded me of another King-related profile I often find myself on: that of Letitia Bland. I went back to her page again; her dad’s name was Osborne! And she married a guy named William King Jr, just like Aaron O’s dad. Hard to reconcile their appearing to have Virginia roots & live in Kentucky with the all-New York-City information I’ve been finding for Aaron O, but I don’t discount that many or all online trees could be totally messed up. And an error that changed “Letitia Bland, daughter of Osborne Bland” to “Lucretia Osborne” would be really understandable. Letitia and this William were actually the parents of George Rogers King, who moved to southwest Louisiana and became a judge in St. Landry Parish. A connection there would be very interesting indeed as he has always ben on my short list of people I feel I should be able to find a connection to but never could. Maybe this will start to become clearer as I look into Aaron O’s siblings next. I mentioned earlier that I was so glad my Aaron wasn’t named William, but it seems like most Aaron Kings had dads named William so it only gets me so far, haha.

I found tons of information about Aaron O’s family. Lots of politicians and lawyers around. I think they connect to the King political family of New York somehow, probably. Lots of those names pop up over and over again in documents related to Aaron O’s family. Check the linked Wikitree profile above for more of what I have found; I’m not going to belabor the details here, the bio I found initially was accurate. I’m sure there’s more yet to find, but I feel like I got a good idea of this particular group of Kings, for now.

I’m excited to see what connections I can make going down this path. Stay tuned to learn about more dudes named Aaron King. ;-)