Going on tangents is not a waste of time

My last post I wrote about how I’m planning on just researching all of the Aaron Kings I find alive at the time in America and see where it goes. Well, I only posted the first article about Aaron Osborne King of New York a couple hours ago and I’ve already found new stuff that might be related to my family specifically just by spinning off on some tangents from what I learned about him, even though I didn’t find any specific connections between us and him. Probably will schedule this to post in a few days so I don’t blow up everyone’s inbox but I need to write it down before I forget, LOL. And also I’m excited.

So Aaron Osborne King’s second wife, Anne, was married previously to a guy named David Gillies. They had a daughter together, also named Anne, and Anne married a Dusenberry in New York. Now, that name is uncommon in my neck of the woods. I have only heard of Dusenberrys in one other context, and that is… on my other favorite line, the Gautiers, one of my great-great-great-grand uncles married a Dusenberry. Just out of curiosity, I decided to see what I could find about my uncle Louis Bernard Gautier’s wife, Adeline Dusenberry, and her family.

I hadn’t done much on this line to this point, I had her parents and that’s it. But when I started looking at the records relating to her dad, I found his father was from New York.

I swear I think I’m losing my mind sometimes when I find stuff like this. It’s nothing, really, but also… it’s not nothing. There weren’t that many people from New York in lower Terrebonne Parish. There still aren’t. It’s notable. Aaron King’s son had his father’s birthplace as New York on at least one census. Still working on figuring out if there’s a direct connection to the Dusenberry who married Aaron O’s stepdaughter. I predict that I will find one if I keep looking for one.

The person in question, John Dusenberry, was married to a woman named either Elodie Reaux (from his son, Adeline’s father’s, death certificate) or Lydia O’Rourke (from everyone else’s trees on the Internet, as yet unconfirmed by me). I think this is probably just a spelling variation; a native French speaker probably filled out the death certificate and heard Elodie Reaux. This is just me guessing, but I think this is probably the case.

I searched for John Dusenberry in the papers and found an article about his death. He actually drowned in the devastating 1893 hurricane that destroyed Cheniere Caminada. John was at Timbalier Island in the extreme south of the state, on the Gulf of Mexico, when the storm hit. He was known as “John Pop”.

Just below the stuff about John drowning, we see that “Mr. Pete, a luggerman, who lives near the mouth of bayou Terrebonne, was in town this week, and states that not a sign of a house or tree remains on the island”.

This just a first name and a rough location of residence, but I am honestly pretty convinced this is referring to my fourth great grandfather Pierre Gautier. I won’t say it’s definitive, but my gut is saying that’s him. Call it a genealogical premonition. I can’t believe I found this following this random line of inquiry about Kings in a totally different part of the country.

Pierre’s son Louis Bernard married Adeline Dusenberry. Pierre’s dad and older brother Bartholomew are mentioned in a couple articles also published around the time of this hurricane, where the author of the article recalls a trip he made to Caillou Island in 1836. He was taken there by “Mr. Gautier” and Bartholomew, another son of Pierer Sr. I’ve found some land records relating to Pierre’s dad and he owned land that was so far down the bayou it’s now open water. Several of Pierre’s kids ended up moving to Jefferson Parish, which is where John Dusenberry lived in 1870. There’s actually a whole group of Gautiers over there and in Plaquemines Parish who have been there a really long time and spell their name like we do, without the H. I can’t find a connection to them, but I’d be kind of surprised if there turns out not to be one. Also, Pierre’s son, Pierre III, is known to have gone by Pete. It’s not at all unprecedented for dudes named Pierre.

I hardly know anything about Pierre’s life besides the names of his wives and kids. I don’t know when he died; I don’t know what he did for a living (census just says “laborer”). I don’t know why he married a woman only a couple years older than his oldest daughters when his wife died. I don’t know why he later had the courts remove two of his daughters with his second wife from her care due to her “immoral behavior” and had them sent to an orphanage in New Orleans instead of taking care of them, despite being alive. I don’t know how he ended up giving me Puerto Rican DNA. I have a lot of questions about Pierre, to put it succinctly. He is one of my favorite ancestors to research, even though (maybe because) he seems to have maybe been kind of crap as a father. Any tidbit I can find about what he was doing during his life is interesting to me, and I am so excited to have found this (potential) one. I know some will say this is not definitely the same guy and also it’s just a tiny blurb about him being a luggerman and living where I already knew him to have lived, and I would hear you and agree, but it feels like a significant find to me, LOL. I could never have recognized it as anything potentially relevant to me at all without all of the research I’ve done over the years providing context. I never would have found it searching directly for Pierre. I’ve searched for him to death and thought I had probably found just about all there was to find in currently-indexed-and-available-online records.

At the same time I found the article about John Dusenberry drowning in the storm, I found a bunch of other articles about the same storm. I noticed that one of them listed people who had died by name.

There are a lot of familiar names in there for me, but the big one is the Rhodes. "Mrs. C. C. Rhodes and 8 children; ten members of the family of Leon Rhodes; Thomas T. Rhodes and a family of four. That is more than 20 Rhodes family members wiped out in one fell swoop. Horrible. All of these Rhodes have a common ancestor with me — Eloise Bergeron, the woman Aaron King had children with in Terrebonne. She only had two kids with her first husband, Thomas Rhodes, but still, in ThruLines my grandfather has 400 matches in ThruLines on Eloise’s side. In contrast, Eloise had six children with Aaron King, and my grandfather has only 75 matches through his side. These are my grandfather’s third-great-grandparents. And now I learn that 20+ of Eloise’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren were apparently drowned in a single day; if this article is true, and they really all drowned, it truly boggles my mind how many descendants there are of Eloise and Thomas today. Wowzers.

Something else I found interesting when looking at Dusenberrys in Louisiana was that John lived in 1880 with a woman named Juliet who is straight up labeled his mistress on the census. I can’t quite make out her surname. (He was widowed by then.) Also, look how many Rhodes! That’s not even all of them that are on that page… by then Dusenberry lived in Terrebonne Parish.

On the 1860 census the family was in Jefferson Parish living just a couple houses down from the Chizighola family.

All the Chigizholas in JP descend from this guy whose nickname was Nez Coupe, who was a pirate and friend of Jean Lafitte. John’s occupation was “sailor” on that census year. I’m not saying that Dusenberry was doing anything piratical and 1860 is way after Lafitte’s time, but, you know, who knows! LOL. Now that I think of it, I have a match on Ancestry whose surname is Isola and they are a King side match, descended from one of Aaron’s sons who is my ancestor, too. Could that be a name variant for the Chigizholas? HMMM.

Nez Coupe’s house is actually still there, as far as I can tell. These pictures are not that old. I can’t find anything saying the house is gone, but it’s hard to imagine it would still be standing there after hundreds of years of hurricanes. But that’s the power of that swamp wood, y’all. :P The Dusenberry house surely would have looked a lot like the Nez Coupe house.

Also found this picture of one of the best preserved houses on Cheniere Caminada after that 1893 storm…

The history of this whole area is so interesting. Sometimes I worry that if I ever figure out my two current brick walls I won’t want to do this research anymore and that makes me sad because I really enjoy it. But then I go off on a whole side quest learning about other people who aren’t even related to me and enjoy it equally… so I don’t think I’ll ever run out of stuff to learn about. :-)

I took part of an advanced genealogy course once & they kept pushing that we must start every session of research with a written research plan and a research question to focus our efforts. Right now I am going to try to find proof of death for x ancestor and these are the steps I will take to do it. Then you follow the steps.

It sounds good, and being organized is always great, but I honestly don’t think that the “research plan” method is great for research you’re doing for fun, especially if you’re stuck on a brick wall. If you are planning each step of research you can only ever find stuff in places you already know to look. If I was rigid about planning I’d never discover anything new. I find the best stuff by accident or by going all around the world chasing down random associated people until I land on something that makes a lightbulb go off. I don’t think I will change my methods. :-)

Go on tangents! Research everybody who seems slightly interesting to you. Especially if you’re at a brick wall with somebody. Just start learning everything about everyone around them… make connections… it’s really magical when it somehow leads you back anyways. I often feel like my brain is expanding in real time with all this info and trying to accommodate all the things I’m learning and relate it to everything else that’s already in there. But it’s a good thing!! Thanks for humoring my tangents.