Dear Diary
... and a Bag of Chips
(Author's note: Obviously, I need to get a better hobby.)
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Some people have all the luck. They have so much luck, skill, talent, etc., that they even appear on magazine covers or show up in soap operas. Do you know anybody like that? I mean, who does that? Um, no one. Their luck runs deep, even genealogically speaking. They aren't like the rest of us - those of us who have to chase our ancestral lines down the proverbial rabbit hole only to find out we're related to some presidential assassin, a country singer, or your run-of-the-mill "dead ends." Heck, somebody like this probably has so much darn luck that he can even give one of his best friends some new (ancestral-like) nickname.
You know, something like "Dazzo."
But hey, who am I to judge? I like to think of Dazzo and his wife Paige as my friends, too. Honestly, for all I know, the lucky guy's dad may have been switched at birth as a baby at the hospital, or maybe he just married some beautiful lady of Polynesian ancestry. Maybe he's even a member of the Mayflower Society. Eewww.
I mean, I don't know anybody like that, but I suppose it's possible.
Anyway, today I thought I'd take a break from wondering about all of that. I figured that Dazzo and Paige might need a break from my ancestral rootings and silly tales, too, so I thought I'd look at something different. I figured I'd go back and see if we, the "regular folks," might just be "connected" to someone like that (at least beyond DNA) - you know, to somebody like Dazzo's friend with all that good luck.
Heck, stranger things have happened.
Sometimes, I gotta admit though, with all this research, I get names stuck in my head. Lately, it's the name "Pearson" that's been playing a bit part in my genealogical conundrums. Now, I'd seen that name "Pearson" in Dazzo's tree and also in the lucky guy's. I kept thinking, Man, you gotta see if they connect.
Is it possible that Dazzo's Pearsons and the lucky fellow's come from the same root stock? Would that be amazing or what?
So I took a quick look back, and whatever connection I thought there might be between Dazzo's Pearson branch and the lucky guy's branch went up in smoke. If there is any similarity between those two Pearson branches, well, it's lost in time and lost on me. Dazzo's Pearson line seems to disappear into some tulip field in the Netherlands, where the name becomes more like "Pier's son." The lucky guy's, well, his "Pearson" name/ancestry never seemed to change. His Pearson name ends up tracked to some guy named Lawrence Pearson, in Yorkshire, England, centuries ago, unchanged, like some sort of puffy English pudding.
I know this isn't a big deal, all that Pearson "connection-or-not" stuff between that lucky guy and Dazzo. Still, it was interesting to me. And I guess I really should introduce "the lucky guy" at this point, whose name is Dan, if only to make the flow in this blog post go a little more smoothly. All kidding aside, Dan's family is incredibly well documented. I'd known about some of this before (as we share some very small common DNA) regarding his French family, but when I began to compare Dazzo's Pearson family lines to Dan's Pearsons, I was (excuse me for saying so) a bit thunderstruck, something stood out among Dan's Pearson lines. It made me wonder:
Does Dan even know about this sh*t?
The first thing (the very frickn first thing!) I see while looking further back in Dan's Pearson side of his family tree is (yet another) Revolutionary War patriot. This patriot's name was "John Blunston Pearson (1740-1829)." Okay, excuse me while I snore a bit here. Wake up, Jeff. Okay, so Dan has another patriot in the tree. No offense, Dan, but I think you're gonna have to do a little bit better than that. The rest of us – me, Paige, and Dazzo – all have patriots, too. Just because you have another one out of your Pearson clan doesn't make you special. Just because me, Paige, and Dazzo have to dig around in the root cellar to find out RW patriots buried in the field of obscurity...Oh, wait, that's right, you don't have to do that, do you, Dan?
Again, you didn't know this sh*t? (No offense intended)
You see, Dan, this particular Revolutionary War patriot comes complete with his own diary of the years following and, I guess, during the war.
Seriously? His own diary? Who has that? Paige? Dazzo? Me - not.
Seeing as I am no Benedict Arnold here, I will confess. I found that Dan's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, "John Blunston Pearson's" dang diary, is still in existence and was transcribed as recently as 1910.
As you can see below, the guy was a real slouch.
I mean, who has that in my family? Um, no one. I'm still digging in the fields of obscurity. lol. Yeah, I'm pretty sure the biography on my Revolutionary War ancestor "Jim-Bob" does not read like the one above.
Well, but what else could I do but check it out?
https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/digitalbks2/id/17121/
This was all well and good, and beyond cool, but before I get too far, I need to share with you that this guy's great grandpa ( that of John Blunston Pearson) seems to have been pretty dang good friends with some guy named William Penn. You see, John Blunston Pearson's mother was a "Blunston," and his great-grandfather was a guy named "John Blunston" ...
and a guy who signed on to documents with Old Bill Penn.
Seriously, Dan? William Penn?
Now I've known that Dan and I have some anecdotal evidence (and beyond DNA) that our families have some "interconnectedness" based on our relationships to the passengers on Penn's ship The Welcome, but a document signed onto by Dan's ancestor and William Penn is well, "all that and a bag of chips." Am I right?
Above: A current publication on Dan's family line of "Pearson"
So I figure I'd better stop about here. I know that any guy on the cover of magazines, and married to a beautiful lady of Polynesian ancestry, and a guy with great friends like Dazzo and Paige, would surely know all of this about his Pearson clan. It isn't like he doesn't feel the Pearson name in his blood, right? The name Pearson is literally an ancestral one passed on down to his children for centuries. The only person who might rival this in our study of family trees is Paige with the Carter family name, and I'm not sure about Dazzo's ancestral lines just yet. (As mentioned, the only ancestral names I have are "Jim-Bob," "Junior," and maybe a "Smith" or a "Jones" along the way) I just thought it was so interesting that there is so much out there remaining to be discovered about a single family line. The thing is, it ain't like me, Paige, or Dazzo has anything to do with all this, but last I checked, we also don't have a book presently published about one of our own earliest known American ancestors.
Some guy named "Larry" Pearson from 1642???
Whatever.
Really? A guy like some Pearson who also happens to be Dan's ancestor? What the heck?
And we sure don't have a stinking Revolutionary War era diary.
But on the bright side, we really do have a great friend.
Guess you could say that he, too, is "all that and a..."
Yeah, I'm not saying that. lol.
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