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Tuesday, June 05, 2012

ANOTHER TANGLE ON MY TREE

Today I did one of my daily Facebook posts commemorating an anniversary
of a birth, death, or marriage of one of my ancestors. This one happened to
be for 6x great grandfather Moses Coburn's death on 5Jun 1742 in Dracut, Ma.
After I posted it, I went over to Ancestry.com to see if there were any new
hints for documents or records that might have turned up recently for Moses
or any of my other Coburn relations, and once again ran into an unexpected
tangle of my Dad's family lines.

I'd worked my way down to the family of 3x great grandparents Wesley
Coburn and Lucy Stow; I'm descended from their daughter Lucy E Coburn (who
married Nathaniel S Barker, my Dad's ancestor through his mother Cora Barker)
but I don't have have much information on the families of her siblings so I checked
them for hints.

And this is where that tangle I mentioned came in.

I found a marriage record for Lucy's brother Moses Roscoe Coburn and a
Mary S. Reynolds, married on 13Jan 1858 in Albany, Oxford, Me.  That sounded
familiar, but the only Reynolds on my family tree(sort of) was my 2x great
grandfather Jonathan Phelps West's first wife Orpha V. Reyolds who died of
diphtheria in 1861. Could Mary Reynolds somehow be related to Orpha?
Yes she was. She's listed on the 1850 Federal Census along with Orpha and
their parents Simeon and  Ruhama (Ames) Reynolds. Mary S.was Orpha's older
sister by five years.

Back when I did my post about Orpha, I learned from Christopher
Dunham   that Orpha was an Ames cousin . I wondered today about her
Reynolds lineage and after tracing it back discovered her father
Simeon was also my cousin through my Packard line. Orpha is my
4th cousin 3x removed, Simeon my 3rd cousin 4x removed.
 
As I said Orpha died in 1861 and Jonathan Phelps West married my 2x
great grandmother  Louisa Almata Richardson.

But even so, it still boils down to the fact that my 2x great grandfather
was married to my cousin!

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