Researching My East Tennessee Ancestors

This year I have decided to get really serious about genealogy and start the year with an application to the Daughers of the American Revolution (DAR).  My application will be for a Revolutionary War soldier is on my paternal line named John McDonald (aka McDaniel) who is my fourth great-grandfather.

My favorite phrase to say about my paternal line is, "the ancestors have been in the USA since dirt."  I get some perplexed looks when I say this (always with a laugh).  So to explain, watching the Ancestry DNA commercials with all the Ellis Island references doesn't apply to me.  I haven't even begun to jump the pond! What have I learned? It is important to validate the research of others and to blaze your own paper trail.  I have contributed to the errors which are now in many other trees by republishing information that I did not verify.  How can I remedy these errors?  Start a blog!

My grandfather, Lewis Sutton, died young in an oilfield accident in the Seminole oilfields of Oklahoma.  My father was ten years old at the time and didn't live near his grandparents who resided in Fannin county, Texas.  He always yearned to learn more about his Sutton line.  As a young man he asked his aunts for information and probably learned that some of the stories were not to be passed onto future generations.  He made a trip to Sneedville, Tennessee when he was older but only learned that this area wasn't tourist friendly as there was only one small motel and that he brought the wrong vehicle to try and drive on those back country roads.  During the 90's, a group of Sutton researchers contacted Dad about his connections to Hancock county, Tennessee and there was talk of publishing a book that would include each line but then this group fizzled.  Unfortunately, my dad became disenchanted with the challenges of genealogy research so I began to pick up the pieces with the knowledge that east Tennessee was home to his father's line.

After gathering some death certificates, writing a letter to my great-aunt, visiting a Family History Center, and reviewing Dad's information from his Sutton group research, I decided that this would have to be put on hiatus until I had some serious time to devote to this hobby and money!  Little did I know that the World Wide Web would launch a whole new world and that I could make all kinds of discoveries. I ran amok in this new digital world.  Soon I would join Ancestry.com and learn how to build a tree and collect and digitize documents.  I was in heaven.

People began to say that I should get serious and become a certified genealogist.  I began to wonder if that would be something I should consider.  I began to read about the requirements and understand that I needed to do much more than gather all these documents and republish information that I found on the web.  I needed to verify my research.  Groan!

So here I am, back to ordering microfilm and looking through unindexed digitized microfilm hoping to verify my east Tennessee ancestors.  What a tangled mess I see!