Looking back to 2024, forward to 2025

There’s no doubt about it.

The very best part of genealogy is the stories.

Stories in The Legal Genealogist’s family take us back a long way in America on the maternal side and in Germany on the paternal side.

Stories that begin, in this country, in the late 1600s. Stories in Germany that we can take all the way back to the late 1500s.

Some of them, astoundingly, given my family’s tendency never to let the truth get in the way of a good story, that may even possibly be true.

And some of the possibly-true ones — that is, the ones that I’ve managed to document with something other than a marginal note that one of the family storytellers told me so — had very big milestones in 2024 or will have big milestones here in 2025.

These “big milestones” are events that were exactly 50 or 100 or 150 or 200 or 250 years ago — or more! — during the year.¹

And they’re the kinds of milestones that we shouldn’t allow to pass without pausing to reflect.

Looking back

In 2024, for example, in the 250-year milestone category, we had the birth of a fourth great grandmother, Elizabeth (Jones) Buchanan, most likely in Virginia or North Carolina, on 14 November 1774.² In the 200-year milestone category, yet another birth: my second great grandmother Friederike Geissler, born 11 June 1824, in Reussen, now in the German State of Sachsen-Anhalt.³

In the 150-year milestone category, on the maternal side of the family, we had the marriage of my great grandparents Martin Gilbert Cottrell and Martha H. “Mattie” Johnson in Parker County, Texas, on 27 August 1874,⁴ and in the 100-year milestone category, the birth of a man who wasn’t related to me by blood at all — Miller Hamilton “Ray” Childress, the husband of my mother’s sister Carol, was born 5 October 1924.⁵ And in the 50-year milestone category, the end of a marriage: my parents divorced officially on 12 October 1974.⁶

Looking forward

In 2025, we have some milestones coming up as well.

For the first time with good documentation, we have an entry in the 300-year milestone category: the birth on 6 January 1725⁷ of my sixth great grandfather John Pettypool. Born to Seth and Martha Pettypool, his birth and baptism was recorded in the Bristol (Virginia) Parish Register.⁸ John married Sarah Sanford, probably in Lunenburg County, Virginia, around 1747, and they were the parents of nine known children. Their daughter Elizabeth married John Jones, and their daughter Elizabeth Jones married William Buchanan, and their daughter Elizabeth Buchanan married Martin Baker and their daughter Martha Louisa Baker married George Washington Cottrell, and their son Martin Gilbert Cottrell married Martha Johnson, and their son Clay Rex Cottrell was my grandfather.⁹

In the 250-year milestone category, we have a guesstimate. At best. I mean, I’m not even 100% sure the dude is my ancestor, much less when and where he was born. But hey… there’s a really good argument to be made that my fourth great grandfather in a maternal line was William Killen born around 1775 who was having kids between 1792 and 1808 in North Carolina and then Tennessee, and who ended up in the Mississippi Territory by 1810.¹⁰ There’s a strong family story that Wilmoth, wife of my third great grandfather Elijah Gentry, was this William Killen’s daughter¹¹ and a lot of DNA support for the story through matches to descendants of William’s known sons. Hmmm… if that’s the best I can do for 1775, I probably should make this proof argument a resolution for 2025, shouldn’t I?

In the 200-year milestone category, there’s a death. My fifth great grandmother, Mary (Boswell) Buchanan, died 7 October 1825 in what is now Mitchell County, North Carolina.¹² She was reportedly born in 1738 in Charles County, Maryland, married Arthur Buchanan there, and moved first to Virginia, then to North Carolina, where the family settled in the Toe River Valley. She is reportedly buried in the Turbyville Cemetery.¹³

In the 150-year milestone category, we’ll go with a birth — this one my maternal grandfather’s oldest sister, Effalie Cottrell, born 6 November 1875, most likely in Clay County, Texas.¹⁴ She appeared in the 1880 U.S. census as a four-year-old in her parents’ household,¹⁵ married Hinton Snoddy in Wichita County, Texas, on 5 May 1898¹⁶ and — the family story goes — died within weeks of typhoid.¹⁷ My grandfather was a baby at the time — he was born in 1898 — and never knew this oldest sibling.

In the 100-year milestone category, I have to go with the single most powerful event of my own ancestry: the emigration from Germany to the United States of my paternal grandparents, Hugo Ernst and Marie (Nuckel) Geissler. With my then three-year-old father, they set sail from Bremen on 26 January 1925 and arrived in New York on 6 February 1925.¹⁸ My grandfather had kin in Chicago, and he brought his little family there. Had he not done so — had they stayed in Germany — it’s a sure bet their son would never have met my mother and… well … yeah.

And in the 50-year milestone category, it’s what I can’t help but think is a love story. A broken-heart story, for sure, but perhaps a sweet one. My Cottrell great grandfather’s sister Mary E. Cottrell married John H. Green in Parker County, Texas, on 4 January 1883.¹⁹ They had one child, Ludy Katherine Green, born 18 August 1892, in Wichita County, Texas.²⁰ She in turn married Eugene Aycock in Stonewall County, Texas, on 27 May 1918.²¹ Gene and Ludy had no children of their own. They lived together for 57 years, until Ludy died, in Levelland, Hockley County, Texas, on 31 August 1975. She was buried 2 September 1975 at Resthaven Memorial Park in Lubbock.²² Nine days later, her grieving widower had a massive heart attack and died. Eugene M. Aycock was laid to rest next to his wife.²³ See what I mean about a love story? A broken-heart story but perhaps a sweet one? Sure looks to me like not even death could keep them apart.

Each of these, a story of its own, to find and to tell — each, in truth, one of the real reasons why we do genealogy at all.

Why I have to write this blog.

Why I have to tell the stories.

To make sure that those I remember aren’t forgotten… that these milestones continue to be remembered down through the generations.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Milestones, 2025,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 6 Jan 2025).

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