Puzey Family

Fred Emily and young Fred Puzey.jpg, a photo by whistlepunch on Flickr.

(To read the full post - please click on the post to get it to open up in full view)

I love getting a request to share or to find out some information. But I am not always as prepared to do this easily as I could be. When my aunt Sandy called to help direct her to the Puzey family history, I knew that  while there was a lot of information available, I haven't made it very easy to find!

So in this and primarily my next post, I'll try to pull together the bits and pieces I have scattered across the world wide web.

Starting with finding photos. Even these aren't all in one convenient spot. I use Flickr for my personal photos and that includes some family photos (click here for the Puzey Family set - a mix of unidentified and known photos)  but I have family history photos also on Facebook, in wikis, in various blog posts (here and here), on Ancestry.com, and still in my hard drive!

Since some of my information isn't available to everyone, I'll republish some of what I posted in Ancestry or have on my hard drive in a part 2 to this post. 

My Third Great Grandfather

(This is a cross post from my Whistlepunch blog.  I should have blogged this here in the first place!)

While shuffling papers  to prepare  for the research I hoped to do on the Rhodes line, I came across a note that gave the address of the last home of Henry Puzey.

Henry is my third great grandfather - his son is Henry William who married Lydia Pollard and their son is Frederick Puzey, and his son is Frederick Elmer Puzey - my mother's father.  Last visit I drove to the original Toone home and also tried to locate the Hunter home but it is no longer standing. I hadn't bothered to look for any Puzeys since I had incorrectly assumed that Henry had been residing with his son in Spring City. I don't know why I thought that since I knew some other details that clearly had him located in Salt Lake City.

Isn't this a beautiful home? It has a large shaded porch that wraps around the south side of the building. It is facing west with the mountains behind it.  It was built in 1890 - 3 years after his son had passed and 6 years before he did. His son Edwin lived in the house after that - I imagine until he died in 1965. It was last renovated in 1985.  Sorry folks, no "For Sale" sign. I wonder if it is still a Puzey living there.  I didn't see any signs of someone being home.

Henry left his wife and family in Hampshire, England and traveled to join with the Saints in Utah. He was a carriage maker by trade and had worked on carriages that carried members of the royal family.  His skills were in high demand in the American west. He settled in Salt Lake City and was a member of the 20th ward high council.  I have pictures of this historic church building to post soon.  His son Henry William soon followed him to the valley and married Lydia Pollard, an educated girl (attended BYU) and they settled in Spring City, Utah. A trip I plan to make next time I come to Utah!! But Henry (sometimes referred to as Joseph Henry) spent his final years here in Salt Lake with his second wife and children.  He is buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery.


To see Henry's picture and learn a little about his crossing to Salt Lake City, visit the "Our Pioneer Heritage" wiki.

Queen Elizabeth's Bridesmaid: A Family History Challenge



The Royal Wedding Party 1947 Princess Elizabeth II and Prince Philip (photo from "the lost gallery" on Flickr)

 On Saturday, my Uncle Gordon called me up with a challenge. I love how he is always on the look out for a family connection. If he hears about someone on the TV or reads about someone in the news with the name Rhodes or Muirhead, I inevitably get a phone call sharing the details and asking me to look into it. He's not the only family member that does that - and I accept the challenges gladly because you just never know. I mean, I wouldn't know about our family connection to the Salem witch trials if I hadn't done the exact same thing!

So the story was this. He was watching a documentary on Queen Elizabeth and it shared some details about her wedding to Prince Philip.  It turns out that one of her eight bridesmaids was a Rhodes. Any connection?? There is the challenge.

I didn't have much hope for being able to discover the personal family history of one of the wedding party from a 1947 wedding. But this one turned out to be rather easy! In fact, the bridesmaid was Margaret Elphinstone who married Denys Gravenor Rhodes in 1950. So it is his family line that I needed to research back.

There is a great website called "The Peerage" which has the family histories of the peerage of Britain as well as the royal families of Europe. His bride was the daughter of a Lord and he was the son of a Major who married the daughter of a Baron. I don't know what it takes to be included in this but they obviously have the pedigree.

I was able to then click back along the patriarchal line of Rhodes. Once you get back a couple of generations (the same generation as my great great grandfather Herbert), this Rhodes line extends into New Zealand rather than Great Britain. I wondered how far that would be and by going a couple more generations back, the line is back in England and now in Lincolnshire. Our line is from Yorkshire/Derbyshire. So I looked a bit closer and it turns out Lincolnshire William Rhodes was buried in Yorkshire. His father was from this Yorkshire area. It isn't the same area as our Rhodes - and the line ended in 1696 in Kippax, Yorkshire, West Riding, England but since I haven't taken our line back that far, it is worth keeping in my notes. My own research of our Rhodes family is back to 1796 so who knows if further research would connect us up or not. I need to get a bit more creative now - I've been lucky with census records but it has been a long time since I've done any significant research with parish records. Just one more area where there is work to be done!

You can enjoy some of the highlights of Elizabeth II's wedding here on the BBC.

Margaret Rhodes became a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother after her husband Denys' death in 1981. She has written a book about her life, being raised in Scottish aristocracy and living a life that hearkens thoughts of Downton Abbey. It's called The Final Curtsy and is now on my reading list!

Genealogy Fan Chart

New Calling - Family History Consultant!

First task: Make a Genealogy Fan Chart using New Family Search. I'll have to get this printed at school tomorrow. Just looking at it shows how much work I have to do - linking records together. And also where the research gaps are. I am looking forward to being more focused on what work I am doing with this.

My Family Tree

Šternberg Family Tree, a photo by m-louis on Flickr.

A new year and another fresh start on my genealogy. It's been neglected for a while since I have been traveling and battling mice (a story for another day) but today I packed up my laptop, my flashdrives, my binders and files and drove out to Dad's place. We copied over my complete files - out of my Legacy program into his PAF program and set these up on both his desktop and laptop. After walking through a few screens of data, we got him set up on FamilySearch and went over how to search, find and add names with sources into his tree here. Then after a few tries, we finally got onto Ancestry.com and I showed him some original source records I've connected to his family names that he can browse later. All of that and it is very clear that my records are a MESS! Duplicates, incomplete and incorrect information, different information in the three different trees and no idea which one is the most accurate -- a big mess. So once again I need to reassess, start the cleanup and get moving forward again. I know my paper records are in better shape so I need to pull the files and clear up the confusion as best I can.

It was good to see that Dad is keen to be involved but I'm afraid I may have just overwhelmed him. I'll let him play around for a bit and make another trip over to plan out what our next steps should be. Wish me luck!