Names and neighbors

I'm going to take a minute and digress here about name choices in families. Names are important and can provide clues in genealogy research. Majority of parents, when naming a child, go to a fair amount of trouble to be thoughtful about it. Meanings of the names are important, as is sound, it should go well with the surname. Children's names are often chosen to honor a relative, sometimes immediate, sometimes more distant. I bear my grandmother's middle name.

When I began researching my family I only had my great grandfather's name to go on. His name was Oscar Reeve and I knew he came to California from Ohio. My first discovery was an obituary for Oscar that someone had posted on one of the community boards. The Obituary mentioned his middle name "Joel" and the town of Willoughby among some other tidbits. The name Joel was the real clue though, that name led me all the way back to Bethuel's eldest son. It took some more research to make the family lines clear and proven, but "Joel" was the clue that got me there. Names again come into play in my theories about who Bethuel's father and brothers are, but that's a topic for another post.

Neighbors are important too. The world of 1776 was different than it is today. People were more focused on the local area in which they lived. When I first started doing census work, I only paid attention to the names in my family. As I worked though, I started to see patterns. There was a Reeve family living right next to a Haines family for almost a century. My great grandfather Oscar followed his Uncle Henry out to California. People tended to live near other family members, sometimes with them. Older adults often live next to, or with a married child's family. There's a quote from the movie "The Silence of the Lambs" that I often think of..."People covet what they see every day". The Children of one family grew up next to the children of another family and naturally one or two would intermarry. When Bethuel moved to North Sea from Southold, he ended up living nearby the Haines family to whom his wife Mary Haines Reeve just happened to be related. Did Bethuel choose North Sea to be closer to his in-laws,or did the in-laws follow Bethuel. When I'm looking for clues as to who a wife is, I often look to the families surrounding them in the census for clues. Rather than just looking for my ancestor, I look for other familiar names as well.