•Thursday, September 11, 2014
This is a success story that I thought I’d never be able to
share with my family and with all of my fellow Bishop family researchers.
I have the recent addition of some Massachusetts Town and
Vital Records to the Ancestry.com collection to thank for that success story. The take-away lesson for me is that we
should NEVER stop trying, and that we should keep revisiting databases and
on-line sources - especially because these sites (Ancestry.com and
FamilySearch.org) are being updated and added to constantly.
The birth record of my third great grandfather John Fitch Bishop is available on line
at Ancestry.com. He was born on 27 June
1770 in what is now the town of Wales, Hampden County, Massachusetts. At the time of his birth, it was still known
as the 'west parish' of South Brimfield and was in the county of Hampshire, Massachusetts. John’s parents were William and Catherine
Bishop. Catherine’s surname may have
been Fitch, but I haven’t as yet found her birth record, nor have I found a
marriage record for William and Catherine.
The last name of Fitch comes from genealogical notes about families in
Wales by a man named Absalom Gardner.
So it was that after searching for John since the 1980's, I came across this record and almost leapt out of my desk chair.
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| Ancestry.com, Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 [database on-line], Provo, UT, USA, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011; Holbrook Research Institute, (Jay and Darlene Holbrook). |
And that was the beauty of it: this is the first birth record I'd found or seen for a John FITCH Bishop which gave his full name. No other record we researchers had found for a John Bishop born in the right range of years (1770 to 1775, according to census records up to 1840), had stated that middle name or even included the initial "F".
Finding this one link opened up this Bishop line all the way back to the emigrant ancestor, Edward Bishop, of Salem, Massachusetts. More about this discovery in future posts.
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