Find Your Family Roots

In order to keep this blog going, I have decided to blog on different things you can do to find your family ancestors. Everybody has something interesting in their family tree, so you should consider finding out where you came from.

The first place you should start when doing your family research is your oldest family members. These people have an encyclopedia of information in their memory banks. Don't do like me and wait until your grandparents are dead to start looking. It is harder. If your grandparents are dead, the next best thing would be great aunts and uncles. Get in contact with your oldest family members and get all of the names of all the family members as far back as they can remember.

Ask for dates of birth, death & marriage. Get city, county, state and country as well. You can research a lot of this information online. Each state has a GenWeb site where you can look at the county within the state for information. Someone related may have already left information on a site and this is really helpful. Don't expect this to happen though.

There are several web pages that you can search for information on your family. Some sites are pay sites, some are free. My next posting will give lists of helpful links on doing your research.

For now, please get in contact with your older relatives and get the information above that you will need. You can't jump to step #2 until you get step #1 completed. I guarantee you will need this information before you can even start researching the net. If you think you already know all of this information, you are probably wrong, so talk to them. I can't stress this enough.

Good luck and I'll be posting some sites soon!

From Riches To Rags...

By Vickie Clyburn Johnson

Sometimes I get a little angry at the way our family has turned out. I love them all, but considering all of the aspects of our history, we should be more successful. I'm sure other families have had setbacks, but this was all caused by one person's actions. I get so mad I could spit and it does absolutely no good.

I remember watching a mini series by Steven Spielberg called "Into The West" that talked about a family originating in Virginia. Anyway this family decided to move and traveled westward with a plan to end up in California where the Gold was. It showed all of the trials and tribulations that these pioneer families went through in order to travel back then. It was a great movie and I didn't miss a single episode. I never knew what a great western writer Steven Spielberg was, but I enjoyed this movie more than any of his science fiction movies. I think maybe he should consider making this story a movie, because it is true.

Anyway, back to the point. After doing many years of family research, I discovered exactly what my grandpa always told our family. Our name wasn't really suppose to be "Clyburn". He told of a story about an ancestor who had shot and killed a sheriff and it had something to do with a slave being set loose, but he didn't really know all the details, because the story had been passed down and was always kept hush hush, because nobody could ever find out what happened. I think he and his family truly believed that the law might come in and really do something to us if they ever found out the truth.

My grandpa died several years ago and he was the best grandpa any kid could have. I missed him so badly and decided to make it my life's ambition to find out the real truth and all the details of what really happened. It took a huge amount of research and it was complicated, because my grandpa didn't really know what our name was suppose to be, but he thought it could be "Blackwell". I started searching the internet and did the google search for "Clyburn, Blackwell". Luckily I ran in to a lady that was related and had all the information anybody could want about those two families and if it hadn't been for her, I probably would have never found what I was looking for. I told her about the shooting and what my grandpa had said, but she really knew nothing about this. She did know from what I'd told her that my family was from South Carolina. She did have some details, but not exactly what I was looking for. I made a web page on genealogy.com and started getting information from people viewing the site.

I found that my family is a part of the Clyburn family through my great great great grandmother. But she married a man by the name of James Blackwell . My gg grandpa Levi Blackwell and his brother Ransom (my gg uncle) had married two indian sisters Margaret and Eliza Sowell. These women had inherited parts in a goldmine through their grandpa, Burrell Brewer. The name of the mine was "Brewer's Gold Mine". It still has that name to this day. This man is my 5th great grandpa.

To make a long story short (if that is really possible here) my gg uncle Ransom had stolen a slave and tried to re-sell the slave to another slave trader, but he was found out and the man who made the purchase got a sheriff's deputy and came to confront him one day while he was helping my gg-grandpa Levi Blackwell reap wheat at Levi's house. He told the man that he would make good on the deal if they would follow him back to Ransom's house, but when they got there, Ransom pulled out a shot gun and killed the slavetrader. There was a letter found by a genealogy broker that has all of this information on it. He contacted me via my genealogy website and gave me this information. I was very thankful, because this was just the link I needed to prove our name.

After Ransom shot and killed the slave trader, it was stated in the letter that Ransom said, "If I'd knowed I was gonna kill him with the first shot, I'd of put the other one in the deputy". I guess Ransom was an evil man, but it was at this point I got really mad at him for ruining my family's name and our entire lives. Before he did this my direct line had a perfectly great life. They had their own plantation in South Carolina and rights to a "Goldmine". But Ransom was married to Levi's wife's sister, so all of the kids were double first cousins. I guess my gg grandpa Levi felt that in order to keep the family together they would both have to flee, so that is what they did. They took off toward the west to get away from the law, because Ransom would have been hanged. They changed their name from "Blackwell" to "Clyburn". Ransom took his mother's dad's name of William Clyburn and Levi just changed his name to Levi Clyburn. If you look at my genealogy site, I have links to census pages that verify the family names in South Carolina and Missouri. I also have the words to the letter written about the shooting. I couldn't afford to buy the letter from the genealogy broker, but he was nice to share the information and I appreciate it. They fled to Southeast Missouri and that is where most of the family still resides today, although many of us have moved to other states and towns, because there is really no work in the town where they now reside.

Later, my grandpa's sister gave me a copy of an original letter from South Carolina written to Levi Clyburn (my gg grandpa) stating that my gg grandma Margaret Sowell had sold her part in the goldmine for $25. TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS!!!! At this point, my blood was boiling. I can't think about it too much, because I just want to have a stroke!!! The words to this letter are on my website as well and you can take a look at all of this information if you'd like. It has all been verified and my name should be Blackwell, but it has been so long now, we see no since in spending money to legally change it. We've been known as Clyburn's our entire life and we do have some Clyburn blood in our veins through Mildred Clyburn my ggg grandma.

The Clyburn name is very prominent in South Carolina and what harm could that do. If I ever have the money to visit that state, at least the name will sound good, but it would probably only make me upset to see how well off some of the Clyburn's are that live there. I've been told some of them live in mansions. I don't know if this is true, but it probably is.

So this is the reason I think my family history would make a great western. I have a lot more details on my extended family lines and they were really prominent people. There is information about my gg grandma and her sister wearing gold belts on the trip to Missouri. It got cold and they had to burn fence posts one night. They knew they'd have to pay for the fence posts, but it was life or death. They just didn't know the man who owned the fence posts would charge them a dollar a post. So when they left South Carolina, they had money, but by the time they got to Missouri, they were completely broke. My aunt and grandmother took trips to South Carolina via stage coach to see their family, because that was the quickest way to get there. There is so much to talk about. The information is almost endless.

My web page is at http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/j/o/h/Vickie-Raylene-Johnson/

Feel free to read it and look over it. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to talk to you about it. I might make future posts on this blog, if I think of anything else to talk about. Thank you for your time in reading this and I hope that you enjoyed the story.