Marilyn Cook, of Doylestown, is a Charter Member of the Bucks County Genealogical Society. She has been researching her family history since 1979.   Her father was interested in genealogy and made some notes. After he passed away, Marilyn gathered his material and started working on it. It was grief therapy, she said, and it became more than that.

Marilyn lived in San Jose, California at the time and most of her family lived in New Jersey and most of her ancestors had lived in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She sent letters and questionnaires to aunts, uncles, and numerous cousins asking about their siblings, parents and grandparents. A lot of the work was done while Marilyn was attending college and working part-time. The best book on genealogy at that time was Val Greenwood's The Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy. On a starving student budget, she purchased it. Her home was within driving distance of three Family History Centers and the Santa Clara Public Library which had large history section and genealogy sections. The SCPL was particularly helpful with "how to" information, suggestions on where to find public records, and much more. The National Archives in San Francisco was another place that Marilyn frequented to search census records on microfilm. That's where she learned the value of looking at the census pages before and after found ancestors. It frequently led to the discovery of other family members. In one such case, she didn't learn of the family connection until 2008 when she was contacted by a man who turns out to be a third cousin.

While visiting her family in New Jersey, Marilyn and her Mom did some research in the Morristown & Morris Township Library. Her mother was looking through a book of cemetery tombstone inscriptions when she came across an entry, "Elizabeth Cook, wife of Charles J. Cook." Some weeks prior to that discovery, Marilyn found a census record for Charles J. and Elizabeth Cook living in Morris County. She wrote down the information on the chance that it could be her great- great-grandfather. He didn't marry her great-great-grandmother until 1869 so he could have had a first wife. Hoping that this might be her Charles J. Cook, she wrote to Evergreen Cemetery asking who else might be buried in that same section. She hit the jackpot.

Miss Jill Edwards, Cemetery Clerk at The Evergreen Cemetery, sent a hand-written, three-page letter. At the end of the letter, she apologized for the handwriting, "...my typewriter is not working properly." One page of the letter included a hand-drawn layout of the lot in which Elizabeth Cook is buried. It contains 11 graves. Marilyn's great-great-grandparents are both buried there - Charles J. and Eugenia M. Cook. Also, her father's Aunt Alice, Eugenia's sister, Amy F. and a son of Eugenia, Robert Nelson Smith. Eugenia had a previous marriage too. The purchaser of the lot was Thomas Weir and it was purchased the day after Elizabeth died. The Weir's appear as neighbors of Elizabeth and Charles J. Cook in the 1860 US Census Record.

Another page of Miss Edward's letter listed all of the people buried in that lot with birth dates, or ages in years, months and days. It also included their address at the time of their death, cause of death and the undertaker's name. That information led to obtaining a birth record for her great-great-grandmother, Eugenia M. Cook (nee Monier). Eugenia was born in 1839 in New Orleans, Louisiana. On her birth record, her paternal and maternal grandparents appear along with her parents, the address at the time of her birth, the address at the time the birth was recorded and her father's occupation.

There are still mysteries. In all the years since starting this research, the birth place of her maternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Ratchford (nee O'Brien), is still a mystery - is it Brooklyn, NY Scranton PA or Ireland? Did her great-great-great-grandfather move to Mexico with his daughters after the Civil War? Or is he the Jean Baptiste Monier buried in New Orleans? So the research continues...

Groundbreaking Agreement to Deliver Valuable Historical Content Over the Next Five Years

PROVO, Utah, September 5, 2013 - Ancestry.com and FamilySearch International (online at FamilySearch.org), the two largest providers of family history resources, announced today an agreement that is expected to make approximately 1 billion global historical records available online and more easily accessible to the public for the first time. With this long-term strategic agreement, the two services will work together with the archive community over the next five years to digitize, index and publish these records from the FamilySearch vault.   Read more... 

African-American New Archives Initiative

For over 230 years African-Americans have fought to rise from the ashes of bondage and slavery to attain a position of social, cultural, and political leadership in our modern World. Achieving such goals requires discovering and embracing the history and heritage of ancestors.  

The African-American New Archives Initiative is an endeavor to gather the records of history pertaining to the ancestors of African-Americans today, and create core collections that will someday be the principle sources for developing histories of these peoples. These records are largely forgotten by today's historians, but they are crucial for discovering ancestral ties between free Americans and their Slave Ancestors.  

James W. Petty, CG, AG, and his wife Mary Petty are Professional Genealogists searching for and gathering information pertaining to these new archives of Black Slave Emancipation Research in the Ante-bellum Northern States. They are working to arrange a visit to the Bucks County Genealogical Society in 2014, and sharing more about this exciting project.