Zacharias’ Elder Brother John Holladay

Today I posted a page summarizing what I currently know about my great-great-grandfather Zacharias Holladay’s elder brother, John Holladay. Born in Virginia in about 1755, he was one of very early settlers in Kentucky and was at Harrodsburg in March, 1777. After the Revolutionary war, Zacharias joined him in Kentucky. John Holladay apparently died in Adams County, Mississippi, in about 1800, but I am still looking for more solid proof of this.

Since returning from my trip to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, I have been fortunate to locate some living descendants of John and his wife Margaret, or Margery Gustavus.  Their descendants use the surname Holliday, and my post also comments on the issue of how our surname is spelled. I am hoping we can verify the genealogical evidence of these relationships by DNA testing.

In the past year I have found some more distant Holliday/Holliday cousins, had a 67-marker Y-DNA test, and verified that indeed I share a common ancestor with them. These findings verify the results many years of genealogical research done by Dr. Alvis M. Holladay, Sr., and his family that were published in his book, The Holladay Family, in 1983.

More about Margaret Gustavus Holladay in a future post.

Reviewing My Genealogical Priorities

Can it really be the first of June? My blogging activities have become sporadic again, it seems. Shortly after my last posting I left on a week-long research trip to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, home of The Allen County Public Library (ACPL). This facility is one of the premier genealogical research libraries in the country and claims to be the largest such library that is publicly-funded.

The ACPL certainly lived up to my expectations. My initial goal was to search for clues to the ancestry of Henry Reynolds, one of my “brick wall” great-great grandparents. This effort was moderately successful – some good information was found in Kentucky and Virginia land records about possible members of his family.

A second goal was to look for new information about the Holladay family in the ACPL holdings for Adair County, Kentucky. These holdings are quite impressive, but I found little for Adair that is not available in Salt Lake City and no Holladay information that was new to me.

While there I also looked for new information about Zachariah Holladay’s somewhat mysterious older brother John. Here I was spectacularly successful in learning about his descendants and about the woman he married, Margaret or Margery Gustavus. John is mentioned briefly in my biographical sketch of Zacharias, especially in footnote  3, but much of his life has been a mystery to me, especially what happened after he disappears from Washington County, Kentucky, records in about 1798.

Both during this trip and since my return, this effort to find more information about Zacharias’ brother John Holladay has occupied much of my genealogy time. The trouble is, other priorities and commitments keep me from spending more than one or at most two hours per day on genealogy. I now have two more genealogical projects to pursue in addition to various tasks under what I call the Holladay Family project. These new projects are the search for Henry Reynolds (1778-1849) parents, and developing a biographical sketch of John Holladay (1755-1800). I’ll be commenting on each of these and summarizing results in future posts.

My Roots in Adair County, Kentucky

My genealogical efforts have been greatly aided by the fact that all of my father’s ancestors migrated to the area of Adair and Green County, Kentucky, shortly after the Revolutionary War. They remained in the Adair County area until my father left in the 1920’s  for Colorado and the West.

The surnames are: Anderson, Brawner, Holladay, Montgomery, Reynolds, Sallee, Smith, and Waggener.   The Creel family is also closely associated with several of these families. I will be making a number of posts about these families and sources of additional information about them. Your comments and inquiries are invited.

My Reynolds Ancestors

This past Monday evening I had one of those delightful genealogical experiences that occur from time to time. Out of the blue I received an email message from a distant cousin who is descended from a sister of my great grandmother Mary Anna Reynolds Holladay. The Reynolds-Holladay family connections go back to the very early days of the settlements south of Green River which are now a part of Green and Adair Counties in South-Central Kentucky. The gentleman who sent the message found me through the surnames of my Adair County ancestors that I posted a couple of years ago on the Adair County page of Kentucky Genweb (http://www.kykinfolk.com/adair/surnames.htm)  These postings sometimes take years to produce results, and it is very important that you keep a current email address posted – you never know when a distant relative with valuable information will find your listing. My newly-found Reynolds cousin and I have been exchanging emails at a great rate and I am now drafting a short writeup on the Reynolds-Holladay connections for posting to this site. I would be delighted to hear from other descendants of Henry Reynolds (1778-1849) and Nancy Ann Sallee (1783-1859) of Adair County, Kentucky.

A Biographical Sketch of Joseph Holladay

Today I posted a biographical sketch of  Joseph Holladay, Zacharias and Kitty’s third and youngest son. Joseph married Sarah J. (Sally) Reynolds and they had at least eleven children. More information about their children will published as time permits.

Blogging Again

Although I haven’t posted to this blog for a couple of months I have had some very interesting email correspondence with several other Holladay family members, both my Adair County, Kentucky, cousins and my “DNA cousins”. The latter are more distant cousins with whom I have made contact as a result of having my DNA tested a year ago for the purpose of proving or disproving that I share a common ancestor with others having the Holladay/Holliday family surname.

I also spent time helping to set up a new user group for the RootsMagic genealogy database program as part of my activities in support of the library of the Southern California Genealogical Society (SCGS). I have been using RootsMagic and its predecessor, Family Origins, to record and report on my work almost since I began to do serious genealogy in the mid 1990s. I have been putting off entering additional data into my database during the past few months until the new RootsMagic version 4 was released, since it contains a lot of cool new features, especially the way it facilitates entry of the source information required to conform to good genealogical practice.

RootsMagic 4 has now been released to the public and it’s time for me begin entering a large amount of data collected over the past several years. I plan to report on this work periodically in this blog, along with some information about the Holladay family DNA studies, the RootsMagic 4 program, and some of my volunteer work for the SCGS.

For the time being, the main focus will continue to be on Zacharias and Kitty Anderson Holladay, their four children, and later descendants. Stay tuned…

A Biographical Sketch of William Holladay

Today I posted a biographical sketch of Zacharias and Kitty’s son William Holladay, my great grandfather. William married Mary Anna (Polly) Reynolds and they had nine children. Brief biographical highlights of each of them will be added as time permits.

A Biographical Sketch of Zacharias and Kitty’s Son, John Holladay

Today I am posting the first of the planned biographical sketches of Zacharias and Kitty’s four children. This sketch is about their somewhat unknown elder son John who is covered little, if at all, in previously published material about the Adair County Holladays. I have discovered a considerable amount of information about him and his children, and this sketch will be updated as time permits.

A brief synopsis of the life each of John’s children has been included. Note in particular that John’s two sons who moved to Missouri fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, a real-life example of brother fighting against brother in that conflict.

Blogs and Genealogy

On Tuesday I gave a short presentation to the JPL Genealogy Club on using blogs and how they can be useful in your genealogy efforts. The handout was a list of some of my favorite genealogy blogs and other web sites about blog readers and blogging software. As requested at the meeting, the list is posted here with links to the sites.

A Biographical Sketch of Zacharias Holladay

I have uploaded a page containing a biographical sketch of Zacharias Holladay, the progenitor of our Adair County Holladay family.  To view it, just click on the link to his name in the sidebar on the right.

Similar biographical sketches of his four children will be posted as they become available.