Georgia Woods

2019 is starting with an unexpected genealogy surprise: living relations in Georgia who connect to the Woods family from Armagh! It's so easy to keep all our focus on the patriarchs, Gillespie, but we must remember the simple fact that everybody in my direct line descends from John Gillespie and Jane Woods!  So what has lead us to this discovery of Woods relations?  29.1 centimorgans shared across 2 DNA segments, that's what, a predicted fourth cousin match to me. Here's a brief account of how we pieced the story together.

A study of the match's tree lead to a William Wood who settled in Georgia in the 1830s. Family records indicate that he was born in County Armagh! A study of our family tree showed that my ancestor, Jane Woods, had a brother, William Woods, who came to Quebec in the 1820s. Mary Gillespie Henderson mentioned this William Woods in her book "Memories of My Early Years" as well of several of his children. But how were these two Woods families connected?

Contact with another Woods researcher in Georgia provided letters written by relations in the 1940s describing what they knew of their Woods family history. According to the letters, two Woods brothers and a sister came to the US when they were young, leaving Canada after their mother died and their father remarried. The letters also stated that the original Woods immigrant was from Ireland, and there were other brothers in Canada, uncles possibly named Robert, James, Gilbert, and Carson. Finally, there was also mention of Woods cousins in Chicago who had been in correspondence with the Georgia family.

Well, it so happened that our William Woods indeed had a first wife who died in 1832 in Quebec, and he remarried soon after. We have been familiar with the children that William had with the second wife in Quebec, but there had never been even a hint that he had brought other children with him upon his arrival in Quebec. Now it seems clear that he did, and that one of those children was William Wood who moved to Georgia! Unable to find Quebec records that pertain directly to the Woods brothers who moved to Georgia, I set about to corroborate the other clues from the Georgia family letters. Here's what I found:

• William Woods had a son named James by his second wife. That James was found living with one Robert Woods in Montreal in 1861. That Robert Woods was born in 1812 in Ireland, so it seems likely and probable, that this Robert was also a son of William Woods and his first wife.
• Further research of Robert's children revealed that three of them later moved to the Chicago area, all of them living there into the 1940s. Here were the Chicago cousins mentioned in the letters!
• Finally, by his second wife, William Woods had a son Alexander, and two of Alexander's sons were William Carson Woods and Henry Gilbert Woods. Since relations often called each other by middle names, these could well be the uncles named Carson and Gilbert. Even the previously-mentioned James Woods had a son named Henry Gilbert Carson Woods, so those names were definitely in our family group.

Thus we have come to a yet another new chapter of our family story. These Woods families (morphed to WOOD in the US) were headed into a dark period of American history, navigating the Civil War and all its bloody violence, and then losing many children to the 1866 small pox epidemic that shook the South. But survive they did to bring their stories into the bigger family history.  Welcome to all Woods cousins!