New Evidence

there she blows - Wiktionary
(nautical) The traditional hail of the lookout in a whaler (whaling ship) when sighting the spouting water thrown up by a whale surfacing.

If I had been a whaler rather a genealogist, first I would be seasick, then I would be saying There She Blows! Genealogy is about sailing on the surface of a vast underworld of ancestors. That these ancestors exist(ed) below the surface is not a question. The question is where to look for them, and how and when we might encounter them. As we start this new decade of 2020, the answer to the question is Maybe Here, Maybe Now.  There She Blows.

And when I say We in my blog posts, I am always referring to collaboration, either in the exploration for, the discovery of, and/or the analysis of genealogical evidence. My most recent collaborator has been one Doug Hart. His research into the Gillespie's of early Ulster/Orange (& surrounding areas) spans decades, and his documentation of it has resulted in a Compendium that he generated with a Typewriter (!) in the 1990s. A Compendium sounds a bit like my rookie attempt to catalog some NY Gillespie's in 2012. Compendium, Catalog. Catalog, Compendium. OK, a Compendium sounds more complete and it is. Doug deserves alot of credit for tracing and studying several NY Gillespie family groups, though long and tedious a task, with the belief that doing so could allow the story of previously obscured Gillespie's to surface. That I generally share this research approach with Doug and that we both seem committed to ongoing discussions of possibility and meaning with regard to Gillespie evidence, both old and new, surely makes us collaborators and me grateful.

All of which is a long introduction to reporting on Doug's recent discoveries of new evidence to add to our NY Gillespie research bucket. Here is a summary:

• A 1770 deed of James Gillespy selling 129 acres of his land in Shawangunk to Matthew Beviers Jr. This document, a transcription, is one that Doug found long ago in his research, but which, at the time, could not be more fully understood. The transcription of the original deed is in itself an exquisite piece of work, giving clarity to the original language of the deed which not only mentions the names of James' wife, and also those of James' parents and when they might have died, but it also describes the exact property later sold in 1797 by William Gillespy Jr and his wife Martha to Matthew Gillespie previously of NYC and more recently of Montgomery. We are in the process of locating the original deed, which when located, will be a wonder to behold, I have no doubt.
• A database of Colden Store records where many Gillespie's are mentioned, some mentioning genealogical relationship, and some involving names that imply closer relationship (neighbor, and/or in-law?) -- specifically Hunter and Kain, and more indirectly, Graham. 
• A transcription of marriage records of the First Presbyterian Church of Troy showing three Gillespie marriages. The marriage catching our attention now is that of Andrew Graham and Jane Gillespie, married in 1797 in Lansingburgh, a place central to our current research exploring links between Ulster and Rensselaer Gillespie's.

To continue the oceanic analogy started in this post, sometimes evidence comes in waves splashing over the deck. The waves are unpredictable and forceful in nature; they can wreck what was once there, and often they leave behind things that are long forgotten or else inexplicable. In this case, all we know with certainty is that the deck is still wet and littered with fragments. Doug and I are in the process of analyzing this new evidence and how it applies to our growing pile of evidence and analysis from the last several months (see my Research Library for 2019 articles). There is a sense that we are inching closer to something of greater import; it could be a whale of a story. Stay tuned.

*Tin Anniversary*

I am having an anniversary of sorts. It's been ten years now since I started working on genealogy "seriously," and nearly that long since I decided to try blogging. From its start, this blog was meant to report Forward Progress on MY Gillespies, which is to say, progress that relates solely to those descendants of John Gillespie and Jane Woods of County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Period. There are innumerable other Gillespies in the world, but it has not been my purpose to research them nor to report on them here even if I were privately interested. It has been a selfishly narrow decision to make, and one that I think our previous family historian, Aunt Edith, also had to make. We have only so much time given to us, and so how shall we spend it? Doing what we think matters most in the long run.

Now, ten years later, I feel this policy of My-Gillespies-Only needs some amending. The simple truth is that we don't know what we don't know, and to overcome that, it seems to me, I have to be willing to open more doors to see what's on the other side. By widening the net, purposefully, I increase the chances of furthering what matters most. And what is that? In my lifetime, I would like to find the Gillespie connection back to Scotland. I know it's there, we all do. But I want to book my flight to Glasgow knowing the names of the ancestors who started this story. I have hope. I think there's still time.

With that said, I made a more conscious choice last fall to start wandering off the beaten path of my Gillespie research. Following small DNA matches that appear to connect me and others of my known relations back to New York, I've started to more fully engage in understanding exactly who were the Gillespie family groups of early Ulster/ Orange/ Dutchess counties. My only goal has become this: to learn more even if the work never ties back to MY Gillespies directly. By finding a balance between keeping my questions mentally focused and my research disciplined, and allowing room for curiosity, instinct, and even accidental insights, I believe it's still possible to discover more and move our collective understanding forward.

From here on, the posts you read on this blog may not apply directly to MY Gillespies. In the title of each forthcoming blog post, I will somewhere embed an asterisk (*) if the information being posted is something only a direct cousin to My Gillespies would want to read. Otherwise, expect my posts to cover my thoughts on various research discoveries as they pertain to the surname Gillespie, even if the discoveries, for now, seem irrelevant to my immediate family. As with the world in general, it becomes increasingly more obvious to me that we are all connected somehow. By shining a curious and insistent light on other early Gillespie families, we might yet find our way back to Glasgow.