Having spent a great deal of time and effort on researching the Hotchkiss, Lee, Munn, Tilden and Other Related Families manuscript, it is time to begin the actual merging of information. It took almost 4 months of research and reading the details of the manuscript, which was not signed, to identify the author as Frank L. Lee, my first cousin, three times removed.
In reading through and transcribing the manuscript, I found numerous citations for various facts and event assertions. Each of these needed to be verified and the actual citation entered where a summarization by cousin Frank may have not quite told the whole story.
I happen to own a number of the volumes sitting on my bookshelves that were cited in the manuscript that was written in the 1930s. These were the easiest to look up, verify, and add to the original if applicable.
Then there were the other volumes that were available in the 1930s that I had not acquired. As I have reported in previous entries, Haithi Trust, Google Books, and Archives.org are my new best friends. After all, the works available in the early 1930s are pretty much no longer under copyright and can be found on one or more of those sites.
Then, there was the assertion that Israel Waters was the father of Ezekiah Waters with the statement following that Frank could find no real evidence to back up that theory. This led to a special project to find the father of Hezekiah – be it Israel or another Waters male. That endeavor, which took a number of months, provided a reason that Frank could not find evidence for Israel Waters being the father of Hezekiah; it was Jacob Waters. There were a number of Israel Waters males found in my research. In fact, one of them was Hezekiah’s half-brother.
Now add the other items I found while searching for the citations in the original manuscript. I now have 135 different sources to add to the story started by my cousin almost 90 years ago.
Frank’s story goes much farther than he was able to construct in the 1930s. I have traced one of his Waters lines back to the Mayflower, and another to the Democratic Party candidate for President of the United States in 1876 (Samuel J. Tilden), Benjamin Hayes won.
At least most of the 135 sources are printed and not in Cousin Frank’s handwriting as the original manuscript.
A Tree Grew in Oakland 