52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 8 "I Can Identify"

I have had my Ogden relations on my mind recently. First I wrote about Jonathan Ogden for Week 7. Next the Relative at Roots Tech site showed me 6099 people attending Roots Tech this week who were purportedly related to me. As I checked them out, I discovered that on the FamilySearch tree someone had made my colonial American ancestor John Ogden of Rye the son of John Ogden the Pilgrim. Now I know that in the past there had been speculation that they were cousins, but no one had ever suggested that they were father and son. <big eye roll>. I did not look closely, but I'm betting that the family tree extending far into the past for John the Pilgrim included the false information from the Wheeler book. (I wrote about that in Week 5.)

I give up on the FamilySearch Tree. It is too hard to fight off the false genealogies that show up there.

On the other hand, I decided to go look and see what was on WikiTree for my John Ogden. The global tree there is far more reliable. I knew that there had been further research on him published in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. It's been on my To Do List to get down to the Newberry Library and read the articles for quite a while. I was hoping that the WikiTree entry for John Ogden of Rye had been updated with the new information. AND IT HAD!!

John Ogden of Rye is now listed as the nephew of John Ogden the Pilgrim. My John Ogden's WikiTree biography now includes a great discussion and overview of all the research on him. He is the brother of NY colonial Richard Ogden. They are the sons of Richard Ogden, brother of The Pilgrim, and Ellen Lupton. Ellen is a brand new person on my tree and Lupton is a brand new surname. Welcome!

It is still an open question as to whether the elder Richard Ogden came to the colonies with his sons or stayed in England. There seems to be evidence of two Richard Ogden's, father and son, in the colonial NY records. You can read more about it in their WikiTree biographies.

Richard, Ellen, and their sons are from...wait for it...Yorkshire! West Yorkshire to be current and specific. Ellen is from Keighley and Richard from Bingley, as are John and Richard. Now I have a location in England for my Ogden line. Last summer my wife and I spent a week with my stepson and his children in York. I was only 32 miles from the places where my Ogden ancestors came from! Damn! If only I had known!

And it doesn't end there. The Ogden tree on WikiTree goes all the way back to my 11th great-grandfather John Ogden who was born about 1524 in Haworth, Yorkshire and died there in 1576. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Michael and All Angels. 

I can identify my Ogden ancestors back 500 years to an 11th great-grandfather. As far as I can tell that is now the farthest back I can trace any line on my tree.

A trivial aside: Haworth is where the Bronte sisters lived three hundred years after my ancestor. The church where he is buried is where their father was the parson. Possibly one of the sisters wandered through the churchyard and saw my ancestor's headstone. You never know.

I spent some time this week adding my 2nd great-grandfather, James Robert Ogden, to WikiTree and linking him to the existing profile for his father Robert Ogden. That takes my Ogden line on WikiTree across thirteen generations from my late mother to my 11th great-grandfather. I added my only living Ogden uncle to WikiTree in the hopes that I could add the Y-DNA test I had him take several years ago. However, WikiTree only lets you add DNA tests to your own profile. Still it is amazing that his Y-DNA and his son's and their sons and their sons (and the son of my mom's older brother who died many years ago) goes back 500 years to a man who lived in Yorkshire at the time of Shakespeare.

Bonus trivia: now that my tree is connected back to all the Ogden related lines, I can verify that I am a 9th cousin of Humphrey Bogart. The Budd sisters Jane and Judith of Sussex and colonial NY are our 7th great-grandmothers.