Looking back to 2025, forward to 2026

There’s no doubt about it.

The very best part of genealogy is the stories.

Stories in The Legal Genealogist’s family take us back a long way in America on the maternal side and in Germany on the paternal side.

Stories that begin, in this country, in the late 1600s. Stories in Germany that we can take all the way back to the late 1500s.

Some of them, astoundingly, given my family’s tendency never to let the truth get in the way of a good story, that may even possibly be true.

And some of the possibly-true ones — that is, the ones that I’ve managed to document with something other than a marginal note that one of the family storytellers told me so — had very big milestones in 2025 or will have big milestones here in 2026.

These “big milestones” are events that were exactly 50 or 100 or 150 or 200 or 250 years ago — or more! — during the year.¹

And they’re the kinds of milestones that we shouldn’t allow to pass without pausing to reflect.

Looking back

In 2025, for example, there was good documentation of a 300-year milestone: the birth on 6 January 1725² of my sixth great grandfather John Pettypool.³ In the 200-year milestone category, a death, of my fifth great grandmother, Mary (Boswell) Buchanan, died 7 October 1825 in what is now Mitchell County, North Carolina.⁴ In the 100-year milestone category, the single most powerful event of my own ancestry: the emigration from Germany to the United States of my paternal grandparents, Hugo Ernst and Marie (Nuckel) Geissler and their then-three-year-old son (my father), setting sail from Bremen on 26 January 1925 and arriving in New York on 6 February 1925.⁵

Looking forward

In 2026, we have some milestones coming up as well.

In the 300-year milestone category — with good documentation even! — there’s a death: my eighth great grandfather William Pettypool died in early 1726 in Prince George County, Virginia. His will, executed in 1721, was admitted to probate on March 14, 1726, by his widow Elizabeth. In the will, he named his wife Elizabeth, sons William (Jr.) and Seth (my seventh great grandfather), daughters Anne Massey (recorded as Mercy) and Mary Broadway, and grandchildren, Anne’s two children, William and Martha. Elizabeth declined to serve as executrix and son William served instead.⁶

In the 250-year milestone category, it’s particularly appropriate in America’s Semiquincentennial year that the choice be another death: this time a fourth great grand uncle, Richard Baker. He was born 23 December 1753, most likely in Culpeper County, Virginia. As far as we’ve been able to determine, he was the 10th of 13 children born to my fifth great grandparents, Thomas and Dorothy (Davenport) Baker.⁷ He was serving with his older brother, my fourth great grandfather David Baker, in the 3rd Virginia Regiment of the Continental Line when Washington’s Army began to cross the Delaware just after dark on Christmas Day 1776. They were headed to what is known today as the Battle of Trenton. And it was there, David reported in a pension application decades later, on the 26th of December 1776, that Richard Baker was killed in that action.⁸

In the 200-year milestone category, we’ll go with a marriage: on the 27th of October 1826, my third great grandfather Johann Heinrich Hüneke and his first wife Rebecca Schrader were married in Bremen, Germany. Both bride and groom were shown as age 23, and he was shown as a cigarmaker.⁹ Rebecca had two daughters before she died in 1833.¹⁰ He then married my third great grandmother Dorothea Mahnken in December 1834,¹¹ and their daughter Johanna Henriette was my second great grandmother.

In the 150-year milestone category, we have to go with another marriage: on the 26th of October 1876, in Cherokee County, Alabama, my second great grandmother Martha Louise (Shew) Baird married Abigah C. Livingston.¹² It was his first marriage; it was probably her second, though no record of her marriage to my second great grandfather Jasper Baird has ever been found. My great grandmother Eula was Martha Louise’s only child by Jasper, but Abigah fathered a whole host of kids to fill the house and was the only grandfather Eula’s children — including my grandmother — ever knew.

In the 100-year milestone category, there’s no contest, and it has to be a birth: my mother, Hazel Irene (Cottrell) Geissler was born on March 21, 1926, in Midland, Texas. Despite the fact that that date was 23 years after Texas began statewide recordation of births, there is — sigh — no birth certificate that was ever filed for my mother, which is why I usually end up citing her death certificate.¹³ One of these years, and I suppose a centennial year would be a good choice, I’m going to order her passport file from the State Department, since I understand that my grandmother filed an affidavit to help my mother get her passport.¹⁴

And in the 50-year milestone category, once again no contest and a birth: my niece Gina, whose details shall not be further published without her permission since she is, I am glad to report, very much alive for us all to celebrate this milestone birthday.

Each of these, a story of its own, to find and to tell — each, in truth, one of the real reasons why we do genealogy at all.

Why I write this blog.

Why I have to tell the stories.

To make sure that those I remember aren’t forgotten… that these milestones continue to be remembered down through the generations.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Milestones, 2026,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 11 Jan 2025).

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