Honk! Honk!

(I wrote this posting last summer, and neglected to actually press the button to, well, post it.)

I'm just back from a wild goose chase in Maine.

The kind that starts with a rumor... and ends with lots of nothing. Okay, that's not entirely true... I did find scads of relatives in Brunswick and Thomaston; just not the ones I was searching for. It was nice to have a mission on our trip to Maine while Alex was learning how to plank a boat. I spent the last week making short forays to various libraries and historical societies in Knox County - Bath, Thomaston and Rockland all have wonderful resources for the genealogically bent traveller.

The story goes like this: Thomas Deane, son of Jonas Deane of Taunton and Eunice Turner, was born in 1691 in Scituate, MA. He married Lydia Cole of Swansea, MA, daughter of Hugh Cole of Plymouth, MA and Deborah Bucklin of Rehoboth, MA. Already the story gets a little sticky; depending on the sources, Lydia's parents could also have been John and his first wife Mary (Lewis) Cole. Fred E. Crowell says in his New Englanders in Nova Scotia column, that "Thomas Deane and family removed to Scarborough, ME before Feb. 17, 1740." and that "Mr. Deane is said to have later removed to New Meadows, now Bath, ME, where he died."

And there is where I started looking: Bath, ME. If Thomas Deane - or Dean - had died in Bath, no one seems to know about it. In fact there are no Thomas Deane records of death/burial (with the correct dates) in Maine that I have found. And it is from a want of searching either. I have since found a place not unreasonably far from Bath that is called Dean Hill. I wonder if it would be a stretch to go climb it and see what is there, maybe a gravestone conveniently marked with Thomas Deane on it?

Well, the next time I'm in Maine...

Where are you?

John and Ellen Young.

Somewhere in Nova Scotia.

Your daughter Emma Georgina, born in July of 1860, is my great-grandmother. She immigrated to the US in 1881 and on 23 July of the same year, she married my great-grandfather James Brinton (Brenton) Johnstone in Boston, Massachusetts. They lived in Winthrop, where my grandaunt Maud Sherlock Johnstone (1886-1917) and my grandmother Blanche Evelyn Johnstone (1888-1994) were born. There was another child, according to the 1900 US Federal Census, but I haven't found any record of that birth.

James B. Johnstone was born in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. I checked the 1871 census - you were not there. You were also not in Sherbrooke where my father said you may have come from; or Guysborough a town that I have in mind, but probably only because I found a census with George Young who had a daughter Emma way back before I knew that you and Ellen were Emma's parents.

So where are you?