Sunday, June 9, 2013

The "Passmore Book"

Genealogy being the quest that it is, sometimes you find a treasure.  The first item I found in the stacks of the Wisconsin State Historical Society was The Love Family Historical and Genealogy Quarterly published in the late 1950's.  It contained current information from subscribers along with some data that had been gathered by early Love genealogists in the pre-Internet days.  It was there I found mention of a two volume book called, Ancestors and Descendants of Andrew Moore, 1612 - 1897 by John Andrew Moore Passmore. The Treasure! 
   PassmoreV1 PassmoreV2


And there it was one row over. After Andrew Moore, there were several pages of information on Alexander Love who (we are so fortunate) married Andrew's daughter, Margaret/Margret Moore. Following Alexander and Margret (pp. 39 - 45) the generations were listed from Col. Andrew Love (pp. 59,94) to James Love (pp. 95,212) to Andrew Love (pp. 212,532) to James H. Love (pp. 532, 1052). And there, on page 1052 was "Emery F., b. 7-4-1862. P. O. Ford's Ferry, Ky." my great grandfather.  I couldn't believe my family's genealogy was right there in front of me. How lucky could I be, how easy is this?

Well, it was lucky. Not every novice genealogist has a starting point like Passmore's book. In the late 1800's John A. M. Passmore, another Andrew Moore descendant, started amassing information on his family. He wrote to Ireland to find Quaker records there. He had some family papers (including several letters written by Alexander Love to his brother-in-law James Moore, pp.40 - 42), but mostly he wrote letters to a lot of descendants to gather the names, dates and other information he included in his book published in 1897 (by that time much of the information on current generations was out of date; Emory Love was married and had several children by then).

Unfortunately, he did not include the sources of most of the material (which probably would have filled another volume).  He compiled the material as he received it, correcting obvious errors, and noted that some individuals had more information about them because their descendants sent more. Thus, we have a copy of Alexander's will, a family member's version of "the skirmish at Stallions" involving Andrew and his sister, Sarah (suggesting Andrew shot Sarah by mistake, but an eyewitness account by another member of the militia says the shot came from the rear of the house not in front where Andrew was), as well as a story about Andrew's death in Kentucky (here a source IS given as the Legend of Ford's Ferry, a work I have yet to locate) and the possibility that his son, Robert, avenged his death by killing James Ford (unlikely as Robert was dead by then). 

So even though information on individuals is uneven and stories handed down in the family may be inaccurate, the book is packed with enough material to give us a broad look at the Love lineage from Alexander to Emory/Emery plus a starting point for filling in missing data. It is a terrific resourse for keeping track of the various Love lines and I refer to it often.

The real treasure, I think, are Alexander's letters. They give us a more personal glimpse of who he was...learned, involved citizen, fervent expresser of the role of God in his life, affectionate family man, unafraid to express his opinion. It also gives us his signature. We are most fortunate that these few letters survived the one hundred or so years before Mr. Passmore shared them with us.  I would like to think they still exist in some archive and that it is possible to see them firsthand, but, if John Passmore willed his research papers to some public repository I have yet to locate it.