My name is John B. Lisle, and I am a Guild Member from Nashua, New Hampshire USA.
I was introduced to family history and genealogy by my father when I was 12 years old when I asked about our family history because my great-grandmother Davidson had just died. He shared a chart he had of his Lisle ancestry that sketched out our line to our Lisle immigrant ancestor John Lisle.
John came to America as a teenager just before the American Revolution. John was of Scot Presbyterian ancestry who came to Pennsylvania from Ireland. John fought in the War and was awarded bounty land in Kentucky. After trying to settle there, it was stolen from him so he returned to Cumberland county, Pennsylvania. Then in 1797 he and his young family went West again and linked up near Cincinnati, Ohio, with Lucas Sullivant who was heading up a group of settlers to settle an area that became Franklin county and Columbus, Ohio. John died in 1808 and his Will was was one of the first recorded in Franklin county.
I then asked my Dad about his mother’s Davidson family. He admitted that he knew nothing about that family. So he wrote his aunt in Texas who was only living relative in that family he knew. A few months later she wrote back with a detailed several page report on her Davidson family that later became the basis for my detailed research on that family.
In the interim, I spent some time with my mother’s parents who were living near us and they shared what they knew about their family.
My grandfather Ridsdale had come to America from North Yorkshire in the early 20th century, and he shared several generations of his family – names only, of course. Although I still have those notes, there are still some of his cousin lines that I have not sorted out.
My grandmother Korp was born in Worcester, Massachusetts but moved with her family to McKeesport, Pennsylvania, just before 1900. Her parents had both come from Sweden and she knew nothing of the family in Sweden.
Over the next several decades, I came back to these notes and the primitive hand drawn trees I created and tried to add more detail. In the 1980s I was able to get more serious about genealogy.
First, when I got my first home PC, my first purchase was some genealogy software. Being fundamentally lazy, I did not see any reason to have to keep handwriting charts every time I found new information.
Second, I had a job that took me to England every other month or so. My mother connected me to one of her Ridsdale cousins so whenever I could on one of my trips. I would visit and get introduced to other Ridsdales in North Yorkshire and show places that my grandfather had lived.
Third, a friend and neighbor introduced me to how to research seriously. Through him, I was introduced to the New England Historic Genealogy Society in Boston, the LDS family history center, the local National Archives office where I could access microfilms of the US census from 1790 to 1900, and many other sources. I also then decided to interview my wife’s mother about her family. I now had several more family lines to put in my PC and either Brother’s Keeper or PAF.
About 1994 or 95, I was playing with this new toy – the World Wide Web. I was already actively using email and RootsWeb email lists. With the primitive browser, I located census transcriptions for my wife’s great grandfather Steadman in Nova Scotia. I joined some Nova Scotia lists and discovered that her Steadman family had come to Nova Scotia from Rhode Island about 1761 as part of the plantation period after the French and Indian War. With some research at NEHGS, I discovered that her Stedman family had arrived in Connecticut in the late 1640s and had settled in New London. But the records of the Stedmans in New England were very confused and seemingly incomplete. But I finally had an ancestral family to research with New England Roots.
Gradually, I found myself spending all of my research time trying to sort out the Stedman families. First in New England and then I headed west into New York, Ohio, and before I knew it I was documenting all Stedman/etc. families in North America. Of course, about this time, I joined Ancestry and with them had all of these new images of census to look at 24/7
By the year 2000, I had fairly completely (or so I thought) documented my Lisle family. I had never found John Lisle’s parents but I had discovered that John had come to America with an older brother.
I had also started building a tree of my Davidson family. A fortuitous find put that family together and I had built a good tree of that Davidson family.
Along the way, I decided I needed to upgrade my genealogy software to something Windows based and settled initially on Family Tree Maker.
The new century started and I knew that I needed to organize what was becoming an unwieldy amount of trees that I was building. And I needed a better tool. At a genealogy show in Boston, I got to try out a number of software packages. I settled on Legacy. The owner of the company invited me to join the beta test team because of my background in software testing. (I am still with Legacy and still with the test team.)
I also decided to do what I now know is a one name study of the Stedman families. I had about 30-35,000 names already in my database. I also decided to focus on the Davidson families in America. My own research was limited to those people connected to my family, but I was actively helping people working on other Davidson families and compiling reams of Davidson data.
And then about 2003/2004 another toy entered my toolbox: DNA. I started reading about and then after a long series of arguments on the Davidson email list about who was related to who among the 18th century Davidsons in the US South, I decided to start the Davidson project at FamilyTreeDNA (FTDNA). We worried if we could get the six people to get tested so the project would be made permanent. We had them in weeks. We now have over 500 members worldwide. But with that project we were able to start sorting out the Davidsons into biological families. In fact, we introduced the concept of biological families to FTDNA which led to their adding the sub-grouping facility on their web site.
We then followed the success of the Davidson work to the Stedman project and the huge Hall project. (I have a 5th great grandfather Hall who is aligned in North Carolina and Tennessee with my Davidson family, but I also have a great number of New England Halls who connected with my Stedman families.).
One of the outgrowths of the DNA work was a realization that most of the families could not be provably connected with their ancestors in the UK. About this time, Ancestry began to introduce English census and other UK records. So, in parallel, I began to start documenting both the Stedmans and the Ridsdales in England.
As I did this, I was reminded of being introduced to the Guild of One Name Studies back at that show in Boston. At the time, the Guild seemed to focused on English research which I was not ready to do at the time. But now, I saw a reason to join which I did and promptly registered the Stedman, Ridsdale, and Davidson surnames and appropriate variants. (I have since passed the Davidson registration to the UK Davidson guru Nick Hide and work with him on the US side as a study associate.)
Another thread that started for me in the late 1990s was that I saw little value in pushing to publish books of genealogical research. As I was adding material almost daily, by the time I published anything, it would be obsolete.I quickly settled on a decision to publish on the web. My first sites went up in 1998. I played with several tools for publishing but decided that the best tool was one that created pages dynamically. My first tool was IGM which was the precursor of the tool that RootsWeb uses for WorldConnect. I saw limitation in that, especially around adding media. About 2003/4 I was introduced to TNG as a fairly extensible tool for publishing web genealogies. The tool was based on a web equivalent of a family group sheet but also could quickly create pedigree and descendant charts.
The past ten years have been a blur of research and new projects. This blog and website will be a place where I will write about topics that are not related to one of my registered studies. Hopefully, someone will find the writings interesting.
