Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Three Things about an Ancestor

Tonight Randy Seaver has us thinking about the details of our ancestors' lives for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along; cue the Mission:  Impossible! music!):

1.  What are three things about one of your ancestors that you have learned doing genealogy research?

2.  Write your own blog post, or leave a comment on this post, or write something on Facebook.

I chose my great-grandmother Laura May (Armstrong) Sellers Ireland.

• Laura May Armstrong was born May 7, 1882 in Burlington County, New Jersey to Joel Armstrong and Sarah Ann Deacon Lippincott.

• Laura bore at least ten children, only four of whom survived to adulthood:
Bertram Lynn Sellers, Sr. (1903–1995)
Cornelius Howard Sellers (about 1904–1905)
Amelia Sellers (after 1904–before 1920)
Catherine Marie Sellers (about 1907–1989)
George Moore Sellers (1908–1975)
Nellie Elizabeth Sellers (1912–2004)
Harry J. Sellers (1913–1913)
Herman J. Sellers (about 1914–between 1915–1920)
Birdsall Sellers (1916–1916)
Bertolet Grace Sellers (1921–1927)

• Laura was apparently a bit of a wild woman for her time.  She gave birth to my grandfather in 1903 without benefit of a husband; his birth certificate, which took quite a while to track down, has merely the socially disapproving "OW" (out of wedlock) on the line where the father's name would normally appear.  She married Cornelius Elmer Sellers seven months after my grandfather was born.  Then, in 1921, almost three years after Elmer had died, she gave birth to another child who did not have a father's name on the birth certificate.