Geneology Research

Ancestry.com gave me a 3 day free trial to their website, which I must say is quite cool. In 3 days, I was able to get a massive list of possible relatives to research. Here is my rough draft family tree. (Must set up account to view)

The research is pretty easy to do on the ancestry.com site. They have a lot of family trees that you can copy to guide you. These are assembled by other users, and are not trustworthy, but can get you started. With a paid subscription, you can click on a name in your family tree, and see census records, military records, immigration records and media records that are possible matches for that person. Most of these records have scanned documents, so with one click, you can view the actual hand written census sheet that your relative is listed on.

I have been able to track my Patriarchal name back to a man name Charles Reilly who was born in 1807 in Ireland. When he moved to the United States, he began spelling his name Reighley, just like I do. He got married in Fredrick Maryland to Caroline Cronise. One of the history books indicated that a Charles Reighley pastored a church there for a couple of "troubled years" in 1832, but I am not positive that this was the same guy, as I do see other Charles Reighley's that have lived in that area.

In the late 1830's he moved to Michigan, I believe he was an army chaplain, and definately pastored an Episcopal church there. He had 6 kids with his first wife, including my great-great grandfather, James Braiden Reighley.

It appears that he moved to the Mississippi in the late 1850's and his wife passed away there, and he remarried. His second wife was a school teacher, Heloise DeMailly, and they had a daughter. There appears to be quite a collection of information on Ms De Mailly's life in the Ker Family papers, Archived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It looks like they have portraits of Heloise DeMailly Reighley, Marie Reighley Watkins, as well as a portrait of Mrs. Watkins with her infant son. They also have several letters written from Miss De Mailly to one of her pupils, Mary Ker. If I am ever in that neighborhood, I will have to check it out.

Rev Reighley passed away in 1862. The folks in the forums seem to think he died in DC, but I haven't seen any documentation.

Anyway, it must have been interesting being a Irish born Yankee living in Mississippi in 1858-1862. I am sure there is a story there, but it is fairly unlikely that we will hear it. At least two of his sons, Charles Jr. and James Braiden, where in the Union army. Charles Jr, died of his war wounds. I suspect that Charles Sr. may have been an Union army chaplain during the civil war. Don't know for sure though. I will keep digging.

It is amazing how many people's legacy boils down to born on , died on, son of, husband of, father of.... I am going to research several other relatives and see if I can gather much of their story.

If anyone finds this post via a search engine, and has more information on these folks, I would love to hear about them. Please leave a comment or drop me an email!