Wavetops: James Palmer (1814-1904)

Surveying the surface of an ancestral ocean

Last week, I wrapped up the last of the “Family Reunion” series, which gave a (sometimes) brief overview of who each of my sixteen great-great-grandparents was. That was useful because it forced me to revisit each of those families, confirm my connection to them using documentary evidence, and review the WikiTree profiles for each of them. And, I did the same thing for my wife’s Sixteen - which means anyone descended from any of those 32 people should be able to find a connection back to us if they can trace their ancestry back that far.

Today I’d like to build on that foundation with the first in a new series. “Wavetops” will look at individuals who are as far back on any given branch of my tree as I have been able to go. They might be someone who puts me up against a brick wall - or they might just be someone who got neglected while researching other lines.

Maternal ancestry for my grandmother, Albert (Tuttle) Clark

James C Palmer was my 4th-great grandfather. I felt he was a good first Wavetops subject because a) he was a shipbuilder, and b) his name was “Palmer” - as in, the Palm Tree Approach. (I assure you, I am very funny.) The real reason, of course, is somebody on Ancestry asked me a question about James Palmer, and I went on a three-day bender of research to get them an answer - and it turned out I hadn’t written about him here, yet.

Fun fact: I first signed up for WikiTree on 6 Jun 2019. Before that, I was posting whatever information I could gather into long blog posts at my old Mightier Acorns site. The entry for James C Palmer and Martha Peterson was posted on Sunday, July 16, 2017. And if you look at the “Changes” tab on his WikiTree profile, you can see that I created James’s profile on 17 July 2019 - two years and a day after posting his bio on the blog.

What I find fascinating about all of this is that the two versions (the blog post and the wiki page) were researched independently from each other. The information I collected and used to write the blog post is in one large, private “master” tree on Ancestry, but the information I used to build the WikiTree profile was collected in a tree called “The Alberta Tuttle Project” - which is public, so you should be able to view it with your Ancestry account. The point of the Alberta Tuttle Project was to rebuild her tree using only verified sources and to apply the skills I had developed for finding and documenting evidence while working on the Callin Family.

The conclusions I made about the Palmer and Peterson families seemed to hold up between one version and the next, but I found more sources (particularly the 1850 Census) and a lot of city directories with clues that helped me flesh out James’s biography. Now I need to move on to his children and build their WikiTree bios.

If you have already read his WikiTree page, I don’t have a lot to add to what is there. There is still work to be done on James; I have yet to find death or burial records for him or for Martha.

Be sure to check out his “Research Notes” section. I did some searching on the people mentioned in the Palmer families in America, but I could not find the will for Alice Palmer mentioned in that story, nor could I find any evidence that belonged to the people named (Alice Palmer, his alleged wife, nor Isreal Palmer, his alleged father). I need to keep digging until I find evidence that either rules out Israel Palmer as James’s father, or tells me who his father is.

Since all of James and Martha’s children were daughters, it’s highly unlikely that any of their descendants will carry the surname “Palmer” - but if you see are a Palmer and you see me and Carol (the other cousin listed in the “DNA Connections” section) in your DNA matches, you could be descended from a brother or cousin. That would be interesting, so say hello!

I don’t really know where Wavetops will take us, but if you want to surf along with me:

Previous posts about James Palmer’s descendants: