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A Lesson in Pushing Bricks Until Something Gives
New genealogical insights into the lives of sisters Jerusha and Anna Martin
I posted a different slant to this story on Substack a few weeks ago. This article is from the perspective of performing the work rather than documenting the findings.
We’ve all been there — fervently skimming through records looking for the one that should be there, yet the Ancestry hints keep showing you one that seems unrelated.
Recently, for me, this was the case for the will of Anner Parker. She was seemingly unrelated to the lineage I was trying to track down, that of Jerusha (Martin) Clark— the sister named in Anner’s will was Jerusha Potter. I figured the algorithm was getting stuck on the given name and kept ignoring it.
But when everything I looked for went unfound, I finally gave up and took the time to actually read the will. It gave me the puzzle pieces I had been looking for — the algorithm had seen what I hadn’t. There was another sister listed in Anner’s will — Lora Durkee.
As I’ve been working on a lineage book of my Lincoln cousins (Windham lineage including John and Jonah Lincoln), I found myself looking at the siblings of Lora (Martin) Durkee, daughter of Nathaniel Ford Martin and Jerusha (Lincoln) Martin. Some of…
