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This is my second family history project. The first was about the Bates family, but this one has been harder partly because there are more ways to spell Garrett than Bates. Also, I found more data on the Garretts that was tough to reconcile.
My research involved the use of:
The LDS (Later Day Saints – Mormon) website.
A commercial website named Ancestry.com.
A commercial website named GenCircles.com
The Google search engine on the internet
The Dallas Public Library – to a small degree.
The LDS and Ancestry.com websites are basically warehouses of results from hundreds of genealogical researchers. They were good to give me direction and alternatives so that I could then use Google to prove or disprove the family connections. The difficulty was that both of the websites would present up to a hundred records with regard to one marriage. For example, if I asked for data regarding the family of John Garrett and Elizabeth Ware over a hundred different genealogical study results are made available. From many of them, one can obtain date and place of birth, death and marriage for the husband, wife, father, mother and each of their children. The trouble is, many of them are different so one has to use preponderance of data, reasonableness of data and verification via Google searches.
In my Garrett research, I found two fuzzy and confusing times. The first was finding the linkage for Great, Great, Grandfather Charles Garrett between 1800 and 1850. The other concerns the first Garrett family to immigrate to America in the 1600’s. I think I worked both of them out although a little fuzziness surrounds the “coming to America”.
In several cases, the history of a spouse was very helpful. Specifically, the Ware Family History that I found on the internet (90 pages) was invaluable. (One of the John Garretts married Elizabeth Ware.) Also, found on the internet was a good history by the Featherstone Society which helped with the ancestors and descendants of another John Garrett and Susannah Featherstone Burton.
When I started the project, I could find ancestors for only 4 generations. Now, I know of 30 generations.
John E. Garrett, Jr. May, 2004
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