We all have them. That one family. The one with too many children, spread between different, unspecified mothers. The one that lived in a time and place with few records and fewer newspapers, none of which seem to be available online. The one that had a terribly common surname, common given names, making even what records can be found questionable. Is it your relative, or one of the many that must have shared his name?

For me, this was the King family.

John King was my fourth great-grandfather. Before November 28, here’s what I knew about him: He was born in Ireland about 1809. At some point he immigrated to the United States and settled in Delaware. He was a farmer. He had a total of fourteen or fifteen children between two or possibly three different wives. Eventually, as all my ancestors did, he came to Philadelphia where he died and was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery.

Tombstone of John and Ann Warnock King, Mount Moriah Cemetery, Philadelphia

I knew the names and ages of John’s children thanks to census records. I had a few baptism records from Old Swedes Church in Wilmington. I had information on some of the children’s later lives, others were complete blanks. I wasn’t even sure which children belonged to which wife, beyond the few for whom I’d found death certificates. Some of the older children’s death certificates indicated their mother was Mary Aiken, others Margaret Aiken. Were these two different women or Mary Margaret Aiken?

In short, I had a lot of blank fields and brick walls. And after researching this family for years, I had hit that point where you just know you’ve found all you can find and this is where you’ll be stuck forever, unless some fourth cousin magically turns up in your inbox with a pedigree chart compiled by an ancestor eighty or so years ago based on information provided by an eyewitness source, filling in all the blanks and offering details you never imagined being able to uncover.

Enter my new favorite fourth cousin, David Shand.

David messaged me on November 28 about our shared King ancestry and, based on things he said in his messages, I had that moment – you know it – where it slowly dawned on me that he knew things I didn’t. Where did this information come from? Was he making educated guesses based on the same records I had found or . . . did he have a source?! I asked, and he sent me this:

King Family Tree – created by John King Wright, photo copyright David Shand

Any readers who pursue genealogy will know the emotions I had when I opened this image. First, it’s a tree compiled by someone who knew how to put together a pedigree chart. It’s beautiful. I got just a tad effusive on poor David, because what a treasure! This lovely tree was created by David’s great-grandfather, John King Wright, who was a grandson of John King and his second wife, Mary Aiken/Aikin. (The family seems to have vacillated on the spelling.) I noticed a few things right off the bat.

Parents of John King, photo copyright David Shand

It was a big deal to have the names and dates of marriage and death of John’s three wives, but even more exciting to me are his parents, Wright King and Jane Smylie. I had never heard these names, but my mom had a great Aunt Annie – sister of my great grandfather George Kenton, Sr. – whose full name was Annie Smiley Kenton. I never could understand why they’d given her such a strange middle name, considering that surname didn’t appear in my tree anywhere. Then there was this:

Photo copyright David Shand

It falls off the end of the image a bit, but at the bottom of the chart John King Wright specifically names Ann Warnock as an informant. My own fourth great grandmother, the third wife of John King.

And of course, I can’t help including this little bit of sentimental value:

Kenton Family in John King Wright’s tree, photo copyright David Shand

Down at the bottom, my own great grandfather, George Kenton, his wife, his sisters, and his oldest daughter, my Great Aunt Helen, for whom I am named.

And on the genealogical front, as I pored over the document and compared it to my tree, in almost every case where I already had information, John King Wright’s names and dates, based on his family knowledge, agreed perfectly with mine, based on documentary research. There are a few errors. Most notably, my Aunt Helen wasn’t Helen Warnock Kenton, she was Helen Bertha Kenton, and yes, they gave me the Bertha too. I would have preferred Warnock!

Honestly, this is the kind of thing you hear about happening to other people, but never expect to happen to you. I’ve said it before, I’m not related to anyone. Of my 436 “fourth cousin or closer” DNA matches on Ancestry, 415 are in that fourth cousin range. I simply never expect anyone to provide me with any juicy genealogical info.

I’m now hard at work incorporating all the new information this tree provides into my own trees. I’m attaching the children to the proper mothers, filling in spouses and descendants, forging through new Ancestry hints, and all around reveling in having not only all of this amazing information, but a new clue to try to take this family back in Ireland someday.

Happy, happy, happy.