Tracy Family Tales

Our quest for identifying the parents of Jesse Tracy now moves south from the Old Turkey Run Cemetery to Waynetown, Indiana. Waynetown is also located in Montgomery County and is due west of the county seat at Crawfordsville. Map showing Montgomery County and Waynetown. By DemocraticLuntz at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63582566 In the year 1880 the population of Waynetown stood at 569 people. One of those residents was a 77 year old farmer named Bazzle (or Bazil) Tracy. He cannot read nor write and, consequently, his name does not have a consistent spelling. Bazzle is important to the family history by being the brother of Jesse Tracy ( see the previous tale ). For it is in this year, or nearly so, that Bazzle would provide us with an important clue to unlocking the origins of this family of Tracys.  About this same time, a man named Hiram W. Beckwith was writing a book on the history of Montgomery County, Ind...

In the introductory post I traced the paternal line of my grandfather, Truman G. Tracy, back four generations to a Jesse Tracy, born in 1795. Although described as a “Kentucky farmer”, Jesse died in Montgomery County, Indiana and is buried in the old Turkey Run cemetery. The quaint little cemetery is about a mile south of the town of Wingate (formally Pleasant Hill) and just north of the gently winding Turkey Run creek, after which it is named. It is tucked back from the main road at the end of a grass pathway and is surrounded by farms.  An aerial view of Old Turkey Run Cemetery as of 2022. It doesn't appear to have changed much in the past 200 years, aside from a paved highway. The cemetery was established in 1828 along with the Turkey Run Christian church. The church no longer exists on the site but was moved to a new location in 1852 and finally to a red brick building in 1904. After the move it was renamed Pleasant Hill Christian Church. Today it is the Pleasant Hill Uni...

This is a blog about Tracy family history. My name is James Tracy and I am a grandson of Truman Glenn Tracy, born in 1918 in Kewanee, Illinois. As such, this blog will focus on my direct Tracy ancestors and relatives with some excursions into maternal lineages such as Young, Rubey, Searle, Kilmer, etc. Each post or “tale” might be about a particular ancestor, a branch of the family, or even a deep dive into genealogical research and methods. For simplicity, I will begin with my grandfather and trace my direct paternal line as far back as possible, and then move forward down the lineage. Beyond that, I will allow this to unfold somewhat spontaneously. Sources will be listed at the end of each tale to keep the text free of clutter. Starting with Truman Tracy, the paternal Tracy line is easy to document backwards an additional four generations by consulting obituaries that were published in the local newspapers alongside some other documentation. (I say “easy” in the sense that newspaper ...