Pilgrims, Pioneers, and Cowboys

In the midst of all the interviews for my husband's father's family history book, I finished the book for his mother's side of the family.  I gave it the title Pilgrims, Pioneers, and Cowboys.

My husband's maternal grandfather Frank Ruby  (shown above with his horse, Frosty) was a rancher, or as his grandchildren preferred to think of him, a cowboy. He came from a long line of farmers and ranchers, dating back to the 1600s in Switzerland, where his ancestors were also ranchers.  In the early 1700s, the first Ruby ancestor came to America and settled in Pennsylvania.  A few decades later, the family migrated to Kentucky, early pioneers setting out  to find good farmland. Other ancestors settled in Ohio and Nebraska, and eventually Wyoming, where Frank  had his ranch.

Frank's mother, on the other hand, is a descendant of Mayflower passengers Francis Cooke, Stephen Hopkins and Elizabeth Fisher Hopkins.  These ancestors settled in Massachusetts, but eventually migrated to North Carolina and Ohio. 

The book contains many stories, pictures, maps and charts, and I hope the family enjoys getting to know the details that, prior to my genealogy research, they never knew about this very interesting family to which they belong. 

Solving my first mystery

One of the things I hope to do with this blog is inspire others who want to look into their family history.  And what has always inspired me is the solving of a family mystery.

I had just started working on my husband's family tree and had hit a brick wall with the Eterovich side as the trail seemed to end once his grandparents immigrated to America.  So I began to research his mother's side of the family.

My mother-in-law's maiden name was Ruby, and several years ago she had given each of her children a booklet containing the genealogy of the Ruby family.  The first line in the booklet was as follows: "Peter Ruby came from Ireland to America before the Revolutionay War." 

Since I had no relatives who had come to this country that early (or so I thought at the time) I found this quite intriguing, so I began searching census records, other family trees posted on Ancestry.com, and other sources. Unfortunately, I could find no one by the name of Ruby who had come to America from Ireland.  So I turned to Google and typed in "Ruby genealogy" and after going down the list of links I came upon the name of a book that seemed promising. It had the title "The Ruby-Rubi Families of Switzerland and America."  However, it was out of print.  So I kept looking and found a website set up by the son of the husband and wife who had written the book.  He had the entire book available for download in a PDF format -- for free.  So I began the long download.

When I began reading, I was fascinated.  These two authors (named Ruby of course) had traveled to Switzerland on many occasions and had done a thorough investigation of a Rubi family that had lived there since the 1600's.  The family tree in their book matched the family tree in the small booklet my mother in law gave us.  When I reached the 1700s, I found the Peter Ruby who had come to America.  However, there still was a mystery to be solved. 

How was it that the family had believed for three hundred years that their origins were in Ireland?  As I read further in the book, and then checked immigration records, I found the answer.  Peter Ruby had made his way from Reichenbach Switzerland (Sherlock Holmes fans will recognize the name Reichenbach) to the Netherlands, where he boarded a ship to America.  The ship, it turns out, was of Irish registry.

This was probably the one discovery that got me hooked on genealogy.  Because of how easy (though admittedly time consuming and occasionally frustrating) research has become with the aid of the internet, I had been able to inform my mother in law of her actual ancestry, which orignates in Switzerland and not Ireland. 

I felt a little bit like Sherlock Holmes. 

Wait until I tell you what else I learned about my husband's ancestors - and mine.  It is almost unbelievable, but you'll have to return to the blog to find out.