Am i related to Denny McDowell the wife of the famous composer J. Foster?

Question

My name is Ashley McDowell and I can't find any information. I live in the USA and i want to find if i am related to Denny McDowell. Someone please help me because I'm really interested in my ancestors.

Answer 1

You could be, but don't hold your breathe.

As Mr. Pack pointed out, McDowell is a pretty common surname. It's not a good idea to assume you're related to any random person who shares your surname, especially so with a pretty common surname.

You say you "can't find any information." Unless you're an orphan, this probably isn't true. Start with yourself - where were you born, when? married? etc. Next move back a generation - ask your mother, your father. Get what they know about themselves first, then 'stories' they may know about their own ancestry.

Are your grandparents still living? Great-aunts or uncles? They can be extremely valuable sources. Get as much information as possible from them - who their parents were, what they know of their grandparents or history. Try as much as possible to get names, dates, and places, not just vague stories - many stories are in fact just stories.

Once you can get back 70-some-odd years, you can start getting vital records (more recent ones are considered private and are difficult for a third party to obtain). 1930 is the latest census available to the public and has been fully indexed - depending on your age, your parents or grandparents were probably alive then and you should be able to find them (thus the importance of the names, dates, and places from your relatives - so you can be sure who you're looking for). Once you find your ancestors in 1930, start tracing them back via the census - with some luck, you can often shoot back 3-5 generations to the 1850 census (the first with everyone's name) - it's not a perfect source by any means, but it's a good first step to get a general picture of the family before delving into other records.

It can be slow and may not be easy, but despite all the information on the internet, you are very, very unlikely to find reputable information on all your families just by clicking a button!

I am unfamilar with J. Foster or Denny McDowell - are you refering to John Foster (1762-1822) of Chapletown South Yorkshire was the composer of the tune set to While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night (that taken straight from Wikipedia)? If so, you'd have to trace your McDowell's back to the mid-1700s before really being able to hazard a guess. I can only imagine that there are many McDowell's running around Yorkshire though, so even if you traced yours back to Yorkshire in the 1760s, there still might not be a relation.

Good luck!

Answer 2

Yes. You are 4th cousins once removed. Your father is Donald McDowell and your mother is Esmerelda Jablonski McDowell. Donald and Denny share a great great great grandfather, Ezekial McDowell. He was a colonel in the 1st Oklahoma Paratroop Regiment during the Civil War, and married a Cherokee princess.

Just kidding!

According to the US Census,
http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/namesearch.pl
McDowell is the 626th most common name in the USA. Smith is 1st, Johnson is 2nd, Pack is 1,628th or so. It isn't common, but it isn't rare, either.

To find out if you are related you would have to trace your ancestors back four or five generations, then write to Denny and ask her if anyone looked familiar. If she doesn't know who her great grandfather was, you'd never know if you were related, unless she trusted you with her grandparents' names and you traced them, too.

If you'd like to see how to search for ancestors for free, you can click on "Top 10 Answerers" here, then on Rust Skipper, me and HSK's Moma. Look at our best answers. We each have our favorite links and advice. We each answer "How can I get started in genealogy?" two or three times a day.

Answer 3

Let me tell you something...we're not experts on finding family history. We're just here to ask some simple questions and maybe answer some simple questions. If you want to know that get a professional.

Answer 4

if you can't get the info, how the heck could we? Talk to family members (duh, your parents!, Aunts and Uncles) and do internet research.