Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a retired healthcare executive who lives outside Nashville, Tennessee with my wife Connie.
My aunt, Mae Elizabeth Cude (b.1915-d.2007) started researching our direct family line back in the 60’s. I must have showed a mild interest, because when she pasted away, all her “boxes of stuff” came to me. After that, the rest of the family apparently decided that I was the family genealogist so every time an attic got cleaned out, more boxes of stuff showed up at my house. When I retired, I resolved to go through the boxes and at least organize what I had. Once I started to see the old family photos, I was hooked. I wanted to know their story.
As I got into it, I could see that a lot of information was treated as fact when it was actually someone’s best guess. Because I come out of the medical industry, I prefer hard data. However, as a former business manager, I also understand the need to make informed decisions based on the “best available information”. I resolved to apply some standards to the process of describing our family’s history, so I came up with my “Three P’s” – Possible, Probable, and Proved. My standard of Proof is pretty high.
I started out reviewing the research of others and trying to prove or disprove their findings. I learned quickly that I needed to locate original documents. I also learned that I needed to “write up” what I learned or the story around the documents would be lost. This led to a short chronological history of each individual ancestor. As I got to know each person, I became interested in the “historical context” surrounding my ancestor’s life, so I added some local history as well. Soon it became obvious that I could string all this together in chronological order and have chapters in a book.
Along the way, I found out that genetic genealogy could be very helpful “plugging holes” in the family tree or eliminating incorrect assumptions. Today I spend a lot of time tracing genetic matches in search of missing links. In many cases, I actually start with the genetic match and go looking for a paper trail. A genetic match can really help focus the search for hard evidence.
The proven Patriarch of the Cude Family is Timothy Cude (Cood), Grays Chapel, Randolph County, North Carolina (b.c.1740 -d.1813). I am descended from John, Timothy’s 2nd son. We knew that John had 3 wives. His 1st wife was unknown. When I identified three different Autosomal DNA matches to Allred, I started looking for the connection. Ultimately, I uncovered John “Johnny” Allred and his daughter “Liddy”. As I develop in the paper, After the Rape of Lydia Allred, I believe that is highly “probable, but not proven” that Liddy was John Cude’s 1st wife and my 3x great grandmother.
I enjoyed doing the research and working with Linda Allred Cooper who was a big help with the Allred side of the story. I look forward to cooperating in the future.
