A HOLT OF MY FAMILY TREE

After my last post about spotting a reference to my ancestor Nicholas
Holt on television last night, I wanted to do a post on just how he
figures into my family tree. It's another case of where two of his
descendants ended up marrying each other, in this case, my paternal
great great grandparents Asa Freeman Ellingwood and Florilla Dunham.

Here's a relationship chart first for Asa and Nicholas:

As you can see, Asa had a double line of descent from Nicholas Holt. first
through daughter Elizabeth Holt who married Ralph Farham(Farnum)II,
and then through Zerviah Holt. Zerviah was Nicholas' granddaughter through
his son Henry. who was eight years younger than sister Elizabeth.

Florilla Dunham was descended from Nicholas' son Henry:

Now the Holts, Abbotts, Ballards and Farnhams were among the original
settlers of Andover, Ma.(I blogged a bit about this once before here two
years ago) and the small population resulted in quite a few connections
between those founding families. The same situation occurred a few generations
later when Revolutionary War veterans from Essex County Massachusetts
took land grants in Oxford County Maine.

In the case of Asa and Florilla, they were double cousins through the Holt
ancestry: fifth cousins through Henry Holt and Sarah Ballard, and sixth
cousins once removed through Nicholas Holt and Elizabeth Short. They
were also fifth cousins through a mutual descent from Ralph Ellingwood:

While I've done work on the Abbott and Ellingwood branches of my family
tree, I haven't done as much on the others, so I expect that to be the next
area I concentrate my research on!