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Archiver > BAUGHAN-DNA > 2008-03 > 1204936563


From: "Edward S Robson" <>
Subject: Re: [BAUGHAN-DNA] Mary Baughan Cope
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 19:36:03 -0500
In-Reply-To: <000301c88088$82d27f80$88777e80$@net>


Hi again, Harry.

There are two or three people that are members of this e-mail list that may
have some information about Mary's connection to Baltimore. Linda Rawlings,
who wrote a Baughan family history book that incorporated much of Mrs.
Cope's research, also lives in Evansville and knew Mrs. Cope personally.
Perhaps she knows something of Mrs. Cope's personal history. Also, Mack
Baughn and Melba Sowell are friends with Charles Weaver Baughan who also was
a personal friend of Mrs. Cope. I'm not sure what they know but perhaps
they will share with us anything that they know.

How about it folks?

Ed Robson

-----Original Message-----
From:
[mailto:] On Behalf Of Harry Baughan
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2008 2:22 PM
To:
Subject: Re: [BAUGHAN-DNA] Mary Baughan Cope

Hi Ed,
As always I am impressed with your knowledge of the Baughan clan. It is
really sad that Mary's research documentation was lost.

Thanks,

Harry

-----Original Message-----
From:
[mailto:] On Behalf Of Robson, Edward (DX)
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2008 10:47 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [BAUGHAN-DNA] Mary Baughan Cope

Hi Harry,

Frankly, I'm not sure about Mary's tie to Baltimore. Her husband, Dana
Cope, worked for NASA and I know that they lived in Silver Spring for a
while. I'm not familiar enough with her past to know why she had chosen
Baltimore as her final resting place.

Mary Baughn Cope was a descendent of William and Frances
(Shaw)(Sheppard)Baughan and so was a descendent of the Littleberry Baughan
family. Mary spent a sizable portion of her years of research trying to tie
our family to the Essex County Boughan family; specifically James and
Thomasin Boughan. We know now from the DNA evidence that Littleberry
Baughan did not get his y-chromosome from the Essex County Boughans. Mary
hit the same brick wall that we have all hit at some point in our research
efforts. She got to the Henrico County Court Order of 1766 instructing the
churchwardens to bind out Littleberry Baughan, son of Susannah Baughan.
>From her research, she knew about Tucker Baughan of Cumberland County and
she knew that my g,g,g grandfather was Littleberry Tucker Baughan. She, as
most of us have over the years, assumed that there had to be a family
relationship between Tucker Baughan and Littleberry Baughan. She could be
right, but there have been no documents found to support that belief.

I have been blessed to be the recipient of some of perhaps the very few
notes written in her hand that gives us some insight into her analysis of
the documents and how she drew her conclusions. I am very impressed with
the depth and breadth of her research. She was a very fine researcher and
clearly spent many hours plowing through records in courthouses and archives
during a time when very little was indexed or complied. She built a very
elegant argument linking Susannah Baughan to the Essex County Boughans.
Like so many of us that have plowed through these same records over the
years, she hit certain brickwalls, in the form of lack of documentation of
certain critical marriage or probate records, that made proving conclusively
Littleberry's descent from the Essex County Boughans impossible. We have
the benefit of knowing now that the DNA evidence indicates a possible reason
that those marriage documents were not found. Perhaps the records do not
exist because a marriage did not occur. Mary's research drew her to the
conclusion that a John Baughan of the Essex County line married a Susannah
Tucker and they had Littleberry Baughan and, perhaps, Tucker Baughan of
Cumberland County. She found a very obscure record of a John and Hannah
Bone who were witnesses to a (I'm trying to pull this out of my memory so it
may be flawed) will of a John Sheppard in western Henrico County. She
pointed to this document as evidence that Susannah (called Hannah) was the
wife of John Baughan (recorded as Bone). She found a Susannah who was a
daughter of William Tucker of Brunswick County. She was the right age to
have been our Susannah. The documentation of Susannah Tucker being a
daughter of William Tucker is sound. But no marriage or probate record has
been found tying Susannah Tucker to any Boughan man.

Mrs. Cope did some very fine genealogical research and analysis and I am
very impressed with the depth of her research into the Baughan family.
To me it is a shame that she did not share her sources with other Baughan
family researchers. That might be understandable if her intent was to
publish and I suppose we all do this hobby with an eye to publishing "one
day". One of the downsides for the rest of us is that she never did publish
and her sources were not widely revealed. I asked one of her friends and
confidents several years ago about the existence of her research notes. I
was told that her notes were either thrown away or sold in a yard sale. She
spent decades researching her family and all of the fruits of that effort
were sent to the landfill. I was told some years ago that she would no
longer talk with folks about her family history research; she was just not
physically up to it. That was a sad loss for Baughan family researchers and
so is her passing six months ago. She lived for 96 years.

Ed

-----Original Message-----
From:
[mailto:] On Behalf Of Harry Baughan
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2008 9:59 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [BAUGHAN-DNA] Mary Baughan Cope

Hi Ed,
What was her tie to Baltimore that she would be buried there? I remember my
father saying he had been contacted by someone who was doing research into
the Baughan family sometime in the mid to late 60's and she eventually
concluded that we were not related. I don't know if it was Mary or not but
the fact that I grew up in Baltimore made me wonder about her tie to this
area.

Harry Baughan

-----Original Message-----
From:
[mailto:] On Behalf Of Edward S Robson
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 11:55 PM
To:
Subject: [BAUGHAN-DNA] Mary Baughan Cope

Dear Baughan folks,

I was checking the SSDI last week and learned that Mary Baughn Cope passed
away last September at the age of 96. Mary Baughn Cope was a very talented
family history researcher who has been conducting genealogical research for
many decades. My understanding is that she has not been actively
researching for several years primarily due to health issues.

I was made aware of Mary Baughn Cope in the very beginning of my start into
family history research. Mrs. Cope had written letters to my grandmother
and a couple of great aunts and uncles back in the mid-1960s. Her personal
research had led her to the conclusion that her ancestor, William Baughan
was from Henrico County and was the brother of my ancestor, Littleberry
Tucker Baughan. She had already drawn conclusions that Littleberry and
Julia Baughan were the parents of hers and my ancestor.

I started researching my family history shortly after I graduated from
college. Some of my earliest letters were dated around 1979. In those
early days, I really wanted to get into contact with Mrs. Cope to learn more
about her research. The only clue that I had about her whereabouts was her
return address which was an address in Silver Spring, MD. Of course almost
15 years had passed since she contacted my grandmother and she was no longer
living in Silver Spring. My letters to her returned as undeliverable. I
even hatched a scheme to drive to Silver Spring, go visit her old address
and see if the current residents or any neighbors knew where she had gone.
I was not even successful in finding her old address.

It wasn't until many years later, after the advent of the internet and
genealogy forums like RootsWeb and Genforum, that I finally found out where
she had moved to. I was quite surprised to learn that she was still living
but was disappointed to learn that she was no longer actively working on her
research.

Mrs. Cope's obituary was posted in the 9 September 2007 issue of the
Evansville (Indiana) Courier & Press. I have a photocopy that I will share
with anyone who is interested. She was burind in Baltimore, MD.

Those of us who are actively researching our Littleberry Baughan roots have
gained much from the work that Mrs. Cope did so many years ago.

Respectfully,

Ed Robson


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