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Monroe County genealogy is difficult to research, as birth and death records were kept by the churches in Key West many of which many were destroyed by fire, especially the great fire of 1868. The transferring of the Middle and Upper Keys to Dade County from 1836 to 1866 also makes research difficult. The commonness of Bahamian surnames, as well as the use of nicknames, throughout southeastern Florida often creates uncertainty of genealogy. Please excuse all mistakes as I am especially not certain of the completeness of the family names.. History is the story of humanity. Artifacts are important; however, I place my emphasis on how these artifacts served humans or society, which is to say human beings collectively. These are some of the humans. I made no attempt to relate this selected genealogy to all contemporary individuals. Space necessitated the omission of some names. Priority was given to families who remained in the Keys. I do hope that some group or individual will take this meager unprofessional attempt and correct, add, delete, expand and preserve it for the future. If nothing else, maybe my difficulties and shortcomings will urge everyone to collect and reproduce their genealogies in sufficient copies so that no fire, hurricane, moving away or destructive event will obliterate their legacy. There are numerous methods of depicting genealogy. To conserve space I organized it as follows. I selected men as my starting points because custom has dictated that women change their surnames when they marry. This is known as the family name. Generally all old records such as deeds, organization records, telephone books, et cetera are listed by the man's name. I try to underline the husband's name in all marriages to remind the reader that all male and unmarried female offspring will be of that surname. All brothers and sisters are aligned vertically down the page. When I knew the children of a marriage, I indented to the right and listed all those brothers and sisters in a vertical line. They may not be directly next to each other, but they are vertically, or I have made a mistake. If those children married and had children, I indented below their parents and again listed their children. Therefore, those persons listed on the left side of a page are the oldest and those on the right are the most contemporary. Brothers and sisters listed vertically are not necessarily listed by age. Another way of saying this is that from a given person, his/her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents are found to the left and above. Likewise his/her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren are found to the right and below. The uncles and aunts on their father's side will be on a vertical line above and/or below the first letter of their father's given name. I attempt to number each sibling below their fathers name. If someone had multiple marriages, I prefixed the spouse's name with a number in parentheses such as (1) and (2). This creates some confusion since if marriage (1) had children who had children; then I had to go back to the left and start with the second marriage (2). All multiple marriages are not listed. Sounds confusing but it is not once one familiarizes him/herself with one or two charts. Tracing from chart to chart is a bit more difficult, but it can usually be done within the limits of my accuracy. The redundancy of family names in the Keys make this difficult. For that reason I have placed to the right of the principal family name the name of the Key for which the family is usually associated. Some names like the Alburys are found on most islands. |