ROOTS & BRANCHES

I first encountered Dr. Jim Tibbitts some 25 years ago when he was the town doctor (charging something ridiculously old fashioned like $8 for an office visit) in Jonestown, where I lived at the time.

Fast forward the quarter century and “Doc” is a widower and living in Cornwall Manor, getting along as comfortably as he can in the retirement community’s health center.

But even with the difficulties of age, a recent e-mail left it apparent that Doc’s never lost his finely tuned sense of humor. “Never have lost my interest in genealogy even after two or three ‘Bill Gates crashes’ has obliterated MY records after some 1,400 entries,” he wrote.

He went on to write that genealogy-oriented niece in Oregon “has most of it as she pursues her interests.” He wrote that she uses family name Tibbetts-Blair, reflecting a World War II service record of her father Thomas W. Tibbetts, who adopted the U.S. military version of his name after some 30 years’ service.

Tibbitts is an avid follower of the “Roots & Branches” column and wanted to share an article from the Scottish publication The Highlander, which talked about the many pitfalls of trying to look at phonetic versions of Scottish names.

Among the examples was about a family in Virginia with the spelling of “Virgosons.”

Listening closely to the phonetics of the name yielded the Scottish name “Ferguson.”

The writer of The Highland article, Anthony Adolph, also talked about a memorial plaque in a Scottish church that notes a 27-year-old woman died on the island of Madeira in the Mediterranean in 1822 … probably the only notation of her death (before the time of death certification in Scotland) and one that would have been assumed to have taken place in Scotland if not for the plaque.

In his e-mail, Doc also wrote about the many visits he and his late wife Shirley made to the United Kingdom. During those visits, they found the marriage record of Shirley’s great-grandfather, giving his wife’s maiden name. The immigrant was a stowaway in the 1870s.

On one of their trips, Doc and Shirley came to Greenock, Scotland, where a fortuitous information from a bread and breakfast host directed us to a local cemetery where we found the headstones of the parents of the immigrant.

Doc’s dry wit was on display as he closed the e-mail: “It may be a few days getting to you as my handwriting is not good (never was).”

As if a retired medical doctor would really need to point out that parenthetical.