Was John Surratt engaged to Miss Roose?

[Susan Higginbotham]

(11-24-2014 04:42 AM)Jim Woodall Wrote:  Back to obits in the late 1800s and early 1900s, how much of what is said in those obits would you take as correct or probable when these obits seemed to inflate the ancestry lines. I know I have a couple of obits from the late 1890s within my ancestry that both claim a connection to a certain Captain Richard Anderson of the Maryland line from the Revolutionary War but haven't yet found further supporting info. How far did people at the turn of that century exaggerate the importance of their ancestry?

I suspect then as now it was fairly common--especially when the ancestor in question was prominent or even notorious. I came across a newspaper article from 1892 correcting a misstatement, at the behest of Anna Surratt's husband, that a Mrs. Kirby involved in a divorce case was a daughter of Mrs. Surratt. After assuring the reader that Mrs. Surratt had only one daughter, Anna, the article concluded that "Although Mrs. Kirby at one time posed as the daughter of Mrs. Surat [sic], her claim was long ago proven worthless." (I wonder if the Mrs. Kirby in question was connected to the Mr. Kirby who was a neighbor of the Surratts on H Street.)