FAMILY MATTERS

I have communications starting with a gentleman who says his defendant is John Couch of 1750 and he has documents

saying he is German where the last name was actually Kautz and was changed when they arrived to the U.S.

Jeff Couch

The Couts Family Association has done some convincing research that the original family name was Kautz, and that Dietrich arrived in Philadelphia with son John in 1750. The name was changed along the way to many variations by his many descendants: Kuntz, Couts, Kutch, Koontz, AND Couch. And yes, there was a John Couch, although no mention is made of Daniel Boone, although Boone is said to have resided in the area. The website for the PDF is: http://www.coutsfamily.com/couts%20teter.pdf The frustration researchers experience is perhaps because they have not considered that John C. Couch really was a German, xVIII

and that he lived with a changed name– and that the “C” as his middle name might represent his original family name - Couts/

Kautz.

Of course, I prefer to imagine that John C. was from right where we live in Westport, Connecticut, and that we are related to all the colonial families here whose names still live in street signs, names of parks, and on the plaques of the oldest homes.

But wishing doesn’t make it so. So, which Couch ancestor is it?Does it really matter? John “C” was quite a guy, and not just because he married a relative of Daniel Boone. He was also a Revolutionary War hero who is noted in almost every posting on The Connecticut Disconnection

the internet to have weighed 500 pounds and have driven a cart to help General Washington cross the Delaware – although only one researcher was astute enough to point out the unlikelihood of this detail, because this would have made him heavier than the cart he would have been sitting on. Here is the Mystery Man of the Moment, and the solution to the John “C” Couch problem: I have noted another strange phenomenon – a larger one – in my internet searches. Not only John C. Couch’s family – but five John C. (Coutz)

or six others - has been traced back to what would become the Northern states: Massachussetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Born 1750 in NC, Germany, or wherever. Died 1830 in Perry County, KY

Connecticut.

Son of and

We could ask the same questions for each of them: Is this possible? Is this likely? Are there Virginia families of the same Husband of

name who would present more feasible ancestry?

Husband of — married December 2, 1783, and others (See notes at below)

The most interesting question to me is: Why is this happening?

Father of , , and

WAS there a movement pretty much in the mid 1700s from the North to the South? Was there some kind of economic crisis M. (Mary “Polly Ann” Boone Couch)

in New England? And why did those noted (including one listed as “Private”) seem to turn up in the South after the American b. 1746, NC

Revolution (John C. Couch, of course, was one)? Was this a result of swapping Revolutionary War land grants? Meeting a pretty d. 1781, NC

girl or a pretty girl’s brother where the soldier was stationed and choosing her over the farm back home? Did this kind of thing (Polly Boone was married to John Couch and was the younger sister of Daniel Boone. Polly was probably born in Berks Co. PA happen more than the history books note it? Or have the history books noted it, but I haven’t been listening?

sometime before her father Squire Boone moved his family south to Rowan County North Carolina.)

There are two other possibilities which come from my personal experience with both the excitement and exhaustion I have felt in working on this family history. First, connecting any English sounding last name to a New England name in the pre-Revolutionary period is easy. If not the same people, than the same names seem to crop up with regularity in both colonial New England and Virginia. I see it as very likely that a pre-internet genealogist would make these connections out of sheer exhaustion and a desire to neatly tie things up – while getting the bonus of possibly connecting to some “Mayflower” people (The Pilgrims were still the most popular bunch among genealogists in the 19th century – even if they were Southerners).

There is another possibility which I present here, at the risk of putting forth a question to which the reader might already know the answer to: Are the genealogy sites on the internet programmed to match up descendants to likely ancestors?

Let’s take our most useful example:

John C. Couch (again), while listed as having been born in Germany, is also noted as being the son of Thomas Couch and Elizabeth Jessop of Fairfield, CT. Was this done by an exhausted genealogist? Was this done by an excited Mayflower family seeker? Or was this done by a computer program which ran into a glitch with John C. and linked Connecticut and Virginia up, ignoring the sidestep to Germany?

Or….is it the internet, and not the others who are most accurate?

This example underscores one of the glories and frustrations of the family researcher: we do and must rely on the memories and work of those who have gone before. To reconstruct the snapshots of almost 200 families which I have tried to do in this book, would require a lifetime of work to do from scratch. But if the majority of the records we deal with are unreliable, the lineages we construct will be also.

505

506