{"id":4982,"date":"2014-03-08T18:05:10","date_gmt":"2014-03-09T03:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/?p=4982"},"modified":"2014-03-09T19:49:30","modified_gmt":"2014-03-10T02:49:30","slug":"who-were-the-horans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/who-were-the-horans\/","title":{"rendered":"Who were the Horans?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was in my early teens and starting to get interested in family history (thanks, Roots<\/a>!), my grandfather Bill Prettyman told me what he knew about his ancestors. He told me that his grandfather was Alfred Minus Prettyman and that his grandmother was Mary Ann Horan. With those words, I learned of my great-great-grandparents for the first time.<\/p>\n

Since then, I’ve learned much about Alfred Minus\/Minos Prettyman and his ancestry, tracing the Prettyman line back to my 18th-great-grandfather John Prettyman, who lived in Bacton<\/a>, Suffolk County, England in 1361, the location of the Prettyman ancestral home, Bacton Manor<\/a> (the most recent iteration of the Manor House dates to the late 1500s<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Mary Ann Horan and her ancestry have proven quite a bit more difficult. I could find information about Mary once she had married Alfred Prettyman (for instance, the 1885 census\u2014see image below\u2014that was taken almost 6 months after their December 1, 1884, wedding), but information about her before she was married proved very difficult to come by.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"1885MNcensusPrettymanAM\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I eventually found a couple of census entries (1875 and 1880) for a Mary A Horan before she was married:<\/p>\n

\"1875MNcensusHoranWilliam\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"1880censusHoranWilliam_rev\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These two census entries listed Mary’s parents as William and Margaret Horan, and showed that Mary was the eldest sibling in a family of at least seven children:<\/p>\n