Welcome to Stedman Family Genealogy and History and the Stedman Family Organization, a gathering place for anyone with an interest in the Stedman family or the family of one of the Stedman surname variants :Stedman, Steadman, Steedman, Stidman, and so on.
One question I get asked all the time. “Are we related?” The answer is mostly a simple “NO!” However, you might be related to my wife Carolyn as her mother was a Steadman from Nova Scotia.
About 1990, I got started with Stedman research because, of all our family lines we have, Carolyn’s Steadman ancestry is the only one with New England roots and, as we live in New England, we thought it was easier to research in our home area.
It has been a great adventure as it has taken us all over North America and our research on Stedmans is now worldwide. We have met fascinating folks in person and by email from all over the world and, hopefully, we are telling their stories.
In this site, we try to share the stories – mostly real, but sometimes legendary – of people throughout time who have been bearers of one of the Stedman surnames.
We also have have the most comprehensive registry of Stedman family data anywhere. Please click on the “Stedman Genealogies” Tab above and search for your Stedman relatives. Please feel free to register for an account that will get you some extra viewing privileges and let me know who you are interested in. Then go exploring!
Our goal is not to provide a comprehensive family history of every Stedman or every Stedman family as that would be impossible. What we do try to provide is a large collection of well documented, reconstructed family frameworks that you can use. We use vital records, parish and church records, cemetery records, census, published histories, DNA, and even compiled genealogies in creating our registry.
When we use existing genealogies, we do extensive checking to assure that the data is corroborated with independent documentation. If someone shares a Gedcom with us, we do extensive checking to assure all of the data meets our standards before we add it to our registry.
But we are not perfect. We use what is known as the “preponderance of evidence” proof standard. That means that we draw conclusions based on all of the evidence that we have found. We make mistakes (and hope you tell us about them!), and we are correcting them as we find new source material that cause us to change our existing assertions.
We periodically update the online genealogies. We usually include in an update some work in progress. Sometime, it just not possible to finish every family line we have been working on and still provide worthwhile updates. Sometime a line may be released before it is complete so that our research partners can critique what we have added.
In addition to just documenting Stedmans, we are going to document Stedman spouses and when possible their parents. We may document further back in the spouse line if we see something interesting; eg, a connection to a famous person, a link to another Stedman family (what I call “hidden cousins”); an ancestor who was a Mayflower Passenger or a Revolutionary War Veteran so a Stedman descendant can begin to think about joining a lineage society.
Let me write about how I approach daughter lines. Many people doing One Name Studies may stop after documenting a daughter. In general, I will try to document a daughter’s life, including any spouses and children. If someone wishes to share further details of a daughter’s descendants – usually because the daughter is their ancestor, I am perfectly willing to include that family line.
Let me also talk briefly about living people and privacy. I include living people in my reconstructed families; however. I do not publish details about known living people except their abbreviated name, gender, and family relationships. I do this because the genealogy of the 20th and 21st centuries need to be documented. The 20th century brought much greater mobility, more common divorce, and more non-traditional families. If we do not get the recent family histories recorded, our grandchildren, even with all of the DNA in the world, may never figure out where they came from.
If a visitor provides me with details of their family and asks that I make all living people invisible, I will honor it. However, if I have previously discovered those details from various public records, I may not be as willing to “discard” my findings.
I will make invisible details of living people upon request if there are issues such as domestic abuse concerning the family or if there are families with young children and non-traditional family issues.
This blog will be updated periodically with news of what we are working on along with some historical information about the Stedman family by myself and a few other contributors. If you have articles you would like to see published, please contact me by email.
If you are on Facebook, we have a Stedman Family Organization group there that you are invited to join.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/stedmanfamilyorganization
Friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jlisle
Thanks for stopping by,
John B. Lisle
Nashua, New Hampshire
Stedman Surname Registrant, Guild of One Name Studies
Founder and Administrator of the Stedman Surname DNA Project