Its website,AmericanAncestors.org, contains more than 300 million searchable records for research in New England, New York and beyond. You can contact the owner of the tree to get more information. They dont get their hands dirty in the field as an archaeologist or even treasure people, he says. [13] They also had twins who died in infancy, Gould and Montgomery. But the digger apparently never found anything. By 1873, the Reconstruction Republican governor of Missouri had called for all the help he could get against Confederate guerrillas, but under the law of the time, he couldnt offer a reward from his own office. Im not sitting here saying to people, Believe, believe, believe. It takes my own skepticism to be overcome to start feeling good about the overall picture, he says. Getler had received similar queries and was wary. James entered the picture in the early 1960s and mid-1970s when a self-styled private detective named Orvus Lee Howk, who claimed to be Jamess grandson, wrote a book and contributed to another arguing that the outlaw was a KGC leader who buried gold. You can dismiss it outright. Wikimedia Commons; colorized by Matt Loughrey. Surprisingly, the clerk had the nerve to lie and tell them that the safe was on a time lock, even though one of the robbers was holding a Bowie knife to his throat. We may earn a commission from links on this page. T.J. Stiles, author of the groundbreaking biography Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, told me that the treasure hunters get at least one important thing right about the outlaw: He was a much more significant political figure than standard accounts portray. Could this be the wolf trap spoken of in the letter between Zanesville treasure hunters in 1949 or was it meaningless scrap? Now, in Ohio, as a journalist rather than as a dad, I was forced to confront whether the power of this story lay in its truth or its creativity and I knew my job was to be on the lookout for signs the magic was an illusion. Andrew Krea, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and NEHGS Researcher Meaghan Siekman, Black Musicians Are Not A Monolith: An Interview with Bartees Strange. From the bottom of my heart, I cant wish him more luck and every good tiding, he says. He said these offered some of the most promising evidence that this could be a treasure site. A popular theory in treasure-hunting circles is that the KGC may have had a hand in the matter, and that the group also buried much more gold from other sources in multiple locations. These trees can change over time as users edit, remove, or otherwise modify the data in their trees. Spouses and children. Getler, 61, a former reporter with the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal and other publications, was a senior writer for Discovery Communications in the late 1990s when he started researching the history. I am unfamiliar with the name Poorer myself, I can tell you. And thanks to reality TV, its not going to stop in the near future or the next 100 years. He adds: The funny part about it is, all the James descendants would love for the treasure hunters to find the gold, because then we could claim the inheritance! The weirdest part of the lack of correct information for his tree is that in many biographies of Jesse and Frank James it talks about the way his mother would tell them bedtime stories about being the descendants of Scottish nobility, as well as having Shawnee heritage, which contributed to their feelings of distrust of outsiders overall. . And he said, Dont worry about it; Ill take care of it. What is it about Jesse James that triggers a sense of connection in so many, real or imagined? Somers rode the excavators shovel down into the hole and started opening what he thought looked like a passage deeper into the hill. Gideon Mimms, my great grandfather, was a first cousin of Mrs. Jesse James. The map is widely shared on the Internet in treasure-hunting circles, but I couldnt determine who first posted it, and Getler didnt know either.