Finding family

For several years I have been doing research on my ancestors mostly using the internet and Ancestry.com. I also made two trips back to Carlisle, KY where the family lived during the late 1700's and early 1800's. From there many of the family moved to Missouri and my line moved from there to Texas. I have reached a block moving backwards into Virginia, Maryland and possibly Delaware. The problem is that there were so many documents destroyed during the wars and of course natural disasters.

In 1969 we moved from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Portland, Oregon. As far as I was aware there were none of my ancestors who ever moved to Oregon and yet there were two other James Walls; one in the Beaverton area and one in Estacada. Since the name Walls is so common I just wrote it off as coincidence.

This week, while doing research on another line of the family (my great grandfather's brothers) I found that two of them moved from Missouri to Portland, Oregon. Well, how about that.

James Thompson Walls Sr. (1851-1922) was a dentist in north Portland before moving to Coos County.The family returned to Portland and they lived in the Maplewood area of SW Portland. His son James Thompson Walls Jr.(1897-1950) was also a dentist. However James Thompson Walls III (1919-?) I have not been able to trace (maybe he moved to Estacada).

George Henry Walls (1869-?) also lived in SW Portland and his occupation was listed as Carman. Most likely he was an operator on the electric trolly line in the area.He had two sons;

Phillip Sherwood Walls (1902-1943) and his son Michael Sherwood Walls who I believe lives in Lake Oswego.
Kendall T Walls (1910-1959) who died in Mobile, Alabama.

So I still need to investigate the Walls family in Estacada and on my next visit I plan to make personal contact with the family just out of curiosity.(Update 4/13/17; I made contact and they said they are from a different Walls family line.)

A side note: While examining documents I became aware of the fact that when you have someone writing things down for you (i.e. a census taker, hospital worker, etc.) it is very easy to have your name spelled wrong. It is also a problem when someone has a heavy accent and/or doesn't speak the native language. I found a distant cousin named Samuel who lived in Kentucky and his name was listed in the 1850 census as Saml which was probably how he pronounced it (this was not an abbreviation by the census taker as all other names were fully spelled out). With this in mind I can just imagine what it must have been like for European immigrants coming to the US at Ellis Island without any documentation and not speaking the language. It's no wonder so many names were changed when they arrived.