Many of the people you hear on the radio use fake names. I don't. I really am Doc Holliday - sorta. I won't bore you with my real first name, but I am a Holliday. There is good reason to believe that we are related to the gunfighter. But, the search for the real Doc Holliday continues.

One of the more recent finds that connects us to Doc is a copy of the 1860 census in Georgia that shows Doc in the house of his father as an 8-year-old boy. We believe this will be key in locking down the path from the Holliday family in Georgia to my known family in the Midwest.

I have to confess that I didn't care or even know about who Doc Holliday was for the first 20 years of my life. I grew up in Missouri, so we had more important things to worry about like avoiding gunfire when getting the mail and stuff like that.

That changed one Saturday morning when I received a phone call from a lady named Karen Holliday Tanner. She told me she was researching a book and had tracked Doc's family to Missouri and wanted to know the name of my father and other relatives. I laughed it off at first wondering who would really care about my part of the family tree. Then, I saw her book.

This was in the early 90's before the Internet really was a thing. Genealogy was much more difficult back in those days and I never took the time to pursue it.

But, over the past few years, my wife has been trying to figure out exactly what our connection to the real Doc Holliday is. What she found has been enthralling and also confusing.

The real John Henry "Doc" Holliday was born in Georgia in the mid-1800's.  The beginnings of his part of the Holliday family can be found on many ancestry websites including Geni. According to most historical accounts, Doc went to dental school in Pennsylvania. It is believed that one of his best friends there was from St. Louis. That's where this gets interesting for my part of the Holliday tree.

STL Today chronicles this part of Doc's life. There's a good chance that this is where Doc hooked up with his famous female counterpart, Big Nose Kate. In the late 1800's and through the turn of the century, there was another prominent Holliday in St. Louis named John. My wife has successfully connected our part of the Holliday family to him. There is reason to believe that he is also connected to Doc.

Here's one thing to know about Hollidays. We're known to have a lot of kids and wander around a lot. That's one reason why trying to trace our family tree can be a maddening experience.

One of the more recent finds that connects us to Doc is a copy of the 1860 census in Georgia that shows Doc in the house of his father as an 8-year-old boy. We believe this will be key in locking down the path from the Holliday family in Georgia to my known family in the Midwest.

What began as an innocent phone call from a researching author around 20 years ago has led to today where we continue to search for our connection to the real Doc Holliday. It's not complete yet, but we're getting closer.

https://youtu.be/GGNdnlCbfMs

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