Twice blessed: Our dual lineage to Benjamin and Martha Waite

There are two historical novels I am aware of that discuss the lives of our direct lineal ancestors. Both are well-researched and have a lot of detail about the times and lives of the characters. But a pure non-fiction work often cannot capture the same sort of story as an historical novel, where the author takes license to flesh out the characters and action.

The first is Captives, 1677. This novel deals with my 8th great-grandparents, Benjamin and Martha Waite. Martha was captured by Indians in 1677 while pregnant with her third child. The Waites were living in Massachusetts; Martha and her two little girls were taken by the Indians all the way to Quebec.

Horseback, walking, canoes. The little girls were handed off to Indian women for their care, so Martha did not even know if they were alive. Martha was frantic about her babies, but knew resistance meant death for her, her unborn baby, and her little girls if they were still alive.

While in captivity, Martha gave birth to a third daughter, who was later named Canada. Canada Waite is my 7th ggmother. Canada had eleven children.

Here's how our descent works from Canada Waite:

Pompo and Our Rhineland Roßmanns

My mother's father's name was Rossman William Smith, Sr. He was the original Pompo. Two of my brothers and I have adopted Pompo as the name our grandkids call us.

Pompo's first name, Rossman, was a family surname, though it worked nicely as a first name as well.

Here is a photo of the Rossman family. This family was entirely German, unlike most of my family's ancestors, who trace to Britain.

Left to right: Elizabeth, b. 1858 (only part of her shows up in the photo); Mary, b. 1848; William (my Pompo's namesake), b. 1866; John, Sr., b. 1819; John, Jr. b. 1861; Catherine Rossman nee Davis (she was a first generation German immigrant,) b. 1824;
and Martha Rosella Underwood nee Rossman, b. 1856.

Not only were the original Rossmans German, they were specifically from a place then called the Electoral Palatinate of the Rhine. 

Our Anti-Prelatick Scots Ancestor: David Frazer

David Frazer (also sometimes spelled Fraser, Fraizer, and Frazier, depending on his mood) was the immigrant founder of our line of the Frazier clan in America. 

He was born in Scotland around 1720, and would have been old enough to have joined his countrymen in the Battle of Culloden. It's unknown exactly when he made it to the colonies. The earliest written evidence shows him working a farm near a place called Marsh Creek, Pennsylvania in 1750, so it is possible he was banished to the American colonies by the English as punishment after Culloden. He later left Marsh Creek and moved southwest to a farm near a little town called Gettysburg. Therein lies a Frazier tale for another day.

He was a devout member of what became known in the colonies as the Reformed Presbyterian Church, and would have supported Bonnie Prince Charlie against the usurping Hanoverian princes. He may even have been among the first people to sing "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," which our children still sing today. He was well educated, and had a considerable library, including, among other titles, the delightfully named title to the right.

Some American Scots became ardent Patriots when the War of Independence came. Many others were Loyalists. There is a scholarly explanation of the divisions among the Scotsmen in this website. 

David died in 1782, shortly before the war was won.

Here's a painting of Bonnie Prince Charlie. He really was quite bonnie.

On whose shoulders do we stand?

My greatgrandfather Thorn Smith was an ardent genealogist. He did his research during the first half of the 20th century. (He died in 1958.) In those days, of course, all records were on paper. Microfiche was not even invented until 1961, so basically all research was done using paper records. If you wanted to find out what land a particular ancestor lived on, or who an ancestor's parents were, you either relied on someone else's scholarship, or found source documents, such as family bibles, deeds, wills, that kind of thing. While a fair amount of scholarly work was available for particular lineages, much of GGrandpa Thorn's work was original.

Genealogical research has undergone a sea change in the past decade or so.

First, many of the records that genealogists use to find and confirm ancestors have been digitized. The idea of being able to locate, much less reproduce, some of the documents we now have at our fingertips was unimaginable in those days. (Or maybe GGrandpa Thorn did imagine it - he was a very bright man.)

Second, DNA research, though still very much in its infancy, allows us to confirm (and find) ancestral relationships that no paper research could ever uncover. When you descend from Smiths and Lewises - two of the most common names in the Anglophone world - DNA can make all the difference.

GGrandpa Thorn's research was descended to Uncle Bob and Aunt Dianne, both Mormons. The Mormon Church has religious reasons for determining ancestry, and Mormons have access to the immense genealogical resources of the LDS Church. So even before the advent of our digital age, the Mormons in my family have been able to continue the work so ably begun by GGrandpa Thorn.

Aunt Dianne in particular has done so much to help me learn some of the ropes of this fascinating field, and has helped me find errors in my own research -- errors that, but for the work of my family before me, I likely never would have found. There is a lot of discipline required to develop accurate information, and my Aunt Dianne helped me to understand why things are often not as they first appear, and how old errors are sometimes even graven in brass or stone. So thank you for that, dear Auntie.

It's all about me, so it can all be about you.

You'll see a lot of references in this blog to such-and-such's relationship to me, or things like "my 8th great-grandmother."

I have an enormous, bloated ego (I'll stipulate to that), but that's not the reason for the references to me.

I have two large family branches - Lewis and Smith.

Lewis splits into Lewis and Stearns;

Stearns traces back easily to the 1600s, but my lineage along the way splits into Christmanns and Bakers and Colbys and many others.

Smith splits into Smith and Freeland, and that Smith splits into another Smith and Thorne and Waite.

Freeland splits into Friedlander and Frazier, Frazier splits into Frazier and McLean.

It gets very confusing very quickly.

So I talk about me. If you're reading this blog, you are probably related to me, and you know how you are related to me, to my brothers, to my parents and grandparents. With that information, you can figure out pretty easily how these people are related to you.

If you are my son or daughter or niece or nephew, just add one more generation to my great-grands. My 7th great-grandfather is your 8th great-grandfather.

I have tried to label (tag) posts with the family names involved. Depending on how much work I put into this blog, there may be a time when folks will want to drill down.

Why I care about my (fewer than) 1028 ninth great-grandparents

Here's the deal with genealogical research: Everyone is related to everyone, and we're not just related through the first humanoids who emerged from the primordial ooze millions of years ago, the proverbial Adam and Eve.

It's pretty amazing, but a common ancestor for every human being now alive probably died not more than two thousand years ago.

For people of European ancestry (or any other ethnic group), the common ancestor is even closer - around 600 or 700 years ago. We're all descended from Charlemagne.

This doesn't mean some lady had a giant passel of fecund kids, it just means family lines die off, intermarry, and migrate. Though mathematically I would have 1028 ninth great-grandparents, the actual number is quite a lot smaller, though I haven't done enough research yet to figure out how much smaller.

If you're related to me, I can prove you are related to both Dick Cheney and Barack Obama through my Grandpa Lewis. I can also prove you are related to George W. Bush, FDR, and Sarah Palin through Pompo's line. Obama, Bush, Palin, and FDR are tenth or twentieth cousins of me, and of each other. That level of cousinage is essentially meaningless.

But here's the other deal with genealogical research: It does not matter to me that I mathematically have around 1028 ninth great-grandparents. It matters to me that they are my great-grandparents. They birthed, and most of them raised, my 512 eighth great-grandparents, who birthed and raised my 256 seventh great-grandparents; etc., until we get to my four grandparents, all of whom I adored, and all of whom adored me.

I look back up the line, and I think my experience probably was mostly - not entirely, but mostly - how it was, all the way back. I love all of my ninth great-grandmothers and -grandfathers because my mother and father loved me, and Nana and Pompo and Grandma and Grandpa loved them, and their parents loved them, and so thank you. My 9th ggrandmothers loved me forward, and I love them back.

A second reason I care: these ancestors, and I mean down to close to modern day, faced challenges we can only imagine. We're talking horrifying, primitive medical care, long sea voyages in leaky, filthy, rat-ridden tubs, brutal and repressive religious colonies, horrific bloody wars, crops failing, Indian attacks. Drowning, starving, tomahawks, childbirth; oh heavens, childbirth. It was a leading cause of death among young women until not that long ago. Women bearing a dozen or more children, with many babies dying in infancy or a few years old - old enough to have been well and truly adored by those around them, so that the losses were great, heartbreaking things.

I would say we are here by the skin of our teeth, but that gives too much credit to luck. Mostly we are here because our ancestors were brave, sturdy, adventurous people who escaped the Old World and would not give up in the New.

That's who we came from.

Big shout out. You guys did a great job. I'm proud of you.

Hello world.

Welcome to my genealogy website. Let's see how this works out.

Apparently blogger (my webhost) has an auto-annoy feature that tells you about cookies and privacy and such and makes you Accept. Sorry about that. Be sure to thank the EU.

Though the busybodies in Brussels have produced some strange rules, Europe itself has produced many wonderful things, including the English language, weiner dogs, creme brulee, and my family. The last item is what this blog is about; the first item is what it is written in. I would like to see a weiner dog perform some tricks, and am always up for creme brulee except when I am on a diet, and even then if I think I can get away with it.

On with the show.