Beyond the Begats

Anyone setting out to tell a part of his family’s history quickly faces difficult decisions. There are just so many stories to tell. Trying to sort them all out is daunting.

The Begats

One way of starting to sort things out is what I call the Begats: Who begat whom, and when and where were they born? We start with names, dates and places. This provides us broad contours of our history. Mom and Dad were born on such and such a date in Detroit, Michigan; their parents were born about 25 years earlier in Detroit and other towns in Michigan; the grandparents’ parents were born about 25 years earlier in Michigan and a couple other states of the Union; and pretty soon before that there wasn’t even a Michigan, and our people come from other states, and before that, colonies, and before that, European countries. Those are the Begats – names, dates, places of birth and death, names of spouses and children.

There is no built-in stopping point for researching the Begats. Some of our family lines can be traced deep into the first millennium, like the year 600ish. I find this an essentially meaningless exercise in a genealogical sense (though it has significance in some cultures and some religions, notably the LDS church.) We’re all descended from Charlemagne.

Suddenly, my pedigree looked classier: I am a descendant of Charlemagne. Of course, so is every other European. By the way, I’m also a descendant of Nefertiti. And so are you, and everyone else on Earth today. Chang figured that out by expanding his model from living Europeans to living humans, and getting an estimate of 3400 years instead of a thousand for the all-ancestor generation.

Other than an evanescent pedigree classiness, there is no purpose in teasing out my relationship to Charlemagne and other ancient royalty and bigwigs. So I haven’t set out to do that, nor do I plan to.

A Natural Stopping Point: The Shores of North America

America is a young country, and the European presence on the continent is also manageably recent. So American genealogists have a fairly natural stopping point: When did our family make it to this continent?


Despite America’s youth, tracing this out is quite an undertaking. A lot of our family has been here for around ten generations. That’s a thousand people. That’s a lot of people to research.
In addition to sheer numbers, the paper trail goes cold on a lot of our family. The Lewis name in particular remains enigmatic. So far, genetic testing on the male DNA gene places our Lewises in a broad group called “Ibero-Celtic.” That means our Lewis ancestors perhaps migrated to the British Isles or France from the Iberian peninsula sometime after the last glaciation, and were out howling at the moon while Druidic sacrifices were carried out with bronze knives. The documentation leaves much to be desired, and perhaps we will never know when this branch first made it to America.

The Autobiography of Thorn Smith

My great-grandfather, Thorn Smith, was a chemist by profession. He was born and grew up in a small town called Portland, Michigan. His father was George Rogers Smith; his mother’s given name was Katerina Elizabetha Shaefer. She was the daughter of German immigrants.

Among the gifts he left his family was an autobiography. When I say he left this as a gift, I mean it quite literally. He was himself an ardent genealogist by avocation (it is upon his work that Aunt Dianne and I are building), and he recognized the importance of leaving behind his story so that later generations could understand a bit of what life looked like for him.

He writes:

This is not written in the spirit of the usual autobiography in which the writer is so inordinately proud of his record that he feels the world is waiting, with bated breath, for what he has to say. Sometimes [his] descendants are interested in learning the customs, the accommodations, conveniences and general habits of living of a bygone era. No attempt is made to erect a monument or set up a standard of living, for it is realized that every generation has a right to live its own life, knowing that its following generation will be still different. [Vol 2., p 9.]

Thorn was born in 1871. Thorn was a family name, coming from his great-grandmother, Sally Thorn (Smith), and long before her, our English ancestor, William Thorne, Sr., one of the signers of the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance. The latter sought an end to the persecution of Quakers in New Netherland, and was one of the precursors of the U.S. Constitutional protection of free exercise of religion.