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.

Puritans and Yankees

In broadest strokes, our earliest American Begats are Yankee Puritans. We had many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ancestors (I haven’t yet counted up the ones I have discovered) who came over from mostly England starting mostly in the 1630s, and settled mostly in New England – and within New England, mostly in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A few settled in Plymouth Colony, a few in Connecticut Colony, a few in New Haven Colony (which was separate from Connecticut until late in the 1600s), a few in Rhode Island, and quite a number in New Netherland during the Dutch colonial days. A handful were Pilgrims who made it over before 1630. The Pilgrim story is different from the Puritan story in several really important ways. Mostly we were English Puritans, though.
That is the Begat-level story of our first immigrant families, including our Smiths, our Stearns, our Bakers, Bownes, Bournes, Colbys, Dunhams, Feakes, Greenes, Halletts, Leavitts, Perkins, Thornes, Waits, Waites, and Waights.) That’s just the tip of the iceberg with family names, too.
Color-coded for ease of reference! Dad’s side is blue, Mom’s side is red.
Later came our first wave of Germans (the Roschmanns) in the late 1600s, then our Scots   (the Fraziers, the McLeans) in the early 1700s, another wave of our Germans in the mid-1700s,  (the Christmanns, the Snyders; the Erdmanns.) This was followed by a smattering of additional English and Irish in the early 19th century (Wilson, French), and, in the late 19th century, our Hungarian Jews (Friedlander, Black, Loveman.)


So far as my current research reveals, all of our family – both sides, wherever they came from - were Yankees. This was true both in the early sense of the word – as inhabitants of New England and environs – and in the later Blue vs. Grey meaning of the word. With the exception of a couple folks from the Frazier line who lived in Virginia, every single ancestor lived in the northern states. And even the Fraziers wound up in a part of Virginia that split off into West Virginia during the Civil War.

Soldiers and Captives and Quakers and Consorts

The Begat facts are indispensable, but rather lifeless. Just beneath the surface of the names and dates and places, we have a more complete picture of the people and their world.


Because I find military history fascinating, I’ll start with that. Many of our men, and some of our women, were soldiers in every war fought on American soil, and, until recently, every war fought by America abroad. During the colonial days, we had ancestors who fought in the essentially endless wars with various Indian tribes, and fought alongside allied tribes. Some lost their lives in the Indian wars (Capt. Richard Beers, d. 1675, 8th ggrandfather) Sgt. Benjamin Waite, d. 1704, 8th great-grandfather through two lineages), some were kidnapped by Indians (Martha Waite, 8th great-grandmother through two lineages), and at least one was born while in Indian captivity (Canada Waite Smith, b. 1678, Quebec, Canada, 7th great-grandmother.) 


Our ancestors fought in King Phillips War, the French and Indian War, the War of American Independence – mostly Patriots, but probably a few Tories; the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the war with Spain, and both of the World Wars. And in living memory, my father fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars.


We had other ancestors who were Quakers, and did not fight for anyone, in any wars at all. Nor would they doff their hats for any man, and that got them in very hot water indeed, moreso than their pacifism.


And there is Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett, who is my 8th and 9th great-grandmother through different husbands. She was born in England, the niece of John Winthrop (the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; he of “City on a Hill” speech fame.) She married first her first cousin, a Winthrop lad, who drowned shortly after arriving in New England; he was probably drunk. She then married Robert Feake. He was a Puritan who went insane, but only after fathering my 7th great-grandmother Hannah Feake (who married a Quaker, John Bowne, in a time when Quakers were greatly persecuted, even in New Netherland, where they lived.). While Robert Feake was still alive, but completely mad, Elizabeth married (or was the consort of, depending on your viewpoint) William Hallett, who was about a decade Elizabeth’s junior and is my 8th great-grandfather. With William Sr., she bore a son named William Jr., who is my 7th great-grandfather. This was all quite scandalous in its day. Had Elizabeth not been a niece (and daughter-in-law) of Governor Winthrop, she probably would have been prosecuted for adultery and hanged. As it was, their house was attacked and burned to the ground by Indians. After Elizabeth died, William Sr. married the widow of my 9th great-grandfather William Thorne, but was later granted a divorce. In his will, William Sr. devised to William Jr., among his other personalty, a negro slave.

Therein lies a tale.

The Beginning of Our Begats

So there is the beginning of our Begats. Yet the Begats are only the beginning. The stories of our ancestors, the people who lived and died, are at turns thrilling and heartbreaking. They are invariably fascinating. There were some very fine people, and some others who were less exemplary, but they are all from whom we are hewn, and from whom we should learn some important things about ourselves.

There are so many stories to tell. I hope to tell a few here.