Uh oh. We’ve been saying “Lewis” wrong since 1872

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about the Lewis brick wall – the frustrating phenomenon that happens when you run out of clues about a particular lineage, and you’re stuck at a place that leaves you baffled about where your family came from. It’s particularly frustrating when it’s your own last name you are investigating. Lewis is a common family name. It has deep roots in Scotland (we’ve got a whole island named after us up there), Wales, Ireland, and England. But it is also quite common throughout the rest of Western Europe.

My working hypothesis has always been that our Lewises were Scots (Clan MacLeod!) or Welsh (Cymru am byth!) But the Internet gives us tools today that genealogists even twenty years ago could only dream of. Searchable databases going back hundreds of years are being made available at an astonishing clip. Just as important, the Internet has made it possible for cousins to find each other and share information. Finding even one more family member from a century or two ago opens a dozen new ways to look for information.

We already knew that William Thomas Lewis, b. 1848, (my 2nd great-grandfather) owned and operated a general store in Frederic, Michigan in the late 1800s. He and his wife Sarah were pioneers to the town. They had eight children, two of whom died in infancy. The oldest, Emmett, b. 1874, was my great-grandfather; his oldest son, Russell Emmett, b. 1900, was my grandfather. (An aside: Grandpa Lewis worked in the family store in Frederic as a young man. I remember him telling me that he discovered while working at the store that he was color blind – a customer asked for some red ribbon, and he gave her blue – something like that. His colorblindness may have saved his life – and the Lewis name - as it probably disqualified him from most types of military service during the First World War. Grandpa Lewis enlisted in the U.S. Army on October 1, 1918, and was released on October 23, 1918. This was long before my own dad was even a twinkle in Grandpa’s eye.)

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.

Definitely an ancestor

I just discovered this photo today (thanks to my cousin Lewis) and thought my family might enjoy it.
This is my 3rd great-grandmother on the Lewis side, Catherine (Wilson) Bishop. She was born 1828 in Lincolnshire, England. She came to Michigan in 1840, when the State of Michigan was only three years old. She died 1914 in Freeland, Michigan (which is near Saginaw.)

She and her husband, Samuel Bishop, also an immigrant Englishman, had eleven children together. Six of Catherine's children survived her. Her oldest daughter, Sarah, was the wife of my 2d great-grandfather, William Thomas Lewis.

She looks very much like Grandpa Lewis and Dad, I think.

Robert K. Smith and the Great War - A Veterans Day Remembrance

Veterans Day used to be called Armistice Day, after the Armistice which ended the First World War. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. This did not happen until the Great War had claimed the life of my great-uncle, Robert Kedzie Smith.

Robert was born 23 May 1898 to Thorn and Mertie Belle Smith. He was the oldest child in the family. (Our Pompo, Rossman, was not born until 1907. Pompo was the fifth child, preceded by Robert, Millard b. 1900, Thorn Jr. b. 1903, and Katherine b. 1905.)

Robert was the namesake of my Uncle Bob, and through him, my brother and cousin.

Robert's first and middle names came from Robert Kedzie, who was GGrandpa Thorn's professor and mentor at the school now known as Michigan State University. Prof. Kedzie was unusually lettered (both an MD and an LLD) and accomplished.

Robert Kedzie Smith

Robert was a Bugler (which was an Army rank during WW I) with the U.S. 32nd Infantry Div., 3rd Battalion. The division fought with great valor, and was given the nickname Les Terrible.

Our Robert was killed in action on 4 Aug 1917, during the Argonne offensive. On the day he was killed,

[t]he authorized strength of the 3rd battalion was 20 officers and 1,000 men, but by 4 August it had only 12 officers and 350 men on the line. As they advanced over 2,100 yards (1,900 m) of mostly open ground, the Germans targeted them with intense artillery and machine gun fire.

The division later penetrated the Hindenburg Line, and became the first Allied unit to reach German soil during the war.

Robert was nineteen when he was killed. His remains are interred at Fere-en-Tardenois, Departement de l'Aisne, Picardie, France. It is a beautiful, green place, born of great tragedy and sadness.

The American Cemetery, Picardie, France

RIP, Uncle Robert.

The Pump-house Project

Photo courtesy Tom Lewis

The Freeland property at Omena - called "Freeland's" during its days as a summer resort - was a property that bound together five generations of my family on my mother's side. The first Omena property owned by our family was several dozen acres acquired by Thomas Edward Hart McLean, who was the uncle of Mary (McLean) Frazier. This Mary was the mother of Mary (Frazier) Freeland, who was the mother of my Nana, Mary (Freeland) Smith.

Embracing My Inner Jew: A Brief History of the Friedlanders

Mary (Frazier) Freeland and Albert Luke Freeland

I got back my DNA results from ancestry.com a few months ago. Ancestry performs a type of test called autosomal DNA. I'll be writing about DNA testing in another post. DNA testing for genealogy is really very new and exciting.

One of the things autosomal testing does pretty well is figure out your ancestral roots. My results were not too surprising. I'm more than 50% "Western European," and another 28% British/Irish. No Native American, but a dash of Greek/Italian and Middle Eastern, leavened with Caucasian (the region, not the race) and Scandinavian.

One fraction that came in right where I expected it: I am 1/8th Ashkenazi Jew. (Ashkenazi is the name of the Jews of Europe.) Both of my law partners have tested, and both were surprised to find that they too have some Ashkenazi Jewish blood. We now refer to one another as "our people" in the firm, unlike the goyim in the outfit. One of my partners found he also has a smidgen of Gypsy blood. He says, "I may steal your wallet, but I will invest the money wisely." We get to make jokes like that because we are Yiddishe.

But I digress.

The Mystery of the Lewises

Top: Sarah Ann (Bishop) Lewis, William Thomas Lewis

Bottom: Susannah Lewis, Laura Lillian Lewis

Photo courtesy of Lewis Harvey, Susannah's grandson

Update 3 Apr 2016:

Through the diligent sleuthing of cousin Lewis Harvey, we have discovered that William Thomas Lewis had at least one, and perhaps two, brothers. The death certificate for brother John tells us John was born in 1850 in Toronto, Canada. His obituary in the Saginaw Daily News (July 1922) tells us he reached Saginaw by 1865.

Importantly, John's death certificate also reports Nicholas Lewis (of New York) as John's father, and Margaret French (of Ireland) as his mother. So there is at least one additional substantiating source for Nicholas and Margaret.

John's second wife was Phebe Duele. Phebe had at least one sister. Phebe died in the mid-1930s. John had two children, Willie and Gertie. Both died too young to leave issue, in circumstances that must have been nearly unendurable for dear Uncle John and Aunt Phebe. It's too sad to write about here; you can check out my ancestry.com tree for details.

The 1880 US Census for Tittabawasee Township, Saginaw County, Michigan shows John, Phebe, Willie and Gertie, as well as Stephen Lewis, who is listed as John's brother. John is shown as 26, and Stephen as 22.

Research in 1850s Canadian records has revealed nothing yet.

John and William (together with some other Lewises) are buried in the Freeland, Michigan cemetery. Freeland adjoins Saginaw.

So, Nicholas and Margaret are still the Lewis brick wall. But at least we have some additional documentary support for them, as well as for our ancestral name of Lewis.

End of update. Original post follows.

_______________________________

One of the challenges facing genealogical researchers is what is known as the "brick wall." This refers to the situation where there are no available records that allow the researcher to determine lineage beyond a certain ancestor.

The photo above shows the Lewis brick wall: William Thomas Lewis, who is my 2nd Great-Grandfather.

I have been trying to trace my family lines back to the original immigrants to America. I have been successful with a lot of them (mostly because I can borrow from the hard work of other genealogists, including Aunt Dianne,) but a few remain a mystery.

One of the mysteries: Where did our Lewises come from?

The Winthrop Woman

Here's another historical novel about an ancestor: The Winthrop Woman, by Anya Seton. Rita read this book many years ago, and I just finished it a couple months ago. Seton was a prolific and entertaining author.

The subject of this historical novel is Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett, b. 1610 in England, immigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 and died 1665 in Connecticut Colony.

Elizabeth's first husband was Henry Winthrop, the son of John Winthrop, who was the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Henry came to the colony in 1630 without Elizabeth; she was pregnant and the sea voyage would be too arduous in her condition.

Henry promptly managed to drown after getting to the colony. Elizabeth came shortly thereafter with her baby daughter. John Winthrop, who was a fire-eating Puritan, arranged for her to marry a fellow by the name of Robert Feake after she arrived.

Robert Feake was my 10th g-grandfather. He went insane, but not until after he fathered Hannah Feake, who will get her own post because she has a similarly fascinating history. (For point of reference: Hannah's daughter Martha married Joseph Thorne, who was the source of "Thorn" as a first or middle name in Uncle Thorn, Great-grandfather Thorn, and Uncle Rossie's son William Thorn.)

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.