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.

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 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. 

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.