29 Dec Genealogy Newsletter- December 27, 2025
Contents
IN OTHER NEWS FROM THE GRAND CANYON
IN OTHER NEWS FROM THE GRAND CANYONIn the last edition, I wrote about a 2011 backpack trip in the Grand Canyon. GRAND CANYON
Here was one other surreal moment that occurred on that trip. Waking up on Tuesday, May 3, 2011, my roommate and I headed over to the lobby of the lodge to get a cup of coffee. Keep in mind, we’re not in a place where you can turn on the TV in your room, check out the headlines on your phone, or grab a copy of USA Today.
The Supai lady manning the desk slowly said to us, “Did you hear that Obama was killed yesterday?” Of course, we were stunned, and in seconds, our brains filled with thoughts of civil disturbance or worse erupting above us outside of the canyon.
My first question was “Where did this happen?” Her answer was “in Pakistan.” I then said, “I didn’t know he was going to Pakistan”, and then asked, “Do they know who did it?” Her answer was “the Navy Seals”. So now, I have a Tom Clancy novel seizing my gray matter.
Fortunately, I recovered quickly enough to ask, “Did you mean Osama?”, and she said, “Sorry, yes, I meant Osama bin Laden.” So, we were able to reposition our brains from feelings of great distress to feelings of triumph. Keep in mind that in the life of a Supai tribe member living deep in the Grand Canyon, there was likely little difference in relevance between Obama and Osama, so it was an easy mistake to make.
I tried to add to the article by using AI to create a cartoonish picture of Obama and Osama riding mules together in the Grand Canyon. While I was unsuccessful, I was glad to see AI telling me it had boundaries that I was attempting to cross.
So, stepping back from that overly surreal fictional picture, I went to Google, thinking there would be plenty of cartoons of Obama riding a mule, since he was a Democrat and the donkey is often a symbol of the party. I was surprised to find only two such images, so I used the one with the least political commentary, as I work hard not to take sides unless it’s regarding the Whigs and Tories of centuries past.
CAN YOU TRACE YOUR ANCESTRY TO ADAM AND EVE?
CAN YOU TRACE YOUR ANCESTRY TO ADAM AND EVE?I recently met with a potential vendor who shared that they had a family tree tracing their descent from Adam and Eve. I was, of course, intrigued by this, and so he was willing to share the tree with me.
The tree showed he was 137 generations descended from Adam and Eve, which falls within the theoretical range of generations involved in such descent.
The line follows the line of roughly 76 biblical generations from Adam to Jesus, listed in Luke 3, including notable and familiar descendants such as Noah, Abraham, King David, and routes through Melchi to Levi to Matthan, the grandfather of the Virgin Mary. However, other sources identify Matthan as Joseph’s grandfather and as descending from Nathan’s brother, King Solomon, rather than from Nathan.
Since his line can’t descend from the Virgin Mary (mother of only Jesus), it traces descent through the Virgin Mary’s cousin Anna, who allegedly married Beli, King of the Britons (at times known as Heli) pictured above.
I cannot find evidence that Virgin Mary’s cousin, Anna, traveled to Britain to marry Beli. Still, it is necessary to support the early British Kings’ claim of descent from Adam and Eve and their hereditary right to rule Britain through divine descent.
Then, from Beli, we go to his son King Lud (pictured below left in the center with his sons), to the Harleian genealogies, a collection of Old Welsh genealogies preserved in the British Library, and then onto Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline (King of Britons), where he mentions a son, King Arviragus. Then the lines go to his son, King Marius, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudohistorical Historia Regum Britanniae, then to his son, King Coilus, and finally to his son, King Lucius (pictured above).
From there, it becomes unsupported with the line from Lucius (center of the stained glass below) to Gladyus to Strada to Helena (statue below), who married Constantine I, Emperor of Rome. From all appearances, Helena appears to have had Greek origins, not British, and even Geoffrey of Monmouth identifies her as the daughter of Old King Coel, not Strada, in trying to establish the divine line.
We will continue down from Constantine in the next edition.
WHAT ARTISTS ARE YOU RELATED TO?
WHAT ARTISTS ARE YOU RELATED TO?I recently found out that my third cousin, twice removed, was the artist John Wesley Carroll (self-portrait adjacent). Carroll was born in 1892 in Wichita, Kansas, and grew up in San Francisco, California. He studied art at the University of California, Berkeley, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927, which allowed him to travel and work in Europe. He taught at the Art Students League in New York City before being chosen in 1930 to lead the painting department at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit, where he taught for more than a decade.
A portrait he made of Gloria Vanderbilt and one of her children won the 1954 Benjamin Altman Prize from the National Academy of Design. Among several others, his work has been exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Carroll was known for his modernist-style romantic portraits of women. His major influences included Paul Cézanne, George Bellows, and Andrew Dasburg.
He divided his time between his studio in New York City and his farm in East Chatham, New York, where he raised cattle for the war effort. Carroll died in Albany, NY, in 1959.
Three of his most famous paintings are “Leda and the Swan”, “Sleeping”, “Ribbons” are below.
THE WHITE NEGROES OF EUROPE
THE WHITE NEGROES OF EUROPEIn 1791, a man of Jamaican origin named Dutty Boukman became the leader of the enslaved Africans held on a large plantation in Cap-Français. In the wake of the French Revolution, he planned to massacre all the French living in Cap-Français. On 22 August 1791, the enslaved Africans descended on Le Cap, where they destroyed the plantations and executed all the French who lived in the region. King Louis XVI was accused of indifference to the massacre, while the slaves seemed to think the king was on their side. In July 1793, the French in Les Cayes were massacred.
Despite the French proclamation of emancipation, the blacks sided with the Spanish, who came to occupy the region. In July 1794, Spanish forces stood by while the black troops of Jean-François massacred the French whites in Fort-Dauphin.
Dessalines came to power after France’s defeat and subsequent evacuation from what was previously known as Saint-Domingue. In November 1803, three days after France’s forces surrendered, the leader of the revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, ordered the execution of 800 French soldiers who had been left behind due to illness during the evacuation. He did guarantee the safety of the remaining white civilian population.
Dessalines then gave orders to execute the remaining Europeans, with a couple of exceptions. During February and March, Dessalines traveled among the cities of Haiti to ensure that his orders were carried out. Despite his orders, the massacres were often not carried out until he visited the places in person.
During the massacre, stabbing, beheading, and disemboweling were common. According to historian Julia Gaffield, most of those killed were former members of the National Guard, a pro-French militia. The image is of an 1806 engraving of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. It depicts the general, sword raised in one arm, while the other holds the severed head of a white woman.
The massacre excluded surviving Polish Legionnaires, who had defected from the French legion to become allied with the enslaved Africans, as well as the Germans who did not take part in the slave trade, and free persons of color, and some other select French medical doctors and professionals.
Dessalines referred to the Poles as “the White Negroes of Europe”, as an expression of his solidarity and gratitude.
A Haitian official who was enslaved for much of his life and attempted to explain the massacre by referencing the cruel treatment of black slaves by white slaveholders in Saint-Domingue:
Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to consume feces? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?
MYSTERIOUS ANCESTORS
MYSTERIOUS ANCESTORSOnce in a while, we get a case where it’s almost like the client’s ancestor beamed down from outer space. Here’s an example of that type of case.
Our search was for Harold ‘Harry’ Ranney D’Arcy. The earliest records of Harry were in the 1914 to 1919 Oakland City Directories, indicating he worked as a salesman.
The next record was a marriage license application he completed on June 13, 1918, at age 44, to 21-year-old Mary Alice Kohler, both of whom were residents of Richmond, CA.
On September 26, 1918, he completed his WW1 draft card, on which he stated he was born on March 25, 1874, and recorded his age as 44. At the time of his registration, Harry lived at 1247 Pearl Street in Alameda, CA, where he worked for the U.S. Mail, about 15 miles from Richmond. He listed Alice Darcy as his next of kin.
As of the 1920 census, after having two children, he was recorded as divorced. Not a complete surprise, given that he is more than twice her age. His birthplace is listed as New York.
According to California voter registrations from 1920 to 1924, he lived at 1563 Octavia in San Francisco, worked as a clerk, and was a registered Republican. The 1910 description of the Octavia Place area indicates it was a nice area. From 1926 to 1927, he continued living in San Francisco while working as a clerk.
He died on July 19, 1927, in San Francisco at 53 and was buried on July 28, 1927, in Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, San Mateo, CA. In his obituary, he is mentioned as the beloved father of Walter, Alice, and Bobbie Darcy, indicating there was still a relationship. He is listed as a native of Ohio (not New York, as he noted in the 1920 census) and is 67 years old, meaning he was born in 1860, not 1874, which would mean he recorded a false age on his draft card and in the census. He is also recorded in the California death index as being 67.
The draft card, census, and death records would be considered primary records, whereas his obituary would be secondary, unless he wrote it in advance.
Alice was having children with John Christian Beck by 1920 and had four more, and they were all recorded in subsequent censuses as a family. She died on July 16, 1948, in Chewelah, WA.
We checked all the D’Arcys and Darcys in NY and Ohio (and nationwide), using birth years from 1860 and 1874. We searched from 1860 to 1910 and found none with sons named Harry or Ranney. We looked at those same surnames, such as Sanford (his son Robert’s middle name) or Ranney in the family, to see if anything suggested a connection.
There was another Harry D’Arcy in St. Louis and in Los Angeles, with simultaneous records, showing that they were different people. There were also Harry D’Arcys who came from England after our Harry was in Oakland.
DNA research has shown that when someone appears out of nowhere, they’re often descended from a family with a different surname and, at some point, begin going by another name. They could choose to go by a different name for legal reasons, to avoid debtors, or because they are unhappy with the current family situation. Those reasons could seem to apply to someone who appears to arrive in California from the east at age 42 and then marries for the first (and last) time at 44 (or 58 if you assume his obituary is the truth). The fact that he would tell his descendants (assuming that one of them wrote the obituary) that he was from Ohio yet recorded on the census that he was from NY, along with his inconsistent age, might indicate someone with a flexible history.
The client was not interested in pursuing DNA testing to identify Harry’s likely origins due to budgetary constraints.
CHARTING FOR POSTERITY
CHARTING FOR POSTERITYOur clients often want to order various charts depending on their needs. The most common is a pedigree chart that runs from left to right, from the most common ancestor, with up to nine generations (top left below).
Another popular option is the combination in which one side of the family is to the left and the other to the right, with up to seven generations on each side, with room for children’s names below (top right below).
A fan chart is named as such because it is shaped like a hand fan, originating from the central person at the hub and branching out to nine generations (bottom right below).
A descendant chart is the chart of the common descendants of a person up to four generations (bottom left).
An Ahnentafel chart is a listing of generations, with each generation numbered by doubling as you go back, with the first person starting at #1. The first Ahnentafel, published by Michaël Eytzinger in Thesaurus principum hac aetate in Europa viventium, Cologne: 1590, pp. 146–147, in which Eytzinger first illustrates his new functional theory of numeration of ancestors; this schema shows Henry III of France as n° 1, de cujus, with his ancestors in five generations. The remainder of the volume shows 34 additional schemas for rulers and princes of Europe using his new method (see above).
Lastly, a family tree can be used, and we can get that completed by a calligrapher, which is very stunning to see.
PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY
PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAYReach out to Dancestors Genealogy. Our genealogists will research, discover, and preserve your family history. No one is getting any younger, and stories disappear from memory every year, eventually fading from our ability to find them.
Preserve your legacy and the heritage of your ancestors.
Paper gets thrown in the trash; books survive!
Ready to embark on your family history journey? Don’t hesitate. Call Dan Nelson and get your project started!
