Ancestors Newsletter- March 8, 2025

12 Mar Ancestors Newsletter- March 8, 2025

ANCESTORS- YOUR 3X GREAT UNCLE DIES, AND HE’S REPLACED BY A LINCOLN CONSPIRATOR

Suppose you were planning to visit Dry Tortugas National Park and were interested in whether you would come across headstones, gravestones, markers, or cenotaphs. In that case, this is the response you would get from AI: The only identified gravestone at Dry Tortugas National Monument belongs to a man named John Greer, a laborer who died at Fort Jefferson on November 5, 1861, and whose headstone was discovered underwater by archaeologists.

However, AI has not visited the Dry Tortugas, as we came across one of our client’s third Great-Uncles, Joseph Sims Smith, and his three-year-old son Henry Price Smith’s cenotaph (pictured). He’s also the uncle of Henry Smith, who has been covered in previous editions.

Brevet Major Joseph Sims Smith was the Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Army at Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas Island, Florida Keys. He died at age 30 of Yellow Fever. In 1869, his body was removed from the Dry Tortugas to New York. He is buried in Green Wood Cemetery. This marker at Fort Jefferson is a cenotaph.

The infamous prisoner who replaced Smith was Dr. Samuel Mudd (pictured below). Mudd (1833 – 1883) was an American physician who was imprisoned for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth concerning the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Mudd worked as a doctor and tobacco farmer in Southern Maryland. The Civil War seriously damaged his business significantly when Maryland abolished slavery in 1864. That year, he first met Booth, who was planning to kidnap Lincoln, and Mudd was seen in company with three of the conspirators. However, his part in the plot, if any, remains unclear. Ancestors.

Booth fatally shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, but was injured during his escape from the scene. He subsequently rode with conspirator David Herold to Mudd’s home in the early hours of April 15 for surgery on his fractured leg before he crossed into Virginia. Sometime that day, Mudd must have learned of the assassination but did not report Booth’s visit to the authorities for another 24 hours. This fact linked him to the crime, as did his various story changes under interrogation. A military commission found Mudd guilty of aiding and conspiring in a murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, escaping execution by a single vote.

Mudd was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson and released from prison in 1869. Despite repeated attempts by family members and others to have his conviction expunged, it was never overturned.

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ANCESTORS- MY WIFE’S GRANDMA WAS KIDNAPPED AND SOLD TO HER STEP-GRANDPA

My wife’s 9th Grandmother, Mary Royal, was kidnapped from her home in Scotland as a young girl, carried aboard a ship, and brought to Pennsylvania.

The brothers William, James, and Maurice Trent, prominent merchants from Inverness, Scotland, were well-known and added to their wealth by selling child servants shipped from Scotland without indentures. Between 1693 and 1697, Maurice Trent appeared in Chester and Bucks counties’ courts, with at least 112 Scottish child servants without indentures, both male and female. You can read more about this practice below.

Caleb Pusey (about 1650-1727) bought the indentures of many of these children. One was Mary Royal in 1697. They were brought to the colonies by Maurice Trent and then sold to Caleb Pusey by William Trent. Pusey purchased Mary to serve for five years. Pictured at right is Pusey’s house where she would have served as it appeared in the late-1800’s

As a side note, Caleb Pusey, through another line, also happens to be my wife’s step-grandpa, as he married her 8th great-grandmother, the widow Ann Stone Worley.

At the end of Mary Royal’s five-year indenture, about 1702/03, she married William Coale and had two children before his death about April 1710 in Nottingham. He mentions his wife Mary and children William (1705) and Mary Coale (1708) in his will, where he left his entire estate to his wife Mary to be later divided between their two children, William and Mary Coale. Ancestors.

Jeremiah Brown married the widow Mary Royal Coles of Nottingham in February 1711, and they had five more children, including my wife’s ancestor, Patience Brown Hadley.

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ANCESTORS- THE OTHER HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN

William and Mary Royal Coale’s daughter Mary married second the widower Henry Reynolds Jr. Around 1720, Henry established a stone tavern on Nottingham Lot No. 17 to serve as a stage stop. Over the entrance was a swinging sign depicting the sun’s rays at dawn and the lettering THE RISING SUN. Around this busy tavern, the village of Summer Hill began to grow.

Located along the direct route between Baltimore and Philadelphia, the tavern enjoyed growth in its popularity as a meeting place for business deals, political maneuvering, elections, and sundry other activities. Travelers and locals alike adopted the habit of saying, “We all meet at The Rising Sun.” The phrase was so entrenched by the time the town’s first post office was established around 1815 that Summer Hill yielded to Rising Sun as the official name of the place. Likely, the post office was located in the tavern.

Soon after the town’s incorporation in 1860, the commissioners constructed slate sidewalks, erected coal-oil streetlamps, and hired a lamplighter, who doubled as bailiff and street maintenance man. Six years later, the Baltimore Central Railroad began to serve Rising Sun, and the pace of growth accelerated. Most of the town’s current structure has been built since then.

Pictured is the Old Rising Sun Tavern painted by David Kennedy.

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ANCESTORS- ANOTHER VIRAL, YET FALSE TREE

My 2nd Great Grandfather Bart Stevenson’s (pictured to the right), father, David Stevenson was born in Virginia in about 1800 according to the 1850 Jackson Co., AL census record, and his birth year is compatible with records for him found in the 1830 and 1840 censuses of Jackson.

Several Ancestry trees have him as the David Stevenson born on September 10, 1800, in Bath, VA. That’s a tempting answer as David could have left home and headed down the Clinch River Valley to the Tennessee River to Jackson County, AL.

However, the same trees, have David marrying Ann Kizer in 1821 in Clark County, OH, acquiring land there the same year and being in the 1830 Clark, OH census, and then by 1840 being back in Jackson, AL, with less kids than he had in 1830, and then by 1850 with a whole different set of children, than the eleven children allegedly born between 1822 and 1846.

The most obvious piece of proof that these are two different David Stevenson / Stephenson’s is that David Stevenson of AL is in the 1850 Jackson, AL census, at the same time that David Stephenson of OH is in the 1850 Miami, Logan, OH census with two different wives and sets of kids. You can see the two censuses below.

The same trees also have 1800 David Stephenson as the son of Revolutionary War soldier David Stephenson, who compiled his verbal will on 21 February 1814 and recorded it on 22 August 1814 (Champaign County Will Book A, Page 38).

In his will, David mentioned his wife, Martha Stephenson, and his children: Arthur, Martha, Anna, David, Charles, John, and Jane, and also mentioned “money owed to me from the state of Virginia.”

While it would be nice to discover that this David, who died in 1834, was the father of David Stevenson of AL, that is not the case since in 1834, David Stevenson, the heir, was residing in Clark County, OH. This doesn’t fit the timeline of David Stevenson of AL, who was in Jackson, AL, in 1830 and 1840.

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ANCESTORS- UPDATE ON THE BACKSIDE OF KEY WEST AIRPORT

Last year we shared the story of the plane hijacked from Cuba in 2003 that landed in Key West Plane hijacked from Cuba. This year, we were able to get a closer look at the aircraft; we also got a picture of the Cold War tower-top gun emplacements at the airport.

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ANCESTORS- MORE ON THE MARQUIS CLAN

Albert Nelson Marquis (January 10, 1855 – December 21, 1943), (picture to the right) was a Chicago publisher best known for creating the Who’s Who book series, starting with Who’s Who in America, which was first published in 1899.

He’s also my fourth cousin, four times removed, as he descends from William and Mary Colville Marquis, which is why his surname caught my eye (his middle name is a coincidence). We covered the “My Telephone Pole Branch of my Family Tree” in January 2025, which chronicled the Marquis family and their prolific endogamy- Marquis Family

Marquis was born in Decatur, Ohio, and raised by his maternal grandparents. At age 21, he founded the A.N. Marquis & Company in Cincinnati and moved to Chicago in 1884. His early publications were generally guidebooks, directories, and maps. He was the complete owner of “Who’s Who” until 1926 and remained editor-in-chief of the publication until 1940. Marquis also published specialized versions of “Who’s Who”, including occupation-specific and location-specific editions. Ancestors.

Marquis states in its preface that Who’s Who in America “endeavors to profile the leaders of American society, those men and women who are influencing their nation’s development”. Entries in Marquis’ “Who’s Who” books list career and personal data for each biography, including birth date and place, names of parents and family members, education, writings and creative works, civic activities, awards, political affiliation, religion, and addresses. The content is also provided online to libraries and other paid subscribers.

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ANCESTORS- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY

Reach out to Dancestors Genealogy. Our group of genealogists will research, discover, and preserve your family history. No one is getting any younger, and stories disappear from memory every year and eventually from our potential 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!