10 Oct ANCESTORS – Newsletter – October 4, 2025
Contents
- 1 ANCESTORS- CAPTAIN STARBUCK’S JOURNEY
- 2 ANCESTORS- HEZEKIAH’S SON GAYER
- 3 ANCESTORS- MORE ABOUT THE LADIES
- 4 ANCESTORS- BANKS USUALLY PREFER NOT TO HAVE GUNS IN THEIR LOBBIES
- 5 ANCESTORS- DESCENDING FROM ALL OF THE U.S. PRESIDENTS AND MAYFLOWER PASSENGERS
- 6 ANCESTORS- CHOCOLATE AND OATMEAL
- 7 ANCESTORS- CONFEDERATES IN THE PACIFIC
- 8 ANCESTORS- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY
ANCESTORS- CAPTAIN STARBUCK’S JOURNEY
Back in 2023, I shared information on my wife’s 5th Great Grandfather, Hezekiah Starbuck Starbuck We learned more about him on a visit to Nantucket, where it turned out he had kept a journal recorded from 1770 to 1775, as a whaling ship captain in the Pacific, which is in the hands of the Nantucket Historical Society.
At Mystic River Seaport, we had the opportunity to board the Charles W. Morgan, an 80-year-old whaling ship (pictured) that remains afloat. It was interesting to see how it was set up and to see the captain’s quarters.
Because the Atlantic had been overharvested, most of the whalers from the northeast had to cross around to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which was a dangerous and long voyage, where, besides catching the fish, you harvested it shipside. On deck, they boiled the oil out of the blubber (see picture below). You can see in the excerpt below the mention of the Spamasities, which is 1700s slang for sperm whales.
ANCESTORS- HEZEKIAH’S SON GAYER
Hezekiah’s son Gayer Starbuck was born in 1777 in Nantucket, MA. His parents then settled in New Garden, Guilford, NC. Gayer joined them there. He married Susannah Dillon in 1799 in New Garden.
In 1807, they moved to rented land near Painterville, in Greene Co., OH. In 1809, Hezekiah moved his family to Barnesville, Belmont Co., OH, where he helped found the Stillwater Monthly Meeting House. All Hezekiah’s children and families, including Gayer and his family traveled with him. In 1810, they purchased land near and moved to the Dover Meeting, four miles northeast of Wilmington in Clinton Co., Ohio. He helped organize the first County Agricultural Fair. He helped to import the first shorthorn cattle. He owned the first steam sawmill in the county and operated a gristmill. Ancestors.
In the adjacent article, there is some remarkable information about his progeny, which included his daughter Abigail, who died in late 1863, resulting in a very early photograph, included at the bottom.
ANCESTORS- MORE ABOUT THE LADIES
In the last edition, we reported on the First Ladies National Historical Monument, and I mentioned that it was hard for women to be recognized for accomplishments in or outside of the home. Because Quaker women were allowed to minister equally with men, and many were quite accomplished, here are a couple of them:
My wife’s 5th Great Grandmother, Charity Wright Cook (1745–1822), was an American Quaker minister. She was born in Prince George’s County, Maryland, but moved with her family to the Cane Creek area of North Carolina at the age of three. They moved again, probably in 1760, to Bush River, Newberry County, South Carolina. There, she met Isaac Cook, a Quaker, whom she would later marry. In 1760, an accusation of sexual impropriety was levied against her, and as a result, she was estranged from the Quaker community for eight years. Even so, in 1762, she married Isaac Cook, with whom she would go on to have 11 children. By 1772, the controversy having abated, the Bush River Quaker Meeting commissioned her as a preacher.
During the American Revolutionary War, Cook traveled throughout the Southern United States preaching the importance of pacifism. In 1797, she traveled to Europe to tour Quaker meetings there; she returned to the United States in 1802, whereupon she and Isaac established new meetings in Ohio and Indiana.
Charity even had the debatable habit of being a pipe smoker. In 1805, inspired by another of her wife’s ancestors, the preacher Zachariah Dix, the Quakers no longer felt it was right to live amidst the practice of slavery, the Cook family moved to OH, where Charity continued her preaching, making her last preaching tour at the age of 75. Cook died in Clinton County, Ohio, and is buried in Caesar Creek Cemetery in Waynesville.
Another Nantucket cousin of my wife, Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793 –1880) (pictured), was also an American Quaker, abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. In 1848, she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first public gathering about women’s rights, the Seneca Falls Convention, during which the Declaration of Sentiments was written.
Her speaking abilities made her a prominent abolitionist, feminist, and reformer; she had been a Quaker preacher early in her adult life. She advocated giving black people, both male and female, the right to vote (suffrage). Her home, with her husband, the Quaker leader James Mott, was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Mott helped found the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College and raised funds for the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She remained a central figure in reform movements until she died in 1880. The area around her long-time residence in Cheltenham Township is now known as La Mott, in her honor.
Mott is commemorated alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the Portrait Monument, a 1921 sculpture by Adelaide Johnson located at the United States Capitol (pictured). Originally kept on display in the crypt of the US Capitol, the sculpture was moved to its current location and more prominently displayed in the rotunda in 1997.
ANCESTORS- BANKS USUALLY PREFER NOT TO HAVE GUNS IN THEIR LOBBIES
JPMorgan Chase’s Manhattan main offices hold the pistols used in the Burr-Hamilton duel of 1804. The pistols were sold to the Bank of the Manhattan Company, a predecessor of Chase, in 1930 by the Church family, who had owned them. One of the pistols was found to have a potentially dishonorable hair trigger, a modification that could have been made by Alexander Hamilton’s family, the original owners of the pair.
The picture below is from a 1903 newspaper article, which features the pistols on display.
ANCESTORS- DESCENDING FROM ALL OF THE U.S. PRESIDENTS AND MAYFLOWER PASSENGERS
I recently had an inquiry from a potential client who said that he had over 350,000 people in his family tree. By comparison, I have 40,000, which is a lot of Christmas cards!
He further claimed that he descended from William Brewster, and most of the people on the Mayflower, as obviously, there was intermarriage within the colony.
He also claimed that he descended from all the presidents of the United States. When I questioned his claim, considering that about 20% of the presidents don’t have any living descendants, I am pretty sure we would have heard of him if he descended from any of the more recent presidents. He amended his claim to descend from several, but that he had kinship with all.
He was looking to capitalize on his remarkable American pedigree in 2026, during the country’s 250th anniversary. After I got a copy of his tree, it was much smaller than he claimed. I also typed in the names of a few presidents, and none of them came up. When I asked about that, he said “look at Rutherford Hayes and John Adams.” Hayes was not in the tree, but he did have people who had Rutherford Hayes as their first and middle name. Hayes is one of those presidents with no living descendants. He did have people named John Adams in his tree, but they weren’t the president.
You can see on the left how many of the Mayflower passengers don’t have proven ancestry. I want to mention that I am descended from Stephen Hopkins.
I suspect the kinship is determined by a celebrity DNA website that claims you share DNA with historical celebrities like Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, royals, and presidents, but no actual relationship is established.
Through my own family history research, I know that my wife and I are kin to a half-dozen presidents, but much of that is traced back to the early days in New England and is common among many Americans. Here’s a YouTube video that shares how all of the presidents are linked in their ancestry, which is not abnormal compared to other random Americans. President’s relationships
So, the rest of the story unfolded when his true goal was revealed, which was to have me conduct all the research to prove his connection to the presidents and Mayflower descendants, and he would handle the marketing aspect. So, I took a pass, as I don’t see how he monetizes his heritage, but best of luck if he is. I referred him to the Society of Presidential Descendants. Descendants
ANCESTORS- CHOCOLATE AND OATMEAL
We visited the Hershey Story Museum, which was interesting as Milton Hershey (pictured) had no children and left his entire fortune to the Milton Hershey School. School began with four students in 1910. Initially, for only white male orphans, the school expanded in the 1960s and 70s to include girls, racial minorities, and “social orphans”—those with impoverished parents. About 2,000 students attended the school in 2020. Admission is restricted to low-income individuals aged 4–15 who do not have intellectual or behavioral problems. Students live in group homes of uniform sex and similar age, with set schedules for elementary, middle, and high school students. The school has Christian elements but is officially non-sectarian.
Since my wife and I have so many Quaker relatives, I wondered which Quaker founded Quaker Oats, since the image on the iconic cylindrical package is what comes to most people’s mind when they think of Quakers.
Although Quaker Oats Company states that the “Quaker man” is not meant to resemble or represent an actual person, the company identified the Quaker man as William Penn in advertising dating back to 1909.
It turns out that the founders were not Quakers. Henry D. Seymour and William Heston founded the Quaker Mill in Ravenna, OH. In 1877, Seymour trademarked the Quaker brand after reading an encyclopedia article on Quakers, who are officially called the Religious Society of Friends. The article ascribed integrity, honesty, and purity to the Quakers, which Seymour realized would be favorable attributes to impute to his company’s breakfast cereal, particularly in an era of food impurities.
So, if you eat Quaker Oats, you may become a better person!
ANCESTORS- CONFEDERATES IN THE PACIFIC
The whaling industry faced numerous challenges that ultimately led to its decline. One of those was the Civil War. The whaling industry was primarily based in the Northeast, with a major hub in New Bedford, MA. Most of the whaling activity was in the Pacific, on the other side of the world, as the Atlantic had been overharvested.
Their nemesis turned out to be the CSS Shenandoah. The ship was an iron-framed, teak-planked, full-rigged sailing ship with auxiliary steam power, chiefly known for her actions under Lieutenant Commander James Waddell as part of the Confederate States Navy during the American Civil War.
Shenandoah was originally a British merchant ship launched as Sea King on August 17, 1863, but was later repurposed as one of the most feared commerce raiders in the Confederate Navy. For twelve-and-a-half months from 1864 to 1865, she undertook commerce raiding around the world in an effort to disrupt the Union’s economy, capturing and sinking or bonding 38 merchant vessels, mostly whaling ships from New Bedford, Massachusetts. She finally surrendered on the River Mersey, Liverpool, United Kingdom, on November 6, 1865, six months after the war had ended.
Shenandoah is also known for having fired the last shot of the Civil War, across the bow of a whaler in waters off the Aleutian Islands.
ANCESTORS- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY
Reach 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!
