Ancestry Newsletter- February 21, 2026

21 Feb Ancestry Newsletter- February 21, 2026

ANCESTRY- CUMBERLAND ISLAND AND ITS HIGH SOCIETY

We recently visited Cumberland Island National Seashore and learned about the Carnegie family’s extensive involvement there.

Thomas Morrison Carnegie was Andrew Carnegie’s brother, who is best known as the founder of Carnegie Steel, Carnegie Hall, and the many Carnegie Libraries. Thomas was also an astute businessman, which gave him the wherewithal to acquire and build several mansions on Cumberland Island, including Dungeness, pictured before and after the 1959 fire, below.

Thomas (1843-1886) married Lucy Ackerman Coleman (1847-1916), (both pictured below) who was the daughter of William Coleman, an iron and steel magnate from Pittsburgh. I thought to myself, it could be a son of Robert Coleman, whom I covered in May 2025. ROBERT COLEMAN Unfortunately, Lucy’s father, William (1808-1878), was much younger than Robert’s son William (1776-1837). There were two iron magnates in Pennsylvania, named William Coleman, who were not closely related.

Lucy herself, while benefiting from the iron industry, ruled Cumberland with an iron fist during her 30 years of widowhood. One of the big rivalries was with her daughter-in-law, Margaret (pictured above), who married her son, George Lauder Carnegie, and built the Plum Orchard mansion as far away on the island from Dungeness as possible.

After George’s death, in Paris on November 12, 1923, she married Roger, Comte de Périgny. After they married, the couple lived at the Plaza Hotel in New York. In 1924, she was sued by Madeline Helen Modica of Newark over an apparent affair with Madeline’s husband, Emmanuel Victor Modica, a car salesman. They later moved abroad and spent their time between his Paris home and the farm and estate they built in 1926 on land at Lake Naivasha known as Kongoni Farm. The farm was a 15,600-acre ranch.

She died on January 9, 1942, at Kongoni Farm in what was then the British East African colony of Kenya. The farm and a life interest in her $2,000,000 estate were left to her husband.

Plum Orchard is now owned by the National Park Service and is open to the public.

More in Cumberland Island in the next edition.

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ANCESTRY- FROM ADAM AND EVE, THROUGH DANISH KINGS, TO THE NORMANS

In the last edition, we leaped from Gorm, King of Denmark, to the father of Gunnor de Crepon (pictured to the right, confirming a charter of the abbey of the Mount-Saint-Michel, 12th century), [Gunnor De Crepon], whom they name as Herbastus De Crepon.

The names of Gunnor’s parents are unknown, but Robert of Torigni wrote that her father was a forester from the Pays de Caux and that Duke Richard I of Normandy (pictured bottom left) went out hunting and stopped at the forester’s house. He became enamored with the forester’s wife, Seinfreda (née De Crepon), but she was virtuous and suggested that he court her unmarried sister, Gunnor De Crepon, instead. Gunnor became his mistress, and her family rose to prominence. Gunnor, like Duke Richard, was of Viking descent, being part Danish by blood. Richard finally married her to legitimize their children.

Gunnor’s brother, Herfast de Crepon, was identified by Historian David C. Douglas as the same Arfast involved in a December 1022 heresy trial at the church of St. Croix, Orléans, before King Robert II of France. At the trial of several canons accused of neo-Manichaeism, Arfast testified that, although uninfluenced by their heresy, he pretended to share their beliefs to gain knowledge that could be used to denounce them. Public sentiment was so inflamed against the heresy that the king was forced to station Queen Constance (Robert and Constance in their crypt below) at the church door to prevent the crowd from immediately killing the heretics. On their conviction, the majority were taken out of the church and burned. Arfast then retired as a monk to the Abbey of Saint-Père-en-Vallée at Chartres, to which he donated land. Gunnor and her children, Richard II of Normandy and Robert, archbishop of Rouen, similarly made donations to this abbey.

Arfast founded one of the greatest Norman aristocratic families. He was the father of Osbern, the steward under two of the dukes of Normandy, and another son named Ranulf. His grandchildren included William FitzOsbern, 1st Earl of Hereford, and Osbern FitzOsbern, the Bishop of Exeter.

There is no clarity on how King Gorm’s son ended up being the father-in-law of a forester in Normandy, so that he could provide the dubious connection between a second set of British Kings, and Adam and Eve. This appears to be another genealogical reach of the attempt to prove descent. The chart shows Gunnor’s (born 936) father as being Herbastus (born 932, four years earlier), who was actually her brother, not her father.

More in the next edition on Richard II’s line.

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ANCESTRY- ALL MY WIVES HAD THE SAME NAME

I happened to catch a reel of an old Bonanza clip in which it was revealed that, in the fictional universe, Ben Cartwright’s three sons had three different mothers. While all were deceased before the show began, they revealed that they passed as follows:
1) Elizabeth Stoddard (Adam’s mother): Died shortly after giving birth to Adam. 2) Inger Borgstrom (Hoss’s mother): Killed by an arrow during an Indian attack while traveling west. 3) Marie DeMarigny (Little Joe’s mother): Died from a riding accident after falling off a horse.

Fictional sons and mothers are pictured below. I thought to myself, what are the odds of a man in the 1800’s marrying three women and them all dying after having one child? According to Google, the answer is 1 in a million.

That reminded me of an early client who wanted to fire us, because there was no way his great-great-grandfather, Bill Ledbetter, would have married three women all named Mary Jane. We shared the marriage certificates, and he confirmed that they were correct; we continued. I pointed out that his ancestor was a smart man, since he could never get in trouble for calling his subsequent wives by the predecessor’s name.

I wondered what the odds were of a man in the 1800s marrying three women all named Mary Jane.

Given that Mary and Jane were the most dominant names of the 1800s, the odds of a man marrying three different women with that specific combination are remarkably high—far higher than they would be today.

While exact “odds” depend on the specific region and decade, here is the statistical breakdown:
1. The Popularity Factor
In the 19th century, a tiny handful of names covered the majority of the population.
The “Mary” Monarchy: In Regency London, approximately 19.2% of all women were named Mary. In the U.S., it was the undisputed #1 name for the entire century.
The “Jane” Presence: Jane was consistently among the top 10 names throughout the Victorian era.
The Concentration: Just five names (Mary, Elizabeth, Ann, Sarah, and Jane) accounted for over 60% of the female population in many areas.

1. The Frequency of Remarriage High mortality rates in the 1800s meant that marrying three times was not an extreme anomaly. If a man outlived two wives, he was drawing from a very small “naming pool” for his third. Random Probability: If 1 in 5 women were named Mary, the mathematical odds of picking a “Mary” three times in a row purely by chance would be roughly 1 in 125. The “Mary Jane” Compound: While “Mary Jane” as a single hyphenated name became more popular in the mid-20th century, the combination of first name Mary and middle name Jane was extremely common in the 1800s.
William “Bill” Ledbetter was born on August 9, 1834, in Alabama. By the time William was in his 20s, he was living in Union, Illinois. He worked as a farmer all his life and made sorghum molasses as part of his work. At the age of 19, Bill married 19-year-old Mary Jane Fairless on January 12, 1854, in Union, IL. Together, they had one child, Andrew “Jack” Jackson Ledbetter. Mary Jane Fairless may have died in childbirth or shortly after that.

Four years later, at 24, William married 16-year-old Mary Jane Asberry on February 27, 1859, in Jackson, IL. Together, they had six children. As of 1870, they farmed in Kincaid, Jackson, IL, and were worth $350. They had six children together. Mary Jane Asberry’s death is unknown.

After Mary Jane Asberry’s death, William, at the age of 40, married his 3rd wife, 31-year-old Mary Jane Parigeon, on June 16, 1875, in Jackson, IL. Mary Jane was born on January 24, 1844, in Brownsville, Jackson, IL. Mary Jane Parigeon was the widow of James Ward from her first marriage and of her second marriage, the widow of Civil War victim John Bailey. As of 1880, William was a farmer, caring for five of his children and five stepchildren from Ward and Bailey. By 1900, Mary claimed to have given birth to 13 children, of whom only 6 survived. William and Mary Jane #3 had three children together.

On July 11, 1907, William died in Kinkaid, Jackson, IL, at 72. William’s gravestone picture is adjacent. Mary died in 1918, but her date of death wasn’t added to the stone, or she was buried elsewhere.

This was the same client who had a Daniel Boone story that we shared in 2024: DANIEL BOONE

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ANCESTRY- THE HARVEST IN KING ROBERT II’S TIME

Fragment (single leaf) of a Speculum Viriginum ms., late 13th or early 14th century. The illustration showing the “Three Conditions of Woman”, viz., virgins, widows, and married wives, in a harvest allegory; the virgins reap a hundredfold, the widows sixtyfold, the wives thirtyfold.

Bonn, Rheinisches Landesmuseum.

 

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ANCESTRY- MORE FALLING AND MORE PRESIDENTS

I mentioned in the last edition that my brother, although very coordinated, always falls into something, which reminded me of his most interesting fall. When he was a teenager, his best friend’s dad was a cameraman for ABC, a rare profession. Since he was from Georgia, he was called Peaches. He filmed many Super Bowls, the Olympics, and many prestigious events.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford was visiting the balloon festival in our little town in Orange County, and Peaches had told his son and my brother that if they went to the rally, he would try to film them from the ABC helicopter hovering over the park.

They were standing on a viewing platform when President Ford walked by, and the crowd surged forward. Since my brother was against the ropes, next to the procession, he was forcefully bent over the rope, and in trying to catch himself, his hands came down on President Ford’s shoulders. The Secret Service promptly pushed him back up into the crowd.

My brother made it into the evening news, but that footage has been lost to time. I did find a picture of John Wayne with Ford (above), as he’d come up for the rally, as he lived nearby in Newport Beach. I believe the news networks were hoping that, instead of my brother, Ford would fall, since he had been tagged as clumsy because of a couple of missteps on the steps of Air Force One.

The only picture I have of a relative with the president is my nephew’s graduation from the USAF Academy (below). They rotate the president, vice president, and secretary of defense (now the secretary of war) through the three academies (Army, Navy, Air Force), and, with a 33% chance, his graduating class ended up with President Trump. Whether you like him or not, you had to give him his due that day, as he shook hands, saluted, and spoke to all 998 graduates. Not many men in their 70s could shake that many hands without being sore, but of course, politicians get a lot of practice!

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ANCESTRY- KEY WEST COCONUTS

The Key West Coconuts were a professional baseball team in Key West, Florida, active around 1930. One of their players, Roosevelt Sands, was almost recruited to play Major League Baseball by the same man who recruited Jackie Robinson a few years later.

From a researcher- At one point in the early 1900s, there were a few hundred amateur baseball teams represented in Key West; there were cigar company teams, fruit company teams, you name it, they had a team. It was quite an amazing time in Key West sports, and I’m not even getting into all the major league teams that stopped over on their way to Cuba, occasionally playing exhibition games against local all-star teams, including the New York Yankees with Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig. Most people on the island didn’t know that Kermit ‘Shine’ Forbes actually played two seasons in the Negro League. Baseball was the pre-eminent sports diversion on the island between 1890 and World War II.

Here is the legend to the picture: Key West Coconuts, c. 1930. Kneeling: Pedro Surrey, Richard, and Charles Williams. Back Row: Cecil Bain Sr., Charles Storr, Roosevelt Sands Sr., Eugene Smith, George Dean.

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ANCESTRY- MANGLING CORN

At age fourteen, on the farm, while loading corn into the corn crib (a mechanical device that carries corn up the side of the corn crib and into a storage loft), my dad got his leg stuck in the automatic ladder (while kicking the corn back into the ladder). You can see in the picture the elevator slats where the corn would sneak out of the ladder, and his pant legs were grabbed by the elevator, being torn up his leg with no way to escape. His little brother, eight, heard the screaming, jumped onto the roof of the Model A powering the corncrib, reached down to the dashboard, and shut off the ignition.

They took him to the hospital, and the initial examining doctor said that my dad’s leg was so badly mangled that they said he would never walk again. They took him to Dr. Dolan in Anamosa, Iowa, where the doctor set the leg using a new method he had learned only the week before in Chicago. This involved pinning his legs using the Rogers and Anderson casting method. He had only practiced the method on a horse.

He had to do extensive skin grafts from the other leg. Three months later, Dad was walking again without a limp. If the doctor had not learned the new operation, he would have had no option but to amputate the leg.

My dad had hoped his teenage injury would keep him out of the draft, but six years later, he was marching around Camp Pendleton with the USMC. As an adult scouter and in his later years, he hiked all over the Sierra and climbed 45 of the 50 highest points in the United States. At 65, he climbed Half Dome with my brother and me, so his scarred legs had put in a lot of miles after the accident.

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ANCESTRY- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY

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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!

 

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