Genealogist- Newsletter- June 28, 2025

29 Jun Genealogist- Newsletter- June 28, 2025

GENEALOGIST- MORE ON THE SMITHERS OF HUNTSVILLE

In the last edition, I shared my Smither ancestor’s store accounts book, John Smither, which showed Sam Houston’s debts, and that our client, who is Houston’s second cousin five times removed, paid off Sam’s debt.

As a genealogist, I received a copy of the Smither account book from James Patton, the long-time Walker County Clerk, who found the ledger amidst the many stacks of books and papers in his office when my oldest daughter and I stopped by to meet him.

James was ever the gentleman and spent some time chatting about the early days of Huntsville and the Smither family’s contributions. He shared that the Gibbs and Smither families were two of the most prominent families in Huntsville. When I asked more about that, I saw that he was choosing his words carefully to try not to create any offense, and in his East Texas drawl said, “the Gibbs were very, very generous, and how do I say it, let’s just say the Smithahs were just plain cheap”.

I assured him I was not offended, as nothing was left to me as a descendant of the oldest son, who had stayed in MS and never moved to TX. He then went on to point out that an exception was Ms. Juliette Ella Smither (pictured), my first cousin, four times removed, a schoolteacher who donated her home to Huntsville to become the Geriatric Hospital and is part of the current Walker County complex (pictured below).

I met James again some 10 years later when we toured the Gibbs-Howell House and the Walker County Museum, where I discovered a picture of my 3x great-grandparents, which can be seen at Gibbs Powell House. If you are traveling northwest of Houston, it’s worth a visit.

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GENEALOGIST- YOU HAVE A CALL ON THE SPIRIT PHONE

I have visited Thomas Edison’s West Orange, NJ lab, and his home in Llewelyn Park, the recreated Menlo Park lab (photo of original below) in Greenfield Village, MI, and his winter home in Fort Myers, FL. I am not a science junkie, but the enormity of this man’s contribution cannot be overstated.

Of course, science requires funding, as every successful experiment or potential product for commercial use typically follows hundreds, if not thousands, of failures. Edison made his money primarily through the sale and licensing of his inventions, as well as by creating and managing companies related to his inventions. He was a prolific inventor, holding over 1,000 patents, and a successful businessman, marketing his inventions and building companies such as the Edison Electric Light Company.

One invention he worked on could have been handy for genealogists- The “Spirit Phone”: Edison was interested in the idea of communicating with the deceased. He worked on a theoretical “spirit phone” or “death machine” that he believed could detect and potentially record vibrations from “personality units,” which he theorized persisted after death. While a working prototype has never been found, this remains a fascinating and unusual concept attributed to the famous inventor.
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Edison died in 1931, and his posthumous memoir, The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, was published in 1948. According to Tech Times, the final chapter of that book included the inventor’s designs for a “spirit phone.” That chapter, however, was never published in English. It had been removed from the original text before publication. In its absence, scholars and scientists believed Edison’s statements about creating technology to communicate with ghosts were his odd way of making a joke or trying to pull a fast one on the public.

But that chapter wasn’t removed from the book entirely. It was never edited out of the French translation, and in 2015, Edison’s true beliefs about the next plane of existence were brought to the attention of French readers via a book titled Le Royaume de l’Au-dela (The Kingdom of the Afterlife). Radio personality and philosopher Philippe Baudouin, who wrote the preface to the book, said that Edison made a deal with an audio engineer named William Walter Dinwiddie in which the first of the two to die “would try to send a message to the survivor from beyond.” Baudouin said that the chapter reveals that Edison “imagined being able to record the voice of another being, to be able to make audible that which is n’t-the voice of the dead.”

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THE GENEALOGIST- DANCESTORS UNCOVERS THE AFFLECK STORY

You can see the above inquiry that came through from Jen Affleck. Not being up to speed on celebrities, I found out from my daughters that Jen Affleck is a Bravo celebrity. There was some drama on the show that you can read about below.

I texted Jen and asked if, in exchange for figuring it out for free, she would put in a good word for us.

Here was her response: Oh yes, I would be happy to! I could give you guys a shout-out on social media, or if we happen to be related, I would love her to come on the show and show how she proved it in a funny scene.

It’s been a big joke/talking point of the show this season. My husband had been told that growing up he is distantly related but never confirmed. Then when we did reality tv the media ran with it. So, we want to actually get to the bottom of it and know for sure.

Our researcher then worked on it and traced both lines back to the 1600s in Scotland, where they both carried the Auchinleck name, which later evolved into Affleck. I shared that with Jen and told her that I could have my researcher in Edinburgh work on the connection.

However, I never heard back. That could be for a variety of reasons, as growing up in Southern California, and having family members in the entertainment industry, celebrities get pulled in a lot of directions, or they could have decided to drop the issue, or that being related in the 1600s was not close enough to mess with the story, as you can see how they wrapped it up below in an article from Yahoo entertainment.

I believe, though, that I discovered the real reason, which traces back to 2014, when controversy arose when Ben Affleck’s family history was featured in an episode of Finding Your Roots, which you can read about further below.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Jen Affleck (sitting far left in picture) and husband Zac Affleck are finally revealing whether he is related to Ben Affleck.

While season one was airing, Jen’s claims that her husband is a distant cousin once removed from the Oscar-winning director and his brother, Casey Affleck, became a debated topic, with some sources claiming that Zac had no ties to the Hollywood stars.

However, Jen and Zac are settling the debate once and for all in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. So, is Zac related to Ben? Apparently, not.

Zac denied having any known connection to Ben in a discussion with Jen, who insisted that her in-laws told her they were. “I’ve heard that as a joke,” Zac clarified. “No one’s ever claimed to have some relationship with him.

“I have no idea if I am or am not related to Ben Affleck,” Zac adds in a confessional. “That had been a running joke in my family. It had never been something serious. So, when Jen started telling people that, I did tell her, ‘I don’t think you should say that anymore. I think that’s probably gonna backfire.’”

Back while season one of the show was airing, in September 2024, Jen told People that while she has “never met” the Good Will Hunting actor, her father-in-law has. “Zac’s dad has [met them], when [Ben] was very little,” she said. “I’m hoping to meet him one day, too!” However, later that month, a source familiar with the Utah Afflecks told People that any claims that they are related to Ben and Casey Affleck are “absolutely not true.”

“There’s no relationship. I just don’t think that’s very fair about that either,” the source explained, noting that genealogy is very important in the Mormon faith.

Ben Affleck **appeared on the PBS genealogy series Finding Your Roots in 2014. When told that an ancestor had been a slave owner in Georgia, Affleck responded: “God. It gives me kind of a sagging feeling to see a biological relationship to that. But, you know, there it is, part of our history … We tend to separate ourselves from these things by going like, ‘It’s just dry history, and it’s all over now’.”

Leaked emails from the 2015 Sony email hacking scandal showed that, after filming, Affleck felt uncomfortable about the segment, which was not included in the final broadcast. The show’s host, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., stated: “We focused on what we felt were the most interesting aspects of his ancestry.”

An internal investigation by PBS concluded that Affleck had exerted “improper influence” over the editorial process and that the producers of the show, including Gates, had violated PBS standards by improperly withholding information. The show was temporarily postponed, resuming after a fact-checker and an “independent genealogist” were added to the show’s staff. Affleck’s episode was removed from the show’s online archive.

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GENEALOGIST- GIRAFFES AND BANKING

During our recent trip to Africa, we discovered that there are three distinct types of giraffes: the Reticulated (the tallest), Masai, and Rothschild. I knew the Rothschilds were a famous banking family, so how did they get a giraffe species named after them?

Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Baron de Rothschild (1868 – 1937) was a British banker, politician, zoologist, and soldier who was a member of the Rothschild family. As a Zionist leader, he was presented with the Balfour Declaration, which pledged British support for a Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine. Rothschild was the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1925 to 1926.

Lionel was the great-great-grandson of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a German-Jewish banker and the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty. Referred to as a “founding father of international finance”, Rothschild was ranked seventh on the Forbes magazine list of “The Twenty Most Influential Businessmen of All Time” in 2005.

At the age of seven, he declared that he would run a zoological museum. As a child, he collected insects, butterflies, and other animals. Among his pets at the family home in Tring Park were kangaroos and exotic birds. As a boy, Rothschild was once dragged off his horse and assaulted by workmen while on a hunting ride near Tring, an experience he attributed to antisemitism.

He attended Magdalene College at Cambridge, where zoology was amongst his classes. In 1889, after leaving Cambridge after two years, he was required to enter the family banking business to study finance. He reluctantly went to work at the family bank, N M Rothschild & Sons, in London. He worked there from 1889 to 1908. He lacked any interest or ability in the financial profession, but it was not until 1908, at the age of 40, that he was finally allowed to give it up. However, his parents established a zoological museum as compensation and covered the costs of expeditions all over the world to seek out animals.

Although Rothschild himself travelled and collected in Europe and North Africa for many years, his work and health concerns limited his range, and beginning while at Cambridge he employed others (explorers, professional collectors, and residents) to collect for him in remote and little-known parts of the world. He also hired taxidermists, a librarian, and, most importantly, professional scientists to work with him on curating and writing up the resulting collections.

At its largest, Rothschild’s collection included 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 birds’ eggs, 2,250,000 butterflies, and 30,000 beetles, as well as thousands of specimens of mammals, reptiles, and fishes. They formed the most extensive zoological collection ever amassed by a private individual.

The Rothschild giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi), a subspecies characterized by having five ossicones instead of the usual two, was named after him. Another 153 insects, 58 birds, 17 mammals, three fish, three spiders, two reptiles, one millipede, and one worm also carry his name.

Rothschild opened his private museum in 1892. It housed one of the largest natural history collections in the world and was open to the public. In 1932, he was forced to sell the vast majority of his bird collection to the American Museum of Natural History after a former mistress had blackmailed him.

Upon his death in 1937, his museum and all its contents were bequeathed in his will to the British Museum (of which the Natural History Museum, London, was then a part), the greatest accession the institution has ever received. The Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum at Tring is now a division of the Natural History Museum.

He is pictured riding a giant tortoise and with his famed zebra carriage, which he drove to Buckingham Palace to demonstrate the tame character of zebras to the public.

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GENEALOGIST- MORE ON THE J. ADDISON SMITH FAMILY’S DOINGS

John Addison and Mary Freelund Smith’s daughter, Mary Freeland “Mamie,” was born about 1874 in MD. Mamie married Thomas Horace Dudley (pictured), a 25-year-old Englishman, at the age of 18 on July 6, 1892, in Bakersfield, CA.

It turns out that Dudley was already married on April 20, 1890, in London, England, to Eva Marguerite Cavenel, the daughter of Armand Cavenel, a gentleman. They may be the reason that Dudley ended up in America.

Dudley came to Bakersfield, California, in 1889. There is a 1891 news article referring to T.H. Dudley, Bakersfield’s wife, staying in Ventura after a holiday, but no further record of her has been discovered. Dudley was initially engaged in the drugstore business, operating the Kern Valley Pharmacy, and later transitioned into the real estate and insurance industries. Dudley was also a partner in the mining and real estate firm of Davis & Dudley. Mary had travelled from Bakersfield to Santa Monica on July 16, 1896, and then she was reported as quite ill on July 21, 1896, with slim hopes of recovery, and died later that day at age 22. The legend was that she died from a horse kick.

On September 8, 1896, Dudley formed the Anglo-California Estates with offices in Bakersfield and London. As mentioned in the previous edition, his father-in-law, J. Addison Smith, represented the firm in London and Sacramento.

In 1896, Dudley moved to Santa Monica and engaged in the real estate, insurance, and auction business (with John B. Proctor) as Proctor & Dudley. Dudley has been president since the organization’s inception. Dudley’s partnership with Proctor was dissolved on November 16, 1898. Dudley likewise had significant business interests in the city of Los Angeles and was connected with the Merchants Trust Company. Dudley was prominent in fraternal circles, belonging to the Masons and the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks. Dudley was a member of the State Board of Agriculture.

Dudley married for the third time at age 31, the 39-year-old widow Matilda Brooks Ryan, on February 13, 1899, in Santa Monica.

Matilda Brooks Ryan Dudley was born in July 1860 in San Francisco, daughter of Francis Wycoff Brooks and Matilda Smith. Francis had engaged in the wholesale paper business.

“When the reports of the discovery of gold in California became current in the east, he joined the rush to the new El Dorado. After gaining some experience in the mines, he, along with his two brothers, Horace and George Brooks, entered the wholesale paper business on Sansome Street in San Francisco. He was a vigilante who made significant contributions to establishing law and order in San Francisco during its early days. The firm did a prosperous business for about twenty years, its field of operation extending throughout the state. The brothers, individually, acquired significant property interests in the city.

More in the next edition on Dudley, it gets more interesting….

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GENEALOGISTS- WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SMART GENES?

After being the last person in America to see Oppenheimer, while on a 30-hour flight to Africa, I wondered what had become of his descendants. Between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, there should have been some smart genes percolating up somewhere along the line.

His daughter Toni was a victim of polio and died by suicide at 32. His son, Peter, at 81, still lives in seclusion in New Mexico, where he works as a carpenter. Oppenheimer’s grandson Charles leads the Oppenheimer Foundation. His granddaughter, Dr. Dorothy Oppenheimer Vanderford, who works in the nuclear field, apparently inherited their grandparents’ science genes.

Here are excerpts from an interview she gave after the success of the movie-

“You know, I didn’t know that so many people were even aware of (J. Robert) Oppenheimer or the history of the building of the atomic bomb,” says Vanderford, who works at the Nevada National Security Site and has called Boulder City home since 1998. “It’s really exciting to see how much public interest there is in watching this movie.”

Vanderford, one of three children of Oppenheimer’s son, Peter, was born in 1973, more than six years after the death of the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb.” But that hasn’t stopped her from becoming one of his leading proponents.

“This has been almost surreal,” Vanderford says. “I spent my life being under the radar, so to be out in the public talking is unusual and a bit of a challenge for me.”

The advocacy for the man she never knew began in earnest when she started working with Charles’ “Oppenheimer Project”. The organization is designed to promote their grandfather’s legacy and the advancement of nuclear energy, including his desire to cooperate with other nations, which landed him in hot water during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

“I’m not really in a position to give juicy tidbits that no one ever knew before,” Vanderford says in her unofficial role as an Oppenheimer spokeswoman. “But his legacy is so significant that I can certainly talk about how important the work he did was and how important it still is today.”

The family tends to take a hands-off approach to projects about the famed scientist. They weren’t involved in the production of “Oppenheimer”. They had little to do with its source material: “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

“Oppenheimer” follows the biography pretty closely, so there were no big revelations, Vanderford says. She was able to appreciate it as a movie and not be distracted by the family connections.

“Partly because I didn’t know him. I think that probably helps,” she says. “In some ways, he’s a character. People see him as sort of mythological. So I can separate the real person from what’s being shown on the screen.

Then there was the amount of time the movie spent on Oppenheimer’s extramarital relations. “I’m not sure that all the information about (his) affairs was accurate,” she adds, “but I think it’s perfectly fine to portray a complex person on the screen. He was complex. That’s fair.”

If anything, the movie has brought her family closer. Her father didn’t often talk about Oppenheimer when she was growing up, but that has changed. “It’s been a form of family bonding, really, talking with my parents, both my mom and my dad, and my siblings,” she says. “We talked a lot more lately.”

As for what she wants audiences to know about her grandfather, Vanderford says, “I like to think of him as a hero, because he did his duty and his service to his country. He led this enormous scientific project, not just because he was brilliant, but because he could get all these different people together to get a job done in a short amount of time to serve a bigger purpose.”

“He was treated poorly,” she says of Oppenheimer’s later years, including the 1954 hearing over whether to revoke his security clearance that forms one of the main arcs of the movie. “But he still kept talking about the values that were important to him, about open communication and sharing of information. So, I tend to see him as heroic because of his ability to persevere and speak his mind, even in the face of severe resistance.”

Here’s a link to an interview with Charles and Dorothy:
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/oral-histories/charles-oppenheimer-and-dorothy-vanderfords-interview/

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GENEALOGISTS- 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.

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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!