ANCESTRY- CHOOSING TEXAS; A LEGEND OF CATTLE, COMANCHES AND A PROMISE KEPT

One of my client’s 6th Great Uncles, Oliver “Bob” Loving (pictured below) was born in 1812 in KY. In 1843, with his brother and his brother-in-law, he moved to the Republic of Texas with their families. In Texas, Loving received 640 acres of land in three patents spread through three counties Collin, Dallas, and Parker. He farmed and, to feed his growing family, hauled freight in his early years as a Texan.

By 1855, he moved with his family to the future Pleasant, Palo Pinto County, Texas, where he ran a country store and ranched on Keechi Creek. He was quite prosperous and worth over $37,000 as of 1860. By 1857, he owned a thousand acres of land. To market his large herd, he drove them out of Texas and in that same year he entrusted his nineteen-year-old son, Joseph, to drive his and his neighbors’ cattle to Illinois up the Shawnee Trail. The drive made a profit of $36 a head and encouraged Loving to repeat the trek successfully the next year with John Durkee.

On August 29, 1860, together with John Dawson, he started a herd of 1,500 toward Denver, Colorado to feed miners in the area. They crossed the Red River, traveled to the Arkansas River, and followed it to Pueblo, Colorado, where the cattle wintered. In the spring, Loving sold his cattle for gold and tried to leave for Texas. However, the American Civil War had broken out and the Union authorities prevented him from returning to the South until Kit Carson and others interceded for him. During the war, he was commissioned to provide beef to the Confederate States Army and drive cattle along the Mississippi River. When the war ended, the Confederate government reportedly owed him between $100,000 and $250,000. To make matters worse, the usual cattle markets were inadequate for the available supply.

In 1866, having heard about the probable need for cattle at Fort Sumner, New Mexico/ They hoped that demand for beef from settlers, soldiers stationed at military outposts across New Mexico, and Navajos recently placed on reservations near Fort Sumner would make the drive profitable. With 18 cowpunchers, they brought 2,000 head of cattle to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Over 8,000 Navajo had been interned at the Bosque Redondo reservation under the control of the fort, but due to the poor conditions on the reservation for agriculture and inadequate planning by the US authorities for provisions, the demand for new food supplies became urgent (see picture below). Goodnight and Loving received $0.08/pound for the steers in the herd, although they were unable to interest the government agent in 800 stocker cattle. Goodnight returned to Texas with about $12,000 in gold to buy more cattle.

Their route later became known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail. The two cattlemen sold beef to the army for $12,000 in gold, and then Loving drove the stock cattle on to Colorado and sold them near Denver, while Goodnight returned to Weatherford, the seat of Parker County, Texas, with the gold and also for a second herd. The two men were reunited in southern New Mexico, where they went into partnership with John Chisum at his ranch in the Bosque Grande, about forty miles south of Fort Sumner. They spent the winter of 1866-67 there and supplied cattle from the ranch to Fort Sumner and Santa Fe.

In the spring of 1867, Loving and Goodnight returned to Texas, ready to start a new drive. This third drive was slowed by heavy rains and Native American threats. Loving went ahead of the herd for contract bidding, taking only Bill Wilson, a trusted scout, with him. Although he told Goodnight that he would travel at night through Native American Indian country, he pushed ahead during the day. In a Comanche attack, he was seriously wounded at the now-named Loving Bend on the Pecos River.

The weakened Loving sent Wilson back to the herd, eluded the Indians, and, with the aid of Mexican traders, reached Fort Sumner, only to die there of gangrene, when he refused amputation. Before he died on September 25, 1867,

Goodnight assured him that his wish to be buried in Texas would be carried out. After a temporary burial at Fort Sumner, while Goodnight drove the herd on to Colorado, Goodnight had Loving’s body exhumed and returned to Texas. Stories differ as to who accompanied the body back to Weatherford, but he was reburied there in Greenwood Cemetery on March 4, 1868 (see below).

ANCESTRY- TEDDY’S GREATEST SACRIFICE

At least 19 U.S. presidents have had children (Jefferson, JQ Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, W. H. Harrison, Tyler, Taylor, Lincoln, A. Johnson, Grant, Hayes, B. Harrison, Cleveland, T. Roosevelt, Taft, F. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, G.H.W. Bush, and Biden) who served in the military during a time of war. This tradition stretches from the Revolutionary War to the post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We learned at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library that all four of his sons volunteered for World War I. His youngest son, Quentin Roosevelt (pictured above), was a pilot who was shot down and killed in action over France in 1918.

Quentin had become a pilot in the 95th Aero Squadron, part of the 1st Pursuit Group. Roosevelt had one confirmed kill of a German aircraft during the German spring offensive, which he shot down on July 10, 1918. Four days later, in a massive aerial engagement at the commencement of the Second Battle of the Marne, he was himself shot down behind German lines.
Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, commander of the 94th Aero Squadron (also known as the “Hat-in-the-Ring” Squadron), in his memoirs described Roosevelt’s character as a soldier and pilot in the following words:

As President Roosevelt’s son, he had rather a difficult task to fit himself in with the democratic style of living which is necessary in the intimate life of an aviation camp. Every one who met him for the first time expected him to have the airs and superciliousness of a spoiled boy. This notion was quickly lost after the first glimpse one had of Quentin. Gay, hearty and absolutely square in everything he said or did, Quentin Roosevelt was one of the most popular fellows in the group. We loved him purely for his own natural self.

He was reckless to such a degree that his commanding officers had to caution him repeatedly about the senselessness of his lack of caution. His bravery was so notorious that we all knew he would either achieve some great spectacular success or be killed in the attempt. Even the pilots in his own flight would beg him to conserve himself and wait for a fair opportunity for a victory. But Quentin would merely laugh away all serious advice.

Quentin’s plane, a Nieuport 28 (pictured below with him at the contols) was shot down in aerial combat over Chamery, a hamlet of Coulonges-en-Tardenois (now Coulonges-Cohan).

He was killed by two machine gun bullets which struck him in the head. The German military buried him with full battlefield honors. Since the plane had crashed so near the front lines, they used two pieces of basswood saplings, bound together with wire from his Nieuport, to fashion a cross for his grave. For propaganda purposes, they made a postcard of the dead pilot and his plane. However, this was met with shock in Germany, which still held Theodore Roosevelt in high respect and was impressed that a former president’s son died on active duty.

ANCESTRY- PAPA, THE PIRATE PRESIDENT

In the last edition, I covered my pirate ancestor Jan Janszoon.

In 1619, the Salé Rovers (a group of Barbary pirates) declared the port of Salé an independent republic free from the Sultan of Morocco. They set up a government that consisted of 14 pirate leaders and elected Janszoon as their President. He also served as the Grand Admiral, known as Murat Reis, of their navy. The Salé fleet totaled about eighteen ships, all small because of the very shallow harbor entrance.

After an unsuccessful siege of the city, the Sultan of Morocco acknowledged its semi-autonomy. Contrary to popular belief, Sultan Zidan Abu Maali did not reclaim sovereignty over Salé (see picture above of Salé in the 1600s) and appoint Janszoon as governor in 1624; rather, he acknowledged Janszoon’s election as president by formally appointing him as his ceremonial governor.

Under Janszoon’s leadership, business in Salé thrived. The main sources of income of this republic remained piracy and its by-trades, shipping and dealing in stolen property. Historians have noted Janszoon’s intelligence and bravery, which were evident in his leadership. He was forced to find an assistant to keep up, and hired a fellow countryman from the Netherlands, Mathys van Bostel Oosterlinck, who served as his Vice-Admiral.

Janszoon became very wealthy from his income as pirate admiral, payments for anchorage and other harbor dues, and the brokerage of stolen goods. The political climate in Salé worsened toward the end of 1627, so Janszoon moved his family and his entire operation back to semi-independent Algiers.

Janszoon became bored by his new official duties from time to time and again sailed away on a pirate adventure. In 1622, Janszoon and his crews sailed into the English Channel with no particular plan but to try their luck there. When they ran low on supplies, they docked at the port of Veere, Zeeland, under the Moroccan flag, claiming diplomatic privileges based on his official role as Admiral of Morocco (a very loose term in the context of North African politics).

The Dutch authorities could not deny the two ships access to Veere because several peace treaties and trade agreements were in effect between the Sultan of Morocco and the Dutch Republic at the time. During Janszoon’s anchorage there, the Dutch authorities brought his Dutch first wife and children to the port to try to persuade him to give up piracy. Such strategies utterly failed with the man.

While in Morocco, Janszoon worked to secure the release of Dutch captives from other pirates and prevent them from being sold into slavery. Janszoon was fluent in several languages, and while in Algiers he contributed to the establishment of the Franco-Moroccan Treaty of 1631 between French King Louis XIII and Sultan Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik II

In 1627, Janszoon captured the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel and held it for five years, using it as a base for raiding expeditions. The Barbary pirates, under his command, flew an Ottoman flag over the island. Slaving raids were made from Lundy by the Barbary pirates, and captured Europeans were held on Lundy before being sent to Algiers to be sold as slaves. More on his slaving raids in the next edition.

Janszoon’s name had morphed into recognition of his first base of power, Salé, so he became, in Dutch, Jan Van Salee, which was the surname that his sons Anthony and Abraham went by.

ANCESTRY- HARPS, HEAVY METAL, AND HYPER-IDENTICAL DNA

While attending the Estes Park Long Peak Scotsfest and Military Tattoo, we got to watch some fun musicians. One of them was two sets of twins, the Harp Twins and the Volfgang Twins. They are both sets of identical twins. The Harp Twins, Twins have been at it longer, but somewhere along the way they met the death-metal Volfgang Twins (Dromil and Dromal), started performing together, and, after several years, married (termed a quaternary marriage). Twin researchers estimate that only about 300 such marriages have ever occurred worldwide.

In the picture below, you can see that one of my friends used AI to change my outfit from shorts and a T-shirt to a proper Scotsman’s outfit. I actually met the Volfgangs first at the back entrance to the performance and asked that stupid question that goes through every guy’s brain. Do you ever worry about drinking too much one evening and confusing your wife and your sister-in-law? Their answer was “we don’t drink!” Good idea!

I was curious, but thankfully ran out of time to ask them, “When one of the couples fell in love, did the other couple do the same just as easily, due to identical DNA and pheromones?”

The scientific answer is that because identical twins share the same DNA, their MHC MHC determined baseline odor is virtually indistinguishable to humans. In famous “sweaty T-shirt studies”, strangers cannot tell the difference between the scent of identical twins. Human testers often mistake two duplicate shirts from the same person as belonging to two identical twins.

I asked one of the Harp twins if they’d ever taken a DNA test, and she said she never would, as Dr. Phil has identical twins who took tests with the major testing companies and got completely different results.

Actually, Dr. Phil doesn’t have identical twins. His oldest son married an identical triplet, and they took 23andMe tests, which revealed ethnic differences that caused some excitement. 23andMe responded as follows: They noted that their system uses different analytical thresholds (ranging from a strict “conservative” 90% confidence level to a loose “speculative” 50% confidence level). At a looser, more speculative level, the software is essentially forced to guess or choose among highly similar geographic regions when reading a person’s raw DNA data. So, whatever that means.

While we’ve all heard that Twins run in families, it’s not always the case; for example, when a set of identical twin brothers has children with a set of identical twin sisters, their odds of having twins of any type are the same as any other couple. However, because the children born to the separate couples are legally first cousins, even though both sets of parents share completely identical DNA pools, the children are genetically full siblings.

ANCESTRY- THE PIONEER MINER WHO WAS IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE

One of my mother-in-law’s immigrant ancestors was Joseph Needham, whom I wrote about his Civil War sufferings last September Joseph

Joseph had a brother, John, born in 1819, who also came to the US and must have gained experience in England as a miner, as he went to Columbiana, Ohio, while Joseph went to Michigan. In Ohio, he worked as a coal miner.

He is recorded in the newspaper articles above and below as a ‘59er (in Colorado for the 1859 Gold and Silver boom), but he must have got there a little later, since he was recorded in OH in the July 1860 census, or the household thought he was en route and added him to the count.

This entry in the town’s history indicates that in the summer of 1860, a formal survey and platting of Grass Valley (which comprises a large portion of modern-day Idaho Springs) was conducted. Historic gazetteers list John Needham as one of the recognized civil authorities and prominent property leaders during the pre-county-organization period. His real estate holdings, as noted in the article, were tied directly to these foundational town lots.

It would have taken at least 12 days by rail, boat, and stagecoach to reach Idaho Springs from OH, so theoretically he could have been in both places in the summer of 1860, but more likely it would have taken as much as 7 weeks.

The second article highlights his shipment of high-grade ore from the Grantham lode on Seaton Mountain. He didn’t just operate there; he was fully integrated into the mountain’s grid’s early development. He worked alongside iconic district operators like J.K. Womack (one of the principal owners of the original Seaton lode) and P.E. Charruand to establish the core network of horizontal “flat veins” that became the backbone of Idaho Springs’ silver and gold boom. [

He appears in the 1870 and 1880 censuses as a miner and mine owner in Idaho Springs, Clear Creek, Colorado, where he died on January 8, 1896.

Below is a map of his significant high-producing mines and the Idaho Springs Cemetery, where he can gaze at I-70 in the canyon for eternity.

ANCESTRY- THE FIRST STREAMERS

For several remarkable years in the 1830s, a small community along the present-day New Hampshire–Quebec border effectively became its own country.

The dispute originated with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which left the northern boundary of New Hampshire unclear because of conflicting interpretations of the “northwesternmost head” of the Connecticut River. Both the United States and British Canada claimed the territory, and residents sometimes faced competing tax collectors and officials from both governments.

Frustrated by the uncertainty, approximately 300 residents declared themselves the Republic of Indian Stream on July 9, 1832. They adopted a constitution, elected their own government, and declared themselves a “free, sovereign and independent state” until the international boundary could be settled.

The experiment did not last long. In 1835, mounting pressure from New Hampshire, including the threat of militia intervention, led most residents to accept New Hampshire authority. Tensions with Canadian officials continued, however, and one dispute over an unpaid hardware-store debt escalated into arrests, an armed confrontation, and a diplomatic protest to President Andrew Jackson.
By 1840, the territory had become Pittsburg, New Hampshire.

The international boundary was finally settled by the Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842, confirming the former republic as part of New Hampshire (see adjacent map).
For a brief period, however, this remote corner of New England had its own constitution, elected government, and claim to independence—one of the strangest little republics in American history.

ANCESTRY- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY

Reach out to Dancestors Genealogy. Our genealogists research, discover, and preserve your family history so those stories don’t disappear. Ancestry only gets tougher as time diminishes recall.

No one is getting any younger, and memories fade every year, eventually slipping beyond our ability to recover them. Paper gets thrown in the trash; books survive.

We offer:

Ready to embark on your family history journey?
Call Dan Nelson at 214-914-3598 and get your project started today.

GENEALOGIST- MORE ON MY SWEDISH DUTCHMEN ANCESTORS

In the last edition I wrote about my 9th Great Grandfather Claes Corneliszen Van Schouwen CLAES The information came from a book called “The Old-World Progenitors of the Wyckoff Family: a Genealogy” (see adjacent picture) is often used as the source for this particular line by descendants of the Wyckoff family. However, it turns out that the Wyckoff connection to the Van Schouwen Family does not hold up, due to the fraudulent work of a genealogist, that I shared back in June.

Pieter Claesen Wyckoff (ca. 1620 – June 30, 1694) was a prominent figure in Dutch and later English colonial Kings County, Long Island, New York. Most persons surnamed Wyckoff in North America, including many variations in spelling, can be traced to his family. Because of the work of a fraudulent genealogist (Gustave Anjou) ANJOU, it was mistakenly believed for many decades that Pieter Claesen Wyckoff was the son of Claes Cornelissen van Schouw and Margaret van der Goes.

However, in 1932, Charles Arthur Hoppin argued that Wyckoff was not their son. In 1945, William J. Hoffman reinforced Hoppin’s conclusions through his own analysis in the article “Claes Cornelissen van Schouwen Mutelaer and the Wyckoff Ancestry”, noting that “There is absolutely no evidence that Claes Cornelissen van Schouw was the father of Pieter Claesen Wyckoff, as has been repeatedly claimed. No connection between them has been found in any public record”

Fortunately, Claes’ line beyond his fictitious son Pieter Wyckoff is well documented.

Borgholm, as we mentioned in last week’s article, was a town with a Castle. Borgholm Castle was built in the 12th Century. You can see a 1634 rendering of the castle (below left). Today it is a ruin of walls, but it is still used for special events, we visited it in 2018 (below right).

GENEALOGIST- THE BUSIEST PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY IN THE LEAST BUSY PLACE

We’ve been to Teddy Roosevelt’s birthplace in NYC, home on Long Island, Inaugural site in Buffalo, and his National Park in North Dakota. We were back up north again and headed west across North Dakota to visit the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library that opened in July of this year.

We’ve been to almost all the presidential libraries, and many of the birthplaces and homes of presidents, but the TR Library had more people present than all of the people at all of the other libraries put together. This was even though western North Dakota is a long way from most Americans.

We showed up on Saturday and found out that we couldn’t get tickets that day, and so fortunately we were there for a few nights, so we bought tickets for Monday, and it was still very busy. As we visited the historical sites mentioned above, there were some side conversations with the staff about how they would have anything to put on display as all of his papers were donated to Harvard, and they wouldn’t give anything up, and the three sites had pretty much staked out what was left.

Well, not to worry, through the use of technology and AI, they have made it a highly interactive and interesting library. You could spend 3-4 hours there easily and really enjoy yourself. Now of course Teddy was not a boring president, so they had plenty to work with in terms of stories and places he’d been. We mentioned his trip to Africa in our July 2025 newsletter.
AFRICA

It is also a stunning location on a hilltop in the Badlands, with noteworthy architecture and design features.

While there you can visit his namesake national park and then head down the road to South Dakota where he’s one of the four presidents on Rushmore. PBS’s history of Mount Rushmore describes Roosevelt as the sculptor Gustav Borglum’s “great personal friend and political hero,” and notes that Borglum had met Roosevelt and campaigned for him, which didn’t hurt his chances of making the short list. As you approach Rushmore from the east, Teddy appears to be studying Lincoln (see picture above), whom he admired to the point that he wore a ring with a lock of his hair, so now they hang from a mountain for eternity!

GENEALOGIST- THE PIRATE FATHER OF THE VAN SALEE BROTHERS

So, over many editions I shared information on my 9th Great Grandfather, Anthony Van Salee and his brother Abraham. So here’s some of what we know about their father.

Jan Janszoon van Haerlem was born in Haarlem in 1570, in Holland, then a province ruled by the Habsburg monarchy. The Eighty Years War between Dutch rebels and the Spanish Empire under King Philip II had started seven years before his birth; it lasted all his life. He married and had three daughters.

In 1600, Jan Janszoon began as a Dutch privateer sailing from his home port of Haarlem, working for the state with letters of marque to harass Spanish shipping during the Eighty Years’ War. Janszoon overstepped the boundaries of his letters and found his way to the semi-independent port states of the Barbary Coast of North Africa, whence he could attack ships of every foreign state: when he attacked a Spanish ship, he flew the Dutch flag; when he attacked any other, he became an Ottoman captain and flew the crescent moon and star flag of the Turks or the flag of any of various other Mediterranean principalities. During this period, he abandoned his Dutch family

Below is a sail plan for a polacca, first built by the Barbary pirates around the 16th century. Many scholars believe the polacca was extensively used by Jan Janszoon. The ship could sail with a large crew of 75 and was armed with 24 cannons.

On May 1, 1618, 36 Algerian galleys arrived at Arrecife, Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, aiming to raid and plunder anything valuable. Led by Tabac Arraez, the pirate commander, a force of 3,000 or 5,000 men looted the island, leaving the inhabitants to seek refuge in caves. Eventually, they were besieged and captured by the Regency of Algiers, totaling 900 men, women, and children. On that day, my 10th Great Grandfather Jan Janszoon, a Dutch soldier, was also captured, and was taken to Algiers

Upon learning of the event, King Philip III of Spain ordered the Spanish navy to intercept the pirates, successfully rescuing around 200 captives. The remaining 700 were sold in Tunis and Algiers.

In Algiers, Janszoon “turned Turk”, or Muslim. Some historians speculate that the conversion was forced under penalty of death. Janszoon himself, however, tried very hard to convert his fellow Europeans who were Christian to become Muslim and was a passionate Muslim missionary.

The Ottoman Turks maintained a precarious measure of influence on behalf of their Sultan by openly encouraging the Moors to advance themselves through piracy against the European powers, which had long resented the Ottoman Empire. After Janszoon’s conversion to Islam and the ways of his captors, he sailed with the famous corsair Sulayman Rais (speculative image above), also known as Slemen Reis, who himself was a Dutchman named De Veenboer, whom Janszoon had known before his capture and who had also converted to Islam. They were accompanied by Simon de Danser. But, because Algiers had concluded peace with several European nations, it was no longer a suitable port from which to sell captured ships or their cargo. So, after Sulayman Rais was killed by a cannonball in 1619, Janszoon moved to the ancient port of Salé and began operating from it as a Barbary corsair. More on Janszoon’s time in Salé in the next edition.

GENEALOGIST- THE GLADS ON THE HILL

In the last edition, I wrote about my grandfather’s farm in Iowa. FARM
My dad told me that my grandfather had bought it from Cyrus Lamb (pictured) in 1944, who had lived on it since 1863. Even if you assumed he acquired it at the age of 21, he would have been over 100 years old when he quit farming and sold it. I was also told that my grandfather found a Civil War-era gun in the barn.

The reality was that Cyrus was born in 1863 and lived on the farm in a log cabin on the site of the house pictured in the last edition, which was built and has since burned down. Cyrus was the only child of Cyrus Lamb Sr. and Elizabeth Smith. Cyrus Sr. was killed in the Civil War, and Elizabeth married Daniel Kohl and started a new family, living on her father Daniel Smith’s farm. The Kohls moved to another farm, and Cyrus continued living with his Smith Grandparents.

The gun was a Quackenbush (see picture and article) that was mass-produced in the 1890’s through 1920’s, so a little late for the Civil War.

After Cyrus graduated from nearby Cornell College, he bought his grandparents’ farm. He married but had no children. However, Cyrus had an interesting hobby.

He farmed, of course. However, he also raised nursery stock and small fruit. What the neighborhood remembered was the flowers. After the heavy work of grain and orchard, he turned the slope into what he called Hill Crest Glad Gardens. At one time he listed about three hundred varieties of gladiolus. Dahlias followed, a handful at first, then thirty kinds. People driving the road two miles north of Morley knew the place by color before they knew it by name.

The glads are the part that still photographs well in the mind: a Jones County farm boy who came home from college, kept the Smith land in production, and then, later, filled the hill with spikes of color until the place needed a name of its own. Hill Crest was not a catalog house. It was one man’s extra work after the corn was in.

Iowa was deep in the “glad game” then. The towns of Decorah and Creston issued catalogs; Des Moines hosted Midwest shows. The three hundred named varieties Cyrus had on one farm north of Morley would have read as a serious amateur collection, not a roadside stand. Below is an illustration of the Hill Crest farmhouse with the rows of glads!

GENEALOGIST- THE FIRST LADY OF MONMOUTH: LEGEND VS. THE TRUTH

Penelope Stout is remembered as the “First Lady of Monmouth,” one of the original English settlers of Middletown, New Jersey, in 1664 with her husband Richard Stout (see the last edition). What can be documented is modest. In September 1648, as Penelope Prince, she appeared in Gravesend, New Netherland, after accusing a neighbor of milking another’s cow and then apologized. Later Middletown deeds name “Richard and wife Penelope,” including a 1670 sale and a 1690 transfer “for the Joynture of [his] Loving wife Penelope.” Richard’s will was proven 23 October 1705. After that date she disappears from the record. There is no known birth, emigration, second-marriage, or death register, and no contemporary notice of a shipwreck that fits her presence in the colony by the mid-1640s.

The legend that grew around her is far larger than those scraps. Since Samuel Smith’s 1765 History of New Jersey, tellings agree on a rough plot: a ship bound for New Amsterdam strands near Sandy Hook; the company hurries on and leaves behind a sick or injured husband and his wife; Native attackers kill the man and leave the woman for dead; she hides in a hollow tree; an older Lenape man saves her, heals her, and later returns her to the Dutch. Smith added a later scene in which the same man warns the Stouts of an attack and a canoe escape leads to peace. Rev. Oliver Hart’s version, printed by Morgan Edwards in 1792, supplied the gore—fractured skull, ruined shoulder, bowels held in by hand—plus the surnames Kent and Vanprincis, a 1620 or 1640 voyage, and the claim that she lived to 110. Later Stout descendants and county historians mixed, corrected, or inflated those two incompatible originals.

Almost every date Hart used collapses against the records. He had Richard as forty at a 1624 wedding, which would make him 121 at death; the marriage belongs around 1644. He had Penelope born in 1602, emigrated in 1620, married in 1624, and died in 1712 at 110.

The 1675 land claim, which dates the marriage to about 1644, also implies children born between about 1645 and 1669. If she married at about twenty-two, she was born about 1622–23, bore children into her forties, and was about eighty-three when widowed. Nothing after the 1705 probate confirms or denies a later death, but it forces rejection of Hart’s other dates. Smith’s “Indian war in New England” timing points at the Pequot War of 1636–37, too early for the family the land records describe.

Claims that Middletown was a Dutch hamlet of fifty families in 1648 are likewise wrong: the Monmouth Patent is 1665, and the first settlers were English.
There is no primary evidence she married anyone but Richard Stout, none that she was a Dutch baron’s daughter, and little that she was Dutch at all. She used an English name, lived in the English town of Gravesend, married an Englishman, and gave her children English names. Later writers piled on Kent, Lent, Von Printzen, Van Princis, a scalping, a drowned shipload, and a 1680 wreck—none of it sourced. Nathan Stout, Therese Seabrook, the Powers, Salter, and Stockton each shifted the beach, the number of Indians, who paid the ransom, and who hid the canoe.

Stockton’s 1896 schoolbook version, still in print in the twentieth century, added “bloodthirsty redmen” and a 110-year lifespan Hart had asserted without a grave.

The most likely outline is therefore the smallest one the documents will bear. Penelope was probably born about 1622–23, in England or among English people in the Low Countries. She was in New Netherland by the mid-1640s, married Richard Stout about 1644, and was in Gravesend by 1648. They raised a large family, took up land under the Monmouth Patent, and lived in Middletown. She was still living when his will was proved in 1705 and was buried in Middletown. A stranding and a Lenape rescue may preserve a real memory, but every printed version is late, internally contradictory, and padded with dates and titles the archives do not support. What remains solid is the settler, the wife on the deeds, and a story the family loved more than they could prove.

GENEALOGIST- MAMA HAD A BUSY SOCIAL CALENDAR

Years ago, I received a call from a lady (let’s call her Mary) who lived near us, and she was trying to figure out how my sister-in-law was related to her (I administer her DNA results). Mary was the daughter of a lady who had six children with six different men. I loved her words “my mom had a busy social calendar”.

Mary had solved who four of the six fathers were and was working on the last two and was hoping we could provide the link for one of them. Through some interfamily effort we determined that the father of the Mary’s half-sister (who lived in France), was my sister-in-law’s Uncle Dick. Coincidentally, Uncle Dick served at the end of WW2 in the US Army Air Corps at a base in France near where Mary’s sister was born and where her mother lived.

My sister and her immediate family got tight-lipped because Uncle Dick was a Philadelphia police officer and his family had been harassed by people, he’d arrested (see articles below) and how upsetting it would be if someone tracked him down through his family’s DNA. Of course, Uncle Dick had been long dead, but you never know.

Meanwhile Mary had found articles in the Philadelphia paper, that gave her enough information to find the late Uncle Dick’s wife, and she wrote a letter to her. It turned out she knew all about her husband leaving behind a French infant daughter when he was sent home at the end of the war.

Mary had told me that her sister lived in a chateau in France, so I joked with my nephew he could travel to France and have a place to stay. However, that all ended when my sister-in-law’s half-cousin once removed passed away six months later. At least, she left us knowing her biological father was a positive contributor to society!

GENEALOGIST- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY

Reach out to Dancestors Genealogy. Our genealogists research, discover, and preserve your family history so those stories don’t disappear.

No one is getting any younger, and memories fade every year, eventually slipping beyond our ability to recover them. Paper gets thrown in the trash; books survive.

We offer:

Ready to embark on your family history journey?
Call Dan Nelson at 214-914-3598 and get your project started today.

ANCESTOR- THE SEA CAPTAIN AND MY 11TH GREAT GRANDFATHER’S TRIAL AND HIS GRANDSON THE GRUMBLER

I am about 12% Swedish, with both of my father’s paternal grandparents being born in Sweden. I also plenty of distant Duthc ancestry, which includes a Dutch line that emigrated nine generations earlier from Borgholm, Öland Island, Sweden.

My 9th Great Grandfather, Claes Corneliszen Van Schouwen Claes, was born in 1597 in Boda, Kalmar, Sweden. Boda was at the northern tip of Öland, an island off the coast of Kalmar, Sweden (see the adjacent map).

Claes’ nickname was “Mutelaer” (Grumbler). Claes was only 2 when his father died in 1599, and in 1603 he was placed under the guardianship of his maternal grandfather, Jacob Van Der Goes of Walcheren, Holland, and Colmar, Sweden, and he learned the trade, which often took him by ship to the Dutch Islands. Claes married Jacob’s granddaughter Margaret Van der Goes on November 9, 1623, in the Netherlands.

In 1624, he returned to Boda, on the Island of Öland in Denmark (now Sweden), to introduce his new wife to his family. In December 1625, he owned a ship called the “Svenska Kronan”, and his home at this time was at Zierikzee, on the Island of Schouwen, in Holland.

The 30 years’ War caused him to sell his boats, and he came to New Amsterdam in 1636 and settled in Breukelen. He became the farm manager for Peter Stuyvesant (famous for the purchase of Manhattan) and was also a merchant and sea captain.

Claes’ father was Cornelius Pieterse Van Schouwen, and his father was Peter Ericksson Van Schouwen.

Peter was involved in the First Battle of Öland (pictured below), which was part of the Nordic Seven Years War (1563-1570), which broke out as a result of King Erik XIV of Sweden’s claim for dominion over the Baltic Sea, which “challenged the trade interests of both Denmark and the Hanseatic city of Lubeck”. It took place on 30–31 May 1564 between the islands of Gotland and Öland, off the northern tip of Öland, between a Dano-Lübeckian fleet of 36 ships, the Danes under Herluf Trolle and the Lübeckers under Friedrich Knebel, and a Swedish fleet of 38 ships under Admiral Jakob Bagge. It was a Dano-Lübeckian victory.

Peter and his brothers became famous or infamous for the actions in the battle as detailed below:

At a trial on July 4, 1564, a charge of cowardice against Swedish naval captains Hans, Nils, and Peter Eriksson failed. Several officers were condemned to death by the king’s jury and adviser Joran Person because captured prisoners had escaped. Hans Eriksson was among those condemned but received a pardon, only to be killed the next year in Upsala castle under suspicion of conspiracy.

Peter Eriksson was more fortunate and fought bravely in the Seven Years’ War of the North. Under Admiral Jacob Bagge, Peter commanded the Calmarne Bancken during a fierce battle against the Danish and Lubeck fleets. Even after a gale separated most ships and the flagship Matchless caught fire and surrendered, Peter continued fighting valiantly. He later commanded the Ornen, helping Sweden secure mastery of the Baltic.

Meanwhile, King Erik XIV ruled with increasing cruelty, aided by his ruthless adviser, Joran Person. The supreme court passed frequent death sentences, sparking a revolt by the nobles. In 1569, Stockholm was captured, Person was executed, and the king was forced to abdicate. After Person’s death, a hit list was found containing his intended victims. This roster included Peter Eriksson, his young son Cornelius, and the three sons of Captain Nils Eriksson—Marten, Hans, and Erik Nilsson—who had also been condemned to death.

Persons’ execution saved their lives, but Sweden remained highly unstable under the next ruler, Johan III. Many citizens fled the country for New Sweden and New Amsterdam. Back in Europe, Captain Peter engaged in a bitter legal dispute with a Dutch businessman, Jacob van der Goes. Despite the fierce hostility between their fathers, Peter’s son Cornelius and Jacob’s daughter Johanna fell in love and eventually got married. Which is good, or I wouldn’t be here!

ANCESTOR- THE PRESIDENT’S TONGUES

I recently read that President Herbert Hoover spoke Mandarin, and spoke it to his wife in the White House, so as not to be overheard by spies, which is sort of ironic, as the Chinese spies of today would have found that convenient.

The article got me wondering how many other presidents could speak a foreign language. The full rundown is below, but French was the clear winner, with six presidents speaking it fluently.

The other irony was that the presidents who led us through the two world wars with Germany both spoke fluent German. No, Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”, does not count.

No doubt these 15 multi-lingual presidents used their skills to their advantage. There is a serious risk of letting someone else speak for you, as this story tells:

Hoping to build warm relations with the Polish public, President Jimmy Carter gave a standard goodwill speech. However, the State Department had hired a freelance interpreter who lacked professional experience translating state visits, resulting in several hilariously inappropriate blunders:

• Carter began his address with, “I left the United States this morning,” which the translator mangled into Polish as, “I left the United States, never to return.”

• Carter’s praise of the historic 1791 Polish Constitution was accidentally translated to imply that the document was open to ridicule.

• When Carter attempted to express his interest in learning about the Polish people’s “desires for the future,” the interpreter used a heavily sexualized word, translating it to the crowd as “your lusts for the future” and declaring that Carter “desired the Poles carnally.”

The story is ironic as several of our presidents have had to address their carnal desires, but this was an accidentally expressed carnal desire.

Here’s the breakdown by president, and below that a cartoon created to illustrate the afterlife conversation they’ll all have or not have:

• John Adams (2nd President)- Fully fluent in French for European diplomacy; classically trained in reading and writing Latin and Greek.

• Thomas Jefferson (3rd President)- Read and spoke French and Italian fluently. TJ taught himself Spanish and read classical literature in Greek and Latin.

• James Madison (4th President)- Scholar of ancient languages; studied and read biblical Hebrew extensively during his time at Princeton.

• James Monroe (5th President)- Achieved full fluency in French during his years serving as a diplomat and minister in Paris.

• John Quincy Adams (6th President)- The most multilingual president in history (pictured above in the oldest presidential photograph). JQA possessed native fluency in French, translated German and Dutch flawlessly, and learned Russian to speak directly with the Imperial Court.

• Martin Van Buren (8th President)- Native speaker. MVB grew up speaking Hudson River Dutch in New York, making him the only U.S. president to have spoken English as a second language.

• James A. Garfield (20th President)- Classical scholar and professor of ancient languages. JAG famously demonstrated his ambidexterity by simultaneously writing Latin with one hand and Greek with the other.

• Chester A. Arthur (21st President)- Classically trained; could read, write, and converse fluently with fellow scholars in Latin. Since he was Garfield’s VP you have to wonder did, they write to each other in Latin?

• Theodore Roosevelt (26th President)- Fluent in French and German, regularly consuming European literature and speaking both during foreign travels. Teddy was also conversational in Italian.

• Woodrow Wilson (28th President)- Read and spoke German proficiently.

• Herbert Hoover (31st President)- Conversational in Mandarin, which he learned while working as an engineer in China. He and his wife used it in the White House to prevent staff from overhearing private chats. HCH also translated complex Latin mining texts into English.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt (32nd President)- Gained native fluency in both French and German as a child through extensive travel and European tutors.

• Jimmy Carter (39th President)- Conversational speaker of Spanish. Jimmy studied it extensively, used it during Latin American diplomacy, and famously read a Spanish Bible nightly.

• George W. Bush (43rd President)- Conversational speaker of Spanish. GWB used his skills for regional political outreach in Texas and delivered parts of his presidential addresses in Spanish.

• Barack Obama (44th President)- Spoke Indonesian fluently as a young child while living, playing, and attending a local school in Jakarta, Indonesia.

ANCESTOR- UNEXPECTED FIRSTS IN THE FAMILY TREE

In the ongoing fantastical Anthony Van Salee saga, discussed in recent editions The Turk , I mentioned his brother Abraham. He was born between 1602 and 1609 in Cartagena, Murcia, Spain. He was a fellow New Netherland settler involved in privateering and described as a “mulatto” in recognition of his mixed-race ancestry. He married a black woman named Fortuyn.

Some descriptions of Abraham Janszoon van Salee include ethnic attributions, such as “Turk” and “Berber”. In court records, Abraham was noted as “Turk”, suggesting that record keepers classified him by appearance or culture. Abraham was known as the wealthy heir of a former European-born head of state. Researchers note that historical collections devoted to African-centric history have similarly been unable to reach consensus on his appearance, race, or origin. Abraham was a part-owner of the privateer La Garce. He died in April 1659 in New Amsterdam.

Abraham’s descendants included the following. His son Frans Abrahamszen van Salee (c. 1670s – after 1749), lived as a free man of color in New Amsterdam/New York and later moved his family to Tappan, New York/New Jersey. He married the widow, Isabella Solomons.
Franz’s son John (Jan) van Salee maintained the family landholdings in the Tappan and Ramapo regions along the New York-New Jersey border.

Jan’s son John Van Salee Jr. had a son John Van Salee III, who married a German immigrant, who had a daughter Maria van Salee (c. 1790s – 1800s). Maria married George de Grasse (an educated, property-owning free man of color who had immigrated to New York City and originally worked as a steward for Aaron Burr).

George deGrasse, was the presumed natural son of French admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse and an Indian woman. George was born in Calcutta, India, about 1780 and originally named Azar Le Guen. Admiral De Grasse took Azar back to Paris for his education and adopted him, naming him George de Grasse.

Admiral De Grasse (pictured top right) is best known for his crucial victory over the Royal Navy at the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781 during the American Revolutionary War. The battle directly led to the Franco-American victory at the siege of Yorktown and helped secure the independence of the United States.

George and Maria had children (my 6th cousins, 5 times removed):

• Isaiah George DeGrasse (pictured below left) (1813 – 1841) was an American minister in the Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1836, he was the first African American to graduate from the University of Delaware. Isaiah’s complexion was comparatively fair and reportedly indistinguishable from the complexions of many white classmates.

• Serena Leonora DeGrasse attended Clinton Seminary in Oneida County, New York, where she met George Thomas Downing (pictured below center) (1819 – 1903), an abolitionist and an activist for African-American civil rights while building a successful career as a restaurateur in New York City; Newport, Rhode Island; and Washington, D.C. His father had been an oyster seller and caterer in Philadelphia and New York City, building a business that attracted wealthy white clients. From the 1830s until the end of slavery, Downing was active in the Underground Railroad, using his restaurant as a rest station for refugees on the move. He built a summer season business in Newport and made it his home. For more than 10 years, he worked to integrate Rhode Island public schools. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Downing helped recruit African-American soldiers.

After the war, Downing moved to Washington, D.C., where for a dozen years he ran the Refectory for the House of Representatives. He was a prominent member of the Colored Conventions Movement and worked to unite the efforts of women’s rights and black rights movements. He became close to Senator Charles Sumner and was with the long-ailing legislator when he died of a heart attack at his home in Washington, D.C., on March 11, 1874.

• John van Salee de Grasse (pictured below right) (1825– 1868) was the first black medical doctor admitted to a United States medical society and a commissioned physician during the American Civil War. At fifteen, he enrolled in Oneida Institute in New York, later pursuing medical studies at Aubuk College in Paris. John earned his medical degree with honors from Bowdoin College’s Medical School of Maine in May 1849, becoming the second African American to do so in the United States. Following graduation, he practiced medicine in Paris alongside renowned surgeon Alfred A.L.M. Velpeau before returning to the U.S. in 1851. He supported abolitionism and efforts to resist the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by aiding in organizing vigilante groups to oppose slave hunters in Boston. In 1863, John served as an assistant surgeon with the 35th United States Colored Infantry Regiment. During the American Civil War, John served in the Union Army as a surgeon with the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first unit formed of the United States Colored Troops.

ANCESTOR- THE FARM ON THE HILL

To get to my grandparent’s farm, you head from Lisbon, IA (where my grandparents moved from the farm) to Martelle, IA. When you get to the center of town, you take the highway to the right and drive several miles to the end of the road, where it says to turn right to Morley, and you head left. As you head up the hill, look to the right, and you’ll see the house and the barns up on the hill.

I visited in 2015, and the home and farm (see Hillcrest farm plate below) had been turned into a something resembling a defunct yard sale, junkyard, and trash heap, with signs reading “keep away ” to deter thieves. There were several abandoned vehicles on the property. The barns were falling down, as the owner already had his own farm buildings when he bought the farm. Overall, it was a sad sight.

This time we visited, and I got lost because I looked to the right and didn’t see the house and the barns up on the hill. So, eventually, I stopped and talked to a lady mowing her lawn, and while I was talking to her, I recalled that they had sold the farm to a neighbor, Jack Switzer. The nice lady said that the Switzer house had burned down about 5 years ago, but Ruth Switzer still lived down the road where the “Y” split. She said she was about 90, but still sharp.

We drove down the road and found Ruth’s house. She answered the door when I told her I was the Nelson grandson, and I explained that I was trying to find the farm. She said “just turn around, look down the hill, and that’s the farm.” They had bought the farm because it was so convenient to their home and farm. I asked how to get to the house and barns, and she explained that the house had burned about 5 years ago, which is what the mower lady was referring to and was calling it the Switzer house, because they owned the farm.

Ruth told me that her youngest son was living in the house, but he was at her house when the fire happened. The son died sometime after that, but it was not related to the fire.

Later, I met the oldest son, who was over mowing his mom’s lawn, and he said, out of earshot of his mother, that the younger brother had been nothing but trouble and sort of implied the fire was likely caused by his brother’s antics.

When we told him we were going to drive down to the barns to take some pictures, he was embarrassed by the property’s condition. Had we not known that the Switzer farm was just around the corner, we would have driven by it. Only the barn was barely visible by the metal roof and it’s pass-through elevated drive; the windmill still stood, and one outbuilding by the road.

Everything was overgrown, so there wasn’t anything to see, but, ironically, we could faintly make out an Airstream trailer parked in the barnyard (it was ironic since my parents towed one around the country). A sad finish to what was once a beautiful functioning farm.

ANCESTOR- THE ROYAL NAVY SAILOR AND NEW JERSEY PIONEER

Richard Stout was born on April 2, 1615, in Nottinghamshire, England. According to lore, a teenage Richard fell in love with a young woman whom his father deemed far beneath their family’s social standing.

In protest of being denied, Richard ran away from home and joined the English Royal Navy. He served a grueling seven-year term aboard a British warship. When his seven years expired around 1640, his ship happened to be docked at New Amsterdam (modern-day Manhattan). Richard walked off the vessel, took an oath of allegiance to the Dutch to become a mercenary fighter, and permanently stayed in the New World.

Records show that Stout was impressed into military service defending Fort Amsterdam that spring during fighting that “jeopardized the very existence of the Dutch settlements.” Known as Kieft’s War (Kieft and his massacre pictured below), the violence began on 25 February when Dutch Governor Willem Kieft ordered simultaneous massacres of the Weckquaesgeek in Corlears Hook (Manhattan) and the Tappan (Lenape) in Pavonia (now Jersey City), killing 120 native women, men, and children.

Richard later became one of the original 39 patentees who founded the town of Gravesend, Long Island (now Brooklyn) under Lady Deborah Moody. In June 1643, Moody founded the English village of Gravesend on what was then Dutch Long Island, seeking religious tolerance that was denied her in Puritan New England. Moody, like the Stouts, was Baptist. Stout was in Gravesend by 13 October 1643, when he made a statement about the theft of 200 pumpkins, which we shared a couple of editions ago: Pumpkins

It was here that Richard met and married Penelope. The Stouts’ later 1675 land claim suggests their oldest child was probably born in 1644-5, making it likely the couple married in 1643-4. Penelope had a fantastical origin story of her own, which will be shared in the next edition.

In Gravesend, he received plantation lot sixteen in the first allotment of house lots and farms on 20 February 1646. You can see the map of the town lot on the plate pictured below. Eight months later, on 26 October 1646, he sold his tobacco crop. In 1657, he had seventeen of his twenty acres under cultivation, and on 5 April 1661, he bought the adjoining plantation.

In early December 1663, a party of Gravesend settlers traveled up the Raritan River, prospecting for land. No progress was made until after the English won control of New Netherland in 1664. The Stouts permanently settled in New Jersey in 1664.

The 7 April 1665 Monmouth Patent identifies him as one of twelve men who bought land from the Lenape. In 1675, Stout reported the land he was due: “Richard Stout brings for his rights, for the year 1665, for his wife, two sons, John and Richard, 120 acres each; total 480 acres.” He obtained an additional sixty acres each for five children, James, Peter, Mary, Alice, and Sarah, bringing his total claim to 780 acres. Three additional children brought the total to ten, but Jonathan, Benjamin, and David “were evidently under the age of 14 in 1675,” or they would have been entitled to thirty acres each. These lots marked the official founding of the town of Middletown, and you can see Richard’s town lot in Middletown in the plate below.

Despite illiteracy, Richard Stout was “frequently elected to fill responsible positions in the conduct of the town’s public business.” He was an Overseer of Highways and a member of the Constables Court. On 26 Feb 1679-80, “Richard and Penelope Stout” sold a house, barn, orchard, and acreage. In 1686, Richard Stout owned 460 acres and produced 20 bushels of wheat and 26 bushels of Indian corn but received a tax abatement because he was “very old.”

Richard and Penelope Stout opened their family home, meeting with neighbors directly in the Stout kitchen to formally organize the very first Baptist congregation in the colony of New Jersey. When the congregation officially formalized its charter, Richard Stout and his oldest son, John, were among the 18 male charter members who signed the covenant. For the first twenty years of the church’s existence, members traveled through the wilderness each Sunday to rotate services between various family living spaces and kitchens.

By 1688, the congregation had expanded far beyond what a private kitchen could hold. The pioneers constructed a simple log meetinghouse in Middletown, marking the first purpose-built house of Baptist worship in the state. You can see a picture of the successor church building above from almost 100 years ago.

Stout wrote his will on 9 June 1703, leaving his (unnamed) “loving wife” his orchard and “that part of or room of the house she now lives in with the cellar and all the land I now Improve,” as well as his horses, excepting a mare and colt, which he left to son Benjamin, as thanks for wintering his cattle the previous year (spelling modernized). The will names nine of the Stout children. Son Peter alone predeceased his parents. Richard Stout died before 6 October 1705, when the inventory of his estate was recorded and valued at £64.8.0. The abstract reports it contained “mostly hogs, cattle, horses and sheep.”

Modern readers often look at the lines giving their sons only “one shilling” and assume Richard disowned them. In colonial law, this meant the exact opposite. It was legal proof that he had already gifted them their massive land inheritance through “deeds of gift” while he was alive. Giving them one shilling in the final will protected the estate, preventing the older sons from legally contesting the will to take land away from the youngest son, Benjamin.

Richard legally protected Penelope by ensuring she retained total control over the home, barns, orchards, and livestock for the rest of her life, ensuring her financial independence as a widow.

Penelope passed away around 1712. A 1765 chronicle famously estimated that by the time she died, she had lived to see a staggering 502 living descendants, earning her the legendary historical title of the “First Lady of Monmouth.” More on her in the next edition.

ANCESTOR- THE CHARMS OF IOWA

On the way to and from my above-mentioned grandparent’s farm, we visited a couple of places that were fun. In Winterset, IA, which is in Madison County, as in the Bridges of Madison County, we visited the John Wayne Birthplace Museum.

I had a couple of coincidental crossing of paths with the “Duke” (which we learned was his dogs name), when I was in the Boy Scouts, we would go down to the Sea Scout Base in Newport Beach, where we would practice our canoeing skills for our annual Thanksgiving canoe trip on the Colorado River. One of the fun things to do was pull up to John Wayne’s Newport Beach home’s launch ramp (pictured to the left and next to the dock on the right), and act like we belonged there. That is not his yacht, the Wild Goose, as this picture is after he lived there.

The other John Wayne crossing of path’s is the couple of times my mom ended up in Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, she stayed in the John Wayne room, where he stayed when he was at Hoag (pictured below). To be clear Dean Martin did not visit my mom.

The second Iowa treat was the Field of Dreams, it’s worth the trip to hear the story and tour the home. We went to college with Kevin Costner; he was a couple of years older than us. Kevin, did finish his BA in Business Marketing degree, but then got distracted by the acting bug, which seems to have paid off for him as 10 years later he starred in the Field of Dreams.

Maybe the driving decision to play that role was the fact he graduated in 1978, and in 1979, Cal State University Fullerton’s baseball team in their 4th year as a Division I school, won the College World Series. You can see his picture where he suited up in 2016, he suited up in the Titans baseball team gear, as he has been avid supporter of the team since the Field of Dreams days.

ANCESTOR- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY

Reach out to Dancestors Genealogy. Our genealogists research, discover, and preserve your family history so those stories don’t disappear.

No one is getting any younger, and memories fade every year, eventually slipping beyond our ability to recover them. Paper gets thrown in the trash; books survive.

We offer:

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GENEALOGY- MACABRE MONUMENTS TO MORTALITY

We visited the Catacombs beneath Paris. In the last edition, I covered Paris’ attempts to deal with high heat-Hot France. With soaring temperatures, performing a concert underground for 6 million skulls did sound inviting!

The Catacombs of Paris (pictured below) hold the remains of more than six million people. Built to consolidate Paris’s ancient stone quarries, they extend south from the Barrière d’Enfer (“Gate of Hell”), a former city gate. The ossuary was created as part of the effort to eliminate the effects of the city’s overflowing cemeteries. Preparation work began shortly after a 1774 series of basement wall collapses around the Holy Innocents’ Cemetery added a sense of urgency to the cemetery-eliminating measure, and from 1788, nightly processions of covered wagons transferred remains from most of Paris’s cemeteries to a mine shaft opened near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire.

The ossuary remained largely forgotten until it became a venue for concerts and other private events in the early 19th century; after further renovations and the construction of access around Place Denfert-Rochereau, it was opened to public visitation in 1874.

I recently was reading an article on the history of Iran. In 1381, Timur, a Turco-Mongol tribal leader, invaded Iran. Over the next two decades, he subdued nearly all of Persia through a series of brutal campaigns against rival dynasties. Several cities were captured, and several that resisted were subjected to devastating massacres and destruction, with Timur using terror as a deliberate strategy to discourage further resistance.

Timur’s reputation for brutality is epitomized by his erection of pyramids built of human skulls. “In 1387, the city of Isfahan rebelled against his authority. In response, Timur ordered the massacre of approximately 70,000 inhabitants. Their skulls were methodically collected and arranged into 35 towering pyramids. In Sistan, according to contemporary sources, around 2,000 people were incorporated—still alive—into a clay mortar, forming the literal building blocks of a grisly tower. This pattern continued across the Timurid campaigns.”

Above is an image of soldiers filing before Timur, holding heads of their decapitated enemies, which they used to build the tower of skulls at Baghdad (1401). A miniature painting from a sixteenth-century manuscript of the Zafarnama.

While those towers quickly collapsed, as organic remains are not sturdy building materials, I checked to see if any such towers still existed, which led to the Serbian Skull Tower, a stone structure embedded with human skulls located in Niš, Serbia. It was constructed by the Ottoman Empire following the Battle of Čegar in May 1809. During the battle, Serbian rebels under the command of Stevan Sinđelić were surrounded by the Ottomans on Čegar Hill, near Niš. Knowing that he and his fighters would be impaled if captured, Sinđelić detonated a powder magazine within the rebel entrenchment, killing himself, his subordinates, and the encroaching Ottoman soldiers. The governor of the Rumelia Eyalet, Hurshid Pasha, ordered that a tower be made from the skulls of the fallen rebels. The tower is 15 ft. high and originally contained 952 skulls embedded on four sides in 14 rows (see below).

In 1861, Midhat Pasha, the last Ottoman governor of Niš, ordered that the Skull Tower be dismantled. Following the Ottomans’ withdrawal from Niš in 1878, the structure was partially restored, roofed over, and some of the skulls removed from it were returned. Below is a picture of this Skull Tower as depicted in an 1863 sketch by Felix Philipp Kanitz.

In 1948, Skull Tower was declared a Cultural Monument of Exceptional Importance and came under the protection of the Socialist Republic of Serbia. Further renovation of the chapel occurred again in 1989.

As of 2026, 58 skulls remain embedded in Skull Tower’s walls. The one that is said to belong to Sinđelić is enclosed in a glass container adjacent to the structure. Seen as a symbol of independence by many Serbs, it has become a popular tourist attraction, visited by between 30,000 and 50,000 people annually.

GENEALOGY- A MOST FAMOUS RESIDENT OF THE CATACOMBS, THE SHATTERED SKULL OF ROBESPIERRE

One of the most famous skulls in the catacombs belongs to Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758 –1794). He was a French lawyer and statesman widely recognized as one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution. Robespierre fervently campaigned for the voting rights of all men and their unimpeded admission to the National Guard. Additionally, he advocated the right to petition, the right to bear arms in self-defense, and the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.

A radical Jacobin leader, Robespierre was elected as a deputy to the National Convention in September 1792, and in July 1793, he was appointed a member of the Committee of Public Safety. Robespierre faced growing disillusionment with other revolutionaries, which led him to argue for the harsh measures of the Reign of Terror. Increasingly, members of the Convention turned against him, and accusations of excess came to a head. Robespierre was arrested.

He was one of five prisoners who then escaped, and there are many stories about what happened, but it seems that, in order to avoid capture, Robespierre took off his shoes and jumped from a broad cornice. He landed on some bayonets and a citizen, resulting in a pelvic fracture, several serious head contusions, and an alarming state of “weakness and anxiety”. A companion handed a pistol to Robespierre, then quickly killed himself with another pistol. According to contemporaries, Robespierre wounded himself when he tried to commit suicide by pointing the pistol at his mouth, but the soldiers prevented him from killing himself successfully (pictured above).

Robespierre spent the remainder of the night at the antechamber of the Committee of General Security. He lay on the table, his head on a pine box, his shirt stained with blood. By 5 a.m., his brother and another prisoner were transported to the nearest hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. However, they prohibited Robespierre from being taken there. At ten in the morning, a military doctor was summoned and extracted some of his teeth and fragments of his broken jaw. Subsequently, Robespierre was confined to a cell in the Conciergerie. On 28 July 1794, the Revolutionary Tribunal assembled around noon. By 2 p.m., Robespierre and twenty-one “Robespierrists” faced accusations of counter-revolution and were sentenced to death under the provisions of the law of 22 Prairial, although without even a cursory hearing.

At approximately 6 p.m., the condemned were conveyed in three carts to the Place de la Révolution. A furious mob, hurling curses, accompanied the grim procession.

A contemporary print identifies Robespierre as number 10 in the procession to the scaffold (pictured below). During the preparation for his execution, the executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, dislodged the bandage securing his shattered jaw, eliciting an anguished scream until his demise. Following his beheading, the crowd erupted in applause and jubilant cries, which reportedly endured for fifteen minutes. Robespierre and his associates were interred in a mass grave at the newly established Errancis Cemetery.

Between 1844 and 1859 (likely in 1848), the remains of all those buried there were transferred to the Catacombs of Paris.

GENEALOGY- AMERICA’S FIRST MUSLIM CLAIM, DECONSTRUCTED

One historical claim was that Anthony Van Salee was the first Muslim in North America. While Van Salee was born in 1607, his father was not captured by the Barbary Pirates and forced under penalty of death to convert to Islam until 1618.

At the age of 11, Anthony would have been under the influence of his father’s religious tilt, and his mother, Margarita, who was believed to be Moorish/Moroccan but born in Cartagena, would likely have been a practitioner of Islam. His mixed heritage likely gave him an appearance that led to the common reference to him as Anthony the Turk and to his owning Turk’s Plantation (even though there were no Turks in Morocco; Turk was a euphemism for brown skin, rather than black or white).

Historical records document that a Quran belonging to Van Salee was preserved and passed down through generations until it was sold in an estate auction in the late 19th century. Specifically, the Quran was preserved through the descendants of Anthony’s daughter, Eva Antonis van Salee. Eva married Ferdinandus van Sycklin, an early Dutch settler in New Netherland (and the namesake for Van Siclen Avenue in Brooklyn).

Over the next two centuries, the holy book remained within allied Dutch American families—specifically the Van Siclen, Gulick, and Rule lines. Around 1886, the Quran was sold at an estate auction following the death of Joachim Rule, a descendant of the Van Siclen family. The history of the Quran and its presence in the family estate was recorded by Robert Bayles, a bank president (Market and Fulton National Bank of New York) and a direct descendant who tracked the book’s ownership.

Accounts from the late 19th century noted that the Quran was kept in remarkably fine condition. Historians point to this care as evidence that even as later generations assimilated into Christian communities in Dutch and English New York, the book was treated with deep respect as a prized ancestral heirloom.

Because 17th-century public records in New Amsterdam rarely explicitly documented non-Christian religious practices, the existence and long-term preservation of this physical Quran could serve as primary historical evidence of Van Salee’s personal faith and Muslim background. Or he may have just inherited the Quran from his father, and, as a unique heirloom in a Christian country, it was preserved as an antiquity.

The identity of the private buyer was not recorded in surviving family accounts or public records. As a result, the current whereabouts and owner of Anthony Janszoon van Salee’s Quran remain unknown to historians today.

In the last edition Bad Grandma we shared Anthony and his wife’s ability to frustrate the Dutch Reformed Church in New Amsterdam. One could infer from his behavior that he was clearly not concerned with the church, other than its influence over state matters. This is why they were banished to Brooklyn in 1639.

Dutch colonial records from 17th-century New Amsterdam do not explicitly document his active personal practice of Islam. Of course, there was no temple or fellow worshipers where he could practice his possible faith.

Anthony’s children, including the family that held the Quran, held to the Christian faith. The official register of the Reformed Dutch Church in New Amsterdam records that Eva was baptized on November 3, 1647, at age 6 by Dominie Johannes Backerus, the pastor in New Amsterdam. The baptism entry lists her father as Anthonij Janszen and names Borger Janszen and Marijken Lievens as witnesses/sponsors. So clearly, Anthony’s intentions were to raise his children as Christians, whether that was because he was a believer or just following the path of least resistance; clearly, he was not trying to raise them as Muslims.

One could wonder if the six-year lag in baptism was an indicator of a delayed decision. However, you have to remember that Anthony was already cast off into Brooklyn for his poor behavior, and that there was not an established Dutch church in Brooklyn until 1654 (see picture), which was coincidentally served by another of my ancestors, Johannes Theodorus Polhemus, who was covered in the June 6th edition. Polhemus. Today, this original congregation is known as Old First Reformed Church, located at Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street in Park Slope (the original church’s sketch above). The more likely reason was waiting until his fierce antagonist, Dominie Everardus Bogardus, had departed the colony (see below).

Subsequent generations and siblings (including his daughters, Sara, Annica, and Cornelia) fully integrated into the local Christian communities of Dutch New Amsterdam and Brooklyn. Their names routinely appear as parents, witnesses, or sponsors in Dutch Reformed baptism registers throughout Kings and New York counties. Descendants of these children include the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, and, more recently, Humphrey Bogart and Jackie Onassis.

Anthony’s second wife, Metje Grevenraet, was associated with the Quakers, a Christian religious belief. In 1674, Anthony was even brought to court for harboring a Quaker in his home, further showing his distance from the dominant Dutch Reformed Church establishment. Since Quakerism, or any offshoot religion, was suppressed by Peter Stuyvesant, there are no surviving religious records, just civil records.

So, from my perspective, Anthony was more likely not a person of fervent religious beliefs or practice but inherited a religious heirloom that 350 years later could represent something controversial, but was a non-event at the time, and he bowed to the practical power of the Dutch Reformed Church, while developing tolerance for other beliefs.

In the next edition, we’ll discuss Anthony’s brother Abraham.

GENEALOGY- CASTLES, KINGS AND PRESIDENTS

I’d previously written about my Swedish ancestors who lived in the shadow of the beautiful Trolle-Ljungby Castle. There have been several articles written; this is the last one, where I covered our local castle, which, when I ride or drive by, makes me think what a rare view I have.Olana.

Of course, my ancestors were not viewing their local castle as tourists; they were planting and harvesting crops. They likely had a mix of feelings. On the negative side, the castle-owners owned the land and collected rent, often in the form of a share of the harvest. On the positive side, the castle-owner had to offer protection and thwart the efforts of other potential occupiers.
Of course, castles were a more common part of the landscape back then, but the peasant class didn’t have the means to play tourist and head off to view other castles (slotts in Swedish). Within 15 kilometers were Bäckaskog Slott (today a conference center we visited), Råbelövs slott, and Karsholm Castle. However, between thick woods and a lack of a high point to check out the scenery, they may have never seen these places.

One of my newly discovered ancestors, Jan Vankerck, came to New Amsterdam in 1663 from his home in Buren, Gelderland, the Netherlands. Buren was also famous for its castle (pictured above, in the 16th century).

Originally built by the Lords of Buren, Castle Buren was first mentioned in 1298. The town was granted city rights in 1395 by Sir Alard IV of Buren, which led to the construction of a defensive wall and a moat, significant portions of which still stand. In 1492, the region was elevated to county status (i.e., a territory ruled by a count) but had limited economic influence due to its geographic isolation.

Jan’s hometown became famous from the 1551 marriage of Ann Buren to William, Prince of Orange, the most famous Dutch royal (see the statue of them below left with their son, William II), which brought the castle under the purview of the royal family, the House of Orange. The Dutch royal family has been known to use the name van Buren as an alias to give themselves some degree of anonymity.

The son of William II, Prince of Orange and ultimately King William III of England of William and Mary fame (see their picture below right), obtained the title Buren in his 1677 marriage to his cousin Mary, Princess Royal, the daughter of King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Mary was the elder daughter of his maternal uncle James, Duke of York (later King James II), which united the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and the Netherlands.

Unfortunately, the newly minted kingdom lasted only 13 years before the young king died in a riding accident, and things unfurled as claimants to the individual thrones led to dissolution.

The eighth president of the United States, Martin Van Buren, traced his ancestry to inhabitants of the town, who had taken the surname Van Buren after relocating to the Dutch colony of New Netherlands in what is now the state of New York. In 1853, following the end of his presidency, Van Buren visited the town while on a tour of Europe and reportedly met with several distant relatives.

I wonder whether Jan Vankerck’s descendants were aware of the trip and took any pride in our first U.S. President of Dutch heritage.

GENEALOGY- THE BIRTH OF THE PURPLE HEART

Earlier this year, I mentioned my first cousin twice removed (that means he was my grandmother’s first cousin), Jess Stevenson (read below about the 61-year delay), being awarded the Purple Heart in WWI. Purple Heart

I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the award, other than seeing signs on I-35 near us that said it is part of the Purple Heart Trail and that August 7th is Purple Heart Day.

While I prayed for my niece and nephew serving their country in the present conflict, I was distraught to learn my niece was injured in a missile attack. She’s being awarded the Purple Heart.

Fortunately, she’s recovered, but something close to home, like that, got me wondering how the Purple Heart got its name.

Its roots go back to 1782. The original Purple Heart, designated as the Badge of Military Merit, was established by George Washington – then the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army – by order from his Newburgh, New York, headquarters on 7 August 1782. Washington had the names of the honorees entered into a Book of Merit. Washington explicitly outlined what the physical badge should look like in his general orders. Washington directed that recipients wear “the figure of a heart in purple cloth or silk edged with narrow lace or binding” sewn directly over the left breast of their uniform coat. It also featured the word “Merit” stitched across the front (see adjacent).

Washington awarded the Badge of Military Merit to only three Revolutionary War soldiers himself:

• Sgt. Elijah Churchill (2nd Continental Light Dragoons): He led two daring, successful commando-style raids behind British lines on Long Island, New York. The first was at Fort St. George (November 1780) and the second was at Fort Slongo (October 1781), both resulting in captured enemy troops and destroyed provisions with zero American casualties.

• Sgt. William Brown (5th Connecticut Regiment): He was awarded the badge for his conspicuous bravery during the pivotal Siege of Yorktown on October 14, 1781. Brown led a “forlorn hope” vanguard party that sprinted forward under heavy enemy fire to attack and capture British Redoubt No. 10 using only unloaded muskets and fixed bayonets to maintain the element of surprise.

• Sgt. Daniel Bissell Jr. (2nd Connecticut Regiment): He received his badge for operating as a military spy. Under direct, confidential orders from George Washington, Bissell intentionally “deserted” to British-controlled New York City in August 1781. He spent over a year memorizing enemy troop layouts, fortifications, and naval strength, successfully escaping back to American lines with critical intelligence just as the war was drawing to a close. His medal was lost in an 1813 house fire.

Washington also authorized his subordinate officers to issue Badges of Merit as appropriate. Although it was never abolished, the award of the badge was not officially proposed again until after World War I.

On October 10, 1927, Army Chief of Staff General Charles P. Summerall directed that a draft bill be sent to Congress “to revive the Badge of Military Merit”. The bill was withdrawn, and action on the case ceased on 3 January 1928, but the office of the Adjutant General was instructed to file all materials collected for possible future use. A number of private interests sought to have the medal re-instituted in the Army; this included the board of directors of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum in Ticonderoga, New York.

On January 7, 1931, Summerall’s successor, General Douglas MacArthur, confidentially reopened work on a new design, involving the Washington Commission of Fine Arts. Elizabeth Will, an Army heraldic specialist in the Office of the Quartermaster General, was tasked with redesigning the newly revived medal, which became known as the Purple Heart. Using the general specifications provided to her, Will created the design sketch for the current Purple Heart medal. The new design, which exhibits a bust and profile of George Washington, was issued on the bicentennial of Washington’s birth.

In our recent trip, we visited the Colmar Pocket and learned about Audie Murphy (1925 – 1971) (pictured). He was widely celebrated as the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II and has been described as the most highly decorated enlisted soldier in U.S. history. He received every military combat award for valor available from the United States Army, as well as French and Belgian awards for heroism. Murphy received the Medal of Honor for valor that he demonstrated at age 19 for single-handedly holding off a company of German soldiers for an hour at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, before leading a successful counterattack while wounded.

There have been over 2 million Purple Hearts awarded. In a visit to the new National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, TX, I learned that one soldier, Thomas “Tommy” Gwynn, U.S. Army (a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross), was awarded the most Purple Hearts (12), (7) in World War II, and (5) in Korea. Thank you to all 2 million soldiers for their service!

GENEALOGY- THE GREAT GREENLAND GRAB: A TIMELINE OF PRESIDENTIAL AMBITIONS

In the last edition, we discussed President Polk’s expansion ambitions- POLK

He’s not the only one as Greenland keeps popping up in the news, but it isn’t really new news in the history of U.S. presidents. Here is the chronological history of U.S. presidents expressing interest in Greenland up to recent events.

• Andrew Johnson (1867–1868), via Secretary of State William Seward. Fresh off purchasing Alaska from Russia, Seward explored acquiring Greenland (and Iceland) from Denmark. I guess he figured Alaska and Greenland would make nice bookends. He commissioned reports highlighting its resources (fisheries, minerals, coal) and commercial/strategic potential in the North Atlantic. Ideas were floated and some negotiations discussed, but no formal purchase offer advanced due to limited congressional interest and political constraints.

• William Howard Taft (around 1910). U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Maurice Francis Egan proposed a complex land-swap arrangement under which the U.S. would acquire Greenland (and the Danish West Indies) in exchange for territory in the Philippines (such as Mindanao). The idea gained some traction in Washington amid interest in Arctic resources and strategy but ultimately collapsed without success.

That sounds similar to the silly idea that I presented to swap Greenland for Puerto Rico Greenland, but like Taft, my idea ultimately collapsed without success.

• In 1917 (under Woodrow Wilson), the U.S. actually pledged not to object to Danish control of Greenland as part of the deal to buy the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands).

• During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in World War II, the U.S. assumed defense of Greenland (via a 1941 agreement after Denmark fell to Nazi Germany) and built bases, but this was protective wartime control rather than an acquisition bid.

After Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, Greenland (then a Danish colony) was cut off. Accurate weather data from the North Atlantic and Arctic was critically important for German military planning—U-boat operations, air campaigns over Europe, and naval movements—because weather systems generally move from west to east. The Allies controlled most existing international weather stations, so Germany tried to set up its own.

The Kriegsmarine (German navy) ran several small expeditions to install manned weather stations:

Holzauge (“Wooden Eye,” 1942–1943): A team was landed (via the ship Sachsen) on Sabine Island / Little Pendulum Island area in northeast Greenland. It operated for nearly a year, transmitting weather reports, until discovered by the Northeast Greenland Sledge Patrol (a small Danish/Greenlandic force of hunters and trappers). The station was later destroyed with U.S. assistance.

Bassgeiger (“Bass Violinist,” 1943–1944): Another station established further north (Germania Land area). It also operated for an extended period before being eliminated.

The only part of North America that technically became under Nazi control was Saint Pierre and Miquelon, which I wrote about earlier. French Islands

Nazi Germany never sent personnel to Saint Pierre and Miquelon. After France fell in 1940, the islands stayed under Vichy French control, raising Allied fears that their radio station and cables might aid German U-boats, but no German troops, agents, or weather teams ever landed there. On Christmas Eve 1941, Free French forces under Admiral Muselier seized the islands in a bloodless 20-minute operation, ending Vichy rule; the islands were never occupied by the Nazis.

• Harry S. Truman (1946) made the most formal and serious offer. His administration proposed buying Greenland from Denmark for $100 million in gold (roughly $1–1.7 billion in today’s dollars, depending on the adjustment method). This came right after World War II, when the U.S. had already defended and operated bases on the island (viewed by the military as a key “stationary aircraft carrier” and strategically vital for the emerging Cold War against the Soviet Union). Secretary of State James Byrnes presented the idea to the Danish foreign minister; Denmark rejected it.

• Under Dwight D. Eisenhower (mid-1950s), the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged another purchase attempt due to ballistic-missile and Arctic defense concerns, but no formal presidential offer was made.

GENEALOGY- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY

Reach out to Dancestors Genealogy. Our genealogists research, discover, and preserve your family history so those stories don’t disappear.

No one is getting any younger, and memories fade every year, eventually slipping beyond our ability to recover them. Paper gets thrown in the trash; books survive.

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Ready to embark on your family history journey?
Call Dan Nelson at 214-914-3598 and get your project started today.

ANCESTRY- THE NEWSLETTER PODCAST STYLE!

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ANCESTRY- A SOUTHERN SLAVEHOLDER PRESIDENT’S AMBITIONS FOR AMERICA

In the July 11, 2026, edition, I shared an article on the Knights of the Golden Circle, who envisioned a United States of America that would expand to include all the countries surrounding the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Caribbean. Knights

The desire was to expand the slave-holding states. In 1854, slavery was still legal in Spanish and Dutch Caribbean territories, most notably Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Dutch colonies like Suriname and Curaçao.

Slavery was already illegal in Mexico, Haiti, all British Caribbean territories, and all French Caribbean colonies, the Swedish and Danish Caribbean, as well as the Dominican Republic, Central America, and the northern coast of South America. The assumed intent of the expansion would be to enslave some of those people. At the time that slavery was abolished in those countries, there were an estimated 1.6 million slaves.

The southern USA already held 3.2 million slaves, so add in the estimated .5 million legal slaves in the Caribbean, and the 1.6 million from above, and the number of slaves would have expanded by 40%, to 5.3 million, exceeding Brazil’s 2 million or so.

President James K. Polk (1845-1849), a Tennessean, whom we covered back in 2024 Polkhad his own “manifest destiny” vision of the expanded USA, which not only included Texas, the Mexican War cession, and Oregon territory, but you can see on the map he envisioned adding parts of Mexico, including Baja on the Pacific and the Gulf down to Tampico. Polk offered Spain $100 million in 1848 to purchase Cuba and sought to annex the Yucatan Peninsula in 1847. He also secured transit rights across Panama in 1846. He didn’t seem to make attempts to acquire territories in the Eastern Caribbean or northern South America, and he died by 1849, so it’s hard to know if he would have supported the 1854 Knights of the Golden Circle.

Alleged members of the KGC included three of James Buchanan’s cabinet members (pictured below), Jacob Thompson (an ancestor’s family friend covered in a past edition Thompson), John B. Floyd, and Howell Cobb, along with his VP John C. Breckenridge (last written about Breckenridge).

While these ideas seem far-fetched today, Polk’s successors, Zachary Taylor, were also southerners and slaveholders; and his successors, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, all northerners, were viewed as protective and enabling of the institution of slavery. So, Lincoln would have had a much bigger job had Polk’s vision been realized.

President Buchanan and his Cabinet (colorized)- from left to right: Jacob Thompson, Lewis Cass, John B. Floyd, James Buchanan, Howell Cobb, Isaac Toucey, Joseph Holt, and Jeremiah S. Black (c. 1859)

ANCESTRY- THE ELUSIVE LIONEL POINDEXTER

Occasionally, when I am trying to give a client an example of how much harder it is to find accurate information on a common name, such as John Smith of NYC, compared to a less common name, I use Lionel Poindexter. So, I was wondering if there was ever such a person?

Apparently, I was channeling from my teenage years, as the only reference to the name AI could find is when Lionel Poindexter first appeared in the Season 1 finale of The Partridge Family (titled “A Knight in Shining Armor,” which aired on March 19, 1971). In the episode, the Partridges introduce him to a talented composer named Bobby Conway (played by 1970s pop heartthrob Bobby Sherman). Even though Lionel actually dislikes music, Bobby manages to set Lionel’s poetry to music, creating a hit song called “Stephanie”.

Or even an earlier resurrected memory of Poindexter, was a character in the animated TV series Felix the Cat (1959–1962), whose name has become a slang term meaning “a bookish or socially unskilled person”.

The last reference I found was a 1923 newspaper clip, referring to an imaginary Lionel Poindexter, a bigamist movie star (see the clip below).

However, many years ago, while researching for a client, I came across the Poindexter family. They descended from George Poindexter of New Kent, VA, who came from the Isle of Jersey, in the Channel Islands between England and France. It is possible that George was present with his uncle John at Elizabeth Castle on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, at the surrender of Cromwell’s troops, and was forced into exile, arriving in Virginia in 1657. He soon became a prosperous merchant and planter. He was also a joint owner of several ships, with Nathaniel Bacon, of Bacon’s Rebellion fame.

After joining Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, the family moved to New Kent County in about 1680. There, between the Pamunkey and Chickahominy Rivers, about 1685, George built a fine home which was still standing in the Twenty-first Century. It was of brick and timber, an elegant mansion for so early a period. He named it Christ’s Cross (pictured), and it became known as “Criss-Cross”. It is one of the six oldest homes in Virginia.

George descended from John Poingdestre, who was born in 1434 in St. Savior, Jersey. He descended from Richard Poingdestre, who lived in the Bayeux area of the Bessin in Normandy in 1180 and in 1195.

There are two famous Poingdestre’s/Poindexter’s:

Jean Poingdestre (1609–1691), pictured below left, was a native of Jersey and a supporter of the Royalists in the English Civil War. He was born in the parish of St Savior, at the Poingdestre fief of Grainville. He graduated from the University of Cambridge and was made a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford in 1636, after studying Classics, specializing in Greek. Poingdestre was offered the job of Charles I’s Latin Secretary (foreign translator) during the war, but seems to have declined. In 1648 he was forced to take refuge in Jersey, where he participated in the defense of Elizabeth Castle in 1651. After the Restoration, Poingdestre returned to England before becoming Lieutenant Bailiff of Jersey, resigning in 1676. During this time, he wrote Cæsarea or A Discourse of the Island of Jersey, a comprehensive survey of Jersey geography, customs, law, governance, folklore, and trade.

George Poindexter (1779 – September 5, 1853), pictured on the right below, was an American politician, lawyer, and judge from Mississippi. Born in Virginia, he moved to the Mississippi Territory in 1802. He served as United States Representative from the newly admitted state, was elected as Governor (1820–1822), and served as a United States senator.

The Poindexter family of Virginia frequently used the names George, Thomas, and John; as a result, their genealogy is difficult to trace. So, I guess those Poindexters aren’t as easily traced as I thought.

ANCESTRY- MORE ON ANTHONY THE TURK AND MY BAD GRANDMA

In the last edition, Van Salee. I shared Anthony Van Salee’s success in expanding his landholdings in New Amsterdam. However, it wasn’t all roses as Anthony was engaged in many legal disputes, which ranged from demands for compensation because his dog attacked the hog of Anthony the Portuguese (described as a black townsman), to charges that he had pointed loaded pistols at slave overseers from the Dutch West India Company.

Between 1638 and 1639, the couple accounted for fifteen of ninety-three recorded court cases. During this period, many private quarrels were brought to the Dutch colonial court. The charges against the couple included petty slander, brought by Anneke and Dominee Bogardus (a prominent minister, see his portrait below) after Grietse accused them of lying; Grietse’s display of private parts to the naval fleet (see below); and Van Salee’s occasions of drunkenness.

It is unclear to what extent animus against Van Salee’s ethnic and religious identity (he was called a Turk, because back in New Amsterdam, you were either white, black, or if you had a tawny complexion, a Turk) drove these conflicts, or if he was himself reluctant to submit to church authority.

His mother was allegedly Moroccan, so not a Turk, but she was from Cartagena, Spain.

Following numerous legal disputes, including with representatives of the Dutch Reformed Church, whose council reprimanded Van Salee and his wife for not behaving as “pious Christians”, he was ordered to leave New Netherland.

Specific examples of her poor behavior were as follows:

• Prior to arriving in Manhattan, she had been fired from Peter de Winter’s tavern in Amsterdam. The tavern mistress testified that Grietse was caught in a back room with her “petticoat upon her knees” entertaining a male patron.

• When sailors on a departing ship jeered at her, shouting, “Whore, whore, two pound’s butter whore!” she pulled up her skirt, smacked her backside, and yelled, “Blaes my daer achterin!” (historically translated to “Kiss my ass”).

• Upwards of 16 townspeople signed affidavits stating that Grietse had pulled sailors’ shirts out of their trousers and literally measured their male anatomy against a broomstick inside her house.

• According to town documents, Grietse openly boasted about her lifestyle to the entire fort. Multiple affidavits recorded her proudly proclaiming: “I have long been the whore of the nobility, now I want to be the rabble’s whore.”

I had no idea how I was going to come up with a visual for the article until, in a restaurant window in Amsterdam, I saw an advertisement for L’Alsacienne Beer, and thought “that’s perfect”, so please forgive my indiscretion.

ANCESTRY- COLOGNE’S UNDERGROUND CHURCH

In May 2026, I shared the story of my 8th great-grandfather, Johannes Nevius, the Ferrymaster in Brooklyn, NY: Nevius

His father, Johannes Neeff, was baptized on November 13, 1594, in the German Reformed Church in Cologne.

On our recent trip to Cologne, we visited his baptismal church. Today the church is known as the Antoniterkirche. The church is housed on the Schildergasse in central Cologne, Germany.

It was built from 1350 as St. Antonius monastery church by the Antonine order (“sack brothers”) who cared for the sick and had been resident in Cologne since 1298. The church has a Gothic Basilica with four vaulted bays and polygonal eastern chancel end sections, buttresses, and a roof turret. Consecration presumably around 1384. At the end of the 16th century, a Renaissance entrance was added on the southern side.

When Martin Luther launched the Reformation in 1517, his ideas quickly spread down the Rhine. Cologne was a highly influential, independent imperial city, dominated by its wealthy Catholic clergy, monastic orders, and conservative city council.

In the late 1520s, the Cologne City Council heavily banned the printing, ownership, and distribution of Lutheran books. Early Protestant sympathizers faced heavy fines or exile. In 1529, Adolf Clarenbach and Peter Fliesteden were burned at the stake in Cologne for refusing to recant their Lutheran beliefs. They became the first Protestant martyrs of the region.

Because public Protestant worship was illegal, Lutherans and Calvinists formed secret “underground” house churches, often meeting in the shadows or fleeing to nearby tolerant territories.

In 1582, Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg—the Prince-Elector and Archbishop of Cologne (pictured)—personally converted to Protestantism. He attempted to declare religious parity, secularize the territory, and turn Cologne into a Protestant dynastic duchy.

The Catholic faction immediately resisted, electing a competing Catholic archbishop. Backed by Bavarian and Spanish troops, the Catholic forces defeated Gebhard’s Protestant forces. The Catholic victory cemented Cologne’s status as a hardline Catholic stronghold for the next two centuries.

For the next 200 years, practicing Lutherans lived in Cologne as second-class residents with no civil rights. They were legally forbidden from building churches or holding public services. To take communion or get married, Cologne’s Protestants had to travel outside the city walls to surrounding territories that permitted Protestantism.

Many early Protestants in Cologne were actually Dutch merchants fleeing Spanish persecution in the Netherlands. This mixed community eventually split into distinct German Reformed (Calvinist) and Lutheran congregations, though both had to remain hidden.

The turning point for Cologne’s Lutherans came with the French Revolutionary Wars. When Napoleon Bonaparte’s administration took control of the Rhineland, they secularized Catholic properties and declared total religious freedom.

In 1802, the French administration officially handed over the Antoniterkirche (pictured below) to Cologne’s Evangelical community. On May 19, 1805, the first legal, public Protestant service in Cologne’s history took place inside its walls, ending nearly 300 years of underground survival.

ANCESTRY- HISTORY UNSPUN

Having spent three evenings in Bayeux with my wife’s band, I became interested in the Bayeux Tapestry, which had been secretly shipped a week earlier, under cover of night, and heavily guarded from France to Britain for exhibition (I guess they were concerned about us riff-raff Americans coming into town).

The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth nearly 230 feet long and 20 inches tall that depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, led by William, Duke of Normandy, challenging Harold II, King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings. It is thought to date to the 11th century, within a few years of the battle. Now widely accepted to have been made in England, perhaps as a gift for William, it tells the story from the point of view of the conquering Normans and, for centuries, has been preserved in Bayeux, Normandy, France.

The cloth consists of 58 scenes, all with Medieval Latin tituli, embroidered on linen with colored woolen yarns. It is likely that it was commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, and made for him in England in the 1070s. In 1729, the hanging was rediscovered by scholars at a time when it was being displayed annually in Bayeux Cathedral. The tapestry is normally exhibited at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in Bayeux, but the museum is closed for renovations. As mentioned, it was returned to England for the first time in possibly over 900 years, to be displayed at the British Museum in London from September 2026 to July 2027.

The designs on the Bayeux Tapestry are embroidered rather than in a tapestry weave, so it does not meet narrower definitions of a tapestry. It can be seen as a rare example of secular Romanesque art. Tapestries adorned both churches and wealthy houses in medieval Western Europe, though the Bayeux Tapestry is exceptionally large. The background is not embroidered, providing a large, clear field of cloth which allows the figures and decorative elements to stand out very clearly.

One of our clients descends from Robert of Mortain, who sits at the left hand of his half-brother William, Duke of Normandy. Robert’s full brother Odo (Odo Episcopus, “Bishop Odo”) sits to William’s right, implying his seniority. This scene in the Bayeux Tapestry occurs near Hastings, immediately before William ordered the building of a castle there, and shortly before the Battle of Hastings. Since that battle occurred in England, it makes sense for the tapestry to head across the Channel.

ANCESTRY- FEELING THE HEAT OF THE SUN KING

In an earlier edition, I displayed a map showing the difference in the number of homes air-conditioned in Europe (10%) vs. the US (90%) and remarked that I was nervous about our upcoming trip. Heat in Europe

While we did not get to the extremes of the 100s in Paris, we were in the 90s, and touring the Palace of Versailles (pictured below) was a sweaty experience. We wondered how all of that humidity affected the treasures within the palace. It’s no secret the French are often resistant to American ideas, so I was pleased to discover an under-shared plan they have for Versailles.

The Palace of Versailles itself is currently executing a multi-year master plan called the “Grand Versailles” project to install an extensive climate control network. Because it is a UNESCO World Heritage site, they cannot simply bolt modern AC units onto the 400-year-old facade.

Instead, engineers are deploying a brilliant, entirely hidden infrastructure. Cooling towers are being built inside the old, historic reservoir building originally designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart in 1680. The exterior roof is being restored to its original configuration to completely hide the technical machinery from public view. A massive network of underground technical corridors connects the cooling loops to the basement of the Grand Commun and tunnels. The system is primarily run into the Grand Apartments in the central section of the palace. The primary goal is twofold: protecting priceless 17th-century artwork and decor from extreme humidity fluctuations and offering relief to tourists shuffling shoulder-to-shoulder during peak summer days.

We’d been looking forward to a concert the next day at the American Church in Paris (pictured above), which we were told was air-conditioned (viva America). However, we were a bit misled, as the sanctuary where we performed was beautiful but stifling; their administrative offices were air-conditioned. The church was the first American church outside of the USA and was founded in 1814. The band stepped up and performed magnificently, aided by the great acoustics of the stone walls and the inspiration of a large and enthusiastic audience.

Afterward, a contingent of band members went on a Rhine cruise. Due to the low river levels in Europe, which you’ve probably read about, we had to change ships (from higher in the river to lower), and then we were the last ship through the castle-lined Rhine Gorge, and now those heading to river cruises in Europe are being loaded onto buses and staying in hotels, hopefully air-conditioned!

ANCESTRY- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY

Reach out to Dancestors Genealogy. Our genealogists research, discover, and preserve your family history so those stories don’t disappear.

No one is getting any younger, and memories fade every year, eventually slipping beyond our ability to recover them. Paper gets thrown in the trash; books survive.

We offer:

– Documented, sourced reports, not unsourced online trees

– Printed books and reports that keep your family’s story alive

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GENEALOGIST- WHO WAS THE FATHER OF PHEBE’S YOUNGEST KIDS?

Two editions ago, we shared the dilemma of the three Phebe’s. In the last edition PHEBE, we shared David Stevenson’s abandonment of his wife and girls, Phebe Belshe Stevenson’s passing in a cholera epidemic, and then her children’s guardian mistreating and taking advantage of the girls. The oldest, Malinda, sued their guardian, William Higgenbotham, in 1845 and prevailed.

The younger siblings of Malinda were listed in the estate papers of Phebe Stephenson, presented in December 1832: Ann Eliza, Polly, and Jenetta. Here are the court record transcriptions:

_On motion of William K. Higginbotham who made oath and together with James Stephenson and Richard Belshe his secure his entered into and acknowledged a bond in the penalty of $ 300 conditional , as the law directs , certificate is granted the said William H Higginbotham for obtaining letters of administration on the Estate of Phebe Stephenson deceased , in due form Ordered that William Thompson , David Young , Nathan Young and William Asberry or any three of them being first sworn before a Justice of the peace for that purpose do truly appraise in currant money the personal Estate of Phebe Stephenson deceased and return the appraisement under their hands to Court On Motion of William T. Higginbotham who made oath and together with James Stephenson & Richard Belshe his securities entered in and acknowledged a bond in the penalty of $ 500 conditioned according to law certificate is parted the said William Higginbotham for obtain my letters of administration on the Estate of Eleanor Alsop in due form . Ordered that William Thompson, David Young, Nathan Young and William Asberry or any three of the being first sworn before a Justice of the Peace for that purpose do truly appraise in currant money the personal Estate of Eleanor Belshe, deceased and return the appraisement under this hands to Court The Court doth assign William K. Higginbotham guardian to Ann Eliza, Malinda, Polly and Jenetta infant children of Phebe Stephenson deceased, and thereupon the said Willliam K. Higginbotham with James Stephenson and Richard Bersay his securities entered into and acknowledge bond in the penalty of $ 200 with condition accord. _

December Court 1832, the Court doth assign William K. Higginbotham, Guardian to Zacheriah Belshey, orphan of Eleanor Belshe, deceased, and thereupon the said William H. Higginbotham, together with John Stephenson and Richard Belshe, his securities, entered into and acknowledged a bond in the penalty of $ 200 with condition according to law.

It’s interesting to note that in 1832, children were referred to as infants. Minor is typically the legal term used. It appears that David had left home by 1823, so the children would be 9 and up, well past infant.

In the 1830 Tazewell census, based on the ages of the people in Hannah (Markum) Belshe’s household, it appears that Phebe and the four girls were living there with Phebe’s mom. The census better separates the ages of the four girls. The oldest, who was the underage 10-year-old female in the 1820 census, was likely born about 1819, based on David and Phebe’s marriage date, so she would be the one listed as 10-14, and based on the girls being listed in birth order above (after Malinda the oldest) would be Malinda (even though her later birth year tracks as 1821/1822 in her later census records); next would be two females aged 5-9, Ann Eliza, and a sibling, say born in 1823, likely Polly (a nickname for Mary); then there is one last female born between 1825-1830, long after David’s abandonment, and being recorded in western Tennessee tax records, this would be Jenetta.

By the 1833 court case, the youngest would be close to 4 years old. So, who was Polly and Jenetta’s father? It was not likely David, since he was long gone, having remarried in Rhea, TN, in 1829 and living in Jackson, AL, as of 1830.

It’s interesting that neither his brothers George nor James Stephenson sought to identify their father, in order for the court to seek support. Of course, I found no records that they attempted to hold David accountable for his abandonment.

GENEALOGIST- THE MANHATTAN TURK

In the last edition, we introduced my newest discovered ancestor, my 8th Great Grandfather, Anthony Van Salee. VAN SALEE I mentioned that Anthony was a Dutchman of a different breed.

He arrived in 1630, at about 23, with his 27-year-old previously widowed wife, Grietse Reyniers Egberts.

In 1638, Van Salee acquired a farm on the island of Manhattan which was named “Wallenstein”, in memory of Albrecht von Wallenstein, supreme commander of the armies of the Habsburg monarchy (pictured above). The plot was located on the north side of the defensive stockade across Lower Manhattan, along present-day Wall Street. The bouwery was surveyed from Broadway to the East River between Ann Street and Maiden Lane. Van Salee transferred the deed the following year.

At the sale of this property to Cornelis van Tienhoven, it was noted: “that he had found 12 apple, 40 peach, 73 cherry trees, 26 sage plants, etc., behind the house sold by Anthony Janszoon van Salee to Barent Dirksen.” This is one of the first references to cherry trees being planted in North America.

By 1639, at the age of 32, Anthony had become one of the largest landholders on the island of Manhattan, as well as a prosperous farmer. His property on Manhattan is included on the Manatus Map of that year (below). He is recorded as # 22 Bouwerie (farm) of Anthony Jansen Van Salee, called the Turk. You can see it just north of the fort on the tip of Manhattan. The map is oriented with north being on the right. I also included a close-up map so you can see the 22.

Today, lot 22 would be worth billions, as it encompasses land that holds landmark properties on or immediately adjacent to its original boundaries, including pieces of the World Trade Center complex, the massive Fulton Center transit hub, and numerous high-rise banking headquarters. Across the Financial District, commercial land values and the vertical square footage built on top of them trade at astronomical prices. A single major skyscraper in this immediate neighborhood routinely commands a valuation between $500 million and over $1 billion.

If you look at just the residential real estate market in the area, a standard 1,000-square-foot luxury condo in Lower Manhattan averages roughly $1.5 million to $2 million. Across the immense acreage Van Salee used to cultivate apple, peach, and cherry trees, the sheer real estate value is staggering.

Anthony Van Salee’s second property was a massive 200-acre (100-morgen) plantation granted to him in 1643. This land sat directly on the border interface of the historic towns of New Utrecht and Gravesend. It was the very first formal, independent European land patent recorded on the western end of Long Island. The estate was a long coastal strip oriented toward the water, positioned directly north of Coney Island—which early settlers frequently called “Turk’s Island” in his honor. There is a map of his land below.

The farm was the site of the “The Great Pumpkin Heist of 1643”, which had nothing to do with Charlie Brown, but according to a formal legal complaint, the incident took place around noon on an autumn day in 1643. A combined raiding party consisting of sailors from an English vessel named the Seven Stars (referred to in Dutch records as the Sevenster), and a notorious privateer ship called La Garce anchored directly in the bay off Anthony’s land. The crew rowed ashore, marched straight into Anthony’s cultivated fields, and methodically harvested and loaded exactly 200 pumpkins back onto their ships.

More in the next edition on Anthony and family.

GENEALOGIST- AACHEN’S FATAL RHYTHM

The midsummer heat of Aachen in 1374 brought no celebration—only madness. On June 24, a citizen suddenly stepped into the public square and began to twitch. Within hours, a handful of people became dozens, then hundreds, all locked in a frantic, inescapable rhythm. Hand in hand, they formed wild circles, leaping and whirling through the streets as if yanked by invisible strings. This was the horrifying explosion of the dancing mania, a psychological plague that would soon fracture the Holy Roman Empire.

These people did not dance for joy. Their eyes rolled back as they slipped into a deep, helpless trance. The growing crowd screamed, wept, and foamed at the mouth, yet their feet refused to stop. For days on end, they spun through the dirt until their skin tore, their ribs fractured, and their lungs gasped for air. Exhausted adults and children collapsed into the dust, and many died where they fell.

Panic gripped the city. Believing the dancers were cursed by a saint or possessed by Satan, frantic priests rushed into the throngs. They splashed holy water and shouted exorcisms over the gasping crowds, but the ritual did nothing. Instead, the hysteria spread along trade routes like a biological wildfire, jumping from Aachen to Cologne, and rushing into Flanders. Traveling mobs stripped off their clothes, mimicked animals, and flew into violent rage at the mere sight of the color red.

Was it a toxic fungus in the local rye harvest, or a mass mental breakdown triggered by years of devastating floods and poverty? Centuries later, the dark truth of Aachen remains a mystery. All that is certain is that for one horrific summer, humanity lost complete control of its own mind, dancing unquestioningly into the grave.

They did discover that music seemed to calm the dancers down, so my wife’s symphonic band did their best to settle the people of Aachen (below)

GENEALOGIST- THE MYSTERY BIBLE

A client recently asked me to find the descendants of the owner of this ornate Bible (above), which his uncle picked up at a sale in Wisconsin.

The bible entries transcribe as follows:

The first page reads “Presented by Mr. and Mrs. R.E. Alexander to Dr. Wm M. Jones on December 28, 1905.”

The second page reads “Presented to Archie E. Vincent by Mrs. Alexander on December 28, 1947.

That’s all I had to go on. Names like Jones and Alexander would be challenges, however,

Archie E. Vincent is a pretty rare name. The only one who appeared to be alive in 1947 to receive the bible was Archie Eugene Vincent. He was from St. Louis.

He was a military veteran and then became a minister, so it’s reasonable to think the bible may have been a graduation gift from theology school.

He became a minister serving in Lakeport, CA. Sadly, you can read in the article that he was estranged from his family and then ended up committing suicide by exhaust hose.

His widow, Rena, appears to have married at least 4 other times after that, so it’s easy to see how a bible could have disappeared along the way, as I am sure a minister had several.

He left behind four children who would now all be in their 70’s and are now scattered across the country. The client is deciding whether to track down the descendants, since it isn’t much of a feel-good story.

GENEALOGIST- “ROCKEFELLERS, FROM ROTTEN TO RICH”

John Davison Rockefeller Sr. (1839 – 1937) was an American businessman and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest Americans of all time and one of the richest people in history. It’s amazing he accomplished this considering his father, William Avery “Devil Bill” Rockefeller Sr. (1810–1906).

“Bill” Rockefeller worked as a lumberman and then a traveling salesman who identified himself as a “botanic physician” and sold elixirs. He was known to buy and sell horses and, at one point, to have bought a barge-load of salt in Syracuse. Land speculation was another line of his business, and the sale of elixirs helped keep him in cash and aided his scouting of land deals. He loaned money to farmers at twelve percent but tried to lend to farmers who could not pay so as to foreclose and take the farms.

Bill was in love with Nancy Brown. However, he ended up marrying Eliza Davison in 1837 because her father would give her $500 when she married, and Nancy was poor. Bill met Eliza on one of his business trips in Upstate New York. It is said that Bill pulled out a slate and chalk to communicate when he arrived at the Davison residence, as he often pretended to be deaf and dumb on his selling trips. Eliza is said to have remarked, “If that man were not deaf and dumb, I’d marry him.” The couple had three sons and three daughters. Bill once bragged, “I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make ’em sharp.”

In 1849, in the city of Auburn, New York, William was indicted for a rape which had occurred at gunpoint. His victim had worked in the Rockefeller household; her name was Ann Vanderbeak. In the 1905 book Memoirs of an American Citizen, Robert Herrick says an improper relationship had been rumored to exist.

The court document reads, “That William A. Rockefeller late of the Town of Moravia in the County of Cayuga, on the first day of May in the year of the Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty eight, with force and arms at the Town of Moravia in said County, in and upon one Ann Vanderbeak in the Peace of God with the People of the State of New York then and there being, violently did make an assault on her, the said Ann Venderbeak, then and there make violently and against her will feloniously did ravish and carnally know. William Cooper, the Rockefeller family doctor, was also indicted for assault and battery with the intention of raping Ann Vanderbeak.
Because of the allegations, William sold the Moravia home and moved to Owego, New York, possibly to avoid trial, under the pretense of providing better opportunities for the boys. A few days later, Eliza’s father sued Bill in the Supreme Court of Cayuga for failure to pay a $1,175 debt. His plea states that Bill had asked him for help with his bail for the rape charges, but that Eliza’s father had not seen Bill since. Eliza also informed authorities that her husband had “absconded and cannot now be found within the state.” William assumed the title “Doctor Bill Levingston” and worked as a traveling snake-oil specialist. Although nothing came of the charges, William left the family penniless.

Although Bill abandoned the family while the oldest were teenagers, he remained legally married to Eliza until her death. Before leaving Eliza, he also had two daughters with Nancy, who had become his mistress and housekeeper.

In 1856, having assumed the name Dr. William Levingston, he married Margaret Allen in Norwich, Ontario, Canada. Bill and Margaret had no children together.

When John D. Rockefeller started his own produce commission business with Maurice B. Clark in 1859, Clark proposed the partnership and contributed $2,000 toward the venture. John D. Rockefeller had only $800 saved up at the time, so he borrowed $1,000 from his father, “Big Bill” Rockefeller, at 10 percent interest. This loan was a crucial turning point in John’s career, allowing him to build wealth and eventually buy equity in larger quantities.

Bill visited with his grandchildren at the Forest Hill estate in Cleveland and at Pocantico Hills in Tarrytown. He taught his grandchildren how to shoot and played fiddle for them in the evenings. Prior to Bill’s visits, John D. would invite some of Bill’s relatives and friends from Upstate New York.

After hearing rumors that John D. Rockefeller—then the richest man in the world at the height of his fame—had a shameful family secret, the press went into a frenzy. Joseph Pulitzer offered a reward of $8,000 for information about “Doc Rockefeller,” who was known to be alive and living under a false name, but whose whereabouts were a family secret. Despite slender clues picked up from interviews with family members and an 18-month search, the journalists failed to track him down before he died. The full story was not exposed until two years later.

Bill had spent some time in Park River, North Dakota, under the Levingston alias. He died on May 11, 1906, in Freeport, Illinois, at the age of 95. He was buried there in Oakland Cemetery. John D. Rockefeller never publicly acknowledged the truth about his father’s life as a bigamist, and the cost for Bill’s grave marker was paid by the second wife’s estate.

GENEALOGIST- A SHOCKING EVENT

My grandfather used to tell me he was the best low-boy truck driver in the San Fernando Valley. A low-boy is a tractor-trailer that often hauls heavy equipment that would be difficult to load onto a higher trailer.

My older cousin, who lived near him, got to occasionally ride with him in the truck while he was hauling equipment. Finally, I spent the night, and I got to ride with him one day on his assignment. I can still remember the brown leather seats and his shifting gears.

After the trip, I couldn’t wait until the next time. I was disappointed to learn that his company made a rule that family members couldn’t ride along any longer, due to insurance. That wouldn’t surprise anyone today, but in the 60s, the rules were looser.

I remember sometime shortly after that he was in an accident, which is accounted for in these news articles.

GENEALOGIST- 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.

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