I don’t know if you’ve ever watched “Who Do You Think You Are?” on NBC on Friday nights, but it’s pretty interesting. Celebrities retrace their roots and discover all sorts of interesting stories about where they came from and who they are.
I always knew. I was half German from Russia and the other half was Welsh, Irish and Scotch.
Even so I decided on a whim the other day to try out ancestry.com. On the show they made it look so easy to research your family tree. And since it’s on a 14 day free trial, I thought, what the heck, I’m in.
It was easy enough. They started with three easy questions. What is my name? Who is my mother? Who is my father? Told you it was simple.
From there, it’s like a big connect the dots game. You simply keep adding mothers and fathers to everyone that appears. I knew the names of my grandparents, so I was already ahead of the game a bit.
But as I continued to click, the plot thickened. For instance, I found out that while my one set of grandparents did in fact immigrate from Russia in the early 1900s, the great-greats on my mother’s side came from upstate New York. They then went on to Missouri and Iowa, finally ending up in South Dakota.
When you start exploring your roots, these little leaves show up on the names. They are hints. Click on them and records associated with each person come up. They are most often searches conducted by other people. But they can also include military records, the census, marriage records, etc. So the process gets pretty easy sometimes. Within about two hours I was four generations deep. I new the names and a little about everyone back to great great great great grandma and grandpa.
I discovered some interesting things along the way.
On my mother’s side, her great grandpa was married to one Phebe Lewis. Her middle initial is ‘E’. As I delved deeper, I found it stood for Experience. It seems there were three women named Experience going back six generations.
The Stockwell name splits off directly from there. Phebe’s husband was Zenus Bartlett. I had actually started this whole thing because I wanted to trace the Bartlett name, as I heard I was a descendent of Josiah Bartlett, the second guy to sign the Declaration of Independence. But the Stockwell line was actually just as, if not more, interesting.
Thomas Stockwell was born in 1774. His father was Ichabod Stockwell whose father was Captain Ichabod Stockwell. His father was Captain John Stockwell who’s father was Captain William Stockwell, who was a sea captain. I actually am a Son of a Son of a Son of a Son, etc. of a Sailor.
He went to sea as a young man as an apprentice, then rose through the ranks to become captain. This was about 1665. I can’t imagine being 12 to 15 and setting off to sea nearly 350 years ago. This was back in the time when a sailor could only know the latitude, not the longitude of his position. A lot of celestial navigation and dead reckoning back then.
There’s actually a lot of captains in my family. I had to call my son about one yesterday. Seems I am a descendent of Captain Thomas Edward Ashby, an explorer. He helped survey the Virginias, and Ashby Gap there is named for him. My son moved to Virginia with his mother last year. He’s about 50 miles from the Gap and Captain Ashby is buried about an hour from Parker’s home. Gave me chills.
His son, had a great story, too. Captain John Ashby served alongside the Colonel George Washington. He is the recipient of a very nasty letter from George, about he and his wife’s behavior.
It seems old John was selling rum to the soldiers and his wife was sowing sedition among his men and attempting to lead a mutiny. George ordered him to remove his wife from the fort or he would do it himself on his next visit.
I also discovered that while I have good German roots on the other side of the family, it wasn’t German Russia. I ended my search temporarily on that side of the family, only after discovering that my family had been in the Alsace region of France since at least the 1650s. Mostly in a single town, Neewiller. Now, if you know your history, you know that this part of the world has been in the hands of France at some points along the way and Germany at other times. But my family roots actually go back to here. Russia was just a more recent stop for my family.
So, now I have to change all my plans. I have to travel to France, a place I said I never wanted to go. I have roots in New York, so I can’t diss on that part of the country anymore, and parts of my family have been in the U.S. since 1660, during the time of Jamestown and more than a hundred years before the United States gained independence.
I’m only just begun the journey. There are a lot more gaps to explore. I only filled in the easy parts, the ones with obvious connections and easy to confirm. But not bad for just five hours of really fun research.
On the show, they tell you that it can really change how you view yourself. I always chalked up the reactions on the show to actors being actors. But it’s really remarkable what I’ve found out. And I now have a sense of place in the world and how I got here.
And it turns out it wasn’t just my horny parents. It was actually a lot of horny grandparents.
On the Treasure Coast looking east towards my new Euro roots,
– Robb