Fun with genealogy

I haven’t published anything recently, but it’s about time. here’s an intriguing sidelight. It’s also been published on my blog, http://jdeveland.com.

Genealogy is a fun exercise. It’s fascinating to try to understand one’s family background — or backgrounds, to be more precise, since most of us come from a lot of pretty diverse origins. It’s also frustrating, because often there is little to know except someone’s critical dates. The more people you can identify, the more people you want to sit down and have a drink with and learn more about their lives and circumstances.

It is, clearly, a hobby or calling that is more accessible to people from some kinds of backgrounds than others. People whose families have been in this country longer, and/or come from places elsewhere with extensive document archives that have been made accessible, have a considerable advantage. It’s interesting that many of the more significant genealogical resources have been made available through the Mormon Church. Of course, their doctrine of the retrospective baptism of the dead has motivated their work. My grandmother occasionally expressed an amused concern that one of her descendants might eventually convert to Mormonism and try to have her retroactively baptized; I told her I didn’t think she had a lot to worry about.

For the past few years, I’ve been occasionally looking into my family background through the resources of http://ancestry.com. There are a number of different genealogical websites, but this is one of the more thorough. I happen to fit into that favored demographic where genealogical research is, if not precisely easy, at least possible. My family on both sides came to North America between about 1630 and about 1750, and are pretty well documented in England and Germany as well. I’m about as white-bred as they come, diversity-wise (with an exception, noted below.) Some of them were pretty hot stuff when they got here, but managed to throw it all away in a few generations; a lot of them were pretty ordinary folks who managed to stay ordinary. My Eveland ancestor arrived in New York in 1710 as part of the “Poor Palatines” — political refugees from Germany not unlike today’s Syrians, whom the British managed to mishandle every bit as much as they are doing with the Syrians today. Plus ca change…

Which brings me to the rather interesting story that I teased out of my family records. It seems that about 1660, there was a man living in the brand-new town of Springfield MA named Benjamin Parsons. He had been born in England and came to North America with his family in 1630. He married a woman named Sarah Vore in the 1650s, and had with her the usual extensive colonial family of 10 or 11 children. Two of his sons were Samuel (1666–1736) and his younger brother Ebenezer (1668–1752).

So far, pretty typical. What makes this story intriguing is that Ebenezer went on to have a son named Jonathan and a granddaughter named Lydia Parsons, who married a man named Moses Greenleaf about 1755, and their daughter Clarina was my maternal grandmother’s great-grandmother. We have in the family an antique travel desk that belonged to her, complete with her signature in ink that bled through to the wood at some point when she signed a particular letter. Clarina’s husband, blessed with the amazing name of Eleazar Alley Jenks, was in 1807 the publisher of the Portland Maine newspaper, and drowned in Portland Harbor when the commuter boat to Boston on which he was coming home hit an uncharted rock in the harbor and sank in full view of the entire town. Kind of a major Civic Surprise. At any rate, Ebenezer is my direct ancestor on my mother’s side.

So much for Ebenezer. What about Samuel? Well, his daughter Hannah went on to marry a man named Horton, and four generations later had a great-granddaughter named Lois Evans (1768–1848) was my paternal grandfather’s grandmother.

If you had trouble following all that, here’s the bottom line: old Ben Parsons is a direct ancestor of mine through both my maternal line and paternal line. With some six or seven generations in between, it’s hardly a prohibited degree of consanguinity, but it is really quite fascinating nonetheless. Creepy? Maybe.

Actually, it’s probably a lot more common than usually thought among families with old New England roots. Back in the 1660s, there really weren’t all that many people in a town like Springfield, particularly people named Parsons (oddly enough, Ben actually was a parson — nominal determinism?) So as people moved around and shifted back and forth, it wouldn’t be all that unlikely to encounter people of similar ancestry.

Now here’s the final interesting twist. Lois Evans’ father Nathaniel Evans (1740–1820) was actually more than half Iroquois (Mohawk, to be precise). His mother was full Mohawk, and his father Samuel Evans was the son of the famous Rebecca Kellogg, by a Mohawk whose name is not been preserved. Kellogg was one of the children taken by the Iroquois in the 1704 Deerfield MA raid. She lived with the tribe for nearly 20 years and had several children there, before returning to the colonists to live with them for another 15 or so years, eventually returning to the Iroquois. On the frontier in those days, identities were not as precisely defined as they might be in the cities. The upshot is that my great-grandfather Joel Eveland (the one who came to California as an illegal immigrant from Ohio) was approximately 3/16ths Native American. Thus, my pretty strictly European ancestry is augmented with slightly more than 1/64th Native American heritage. Obviously, this doesn’t entitle me to anything in the diversity sweepstakes, but it is interesting and if I were to get a new haircut, at least I might be able to deflect some of the charge of cultural appropriation that could result.

Well, none of this is of cosmic significance to anybody outside my family, and of limited significance to those within. I’m going to keep digging, because that’s what us ex-history majors from reed do with our spare time. But it does go to show that when you start digging into your background, you never know precisely what you’ll find. That’s why I’d like to sit down with these folks over a little drink — well, actually a lot of little drinks — and just listen.