My mom
gave us many gifts before she left us. There are too many to list here, and
that is not my intent. The one I want to write about is the red notebook. The
one that has all the family tree stuff in it.
Mom became interested in her and my
dad's ancestries many years before she died in 2006. It really picked up when
she retired from teaching about 15 years earlier, and it became her passion
during those retirement years. Much of the progress she made was prior to the
internet, and it involved many phone calls and letters, following one clue
after another. Also many visits to libraries, courthouses, and historical
societies around the Eastern U.S., especially Ohio and Kentucky. She even made
one trip with my sister and brother-in-law to Sweden, although I believe that
that was not fruitful, since she didn't realize at the time that the surname of
the first generation who arrived in the new world in the 1600's was not the one
they were born with.
To start at the beginning of the
story of her search for her roots: My mother's family had immigrated to
southwestern Ohio from Morgan County in southeastern Kentucky before she was
born, the 5th of 6 children. Her father was from a farming family, but he had
moved his family to the Cincinnati area to obtain work in manufacturing. When
my mother was a small child, the family moved back to Kentucky after the
depression hit, when her father was financially ruined after a couple of family
members defaulted on their home mortgages on which he had co-signed. There,
they got by with a little farming and with a WPA supervising job that he got as
a political appointee. There are still buildings standing in the Maytown area
that he built. There are also family stories of his generosity in helping those
less fortunate, including hand-building coffins for families who couldn’t afford
to buy one for their recently deceased family member.
After the depression eased, the
family moved back to Ohio for the good union jobs available in the
manufacturing industry there. In my mother's late teens (after she had
graduated high school at age 16), they moved to a small farm in Midland, Ohio,
which is where they were living when she met my dad.
Whereas Mom's immediate family had
moved around quite a bit, my dad's family had been (mostly) farmers in Clinton
County for several generations. As such, political tendencies as they were,
Dad's family were mostly stalwart Republicans, and Mom's were generally
blue-collar Democrats. These factors, combined with Ohio's bias against those
"hillbilly Kentuckians" left my mom being not much welcomed into the
family. Some of the anecdotes I have already recounted in my entry about
Grandma Miller, so suffice it here to repeat that Dad's mother at first refused
to go to the wedding ceremony and reception, although she gave in at the last
minute upon urging from her daughter, my father’s older sister.
With this background, I think we
can see what at least part of Mom's motivation was in digging into both sides
of the family genealogy -- to prove that her family was just as good as my
dad's. And indeed, I think she was successful at doing that, if by
"good" you mean having a long record of service to the U.S.A. She
eventually joined the D.A.R. and became a regent for the state of Ohio, and I
have documentation (mostly from her, but a couple done since her death) of 8 of
her ancestors being acknowledged as Patriots by the DAR, versus 5 for my
father's side of the family. I have no
indication of any of my ancestors immigrating since the American Revolution, so
I guess I’m about as American as you can get, at least among those with
European descent.
With most
of the many ancestors that I have a record of, I have no stories. Just names in
some cases, others with dates and places of birth and/or death. There are a few
stories, though, and I’ll tell a couple of them here.
Peter
Miller was born in Wales in 1740, according to family records, but no specific
date, location, or parentage is known. He met his bride-to-be in Philadelphia,
and they went into Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, to start a farm. After
having 5 children, the War called him to service, and he was mortally wounded
in the Battle of Brandywine Creek, not too far from Philadelphia. He actually died several months afterwards.
His wife, the former Catherine Rhodes whose parentage is also not known, was forced
to give up her small children for adoption into families who could care for
them. The youngest, my 3rd great grandfather Isaac Miller, was
adopted (though his surname was not changed) by a John McKinnen. Mr. McKinnen
eventually took Isaac to Kentucky and later to Clinton County, Ohio, where he
gave Isaac a homestead (100 acres) as if he were his own son. I do not know how
Mr. McKinnen had become so land-wealthy that he owned 1000 acres there, except
that he had traded his Kentucky acreage for it. Isaac, as a young man, thus
became one of the early white settlers of Clinton County. There exists a story
of how he had to chase off an Indian who was trying to steal some chickens, so
I conclude that he was part of the process of European descendants who
basically stole the land from the Indians, much to my own chagrin.
Another
ancestor on my father’s side was Ephraim Kibbey, who was a well-known
frontiersman at the time, having been the lead scout for “Mad Anthony” Wayne. I’m
sure he killed many Indians in his time, and perhaps even took part in some of
the massacres of Indian settlements that occurred. There is a Wikipedia article
about him, and he is regarded as one of the original settlers of the Cincinnati
area. Again, I am not proud of the process of which he was a part, although I’m
sure he believed at the time that he was doing right.
My mother’s
side also had some rather notorious characters, including one Francis Hopkins,
who was known as the “Tory Bandit.” He was hanged (lynched) for his activities
against the cause, although ironically his son Gardner was a patriot, and he in
fact is the DAR Patriot that my mother used to gain membership into DAR.
Another ancestor (both 4th and 5th great grandfather to
me) was Daniel Williams, who is said to be a direct ancestor of half of the
current population of Morgan County, Kentucky. He was a companion of Daniel
Boone in settling the Kentucky wilderness, and both he and his father Edward are
listed as DAR Patriots.
This will
have to suffice for now as “Part 1.” When I complete this online blog entry, I
will include some of the other stories I have discovered. They are stories
about the birth and growth of the United States of America, and of the hardships and triumphs of the people as they made their way forward in life.
