New Haven, Connecticut

I have traced several branches of our family tree back to New Haven during colonial times.

Capt. Daniel Hall, my maternal 7th great grandfather, lived in nearby Wallingford with his wife Thankful Lyman from Middletown, CT.  Abraham Hall, my 6th great grandfather, lived in New Haven with his wife, Sarah Doolittle. Abraham is buried in Center Street Cemetery, Wallingford, which is close to Doolittle Park.

Capt. Daniel Hall > Abraham Hall > Medad Hall > Elisha Hall > Alfred King Hall > Andrew A. Hall > Ada C. Hall > Horace C. Crofford > Virginia M. Crofford > Teresa Zaun Austin

John Hopkins, my 7th great grandfather (maternal), operated a grist mill in New Haven built by his father Stephen Hopkins of Hartford.

Lt. John Hopkins > Mary Hopkins > Abraham Hickcox > Jared Hickcox > Hannah Hickcox > Anna Dillingham > Horace C. Crofford > Horace C. Crofford > Virginia M. Crofford > Teresa Zaun Austin

Some of our ancestors, both maternal and paternal, are buried in a famous graveyard on what is now called, "Center Church on the Green."  The original cemetery is gone, but many of the gravestones are preserved underneath the church building.
http://www.newhavencenterchurch.org/history.html

I will add the names of our ancestors buried there as I discover them.

From my maternal grandfather's lineage:

Eleazer Brown 1642 - 1714 (my 8th great grandfather)

Sarah Buckley Brown 1640-1723 (my 8th great grandmother)

From my paternal grandfather's lineage:

Nathaniel Bradley 1661-1745 (my 7th great grandfather)

Ruth Dickerman Bradley 1668-1725 (my 7th great grandmother)

Alice Prichard Bradley 1625-1692 (my 8th great grandmother)

Plain brown wrapper

I received a mysterious package in the mail today from Aunt Teeny.  It was a thick packet of papers, but was addressed to "Leah & John" at my address.  So I called Aunt Teeny and she said that she had found a pile of genealogy papers and put them in the mail for me.  No clue why it said Leah & John.  When I opened it, it appeared to be a random assortment of letters and old typewritten documents.  On closer inspection, I realized that it was years of correspondence between Aunt Miriam and Uncle Herman and a relative in New Jersey named Ray Eggers.  Mr. Eggers had spent years doing research on the family and had published books about it.  He was particularly determined to prove the link with Roger Williams. He did it the old fashioned way, by traveling all over the Northeast doing research using primary documents.   It took more than a decade, but he finally accomplished his mission.

As I scanned the documents to post online, it occurred to me that Ray Eggers was probably a source for the Weismantel family Ancestry research as well.  I have been communicating with Matt Weismantel through Ancestry over the last year.  Ray's connection with Marge Weismantel was the source of many photos and documents, as well as the Bryant family Bible, all of which had already been shared with me by Matt.  We are all descendants of Roger Williams through the Abbott line.  

All of Ray's work and correspondence is now posted in Google Docs and has been shared with my fellow Ancestry researchers.

May Abbott Cowan, half sister of George Wright Abbott > Bonnie F. Cowan > Raymond F. Eggers.
[George Wright Abbott > Jacqueline D. Abbott > John B. Zaun > Teresa Zaun Austin]

In talking with Aunt Teeny this afternoon, more stories came out about the Butler family.  She said that Rawley Martin Butler came home from WWI with syphilis.  He came to live with the Lukhards when Junior (Herman, Jr.) and Dee (Rawley) were young and shared a bed with the boys until the syphilis was discovered. Rawley's wife Hilda divorced him and he eventually died of it in 1944.  Rawley's grandson questions some of these details, however, because Rawley and Hilda had two children in the 20's and she lived to a ripe old age.  He also said that Rawley had been known to have a gambling problem and had lost the family home which could very well have been a reason for the divorce.  The chronology of this story doesn't exactly make sense, but either way, it's a very sad situation.

Legacy

I have undertaken this ancestry research as my legacy to my children, my nephews and niece, and to all of their children.  I believe that our life on earth is fleeting and our physical being is not our eternal reality.  However, our sense of self on earth is partly derived from our place in history.  Seeing ourselves on a timeline of people who have come and gone gives us a more authentic perspective.

There is so much family history that died with my grandparents and with the scattering of family records among their descendants.  I am grateful for my youthful urgency in interviewing my great grandmother Zaun before she died.  I was not yet even a teenager, but sat down at the bedside of my Nanny and wrote down all of the names and dates that she could remember about her family.  There were tears in her eyes as she struggled to remember some of the details about her brothers and sisters.  From her memories, I painstakingly created a poster of our family tree (with fountain pen and ink cartridge) that I still have.  This poster was the starting point for my Ancestry research decades later.

I hope that it will be meaningful to my children someday.  I have put all of the photos and documents in my possession on each of the profiles so that it is easy to tell who was related to whom and how we all fit together as a family.  I love my family and especially my children so much - I am so proud to be connected with them in this interesting family!

We're all related...

It is so exciting to find people on Ancestry who share the same relatives.  Email exchanges between one of these newfound cousins has spiced up my research lately!  We share the same great grandmother, but he is a descendant of her first husband and I am from her second.  We have worked together through emails to solve some of the puzzles in our family tree, particularly regarding the Butlers (who are not related to me, but were close to my grandmother).

We knew that William Butler was an engineer and that he and Ida Rene lived in Lynchburg.  Another relative on Ancestry documented William's middle name as "Brown", but we have found no proof of that... yet.  If it is Brown, then there is a 1904 gravestone in Lynchburg that matches his information.  Closer inspection of a census document showed the abbreviations "Cabell, Rmt" and "So Ry".  Curious!  I googled "So Ry" and came up with Southern Railway... he was a TRAIN engineer!  The time and place made perfect sense.  I pulled up Google maps and found Cabell Street in Lynchburg... as I followed it by satellite view through the city, it crossed a main roadway called Rivermont  ("Rmt").  They must have lived at or near that intersection.  These leaps and bounds of discovery took less than five minutes!  So now I am going back and looking more closely at all of the census documents for everyone in my tree, searching for clues that I might have missed.

I spoke with my "Aunt Teeny" (Miriam Vaughan) and asked her what she knew about the Butlers.  She did not know much, but promised to contact some people who would know.  I also realize the urgency to interview certain older folks while they are still around, like Charlie Fletcher who is descended from Ida's twin, Addie.  Interesting that both Ida and Addie married men who were twenty years older than they were.  Both of these women had powerful, far-reaching influence in the family... makes me want to find out more.

Places

I would love to plan a trip itinerary based on the principal locations that my ancestors lived.

New England

Providence, RI, and Newport
Hartford and New Haven, CT
Fort Lee, NJ
Barnstable, MA
Buffalo Gap, SD
Liberty, IN
Lancaster, NE
Fort Lincoln, ND
Newcastle, WY
Hancock, IL
Hampshire, UK
Cornwall, UK
Salisbury, UK
Isle of Wight,  UK

Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Illinois

Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Cornwall, Salisbury

Ok, so I threw in Salisbury.  Who knows, we probably have Druids in our ancestry somewhere....  [PS just found out (2/8/14) that my 8th great grandfather John Greene was born in Salisbury, and we have deep royal roots there.]

One more place:  Berkley Castle, Gloucester is the birthplace of my 12th great grandmother Muriel Berkley, 1516-1543

Ordained

In no particular order, here are some of our ancestors who were men of the cloth:

Rev. Orrin Bishop Judd, 1816-1892 - Baptist theologian and author; translated a portion of the Gospel of Matthew.

Roger Williams, 1602-1683 - anti-Puritan (disagreed about works vs. faith), started the first Baptist church in America

Rev. Richard Barnard, 1568-1641 (England)

Rev. James Ashton, 1652-1705 - Minister at the First Monmouth Baptist Church, oldest Baptist church in New Jersey.

Hmm... notice a Baptist theme here?

Joseph Bucklin Bosworth, 1790-1850 - The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints - contemporary and leader of the Mormon Church under Joseph Smith. Smith's journals talk about this respected prophet.

Charles Wesley Wandell, 1819-1875 - The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.  Lived in Utah. Died a missionary in Australia.

...to be continued...

Lines crossed

The relatives that I am meeting through Ancestry are helping to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge.  I am communicating with two relatives, both named Matt, who did not know each other except through Ancestry.  One of these newfound relatives is the great grandson of Rebecca Abbott and William Bryant, my great grand aunt and uncle.  The other is a grandson of Rawley Martin Butler, my grand uncle. Common denominator = Ida Rene.

I had always heard that our family line were crossed between Bryants and Abbotts but could not find it in my research.  According to one of these newfound relatives, George Abbott's half sister Rebecca was married to Ida Rene Bryant's brother William.   I may have known this at one time but would never have been able to dredge it up on my own.  Amazing how discovering such a precious nugget of information can make my day.

William Thomas Bryant, brother of Ida Rene and son of Eley and Margaret Bryant, was born in March 1867 in Southhampton County, Va.

Rebecca Godfrey Curtis Abbott, half sister of George Wright Abbott and daughter of Whitfield Barrie and Gertrude Clayton Abbott, b. 28 Jul 1868 in Fort Lee, NJ.

William married Rebecca in 1900. They met when they were coworkers in a hat factory in Fort Lee, NJ. William had probably taken the train to NJ that had recently been extended to Norfolk, VA. William returned to his parents farm in Princess Anne County, but Rebecca (called Bonnie), finding herself pregnant, took the train to Norfolk where William met the train and they were married immediately in the nearest church parsonage. They lived with Eley and Margaret Bryant for about a year before returning to NJ. The baby died soon after childbirth. 

George Abbott married Ida Rene Butler (nee Bryant) in 1904 in Norfolk, VA. 

After Eley Bryant died, Margaret Bryant went to live in Richmond with Ida Rene and George Abbott. She died on a train trip back to Blackwater to visit Addie in 1908.

Ida Rene Bryant

Ida Rene Bryant, my great grandmother, was born in 1868 to Eley and Margaret (Cobb) Bryant in Southhampton County, Va.  Her siblings were Charles, Mary, William, and Gattie Jane, and a twin sister, Ariadne.  I have traced the Bryant and Cobb families back to around 1700 in Southhampton and Isle of Wight Counties.

It appears that Ida was married to a man named Williams, and was widowed before marrying William Butler. (She had an earlier marriage to Llewellyn Eley at age nineteen, possibly annulled). Ida Rene and William Butler (a train engineer) lived in Lynchburg for a time.  They had a live-in servant named Susan Austin according to the 1900 census.  Ida had three sons with William Butler:  Earl, William, and Rawley.  [Earl was 3 years old when they married; William Jr. died at age 19]. The story goes that Ida actually met George Abbott when he was only ten. Her brother William T. Bryant was married to George's sister Bonnie. Anyway, George was only 21 when he married Ida Rene; she was 35.  She and George had three daughters, Miriam, Jacqueline, and Audrey.  They also had a son, George Wright Abbott, Jr. who died in infancy.

Ida, center, with George (mustache) and daughters Miriam, Jacqueline, and Audrey.

George and Ida

Ida Rene

Ida and grandchildren, including my father,
John Beverly Zaun (front).

Ida's twin, Addie, married Blucher Fletcher and settled in the Blackwater area of what is now Virginia Beach.  Blucher was 20 years older than Addie and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.  They had a son, Blucher "Bluke", and a daughter, Ruth, who was mentally disabled.  On an interesting note, Addie's and Ida's descendants who live in Virginia Beach today have crossed paths and connected with each other in various ways through business, community, and church.  The family resemblances are uncanny, especially with the redheads.

Addie and Blucher

Addie

Ida died in 1933 at age 65.  George lived another 26 years.  Near the end of his life, George Abbott "Gramps" told his daughters that their mother was "quite a woman."

*postscript:  my newfound cousin, Matt, who I met through Ancestry, is a descendant of Ida from her marriage to William Butler.  This kind of connection is part of what makes Ancestry research so rewarding!

Reverend Orrin Bishop Judd

Zaun > Powell > Judd

If this blog emphasizes the fame and notoriety in our family lineage, it's because the more colorful characters more immediately come to mind. This post is no exception... meet Orrin Bishop Judd, the grandfather of my great grandmother Nannie Zaun (Georgia Powell).

Orrin Judd was born in 1816 in Hartford, Connecticut.  He grew up in a middle class home "removed alike from the evils of affluence and want." (Memoirs and Remains of Rev. Willard Judd).  He was the ninth of ten children - seven sons and three daughters with two decades between the ages of oldest and youngest.  He graduated from Madison University which later became Colgate University. Succeeding generations of "Orrin Judds" also attended college there.  The current Orrin Judd, who is the great great grandson of our Orrin and his third wife Susanna, maintains a blog called "BrothersJudd" in which he writes about his family's tradition:

"The Reverend Orrin Bishop Judd graduated from Madison which became Colgate and was a trustee.  
His son, Orrin Reynolds Judd, was a trustee of Colgate.  
His son, Orrin Grimmell Judd, went to Colgate and was a trustee.  
His son, The Reverend Orrin Dolloff Judd, went to Colgate-Rochester Seminary. 
His son, yours truly, went to Colgate." 
 (http://brothersjuddblog.com/archives/2008/05/fairest_theme_of_all_our_lays.html)

Rev. Orrin Bishop Judd D.D., L.L.D., was a respected Baptist theologian and author, as well as servant in both public and private office.  He wrote a translation of the New Testament (Matthew ch. 1-3), and many other works including a biography on the life, religious experiences, and teachings of his brother, Rev. Willard Judd.

(https://archive.org/details/memoirsandremai00conegoog)  

He founded the New York Chronicle, which he edited for many years (The Magazine of Christian Literature, volumes 5-6). 

Other works listed here:  http://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-no97-37833.  

Orrin was quoted at the beginning of this scholarly work:  

However, on the more human side, Orrin was married three times, and made front page news in the New York Times (April 19 and 26, 1868) because of a scandalous divorce from his second wife - our ancestor - Elizabeth MacDonald.  Her son-in-law testified that Elizabeth, who herself was a writer for the New York Tribune, was "treated with the most revolting cruelty," and that her husband beat and starved her and kept her from seeing her children.  In her own testimony, Elizabeth says that when she had only been married a week when she discovered that Orrin's "love of money was his besetting sin." He would not give her money for household incidentals, even refusing to supply his aging mother, who lived with them, with sufficient underclothing.  Elizabeth took off her own underclothing for the "venerable lady" and as a consequence took ill herself.  She accused Orrin of adultery, and the testimony of offenses and tawdry details of their personal lives goes on for entire pages of the newspaper. 

Egad.

The 1880 census in Brooklyn, NY, Orrin's occupation is "6th Ave E.RR." (elevated railroad).  The 6th Ave. E.RR was constructed in 1878.  I have not confirmed positively that this is the same Orrin Bishop Judd.

Powell Family circa 1895

Soon after I started doing research on Ancestry.com, another researcher contacted me asking if I had information about her husband's ancestor, Jefferson Monroe Powell.  She had posted some family photos on her family tree and offered to share them with me.  One photo in particular took my breath away.  Several generations of Powells are pictured in front of a house in Henrico, Va.  There are two generations of adults in the photo, children of various ages, a dog and a goat.  An infant sits precariously on the top of a tall fence post, the mother barely within reaching distance.  A young girl standing at the gate is unmistakably my great grandmother, Georgia Powell. But I stared and stared at the young man at the right side of the photo... he is a dead ringer for my father.  Funny, I'd always thought my father was a Zaun through and through, but there's no doubt the Powell genes are very strong.

Bethlehem Cemetery

My great grandparents, John Adam and Elizabeth Zaun, came to America from Germany in 1867.  I had heard of them, but knew nothing at all about them.  Last fall, I discovered online that they were buried in Bethlehem Cemetery in Richmond.  This was a surprise -  I  previously had no idea where they had lived or died.  Furthermore, it said the cemetery was on Penick Road.  That road was very familiar to me, as it was the street address of my great grandparents.  When I was growing up, my family made the pilgrimage to the little house on Penick Road to see "Nannie and Poppoo" about twice a year.  I wrote them letters regularly as a child, so the address was permanently forged in my memory.

In November 2013, my sister and her husband and I were on our way to a relative's birthday party in the Richmond area, so we decided to stop at the cemetery to see if we could find the graves.  It was a tiny cemetery and many of the stones were very old and illegible.  But as we searched, we found other ancestors' graves.  Everywhere we turned, it seemed, we saw another family name!  Powell, Abbott, Lukhard, Bryant, Zaun, Wright... we even found the graves of infants that we never knew existed.  I took pictures of all of their tombstones.

When I got home and uploaded the photos, I noticed an astonishing coincidence.  My photo of my great grandmother's grave, Ida Rene Abbott, was taken from the same angle as a photo taken in 1933, the day she was buried.  The same shot, 80 years apart! The church in the background looked the same.

In another old photo in my collection, my great great grandfather Jefferson Monroe Powell is standing next to a plaque honoring my great great grandmother Powell - I realized that this picture was taken at the same church.

Douglas Avenue (click on link at bottom of this post for the most recent info)

I am delighted to have finally solved another baffling mystery about my maternal grandmother's parentage.  All her life, my mother has believed that her maternal grandfather was named "Augustus Douglas Allen," because that's what her mother told her it was. In months of research, however, I have never come across that exact name.  I did find many records for "Augustus Dozier Allen" and "Augustus D. Allen," but I could never be sure that I had found the man I was looking for.

Tonight, after reviewing the information on Mom's side of our family tree, I was showing her some of the documentation I had gathered on her family.  I pulled up a Wichita City Directory from 1911, and sure enough, there was "Augustus D. Allen."  It took a minute or two to realize what I was seeing underneath his name, but it slowly registered... his business address (A. D. Allen Real Estate and Loans) was...drum roll...

                         121 Douglas Avenue! *

My grandmother, that sad, abandoned little girl, had remembered only bits and pieces of information about her childhood in Wichita, and she put them together as best she could.  Now, it all makes sense.  

Augustus lived with his family in Wichita.
Eva was sent to a hospital for the insane at Old Fort Supply (near Woodward) in Oklahoma.
Ethelyn (Teresa) was sent to an orphanage Paris, Texas, then worked as a nurse in Oklahoma City.
Augustus continued to live in Wichita and married Emma in 1905.
Note the proximity of the locations though they are in three different states.

I do not take for granted that I can access all the information I need from my living room couch.  Up to very recently, people had to take long sabbaticals and travel all over the country, visiting libraries and courthouses to search through reams of documents for rare nuggets of information about their family's past.  In just a few days I have revealed things about my grandmother's life that she never knew, and could never know, in her entire lifetime.  I pulled up Google Maps, searched for "121 Douglas Avenue" and was virtually transported to the very spot that my great grandfather conducted his successful real estate business.  (It's now a vacant lot in the middle of the city).  Less than a week ago, I knew absolutely nothing about the man and now he is a tangible reality... to me, it's just amazing.

121 E. Douglas Avenue.  Now a vacant lot.

*postscript:  in the process of compiling a timeline of Augustus' life, it became obvious that A. D. Allen Real Estate was established much later than my grandmother would have remembered.  However, in investigating his early work in Wichita, I found that he had worked at the Kansas Bureau of Immigration, also on Douglas Avenue.  This is what my grandmother would have recalled from her year or so in Wichita with her mother and father. 

Update - January 2, 2015:  New information had brought up questions about the above story.  See the updated entry, "My orphan grandmother," for the newest information on Augustus D. Allen:  http://descenddance.blogspot.com/2013/12/un-common-ancestry.html

Common Threads

I keep coming across certain common threads in our family history... for example, there are at least two pioneer schoolteachers in our lineage:
1) Ada C Crofford, Fort Lincoln, Dakota Territory, 1876.
2) Anna Lyons Crofford, Liberty Township, Indiana, 1837.
Each began the first school in her territory.

Custer House at Fort Lincoln

Gen. Custer appears in the unrelated stories of both of my maternal grandparents:
1) Ada Crofford, my grandfather's mother (mentioned above), was friends with Mrs. Custer and was teaching school in Fort Lincoln when Custer left to fight the Sioux at Little Big Horn.
2) Eva L. Allen, my grandmother's mother, resided in a mental hospital in Oklahoma that was a former "Camp of Supply" from which Custer left to fight the Cheyenne Indians at the Battle of Washita.

I don't know why but I find this kind of thing fascinating.

The Gaspee Affair

We are pretty solidly descended from New England stock.  Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island... much of our lineage can be traced back to these New England colonies.  So many early colonists were related to each other in some way - I have often wondered how many times our genetic lines crossed.

Our direct ancestors include many important colonial leaders.  Descendants of Roger Williams in Providence RI were patriots and conspirators in the early movement against Britain.  These names - Godfrey, Sabin, Greene, Hopkins and Ashton - are commonly found in many early Rhode Island historical accounts. Our own Captain Samuel Godfrey was a participant in the "Gaspee Affair," one of the most significant events leading up to the American Revolution.

Sabins Tavern in Providence was the meeting place of a group of early revolutionaries as they planned an attack on the British ship Gaspee.  The attack took place on June 10th, 1772. The ship was grounded at a spot on the Providence River now known at Gaspee Point.  Eight rowboats full of Providence men quietly approached the ship during the night and burned her.  The ship burned to the waterline before her powder magazine exploded.  This incident is recognized as the first act of violence toward Britain, predating the Boston Tea Party and the "shot heard 'round the world."  Britain never learned the identity of the culprits.

If you want to know more, check this out:  http://www.gaspee.org/

Providence is now on my bucket list of places to visit.

Abbott > Whitfield > Godfrey > Greene > Sayles > Roger Williams.
Abbott > Whitfield > Godfrey > Ashton > Williams > Roger Williams.