Ulysses S. Grant and Me

I was happy to find that WikiTree’s suggested connection to President Grant takes me back into my early Pease family ancestors in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.  This was the first line that I was track back into the 17^th century in Massachusetts, and I have become very fond of them.  They provided me with my first clue about how deep my family roots ran in the United States, and I enjoy touching base with them every so often.

My birth name, Arnold, doesn’t take me very far back into my family history.  The immigrant ancestor on this line was Eli Arnold, who showed up in Maine in the 1790s.  I haven’t been able to make much sense of his life before that.  However, Eli’s son, Spencer, married Martha Pease in 1817 in Maine, and Martha connects me to six generations of Pease family members in Massachusetts.

The WikiTree connection is spot-on through #8, John Pease, and his sister Abiah (#9).  This family provides me with an embarrassment of riches, which sometimes makes it hard to track.  John and Abiah had the same father (Benjamin Pease) but different mothers. John’s mother, Jean Arey, died in 1726, three years after giving birth to her 12^th child in 15 years.  Benjamin married Abiah Vincent shortly after Jean’s death in 1726, and Abiah Pease was their first child, born in 1728.  Four more children were added to this family by 1736, for a total of 17 children.  The oldest child was 38 years old when the youngest child was born in 1736.  Randy old goat.

Benjamin was not the only prolific member of the Pease family.  Although he was apparently the only child of his father David, his grandfather (also named John) had 11 children with two wives, and various uncles and cousins also had a lot of children.  Factor in that every generation in every branch of the family was apparently required to include a Robert, John, and Mary, and you can see my dilemma.  My tree includes eight men named Robert Pease, 19 men named John Pease, and eight women named Mary Pease.  It’s easy to become confused.

The family of Abiah Pease (sister of John Pease) was new to me, but I was soon able to confirm the connections.  Abiah married Benjamin Sandford (#10) on Martha’s Vineyard in 1748, and they had a daughter named Abigail (#11).  Abigail married Benjamin Newcomb (#12) in 1759 – but in Nova Scotia rather than the expected Martha’s Vineyard.  I wondered how this had come about, and here’s what I learned.

First, we need to look at a map to see the distance between Martha’s Vineyard and the town of Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, where Abigail and Benjamin married. 

The town of Cornwallis is on the Bay of Fundy, across the Gulf of Maine from Massachusetts.  The trip would probably have taken several days over the 300 miles of open ocean, depending on the winds and the tides.  But these were seafaring fisher-folk; the trip would not have been daunting. 

What little research I was able to do revealed that the Sandford and Newcomb families were part of a migration of New England planters to Nova Scotia between 1759 and 1768.  Here’s what I learned about this from one source. https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/journey-of-new-england-planters-to-nova-scotia

In the wake of the deportation of the Acadians in 1755, newly cultivated lands opened up in Nova Scotia, which needed to be populated. Roughly eight thousand men and women from New England came to settle in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, and in the Upper St. John River Valley of present-day New Brunswick, between 1759 and 1768.

The first move towards settling the newly vacated lands after the Acadian Deportation was made via the Proclamation by General Charles Lawrence to the Boston Gazette on 12 October 1758, inviting settlers in New England to immigrate to Nova Scotia. The agriculturally fertile land in Nova Scotia would be a driving force in enticing the emigrants, but the New England colonists were wary. Lawrence sent a second Proclamation on 11 January, 1759 stating that in addition to land, Protestants would be given religious freedom, and a system of government similar to that in New England would be in place in the Nova Scotia settlements.

In the mid-eighteenth century, most New Englanders were desperately poor. For many generations, fathers had split up their lands to give to their sons, which meant they had very little land to farm themselves. The promise of over a hundred acres of land in Nova Scotia was enticing. Others were excited about the prospect of being close to the Grand Banks, which had a seemingly unlimited supply of fish. Unfortunately the promises and expectations of the settlers were initially not fully realized. The devastation of Acadian farms arising from the war between the British and the French made much of the offered land initially unusable. Regardless of these issues, the “Planters” emigrated and adjusted to the new circumstances that presented themselves in Nova Scotia, implementing a societal structure similar to that in New England. Although they were physically separated from family members left behind in New England, many maintained close ties through letters and occasional visits.

Land was the most influential reason for this emigration from New England, and the primary incentive for the move to Nova Scotia. Under the terms of Lawrence’s Proclamations, every head of family was entitled to one hundred acres of wild land and another fifty acres for each member of his household, up to one thousand acres. The land would be free of charge for ten years, after which a small rent would be charged. Grantees would have to improve one-third of their land every ten years, until all was cultivated. Lawrence’s offer made available a vast amount of quality farmland at a time when there was virtually no free land left in New England, due to a massive population increase to the area.

I found this interesting for another reason.  One set of my Martha’s Vineyard ancestors went to Maine sometime after the American Revolution.  I think it’s clear that people were comfortable moving around on the coast as circumstances drove them.

With this diversion out of the way, let’s look at how the rest of this connection holds up. David Newcomb had a son named Asaph, and Asaph had a daughter named Minnie.  Minnie’s husband, Jesse Cramer, was the son of Mary Grant – the sister of Hiram Ulysses (Ulysses Simpson) Grant.  Easy-peasy.

Geni provides me with two possible connection to President Grant, both of them through my mother’s family line.

The first connection (above) takes me through familiar territory through John Doyle Lee (in the middle of the second line on the chart).  He featured in my (ultimately disproven) link to George Washington and to my link to James Madison.  Here’s what I wrote about him in those posts.

Lee was born on September 6, 1812, in Kaskaskia, Illinois Territory, and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1838. He was a friend of Joseph Smith, founder of the church, and was the adopted son of Brigham Young under the early Latter Day Saint law of adoption doctrine. In 1839, Lee served as a missionary with his boyhood friend, Levi Stewart. Together they preached in Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. During this period Lee converted and baptized “Wild Bill” Hickman. Lee practiced plural marriage and had 19 wives (at least eleven of whom eventually left him) along with 56 children.

Wikipedia adds a bit more about John Doyle Lee:  Lee was later convicted as a mass murderer for his complicity in the Mountain Meadows massacre, sentenced to death and was executed in 1877.  You can read more about the Mountain Meadows massacre in its Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre 

Geni has much more information about John Doyle Lee.  You can look at his profile here. https://www.geni.com/people/John-Lee/6000000000836147633. 

May (Polly) Workman’s father, John A. Workman, was among the people who converted to the Mormon faith in Overton County, Tennessee, in 1840.  He and his wife, Lydia Bilyeu, soon moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, to join the Mormons who were moving there to join up with Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.

Mary Ann soon divorced John and married a man named Bennett, which explains why she is listed as “Mary Bennett” in Geni. 

The rest of the connection is a little iffy.  Mary Ann was John’s seventh wife; Terresa Chamberlain, on the other side of John in the chart above, was his oh, I don’t know, 17^th wife or thereabouts.  There is no record of their divorce, but she went on to marry several more times (only one husband at a time so far as I can tell), which is why she carries the surname Chamberlain, from one of her other husbands.

If I can get past the polygamist in this line, the rest of it seems pretty good.  It was interesting to see that President Grant’s grandmother was Sarah Delano, part of the well-known Delano family that also produced Franklin D. Roosevelt; President Roosevelt’s mother was a Delano.  President Roosevelt was President Grant’s 4^th cousin 1x removed.

This connection gets a grade of “B.”  Parts of it are rock-solid, but my mid-19th-century polygamists raise questions.

Geni provides me a second connection, as you see here.  It takes me through my mother’s family line back to my Dutch ancestors.  I recognize these names back through Abraham Workman and his mother Elizabeth (Wyckoff) Workman.  Her mother is correctly identified on this chart; her maiden name was Wyckoff and she married her 5^th cousin, also a Wyckoff.  Her father was John Wyckoff, as the chart suggests.  But the tree falls apart at that point; I can’t find anything that suggests John had a brother named Richard, and I can’t find anything that suggests Rebecca Simpson’s mother was ever married to a man named Addis.  Some of the comments on WikiTree and Geni say in fact that this connection has been disproven, as records show that Mary would have been only 10 years old when Rebecca was born, making it highly likely that the people who proposed this connection got the wrong Mary.

James Buchanan and Me

I enjoyed researching this connection because it took me back into my Rhode Island ancestors, the Deuel family (or Devol, Davol, Deul, and various other spellings).  The story goes that the family name was original Davol, of French origin, but that it was too close to “devil” so the family changed it.  I don’t exactly buy that.  I think it’s more a function of the fact that the interior letters look like a bunch of squiggles when people signed their names so people read the squiggles differently. 

I also enjoyed encountering my 5^th great-grandfather Benanuel (or Emmanuel) Deuel again.  I have ample evidence that he served in the American Revolution, but he’s not in the DAR database with a proven lineage because no one can agree on how to spell his name.

As I move through the rest of this suggesting connection between me and President Buchanan, I encounter a problem – I can’t document a connection between William Gaylord (#13) and Samuel Gaylord (#14), who is supposed to be his son.  I’ve spent a couple of hours on this, and I’m just not finding it.  Life is too short to spend any more time on this connection. 

WikiTree is always evolving, and when I visited the site this morning to check a couple of connections, I found a new line between me and President Buchanan.

I don’t really have to spend much time analyzing this connection – a quick survey shows me a persistent problem with my mother’s Workman family line.  #6 on this lineage is Lydia Bilyeu, and there are a bunch of women named Lydia Bilyeu in my family.

Now let’s see what Geni has to offer for this connection. 

At first glance I’m happy to have a chance to explore this connection.  I recognize these names back to Elizabeth “Betsy” Hunt and her brother Jefferson Hunt (although in my tree I have documentation that his first name is Thomas, not Charles, which makes sense because he was born in 1803, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson).

This line is fun because Jefferson Hunt converted to the Mormon faith in the 1820s and became a leader of the group that first settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, and then moved on to Salt Lake City under Brigham Young.  The Mormons have written extensively about Jefferson Hunt.  This is one reason I have this image, which is a hand-drawn map of the early life of John Hunt in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.  It is the frontispiece of a 1958 book Captain Jefferson Hunt of the Mormon Battalion by Pauline Udall Smith.  I retrieved this book from the Hathitrust web site. 

Jefferson Hunt was a member of the Nauvoo Legion in Nauvoo, where he was also ordained into the priesthood, but he and his family moved to Iowa early in 1846 when the persecution of Mormons in Nauvoo intensified.  While in Iowa, he volunteered to serve in the Mexican War as Captain of Company A of the Mormon Battalion.  This Battalion (the only religion-based unit ever formed in the U.S. Military) was created at the request of President Polk; the Saints  had been asking for government protection against the persecution they had suffered at the hands of local residents in Nauvoo, and the Mormon leaders believed that federal help would be forthcoming if the Saints aided the United States in its military effort against Mexico. 

Jefferson left military service in 1847.   Pauline Udall Smith wrote a book all about him – Jefferson Hunt of the Mormon Battalion.  He also has an entry in the four-volume set Conquerors of the West by Florence Youngberg.  After his service with the military, he went to California and settled the part of the state that became San Bernardino, serving in the first California legislature from 1853 to 1857.  He is honored as the “Founder of San Bernardino.”   He moved back to Utah, settling in Ogden Valley, where the town of Huntsville is named in his honor.

So with that out of the way, let’s see how the rest of this lineage matches what I have on my tree. 

As hard as it is to believe, Jefferson Hunt had a son named Liberty Independence, and he had a daughter named Consuela – so far, so good.  Consuela married Thomas Jasper Thornton and they had a daughter they named Sunbeam.  Swear to Goddess.  A side note – she died in 2014 at the age of 95.  Here’s a picture of “Bea” Thornton – she enlisted in the Army in 1944 as a surgical technician. I found this picture on Ancestry.

Bea’s first husband, Lyle Mower, was a pilot who became a POW during World War II.  They had no children before divorcing in 1946.  Lyle also married several times; his third wife, Bessie Buchanan, makes the link to the Buchanan family.  Bessie’s great-grandfather, John Buchanan III, was born in Ireland but immigrated to the United States sometime before 1812, when his marriage to Nancy Buche (or Bache) is documented in Kentucky.  John Buchanan and his family converted to the Mormon faith in the 1830s, and after John died in 1830 they joined with the church in Nauvoo and then went to Salt Lake City with them. 

As I explored this family, I wondered why James Buchanan Sr. did not join the Mormon church when his brother John’s family converted to that faith.  It appears that James’s parents both died when he was young and he was sent to live with his mother’s brother Samuel in Ireland, and then at age 22 came to the United States to live with his mother’s other brother, Joshua. 

Overall, this family connection checks out.  I enjoyed exploring it because it took me from President Buchanan’s 18th century Irish grandparents through the founding and migration of the Mormon Church, to his collateral descendants (he never married and had no children) who served in World War II and lived until 2014.  Quite a ride!

Franklin Pierce and Me

I think it’s a good idea to begin with exactly when Franklin Pierce was president and what was going on at the time.  He served one term in office, from 1853-1857.  Here were the key events of his presidency:

• January 6, 1853 – Franklin Pierce’s only surviving son, Benjamin, is killed in a train wreck. His other two children had died in infancy
• March 4, 1853 – Pierce inaugurated
• December 30, 1853 – Gadsden Purchase concluded
• Mary 30, 1854 – Kansas-Nebraska Act, setting the stage for “Bleeding Kansas” and the ramping up of hostilities between pro- and anti-slavery elements in the country
• July 6, 1854 –Founding of the Republican Party.  Pierce was a Democrat
• Throughout 1855, hostilities increase in Kansas
• May 22, 1856 – Caning of Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate.  The fight was provoked by Sumner’s fiery anti-slavery speech on the floor of the Senate two days earlier.
• June 2, 1856 – the Democrats dump Pierce, nominate James Buchanan for President.
• November 4, 1856 – Buchanan is elected President.

This line connects through my Cody family in New England and New York.  I wrote about this family in the second week of this project, when I was researching my connection to President John Adams.  My connection that week was through Daniel Cody (#6 on this chart) and his brother Elijah.  This week, the connection is through the family of Daniel’s mother, Mary Parmenter (#7). I’ve done a fair amount of research on this line and I’ve grown fond of Mary.  I’m happy to have the chance to tell you about her.

First, let me repeat what I wrote about the Adams family and tell you about the Cody family.  You may recognize this as the name of one of the iconic figures of the American West, William F. Cody (aka “Buffalo Bill” – I call him Buff).  The members of the Cody family in America are descended from Philippe and Martha LeBrocq L’Escaude, Huguenots who came to Massachusetts from the Channel Islands in 1698.  By the next generation, the surname had been Anglicized to Cody.  Philippe and Martha had six children, but only two of them are important to the link between Buffalo Bill and me: their sons Isaac and Joseph.  I am descended from Joseph and Buff is descended from Isaac, my third great-grandmother Melinda Cody was Buff’s 4^th cousin.

Here’s what I know about Mary Parmenter.  She married Joseph Cody in Massachusetts in 1757.  They had eight children before Joseph responded to the Lexington Alarm in April 1775, and three more children before 1784.  After the war, they ran a farm and a successful store. However, perhaps as the result of some business setbacks, Joseph died in 1787, and Mary was left to her own devices. Her children ranged from age 3 to 27, and she may have felt she was in a fine pickle. As the story is told, Mary moved with some of her children to Marcellus, NY, in 1794. It is likely that Mary received land there as compensation for Joseph’s military service.

After a trip of almost 300 miles on horseback in the spring of 1794, Mary and a couple of her older children scouted out land in the newly formed town before claiming 640 acres. She then went back to Massachusetts, retrieved the rest of her children, and returned to settle on her land in Marcellus.

Not too long after her arrival in Marcellus, Mary married Jared Smith, who was also a new arrival in the town and whose land abutted Mary’s property. Jared entered into the tavern and inn-keeping business in Marcellus, working directly with Mary’s sons Joseph and Elijah Cody. Mary and Jared and several of Mary’s children worked in these enterprises and were important figures in the everyday lives of the residents of Marcellus.

As I trace this connection, at first I encounter a familiar name – Mary’s mother, Thankful Cheney (#8).  Love these Puritan names.  But then I had to do some tree-building to test this connection.  Thankful did have a sister named Mary (#9), and Mary was married to a man named Thomas Dill (#10).  I didn’t have him on my tree, but it didn’t take long for me to determine that this was accurate. 

It wasn’t hard to discover that he had married twice – Mary Cheney was his second wife, but he had been married previously to a woman named Mary Pierce (#11).  So far so good.  The next connection gave me a little bit of trouble – the WikiTree connection had her mother identified as Elizabeth Pierce (#12), but I wasn’t sure if that was her maiden name or married name.  A little digging revealed that this was probably her maiden name – that her husband, Nathaniel, was also a distant cousin. 

Once that problem was out of the way, it wasn’t hard to trace the descendants of Elizabeth and Nathaniel down to their 2^nd great-grandson, President Franklin Pierce.  It helps that several of the people in that line were well-known in their own right, serving as colonial officials and elected officials through the years of the early Republic.

Note:  When George Bush I was President, I remember hearing that his wife Barbara Pierce Bush was also related to President Franklin Pierce.  I thought that maybe she was a direct descendant, but when I wrote about President Pierce’s life (above) I realized that none of his children lived to adulthood.  A little research revealed that Barbara Pierce Bush’s relationship to Franklin Pierce is the same as my relationship to Buffalo Bill – 4^th cousin 4x removed.  The only thing that makes it seem more meaningful is that her connection to the Pierce family is a male-only line so the surname didn’t change.  I am less impressed than I used to be. 

Geni takes me along a different path, this one through my father’s family through his Wilcox ancestors in Rhode Island.  My father’s family has a lot of early settlers in Rhode Island, and I enjoy visiting them occasionally. (You should note that I visit them in my mind only — I don’t have any close relatives who are still in Rhode Island. They left the state before 1800.) A quick glance at this chart provides me with names I recognize back to Theophilus Richardson (on the right end of the second line in this chart). Theophilus’s father, Ezekiel, was a passenger in the 1630 Winthrop Fleet and was one of the founders of Woburn, Massachusetts.  Theophilus was one of nine children – one named Melchizedek – but what’s important for this lineage is that he had another brother, Josiah.

From Josiah, it’s not hard to build through his daughter and granddaughter to the Pierce line, and from there to Franklin Pierce.

One thing I found interesting about both of these lines – Franklin Pierce’s father and grandfather were both named Benjamin Franklin Pierce.  I just finished teaching an Osher class about Benjamin Franklin, and I wasn’t surprised to find that the first Benjamin Franklin Pierce was born and given his name in 1757, at the peak of Benjamin Franklin’s worldwide fame as a scientist. 

Millard Fillmore and Me

I thought this might help us remember who Millard Fillmore is

According to this chart, Millard Fillmore is my 3^rd cousin 6x removed.

I was able to verify this connection pretty easily:

Numbers 0-9 on this chart were already on my Ancestry tree.  I have worked with this line a number of times and it’s pretty rock solid.

Before I move on to the Millard Fillmore portion of this line, let me tell you why I like this lineage:

1.  It goes back through my Arnold family, which is the shortest of my ancestral lines.  My immigrant ancestor on this line, Eli Arnold, came to America in the last half of the 18^th century and was a fairly ephemeral character.  I haven’t been able to find out very much about him
2. The father of Miles Arnold (#4) was Spencer Arnold, Eli’s son.  Spencer’s wife Martha Pease provides me with a connection that goes all the way back to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1630s, when two Pease brothers emigrated as part of the Puritan Great Migration.  This was the first family that I had traced back this far when I started doing serious genealogy research a decade ago, and I’m always happy when I get to revisit them.  They feel like old friends.
3. The movement of Cousin Millard’s ancestors from Bristol, Massachusetts, to Dutchess County, NY (between Manhattan and Albany) mirrors a pattern I saw in my own family line.  My ancestors who migrated in this pattern were Quakers, although I don’t see any evidence that Cousin Millard’s family followed this faith. 

I had to build the connection to Millard Fillmore – I had Ester Ripley (#10, Joseph’s sister) in my tree, but I didn’t have any information about her.  In fact, my tree said she died in infancy.  I had to work a bit with the hints WikiTree provided, but I was able to confirm all of the connections.  I was particularly happy when I got closer to Millard Fillmore on this line – I began to get hints like this.

This connection is pretty rock-solid. 

I also like this because it gives me the opportunity to reflect on Millard Fillmore – certainly a sentence most people, including me, have neither thought nor uttered in our lives.  The White House website itself doesn’t have much good to say about old Cousin Millard:

In his rise from a log cabin to wealth and the White House, Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence, an uninspiring man could make the American dream come true.

Despite this fairly rude comment, Cousin Millard holds an interesting spot in United States history.

1. He is the second president to have come into office upon the death of a president.  John Tyler assumed the office in 1841 (after the death of William Henry Harrison) and cousin Millard assumed the office in 1850 (after the death of Zachary Taylor). Neither Tyler nor Fillmore was able to win the office in his own right in the next election
2. As Vice President, he presided over the Senate during the months of debate over the Compromise of 1850,
3. He was the last of four Presidents from the Whig party to serve as President, following Harrison, Tyler, and Taylor.  This makes him the last president not to be affiliated with either the Democratic or Republican Parties. 
4. When the Whig party disintegrated in the 1850s, Fillmore chose not to affiliate with the new Republican Party, instead accepting the 1956 nomination for President of the Know Nothing (or American) Party.  This was a fiercely anti-immigrant party that flared briefly during the 1950s.   Their name stems from the fact that members of this originally clandestine group were required to answer “I know nothing” when asked about the specifics of the movement. 

Interestingly (well, I think it’s interesting), Geni also takes me back to the Wibourne-Eddy-Millard-Fillmore connection, although the connection is through my mother’s side of the family.

In this connection, I am good back to the second Thomas Jenkins (on the right side of the second line on this chart.  However, I don’t show Hannad (or Hanna) Jenkins as his mother.  Instead, I have his mother identified as Lettice Hanford, which Geni shows as his wife.  This is just incorrect, so this connection breaks down.

This makes me a little sad.  The Hunt family in my mother’s ancestry connects me to the Mormon Church in the 1840s; Jefferson Hunt, the brother of Elizabeth “Betsy” Hunt, was with the Mormons in Nauvoo and was a leader of the group that migrated to Salt Lake City.  It’s fun to be able to talk about these ancestors.  This will have to wait – I’ll have several chances later on in this series.  Preliminary information suggests that I connect to nine presidents through my Hunt line – Buchanan, Lincoln, Cleveland, McKinley, Taft, Nixon, Bush, Clinton, and Gore (I included him because he won in 2000 (although we didn’t storm the capitol building and threaten to hang him unless he did the “right thing”).

Zachary Taylor and Me

According to WikiTree, Zachary Taylor is the grandnephew of the wife of my 2^nd great-granduncle James Gaines.

At first glance, this WikiTree connection follows a path that has become familiar to me.  Numbers 0-8 on this chart are family names on my paternal grandmother’s line.  This is the same line that connected me to Presidents Madison and Polk.  After #8, Richard Gaines, this line moves laterally to his brother James, James’s wife Elizabeth Strother, and Elizabeth’s brother William.  All of these connections checked out when I tested them on Ancestry.  I continued to follow this line, proving that William had a daughter named Sarah and that Sarah married Richard Taylor.  I was also able to verify that the son of Sarah and Richard Taylor was Zachary Taylor, who would be elected president in 1848.

Geni takes me once again through my Walton family line in Virginia.    

Any of you who have been reading my posts may recall how frequently my Walton family in Virginia has provided the links for these connections, and I’m here once again with my connection to Zachary Taylor.  I have mentioned the book I’ve used to confirm the details of this family – Waltons of Old Virginia – and I decided I needed my own copy of this book to figure out these complicated ancestors.  My copy will arrive in the next couple of days.  At $30, it’s a good bargain.

A quick look at the connection suggested by Geni reveals the same problem – this is the wrong William Walton.  Here’s what I wrote about this wrong connection in my essay on President Polk:

Once again, Geni takes me through my Walton family line – and again, through William Walton.  And again again, through the “wrong” William Walton.  My 4^th great-grandfather William Walton was born in 1784 and married his cousin, Barbara Allen Walton.  The William Walton that Geni thinks I’m descended from was born in 1777 and is the son of Mary Ann Hobson (Walton), which shows on this connection.  I can get to Zachary Taylor through the correct William Walton; both Williams have a common 2^nd great-grandfather, Edward Walton (1672-1720-1772).  This makes them 3^rd cousins.  So I give this a passing grade – the connection is there, but not the way Geni diagrammed it.

But as Geni does, it suggested a second connection to Zachary Taylor.  It goes back through my paternal grandmother’s line once again,  but diverges to the Botts/Gaines family I’ve written about before. 

At first, this connection tracks with what WikiTree outlined.  But it goes in a different direction after Richard Gaines when it identifies his mother, Isabella (Pendleton) Gaines.  This is accurate, as is the identification of her mother as Mary (Taylor) Pendleton.  Mary’s father is James Taylor, who was born in England and came to Virginia with his father, John Taylor, in 1648.  This is a spot-on connection – I have explored this link in the past, and it’s accurate.  My 9^th great-grandfather, James Taylor, is Zachary Taylor’s 2nd great-grandfather.  This makes Zachary Taylor my third cousin seven times removed.

I wanted to figure out why WikiTree didn’t give me this connection.  It wasn’t hard to identify the problem – WikiTree includes all of the relevant information to support this connection, but it involves 14 degrees of separation, one more than the 13 degrees of separation provided in the WikiTree connection that began this essay.  Unlike Geni, WikiTree only shows the closest connection. 

And although I don’t rely on FamilySearch for the accuracy of its tree, it was reassuring to find that this site also supports my connection to Zachary Taylor. With pictures.

Here’s the FamilySearch depiction of my connection to President Zachary Taylor. It tracks with the Geni connection.

So I think we have a winner here.  Every suggested connection checks out with documented information. 

• I’m happy to be done with this set of presidents.  Almost every president up to this point connects to me in Virginia (only Adams pére et fils are through a different connection – but since I wrote about Virginia-born Henry Clay in place of John Quincy Adams, that week’s essay focused on Virginia connections as well).  Looking ahead, I don’t encounter my Virginia ancestors again until Benjamin Harrison (#23).  After that, Virginia provides my connection to Woodrow Wilson (#28), Lyndon Johnson (#36), Jimmy Carter (#38), Bill Clinton (#42), Al Gore (I decided to look at his lineage in place of Bush Jr.),  Barack Obama  (#44), and Joe Biden (#46).   New England, here I come!

James Knox Polk and Me

This connection makes sense at first glance.  I recognize all of the names in my direct lineage through #9, William Gaines.  The connection between William’s brother Henry and James K. Polk seems valid – I was able to recreate this connection through information I found on Ancestry.  According to Ancestry, President Polk is the brother-in-law of the grandniece of the wife of my 7^th great uncle. 

This is another view of the relationship between me and President James K. Polk

Although James K. Polk was born in 1795 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, he moved to Tennessee with his parents and other family members in 1806.  His family were among the founders of the town of Columbia  (about 40 miles south of Nashville) and dominated politics in Maury County for decades.

My connection to President Polk goes through my Botts/Gaines thicket in central Virginia, as has been the case with many of the connections I’ve worked on in this project.  After the American Revolution, Henry Gaines and his family moved from Virginia to Laurens County, South Carolina.  Henry died in 1796 due to injuries he sustained while working to build, and he was buried on the Gaines property in the county.

Genealogists exploring this family’s history are delighted by this marker on Henry’s grave in South Carolina. 

Henry was married to Mariah Wood; Mariah’s first husband, John Stepp, died in 1750.  I was very confused about Mariah; her parents, John and Sarah Barden Wood, were from Massachusetts.  It wasn’t clear to me how they had come to be in the Carolinas.  Someone on Ancestry shared this snippet from a Wood Family History.

Without some indication of the sources of this information, this is not adequate proof that the John Wood born in Massachusetts is the same John Wood who we find in the Carolinas after the Revolution. But this is about as much work as I want to put into this today.  I’m going to say the connection is okay, although I recognize it would not qualify me for any lineage society.  That’s not my goal.

This John Wood had a son (Mariah’s brother) named Reuben, who was also born in Massachusetts (so was Mariah) and moved with his parents to North Carolina.  Reuben’s daughter Mary Wood (born in North Carolina) married Joseph Wilson in that state in 1797.  Mary and Joseph’s daughter Laura married Marshall Tate Knox, a younger brother of President James K. Polk.  In researching this, I found three questions that I would explore if I had more time to spend on this link.  First, why do two of President Polk’s siblings have the middle name “Tate?”  Next, how does this connect to William Caldwell Tate, the man Laura married after Marshall’s death in 1831? And last, what killed President Polk’s younger brothers Franklin, Marshall, and John in 1831.  They died several months apart in the same year.  I can’t find evidence of a significant epidemic in central Tennessee in 1831, although it’s certainly possible that some contagion spread within the family – or that this family experienced a run of bad luck that led to the death of three otherwise healthy young men at the ages of 29, 26, and 24.

All things considered, this connection gets a good grade.

Now let’s look at how well Geni did on this connection. 

Once again, Geni takes me through my Walton family line – and again, through William Walton.  And again again, through the “wrong” William Walton.  My 4^th great-grandfather William Walton was born in 1784 and married his cousin, Barbara Allen Walton.  The William Walton that Geni thinks I’m descended from was born in 1777 and is the son of Mary Ann Hobson (Walton), which shows on this connection.  I can probably get to James K. Polk through the correct William Walton; both Williams have a common 2^nd great-grandfather, Edward Walton (1672-1720-1772).  This makes them 3^rd cousins.  So I give this a passing grade – the connection is there, but not the way Geni diagrammed it. 

So I have one final question before I (mercifully) abandon this essay:  why didn’t Geni come up with the connection through the Gaines family that WikiTree outlined?  I began to trace this back from President Polk, and the Geni family tree doesn’t include a woman named “Mary” as the wife of Reuben Wood; without this marriage, the connection falls apart on Geni.

But Geni isn’t finished yet.

As I have come to realize it always does, Geni suggests another connection – this one through my mother’s (Workman) family line to President Polk’s Knox family from Scotland.  I’m not going to check this out – life is too short. 

John Tyler and Me

Once again, WikiTree takes me back into Virginia through my paternal Walton line. 

• At the end of this series, I going to have to write an analysis of which family lines provide me with the greatest number of Presidential connections.  So far it’s the Botts/Walton line in Kentucky and Virginia, but that’s probably because so many of our early Presidents were from Virginia.  Once we get past Zachary Taylor (coming up in two weeks), we don’t have any Presidents from the South until Benjamin Harrison (the 23^rd President) and then not again until Woodrow Wilson (the 27^th President)

This line tracks with my tree on Ancestry back through my 6^th great-grandfather Charles Anderson (#8 in the box above).  Once it diverged to his sister, Mary Anderson (#9), I had to do some work to confirm these connections.  On my tree, Charles had two sisters named Mary – this is because I wasn’t interested in them when I was building my tree and didn’t bother to figure this out.  After a little looking around, I confirmed that Charles actually had only one sister named Mary, and that she in fact did marry a man named George Martin.

Before I go any further into this connection, I want to talk just a bit about my Anderson family connection.  James Anderson (the father of Charles and Mary) was the grandson of Reynard Anderson, who came to Virginia as a headright (probably an indentured servant) sometime before 1654.  Reynard’s wife, Elizabeth Skiffen, was born in England to William Skiffen, who also came to Virginia as a headright before 1650.  Reynard and Elizabeth married in Charles City County (about 15 miles from my house) in 1662.

The more interesting story focuses on Elizabeth Ligon, the mother of Charles and Mary Anderson.  I haven’t been able to figure out the exact connection yet, but Elizabeth is the great-granddaughter of Thomas Ligon, a “gateway” ancestor for signers of the Magna Carta. 

• A gateway ancestor is one whose lineage is proven to a past event (in this case the Magna Carta).  By proving my connection to Thomas Ligon, I am proven back to 1215, when the Magna Carta was signed.  I have a little problem with the idea that she’s married to a man named Matthew Ligon; I have her married to someone else, but there was only one Ligon family in Virginia in the 17^th century, so her children are direct descendants of Thomas Ligon in some fashion.

So now that we have the Ligon connection pretty well established, let’s go back to look at Mary Anderson (#9).  She was married to George Martin (#10), but I don’t show Susannah Chiles as his mother.  I’ve poked around on Ancestry a bit and I can’t make this link. 

So I hopped over to Geni and see if it helps me out at all. 

This connection takes me through the same Walton family, but this time the connection is through Tabitha Allen Walton (Botts) father, William.  Once again (just like in my discussion of Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson in earlier weeks of this series) the problem is the proliferation of men named William Walton.  The William Walton that Geni suggests connects to John Tyler was born in 1777; the William Walton who was Tabitha’s father was born in 1784.  I didn’t contact the Geni profile manager to fix this when I encountered it a couple of weeks ago, but I think I’ll have to follow through now. 

I decided to check out what FamilySearch has to say about this connection.  Here’s the link they propose:

This connection suggests a blood relationship – that President Tyler and I have common ancestors, Robert Booth and Frances Burgess.  However, on my Ancestry tree Robert is not my x great-grandfather, but rather is the father-in-law of my 9^th great-granduncle. The connection fails, once again, on the mis-identification of my 4^th great-grandmother William Walton.

I may have to check my Walton facts again – I have pretty good sources for “my” William Walton, but everyone else disagrees with me.  I can access my sources when I’m at the library on Saturday so I’ll double-check everything.   I’ll let you know.

Although these suggested connections fail (at least at this point in my research) I’m certain the connection is there somewhere. I’m not trying to prove direct lineage. My Botts/Walton/Gaines/Madison family thicket in central Virginia in the 18th century intermarried with all other families in the area over several generations so far as I can tell. I am comfortable in stating that I am connected in some fashion to all of the presidents from Virginia; the fact that I can’t always draw out that connection is a function of how much time I have to research all of these connections.

What this project has proven to me so far is that I need to research my Walton family more thoroughly. They were living in Hanover, Louisa, and Goochland counties in Virginia during the relevant time period, and those counties are not very far from me. I could visit all three counties in one day if I determined that I needed to see records that are not online at the various courthouses and genealogical societies. I could also use the resources at the Library of Virginia in Richmond; it’s less than an hour’s drive from me. I’ll be at this library this afternoon to meet with the woman who runs the volunteer program there; I’m planning to volunteer (probably only one morning or afternoon shift each month) to be in a position to learn more about what this library has to offer. Maybe I’ll be able to answer the question.

William Henry Harrison and Me

Both Geni and WikiTree show that I’m connected to President William Henry Harrison.  I’m going to explore each of these connections in turn.

At first, the Geni connection looks pretty good through the Wyckoff family (Susannah Wyckoff, sister of my  5^th great-grandmother Elizabeth (Wyckoff) Workman.  I wrote about them in last week’s essay on Martin Van Buren.  But I encountered a problem – I couldn’t find any evidence that Elizabeth actually had a sister named Susannah.  Geni makes the connection by using three unsourced family trees, and I can’t find any document that says she existed.    

Ancestry was no help, and Wikitree didn’t provide any guidance either.  I found William Samuel Francis (on the far right in the second line in the chart above) but I couldn’t find any evidence that he was married to Susannah Wyckoff.  Both Ancestry and WikiTree show him with only one marriage, and it’s not to Susannah Wyckoff.

This is a shame, really.  If this line had proved out, I would have been able to connect to the powerful Carter family in colonial Virginia.  But it was not to be.

The WikiTree connection looks a little more promising.  This connection appears to traverse the Botts/Gaines family line that has connected me to President James Madison and President James Monroe.  I wondered if this line would prove out.

TL/DR:  It doesn’t work.  The problem is with #8 Richard Gaines; his mother was Isabella Pendleton, not Jemima Pendleton, and I can’t find any connection to Martha Ruffin to make the link to the rest of the tree.  None of the WikiTree profiles for this connection have any sources that prove the link, so I think I have to give up this connection as well.

Geni suggests one additional connection, as shown on this chart.

This is just so unlikely.   Thomas Spencer, Esq. (on the right end of the third line) is identified as my 12th great-grandfather, born in Warwickshire, England, in 1472.  The sources to support this are weak indeed – a whole lot of unsourced family trees and a couple of documents here and there.   I clicked around WikiTree a bit to see what I could find, and did a few Ancestry searches to see what I could tease out, but there’s just too many years and too few documents to make this work out. 

This is the first president I have failed to prove at least some degree of connection to.  When I get to his grandson (the 23^rd president, Benjamin Harrison) I find a connection through the Mormon polygamist John Lee (see my essay on my secondary connection to President James Madison).  This provides a kind of backward connection to President William Henry Harrison through his grandson; I’ll write about that in the 23^rd week of this project.

Martin Van Buren and Me

For the next several weeks I’ll be writing about some lesser-known presidents.  Martin Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States, serving for only one term from 1837-1841.  He was the first president not of British or Irish descent – his family was Dutch.  My mother’s roots were in Dutch New Amsterdam, so I expected to connect to this president through that part of my family tree.  I was surprised when I saw this connection through WikiTree.        

This connection is fairly straightforward; I am very familiar with the names going back to #7 on this chart, Prince Pease.  I already had his sister Mary (#8) on my tree, and it didn’t take long to identify Mary’s husband as Marshal Jenkins and their daughter as Abigail Jenkins (#9).  In just a few more clicks I was able to identify Abigail’s husband as Thomas Worth, making way for their son William Worth (#10).  William Worth married Margaret Stafford and they had several children, including Josephine (#11), who married Howard James (#12).  His sister Ellen James (#13) married Smith Van Buren (#14), the youngest son of President Martin Van Buren.  This connection checks out.

• As they say, I want to “put a pin in” William Worth on this line. I’ve added a story about him at the end of this essay.

When I went over to Geni to explore my connection to President Van Buren, I found the expected link through my Dutch family in colonial New Amsterdam.  This connection goes back through names I recognize – Abraham Workman, who married Elizabeth Wyckoff (Workman) in New Jersey in find the date.  She is descended from the immigrant ancestors on this line, Pieter Claeszen Wyckoff and his wife, Margreitje Cornelise’Grietje’ van Ness, who were both born in the Netherlands (probably) and married in New Amsterdam sometime before 1646.

At first I thought this line was pretty valid – but then I saw a problem.  A close-up of a portion of this tree from Geni illustrates the issue.

Setting aside for a moment the problems with understanding Dutch names, with the letter sequences that don’t make sense to English-speaking people like me, this sequence of names itself points out the problem.  Until New Amsterdam became New York in 1660, the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam followed a patronymic naming system, in which a child’s “middle” name referred to the name of the father.   Here’s what this looks like in my Ancestry tree for the first four generations of this family in New Amsterdam:

This is fairly straightforward once you get the hang of it, and it’s useful for genealogy purposes.  The son of Pieter Claeszen Wyckoff is Claes Pieterse – telling us that his father’s name is Pieter.  The son of Claes Pieterse Wyckoff is Pieter Claeszen, telling us that his father’s name is Claes.  The son of Pieter Claeszen Wyckoff is Nicholas Pieterse, telling us that his father’s name is Pieter.  It is confusing when families repeat names across generations, but once you think it through, it makes sense.

So what’s the problem with the tree on Geni?  The father of Nicholas Pietersze Wyckoff should be named Pieter (as I have it on my tree), but Geni shows him as Nicholas Wycoff, without a patronymic to help us out.  That doesn’t make sense.  However, this turns out to be a minor error.  As my tree shows, Nicholas Pietersze Wyckoff’s father is Pieter Claeszen Wycoff – but Pieter has a brother named Jacobus, so I think the Geni tree just has the wrong brother as the father of Nicholas. 

With this resolved, I looked at the rest of the connection to Martin Van Buren. Let’s look at the Geni connection again:

So these links check out:

• Claes Pietersze Wyckoff’s mother was Margrietje Cornelise “Grietje’ Van Ness
• Grietje’s sister was Hendrickje Cornelise van Ness, who married Jan Jansen Oothout
  • I initially had a problem with this; I had a “Hendrick” on my tree as Grietje’s brother, and I was confused about whether a family would have a son named Hendrick and a daughter named Hendrickje.  After a little research, I concluded that it would be like having children named John and JoAnn, or Henry and Henrietta.  So I added Hendrickje to my tree, and found that she married Jan Jansen Oouthout, as Geni  had indicated.
    • By the way, did you notice that it would be easy to find the father of Hendrickje’s husband Jan – his patronymic middle name was Jansen, so that tells us that his father is also named Jan.
• Hendrickje and Jan had a daughter named Jannetje.  But Ancestry didn’t help me find the husband of Jannetje – so I turned back to WikiTree.
• There I found a suggestion (supported by some records) that her husband was named Laurens Van Schaack; when I went back to Ancestry and plugged this name in as a possible husband for Jannetje, I was able to begin to build “down” to Martin Van Buren.
• Laurens Van Schaack and Jannetje Oothout had a daughter named Jannetje Van Schaack.
• Jannetje Van Schaack married Johannes Dircksen Hoes.
• Jannetje and Johannes Hoes had a daughter named Maria Hoes
• Marie Hoes married Abraham Van Buren
• Marie and Abraham Van Buren had son named Martin Van Buren.

Once I sketched him in, the WikiTree U.S. Presidents’ Project kicked in with verified links to reinforce the connection back to the Wyckoff family.  My connection to the Wycoff family is rock solid, so I think this link is also good – although I wouldn’t take it to Final Jeopardy or use it as the basis for a lineage society application.  The connection gets a passing mark, although it doesn’t get an “A” because of the wrong brother problem in the Wyckoff part of this tree.

Then I wondered – if WikiTree helped me verify the connection from Geni, why didn’t WikiTree give me this connection when I asked?  I think it’s because WikiTree provides only the shortest connection; the New Amsterdam connection is longer than the connection WikiTree gave me, so it didn’t tell me about this connection. 

My takeaway from this exercise is that these platforms can reinforce one another – one platform might have a detail that helps build out the tree on another platform. 

As promised – here’s the William Worth story.   

William is my 2^nd cousin 5x removed; my 6^th great-grandparents John and Hepsibah Ripley Pease were his great-grandparents.  His generational peers on my line were my 3^rd great-grandparents Spencer and Martha Pease Arnold, both of whom were born in Maine in the 1790s.  William was born in Columbia County, New York (just south of Albany) and first fought in the War of 1812.  His military career continued – he taught at West Point from 1820-28 and later was appointed Commandant of Cadets at the school.  He served in the Second Seminole War in Florida in the early 1840s and fought in the Mexican War under the command of Zachary Taylor.  He also served under General Winfield Scott in this war; this relationship came to an uneasy end over a disagreement on battlefield tactics.  Worth had originally named his son “Winfield Scott Worth” in honor of his commanding officer; after this disagreement, he changed his son’s first name to “William.”

After the Mexican War, he was appointed as the administrator of the Texas and New Mexico military districts.  He died of cholera in San Antonio, Texas, in 1849.  The city of Fort Worth, Texas, is named for him, and he is buried in Worth Square in New York City.

This is the Worth monument on Worth Square (on 5^th Avenuye and W. 25^th Street, just across from Madison Square Park.  Googlemaps shows me this is now a kind of outdoor café

End Note:  My spell-check and autocorrect may never recover from this post.  A couple of years ago when I was working on this line, I consulted with a friend who was born in Amsterdam and speaks Dutch fluently; she confirmed that even the Dutch themselves don’t agree about how these names should be spelled. 

Andrew Jackson and Me

This week takes me back into the “Walton Thicket” where I was ensnared last week when I wrote about Henry Clay.   As a refresher, here’s the Geni link between me and Henry Clay.

This is the relationship that fell apart when I examined it closely – and the problem was that this link relied on the “wrong” William Walton.  So my question has to be – does my connection to Andrew Jackson fall because of the same problem?

Some easy research allayed my fears; the WikiTree connection to Andrew Jackson relies on the “right” William Walton; and because I haven’t yet worked to correct the Geni profile to include the correct individual, that platform doesn’t suggest this connection. 

This time WikiTree got it right – #6 is “my” William Walton.  The other connections check out – at least through the cursory investigation I was able to do in the past couple of days.  

• William Walton had a brother named Martin.
• Martin had a son named Simeon. 
• Simeon’s wife was Mary Henry.
• Mary’s grandmother was Mary Donelson.
• Mary Donelson had a brother named John.
• John had a daughter named Rachel.
• Rachel Donelson married Andrew Jackson.

I want to highlight two stories out of this connection.

First, let’s talk about Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel.  Her backstory is simple enough.  She was born in Virginia, but her family moved to Tennessee in 1780 before relocating to Kentucky.  It was there that Rachel married Lewis Robards; however, their marriage didn’t go well.  The fact that Rachel’s mother returned to Nashville after Rachel’s father was killed under mysterious circumstances plays a role in this story.

Lewis and Rachel quarreled (probably because Lewis was jealous of Rachel’s “lively” disposition, accusing her of flirting with every man she came across), and Rachel soon joined her mother in Nashville.  After coming to Nashville to seek a reconciliation with Rachel, Robards soon returned to Kentucky, vowing never to see Rachel again.  It was then that Rachel first met Andrew Jackson. 

This is where the problem started.  Jackson believed that Robards and Rachel had divorced, and he set to wooing her.  After reconnecting with Rachel in Natchez, Mississippi, Jackson and Rachel returned to Nashville as a married couple, although no record has been found of their marriage.  The entire story is muddled by the attacks waged against Jackson (and against Rachel) in the 1820s. 

After Robards was finally granted his divorce from Rachel in 1793, Andrew and Rachel legally married in January of 1794.  Rachel died in 1828, just before Jackson went to Washington to assume the Presidency.   Jackson apparently mourned her loss for the rest of his life.

The other story I want to tell you focuses on Martin Walton (#7 on the chart, the brother of William Walton).  This makes him my 4^th great-granduncle.  I have never researched him before – the Walton Thicket is difficult enough without bringing in collateral ancestors.  But in proving the connection between my Walton family and Andrew Jackson, I became aware of Martin Walton.  His story is interesting.  

Here’s what was written about him in The Connection, a local newspaper for Robertson County, Tennessee (north of Nashville on the border between Tennessee and Kentucky):

Revolutionary War hero Martin Walton made impact on Robertson Co.

October 13, 2022

BY ANNE SMITH Charlotte Reeves Robertson DAR Chapter

This home, built in 1809 by Dr. Martin Walton still stands in the Cross Plains community today. The house was placed on the National Historical Register in 1996.

• Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories submitted in the American Patriot series, researched and authored by the Charlotte Reeves Robertson Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

The United States of America is 246 years old.

Two hundred forty-five years ago Martin Walton, from Louisa County, Va., entered the service of the army of the American Revolution as a militiaman. He was 16 years old and had 12 siblings.

He served several three-month tours from the years of 1777 through 1781. His grave marker indicates he was in Taylor’s VA Regiment. Colonial Virginia did not maintain a standing army. Nearly everyone was engaged in agriculture and needed to plant in the spring and harvest in the fall. The Virginians were not wealthy enough to afford full-time soldiers. Whenever there were colonial “alarms” about pirates or Indians, riders on horses would spread the word to various farms and the men would assemble as needed. Walton was one of these men.

During his tours, Martin was endlessly marched from pillar to post, he guarded prisoners, and on one occasion he lay in wait with his regiment in a failed attempt to ambush Colonel Banastre Tarleton and the British force, as Tarleton visited his favorite place to exercise his horse and his troops. Private Martin’s cumulative war service amounted to 19 months and 10 days.

Martin was known to have stated that he saw General Marquis de Lafayette before his retreat into Culpepper County and also on his return from Culpepper County through Louisa County, as he was encamped on the south side of the south fork of Pamunkey River near Anderson’s Bridge.

Martin Walton married Elizabeth Johnson on April 15, 1788 in Louisa County, Va., located in the north central region of the Commonwealth, and named to honor the Queen of Denmark, daughter of King George II. The Waltons made their home in that area and while living there, had five children.

In 1802, having obtained a land grant, Martin left his native Virginia and moved his family to Robertson County, Tennessee. His widowed mother travelled along with the family, as they followed other family members who had traveled to Robertson County before him — his brother, Meredith and his married sisters Ann (William) Edwards and Temperance (Richard) Nuckolls. They all settled in the eastern part of the county.

In 1809 Martin built a large brick home on the property. He was now a physician and a large landowner. The family grew corn and cotton and he also made whiskey. He was instrumental in helping to organize Hopewell Baptist Church and could occasionally be found preaching there. The community welcomed him as a leader.

The beautiful home Martin built is still standing and occupied today at 6354 State Highway 25 E. in Cross Plains. It was initially built on what was then the Springfield to Gallatin Road, a main travel route from the county seat of Robertson County and the seat of justice for Sumner County. The home’s original floor plan had a central hall with a large room on one side and two smaller rooms on the opposite side. The second floor had an identical layout. The basement was stone-lined to provide storage for meal, meats and wines. In 1996 it was approved for the National Register of Historic Places.

Martin and Elizabeth raised all five of their children in this house. At his death, his son David J. Walton assumed responsibility for the property as administrator. However, David was murdered on the property in 1845, and in 1846 it was then sold.

Dr. Walton was a respected physician and attended residents west of his home in Springfield as well as to the east in Cross Plains. Two of his sons became educators in Robertson County. His grandson founded Neophogen College in Cross Plains and his great-grandson, J.W. Huey, was Springfield’s first superintendent of public schools.

Martin died at 83 years of age, and was buried in the Walton Family Cemetery, located at 6358 Hwy 25E. He left his mark in Robertson County through his many descendants, who in turn, left their mark. When you next drive the distance between Cross Plains and Springfield, look for these ghosts of the past in the form of the land and the lives of the residents of today.

Mrs. William H. (Frances W.) Simmons, a citizen of Springfield, TN and the organizing Regent of Charlotte Reeves Robertson Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution was Dr. Walton’s great-granddaughter. The DAR chapter was organized October 29, 1927, some 146 years after Martin Walton’s service to America. In October 1933 Mrs. Simmons helped to honor this local pioneer patriot, when handsome markers erected to his memory were unveiled at his gravesite.

I was interested to learn about Great-Uncle Martin.  I have other ancestors (on my mother’s side) who lived in neighboring Overton County, Tennessee, at the same time that Martin was building his home and career in Robertson County.  In addition, I have family in Nashville and some surrounding areas.  My husband Tim’s brother Warren did his residency at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville and spent the rest of his life in Nashville and nearby Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  We visited his home often for family reunions he and his wife Beverly hosted for 15 or more years.  Beverly died in 2019, and Warren passed away on January 1 of this year.

And although Geni didn’t support the connection through the Walton family to Andrew Jackson, it does suggest another link, as you see here:

I’m not going to spend any time on this proposed connection; it goes way too far back to be provable.  As an example – Margaret Coningsby, in the middle of this chart, was purportedly born in 1490, although the profile provides no documents to support her profile.