Journey Through the Past
More About Mummum
“She lived to be almost 100. In the 1880s, as a little girl, she went from Pennsylvania to Kansas with her family in a covered wagon, and before she died she rode in an airplane.”
That was my often-shared summary of my great grandmother’s life. It’s usually the prelude or postscript to describing the real showstopper moment in her story.
This really happened:
Mummum began losing her sight in the late 1930s. By 1938, it had deteriorated to the point that my father (her grandson) was sent from his family in El Dorado, Kansas, to live with her and his grandfather. By 1942, she was blind. I originally had 1948 as both the year that happened, and when Dad moved in with her. But I was wrong about both. He was already with her years before her vision totally failed. He wasn’t 14 when he moved. He was five. (There’s more about this in the epilogue).
So Dad did a lot of his growing up away from his own parents and brother and sister. The Kansans and Oklahomans saw each other often, taking advantage of the free train travel available to AT&SF employees (Dad’s father, uncle, and grandfather were railroad mechanics). So it wasn’t like he was shipped off rarely to be seen again and he did spent some of his summers back in El Dorado. But he went to Purcell schools and lived with his grandparents throughout college and law school, until Mom and he were married.
Despite her disability, Mummum was far from helpless. Mom told me she used to watch in awe as my great grandmother made her way around. She was able to cut up a chicken to fry by herself. She occasionally went with my brother and me to daycare, but she wasn’t there to be looked after herself. There were things she could do in the kitchen, laundry room, and playroom to help the Hambys, Carl and Venie, who hosted children in their home.
On day in October 1963, Mummum was holding a squirming infant in her lap. He was swinging some kind of toy around wildly and smacked her on the side of her head. That’s the story I was told and have repeated for decades. But now I can access the newspaper accounts of the event, which say that the assailant wasn’t in Mummum’s lap but wanted to be, and grew impatient waiting for his turn. He expressed this by throwing the toy and hitting her directly in the right eye.
It restored her sight. After 21 years of blindness, she could see.
I know, I know. It sounds like some backcountry miracle (“She got a lick on the head”) or a National Enquirer story (it was!). But it happened.
At the time, Mummum shared a house with her younger sister, Maud. Over the next few years, her sight began to deteriorate again, and Aunt Maud began showing signs of what they weren’t yet calling Alzheimer’s. Maud was moved into a rest home. Mummum, in her 90s and nearly blind again, lived with us for a year or so before joining her sister.
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So as I was growing up, I had direct access to someone born nearly a century earlier. I wish I’d known to be more curious, ask more questions, get more stories. If I had, my decades-later synopsis of Mummmum’s life might not have had so many factual errors.
First, her birthplace. As readers of Part 2 of this project know, it wasn’t Pennsylvania, but rather Aurora, Missouri. She never lived in Kansas, although her son and daughter eventually did. Also, the big family move was in 1890 after the Oklahoma Land Run, not “sometime in the 1880s.” Mummum was 13 at the time, and thus, not a little girl.
Nosing around online exposed another long-running error of mine. I found a photo of the headstone for Mummum and her husband, Charles Benton Gold, a marker I’d seen often at Hillside Cemetery in Purcell. Her dates are right there: 1877–1973. She did indeed live a long time, but to 96, not as close to a full century as I believed. I wasn’t the only one who had her lifespan wrong. A couple of places online have it as 1878–1974. This despite overwhelming evidence of the correct years, no piece of it more inarguable than that headstone. No way it was a year off on either end.
So from now on it’s:
“My great grandmother lived to be 96 years old. As a young woman, she journeyed with her family from Missouri to Oklahoma in a covered wagon. In her lifetime, people went from horseback to airplanes.”
At least I got the wagon part right. And I’m stepping back on the airplane bit. There’s no one around to confirm it and I fear I might have made it up.
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Looking Back
Going online to verify (correct) Mummum’s story was my first experience with internet genealogy sites, and from there, I just kept going. Here it was, a fairly effortless way to explore the old “where did I come from?” question. So off I went, looking for the first individuals from my family to relocate from Europe to America.
I set up at family tree with Dad’s parents and grandparents on the left (Elders, Golds, Nixes, Conners) and Mom’s on the right (Becks, Muses, Blevins’s, Grays). Things happened quickly. I really didn’t have to do a lot. Children and parents, brothers and sisters were already connected, photos and official documents already linked to them. The branches surged up and spread out. Soon I had a structure so big it prompted a warning from the site: the whole tree might not be there the next time I opened the page.
The Nixes then. I started with Mummum’s father’s line, cross-referencing with a couple of additional genealogy sites for backup, clicking and clicking, one Nix preceding another – 19th century, 18th, 17th, and then…
Paydirt.
His name was James Nix, my seventh great grandfather. He was born October 20, 1642.
In Barbados!
Which means that James’s London-born father, John Nicks, was the first in this line to venture across the Atlantic. He traveled to the West Indies with his wife, Sara in 1635, and James was born there seven years later. They didn’t stay long after that. Their second son, John II, was born only a year later in Virginia. Why the sons’ last names are spelled differently than the father’s, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like enough of a change to fool anybody. Maybe they got tired of the apostrophied plural of the “cks” version.
The bigger question is: why would a young 17th-century English couple strike out for Barbados? I typed those exact words into Google and got some possible explanations. He might have been seeking his fortune in the island’s booming sugar trade, perhaps with a land patent from King Charles I in hand (he was giving those out right and left at the time). Another option: he was a royalist soldier on the losing side of the English Civil War, one of hundreds Cromwell banished to the island. Nah, that couldn’t be it. John Nicks and family were in and out of Barbados and established in North America well before the Lord Protector was in a position to banish anybody.
So maybe it was sugar that lured the Nicks’s to Barbados. Except…
Here came a different source that said James Nix’s birthplace wasn’t that Barbados. It was Barbadoes Island, in the Schuylkill River near King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles northeast of Philadelphia. I was well into writing the latter sections of this part, pages further down, when I saw that and had to scroll back up here to get my Barbadoses straight. What a letdown. For a moment there, my family’s American story included a stop in the Caribbean. Like Hamilton’s!
Except again:
Days later, when I thought I had this drastically revised part wrapped up a second time, I looked up John Nicks again. And except for that one link to Pennsylvania, every other record I could find has my John and Sara’s only North American address as Virginia. Their direct descendants remained there for at least three subsequent generations, well into the 18th century.
Then the capper: on one site, the record for John Nicks included information about the ship Hopewell, which made multiple trips across the Atlantic in the 1630s. On February 17, 1635, the Hopewell left London headed for, yep, Barbadoes (the old spelling), the one in the West Indies. The site included a list of the ship’s passengers, among them 23-year-old John Nicks. As for Mrs. Nicks, I’m guessing John signed for both of them.
Back in the Caribbean!
I know it’s shaky. The record that says James was born in the Schuylkill has John going directly from England to Pennsylvania. Another record has John dying in the West Indies and never making it to North America at all. But those are outliers. The consensus supports the tropical Barbados layover, and that John and family went from there to Virginia.
With that, the question of where I come from in Europe had its first answer:
England 1.
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Things went more smoothly with the next few searches.
For my Elders, the first person I identified as being born over there and living over here was Robert Elder, Sr. (1679-1746). But one further click back revealed that it was his widowed father, John Mayes Elder (b. Edinburgh, 653; d. Pennsylvania, 1741) who crossed the Atlantic first. Robert Sr. joined him a few years later, traveling with his wife, Eleanor, and their children, including Thomas (my ancestor), Robert Jr. (there had to be one, right?), and their brother John. John was later known as the “Fighting Parson of the French and Indian War.” He was both a Presbyterian minister and colonial militia leader.
But let’s go back to Scotland. Look where these Elders were living when Robert Sr. was born. A place a few miles from Glasgow called…
Eldershire! We — okay, they — had their very own shire!
Other records show Robert Sr.’s birthplace as “Elderslie,” but either way we have an eponymous ancestral seat in Scotland! Gotta go someday. Not to press a claim. I wouldn’t do that. Although, if a local hotel offered a discount…
In North America, these Elders initially settled in Venango, Pennsylvania, near the southern shore of Lake Erie, closer to Cleveland than Pittsburgh. But they made a more lasting home 300 miles to the southeast in Paxtang, not far from Lancaster, which in the 1700s already had a growing Amish population.
Anyway:
England 1, Scotland 1.
With the Nixes and Elders pinpointed, that left the Golds and the Conners on my father’s side. But for each, despite checking multiple sites, the trail backwards stops in the early 1800s, and on this side of the Atlantic. Quite frustrating, considering how much further back I could go with the other family names I was researching. (There’s more about this in the epilogue).
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So now, over to Mom’s side:
The Becks: my maternal grandfather, Louie, always said his ancestors were from England. He had one of those plaques with a family crest on it (like that proves anything). I can’t confirm which of several English Beck coats of arms I’ve seen is ours, if any. But I have identified my Beck ancestor who first came to America: William Roger (1635-1715). He was born in Norfolk, England, and died in Solsbury, Pennsylvania, in Bucks County. William Roger crossed the ocean with his wife, Mary Ann Doughty, and a some of their children. They had 16 in all, some born in England, some in Pennsylvania. Five died in infancy.
This is a good place to point out that online ancestry research relies heavily on artificial intelligence these days. Sites use AI tools to scan historical records, suggest possible parent and sibling connections, and compose brief life stories. It’s the reason why my family tree grew so quickly.
But as we know, it’s not infallible. AI was probably at the root of the whole Barbados mixup with the Nixes. And I’m certain it’s responsible for an unlikely “fact” in one site’s bio of William Roger Beck’s wife. That blurb has Mary Ann’s birth year as 1634, as do other sites. But it appears to have conflated her with another more recent Mary Ann because it has her birthplace as Cecil-Kent Medical Center, Cecil, Maryland.
Which opened in 2013.
England 2, Scotland 1.
The Muses: until this project, I never knew that was my grandfather’s mother’s maiden name. Researching her family led me to John Muse, who died in 1723 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, but was born in England in 1633, in the evocatively named village of Souldrop. The village is still there (it’s England, after all), about 70 miles north of London, with Cambridge to the east and Stratford-upon-Avon about the same distance to the west. The name means something like “outlying farmstead near a gully,” not, as I feared, “place so terrifying your soul drops out of your body.” He married Catherine Lewis in Virginia, her second husband. Her father, Richard, had come to Virginia from Wales more that 20 years before John Muse set sail. So Wales gets a credit as well.
England 3, Scotland 1, Wales 1.
The Blevins’s: From my maternal grandmother, Bertha Mae, the tree went upward (backward) through her father, Isaac, to John Willam Blevins, born in 1668 in Lancashire, England, died in 1718 in Maryland. He was married in England to Isabel Maccoon, but their children were born in Maryland, so she must have come with him.
But that’s not it for my Blevins’s as far as accessible documented history is concerned. The line is traceable back a further 300 years, through multiple spelling variations (Bleddyn, Bletheyn, Bleddin, Bleddyn again); and all of those generations before John William lived in Wales.
England 3, Scotland 1, Wales 2.
The Grays: This is my grandmother’s mother’s family, and here, I had another confusing situation to navigate. But unlike the Barbado(e)s question, this one has been unquestionably resolved.
Initially, the site I was using insisted that Bertha Mae’s maternal grandfather was Albert W. Gray. But it offered no information about his father. Really? That’s it? I was able to go back hundreds of years further with Bertha Mae’s father’s family, her husband’s, the Nixes, the Elders. Why the roadblock (treeblock)? And about this Albert W. — he seems to have lived his entire life in Maine.
Maine?
I took another look at the record for Bertha Mae’s mother, Bertha Lee Gray (we called her Big Mama) and saw that she was attached to a second family tree, one created by someone with a user name that included “gray.” Rather than Albert W. as Bertha Lee’s father, that tree had Robert Eli Gray. I exchanged messages with “gray” and turned out that he was also from Purcell, knew a bunch of people in my family, and even thought he remembered me. And he was sure Robert Eli was the right guy.
But it was an additional discovery that sealed it. This photo:
Whoa.
I found it at a site that provides the location of Robert Eli’s grave. See the older gentleman in the middle? Notice that his left pant leg is empty, and his left hand is missing a couple of fingers. Now look at that distinctive white spade beard. Think you’d remember him if you’d seen him before?
Me too. Because I had.
It was in a different photo of a larger family gathering, a photo my grandmother showed me in the mid-1980s before I moved to New York. That same man was sitting at the far right end of the first of two rows of people, empty trouser leg and dis-fingered hand in clear view. She said he was her grandfather, but she called him “the Colonel,” so I’d never heard his real name. She told me he was wounded in the Civil War and I now know it was the Battle of Mansfield, in Louisiana, April 8, 1864. He died in 1914 when she was a baby, so she never knew him.
One more thing about the photo. One of those young women in white standing behind the Colonel is likely Big Mama. I’m thinking she’s the one in the middle of that row.
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I replaced Albert W. in my tree with Robert Eli and here they came, Gray before Gray going back generations to Thomas W. Of my first-to-America ancestors, he’s the last I’ve identified. But he was the first to arrive here.
He was born in London in 1595, and made the journey to the Jamestown Settlement while still a teenager. I found no records anywhere for his parents. Maybe they brought him, maybe he came alone. He certainly comes across as mature for his age. At 15 he married Margaret Annis Valentine, age 20. She was the first of his four wives and he had children with all of them.
He became a prominent citizen in the settlement, one of the “Ancient Planters of Virginia,” an honorific given to any (male, I suspect) resident who came to Jamestown before 1616 and endured its often brutal early years. This historic marker commemorates a location in the settlement called Gray’s Creek. Originally named after Captain John Smith, then renamed for the son of John Rolfe and Pocahontas (yes!), it was renamed again when Thomas W. took control of the land.
But my Gray line can be traced back even further than my Blevins line, back another four centuries. There’s a couple of “Sirs” in there, one of them with a documented birth in a castle. My people! And then, at the top of the tree: John de Gray.
Take a look at this guy!
There’s no specific birth date for him but in the late 12th century, he’s in service to Prince John, son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (as in The Lion in Winter, Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn). Once John became king, John de Gray received a number of royal and ecclesiastical appointments, including Bishop of Norwich and Lord Governor of Ireland. And he amassed great wealth, with estates all over England. How do I know this? Because he has his own Wikipedia page!
Final tally:
England 4, Scotland 1, Wales 2, Unknown 2.
I know ancestry sites are riddled with icomplete records, mistake-filled trees, and AI-fueled misunderstandings. And I know more serious genealogists will be appalled at my unrigorous methodology (Wikipedia? Really?). But this is what I’m going with — the ancestors I can identify as being the first to relocate to America came from the constituent countries of Great Britain, starting at the turn of the 17th century.
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Meanwhile, Back in the Gene Pool
And so I returned to 23andMe. That’s science, supposedly less vulnerable to deliberate or inadvertent human error or AI goofs. And science said I was over 98% from Ireland and Northern England. Plus 1% from Finland. So far, I hadn’t found any direct ancestors originating from those places.
I looked for my printed 23andMe report to make sure I had my percentages right, and, predictably, I couldn’t find it. I logged into their website and got a message that my analysis had been updated. Updated? I only spit in the tube for them once! And why do a retest if I didn’t ask for it (as if I thought I could)?
I put those questions to DaNA, 23andMe’s AI-powered chat feature, and here’s her reply:
23andMe treats Ancestry Composition as a “living analysis” that improves over time as more people from different backgrounds become customers.
Well, then. According to the new results, I’m now 63% Northern English, Scottish, and Irish, and more Scottish than Irish. I’m also now 35% Western European (half of that French, most of the rest slightly more Belgian than German). My Finnish content took a hit, that one percent cut in half, but I gained a half-percent of Spanish & Portuguese. I’m still 0% Jewish.
Some significant adjustments there, but nothing to spark an identity crisis. I was especially pleased to see my Scottishness assert itself, given what I found online (Eldershire!) That stubborn percentage of Irishness clinging to my DNA? It could easily be the work of the Golds and/or the Conners, the lines I couldn’t trace back across the Atlantic. Those family names look to be long established in Ireland. The Northern English and Western European portions? According to the ancestry sites, my 16-17th century English forebears were from London and the Midlands, not Liverpool or Manchester or Newcastle. And I haven’t discovered anyone in my direct family from the other side of the channel. But hey, people move around, and mine must have done that at a time before the advent of official documentation.
That’s the thing to remember when comparing ancestry research and genetic analysis. Historical records are all about pinning individuals down to specific places and dates. They can take you back a long way. But genetic analysis reaches back farther — much farther — and genes stay the same no matter where a person ends up. Just as North America became a destination for Europeans after Columbus, so were the British Isles a destination for thousands of years before that, with people from all over the continent coming to the land where the Celtic Britons already resided. Seems likely that my DNA contributors were among them, including whoever put the Finn in me.
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I’ll keep checking the ancestry sites to see if there’s a breakthrough with the Golds or Conners, and I’ll be on the lookout for further updates from 23andMe. And the next time somebody asks me where I’m from, if Oklahoma isn’t the answer they’re looking for, I’m going to say Scotland. After all, it is where the people bearing my name originated.
Plus, you know, Eldershire!