Up a Tree

I mentioned in an earlier post -- Kings of King Mountain, posted April 9, 2021, -- that pursuing one of Sharon's ancestors had led me to learn about the Battle of King's Mountain, a Revolutionary War battle considered to have been a key victory near the end of the war.  Of course, I knew nothing about it. But one of Sharon's forebears had apparently been part of it.  Subsequently I found that yet another branch of the family tree had contributed to the battle, the French branch I've talked about in the last two posts. One of Rene Jacques Husson's great grandchildren, Conrad Hussong, was present at the end of battle. By this point in the family history, a "g" had been added to the name owing to the English not hearing the nasal, French pronunciation of the name correctly. Why the family went along with this change is not explained, but my guess would be that it was written down in some official record and going along with the change proved easier than corre...

Research for the last post revealed that Sharon's father had roots that extend deep into 15th and 16th century France -- and probably before that, going by information contained in a typewritten manuscript produced by a man who would have been some sort of numbered cousin. (I've had the whole first cousin, etc., once removed, etc., thing explained to me in a way that made sense at the time but completely eludes me now.) One of Earl's (that's Sharon's father) great-great-to-the-x grandfathers came to America in the 17th century as the result of religious persecution. Rene Jacques Husson was born in France in 1635 at a time when relative peace reigned after 36 years of violent conflict between the Catholic population of France and converts to the Reformed wing of the Protestant movement developed by John Calvin. These Protestant followers were called Huguenots. (Don't ask me why. Many theories abound as to the origins of the name.) Other Protestant groups existed ...

I decided to switch to Sharon's side of the family with a certain amount of misgiving because, though I had found some interesting episodes in the Reagan family history, much of the time I ran into dead ends in the branches of the genealogy, especially with respect to her father's part of the tree. I decided to be a little more systematic with my research and tumbled onto a branch of her father's genealogy that went all the way back to the 16th century, and to my surprise, that part of the family came from France and the Netherlands. Sharon's family has deep roots in Ireland but France and the Netherlands? Even she was surprised when I told her.  As I began looking at the branches and limbs, I found historical connections to the Huguenots, whom we'll discuss in a coming post, some of  whom fled to America in the 1600s, and to the American Revolution, in which some of her ancestors fought alongside others of her ancestors, some at the same important battle. I wouldn...

We back up in time in this post from the days of Lord Greystoke, moving to the 17th century. There we find a Sir John Lisle, also sometimes referred to as Lord John Lisle, though I could not find that he had any titles of nobility. Cromwell appointed Lisle to the House of Lords, which probably accounts for the use of the title Lisle was a prominent person in his own right, and I will return to his story in another post. Suffice to say he was part of legal proceedings that led to the execution of King Charles I of England in 1649, an involvement that would lead to his violent death. This time I want to look at his second wife, listed on my family tree as Lady Alice Beconsawe. Lady Alice also died a violent death, perhaps as much because she was married to Sir John as because of the charges laid against her.  I'm relying for the post on the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 33, published in 1893, once the standard reference for the lives of the famous and infamous in Great Brita...

I have mentioned before that my grandfather had a chauffeur's license. At the time, I assumed that would be the older equivalent of what Texas used to call a chauffeur's license, which you obtained if you planned to drive a taxi or a bus, or to be an actual chauffeur. Nowadays they issue Class B and Class C licenses, more commonly referred to as commercial driver licenses or CDLs, for those jobs, and cities control who receives a permit to work as a cab driver or chauffeur. I mistakenly assumed that much the same would be true for Illinois, even though a five minute web search probably would have disabused me of the idea. I did search for chauffer's license in the early 1900s in Illinois and came away empty handed.  I still have no clear idea what the licenses for that period were or how you obtained them, but I again assumed my grandfather probably drove a taxi. That's a lot of assuming, isn't it? I found a new document -- a "registration card" mistakenly...

I promised a dive into the British peerage system for this post, and we'll get to it in just a bit.  Before that, I ran across a bit of a surprise as I began looking into some of the documents about my closer family members while taking advantage of a trial membership on Ancestry.com. In one of the censuses, I found out that in 1930, my dad's family lived in Hoboken, NJ. Hoboken, y'all. I can remember when it used to be popular to make jokes about the city.  Hoboken, by the way, is where Frank Sinatra was born, six years before my father, so he would have been in high school -- if he went to high school; I don't know his history -- while my father was in elementary school.  Dad and family wound up in the Bronx, and I remember in my early years how people would comment on his accent. I can remember him saying "deese" and "dose" (pronounced "doze") and "dat." After spending about half or more of his life in Texas, though, the accent...

One of the things I'm going to need to learn to do is to pay better attention to the exact lineage of the people I find in my past so I can track them down again. I found Sir John de Greystoke last week, prompting the post about coats of arms and heraldry, and I know that he was an ancestor of Orpha Morse, who in turn is an ancestor of my grandmother. For the life of me, though, I could not trace back from Orpha to John this week. I need to do this because part of my quest is to understand exactly how I could have so many members of the English peerage, and possibly royalty, whose stories flow down to a poor Chicago resident begging members of Congress and the military for enough money to be able to feed her family.  At some point, some offspring of one of the peers did not succeed to the title, and his or hers heirs went on to become "regular" people, like Matthew Crawley in Downtown Abbey, who at the opening of the story is a solicitor and most assuredly not a posh memb...