WikiTree and Me

By Bob Ferris

Those faithful family followers and others who regularly stumble onto my site might have noticed a little laziness on my part in terms of updates and posts.  Some of this is true laziness that comes justifiably with my sixth year of retirement as I settle into this idea of not working.  And the rest of it is the result of distractions.  For one thing I moved and am more focused now on vegetable gardening.  I am also more involved with volunteering at the Oregon Coast Aquarium where I am serving as an interpreter and helping them re-write their training manuals for existing and new interpreters--both as the science evolves and as the facility becomes more complex as it enters its equivalent of a second generation.

The last and most relevant distraction is that of WikiTree. When I set up Ironbranches I wanted to establish a free medium that allowed for posting of our family history and lore that encouraged and facilitated collaboration.  I also wanted a venue that expected references and evidence rather than allowed gross speculation and fables.  Genealogy should not be a game of liars dice.  In most regards WikiTree fulfills these criteria and I have spent a lot of time filling in the blanks on both my mother's side and my father's too.  I have tried to do this, where possible, eight generations deep.

The above has verified some of what's known and led to some discoveries as well.  I have always known that both my parents likely descend from passengers on the Mayflower.  More recently, I found that they share a common ancestor in the earliest Quakers in Maryland as they both have the Johns family in their lines.  And via WikiTree I also found that they share Francis Eppes II (b. 1627) in common (my father through his Ramsay line and my mother through her Settles connections).

Both my parents share deep English, Scottish, and Irish roots.  But one thing they do not share, are links to ancestors who settled New Amsterdam.  That is all my father through his Ferris line, though Ferris is English, probably by way of Normandy.  After sorting through piles of alternative spellings, patronymics, and the Anglicizing of Dutch names which might have been French, German or even Walloon to begin with I am almost grateful for my mother's being not Dutch.  Moreover, the settlers of New Amsterdam seemed opportunistic breeders who frequently married 1st cousins once removed making family trees a twisted affair.  That is not to say my mother's folks who bounced over the trail via Fort Cumberland did not see groupings of siblings marrying siblings in other families as they populated Kentucky, Indiana, and Missouri.  Folks tended to marry others who were near or they knew.

So, when you have an opportunity take some time to look at our family on WikiTree.  Please share this with others and add facts, photos and additional branches where you can.

  

Swimming in Welsh Rabbit and Perfumed Doubts

By Bob Ferris

When I was young my mother would make us Welsh Rabbit or Rarebit (both are correct).  She poured the cheesy mixture on saltines rather than the traditional toasted bread and we liked it that way or did not know better.  I think about this concoction now as I am trying to sort though a chunk of my ancestors originally from Wales.  This process feels a lot like paddling through the aforementioned orange goo mainly because I cannot help but feel that I enter Google hell when trying to sort through those with two first names, particularly when those names are sometimes the same (And, yes, I am thinking about you, probable great-grandfather James James from Llanwrthwl.)  I suspect that it is all right there before me, but it is often covered by something that masks like this melted cheese with white sauce, sprinkled with paprika, and poured on crackers.

I am emotionally and intellectually supported in this by a newly discovered half-fifth cousin who I recently met online while trying to sort out our shared Randolph lines and false family myths about a supposed link to Edmund Randolph.  I say half-fifth cousins because we share a common ancestor in Frances "Frankie" Randolph but descend from Frankie's different husbands: she from Thompson Randolph and me from Samuel James.  But we are more than that too as our two lines from Frances, son Thompson Randolph (Jr?) and daughter Susannah James, married brother and sister Hannah and James Taylor.  This makes us 6th cousins as well.  Confused yet?  (For those of you keeping score that means our degree of theoretical relatedness is 1X2 ^-14 + 2X2 ^-16. This is more than just half-fifth cousins but still well less than half of one percent of relatedness.)

The Welsh preference for two first names and the calculation of the big toe-scale degree of relatedness with my cousin is only the start of the confusion and complications.  But let's digress some.  When my late brother Bill presented his first version of our family tree in 1993 he listed Samuel James' father as Moch James without any explanation.  Roughly six years later he revised the tree and named Samuel's parents as Evan James and Anne Foreman.  In this latter revision he cited work by my grandmother Edna Robb Settles who through most of her efforts was a very solid researcher and actually was able to interview relatives who interacted with those born in the late 18th century and early in the 19th.  My grandmother was a genealogical dynamo but this I only know second-hand because she had a stroke three years before I was born.  I never saw the brilliance and this probably colors my thinking, which in most cases it should not.

I have to admit that there are times when my lens of my grandmother creeps in.  For instance, while I was looking at Jacob and Mary Taylor in North Carolina, the parents of James and Hannah, memories of my grandmother intervened.   My confidence in her work disappeared in my recollection of the cloud of perfume she wore as her senses diminished and my time with her as she descended into the not knowing.  As I started to see several in the North Carolina counties of Onslow and Duplin with the last name James, the Evan and Anne connection felt a little twitchy at times and I got distracted by a James line in North Carolina that had a first name pattern very similar to the one used by Samuel and Frankie in naming their children (i.e., Samuel, Isaac, and Enoch).  But each well I dug seemed to come up dry.  None felt right or possible.  So back I went to Evan, Anne, and the lands around Fort Cumberland and headwaters of the Potomac.

Children of Evan James (1756-1810) and Anne Foreman (1756-1839)

Mary Jane James Deakins (?) b. 1774 (1)
Samuel James b. 1774-1775 (1,2)
Mary "Polly" James Lovitt or Lovett b. June 10, 1776 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Thomas James b. 1778 (1)
John F. James b. 1779 (1, 2)
Grace James Sigler b. 1779 (1, 2, 3, 4)
Susan James b. 1784 (1)
Nancy Ann James Poland b. 1787 (1, 2, 3)
Isaac James b. 1786 (1)
Susannah James Sigler 1790 (1, 2, 3)
Evan B. James 1792 (1, 2, 3, 4)
William F. James b. 1795 (1)
Elizabeth "Eliza" James unk. (1)

Evan and Anne are listed on many websites and are variously credited with having from one to thirteen children with only a few pages showing a child named Samuel.  There is uncertainty.  But here is where history and geography collide with genealogy.  Records show that Samuel James was married in Allegany County, Maryland in 1793 and that Evan James was buried in Westernport, Maryland in 1810, also in Allegany.  So I am thinking: Great, we can go to the census or tax records for 1790 and before to sort this out.  Except we cannot exactly because of the near constant border wrangling between Maryland, Virginia, and eventually West Virginia as well as the War of 1812.  Due to the former Samuel James could have been born in Virginia and married in Maryland without moving an inch from where his crib was rocked.   This made determining which jurisdiction would have kept the family's records difficult to determine and the War of 1812 made them nearly impossible to find because the British put many of these records to the torch.

From here.

But records for Evan James and his family do exist.  For instance, Evan James is listed as someone who settled west of Fort Cumberland prior to 1788 in several publications.  The root source of this information comes from the records collected by Col. Francis Deakins who was tasked with surveying Maryland's western border and creating the so-called Deakins Line perpendicular to the much more famous Mason-Dixon Line.  According to Deakins and his crew Evan James held lots 3542 and 3544 (see page 29 bottom right in the link) and his designation as a settler means that he probably did not serve in the Revolutionary War.  In other publications these "settlers" are described as squatters which seems harsh for these were folks who staked out lands on the edge of civilization when the risks of that action were pretty high.  The lots were generally fifty acres in size so Evan and Anne seemed to have both land and a large family which generally indicates they were farmers which is verified by the piece on grandson Andrew Jackson James above. 

Allegany County Land Records

As time passed Evan's holdings increased as indicated by the typed transcript above.  It is unclear whether this indicates total holdings or recent purchases as neither of the parcels listed in 1787 are included.  Of note are the notations for a property known as "Good and Bad" which is important because Evan James was buried in the Poland Family Cemetery which was derived from these lands.  This knowledge with other clues gives some indication of how the estate of Evan James was divided, the Poland coming from his daughter Nancy Ann's marriage and the subsequent sale of the remainder of this land by John Deakins' who was married to "Margaret" (Margaret was more than likely Mary Jane James) show that other acreage went to another daughter.  Anne, after Evan's passing, went to live with Polly James Lovitt and her family in Ohio.  Additionally, there are Allegany census records from 1800 and 1810 after Evan's death.  The 1800 census shows a household of eleven including three children under ten years of age.  These three could be Evan Jr., William, and perhaps the mysterious and less documented Elizabeth.  In 1810 the household is reduced to four including Anne (Ann).  The three remaining under 26 could also be those three mentioned above.

From here 1998.  John Deakins married Margaret (possibly Mary Jane) on June 8, 1797 

All of this leads to thoughts and questions.  Westernport was once considered for an extension of the C&O Canal that would run upriver from the terminus at Cumberland some 20 miles away.  It never was built.  How much of this figured in Evan's plans?  Moreover, the canal only functioned for a time and then was largely supplanted by the railroad which did come to Westernport, but not in Evan's time.   Ironically, spoils from some subsequent railroad construction in the 1940s covered Evan's grave much like the cheese at the beginning of this piece pouring on the crackers.

Through much of my modest research I often speculate on connections as well as circumstances and motivations.  The how and why being nearly as important to me as the exchange of genetic material.  This brings me back to Samuel James and Frankie Randolph,  a farmer's son in a household filled to the brim with siblings coming together with a young widow with one or more children traveling west over what was originally Braddock Road (see above and Note 1 below).   Since records indicate that Samuel and Frances were married on the same day as her cousin Elizabeth Prudence Randolph wed Jesse Reno in the same county and Frances, Elizabeth, and Jesse were all from Manassas, I tend to believe that the three were all traveling together as part of a larger group.   This fits a pattern as Frankie's brother Thompson had traveled to Kentucky with other families from Manassas and Prince William County roughly a dozen years before.  Elizabeth and Jesse could have been childhood sweethearts or their romance blossomed on the road.  Who knows?

Samuel and Frankie are trickier and more caprice must have been involved.   It seems strange the probable quickness of it all but then I remember that my parents William and Mary Ferris did a soup-to-nut courtship in a week's time in the closing years of World War II.  I remembered too that sisters Grace and Susannah James married brothers William and Peter Sigler just as their step-nephew and niece married the Taylor brother and sister all indicating a challenging dating landscape.  It could also be that things were getting crowded and conflicted for the teen-aged Samuel rubbing shoulders with Evan.  Frankie was also likely sensitive to the fact that she had lost a sister-in-law and nephew in an Indian raid near their destination about dozen years before.  So we have two pre-loaded souls colliding in a land of few opportunities traveling to land with even fewer.   Bubbling cheddar cheese meeting white sauce.  I don't really know as all is supposition until truly proven like many or even most parts of this narrative.  Time may tell or not.

****

Note 1: This route beginning at Fort Cumberland rather than the more southern route through the Cumberland Gap which would have been the obvious choice for the Taylors in North Carolina, but not Randolphs setting out from Virginia is another reason to doubt the North Carolina Jameses.

American Liberty as an N-Dimensional Hypervolume

By Bob Ferris (this is cross-post from my Green Dreams site)

I have always been fascinated with the concept of an ecological niche being characterized as a n-dimensional hyper-volume defined by an infinite number of changing and interacting bio-physical factors.  Phew.  It makes my mind happy.  I like to think about stuff like this on my morning beach walks.  Unfortunately, this idea recently collided with an electronic discussion that I had involving members of a Libertarian organization trying to imply that Oregon was heading towards a "civil war." Their evidence was the recent corporate-sponsored senior prank executed by a group of Republican legislators who walked out and hid during the legislative session to avoid a vote they knew they would lose on cap and trade legislation.  A baby step towards doing something about climate change.  My discussions with the Libertarians really came down to a disagreement over liberty and how it was defined.

The group headquartered in the Northeast and wanting to spread its wings geographically sided with the pranksters as well as the militias and repeatedly argued that you were either with them (i.e., for liberty) or you were a Communist.  There did not seem to be any middle ground.  The bold boys (and they were all male) evidently held that liberty was a single point or maybe a collection of points along a line or in a geometric plane that was free from regulations, taxation, or any form of governmental control or interference.  I disagreed as my sense is that liberty as it was envisioned for the country is more of a hypervolume just like those ecological niches.

I suppose that liberty can be a jumble of points or perhaps a line if you have one person living on a desert island all alone.  But add another person to that island and liberty becomes an exercise of protecting your own and not compromising another's.  Liberty in a multi-person context becomes a set of rights and responsibilities.  No longer can you sing show tunes at three in the morning or pee wherever you want.  With each additional person the structure of liberty and the approaches to protect it become more and more complex.  I think the Founding Fathers understood the tricky and interactive nature of national-scale liberty.

When I was in school I was taught one idea per sentence and one theme per paragraph.  I suspect that Gouverneur Morris who wrote the Preamble was taught that too (in at least a couple of languages) and I suspect that is why the Preamble of the US Constitution reads like a carefully ordered recipe for achieving the desired level of liberty, for the most, and for the longest possible time.  Given the sensitivity for the individual, it was probably an optimization approach rather than one designed for maximization.  I would think that the nod to some individual liberties is a little like the carbon added to iron to make it steel (see below quote).  The iron and carbon analogy is helpful when looking at liberty as our Libertarian friends want all the carbon (personal liberty) they can get which is the recipe for steel blades that break or what is commonly known as pig iron.

“the dignity or moral importance of persons may compensate numbers.” Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746)

Essentially, American Liberty is probably a kind of a highest common denominator concept.  Moreover, this single-sentence paragraph weaves the fabric of national-scale liberty in a manner which implies that weakening any or all of these contributing factors lessens the probability of the latter.  It also is a cloth colored by inclusive words such as union, common, general, and our which give structure to the idea and set the theme of this applying to all of us together.  Roughly a century later Minister Francis Bellamy [1] wrote the Pledge of Allegiance that echoed this collective idea of "liberty and justice for all."  But others came before either.

"The good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of the state, is the great standard by which every thing relating to that state must finally be determined." Joseph Priestley in The First Principles of Government and the Nature of Political, Civil and Religious Liberty (1768)

When you look at the above quote, and similar writings by Francis Hutcheson [2], Jeremy Bentham and other Utilitarians (all influenced by Epicurus), you understand too that the inherent principles of the Preamble did not form in isolation but came from other thinking before, during, and beyond the Revolution.  Few know Priestley now but he can be thought of as the Albert Einstein [3] of the 18th century in that he was a prominent scientist, theologian, and philosopher who left his native England for the intellectual freedom of America.   Joseph was also a friend of Thomas Jefferson as evidenced by more than 150 letters that passed between them and Dr. Priestley is said to have had a "...disproportionate influence on the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and who framed the Constitution of the United States."

"...convinced that by ruining my family and distressing my friends by risking either, would only gratify the ignorant and malignant, I shall seek that livelihood in another land which I cannot peaceably gain in this."  Joseph Gales Sr. 1794

Priestley was also active in the founding and promotion of the Christian Unitarian Church which acted to reconcile religion and science and attracted the likes of English journalist Joseph Gales Sr and his wife Winifred Marshall who were chased out of England at about the same time as Priestley in 1794.  Gales was a friend of Thomas Paine and published Paine's works as well as those of Priestley.  I know Joseph and Winifred and this story because they are the last immigrants in my bloodline to come to the new world.  I remember a lot of these lost players and discussions for family reasons but others over the years have remembered them as well.

Gifford Pinchot in setting up the US Forest Service coined the phrase: The greatest good to the greatest number of people for the longest time.  His slogan riffs on the words of Jeremy Bentham and also incorporates themes expressed in the Preamble by adding the dimension of time.  Pinchot would have appreciated the idea of the hypervolume as he embraced science and helped found the Yale School of Forestry with the backing of his father.  Pinchot and his brother Amos also joined with Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 in the founding of the Progressive Party which became know as the Bull Moose Party when Republicans of the times were divorcing themselves from the conservation movement launched by Roosevelt and others such as John Muir.  Additionally, Roosevelt was also a fan of Gouverneur Morris so much so that he wrote his biography.

But back to the idea of American Liberty as a hypervolume.  Some might object to my mixing of this scientific terminology with the political.  Too eggheaded.  Too complicated.  I do it for two reasons.  The first is that my idea of ideal liberty is probably different than yours which means that my liberty is defined by a different axis (i.e., dimension) or volume (set of axises) than yours.  Much as I'd like to think mine is a straight and consistent vector it is not and changes with time and conditions as I suspect the vectors of others do as well.  We are human too so we blink on and then off, we multiply, and we move.  Since a hypervolume happens when the dimensions number four or more we are clearly there with nearly 330 million of these often squiggly constructs to consider.

My second reason for using the term is that it is applied to a concept developed nearly two and half centuries ago by some extremely well-educated men who fully embraced the most modern and scientific concepts of their time.  They were hungry for these ideas and proudly carried the banner of the Age of Reason.  I am confident that they would embrace this or something similar to this usage.  They would gravitate to the most complicated and then slice it and dice it in order to understand it. 

In ecological niches those conditions within the confines of the hypervolume tend to support the critter's existence and those outside tend not to.  Viewed through this ecological lens the fossil fuel industry externalizing the environmental costs of their pollution and corrupting legislatures to facilitate that while curbing needed actions on climate change would clearly be outside of even the most generous interpretation of this optimized hypervolume of liberties.  The same would be true of operations like Walmart where society enables the family's profits by subsidizing their workforce while greasing the skids of our manufacturing decline and adding to trade deficits with China.   And I would add that this hypervolume defined by the Preamble would not include nor even consider the notion that everyone has the right to own whatever ordinance in whatever amount they so desire just so arms companies can expand or maintain sales in times of relative peace and that individuals can spray the landscape with lead.  Translated into biological terms it is easy to see why conditions equivalent to these would limit the life expectancy of an animal or population.   Why is it so hard to understand that in the world of the economic and political?

As one can see from the above and the supporting notes below I feel that the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the US Constitution are a little like a Family and Friends plan [4].  This is probably why I was so offended by Trump's 4th of July performance where it was all about the military and very little about the Founding Fathers on the day meant to celebrate their ideas, courage, and sacrifice.  It is like wanting to celebrate the achievements of the honor society at a school but spending your time talking about the football team.  But it is more than that.

The Founding Fathers were thought leaders taking us away from the blind faith and mysticism of religion (while maintaining the best of its moral teachings) and towards developing science and enlightenment.  That is why thinkers, scientists, and journalists like Paine, Priestly, and Gales came to America and flourished [5].  Trump, his evangelical choir willing to believe anything, and others like those who freaked out when the Declaration of Independence was tweeted by NPR in 2017 or the Libertarian group above are madly throwing salt on the fertile fields where this great experiment was launched.  It is not hard to imagine hearing the sound of 56 disapproving cane tips pounding angrily on the floor of Independence Hall in protest.  Hopefully enough others hear the din too in order to affect change.

*****

On a More Personal Note:

[1]

"Bellamy was a Christian socialist who "championed 'the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources, which he believed was inherent in the teachings of Jesus.'" In 1891, Bellamy was "forced from his Boston pulpit for preaching against the evils of capitalism", and eventually stopped attending church altogether after moving to Florida, reportedly because of the racism he witnessed there. Francis's career as a preacher ended because of his tendency to describe Jesus as a socialist. In the 21st century, Bellamy is considered an early American democratic socialist."  From Wikipedia biography of Francis Bellamy

It is interestingly ironic that elements of the forces that argue for the more individualistic and selfish vision of liberty often cling to and revere both the "We the People" phrase and the Pledge of Allegiance not knowing the history of either nor the strongly held beliefs of the authors.  Gouverneur Morris who penned the Preamble and most of the Constitution was an advocate of a strong federal government who wanted to limit state power.  Reverend Bellamy was a Socialist Christian minister who also believed in an absolute separation between church and state.  Both men have ties to Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris in that Gouverneur worked for the older and unrelated Robert and Francis was born in Mount Morris, New York that was named to honor the gentleman who stepped forward with money when it was needed.  My mother read a biography of Robert Morris while she was pregnant with me.  My middle name of Morris relates to brothers Lewis and Gouverneur, but my mother insists that my love of fishing comes from her reading that book as Robert Morris loved to fish and often did so with George Washington and Gouverneur Morris (see Washington as an Angler here)

[2] Francis Hutcheson was a prominent Presbyterian minister and educator in Dublin at the same time as my ancestor Robert Alexander was training for the ministry before heading to the Colonies in 1736.  It would have been hard for Robert not to have had contact with Francis and his ideas.  And harder still for Robert to not pass lessons learned on to his students at the Augusta Academy which eventually became Washington and Lee University after spending time being Liberty Academy about the time of the Revolution.  Robert's grandson Archibald was the fourth president of Hampden-Sydney College (James Madison and Patrick Henry were early trustees) and the founding president of Princeton Theological Seminary.  Hampden-Sydney named for two champions of and martyrs to personal and religious liberty (John Hampden and Algernon Sydney) and started in late 1775 near settlements of displaced Scotch-Irish in Virginia was probably like a match thrown in a pile of already warmed gunpowder.

"Indeed, the original students eagerly committed themselves to the revolutionary effort, organized a militia-company, drilled regularly, and went off to the defenses of Williamsburg, and of Petersburg, in 1777 and 1778 respectively. Their uniform of hunting-shirts - dyed purple with the juice of pokeberries - and grey trousers justifies the College's traditional colors, garnet and grey."  From the History of Hampden-Sydney College.

[3] It has also been said that Priestley was the Abbie Hoffman of his time but I think that works for Thomas Paine better.  It is illustrative to read Paine's critique of Gouverneur's oration at the funeral of Alexander Hamilton to get a notion how Paine might attack those who were once colleagues when they digressed from the purity of Paine's democratic vision.  There is a little bit of the personal here as Gouverneur had both a withered arm and was missing a leg.   I suspect much of that was due to Gouverneur's lack of effort to get Paine released from French prison when Morris was serving as American Minister to France, Paine was a man of fans and detractors.

[4] I have often struggled with the task of characterizing how and where my family participated in the events leading up to the American Revolution and the forming of this nation which is an exercise every bit as complicated as this notion of a hypervolume.  Some of it is easy.  Lewis Morris signed the Declaration of Independence as a representative of New York.  Lewis and the Lewises who came before him are direct ancestors making Gouverneur Morris a long ago uncle celebrated in the middle names of my great-grandfather and my grandmother.  Similarly Joseph Gales Sr. is remembered in the names of my great-great-grandfather, great-uncle, and my sister.  George Washington was a friend of Gouverneur's, but also of Quaker ancestor Benjamin Chew and dined with a young Andrew Ramsay and his wife at Mount Vernon.  It goes on and on much like a well-stirred bowl of spaghetti with strands of angry and educated Scotch-Irish from Ulster, a smattering of exiled Scots that didn't bounce first in Ireland, a fistful of Huguenots, and a collection of Englishmen and women booted or pushed across the pond for various reasons--some religious and others political.  Been there, done that, have the t-shirt.  

[5]

[] I believe that the reverse of this is true as well in that scientists want to leave or not go to areas that do not welcome or respect new ideas or eduction.  The Agricultural Department scientists objecting to being transferred from Washington, DC where 53% of the population have college degrees to Kansas City where only 33% have obtained this level of education is a good example of scientists gravitating to or wanting to stay in areas of enlightenment rather than those where education appears less valued.

Whisperings from the Ghosts of Christians Past: It is Time to Listen to Your Refugee Ancestors

By Bob Ferris

I started out wanting to write a heartwarming and patriotic piece about my ancestors Archibald Alexander and Mary Enos to celebrate the 4th of July.  Dear Archie was a surgeon who served in the Revolutionary War, sailed on ship holding a letter of marque, was captured and imprisoned on the infamous hulk Jersey, and then cast overboard when the British thought him dead.  According to family legend, Mary found her husband-to-be washed up on the shore.  It's a nice story about sacrifice, hardship, happenstance, and, hopefully, love.  Could be true and I've been combing the beach a lot of late looking for treasures so this resonates with me.

Unfortunately, current events and my deeper research of the players involved picked the scab of a deep wound in our family that morphed into a guiding principle of this country.   That principle seems now to be forgotten or misremembered by many.  It's a pair of new pants versus a new pair of pants type of issue that clearly confuses some folks.  That nearly all of our Founding Fathers (and Mothers) were Christians of some sort is absolutely not the same as them intending to found a Christian nation (1,2,3,4).  But let's look first at the sandy lovers and their families to understand why they would embrace and practice a religion, but not want to be governed or judged by one.

Perhaps the workshop of Joseph Enos looked something like the above from Colonial Williamsburg.  Joseph had apprentices including his nephew Richard who was the orphaned son of his brother Abraham.  The rule of three referred to in his apprenticeship papers is essentially linear algebra.   

Lovely Mary was the daughter of a cordwainer or someone who makes shoes from new leather rather than a cobbler who repairs footwear.  Her father, Joseph Enos, was likely of French descent and from Huguenot persuasions only a few generations away from fleeing country-to-county because their brand of Christianity did not conform with that of the ruling powers.  The Catholic Church in France was more than a little insistent that all folks living in France at this time worship just as they did.   And as a consequence Mary's forbearers went from lives of relative opulence to a more humble existence simply for the beliefs they held that were similar but not the same as those in power.  (And much the same happened to Catholics in England.)

From here.

Brave Archibald came from similar circumstance.  The Alexanders were Scots who became Ulster Scots in 1652 or the so-called Scotch-Irish over their Presbyterian beliefs and their blood ties to the Stewarts who were Catholic.  Archibald's family fled Oliver Cromwell's regime to Ireland in his great-grandfather's time and then many of the Alexanders were ousted from Ulster in 1736 by the high rents charged by the landowners who wanted them and theirs to be part of the Church of England and nothing else would do.

The main lane of Manorcunningham in Ulster where the Alexanders settled.  Even today it is small with only 675 souls.  The Alexanders must have done well because Robert's father William was know as "the corpulent" due to his size and girth.

Archibald's father, the immigrant, was a Presbyterian minister named Robert Alexander who came to the Colonies with his two brothers (probably William and Archibald).  Rev. Alexander was a learned man said to be educated at colleges in Dublin and Edinburgh who had collected a small library which he was forced to toss overboard during a storm while in transit from Ireland to Philadelphia.  Young Robert, now book-less, wrote out some of these drowned tomes longhand from memory and used them for teaching until the volumes could be replaced.  He obviously took education seriously even to the point of founding a school in what was then Augusta County, Virginia when he and his family moved south from Pennsylvania to join other Scotch-Irish refugees about a decade after his landing.

Education seemed to be in the Alexander blood.  Robert's grandson Archibald Alexander was the second president of Hampden-Sydney College and the founding president of Princeton Theological Seminary.  John Hampden and Algernon Sydney were British martyrs to the causes of representative government and religious freedom.  

Robert ran what was called the Augusta Academy from 1749 to 1762.  Why is this little ten-student, college preparatory school worth mentioning?  Because that institution was reconfigured and renamed Liberty Hall Academy sometime around the start of the Revolution and remained such until endowed by a large gift from George Washington himself in 1796.  Liberty Hall Academy was then renamed Washington Academy until in became Washington College in 1813.  The institution eventually transformed into Washington and Lee University after the Civil War and following its five-year leadership under Robert E. Lee.  It is important to this narrative to understand that although this institution had its roots in educating Presbyterians many of whom later stood in pulpits, this school founded by and for Presbyterians does not have a sectarian affiliation.

So while the sample size is small (i.e., two), what conclusions should be drawn about the sentiments of the general population of the colonies fighting to become a country from this chance, shoreline meeting between Mary from Delaware and Archibald of Virginia?  Minister and mathematician Robert Alexander would probably say nothing, but that view changes when you factor in the stories of scores of other folks listed on these electronic pages.  There many in our broader family have stories to tell.

For example, both my mother and father descend from the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower after living in exile in Holland.  Moreover, my late father's Dutch ancestors seemed frequently to be Walloons of a mostly Huguenot leaning pushed towards Amsterdam from France or Belgium and then somehow, magically finding themselves on ships bound for the New World where they could enjoy the privilege of arriving on an occupied foreign landscape with little or no supportive infrastructure.  By all accounts those early days at Fort Orange (Albany) and New Amsterdam (New York) were a little challenging.

Distant great-grandmother Mary Towne Estey on my mother's side understood the difference between embracing a religion and being ruled or judged by a religion.  She and her sister were hanged as witches in 1692 during the infamous Salem Witch trials.

Additionally, the only known shared ancestors of my parents in the New World were the Johns family who were Quakers which was a sect that experienced its own set of encouraged migrations such as the Chews going from Virginia to Maryland and then on to Pennsylvania.  The Quakers also seemed to attract some of the country-bouncing Huguenots like Marie Ferree.

This is the family tree of Isaac Lefever who escaped with Marie Ferree and her family.  He married Marie's daughter is part of our lineage.

Madame Ferree was a woman of noble birth who fled from Picarde, France to Germany and from Germany to England where she and her family hit the religious refugee slip-and-slide of the time heading directly to Pennsylvania and settling in a place named Paradise where the descendants had reunions until 2014.  All of these ancestors held on to their beliefs and were persecuted by governments beholding to a certain religion or sect that was not theirs.  The word "persecuted" seems a little weak in this context as titles and lands were taken; whole families were nearly wiped out (see above Lefever family tree); and once comfortable lives absolutely destroyed.  But they survived and remembered.

It is important when looking at the past and current events where the term refugee originated.

In this I think too about Gouverneur Morris who wrote much of the US Constitution including the Preamble and coining the phrase "We the People" as a slap in the face to those pushing state's rights.  He was half-brother to Declaration signer Lewis Morris in our line so is an uncle of sorts.  Gouverneur's mother was a Huguenot.  Gouverneur was something of a peg-legged rogue, but by most accounts a fairly religious gentleman.    He was undoubtably marked by his mother's experience and wrestled with the idea of whether or not Catholics should be allowed to serve in elected positions or even be covered under a religious freedom clause in New York.  Gouverneur and others debating these issues at the time realized the distinction between being allowed to practice one's religion freely versus being ruled by a church.  What's more, many of the Founding Fathers understood that freedom of religion should apply to all religions including Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism regardless of what the proponents of Dominionism or their power-hungry allies might argue today.

So back to Mary and Archibald.  My work on their nice story got derailed, in part, after seeing a news story about Trump's spiritual advisor Paula White calling on the power of Jesus to smite the "demonic" forces wanting to thwart his re-election.   There are times in my life when I think about our ancestors looking down on us in judgement.  Have we lived up to their expectations and honored their sacrifices in founding this country? Are we staying true to the ideas expressed in the Preamble of the Constitution which I view not as a documentation of conditions of the time but rather a vision statement of what the Founders wanted for the future as a result of their Revolution?  I suspect that they would judge some of us good and some of us bad in this regard, but I cannot imagine they would not be uttering some sort of colonial version of WTF upon observing this thrice-married, Gucci-bag carrying, Prosperity Gospel-thumping, Rasputin-wannabe having the ear of a sitting president.   Gadzooks or zounds, maybe?

Am I picking on Paula and her ilk?  Probably, but I was equally influenced by Jerry Falwell Jr. and his un-Christian remarks regarding the conditions faced by children detained at the border and his displeasure that someone would criticize these conditions considering the huge challenge of caring for a child adequately for anywhere from $150.00 to more than $700.00 a day.  This is an interesting argument considering that two adults making $15 per hour generate $170.00 per day gross from which they are supposed to house and feed themselves as well as provide rich and full lives for whatever offspring they may have which I am assuming includes beds, toothpaste, and soap.   But Mr. Falwell apparently thinks we should have sympathy for the detention center folks and the private prison profiteers?

I often emphasize the soldiers in our family and the battles, but we also have many, many clergy in our ranks and a lot of them were educators too.  Above is a Matthew Brady portrait of the Rev. Isaac Ferris who was Chancellor of New York University from 1853 to 1870.  Isaac's family has English roots and his wife Leticia Storm comes from Walloon Calvinists and is the great-great-great granddaughter of Dirck Storm.  This history of experience is deep and tangled.  A portrait of Isaac hangs in my office.

In my own imaginary discussions with the hundreds of ancestors stretched across nearly 400 years in this new land, I doubt there would be much resembling a "you guys nailed it" or "this is exactly where we hoped you would be" rolling forth at this point.   Looking at this more broadly, I wonder what education champion Robert Alexander, for instance, would think of the idea that our federal government spends ten times more on fossil fuel subsidies than education when a full-cost accounting analysis is employed or about the present attacks science and the apparent celebration ignorance.  Or what would his Jersey-alumnus son think of the private prisons holding refugees simply looking for a better life when opportunities collapsed elsewhere?  And what would dear Mary think of children being separated from their mothers?  Mary was not wed until she was in her early thirties and would have probably found children beyond precious.  I shudder to contemplate what all of them and others on this site would think of our present state including the assault on the democratic cornerstones gained in the Revolution (1,2,3,4), but I digress and should wrap this up.

My point in all of this being it is important to know and understand these origin stories as we cruise forward or make course corrections as a nation. Our country was a bold and shining statement unlike all others at the time.  We retain that quality by remembering that and holding to it in the context of today's world.  We lose it if we are not vigilant in protecting ourselves from the very conditions that catalyzed the Revolution in the first place: an overly empowered elite, policies too driven by corporations, and a government steered by a particular church or sect that preaches love but practices intolerance.  If you think that Mary and Archibald would be happy with our current condition, have a happy 4th!  Otherwise you might spend a little time before and after the fireworks thinking about what you can do to honor this pair and this country's founding principles.  My sense is that there is some serious work to do.

The Ecology of Memory and Apricot Dreams

Most of the area in question from a 1906 map.  Springer is on the right.  El Monte crosses the center and O'Keefe Lane (nee Josefa) branches off to the left.  Covington did not exist and the yellow portion was owned by Sarah Winchester who sold it to Los Altos for their downtown.

By Bob Ferris

Memories are a funny thing.  I, for instance, have trouble remembering Elijah Wood's name and differentiating between Sam Shepard and Sam Elliott.  Many of us wrestle with lapses like this.  But I do remember the first time that I heard the word "ecology" in the mid-1960s when I was twelve going on thirteen.  It came in the form of a rebuke: Don't they teach you about ecology in school?  And it came from the mouth of a man named E.G. Kern.  A large round-faced German guy.

I later studied ecology in college and co-taught this subject in graduate school.   I have given guest lectures on this and related topics at universities on both coasts.  So, in retrospect, this seed planted by E.G. , or OK as he was also known, is important to who I became and what I am now.  I am thinking about E.G. because I don't know or remember that much about him and that bothers me.  And with the marching of time, in general, and my older brother Bill who knew Mr. Kern better and longer passing away this fall, the door to my knowing is closing.  There is only a small crack where some light flows through.

My family in 1959.

When I tell people I grew up in Los Altos I generally get a city-boy stamp because of the developmental explosion of Silicon Valley.  This strikes me as humorous as my older brother and sister often roamed our now densely settled former neighborhood with bows and arrows shooting apricots out of trees and wandering wild when they could.  I was not anymore subdued and remember dirt clod and BB-gun wars as well as romps in Hale Creek and more than a few episodes when I would come home a little bloody only to start crying when my mother opened the door to let me know how badly hurt I was.  Certainly we lived on a city lot but this was a base rather than something that defined our total home range.

The French ormolu clock that my great-aunt Mary Morris Phelps gave my mother and then me came to us in a well constructed box delivered by train to the Los Altos train station. 

This was in a time before Foothill College, 280, and the Foothill Expressway.  Before Mayfield Mall came and went and when Sears was the place to buy Craftsman tools that lasted a lifetime.  During my youngest years the wreckage of what was San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake rested safe beneath the protection of sturdy, creosoted ties and operating railroad tracks that ran to a station that awaited passengers and freight in downtown Los Altos rather than the next iteration of a restaurant or some other enterprise.  Whitecliff Market was operating and Clint's with its peppermint stick ice cream made after Christmas with crushed candy canes.  It is also a time mostly populated by those now gone.  So I triangulate and speculate with the help of my nearly 98 year-old mother and my older sister Caroline.  And this story starts with eggs and apricots.

"--his first home was a cottage on the E.G. Kern chicken farm at the end of O'Keefe Lane."  in The Passing of a Los Altos Legend: Co-Founder David MacKenzie Gave Local Community its Voice. 

E.G. Kern was our egg man in the 1950s and 1960s.  We had a box where my mother would put money and Mrs. Kern would deliver our eggs never speaking or holding a conversation with customers.  My mother thought she had little or no English.  We also had a milk man named Gene and he was a little bit more gregarious when he brought us our Borden's.

We lived at the corner of Springer and Covington (nee Emerson) in the house with the Rancho sign.  E.G., Mrs. Kern and Natasha, a Russian refuge rescued by Mrs. Kern, lived at the end of O'Keefe Lane in Los Altos Hills.  I know this location from the sole electronic evidence I could find that an E.G. Kern ever existed which was an obituary for one of the co-founders of the Los Altos Town Crier, David MacKenzie.  Mr. MacKenzie lived in a cottage on Mr. Kern's land that was also the site of the iconic oak tree which inspired MacKenzie's long-running "Under the Oak" column.

David Yule and me in 1958

My mother traces our deepening and more personal relationship with Mr. Kern to 1960 when Helen Yule our neighbor around on Riverside Drive talked to my mom about OK having trouble locating workers to harvest his apricots.  Mom being a mom of the time volunteered her kids and then went off to recruit others in the neighborhood including some of the Yule children and the oldest Martin family offspring, Galen.  The Martins had been our neighbors in Palo Alto in the late 1940s before our family moved to Los Altos just before I was born in 1952.  The Yules and Martins were what I would call shadow or parallel families in that there seemed to be a post-WWII, baby-boom reproductive synchronicity at play that paired members in my family with those in theirs.

We descended on the orchard along with Diane Nelson and Tris Rosenburger from across the street and John Millar from next door on Springer.  We know it was 1960 not because we remember the date, but because of a bit of auditory annoyance.  Mr. Kern had attached a transistor radio to the electric fence near the cutting tables.  So while the boys picked and dumped galvanized buckets of apricots into wooden lug boxes, the girls and me, because at seven I was too small for the three-legged orchard ladders, sat at the tables, cut cots, and listened to music.  It was the summer of a certain swimsuit song and according to my mother it played, and played, and played.   This was also the year of the payola scandals that involved Dick Clark, so there you go.

I had to look for pictures of wooden lug boxes like the ones we used.  Large enough to hold some fruit but rigid enough so the cots would not be bruised or crushed when the lugs were stacked.  Indentations on the end for finger grips.

Beyond the above recollections things get a little murkier.  All three of us remember Mr. Kern as being large, florid-faced, khaki-shirted, and highly educated.  I remember his WWII surplus jeep too as I was the one who had to jump out and twist the hubs putting us in 4-wheel drive when the road got rough.  My sister and I remember something about Heidelberg University and thinking he had a Ph.D. and possibly lectured for a time at Stanford.  And my mother told me she recalled Mr. Kern telling her of his trip across the US working at a steel mill once and harvests of corn and hay. 

The other misty memory is that E.G. was married to a German countess and when she arrived at the Los Altos train station she was dressed in finery and furs.  She was so elegant, in fact, that E.G. considered just turning around and leaving her there as he was so embarrassed about his happenstance and could not imagine taking this woman dressed as she was to his chicken farm.  She came and worked side-by-side with him until her death.   I have no memory of her.

The next few years are blurred for me.  I grew and I remember cutting more cots and eventually being able to manage the heavy wooden ladders and picking--perhaps at ten or eleven.  I also recall with a little bit of dread the ivy covered outhouse on O'Keefe where the black widows lived.  I would stand but not sit.  I recollect a Bavarian cuckoo clock, beer steins, and lived a little in fear of Natasha who was rumored to have chased a woman off the property with an axe because that woman had the temerity to show a romantic interest in Mr. Kern.  Natasha wore bandanas and had gypsy kind of look.  She rarely spoke with me and she was fiercely loyal to the memory of the Countess who gave her a home after her tribulations in Russia.  My impression was that Natasha was institutionalized occasionally but neither my mother or older sister remember that.

The first tape measure from the first tool box my father ever bought me.  

My next clear memory has to do with biking.  My father bought me a J.C. Higgins three-speed bicycle at Sears.  I promptly pedaled that bike to Frost Amphitheater at Stanford and rode it from the rim to the stage down the stair-stepping seating.  The bike made it home but it was never the same.  About the same time some boys, I think it was a trio, rode bikes from Los Altos to Santa Barbara and back.  To me as this point that was the functional equivalent of a Mt. Everest climb.  I know that one of the boys was Art Yule and the other two could have been his brother Gordon and Joe Tyburczy.  I remember Art because on his return he chose to sell his Royce Union ten-speed with a Campagnolo derailleur for fifty dollars.  I wanted that red and silver bike which was one of the first ten-speeds in our neighborhood.

My father told me that I would have to earn the money myself for this new bike which brought be back to Mr. Kern and odd jobs at the chicken ranch and in the orchard.  I shoveled chicken manure and cleaned stalls often stalked by Natasha's cats that were more wild than tame.  There seemed to be hundreds of cats and I often found the little nests they made in the barn as the cats produced more and more.  Luckily my father (or mother) advanced me the money so that I could ride the Royce Union the roughly two miles to work which seemed like an expedition.  I kept that bike for nearly two decades.

Mr. Kern had another property in Corralitos near Watsonville.  It was an apple orchard surrounded by forests which he called Laugh-a-Lot.  When I was twelve Bob Climo and I went to work for a period at Laugh-a-Lot staying in a primitive one-room cabin near the orchards.  Part of our job was to break up packrat nests near the trees.  It was an adventure and I was armed with older brother's Benjamin pellet rifle.  It was pump model and shot .22 caliber pellets until we ran out of ammunition and eventually tried to make our own out pebbles, sticks, and even pepper which unfortunately ended up in my friend's face (he got me back when a firecracker blew up in my face two years later).  We were generally boys on the loose and that is when Mr. Kern talked to me ecology, which was a little before my father talked to me about jamming the barrel of that pellet rifle with wood so completely that my father had to make a drill out of brass welding rod to bore it out.  The former lesson stuck with me longer than the latter as I still do stupid things occasionally.

My brother was fifteen that first summer of the apricots and twenty-one when I camped out with Bob at Laugh-a-Lot.  My brother took German in high school and college; I assume largely because of Mr. Kern.  His memories were probably deeper and broader, but they are gone.  I never knew OK's first name or that of his wife or possible later partner who joined him in Corralitos after Natasha was gone.  I don't know for sure what he studied at Heidelberg or when.

Stories were told by OK and Natasha while we were cutting cots.  My older sister Caroline was too young and likely too distracted by a crush she had on John Millar to remember or appreciate the tales.  It was old people talking in often hard to understand accents.  My mother remembers some of what was told but was probably more focused on making sure I did not eat too many apricots, cut myself with the wooden handled paring knives, and keeping my younger sister Mary, who was four, out of trouble.  We held all of this in our hands and let it drift away.

This could have been the end of it.  In doing my research I contacted former anchorperson and Los Altos High School classmate Robin Chapman who wrote a book on apricots and blogs about Los Altos and the region.  She was not aware of E.G., but knew our house.  I also contacted Judy Malmin who runs a Facebook page and website dedicated to Corralitos History.  I thought that she might know about Laugh-a-Lot and Henry.  Judy found a Kern farm but not the right one.  Judy also did a census search for 1930 and found Emil G. and Hildegard Kern. She did the same for 1940 and then it was off to the races. (Thank you, Judy!)

Once I had a first name for E.G. I got beyond the exempli gratia (i.e., e.g.) confusion of his initials and eventually ended up with the above gem.  This is E.G.'s draft card from WWII.  He was 44 at the time and missed being in the so-called Old Man's Draft by less than a year.  When I saw this card it took my breath away, because I was also born on September 26th...but not in 1897 nor in Kirchheim unter Teck, Germany.

Into the wee hours I looked at census records, old phone books, immigration records, and social security information and here is what I found in addition to the information in his draft card.  Emil came to the US in 1924 and by 1926, when Hildegard arrived and they were married, the couple called Los Altos and O'Keefe Lane (Avenue), specifically, their home.  They were not citizens in 1930 but were by 1940.  I do not know if this was the natural course of things or in response to events brewing in Germany.  E.G. was listed as a farmer in all documents and Hildegard as a his wife (the above is from 1940 census). 

Of his life and how they met or courted there is not much.  He was of an age to have served in WWI.  He never mentioned it, but that is not uncommon for veterans.  He was around 27 when he came to the US and the education section of his 1940s census record (above) seems to indicate that he went to college and perhaps graduate school so that seems to agree with our impressions.  (The "no" refers to school or college in 1940 see instructions).  Emil was 29 and Hildegard 28 when they married for their first and last time.  And I cannot find any record of children, but the couple collected people like Natasha and Henry.  My brother and I might be on that list as well.

I could not find a maiden name for Hildegard but suspect that she very well could have been a countess and was "von" something or another.  Being noble had some meaning in Germany during the early 1900s but not much after 1919 when the privileges of German nobility were removed.  She went to college for at least one year.  I could not find when or where she died but suspect it was in the late 1950s.

Emil Gustav Kern breathed his last on November 28, 1973 in Santa Cruz two months after his 76th birthday.  By that time my parents had moved from the Covington house to Los Altos Hills and would leave there in a couple of years.  My brother was in the Navy and my sister Caroline was married and had just returned to the area.  I was in college at Oregon State and my sister Mary was in her last year at Chester F. Awalt High School (now Mountain View) and had just been crowned homecoming queen (she is in the yellow dress in the above video).   My point is that we had all moved on from apricots and lug boxes.  We would not collectively return to Los Altos and sleep in one house for something like forty years and then we did that missing two family members--my father and brother.

The last picture of my entire family in 2014.

No one wrote an obituary for Mr. Kern or Hildegard that I can find.  My mother seems to think he was with another woman during his last days, but I could find no record of that.  I think this an egregious oversight, but then I remember my brother's love of German, my pursuit of ecology, and that this piece might serve as an obituary of sorts.   Auf wiedersehen, Herr Kern.