A Revolutionary War soldier’s DNA links him to living relatives – I know many have already seen this, but wanted to share for those who might not have tripped across it yet. Very cool! #GeneticGenealogy #genealogy

O Horizon – Official Trailer – Well, that didn’t take long. There’s already a movie about a young woman who brings her deceased dad back in her life through “new technology” (has to be AI), and how that plays out for her. Reminds me of the bring-back-your-ancestors offering I shared no so long ago. #genealogy

Photo by Suraj Tomer on Unsplash

The post Genealogy Roundup, June 24 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

It was a damp morning in late February 2008 when the phone rang. Harvard scholar and PBS host Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. was calling with one of his random genealogical requests. He was going to be on The Colbert Report later that day. Did I, by any chance, know anything about Stephen Colbert’s roots? Luckily for him, I had two hundred years of family history at the ready.

Unnaturally obsessed with the ancestry of my fellow Irish Americans, I had already snooped into Stephen Tyrone Colbert’s past and discovered that he was about as Hibernian as they come. 15 of his 16 great-great-grandparents were either born in Ireland or of Irish heritage, and rather remarkably, their descendants continued to marry only with other Irish Americans for three generations until Stephen himself slightly disrupted the flow when he wed Evelyn “Evie” McGee. In his own words, “I have broken the pattern, and am in a mixed race marriage. I’m Irish, and my wife is Scots-Irish. Somehow we make it work.”

Several weeks after that call, my nosiness was rewarded when I woke up to the best St. Patrick’s Day gift possible — an email from Stephen thanking me and remarking that he was “thrilled to hear we are pretty much pure Irish.” Fortunately for all of us, this should-be poster child for Irish Americans assumed the throne of David Letterman’s Late Show in 2015, and has made the show well and truly his own – an anchor many of us watch to laugh away our worries. Though many mourned the loss of The Colbert Report, we now get to mellow out each evening to the man himself, rather than the character he portrayed for a decade. And as anyone who’s ever met Colbert will attest, the real man is brilliant, quick-witted, multi-talented, family-oriented, devout, and kind.

Family resemblance? (from left to right): Stephen T. Colbert, father James W. Colbert, uncle Andrew E. Tuck, grandfather Andrew E. Tuck, great-grandfather John C. Fee, and great-great-grandfather Patrick Connolly

An Ancestral Tour

So what sort of family tree produces a Stephen Colbert? Geographically concentrated in New York and Illinois upon arrival in America (in some instances, after a brief interval in Canada), the opposite is true in Ireland where all four provinces can lay claim to a piece of Stephen’s past. So dense and deep is his Irishness that I have little choice but to share it in digest form in order to give a short, yet fairly comprehensive tour of his ancestral map. To that end, I’ll focus on the immigrant generation, whomostly emigrated between the 1820s and 1860s, and provide a brief sketch of each pair of his great-great-grandparents. As you peruse these eight clusters, don’t be surprised if you notice some family patterns.

Colbert/Fletcher

Since we usually have the greatest interest in the surname we start out with, it’s a Murphy’s Law corollary that Colbert is the most mysterious branch in Stephen’s pedigree. It’salso a geographic exception with a third great-grandfather named Anthony, born in the 1790s, who settled in Shepherdstown in what was then Virginia. His descendants would swiftly scatter to Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, and California with Stephen’s line opting for the Land of Lincoln.

marriage license recording George W. Colbert’s race as Irish

Though stories have floated down through the generations of a possible French origin for the Colbert name, the few paper trail indications that exist all point to Ireland, including the marriage record ofStephen’s future great-grandfather, George William Colbert, that notes his race as Irish.

Family lore also holds that George converted to Catholicism for his marriage to Angeline Garin, an event which is said to have provoked a cross-burning in their yard. The tale relates that George calmed his new bride saying, “Let it burn. It sheds a lovely light.” While it’s not been possible to verify the incident, the dual-religion aspect rings true as George’s parents were married in the Lutheran church — perhaps because of his mother, Susan Ann Fletcher, who introduced the only non-Irish ancestry into the mix, a combination of German and English.

Garin/Caffery

George Colbert’s bride, Angeline Garin, was born in Carrollton, Illinois to immigrants Michael Garin and Bridget Caffery. Given that both Michael and Bridget, along with some of their parents and siblings, had crossed the Atlantic in the 1850s, the Famine was undoubtedly a driving factor in their decision to emigrate. The couple married around 1868 and settled amidst a cluster of family members in the Illinois counties of Greene and Macoupin.

The Garin name was a simplified version of one that that was spelled variously as Gearon and Guerin in earlier days, and a search of available church registries revealed that Michael’s parents, Michael Gearon and Johanna Nicholson, had married on January 29, 1834 in Limerick. Regrettably, the picture is hazier for Michael’s wife, Bridget Caffery, as documents pertaining to her family contradict themselves and mention both Dublin and Belfast.

Tormey/Manning

Yet another pair of great-great-grandparents who decided to keep their secrets to themselves is John Tormey and Honora Manning. In fact, the few traces they left make it unclear whether they were born in Ireland or New York. All that is reasonably certain is that they had a son, Henry John Tormey, bornbetween 1862 and 1866 in Staten Island. A couple that may be them appears in Castleton, New York in the 1860 census, but then the trail fades. It might have helped if their son had stayed put, but working as a railroad conductor, he bounced around from Staten Island to Port Jervis to Jersey City and finally to the Bronx. It’s lucky for Stephen that Henry was a wanderer, though, because it was in Port Jervis that he met his future wife, Maggie McCrory.

Baptism (in Latin) of daughter of John and Margaret Tormey that shows her parents’ birth places of Staten Island and Hibernia

McCrory/McCreash

Margaret Ann McCrory was the daughter of Henry McCrory and Margaret McCreash, and it’s the McCrory branch that indirectly contributed Stephen’s middle name of Tyrone. According to him, “The McCrorys were O’Neills way back, and the story was that one of the O’Neills had been the Earl of Tyrone, and so they named me Tyrone after him.”

While it’s conceivable that there’s a Tyrone connection back in the mists of time, the more immediate link is to Belfast where Henry “McRory” and Margaret “McReesh” were considerate enough to leave a critical clue for future generations by marrying in the Catholic Parish of St. Patrick, which has sacramental registers dating back to 1798. The McCrory-McCreash nuptials took place on October 8, 1842.

 
1842 marriage of Henry McCrory and Margaret McCreash (St. Patrick, Belfast)

Tuck/Dunn

Shifting gears from Stephen’s paternal ancestry to his mother’s side, more is known about the Tuck portion of his family tree than any other thanks to memoirs left by his great-grandfather, Andrew Tuck (1833–1917). Andrew wrote at length about the challenging start to his parents’ North American experience.

John Tuck and Judith (aka Julia) Dunn married in 1817 in what was then Queen’s County and is now Laois. More specifically, John was from Ballyhora(ha)n and Judith from nearby Camross. In the 1820s, John journeyed to Canada while Judith stayed behind with several children. The intention was for him to save money and return to Ireland to bring his wife and children back with him, but he made the mistake of turning over his earnings to his employer for safe-keeping. When the employer got into financial difficulties, John was left empty-handed and separated from his family.

After a number of years apart, Judith took matters into her own hands and traveled to Canada with their by-then, only surviving child, John Jr., and surprised her husband by showing up at the quarry where he worked one day in 1832. Shortly thereafter, the reunited family moved across the border to Lisbon, New York, where Andrew was born as he put it, “about the 9th of November, 1833 — I had no exact date of my birth — but the consensus of those who ought to be good authority is that it was about the 9th of November.”

Andrew Tuck’s memoirs go on to share details about walking to school (seven fences to cross if you took the short-cut and snow that caked up under your heels, crowding your feet out of your shoes), his family (including the birth of each child and the loss of a son to typhoid fever), his land purchases and building endeavors over the years (transaction by transaction, and decisions as minute as opting for a railing on a back stairway), his politics (“I was something of a political curiosity — an Irishman, a Republican”), his views on slavery and pride in voting for Lincoln (“It required courage, confidence and firmness”), and just about everything a curious descendant might hope for.

One of several obituaries for Andrew Tuck, Potsdam Courier Freeman, February 28, 1917

Lynch/Rowan

Andrew Tuck was fortunate enough to marry a woman he greatly admired named Maria Lynch. Maria was one of at least seven children of Thomas Lynch and Bridget Rowan, and like the Tuck-Dunns, her family had back-doored into upstate New York through Canada. From Smiths Falls, Ontario, they had moved to Ogdensburg and later Lisbon, New York.

The family made steady appearances in local records from the 1850s into the 1880s, but with the exception of a sister of Maria’s named Julia, vanished. Julia became a Grey Nun, assuming the name Sister Scholastica, a fitting choice as she would spend decades teaching. Her 1943 obituary offered a little insight into her personality and standards, commenting that, “It would have been difficult for a pupil to appear before her after shirking his duty.”

Extensive digging eventually turned up an article in a local newspaper that provided a vital clue in the disappearance of Maria’s parents. On April 23, 1886, their house burned down. Wasting no words, the piece stated, “Nothing was saved. No insurance.”

Succinct April 1886 article about the Lynch house fire

It was this event thatled the now-elderly Lynch immigrants to make one last move to Illinois where they would spend their twilight years with several of their children who were living in the Chicago area. And it was the death certificate of one of their sons that would furnish the only hint of their origins in Ireland — a frustratingly vague designation of Connaught.

Fee/McMahon

The Fee line is another one that left a generous paper trail, mainly because of their business interests. Owen Fee, who would marry Margaret McMahon in the late-1830s, was originally from County Monaghan, where tithe applotment booksinclude a man of his name in the townland of Drumaconvern about a decade earlier. His bride is believed to have been from Cootehill in the neighboring county of Cavan.

Owen emigrated in March 1835 and filed his intent to become a citizen in Rochester, New York in 1837. He worked as a butcher there, but passed away unexpectedly in 1855, leaving his widow Margaret with five children, the youngest of whom was only four. Margaret continued to run the family business as a grocery until her oldest son converted it to a saloon and deli in the early 1860s. Assessment lists from 1863 show Margaret being taxed as a “retail liquor dealer,” but it was that same year that her sons formally launched Fee Brothers which is still operating — and owned by cousins of Stephen’s — today.

The company evolved over time, adapting to circumstances as necessary. During Prohibition, for instance, it became a supplier of sacramental, “standard altar” wines which seems appropriate since two of the founding brothers, including Stephen’s great-grandfather, John C. Fee, were among the first altar boys when St. Bridget’s Church wasestablished in Rochester in 1854. Today Fee Brothers offers a variety of cocktail mixes, bitters and cordial syrups, and sports a logo which portrays the four brothers along with the slogan, “Don’t squeeze, use Fee’s.”

Connolly/Maloy

Rounding out Stephen’s eight pairs of great-great-grandparents are Patrick Connolly and Elizabeth Maloy. When Patrick made his way as a teenager from Knockaturly in County Monaghan to Rochester, New York in 1834, he was taking the first step toward building a new life as a successful merchant — initially in candles with his brother, James, and later specializing in “lace and fancy goods.” About the same year he crossed the ocean, his future wife was born in Rochester to Charles and Margaret Maloy who had emigrated from Kings County (now Offaly) in the 1820s.

Patrick and Margaret had one son and eight daughters. Two daughters died young and two dedicated themselves to the Sisters of Charity, serving in hospitals and orphanages. Their third child, Carolina, would eventually marry John C. Fee, joining two prosperous, Rochester families. It says something of the Connollys that when Patrick passed away, school books were among the first possessions specified in his estate papers to be held in reserve for his family.

Cherish the Ladies

All of this sprawling heritage was funneled to Stephen by way of his mostly second-generation great-grandparents, striving grandparents, and over-achieving parents. His father, in particular, was a man of singular accomplishment. Having acquired his medical training and skills at Columbia and Yale, James William Colbert, Jr., M.D., served with the U.S. Army’s Medical Corps and as Assistant Dean of the Yale University School of Medicine, before becoming at age 32, the youngest person to hold the deanship of a medical school (at St. Louis). He later moved on to NIH, and finally to the Medical University of South Carolina. Along the way, he still found time to serve on a number of health and medical boards, and as Co-Chairman of Doctors for Kennedy during the 1960 Presidential campaign.

John F. Kennedy and James W. Colbert, Jr., M.D. in 1960 (JFK Library, www.jfklibrary.org/)

And then there’s his mother, Lorna Elizabeth (Tuck) Colbert, who bore and raised 11 children, the youngest of whom was Stephen. Tragically losing her only brother in the immediate aftermath of World War II and then her husband and two sons, Paul and Peter, in a plane crash in 1974, Lorna was able to do far more than persevere. As Stephen explained at the time of her passing, “Her love for her family and her faith in God somehow gave her the strength not only to go on, but to love life without bitterness, and to instill in all of us a gratitude for every day we have together.” Giving us a sense of her spirit and joie de vivre, he continued, “I know that it may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long, but the fact that my mother was 92 does not diminish. It only magnifies the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut.”

Listening to these words again after having just steeped myself in Stephen’s family history, I realized that they carried some echoes from the past. As we’ve already seen, Stephen’s extended family features nuns who ran schools, hospitals and orphanages. His great-great-grandmother, Judith (Dunn) Tuck, had ventured to North America in 1832 to reunite the long-separated pieces of her family. Another second great-grandmother, Margaret (McMahon) Fee, had taken over her husband’s business when he died and mortgaged her home to enable her oldest son to establish Fee Brothers in 1863. When his great-grandmother, Maria (Lynch) Tuck passed, her obituary noted that she “was of a splendid type of ostentatious Christian womanhood, a sacrificing helpmeet and a devoted mother.” And in his last letter home before his loss in a vehicle accident in Austria, Stephen’s uncle had written home, “Mother, how can a man be better while in a shower of your love and understanding?”

The remarkable women of Stephen Colbert’s family tree: wife Evelyn McGee-Colbert, mother Lorna (Tuck) Colbert, grandmothers Marie (Fee) Tuck and Mary (Tormey) Colbert, great-grandmother Carolina (Connolly) Fee, and great-great-grandmother Elizabeth (Maloy) Connolly

Ruminating on the topic of marriage, Andrew Tuck, the ancestor who left such thoughtful memoirs, reminisced that his future wife first made an impression on him with the way she acquitted herself when called on in geography class. He recalled a minister who preached that, “when a man married, he raised or lowered himself a step,” and referred to this sentiment as “an absolute truth.” Clearly regarding himself as having coming out ahead in the bargain, he went on to say of his own marriage, “Ours was the case of the unknown wife of the fairly well known husband, and when the latter left home, he often left more brains at home than he took with him, where often most needed, and with better results.”

Andrew was spelling out what had gradually dawned on me. The secret sauce of Stephen Colbert’s family tree is one of amazing women and the men who were smart enough to find and marry them. Stephen might jokingly claim that he broke the family pattern by entering into a “mixed marriage” with a Scots-Irish woman, but with his wise choice of Evie McGee, he’s keeping alive the tradition that matters most.

Similar articles: Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, Pharrell, Rachel Maddow

Note: An earlier version of this appeared in Irish America.

The post The Amazing Women in Stephen Colbert’s Family Tree appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Aisne-Marne Cemetery caretaker and me as a youngster

I was born into an American military family stationed in France, and as the first child of young parents (20 and 24 at the time of my arrival), had the good fortune of being carted along on a number of European adventures during my toddler years. My father, George C. Smolenyak, was an avid photographer, and like some at the time, had a preference for slides over pictures. As a result, assorted moments from my earliest years have been preserved in these miniature transparencies.

My father was a meticulous man with a remarkable memory, so could easily rattle off locations and other specifics decades after the fact — details which inevitably matched the labels he had recorded on the slides’ edges when he first created them. Dad had a few favorites he enjoyed telling stories about, such as my first encounter with snow in the Pyrenees or that time I kept everyone in a small hotel awake with my bawling, but there was one in particular he told repeatedly.

His tidy script notes that it was the “American caretaker, Belleau Woods Cemetery, France” and the slide shows this man bending over to chat with 18-month-old me. I’m clutching a branch he had apparently just handed over.

Dad’s caption on the slide

Time and time again, Dad explained that this gentleman was an American soldier who had served in World War I, stayed in France and married a local woman, and worked at Aisne-Marne Cemetery where 2,289 Americans are buried. When my father asked him while he had remained in France, he responded simply, “To take care of my buddies.”

This moment-in-time has always been special to me — partly due to Dad’s vignette and the snippet of my history it holds, but also because it foreshadows my later experience. I’ve spent years working with the U.S. Army assisting with the on-going effort to identify our soldiers who are still unaccounted for from past conflicts ranging from World War I to Vietnam. As it happens, I recently reached a random but timely milestone of having researched 1776 soldiers as of this year, America’s 250th anniversary. In my mind, this snapshot captures the instant this amiable veteran had just passed the baton so I could one day also help take care of his buddies.

For this reason, it has tormented me that I didn’t know who this man was. I asked Dad several times hoping that his impressive memory would suddenly toss out a name, but no such luck. But I’m a professional genealogist. I should be able to unearth his name, right?

It wasn’t for lack of trying, but as those who are familiar with American records know, our twentieth century military personnel records are sketchy at best since so many went up in flames (or were swamped by water) in a 1973 fire. So how could I find him? All I knew was that he had served in WWI, married a French woman, worked at this cemetery, and was still there in the 1960s. Where to start?

Then it occurred to me. What about those record sets for Americans living abroad? Ancestry doesn’t make them prominent, but if you search their catalog for relevant collections, you’ll pop up several including the following:

U.S., Consular Reports of Marriages, 1910–1949

U.S., Consular Posts, Emergency Passport Applications, 1915–1926

U.S., Consular Registration Certificates, 1907–1918

U.S., Consular Reports of Births, 1910–1949

U.S., Consular Registration Applications, 1916–1925

U.S., Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835–1974

U.S., Registration Certificates — Widows, Divorced Women, & Minors, 1907–1914

I didn’t have a name, but did I perhaps have enough other information to ferret him out? I took a dive leaving the name fields blank and entering “Aisne” and “Belleau” instead in location and keyword fields. Most came up empty, but I eventually got some hits with the 1910–1949 birth index. Seven children had been born to six couples in the relevant vicinity and time frame. Of course, I didn’t know for sure that my mystery man had any children, but it seemed a reasonable possibility, so now it was a matter of narrowing the field.

I researched each of the six men. Not surprisingly, all had married French women, but a couple had birth dates that suggested they were too old to be the fellow I was seeking. Another struck me as unlikely as he was a naturalized American citizen from Romania, and my father, hailing from a Slavic family himself would have inevitably remarked on the man’s origins and accent. But all this was a bit speculative. Fortunately, I was able to eliminate several because U.S. records showed that they had moved back to the States well before the 1960s. I was soon down to two. What could I use as a tie-breaker? Maybe passport photos? Yes! Both had photos taken in the 1920s. One of them was almost bald even as a young man, so it had to be the other one.

I was now looking at Charles William Anderson along with his wife and daughter. After all this time, I finally knew his name, and it made me smile to have spotted him with his own toddler.

Passport photos as seen on Ancestry

I’ll detour for a moment for those who might be new to research to mention that it’s often worth checking whether a particular resource is available in more than one site as a quick look into FamilySearch’s full-text collection turned up a much cleaner version of this same image.

Same photos as seen in FamilySearch’s full-text collection

I was confident I had the right man, but genealogists can never get enough substantiation, so the final leg of my research was tracing his family forward and reaching out to his descendants. One of them — surprised, but pleased to be contacted out of the blue — responded and confirmed that the man in the slide was indeed Charles W. Anderson, a fellow she recalled as her kindly grandfather.

It had taken much longer than I would have wished, but my own unknown soldier now has a name. If Dad were still with us, today would have been his 90th birthday, and while he’s not here to tell, I’d like to think that somehow he and Charles know. Happy birthday, Dad, and thanks for indulging this one-time toddler, Charles.

Note: While I occasionally use AI for image-generation, all my articles are written by me and AI images will be identified as such.

The post Identifying the Mystery Man in My Baby Photo appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

The Quest for Annie Moore of Ellis Island – As this is the last day of March which is both Women’s History Month and Irish-American Heritage Month, I’m sharing links for my book about Annie Moore, the Irish teenager who was the first to arrive at Ellis Island. If you enjoy sleuthing for pockets of history, I think this might appeal to you!

The Woman Who Refuses to Let History Disappear – Whoa! So grateful for this lovely profile by Christina Stanton! Henceforce, please refer to me as “the woman who refuses to let history disappear”!

Photo by Nahrizul Kadri on Unsplash

The post Genealogy Roundup, April 1 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

This case was tough because the soldier was both an immigrant and foster child, but I did indeed find relatives from his birth family who could provide DNA reference samples, so I think there’s probably more to the story than is shared here.

Regardless, welcome home Sgt. Roger Laurent Raoul Duquesne. Honored to have researched your family. #hero #KoreanWar

Photo by Joe Richmond on Unsplash

The post Genealogy Roundup, March 11 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

‘Meeting my dad was a D:Ream’ – pop star’s 50-year search for his birth father – If you’re one of those who believes non-physical traits are also passed on, you’ll enjoy this one.

The post Genealogy Roundup, March 4 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Which of the following describes the heritage of Peter Gene Hernandez, better known as Bruno Mars?

• Ukrainian
• American
• Filipino
• Hispanic
• Jewish
• Hawaiian
• Puerto Rican
• European
• Hungarian
• Asian
• Spanish

The correct answer is all of the above. And though I haven’t been able to prove it through the paper trail, he may well have some Taíno and African roots through his Puerto Rican ancestry.

As a genealogist who’s been delving into the past for most of my life and playing with DNA for almost two decades, I’ve climbed the branches of several thousand family trees, and the more branches I explore, the more apparent the growing “melangification” of America becomes.

Folks like myself who are 100-percenters or half-and-halves with roots in only one or two places are rapidly becoming quaint, and families like Bruno’s are slightly ahead of the curve. If you were to come back 100 years from now, I suspect most families would look like the cast of Hamilton. But for now, let’s linger on Bruno’s for a bit. Here are a few things you probably didn’t know about his roots:

• He’s typically described as being Hawaiian-born to a father of Puerto Rican heritage and a mother from the Philippines. This is all true. His parents are Boricua and Filipina. But his ancestral pool also happens to be one-quarter Jewish hailing from Hungary and Ukraine.
• In the U.S., Hawaii, New York, California, Nevada, Puerto Rico and Texas all hold a piece of his family’s past.
• Bruno’s Ukrainian immigrant ancestor, a one-time Hebrew teacher, entered America not through Ellis Island, but through the port of Galveston, Texas as part of the Galveston Movement. His future bride, however, was of Ellis Island stock.
• This same ancestor was once banned from ever becoming a citizen, but after modifying his name (please see the Ellis Island chapter of Hey, America, Your Roots Are Showing if you still believe that old myth about names being changed by immigration officials) and waiting about 20 years, he was finally naturalized.

• As seen in this photo, continental blending in Bruno’s family began a long time ago. This shows a pair of his great-great-grandparents — the father born in Spain and the mother in the Philippines — with two of their daughters around the 1890s. About a decade after her husband passed away, Bruno’s great-great-grandmother remarried to a Chinese gentleman 19 years her junior, introducing yet another country into the family mix.

Spanish birth record of a great-great-grandfather of Bruno Mars

• When it comes to Spain, it’s Segovia — I’m talking to you, Nava de la Asunción and Fuentepelayo! — that gets the bragging rights.

Whenever Bruno Mars races around the globe on tour, there are likely unsuspecting cousins in his audiences in Madrid, New York, Manila, Kiev, San Juan, and Budapest. I look forward to the day when we all realize there’s nothing especially remarkable about that.

Follow Megan Smolenyak on Bluesky.

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A second chance with a second surname – Improved surname tool at John Grenham’s Irish ancestors site! #genealogy

Photo Credit: Caroline Johnston under Creative Commons license

The post Genealogy Roundup, January 14 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Betty White, now 96 years old, graced us all with her presence at the Emmys. Mischievous and beautiful as ever, she was honored for her remarkable eight-decade career in show business which includes classic series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls.

But it was one of her more recent shows — Hot in Cleveland — that puts me most in mind of her own life. In it,White played a wisecracking, Midwest caretaker of a house a trio of Los Angelistas landed in upon impulsively fleeing their California lives. An Illinois native, White moved to Los Angeles while still a child, so this series was a version of her life in reverse.

Though born in Chicago in 1922, Betty Marion White was already residing in a neighborhood ensconced between Melrose Avenue and Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles by the time of the 1930 census. Her father, Horace L. White, a WWI vet and electrical supplies salesman, seems to have been doing fairly well in spite of the nascent Great Depression, as the family owned their home and — perhaps more importantly for Betty’s future career — a radio.

That only-child Betty was close to her parents, Horace and Tess, can be seen in this 1954 California Voter Registration in which the then 32-year-old Democrat shared the same address as her Republican parents. This same year she had a self-titled show on NBC and was voted honorary mayor of Hollywood.

(Ancestry)

Both Horace and Tess were raised in Chicago with a single sibling and Canadian-born mothers (thank you, Canada, for sharing yet another comedic talent with your Southern neighbor). Both also had immigrant fathers, meaning that all four of White’s grandparents were born outside of America, but the specifics are surprising.

It turns out that the ethnic brew that created Betty White is one-quarter Danish, one-quarter Greek, one-quarter Canadian, one-eighth Welsh and one-eighth English. Her Canadian portion sports branches that meander back not only through Canada, but also New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts to the early days of the United States, and eventually back to England, so in fairness, her English percentage should be rounded up a bit.

Perhaps what’s most striking is the Danish-Greek combination. Her Danish grandfather, Christopher White, came to America as a young man and bounced around Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois working as a salesman dealing in everything from hats to rubber. It’s possible that his wife Ettie was the quasi-namesake for Betty.

White’s other grandfather, Greek-born Nicholas Cachikis, also came here as a young man and worked as a salesman, but of one item — ice cream. For decades, he sold ice cream off a wagon, but it was apparently a hand-to-mouth existence as he was sadly buried in a potter’s field when he passed away.

So Betty White will always be Hot in Cleveland and a host of other places, but it’s Chicago, Denmark, Greece, Canada, England and Wales that should be hot to claim her.

Originally published on Medium on September 18, 2018

The post The Roots Recipe for Betty White appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Sultana as seen in original photo and after colorization and enhancement (via MyHeritage and Photoshop Elements)

The fact that this image exists is remarkable enough, but the story that spilled out of it is even more so. Included in a scrapbook of immigrant photos taken between 1890 and 1892 by E.W. Austin who worked at the Barge Office while Ellis Island was being constructed (well before the widely known Augustus Sherman and Lewis Hine collections), it’s clear that it meant more to him (or perhaps the recipient) than most as close inspection reveals that it had once been framed. And then there was the caption which was more detailed than usual: “Sultana Numeir, age 18 — Lebanon, Syria — speaks English & Spanish.”

Wondering whether I could pick up Sultana’s trail to learn what had become of this striking young woman, I received a quick assist when I realized a neighboring photo in the album also included Sultana. This one was described as “a family of 4 from Syria, Turkey — Two Hebrews from Oran, Algiers.”

Sultana with her mother, brother, and father along with two fellow travelers

It didn’t take long to find a matching family with a daughter named Sultana arriving around the expected time in New York passenger records. They had sailed from Italy which explains why the entries for Sultana and her brother said “figlia” and “figlio” (son and daughter) and their mother’s “moglie” (wife). Listed above them was their father/husband, Soliman Numeir.

Arrival record of Numeir family (Ancestry)

Ages were given for each and the family was entered as Moroccan. This last seemed a little odd since they were supposedly Syrian, but I’m accustomed to seeing contradictions in records of this vintage, so was still optimistic that this would give me enough to follow them forward in time.

I tried the usual resources for immigrants — census, naturalization, city directories, etc. — but came up empty. Where had they gone? Had they changed their name, moved elsewhere, or maybe returned home? Knowing it was a long shot, I turned to newspapers. Recent immigrants rarely made the papers unless there was trouble of some sort, but you never know and I was running out of options.

Much to my surprise, I found that Sultana had quickly made her mark. Sometimes solo and sometimes with her mother, she traveled to assorted East coast cities (Buffalo and Boston were particular favorites) where she would tell their story — mostly to Christian women’s groups — and sell embroideries.

Article about Sultana “Numier” (Buffalo Courier, 29 April 1892, Newspapers)

The family had left Syria due to “religious troubles” and gone to Morocco where they served as Christian missionaries. This explained why their arrival records had noted the Numeirs as Moroccan. Other details varied across the articles I found (not the least of which was their religion which rotated through Catholic, Protestant, and Unitarian), but Sultana was consistently described as a recent immigrant, fluent in several languages and seeking to further her own education as well as her brother’s, and who appreciated what America had to offer. She left a favorable impression and was considered attractive and a touch exotic — enough so that an artist painted a portrait of her in a “characteristic ‘eastern’ pose” that was put on public display.

Portrait of Sultana by Edward Glover Niles (The Boston Daily Globe, 3 March 1896, Newspapers)

Then her story took another curious turn in early 1895. Without warning, Sultana Francesca Neumeyer (the family had Germanized their surname) eloped and married a man named Edward Luther Perry in New York City. This resulted in a flurry of gossipy articles that barely disguised a fascination with what was regarded as a mixed race marriage.

Edward was a Harvard student described as a grind (“his acquaintances are few, his interest in the affairs of the college limited, his abode cheerless”) and “modest, unassuming and not inclined toward handsomeness.” In some respects, Sultana was treated more kindly (“beautiful, her manner vivacious, her accomplishments many”), but her biographical sketches also included doses of 1895-style racism and at times veered toward fiction. Depending on which version you read, she had been born in Cadiz or Madrid, Spain or Gibraltar. Her purportedly German father and Spanish mother (or parents of those respective heritages, even though both were Syrian) had toiled as missionaries in Morocco and Syria where “the sun imparted a charming duskiness to her skin, and the climate mellowed her temper.”¹ And she had either come to America at the age of three or three years ago.

This undesired attention prompted Sultana’s new in-laws to issue a “doth protest too much” response insisting that they were pleased with the marriage and that the couple had wed in New York to “prevent any unnecessary talk” during their son’s senior year at Harvard — a claim that, if true, clearly backfired.

Sultana’s in-laws’ response to the marriage (The Boston Daily Globe, 9 February 1895, Newspapers)

Some of the articles about Sultana and Edward’s February 1895 marriage said that they intended to go overseas as soon as he finished his studies, and this was corroborated by his application for a passport that May. Shortly after, they left for Sultana’s family’s hometown — now Zahlé, Lebanon.

It must have shocked everyone just months later to read in the same newspapers about Sultana’s death. Announced initially in Boston, her obituary would appear in papers across the country over the ensuing months. 22-year-old Sultana who had captivated so many in the five years since her arrival in America had succumbed to consumption on December 5th.

Announcement of Sultana’s death (The Boston Globe, 1 January 1896, Newspapers)

Her husband, Edward L. Perry, lingered for several months working with the Presbyterian Mission during the Hamidian (Armenian) Massacres, finally returning to the U.S. in August 1896. Less than a year later, he resumed his studies and remarried, starting a new family. He would later report in Harvard updates that he had “done absolutely nothing worthy of note.”

Harvard College Class of 1895, Fifth Report (Google Books)

So that’s the end of Sultana’s story. Or was it?

Sultana’s drama, it turned out, was not the only one playing out in the Numeir family. Sparked by later records pertaining to her mother that didn’t quite seem to make sense, I shifted my attention to Joseph, Sultana’s brother who had arrived with her that day in New York’s harbor.

Joseph was slippery to follow — partly because he casually bounced between his first and middle names of Joseph and John (which is why I’ll refer to him as JJ from this point). These two common names coupled with all the variations of Numeir that had cropped up (e.g., Neumeyer, Neumire, Newmyer, etc.) produced a frustrating number of candidates to sift through while trying to trace him. The reason I bothered, though, was his mother who resurfaced in America in the 1900s.

The whole family had disappeared by the time of the 1900 census, but Sultana and JJ’s mother, Mary, showed up again two years later — and she wasn’t alone. Now she had a “son” named John who had been born in 1895 in — depending on which source you consulted — the U.S., Syria, or England. His specifics shifted over time with him finally settling as John J. Neumeyer, grandson of Mary, born on 21 December 1895 in Hull, England. And to be clear, John wasn’t the one tweaking the details; his grandmother was.

Given her age, it made more sense for John to have been her grandson. It seems she had fibbed to make it easier to enter the country, but whose child was he? John had the Neumeyer name, suggesting he would have been JJ’s son, but was this a fabrication to facilitate her traveling with this youngster? And how and why did Hull, England enter the equation?

So began another research dive that would take me on an astonishing journey. Rather than retrace the quest step by step since it was complicated and anything but linear, I’ll share a condensed rendition of the saga of Sultana’s brother, JJ.

Around 1894, he married Mary E. Wood, an English immigrant. Soon after in January 1895, they had a daughter named Rose in upstate New York. He worked as a photographer (an interest possibly triggered by the photos E.W. Austin had taken of them upon arrival) and was doing well, so you might have thought they’d stay put. But in September of that year, the young family traveled across the Atlantic to England. Maybe his wife was homesick or they thought the prospects for his business were better there?

Not quite.

The family went to Lincolnshire, where JJ and Mary soon split. Mary left Rose with JJ, but he wasn’t able to care for her, so he approached the Glanford Brigg Board of Guardians to have Rose boarded out at his expense.

But on 6 August 1896, JJ — all of 27 years of age — died from nephritis uremia in an infirmary in nearby Hull (presumably where Hull came into the picture). When that happened, the woman who had been caring for Rose gave her to the Glanford Brigg workhouse because she was no longer being paid. Against the odds, a woman who belonged to the Board of Guardians was so taken with Rose that she adopted her.

Meanwhile, JJ’s wife, Mary, professing that their marriage was invalid, wed her childhood sweetheart in July. Since she had taken on another surname about a month before JJ died, those who knew that Rose’s mother was alive couldn’t find her, so the adoption went ahead.

There are many elements of this story that are peculiar, but one that stands out is that Mary, living about 20 miles away, didn’t know about her daughter’s adoption, but somehow Rose’s grandmother in Syria got wind of it and showed up in England to claim her in October. Unfortunately, the board’s minutes and relevant inmate registers and boarding out records have gaps around the time this was happening, so what is known is derived from newspaper accounts.

Custody dispute over Rose (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 30 October 1896, BritishNewspaperArchive)

According to several articles, the woman who had adopted Rose didn’t want to give her up, but the board initially decided in the grandmother’s favor. Efforts to have Rose’s mother, Mary, weigh in were fruitless since they hadn’t found her, so the turmoil continued for two months with attorneys for both sides joining the fray.

In mid-November, the board concluded they had lost authority the moment the child was adopted, leaving the other involved parties to sort it out. This is when the mother materialized saying she had only learned what was happening upon reading about it in the local paper. Mary strongly preferred the board member because she didn’t want her daughter taken to Syria (“they would barter it away to the Turks for £200”), and signed paperwork authorizing the adoption, so the grandmother left England without Rose. At this juncture, the media invited Rose’s mother to share her experience and shifted from dismissing her to celebrating her.

Mary offered a dramatic narrative in which she had been tricked into marriage by a bigamist, a reality she learned about by intercepting a letter written to him.² He had not only a wife, but also a son who was living with his grandparents in Syria. In arguments that ensued, he struck her in the chest, causing cancer that forced her to have surgery to remove her left breast. When she recovered, she took her daughter to England, but “being passionately fond of the child,” he pursued them on the same ship, though they didn’t travel together.

Even after they arrived in England, he continued to follow her until one day he pointed a loaded revolver at her and said that he would kill all three of them unless she let him keep their daughter. With only ten minutes to make her choice, she reluctantly left without Rose in order to save all three of their lives. She and her new husband subsequently tried to find her daughter, but to no avail.³

The challenge with interpreting this from the distance of 125 years is that in spite of the compassion one might feel for Mary, she was a classic unreliable narrator, blending hyper-specific and accurate details with other, more questionable ones. The name and address she gave for the woman who had sent the letter, for instance, were valid. Moreover, the letter-writer was a wealthy socialite who would soon be embroiled in a public scandal for attempting to elope with the “wrong kind” of man (her melodrama merits its own article, but I’ll resist temptation to stay on track here), enhancing the plausibility of Mary’s allegation.

On the other hand, you can’t get cancer from being struck (and even if you could, the odds of a freshly arrived immigrant living in rural New York being able to get this surgery, still in its early days, so swiftly are doubtful), and the paper trail shows that she journeyed back to England in a second class cabin (there were only seven in this class total, including their daughter) with the man she said she was running from. Elements mentioned in other coverage, such as the fact that Mary’s own mother supported the Syrian grandmother, injected further confusion.

Some of what she said was definitely true, but flourishes seem to have been added, perhaps to garner sympathy or explain why she was late becoming involved in her daughter’s predicament. And JJ, her quasi-husband, was no longer alive to present his side.

All of this wouldn’t matter much if it weren’t for Mary’s assertion that JJ had been married before and had a son who was living with his parents in Syria. That claim brings us back to the mystery grandson his mother later brought to America — the one who eventually went by John J. Neumeyer and was said to have been born on 21 December 1895 in Hull, England. And this is where we encounter a battle of unreliable narrators because Sultana and JJ’s mother — also named Mary — had a habit of changing her story over time, so much so that her grandson wound up befuddled about his own origins.

Whose child was John J. Neumeyer, born 1895? (Ancestry)

John lived with her until she died when he was 24, but even three years before then, he expressed his confusion when applying for citizenship, saying, “I was informed I was born in England — I do not know of what parents. I remained in England until I was 11 months old when I was taken to Syria where I remained until I was six years old. I have lived in the United States ever since.”

He also noted that, “I am informed by Mrs. Mary Neumeyer who for some time claimed to be my grandmother,” revealing that he was no longer convinced that she was.

Declaration of Intention for John Neumeyer (Monmouth County Archives, NJ)

I don’t think it’s any accident that when she died in 1920, he made plans the next month for a trip to England. His passport application and the local newspaper said it was to study for the ministry, but he only stayed for three months. I suspect that among his grandmother’s papers, he had found traces of Rose, and believing her to be his closest living relative, went to try to meet her. Or conceivably, the two of them had managed to connect the dots several years earlier when Rose had begun using “Numeyer” as a middle name. In any case, his inheritance from his grandmother (and yes, it appears that she really was his grandmother) allowed him to make the trip.

I’d like to think John and Rose met, but the question in my mind is whether they were siblings or cousins.

John’s grandmother had said that he was her son’s son. And John’s very existence would seem to lend credence to the tale about JJ already having a first wife and child when he married Mary E. Wood, but other “facts” of the two Marys clash.

If the alleged son’s date of birth is correct and he was born in England, how could that timing have worked? He would have been born after Rose, not before, so he couldn’t have already been taken to Syria. The younger Mary would almost had to have been his mother, meaning that she would have been very pregnant when crossing the Atlantic and given birth to three children in two years — two with her disavowed-husband and one with her new one — with barely time to breathe in between. And even if that happened, why is there no birth record in England for such a child, and why is there no mention of him in all the news coverage about Rose’s adoption? Wouldn’t her having a local, infant brother have at least been mentioned in passing?

Two other possibilities come to mind. It could be that the story about JJ having a son from a previous marriage was true, but it was earlier and not in England, so the child was a bit older — say, born in 1893 or 1894. Or maybe — just maybe — John was really Sultana’s son.

It’s hard to avoid noticing that he was born the same month that she died. True, he was born on the 21st and she died on the 5th (and yes, I tried to verify, but failed to obtain relevant Lebanese records), but with all the other truth-stretching floating about in this family, what’s a gentle tweaking of dates?

I think it’s plausible that Sultana died in childbirth, and that her husband either chose to or was persuaded to leave his child with his in-laws and return to America. It was 1896 and he was a widowed, 22-year-old student with a half-Syrian child. He came from a family that was ambivalent about his marriage and he was dealing with a strong-willed mother-in-law who had the home court advantage since this would have taken place in Syria.

Whether John was JJ’s child or Sultana’s, using the Neumeyer surname and borrowing aspects of Rose’s life would have made things easier for his grandmother as she returned to the United States to begin a fresh chapter with a little boy by her side. And if John was JJ’s son from a previous marriage, she would have needed to nudge the date of his birth by a year or two so that it could have happened during the brief period JJ had lived in England.

Barring unanticipated revelations (such as Lebanon providing the requested records or the unearthing of the missing Board of Guardians records in England), the only way to solve this riddle would be through DNA testing. But this situation is complicated and there are four clusters of potential participants to consider — those descended from 1) John, 2) Rose, 3) Mary E. Wood’s second marriage, and 4) Sultana’s husband’s second marriage.

I have researched descendants in each branch, and all indications are that none of them is aware of this story or their connection to it. Normally, I contact relatives before publishing, but this family history is so complex that for the first time ever, I decided to write first and reach out to family members with a link so they can absorb it (or not) at their own pace.

I hope that they will be pleased to learn more about their heritage and see a couple of out-of-the-blue family photos from 1890. If any should choose to allow me to share their reaction, I will post updates here, but I am not going to try to persuade anyone to take a DNA test. My goal was simply to try to find out what had become of the young woman in the photo, so everything else is up to them.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes it takes considerably more than a thousand words to explain one. I hope you’ll agree that this one deserved 3,400.

¹ All quotes in this paragraph are from “A Harvard Romance,” Worcester Daily Spy, 10 February 1895 (Newspapers).

² Efforts were made to uncover any prior marriages JJ might have had to determine whether he was a bigamist, but marriage records of that era were hyper-local and nothing has been found in likely locations to date.

³ Details of Rose’s mother’s account are from “A Scunthorpe and Lincoln Romance,” The Lincolnshire Chronicle, 27 November 1895 (BritishNewspaperArchive).

The post Captured in Time: Syrian Immigrant Sultana Numeir upon Arrival in America in 1890 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.