Your Genealogical Past

Your Great Grandpa Merriam initiated the study of our family history in the early 1930s when he was living in Chicago, IL. His work has been invaluable to us in charting our family history. It's my intent to share, in an introductory format, some facts about our family history over the next few weeks and months. In doing so I hope I can stimulate you to begin to expand your family history, especially those of your spouses, but also of our own family.

I recently shared "fan charts" of our genealogy that show what we know about the most recent 9 generations. The value of a fan chart is that it can provide a significant overview of our knowledge on a single sheet of paper. At the first generation appears one person (me or mom). At the 2nd generation appears our parents (2 people or 1 family). At the third generation appears 4 people or 2 families. Moving out from the 3rd generation, the number of families doubles at each generation, as does the number of individual. At the 9th generation we have 128 families and 256 individuals (still with me?). Realize this does not count multiple marriages or siblings. Working from the center out there are a total of 255 families represented on the chart and 511 people. When you combine both fan charts (mom and mine) that total 1,022 individuals and 511 families. That is a lot of people in our family history. The following table will be explained in greater detail a future blog.

How are we doing on our family history? Considering how much work Great Grandpa Merriam did, there is still a lot to do. I just created a table and you can see it below. If we go back just 4 generations - 5 generations for our children, then we look pretty good as we are at 100% knowledge of who ancestors were, even if we don't know much about them. However, once we get to generation 6, for a lot of our ancestors, we don't know much. There are some challenges when you get back to the 6th through the 8th generation. These can be difficult periods to find good information about ancestors. I'm sure the information is out there, we just haven't found it yet.

Let's look at what a generation is. A generation is sometimes defined as that time between the birth of a mother and the birth of her first offspring.  The literature says a generation is about 25 years and our family matches that for the last 4 generations. I'm using fathers rather than mothers for my example. My grandfathers were both born in 1893. My father was born in 1920. I was born in 1946. My oldest was born in 1970, and her oldest in 1994. There were 100 years and 9 months between the time my grandfather was born and the time my grandson was born.

As an example I traced forward to your great grandmother Eura Marion Johns (3 - this refers to the generation from me where I am (1)). Willen (12th generation from me) was born in 1580 in the Netherlands. His son, Aert Williamson (11)  was born in 1625, also in the Netherlands, but died in the Dutch colonies of New Amsterdam, what we now call New York City and New Jersey. William Aertse Williamson (10) was born in 1650 in New Amsterdam. You will find on the genealogical records it says New York City, but it was New Amsterdam. The Dutch settled the area prior to 1625 and it remained New Amsterdam until British frigates demanded the surrender of the city in 1664. Hence, records that say "New York City" have been modernized and cannot be verified as a NYC address prior to that time. I'm sure there is some geneaologist out there who can correct me.

My mother (2) and her mother (3)

Back to the ancestors. William Aertse Williamson's son Elbert Willemse Willemsen (10) (note the last name spelling change) was born in New Amsterdam in 1650. His son, Elbert Willemse Willemsen (9) was also born in New Amsterdam in 1688 (still using the New Amsterdam geographic location). William Elbertese Willemsen (8) was born in New York City in 1710, and his son John Williamson (7) was born in New Jersey in 1745. Jacob Williamson (6) was born in 1770 and his daughter Sarah (5), was born in 1815 and she married Jonah Johns and their son Lindsay Sutphin Johns (4) was born in 1845 in Pike County, Illinois. His only daughter, Eura Marion Johns (3), and my maternal grandmother, was born in Perry, Pike County, IL in 1893. Her daughter, my mother (2), was born in 1922, in Des Moines, Iowa. Geographically, that particular line of ancestors moved from the Netherlands to New Amsterdam (New York City and northern New Jersey) to the midwest between 1580 and 1922. Most of those ancestors lived what today we call the United States.

That is an awfully long introduction, but I think it helps us to better understand who we are. You can clearly classify yourselves as "Americans" because as we shall see in some future posts, we aren't just from the Netherlands, but also from England, Scotland, Normandy, Germany (Prussia to be specific), and other northern European locations. We came early and we came late (mid 1800s), but ancestrally we are here and have been here for a long time, so when someone asks where you are from the right answer is the United States. We've been here too long to suggest we have a different heritage than our American heritage. Our ancestors were here for the French and Indiana War, the American revolution, the Civil War, and all those since then. We may not have fought in all of them, but we were here. You have been in America for at least 11 generations dating back to 1635 and probably before.