Our American Ancestors
I have been collecting scraps of information about our American ancestors off and on for many years. Now I have retired I have time to pull it all together and try to fill gaps. This is as far as I have got. Amanda has put material on her website at http://clarke.moonfruit.com/home/4559302009, some of which I have borrowed.
It is difficult to trace ancestry reliably. The main sources are records of birth, marriage and death, which were kept by churches until the first half of the nineteenth century, so they only exist where people were members of churches and the records have been preserved. But these records are only the starting point. We might have birth, marriage and death records for John Smith, but how do we know that this is the same John Smith? The rarer the name, the easier it is to track people. Wills can provide important information about family relationships. Court records, land sales, rental and tax records, and more recently census records, can provide important evidence of continuity of residence. Family bibles were traditionally passed from generation to generation, with each generation recording family births, marriages and deaths. Then there are family traditions, passed down from generation to generation. But even in the best of circumstances it is almost impossible to get an absolute proof.
Fortunately (rich, white, male) Americans have been obsessed by their ancestry since at least the age of mass immigration from the middle of the nineteenth century. The result is a lot of books reporting on genealogical research into the ancestry, and especially the European origins, of Northern European immigrant families. In parallel there is a large number of local histories of the towns that were settled in the seventeenth century, drawing on local church and civil records. (There is obviously a lot more information about men than about women, because men were the main property owners and tax payers.) A lot of this material was produced by descendants about their own families, who obviously had an interest in finding important people as their ancestors, especially if they had titles and coats of arms, so some of the reports of distant English ancestors are very dubious. However, over the past two centuries there have also been more disinterested and very professional genealogists who have conducted more rigorous research and published their findings in specialist journals. Finally, many local and church records have been published to facilitate further research. A lot of these books and articles have become available on the internet, though rights to a lot of sources have been bought by genealogical websites (especially ancestry.com) which charge for access (though ancestry sometimes has free trial subscriptions, which I have used to get and check information). The increasing availability of information means that there are millions of family trees available on the internet, mostly loaded onto genealogy websites (like ancestry). The largest collection is the Mormons’ FamilySearch.com, because they have been collecting genealogical information to book people’s places in heaven on judgement day. These sites do not check any of these family trees, most of which contain no information on sources and, where they do, the source is usually another family tree. At best these family trees can give us a clue where to look, at worst they are completely misleading.
I have tried to weed out all the unreliable and speculative relationships from my database, so I am confident that most of the information here is reliable. Where it is more doubtful I use words like ‘probably’, ‘possibly’, ‘some have claimed’. I have fairly reliable information on 200 out of 254 of our ancestors up to our grandfather Herman’s 5th great grandparents (for a few I have only names, but for most I have at least approximate birth, marriage and death dates). Eighteen of the 54 missing ancestors are the ancestors of Herman’s grandfather, Elias Smith.
I have tried to tell the story as a narrative, rather than with potted biographies of each individual, but it can get confusing because there are so many lines. The overall family tree is in Herman pedigree.pdf (do not try to print the whole thing, it is 101 pages!). When I have tidied it up I will upload the database to www.familysearch.org.
The biographical information is in the following files (if you want to start with the original ancestors then read them from the bottom to the top of the list). An overview of our earliest American ancestors is here.
On the whole our direct ancestors in the following files are indicated by being bold and italic. Just click on the title to download the file.
You can see a mapping of the places in which our ancestors were born, lived and died.
My (our) grandfather, Herman Clarke, was the son of Thomas Curtis Clarke and Susan Harriet Smith. Click on the titles below to open the file in a new window.
The Clarke ancestors:
Thomas Clarke Grandchildren.pdf
Susan Harriet Smith’s ancestors:
Tom Clarke wrote a treatment for a biographical novel that he proposed to write about his father Herman (thanks to Manda for passing this on). Who knows how much of this is accurate and how much wishful thinking/fantasising, how much about Herman and how much about Tom??!!