In Remembrance: Thomas French

This week’s In Remembrance memorializes Thomas French, Michael’s 4x Great Grandfather, who was born on this date in 1820.

Picture of the headstone for Thomas and Mary (Newell) French — The headstone for Thomas and Mary (Newell) French, Mound Cemetery, Racine WI

Thomas Elmer French was born on July 8, 1820 in Ireland and arrived in the United States in January 1841 at the age of 19. He is one of our few known ancestors who arrived in this country through Ellis Island, and he’s memorialized on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor which was established by the Statute of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation to celebrate the opening of the Ellis Island Museum in 1990.

Not much has been confirmed about Thomas’ time in New York until his marriage in 1848. It’s possible he served in the US Army (a Thomas French, from Brooklyn, enlisted as a tailor in Apr 1840 and it’s possible our Thomas arrived a little earlier than recorded), or given his presence in St. Lawrence County it’s possible he was one of the scores of Irish workers involved in building the various canals in the area (as we saw with Daniel Leonard Link), but regardless we know he married Mary Jane Newell on 15 Jun 1848 in Governeur, NY. The couple moved to Wisconsin soon after and established a farm he would reside on the rest of his life.

Photo of an old cake plate inscribed with "French" in the center, on a white background — A decorative cake plate c. 1850 with “French” inscribed, taken from Catherine (Morse) Leonard’s estate, the Great Grand Daughter of Thomas and Mary French

His first child, Suzette Newell French was born in Wisconsin in the spring of 1849, and they would have 6 others who survived to adulthood (May, Charles, John Jay, Ada, Cora and William). Thomas applied for US Citizenship soon after his arrival in Wisconsin, renouncing his allegiance to Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland on his 30^th birthday, 8 Jul 1850, and he was eventually Naturalized as a citizen.

Image showing an overlay of an 1858 Racine Co. Plat Map showing the boundaries of Thomas French's farm over a Google Maps satellite view of the same property — Thomas French’s farm as captured in a 1858 Racine County Plat Map, overlayed the same land today in Google Maps

The farm was 85 acres located just West of Franksville, straddling Kraut Road and running just East of Borgardt Road (Link). When Suzette married Addison Morse in 1869 they moved to a 130 acre farm on the West side of Borgardt Road, with Addison’s brother JB across the street and his 110 acres abutting Thomas’ farm’s Southern boundary. His family remained close his entire life, with most of his children living nearby and those that lived away visited often. In fact Suzette’s first son was named with her father’s middle name as his first: Elmer Addison Morse.

Mary passed away of a long illness in 1894, and Thomas survived her for another 12 years before passing away on 27 Mar 1904. He was remembered as a highly respected, a man noted for his good deeds and being every ready to help anyone in need, as well as one of the last remaining early settlers in the area.

Thomas French’s descendants to Michael’s 2x GGP

From Slurs to Sources: Modernizing Genealogy for LGBTQIA+ Family
Evolving social mores call for evolving tools and techniques to capture our family tree

From Slurs to Sources: Modernizing Genealogy for LGBTQIA+ Family <h4>Evolving social mores call for evolving tools and techniques to capture our family tree</h3>

Editor’s note: This is a non-political post on a subject that has inexplicably become political, and is merely a family history post discussing genealogy techniques. If this subject bothers you please skip it or at least keep your comments non-political. We will delete your comments and ignored if you can’t.

The hobby of genealogy, as we now practice it, became popular in the late 1800s when membership in lineage societies such as the Sons/Daughters of the American Revolution and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants helped promote it. Genealogy has evolved quite a bit since those days, as has the types of data applied to our ancestors. In the late Nineteenth Century the terms we used for immigrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ people, or African Americans were so archaic that most people now consider them slurs.

That evolution followed the progress of society and we are in the middle of exactly this type of social evolution in our lifetimes. The LGBTQIA+ community continues to gain recognition and our genealogy needs to evolve accordingly, and we’ve given a lot of thought how we’ll address it.

Photo of a man dressed in women's clothing, c. 1918 — While these questions seem modern and “new”, the LGBTQIA+ community have always been present in our family trees. There’s more honesty, acceptance, and open discussion today, but as this image from c. 1918 demonstrates, things like gender have never been as constrained as we were led to believe.

Early in our journey to document our family history we made discoveries that upended conventional family lore, often secrets intentionally buried decades ago, and we had to decide how we’d proceed. Our North Star on these discoveries became that we’d tell the truth as we knew it because researchers 100 years from now are going to find our work and will want to know the complete stories we’ve uncovered. Additionally, these truths are fundamental to the story of our family and why we are who we are, so we’ll share them.

But there is a level of respect and love called for in how we tell these stories. For instances one of our biggest discoveries involved living relatives and we consulted them and their children on how best to proceed (Link).

Limits of traditional genealogy for newly accepted mores

The design of our genealogy tools reflects the assumption of a traditional American nuclear family. Family Tree Maker still assumes the opposite sex when you enter a new marriage fact as well as noting parents of a child as “Spouse” even if they were never married. Ancestry follows these traditional notations as well as limiting each person to Male, Female or Unknown genders when many official bodies recognize other options. However, over half of the US States recognize (or have previously recognized and issued documents with) “X” or “other” as valid genders, which challenges our ability to note the truth of these documents.

For instance, if a child is born male and, during their first 20 years, gets a driver’s license, graduates high school, and enrolls in college under one name and gender before later transitioning, the historical record could be totally confusing 100 years from now. Without context, a new woman appears to have graduated college, gotten married, worked various jobs, and renewed her driver’s license, seemingly out of thin air.

A future family historian likely be able to link what looks like two children to the parents, guessing they had two children, one who died about age 20 and the other about the same age establishing all sorts of records but nothing before the age of 20. They could also trace their ancestors back to this child and quickly find a brick wall because they can find no record of them before adulthood.

Properly recording facts for our Trans family

When we were faced with these issues in our tree, we first asked our Trans family and friends how they would like us to approach it. They largely hadn’t given it much thought, but they recognized both the inherent risk of using what they know as “dead names” (which are so named because they are hopefully never to be used again) in our quasi-official documents, as well as wanting to accurately preserve historical records for later generations to consume and understand.

The solution we arrived at was to use “at birth” attached as secondary facts. For a trans family member their current name and gender is noted as default, and we attach their dead name and original gender as secondary facts.

Adapting our tools to integrate our LGBTQIA+ family

We use Family Tree Maker as our primary family tree tool (link), which allows us to define custom facts. We’ve defined the custom facts “Name (at birth)” and “Sex (at birth)” in FTM and use those to attach sources listing original information. We keep those facts flagged as “Private” to ensure that even though the person is alive (which makes all their records hidden by default), these facts will remain private even if we choose to share info on living relatives. This is an extra step to respect our family member’s wishes, and ensure we don’t create reports, etc. where we’d accidentally share this information.

Screen capture of the Fact screen in Family Tree Maker, showing the "at birth" custom facts for a relative that has changed genders/name — An example of the record (in Family Tree Maker) for a transgender family member, using their preferred name and gender but also capturing their name/gender “at birth”, with records attached

Another of our favorite family tree tools, RootsMagic (Blog link), allows for custom fact types as well, but we run into challenges using some online tools. FamilySearch and MyHeritage both allow for custom facts and we’ve been able to create “at birth” facts on each, however Ancestry does not allow for this. Given that Ancestry is the largest commercial ancestry website, and it has our default online integration with both FTM and RootsMagic, this limitation means we’ll be restricted in sharing these elements publicly when the time comes.

Screen capture of a custom gender fact created in FamilySearch.org — An example of a custom fact for Gender (At Birth) in FamilySearch

Marriage/Relationship facts

The question of how we will capture various relationship facts is related to our LGTBQIA+ family, but not exclusively. We sit at a time where social mores on adult relationships are more broadly defined and we are moving past the European notion of one lifelong marriage.

Divorces are much more common today, as are parenting relationships that never included marriage. Beyond that, “modern” marriage traditions increasingly include same-sex relationships, polyamory, non-traditional/non-official marriage (like handfasting), etc. We are left to decide how best to capture these relationships properly for history’s sake with tools that are not ready for relationships outside of husband and wife.

Screen capture of warnings when creating a same-sex marriage in FamilyTree — A warning from FamilySearch we are creating a same-sex marriage

For instance, our tree has children born to couples who never married and Ancestry, MyHeritage and Family Tree Maker want to default the parents’ relationship to “Spouse”. We can manually override that and select relationships like “Partner”, “Single”, or “Other”, but that’s a small list for accurately capturing relationships.

Screen capture of selections for Relationship in Ancestry

Other tools like FamilySearch don’t make it as clean or easy. Trying to create the same relationship for a child of a never-married couple results in a convoluted mess. Technically we can capture the relationship, but you can only view both parents from the child’s record.

Screen capture from FamilySearch depicting how a mother's record only lists the father of her child if they were married — FamilySearch doesn’t display a child’s other parent if they were never married.

Screen capture from FamilySearch depicting how a child of two people who never married is displayed — FamilySearch doesn’t display a child’s other parent if they were never married.

Flexibility falls by the wayside when we try and document polyamorous couples. Polyamory is emerging as an increasingly common relationship type, but none of our tools are yet able to effectively capture these marriages. Non-traditional partnerships cannot be accurately recorded in our tools, nor can the parenting arrangements their children were born into.

Make it work!

Our family 100 years from now will likely be much more versed in these notions than we are today, at the dawn of this evolution. They will be expecting the information we have and regardless of the tools we use and regardless of the evolving nature of our family’s relationship our job is to capture our family history as we know it during our time. It’s important we capture these facts with truth and detail so the genealogists that come behind us can build off our work.

In many ways, given the current limitations of capturing this information formally, our work may be the only records that can decode the truth of our people and we need to ensure we capture it completely and with respect to the people who are living these new ways to fully enjoy their lives.

Keeping a critical eye on our research
Sometimes the excitement of the find blinds us to records that don't match out ancestors

Keeping a critical eye on our research <h4>Sometimes the excitement of the find blinds us to records that don't match out ancestors</h3>

We’ve inherited a lot of family treasures since we became known as the group preserving the publishing our family history, but only one is on our desk at all times: A very old, unattractive portrait of Samuel FB Morse. The first great historian in our family was Myra (Tradewell) Morse (1870-1962), and she and her cousins spend decades building out a family tree we still use as a base today. She established our family line to her GGF Charles Edwards (1768-1811), who served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War so she could establish her Daughters of the American Revolution membership in 1904. She also established a link for her husband Elmer A Morse (1870-1945) (link) to his 2xGGF Samuel FB Morse, and this little portrait of the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and Morse code was venerated and displayed in the Elmer and Myra’s house proudly.

The only issue was, neither of those facts were true. A Charles Edwards might have been a soldier (still open for debate), but the link to that Charles was specious and called out by the organization in later years. Myra was a State DAR leader and lost her membership in the organization because they had re-evaluated her research and found it lacking what’s required as proof. Her daughter saved the day by identifying a new ancestor with qualifying service, getting her membership under that soldier, then Myra re-applied under the same ancestor and regained her membership. Also, there was no direct relation from Elmer to Samuel FB Morse (they are 4^th Cousins, Twice Removed). His 2xGGF was Samuel Morse, but they were born 50 years apart, in different States, never lived in the same State and our Morse died while telegraph Morse was still in his teens.

This is the kind of thing that pollutes the Ancestry.com algorithm and becomes cannon, and we almost plowed through doubt even as we thought we were being skeptical and reserved.

We keep Samuel FB’s portrait on our desk to remind us of how we can manifest results we want by bending facts in ways we aren’t even aware of. Myra did great work, there’s no way she just made this all up on purpose. And we were reminded of that this weekend when we followed that same path despite all of our efforts to avoid this.

It started Friday night, on Instagram, when one of my favorite creators Jen, The Formidable Genealogist (https://www.theformidablegenealogist.com/), posted an announcement that Ireland would drop (what we read as) the fully searchable 1826 Ireland Census at midnight. This was a massive breakthrough for us, and despite cooking dinner (with a glass of wine) we tried the site a few times to see if it dropped early. It did come online Friday night and we did some searching on the couch watching TV that evening.

The reason this was so exciting for us that the oldest Leonard ancestor, Michael (1799-1861), arrived in the US around 1830 with 2 young children and no record of a wife. John (1828-1891) and Ann (1829-1906) always listed their birth location as Tipperary, Ireland but we’ve never been able to establish they actually arrived or how the family looked at the time. Ann’s obituary said her “parents” arrived in the US when she was “just a child”, and settling in Quebec, Canada before moving to Lockport, New York. We know Michael remarried around 1841 in Lockport, and had 4 children with his new wife, and in the 1850 US Census Michael had moved to Wisconsin with John and Ann, his new wife, and the 4 children. The questions are numerous: Did he arrive with his first wife? If so, did she die before having any additional children? Were there additional children that we have no record of that didn’t make the move to Wisconsin? It all makes so little sense that we, along with a great researcher on Ann’s line, have never been able to gleen any fact about this family pre-1841, and we’ve hired professional genealogists in Canada to help attempt to establish Michael’s arrival details (he likely arrived in Quebec, not the US and moved).

With that backdrop, it was exciting to have a census just 2-4 years before Michael’s emigration, and we woke up Saturday morning and immediately searched and we found 162 Michael Leonard’s captured in the census! Narrowing to just Tipperary, and found 7 Michael’s, but only 2 were close enough in age to possibly be ours. The 17 year old was still living with his parents, and his record wasn’t of any value. But another was 32, and it stopped us in our tracks.

Image of a table listing Michael Leonard's from Tipperary County, Ireland in 1926 — A list of all Michael Leonard’s in Tipperary

He’s obviously 5 years older than our Michael, but given the uncertainties of the time that is not entirely unreasonable. He lived with his father-in-law and his aunt, as well as his wife Mary but it was the children that made us gasp. Michael and Mary had John (age 6), Mary (age 4), and Annie (age 2). These ages don’t match entirely, but they are in the range and reviewing all of the Michael’s within the age range throughout all of Ireland, we didn’t find another John and Ann siblings. This felt huge, not proof per se but a huge lead that could mean we were going to break down a brick wall. If we squinted hard enough we could chalk all the dates up to the fog of history, this matched the family pattern we we’re desperately searching for, and with no other matching pattern from that critical year we were pretty certain this was our family!

It wasn’t until we started typing up this finding to share with our newly hired genealogists that reality smacked us in the face: this wasn’t the EIGHTTEEN twenty-six Irish census, it was the NINETEEN twenty-six census. A full 100 years later than we’d read it, well after Michael, his children, and many of his grandchildren had passed away. This census had zero value to our research.

32 year-old Michael Leonard and his family, from the newly released 1926 Irish census…NOT our ancestor!

Once we misread the original IG post, the various 1926 designations escaped us. When we found a record that MIGHT work, we mentally twisted it until we were pretty sure it did work. Had that been an 1826 census we would have started treating that as a valid record despite knowing better. Sure, it could be a thread to pull, and we would have shared with our researchers, but it proved nothing and shouldn’t go any further until we knew it did. This is the kind of thing that pollutes the Ancestry.com algorithm and becomes cannon, and we almost plowed through doubt even as we thought we were being skeptical and reserved.

And it happened as we were staring at Samuel FB Morse trying not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors.

In remembrance: Elizabeth Frost

This week’s In Remembrance highlights one of Antigo’s forgotten matriarch’s, Elizabeth J (Frost) Boerner, who died on this date in 1943.

Elizabeth was born 4 Aug 1861 in Shiocton, Wisconsin to Asahel Frost (1828-1897) and Rosetta (Newell) Frost (1829-1892) at a time when Shiocton was a booming logging town. Asahel was a farmer and later a carpenter and Elizabeth was the middle of 9 children. Both the Frost and Newell families trace their arrival in North America to the early 1600’s and they largely followed the pattern of several generations residing in Massachusetts and/or Connecticut, then migrating to New York after the Revolutionary War for 1-2 generations, then on to Wisconsin.

She married John J Kupps in Shiocton on 16 Mar 1876 when she was 16 years old, and he was 27. Unlike Elizabeth’s family line, John was born in Bohemia and he and his parents arrived in the US only about 20 years before his marriage. He worked as a laborer in the lumber industry, which was winding down in Shiocton, and they moved to Bryant (in NE Langlade County) in 1885. Bryant, and which was the next logging hot spot in Central Wisconsin.

John and Elizabeth had two children, Emma Marrion (Kupps) Leonard (1879-1953) and Kathryn (Kupps) Driscoll (1882-) before moving to Langlade County. John was hired by T.D. Kellogg in Antigo in 1891 and the family moved into town soon after.

Elizabeth was widowed in 1899 when John passed away at the dinner table after, as the local paper put it: “a severe fit of coughing. Arising from a table he passed through the kitchen and reached the outer door when his strength apparently failed. He stopped to rest on the steps and leaning his head back on his wife’s lap, he quietly and silently passed away.” Family lore, shared by Emma’s granddaughter Peggy, has it that John had stopped off at the tavern unexpectedly for a few and when he returned home well after dinner Elizabeth refused to make him a plate, so his mother (who was visiting) agreed and Elizabeth went upstairs angry. John subsequently choked on dinner because he was so drunk, and suffocated. His official cause of death was heard disease, so we can take the story for what it’s worth!

Elizabeth raised her daughters alone until Emma married Dan Leonard in 1902 (In remembrance: Dan Leonard), and Kathryn married Jess Hawkings in 1904. She lived with Dan and Emma until remarrying Louis Boerner (1850-1935) around 1906. Louis was also a widower, and a Naturalized citizen originally from Germany, who brought two children into the marriage: Erma and Edward (adopted from the State Home when young). The Boerner family was well known in Antigo, and Louis’ father owned the main daily newspaper. He was a furrier and well regarded as his was about the only fur store in town at a time when fur was very common.

Her stepson Edward was killed in action in WWI, and she lost Louis in 1935. Her Grandson Floyd Leonard (1906-1941) was killed in Egypt one week after WWII was declared. Elizabeth died after a long battle of what was then called “Bright’s Disease”. We now know it as Chronic Nephritis, and is usually a byproduct of high blood pressure and heart disease, which are mentioned on her Death Certificate.

Chart detailing ancestors of Gerald F Leonard — Family tree of Elizabeth (Frost) Boerner to Michael’s Leonard GGP

Patriotic Service in the Revolutionary War
Honoring Israel Standish (1721-1802) and his stand on principles

Patriotic Service in the Revolutionary War <h4>Honoring Israel Standish (1721-1802) and his stand on principles</h3>

With the arrival of the 250^th Anniversary of the founding of the United States there’s renewed interest in all our patriot ancestors, and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) have been helping us establish the genealogical lines to those patriots for well over 100 years. The most common route to establishing a patriot ancestor is establishing them as soldiers in the Revolutionary War, and we have 20 or so DAR ancestors who followed that pattern. But we want to examine one ancestor who highlights a lesser-known path to being recognized as a patriot by the DAR: Patriotic Service.

Patriotic service covers those nascent Americans who didn’t pick up arms to fight the British, but still provided material support for the revolution. This could include providing funds or supplies to the Continental Army, or signing an oath of allegiance or a petition to support the cause.

In 1777 the US Revolution wasn’t going particularly well for the States. The siege of Boston had been broken in 1776, but the ousted British troops had sailed to New York and established control over the city, soon driving General Washington’s army off of Long Island and then out of New York completely. The British had captured a large number of prisoners of war from various battles and established their largest prisons in the New York city area. The largest, and most notorious was the Sugar House on Manhattan but the prison ships anchored off Long Island held just about as many POW’s. Conditions in these prisons can only be called horrific. There were no sewage systems, the food was rotten and there was very little of it (for example a standard ration at the Sugar House was 1 pound of rotten meat and 4 pieces of moldy bread every 4 days), there was no furniture to sit or lie on, on land prisoners would sometimes receive 30 min. of fresh air a week but often times they would just be granted turns standing and breathing out the windows for 10 minutes. On the ships, due to the waste-based diseases, it was almost impossible to come out of the holds for air…and if a prisoner could make it up the ladder the deck was usually so slick with excrement it wasn’t possible to stand (The Prisoners of New York). Mortality rates for captured Revolutionary soldiers was 75%, and the descriptions of their conditions can only be matched by the description of the conditions on the ships that traversed enslaved humans across the Atlantic for centuries.

It’s under this cloud of mistreatment that 32 men from Connecticut signed a petition to the newly formed General Assembly of Connecticut on 5 May 1777, pleading for the body to interve on the behalf of citizens of that State who were being held in New York. The petitioners are clear they are in favor of the revolution, and call those who risked their life for the cause as “noble”, but they are clearly pained by the conditions of imprisonment calling it: inhumane, barbarous and deplorable. However, they are also honest that they have no idea how to accomplish any solution since they know we can’t effectively pressure the British. They do however voice the opinion that if the Assembly can figure out how to accomplish this, the “Army [will] soon be supplied with a number of men sufficient to repel our enemies”.

Text of the petition for prisoners, 1777
To the Honourable the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut to be convened at Hartford within and for said State on the Second Thursday of May 1777.
Whereas. Since the commencement of the present unnatural War, it has so happened that great number of our Friends who have nobly ventured their Life for the Defense of our Injured Country have unfortunately fell into our Enemies hands and by them are held captive and prisoners of War and treated in the most inhumane and barbarous manner many having been stripped of their clothing, exposed to the weather and denied a sufficient supply of food for the support of life and under which suffering many of our Respectable and Worth friends have lost their life: and others who still survive are yet in the same deplorable circumstances in New York and on Long Island. Suffering under the insults of the enemy and destitute of necessities and clothing or money to purchase that necessities of life; all which are so publicly known that they are undeniable facts.
Whereupon we the subscribers inhabitants in the State aforesaid pray this Honorable Assembly to commiserate and take into consideration the disgusting condition of our Friends in captivity as aforesaid who are belonging to this State and in your wisdom devise some method for the support and relief when we know not how it can be effected without some exertion of the public and which if done by your Honour and publicly known among the people. We humbly conceive would be a very great inducement to other voluntarily to insist and engage in the cause of our country and our Army soon be supplied with a number of men sufficient to repel our enemies, or in some other way grant relief.
As your Honours in your wisdom shall judge most reasonable and just and you memorialize as in duty bound shall memorialize as in duty bound shall coc. (?) Pray. Dated in Connecticut this 5th day of May 1777 (Link)

Michael’s 7xGGF Israel Standish (1721-1802) was living in Preston, Connecticut when he was one of the 32 signatories to this petition. He was the great grandchild of Mayflower passenger Myles Standish, so he likely had at least some notoriety (not as much was we’d think today, but that’s for another day!), and he was an established farmer in his mid-50’s. His children lived in Preston as well, and he had at least 10 grandchildren under 5 years of age at the time living near him. Even a simple petition asking for something to be done to save the son’s of Connecticut from the horrors of British prisons was a deeply treasonous act. He had publicly attached himself to the cause of revolution, and he would have likely lost all that mattered to him, if not his life, had the rebellion failed.

Image of signature of Israel Standish — Israel Standish standing ten toes on principle and putting his name down on paper!

And at the time, the Americans (outside of Boston) hadn’t shown much capability of defeating the British. His farm was just to the East of New York (and just across the sound from Long Island, which was easily crossed) and it was firmly under the control of the enemy. He was influential and known enough to be included in joining the petition, and doing so left him no chance for him to deny where his loyalties lied, so this was a significant act of defiance even though on the face it seems like a simple enjoinder. We can guess there would have been an effect on his neighbors. Those loyal to the cause of freedom stood up and be known as such, and there was a group on one the other side equally loyal to England, however those in the middle would have likely felt swayed by their neighbors risking everything to publicly support a United States free of the crown.

So in someways these acts of Patriotic Service had impacts as strong as those who served militarily, which is why the DAR recognizes the “simple” act of signing a petition as worthy of veneration for having served the cause of liberty.

An American Genealogy

Share the journey to document one family's history, as well as tips, tricks, and lessons learned along the way!

Category: Genealogy