"Who Am I?"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Who am I?”

June 3, 2025

 

“Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am?”

                                                                                                                                Lear, speaking to the Fool

                                                                                                                                King Lear. Act I, Scene IV, 1606

                                                                                                                                William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

 

Besides satisfying a personal curiosity, the study of one’s ancestry is fascinating in an intellectual sense: First, it personalizes history. How much more interesting it is to read about the American Revolution or the Civil War with knowledge of an ancestor then alive. Second, such a study considers a mathematical paradox –We know that about 75,000 years ago small groups of earliest humans began migrating out of Africa, traveling north, east and west. Those few humans have given us a global population today of over eight billion. But we also know that each of us descend from two parents, four grandparents, and eight great grandparents, a process that doubles with each generation going back. How could so many ancestors be reduced to so few that came out of Africa? How to reconcile that apparent contradiction? The answer – we are all related.  

 

A few weeks ago a friend and I were talking. She was born in England, raised in France, and as a nine-year old crossed the Pyrenes in 1940 on foot with her family to avoid Nazi occupation. In our conversation, she referred to me as a “Real American.” I was prompted to see if I could name all of my four-greats grandparents, most of whom would have been born before the American Revolution, and to discover if all (or most) were born in North America.

 

Starting with the surnames of my four grandparents, I spent many hours researching, working backwards into the past.  I had the invaluable help of a sister who had done most of the preparatory work years ago, and was thankful for the internet, which is a plethora of information, though not always accurate. Ultimately, I was able to name, with relative certainty, sixty of the sixty-four. (I believe I know the names of the other four, but I am not certain.) Of course I also had to come up with names and dates of thirty-two three-greats grandparents, along with sixteen two-greats and eight great grandparents – 120 names in all. Of the sixty four-greats for whom I was able to name and find a birth date, fifty-eight were born before the American Revolution (between 1713 and 1770), one in 1777 and one for which I could find no date. All but two were born in Colonial America. Two were born and died in Ireland – Martha Jackson (1777-1808) and Col. Hugh Hanna (1770-1806). A brother of Martha, James Jackson (1782-1840), brought their orphaned daughter – my three-greats grandmother Mary Jackson Hanna (1801-1843) – to Alabama in 1818, where she married Joseph Lawrence Dawson Smith (1799-1837). More on James later.

 

One of the fun things about studying one’s ancestry is coming across colorful characters; for most of my ancestors, to quote Henry David Thoreau, had to have led lives “of quiet desperation,” in an unsettled country, alive with danger. To name a few of the more interesting ones: James Williams (1741-1826) was a four-greats grandfather who married Susanna Shaw (1744-?). He was captain of a militia unit that marched to  Roxbury, Massachusetts on April 20, 1775 where they met no resistance. While he was not at either Lexington or Concord, he was still considered a “Minute Man.” Asa Messer, senior (1739-1806) and Abiah Whipple (1746-1809) gave birth to Asa Messer, junior (1769-1836) who married Deborah Angell (1776-1862). The younger Asa, a three-greats grandfather, became the third president of Brown College, then known as Rhode Island College. Noah Webster (1758-1843), the lexicographer, and his wife Rebecca Greenleaf (1766-1847) were four-greats grandparents. A seven-greats grandfather was Richard Hunnewell (c.1645-1703) of Scarborough, Maine. He was known as the “Indian killer.” Fittingly, he was killed by Indians, at what is now known as Massacre Pond near Prout’s Neck, on October 6, 1703. 

 

There is a connection to T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) on both my father’s and mother’s side. My grandfather Sydney M. Williams (1873-1963) was a second cousin of the poet, as they shared great grandparents: Thomas Heywood Blood (1775-1848) and Mary Sawyer (c.1775-1850). My grandfather once told me that the only time he met the poet, who was fifteen years younger than he was, Eliot was wearing a sailor’s suit. On my mother’s side, her father Henry Stuart Hotchkiss (1878-1947) descended from his three-greats grandparents, William Greenleaf (1725-1803) and Mary Brown (1728-1807). Those two were one set of T.S. Eliot’s two-greats grandparents. There is also a distant connection to Gideon Welles who was Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy. He and my two-greats grandmother Isabella Welles Hunnewell were third cousins, sharing a common ancestor in Samuel Welles (1660-1731) who lived in Glastonbury, CT, which was home to Gideon Welles.

 

As for the southern branch of my family, the James Jackson mentioned above emigrated to Tennessee and then to Alabama, where he owned a large cotton farm, “Forks of Cypress.” He was a two-greats grandfather of Alex Haley, author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family and Queen: The Story of an American Family. James and Martha Jackson (a four-greats grandmother of mine) were children of Hugh Jackson (1709-1777) and Elinor Gault (c.1710-1791), both of whom lived and died in Ireland. Thus Alex Haley and I – he as the three-greats grandson of Hugh and Elinor, and I as the five-greats grandson of the same couple – are cousins. James Jackson was also the owner of “Peytona,” considered the greatest race horse of the time. His race against the mare “Fashion” on May 13, 1845 at Union Course on Long Island – a race between the north and the south (as well as mare versus stallion) – was the subject of a Currier & Ives print. “Peytona,” who had traveled 1,500 miles, won the race.

 

The most colorful connection, however, is Edward Augustus Silsbee. He was the youngest of eleven children, seven of whom lived into adulthood. My paternal grandmothers’ maternal grandmother (in other words, a two-greats grandmother) was the third oldest, Sarah Ann Silsbee. She was born June 18, 1814 in Salem, MA. He was born on February 19, 1826 in the same town and died on April 5, 1900 in Boston. At age 24 Silsbee commanded the clipper ship Columbia on an 18^th month voyage from Salem to San Francisco, the East Indies, Calcutta and back home. The Log of the voyage is now at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. A copy of it is at the home of our son who was named for Edward Silsbee. Following his career at sea, Silsbee, a life-long bachelor, became, as described in 2017 by Dr. Tim Sommer, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Houghton Library, “a Shelley enthusiast and ardent collector in pursuit of literary relics.” Silsbee lived in Florence between 1872 and 1879. There, he ingratiated himself with Claire Clairmont and her niece Paulina. Claire had been an intimate companion of Percy Bysshe Shelley who had died in 1822. The story of Silsbee, Clair Clairmont and her niece inspired Henry James’ novella, The Aspern Papers. Ultimately, Silsbee acquired Shelly’s notebooks and donated them to the Houghton Library at Harvard. A charcoal sketch of Edward Silsbee by John Singer Sargent (photo attached) is now at the Bodleian Library at Oxford (donated by him in 1899), with other Shelly artifacts Silsbee had collected. In the portrait, Silsbee’s craggy face is discernable behind his flowing white beard.

 

On my desk I have a photograph of my only great-grandparent who lived to see me born. In the photo, she holds me – at a slight distance, as though I had soiled my clothes. I look happy (see attached photo). Sadly, I do not remember her. She was born Mary Bolling Kemp in Petersburg, VA on January 15, 1861. Her mother died young, in 1867, likely from the effects of the siege of the city, which lasted from June 9, 1864 until March 25, 1865.

 

Marriage among cousins was not unusual at the time. Four sets of three-greats grandparents married cousins: Benjamin Williams (1757-1830) married Lydia Williams (1774-1845) on November 28, 1793. She was his first cousin once removed. John Welles (1764-1855) married his first cousin Abigail Welles (1776-1844) on April 28, 1795. Justus Hotchkiss (1772-1812) married his third cousin Susanna Hotchkiss (1775-1825) on April 27, 1800. And on March 12, 1812 Joseph Washington (1770-1848) married his second cousin once removed, Mary Cheatham (1796-1865).         

 

History comes alive when personalized. We know these people lived. They laughed and they cried; they loved and they argued; most important, they bred and produced descendants. Their lives cause us to behold the miracle of our own birth. It is difficult, with our conveniences, to imagine the lives they led – no paved roads or even trains; no telephone, telegraph, or flush toilets. Leaving home, many expected to never return. Most of my four-greats grandparents lived to see the United States gain its freedom from Britain, yet they all died before slavery ended. Most of their grandchildren (my great grandparents) died before women gained the vote. 

 

Like us, they grew to adulthood. As the 1950s were my generation’s time to grow from child to adult, and the 1920s the decade for my parents and the 1890s for my grandparents, my four-greats grandparents came of age in the years just before, during, or just after the American Revolution. It is sobering to think of the challenges they faced, and one is reminded of these lines from Kipling: “Beyond all outer charting/We sailed where none have sailed.”[1]

 

Yet their values were the ones we espouse: humility, justice, diligence, dignity, responsibility and kindness. “We are,” former Senator Paul Tsongas (D-MA) is quoted, “a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and grandchildren.” When asked why spend so much time looking back to those long dead, I am reminded of Edmund Burke’s quote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790: “People will not look forward to posterity who never looked backward to their ancestors.” Can we derive wisdom from the past? Perhaps. Though Canadian comedian Norm MacDonald once wrote: “The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast.” That it does.

 

I think of the question that titles this essay: Who am I? Unlike Lear’s relationship with Goneril, my daughter loves me. While I have genes from all my ancestors, I am not them. I am my own self, an individual who has tried to do the best he could with the talents he inherited and with the knowledge he acquired. I love my wife and the children we raised together, and the children they, with their chosen spouses, have raised. One’s personal history does provide a sense of belonging, but we are a consequence, not the cause. As for who we are, Dr. Seuss put it well in Happy Birthday to You: “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” So, yes, even though not all of my four-greats grandparents were born in North America, I proudly accept the moniker of “Real American.” 

 

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[1] Rudyard Kipling, “The merchantmen,” first published in Pall Mall Budget, May 15, 1893.

Essay from Essex - "Ancestry"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Ancestry”

January 23, 2022

 

“Everything, from when and where we are born to when and how we die,

is out of our hands. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

                                                                                                                                J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)

                                                                                                                                The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954

 

The pandemic prompted an interest in genealogy, made easier because of the internet and with companies like Ancestry.com, 23andMe.com and MyHeritage.com. This interest was not so much about deifying one’s ancestors, as was common in preliterate societies, it was more about learning of inherited diseases. Nevertheless, those companies saw their businesses double over the past two years, and Ancestry.com, a billion-dollar revenue company, was sold to Blackstone for $4.7 billion in December 2020.

 

Curiosity about one’s ancestors also played a role. We inherit traits from those who came before us, and gene and DNA technology have made tracing one’s ancestors easier. As well, I have long been fascinated by the math of evolution. Everyone descends from two people. Assuming three generations per hundred years, looking back a thousand years to the Norman invasion of England, a child born today would descend from 536,870,912 twenty-seven great grandparents. With the population of the world in 1066 estimated to be about 340,000,000 how would that be possible? The only answer is that we have common ancestors. My parents, for example, were fifth cousins, both descended from William Greenleaf (1725-1803) and Mary Brown Greenleaf (1728-1807). For most of human history populations lived in low-density rural areas. In 1790, 90% of Americans lived and worked on farms. Spouses were generally neighbors and likely to be 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th cousins. It was 1920, three hundred years after the first Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, before more Americans lived in cities than in the country, a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and a surge in immigrants during the last half of the 19^th Century and the first couple of decades in the 20^th.

 

Nevertheless, with so many preceding us, we each carry the genes of some fascinating forebearers, who should be judged by the moral standards of their time, or else we would disown many of them. At the time of the Civil War, roughly 10% of the U.S. population was comprised of slaves – about 3.1 million. Slavery was not novel to the U.S. While inhuman, it had been ubiquitous throughout most of human history. It appears in the Bible and in the Code of Hammurabi. It was pervasive in classical Greece and in republican and imperial Rome. It persisted in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia and still exists in parts of the world. Helen Keller, in The Story of My Life, perhaps quoting Plato or Socrates, wrote: “There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”

 

At the time of the Civil War, almost all slaves in the United States lived in the south. Seventy-five percent of southerners owned no slaves, while 1,733 families owned more than a hundred each. Among those families were one set of my eight two-greats grandparents in rural Tennessee, about 30 miles north of Nashville. In 1860, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, the farm contained about 13,000 acres, had 274 slaves. It was the largest grower of dark fire-cured tobacco in the U. S.

 

While some of the letters and papers stayed with the family, most of the original documents from Wessyngton, as the farm was called, were donated to the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville. The best history of the place was written by a descendant of some of those slaves, John F. Baker, Jr. of Springfield, Tennessee in 2009: The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation. In this book, which Kirkus Reviews calls “an enriching, deeply personal history,” he traces his ancestry. One set of Mr. Baker’s two-greats grandparents, Emanuel and Hennie Washington, had been born into slavery at Wessyngton. An 1891 photograph of them, with their two sons, adorns the cover of his book. A copy of the same photograph hangs in our apartment in Essex, Connecticut. Wessyngton was founded by a three-greats grandfather, Joseph Washington in 1796, the year Tennessee became a state. With John Baker and Stanley Rose (a third cousin) as the impetus, a Wessyngton Memorial Monument was dedicated in October 2015 listing the names of over 200 slaves known to have been buried there. As a youngster, I visited Wessyngton when two of my maternal grandmother’s siblings lived on the farm. In the early 1980s, our oldest son spent two summers working in the tobacco fields.

 

Another story that I used to hear told was of Richard the “Indian Killer.” Richard Hunnewell, born about 1645 in Devonshire, England and migrated to Scarborough, Maine (then part of Massachusetts colony). His wife and one child were killed in an Indian raid, and he was killed by Indians at Massacre Pond in 1703. However, there were several Richard Hunnewells and records are confusing. The Richard from whom I believe I descend lived a more prosaic life, as a mason and bricklayer in Charlestown, Massachusetts. 

 

There are other nuggets tucked into the recesses of my ancestry, as there are with everyone. Asa Messer (1769-1836) was a three-greats grandfather on my father’s side. In 1804 he became president of Brown University, the same year the college took its present name. He served until 1826, when his belief in Unitarianism created concern from some of the Congregational trustees. My middle name comes from him. A four-greats grandfather on my mother’s side was Noah Webster (1758-1843) of dictionary fame. A great-grandfather, Joseph Edwin Washington (1851-1915), spent ten years as a Democrat Congressman from Tennessee. Edward Augustus Silsbee (1826-1900) was a great uncle of my paternal grandmother. He was a bachelor sea captain who became fascinated with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and was the inspiration for Henry James’ novelette, The Aspern Papers. Our second son was named for him. Gideon Welles (1802-1878), nicknamed “Father Neptune” and Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy during the Civil War, was one of my great great-grandmother’s (Isabelle Welles Hunnewell – 1812-1888) second or third cousins. A framed photograph depicts my maternal grandmother with her godfather, Fitzhugh Lee (1835-1905), no relation but a nephew of Robert E. Lee. Through the Webster side of my family, we trace our ancestry to William Bradford of the Mayflower. However, if you think that is bragging, the General Society of Mayflower Descendants estimates there are 35 million living descendants of those 100 or so people who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts on November 11, 1620.  

 

Stories of ancestors provide entertainment, and they make history more interesting, as we associate historic events with those from whom we descend. They help us realize how far we have come. Have you wondered what kind of a life your great grandmother lived, or what made your ancestors leave their home country to come to an unknown new world? We all have interesting forebearers among the hundreds of thousands from whom we descend. Among them are likely kings and slaves, as well as ruffians and preachers. We cannot change them or the times in which we lived. But we should know something of them.

 

It is Gandalf’s advice, quoted in the rubric that heads this essay, that I find inspirational. There are aspects of our selves we cannot change – the color of our eyes, our height or gender. But we were all given life, which is a miracle when one considers the odds against being born. It is how we conduct ourselves and what we do with the life given us that should be our focus. Two hundred years from now some descendant might query about his or her ancestors. No descendant of mine will remember me for my accomplishments. I will have no Wikipedia page. But I hope to be remembered for having lived honorably.