Remembering the Maine

I remember this story from history class.

An American ship in a foreign harbor, supposedly on a mission to defend democracy and freedom, is destroyed. Emotions run high, and questions abound - the official investigation inevitably leaves some unanswered. Lives were lost, honor sullied. The press, eager to sell papers and to push their owners' agendas, create a battle cry, and political pressures overwhelm pacifist preventative measures, leading the President to reluctantly go to war.

It is all a familiar pattern to us by now - or should be. The harbor could have been the Gulf of Tonkin; the yellow press could have been Fox News; the incident could have been Pearl Harbor. But this time - in 1898 - the harbor was Cuban, the ship was the USS Maine, the President was McKinley, and two months after the incident, the Congress declared war on Spain.

Among America's military adventures abroad, this one stood out for being less noble than others - at least, with the benefit of a century of hindsight. It wasn't a war for freedom and democracy, but it was clearly a war for expansion of our territory - and it was touted in the press of the day as a fight against aggression. It was a war that disrupted the already dwindling Spanish Empire, setting them on a self-destructive course that contributed to later wars. It brought a number of Caribbean and Pacific islands into American possession, and set the U.S. on its uncomfortable historical course with Cuba.

There's a decent overview of the Maine event on Newpapers.com's FishWrap blog, and of course there's more thorough background on Wikipedia.

Whatever else may be true about the circumstances surrounding the war, Americans who fought in it were a lot like my generation. They were too young to have been involved in either side of the Civil War, but they had grown up hearing about the glorious battles and heroics, and they were looking for a mission. The shock and horror of the war between states had subsided somewhat, and among the many unresolved internal issues there was growing appetite for using the military to show the rest of the world what the U.S. was capable of.

This was the war that made a hero out of Teddy Roosevelt, and he wasn't the only adventurer of his age with something to prove. This is my family's connection to that war.

The Nixon Connection

The first thing most people wonder when they start thinking about genealogy is, "Am I related to somebody famous?"

And for anyone who sticks with their research for any length of time, the answer is probably, "Yes!"

There are a lot of ways to be "related" to someone else - marriage, blood, adoption, or even business partnerships are all legitimate relationships that you can prove with documentary evidence, if you're just trying to show a connection. One of the most direct relationships - and the thing most people think they mean when they say they are related to someone - is to share a common ancestor. Sharing a common ancestor with someone is what makes you "cousins".

A few years back, I found a book called Ancestors of American Presidents by Gary Boyd Roberts, which showed that I share a common ancestry with the late former President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon. He is my 5th cousin, twice removed. (Which, if it helps, means he and my grandmother were 5th cousins.) Whatever you may think of him as a president, or as a person, he certainly qualifies as "famous" - and since he was in office the year I was born, his story has some immediacy for me.

But for a lot of people, the whole "Nth cousin, X removed" concept is very hard to understand - I still struggle with it. So let's take a look at exactly how our ancestral paths diverged, starting with our common ancestors, Thomas Clemson and his wife, Elizabeth Strode. This couple would have been the President's 4th Great-Grandparents, and they are my 6th Great-Grandparents.

1. Thomas Clemson (1710-1785) and Elizabeth Strode (1725-1827)

Tettenhall and Dudley
(made with Google maps, 2014)

Thomas's parents were James Clemson and Katharine Wright of Staffordshire, England. Their families lived in Tettenhall and Dudley, respectively, which were villages about 8 miles apart near what is now Wolverhampton. They left England and came to join the Quaker community in Philadelphia around 1690.

Elizabeth's parents were both born in the Penn colony, in Chester county. Her maternal grandfather was one Morgan James from Wales, and her paternal grandfather, George Strode, arrived in the New World from Southampton in 1678, landing in Barbados before making his way north to settle in Pennsylvania.

Thomas and Elizabeth married in Salisbury township, Lancaster county, PA, in 1747. They had 10 children over the following 20 years - 3 sons, and 7 daughters. Two of those daughters were:

2. Sisters: Elizabeth Clemson (1759-1833) and Mary Clemson (1763-1817)

Elizabeth married an Irish immigrant named James Livingston in December 1782, and they had four sons and four daughters between 1782 and 1801. They relocated through the central part of Pennsylvania until sometime after 1810, when the family moved 550 miles west to Springboro, Ohio.

Mary married Joseph Moore in January 1782. He was the son of another Quaker family in Salisbury township, though his father had immigrated from Ballymoney, Ireland. Records indicate that Joseph moved to Morgan, Ohio, after Mary's death. The only child of their marriage that I know of is their son, Joseph Dickinson Moore.

Morgan is more than 150 miles from Springboro, so it is unlikely that any Moore children knew their first cousins, the Livingstons.

3. 1st Cousins: Mary Magdalene Livingston (1782-1847) and Joseph Dickinson Moore (1794-1860)

Mary was the eldest child of James and Elizabeth Livingston, born in Pennsylvania in January 1782. (If you're doing the math on that, you might sense a family scandal in the background.) Mary married a Scottish immigrant named Thomas Henderson Murray in May 1803 in Pennsylvania. They had 11 children over the next 20 years - 6 sons, 5 daughters. Those born before 1816 were born in Pennsylvania, and those born in 1818 or later were born in Ohio, where the family settled in Preble county.

Joseph was born in Center county, PA, in October 1794. At 24 years of age, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Since this was 1819, and there was no war on at the time, he might have enlisted to protect frontier families like his own as they expanded across the territory gained under the Treaty of 1818. He married Jane Brown in 1825 in Perry county, Ohio. Jane was the daughter of an Irish Presbyterian who immigrated from County Cork, served in the War of 1812, and settled in Perry county. The couple produced 6 sons and 5 daughters between 1826 and 1848, then relocated to Warren county, Iowa some time before Joseph's death in 1860.

4. 2nd Cousins: Aaron Murray (1822-1887) and Mary Louise Moore (1832-1918)

The youngest son of Thomas and Mary, Aaron Murray was born in Warren county, Ohio. He married Maria P. Harris in 1843, and they moved to Wabash county, Indiana, where Maria died in 1854. Widowed with two small boys, Aaron soon remarried in 1855 to Hannah Lyman Bender, whose first husband, Michael Eby, had died in 1850, leaving her pregnant and with two small boys. Aaron and Hannah had 5 children of their own over the following decade, during which Aaron served the Union during the Civil War with the 113th Regiment, Illinois Infantry. After the war they moved down to the newly founded town of Stark, Kansas.

Mary Louise Moore married Thomas Wiley Wadsworth (1826-1879), who was born in Harford county, Maryland. The Wadsworths likely descended from a Thomas Wadsworth who was born in 1713 in Middlesex, England, and was conveyed to the plantations of the Virginia colony in 1733 after being convicted of theft or larceny. After moving to Ohio and marrying Miss Mary Moore in 1850, this Thomas went on to raise four daughters and a son before his death in 1879. Mary remarried to George Amerine in 1886.

5. 3rd Cousins: Rosa Edith Murray (1861-1943) and Sarah Ann Wadsworth (1852-1886)

Rosa grew up in what would become the town of Grant, Kansas, and married Albert C Huff in 1883. Together they raised three sons and three daughters in Savonburg, Kansas, and then followed their children as they moved down to the newly settled desert town of Glendale in Arizona.

Sarah grew up in Hocking county, Ohio, and married Samuel Brady Nixon in April of 1873. The Nixon family had originated in Ireland, arriving in Delaware in the 1720s. Samuel's father, George, was a Union soldier from Ohio and was fatally wounded in the Battle at Gettysburg on 3 July 1863 - the same day that Samuel's grandfather, also named George died in his home in Richland, Ohio. Sarah and Samuel had a daughter and two sons when Sarah died at the early age of 33.

6. 4th Cousins: Hannah Merle Huff (1889-1984) and Francis Anthony Nixon (1878-1956)

Hannah Merle, whom everyone called Merle or "Merly", grew up in Savonburg, Kansas, and followed her brothers and sisters down to Glendale, Arizona, where she married Howard Ray Witter - who went by the nickname "Dick" - in March 1917. He got his draft card in June. After the war, Dick and Merle set up a dairy farm and raised two children, a son and a daughter.

Frank Nixon moved to California around 1900 after suffering from frostbite while working in an open streetcar in Columbus, Ohio. He worked as a farmhand, oil roustabout, and lemon farmer before he converted to Quakerism and married Hannah Milhous 25 June 1908. They lived in the Quaker community of Whittier, California, where the family business was a grocery store that also sold gasoline. They had five sons, two of whom died from tuberculosis - Arthur at 7 years old in 1925, and Harold in 1933 at 24 years.

7. 5th Cousins: Nancy G. Witter (1925-2004) and Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)

Nancy grew up on that Glendale dairy farm and married her Army sweetheart, an airplane mechanic with aspirations of becoming a pilot, in the early days of the Second World War. They raised two kids in Glendale, Arizona, and taught in the Glendale schools for their whole careers; he taught math, and she taught art. They were my grandparents, which makes me "twice removed" from grandma and cousin Dick, who are "5th cousins".

Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States. He graduated from Duke University, became a lawyer in Whittier, where he grew up, in 1937 - about four years after his brother had died of tuberculosis. He married Thelma "Pat" Ryan on 21 June 1940, and after the War they had two daughters, Tricia (born 1946) and Julie (born 1948).

More Generations and Relationships

Now that you've come this far, hopefully you will have an easier time understanding the way genealogists refer to cousins. Simply being some kind of "cousin" means that two people share a common ancestor; the ordinal number (ie, "5th") tells you how many generations back that common ancestor is; and the "X removed" tells you the number of generations between the two cousins.

If we keep following the ancestral paths above, for example, I can claim even more "famous" relationships. Julie Nixon (6th cousin to my dad, and my 6th cousin, 1x removed) married David Eisenhower, son of General and 34th U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. That means that I would be a 7th cousin to President Eisenhower's grandchildren! But, because we're only related by marriage, the whole "cousin" thing doesn't apply to me and POTUS 34; he is merely "father-in-law of my 6th cousin, 1x removed" and not my "5th cousin, twice removed" the way Mr. Nixon is.

But my children and Julie's grandchildren will all be 8th cousins, and so on.

And what does all of this gain for us?  Are there treasures and perks associated with being distant cousins to the American version of royalty?  Not really. Though for me, it reinforces the notion that the "great men" of history aren't the interesting part of the story. There are more than two dozen people between me and President Nixon who lived adventurous lives and have interesting stories.

From the possibly scandalous origin of Mary Magdalene Livingston to the tragedies leading to the marriage of Aaron and Hannah Murray; and between the wars, disasters, diseases, and accidents that threatened all of them there are so many things that had to happen just right so that the famous person and I could both be here.  For me, it is just as exciting to discover those average, normal people who lived their average, normal lives as it is to learn about those who had their hand in larger events.

And I love that when you look at history from this point of view, even Presidents are just people - they're just acorns, perhaps a little Mightier than the rest for a brief time.

Twice Honored

Another revised repost from the original Mighty Acorns blog; this one in honor of Armistice Day.


When I was a kid, I had a plague on my wall that my father had made. It was a dark piece of wood with the newspaper obituary of his grandfather, Dick Witter Sr., held in place by heavy layers of shellac. He had also mounted grandpa Dick's pocket watch and a silver dollar, along with a photograph.

I must have read this clipping a million times while I was supposed to be doing homework:

"Live and Let Live" by a Friend*

It is not entirely accidental that Dick Witter Jr. is one of the most respected citizens of Glendale. After serving as traffic cop, meter minder and in other capacities, he was promoted to City Magistrate, Judge no less, a position which he carries on with dignity and honesty.

One of the main reasons, we believe, that he is what he is today, belongs to the upbringing by his mother and father. We have known them both for nearly 30 years. No finer, more industrious people ever lived.

His dad, Howard R., also called Dick, and known to many of the older residents of Glendale, died Sunday and what a pity. Not because he has gone to his last reward as all of us must but because such a fine image of a man has to disappear from the every day world as we know it.

Possessed of that rarest of human blessings, a sense of humor, he never laughed at others but always at himself. And we cannot think of an unkind word that he ever uttered against anyone. That, in itself, is a rare gift indeed. So many of us, myself included, often belittle and revile others, perhaps as a defense against our own foibles; who knows? But Dick Sr. never did.

This world would be a better place in which to live if more of the people emulated the Witter family with their unsaid but sincere code: "live and let live."

*Written by Tommy Anderson; appeared in the April 5, 1963 "Glendale Herald", Glendale, AZ


When I used to read that plague as a boy, I didn't attach the importance to it that I do today. I don't think I realized it was an obituary for a long time, since the first paragraph is about my great-uncle Dick, who I actually knew and who, at the time, was still alive.

I did think a lot about "live and let live" and what it meant, though. When I would read about that sense of humor, that tendency to laugh at himself, I recognized the same trait in my dad and grandma. I saw how I learned it from them, and without realizing it, reading and re-reading that old plaque made me feel closer to the old dairy farmer in that photo who died nearly a decade before I was born.

Coming from Kansas to raise a family on a hot, dry dairy farm in Glendale, Arizona; building a life in a corner of the infant state; surviving World War I, the Great Depression, and seeing a son through World War II - these were the people in the background of history. He was the "Over There" of song; they had the pot that Roosevelt promised to put a chicken in; and later, they were "back home" to their soldier in the Philippines.

People like these don't expect high honors or recognition; maybe it is the humility passed down from the Witters who came from Germany with the other Pennsylvania Dutch. Maybe it is just a realistic outlook that says, "Don't attach too much importance to yourself." It could have something to do with that self-deprecating sense of humor Mr. Anderson described. I imagine my great-grandmother's reaction when she received the condolences of friends and family after Dick Sr. passed away in March of 1963: the stoic widow's pride at the honors and sympathies, and then the quiet packing away of the memories. No need to fuss, now. Tidy up, and move on.

When we visited Arizona for Christmas in 2005, Grandpa Bob took me to his garage and offered me several boxes of "old junk". He knew I was interested in all this family history stuff, and I knew that he wasn't able to bring himself to throw away everything that Grandma, a notorious pack rat, had held onto over the years. These boxes had been sitting for a couple of years in this garage, a storage unit for a few years before that, and their old house on Gardenia Avenue for some fifty years before that.

Digging through, I found that picture of Dick Sr. and that eulogy I recognized from the plague. I found a letter of condolence from their U.S. Congressman, and in a large manila envelope postmarked February 7, 1964, I found this certificate:


I suppose all the veterans' widows were receiving these, but it was still a thrill for me to find something with my great-grandfather's name on it, signed by President Johnson:

Looking at the postmark, I was struck by how strangely history folds around us. When Dick Sr. died in March 1963, President Kennedy was still alive. It's petty of me, but my first thought was to curse the timing that put one man's signature on a document instead of another's. That moment passed, though, as I thought about how these things must work.

I imagined that certificate would have waited for a break in the busy schedule of a President for his signature while the events of that year played out. The Birmingham Campaign, followed by the March on Washington. The end of Project Mercury, and the first woman in space. The Supreme Court forbids mandated school prayer; and a Partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty is signed and ratified.

And that November surely changed a lot of plans.

Who knows how long it took for someone from a protocol office to get these certificates printed for the heroes of a fifty-year-old war, how many there were in the stack, or how long it sat waiting for the pen stroke of the mighty. Assuming those letters were still being physically signed by the President himself, I imagine how a still-stunned and grieving Mr. Johnson might have felt, sending condolences to my great-grandmother. Considering he was certainly still grappling with the circumstances under which he had just come into office, I like to think that a duty like this, while sad, would be of some comfort to him.

And I can imagine how she, a farmer's widow, reacted when she saw it arrive in the mail - nearly a year after she lost him. I can almost see her face when she opened it; the pang of being reminded of her loss followed by a wry smile of appreciation. That familiar combination of humor and humility that helped her maintain her husband's "live and let live" attitude over all those hard years.

I wonder, if I could go back in time and ask her what she felt, what she would say about that honor? Did it bring her any joy? Did she show it to anyone? She kept it, so it would seem she accepted it as the honor it was intended to be. Did she smile when she saw it, or cry, or simply nod as she slipped it back into its envelope and laid it in a drawer on top of the other one - the one that I found later, as I kept combing through Grandpa's old boxes. The one with the 1963 postmark and that other certificate, identical to the first except for the signature:

John F Kennedy

A Biography of James K. Polk

Had you told me in highschool that I would grow up to be a man who would blog enthusiastically about a James K. Polk biography... I would have probably been really interested in the concept of "blogging."

That's because I've always been a little bit of a history nerd, and more than a little interested in the Presidents of the United States, in particular. And I've always been aware that when people like me hit a certain age, it suddenly becomes more fun to read a biography about an obscure president than even the latest sci-fi novel on the shelf.

Anyway, here's my Goodreads review on:

Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America by Walter R. Borneman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a really quick and easy read for me. The writing was crisp and conversational, and struck a balance between showing the political tensions & ambitions of each player without making anyone out to be a particular hero or villain.

I also appreciate writers who avoid the Great Man approach - a difficult task when so many of the characters viewed themselves as Great Men. Having read about Polk, I feel prepared to move on to learn more about his contemporaries, or even Andrew Jackson.

View all my reviews

To expand on that, what I really took away from this book were these things:

First, it was great growing up in Arizona, so I'm very grateful for Polk's role in acquiring that particular territory - but did we really need to stomp immediately across the entire continent without regard for the people already living there? It's interesting to see the various factions of Polk's time arguing over how to take over the land ("54'40" or Fight!" or  compromise?) and how it should be brought into the Federal system (slave states or not?), but no one ever questioned Manifest Destiny or the immorality of forced relocation and near genocide.

I guess one shouldn't expect a President who so assiduously avoided the question of slavery to have many compunctions about displacing indigenous people - especially considering that his mentor, Andrew Jackson, was responsible for the Cherokee's infamous trip down the "Trail of Tears".

It's not as though I'm about to give up my lifestyle, or lobby for reparations 160 years after the fact, but I try to deal with the regret by embracing the fact that our world has changed to the point where my reaction to reading about these events is not a purely positive, gung-ho cheer leading reaction. Maybe we can't change the past, and maybe we have to accept that "that's how the world worked, then" - but maybe we can try to make sure that's not how the world works now or in the future.

Secondly, as loosely as Americans tend to apply the term, what does "founder" really mean? After all, Polk was the 11th President; he was born after the Constitution was adopted. He doubled the size of the country, but young as it was, he didn't have much to do with "founding" it. I know a lot of people who have a vague notion of doing things the way "the Founders" would have done them, but there were a lot of things that Polk did that frankly, many of the real Founders would have found appalling.

For example, the book talks at length about how Polk expanded the Constitutional powers of his office in ways that were almost scandalous. As a Democrat, Polk also took a great deal of criticism from his Whig opponents - including one young Congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. The book also makes a point of the irony that Lincoln, who challenged Polk's claim that American blood had been spilled on "American soil" and implied that the Congress had been tricked into declaring the Mexican War, would go on to stretch those powers even further in the name of holding the Union together.

But while the Civil War looms ahead, despite Polk's best efforts to ignore the signs, reading about the Mexican War really made me think about my family's place in our history.

My 3-great grandfather, Joseph Frey, was a soldier in that war, who served under General Winfield Scott and was discharged at Mexico City when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. He was a German-speaking immigrant who came to New York from Baden-Wuerttemberg some time before 1840, and he would go on to serve New York as a sergeant in the Civil War, as well. He died in the Soldier's Home in Washington, DC in 1877. Joseph was my maternal grandmother's great-grandfather.

While the war was underway, one of my paternal grandfather's great-grandfathers, Robert Greenlee, was fleeing the so-called Great Potato Famine in Ireland for Pennsylvania. He arrived in 1847 with his father, uncle, and brothers. Meanwhile, just one whole state over, William Callin - another one of my paternal grandfather's great-grandfathers - was clearing the Ohio farm that would become a stop on the Underground Railroad.

None of these people knew each other. They probably wouldn't have understood each other very well had they met, and they would have all been stunned to discover what was just around the corner for them and their families. They would see the railroads built across the continent, their children would move west - those who survived the War - and their grandchildren would meet each other and have MY grandparents. (Small world!)

I wonder what each of them thought as the Polk administration unfolded during those four years. I doubt they all would have agreed on his foreign policy goals, his approach to using tariffs to fund government, or his plan to create an independent treasury any more than we agree today on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, taxes and debt, and the Federal Reserve!

But there they were, and this was their world - as much as it was the world of President Polk - which is what I mean when I say I'm "not much for the Great Man approach" to history.

And if I've piqued your interest at all in Polk, but you don't have the time to read his biography, perhaps I could interest you in this, instead: