James A. Garfield and Me
WikiTree shows me this connection to President Garfield. At first glance it looks okay, running through my Cody family (again! – see my essays on John Adams and Franklin Pierce, both of which also run through this line). My 4th great-grandfather Daniel Cody (#6) had a sister named Rhoda (#8), who married #8 Jonathan Reed. Jonathan’s father, Charles Reed (#9) married Keturah Spencer in Dutchess County, New York, in 1762; however, they lived as a family in Massachusetts, the home of the Reed family. Charles was a private in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. After his death in 1785, Keturah remarried and moved to Onondaga County, New York, where Mary Parmenter Cody (the mother of Daniel and Rhoda) had also moved in the late 1780s.
Charles Reed’s brother, Thomas Reed (# 10), died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1776. At first I thought that this might be connected to the Revolution, but I noted that Thomas was in his 60’s when he died, probably too old to serve; at any rate, I found no evidence that he had served.
Thomas married Lydia Parker and they had a daughter named Kezia (#11) – probably named after Thomas’s sister, Kezia Reed. Kezia married Caleb Parker (#12) in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1762. You’ll note that Kezia’s mother was a Parker and Kezia married a Parker. This confused me at first, as I kept getting my Kezias and my Parkers confused. I took a brief detour into the history of Lydia Parker and Caleb Parker, and didn’t immediately find a connection. If they are related, it’s more than four generations back and in England.
You’ll note that #13, Hannah Garfield, is also identified as the wife of Caleb Parker. Kezia, Caleb’s first wife, died in April of 1776 at the age of 30; Caleb remarried in December of that year. Hannah’s brother, Solomon, saw action at Lexington and Concord and was later in Boston, although I can’t determine where he was exactly.
According to Find-a-Grave, following the war Solomon and his wife Sarah moved their family from Massachusetts to Oswego County, New York. Their son Thomas (#15) married Asenath Hill and had three children with her, including Abram (#16). Abram married Eliza Ballou in Ohio in 1820, and their fourth child, James Abraham Garfield (#17) was born there in 1831.
This is a common migration pattern – New England to western New York (probably drawn by Revolutionary War veteran land grants) to Ohio (after around 1815, when steamboats began to provide ready transportation to the Midwest via the Great Lakes). Several of my ancestral lines made a trip like this.
This is rock-solid. President James A. Garfield is definitely the great-grandnephew of the wife of the husband of the paternal 1st cousin of the husband of my 4th great-grandaunt. It proves out beautifully and there weren’t any “and then the magic happened” moments in this path.
Geni shows me a different path. This one also goes through my paternal line, but through my grandfather rather than my grandmother. My great-grandmother, Angelina Wilcox (Arnold) is descended from the Wilcox line I already discussed in my essays about Franklin Pierce and Rutherford B. Hayes.
This line is solid through Elizabeth Baker (Wilcox), my 5th great-grandmother (in the middle of the second row). Elizabeth was John Baker (son of Thomas and Mary), who lived in Exeter, Rhode Island. My Wilcox family lived in Rhode Island for several generations, so this makes sense.
I had a hard time John Baker’s sister, Sarah. Sarah was supposedly born in 1703, and I had one sister (Suzanna) who was born that year, but I had no further information about her. So I decided to plug Sarah’s name into Ancestry as an additional sister for John to see what panned out.
In case you’re wondering, “making stuff up to see what happens” is a perfectly legitimate research strategy. The technical term for it is “investigating a hypothesis” — which sounds better, tbh.
I began to tease out some potentially useful information. I found several family trees that included “Sarah” among the children of Thomas Baker, but these appeared to be the result of convenience and wishful thinking rather than documents. But one of hints I got showed me a screenshot of a handwritten birth record (unfortunately, the source was not identified, although I could probably find it if I needed it for a lineage society application. I don’t need it for a random Monday blog post.)
This record shows that a girl named Sarah was born to Thomas and Sarah Baker in February of 1703. But Thomas’s wife was named Mary. What gives? So I went back to Thomas’s profile and did a bit more digging around. There is some evidence that he was married three times, and that her married his third wife, named (drumroll please) Sarah in 1702 – just in time for them to have a daughter (which they named Sarah) the following year. Is this proof? No. But it strongly suggests an avenue for further research, which I would do if I really cared about proving this to any degree of certainty.
As I continued to search for evidence that this might be a valid connection, I decided to continue to make things up to see what would happen. So I added “Peter West” as the husband of the ephemeral Sarah Baker, and began to poke around, using the individuals provided on the Geni tree. After a couple of entries, I encountered Peter’s grandmother, Susannah Soule – a name that is readily recognized by anyone doing research on the passengers on the Mayflower. Sure enough, Susannah Soule was the daughter of George Soule of the Mayflower. Now I was getting somewhere. All genealogists know that some family connections are more sought-after than others, and the Mayflower is the pot of gold. These lines are heavily documented and sourced. Could this help me out?
The Mayflower-supported information told me that Susannah was married to Francis West and that they had a son also named Francis West, Jr. So far, so good. The “Silver Books” (which are ironically the gold standard for documenting Mayflower passengers) show that Francis Sr. and Susannah had another son, John, which tracks with the Geni information. Again according to Geni, John West married Mehitable Bullock, and they had a daughter named Elizabeth.
I encountered a several-generation dry path as I attempted to figure out if this connection was valid. I just kept putting in placeholder information to see what I could dig up. More hypothesis-testing, right?
After more effort than it was probably worth, I concluded that one link in this connection – Mehitable Ingalls (Ballou) – presented an obstacle I couldn’t overcome. I could link “Mehitable Ballou” to James A. Garfield, but I could not link her to the Ingalls line, and so I lost the connection to my Wilcox family. So although this was fun to experiment with, it essentially ended in failure.
