James Madison and Me
For 2024, I’m writing a series of blog posts I’m calling “Daughter of Presidents,” exploring my family tree connections to the Presidents of the United States. These posts will appear each Monday
Today’s essay is about how I was able to make WikiTree work for me through attention to detail and by using profile managers to fix a problem with the tree
My earlier family tree research (using Ancestry and other sites) had revealed my connection to President James Madison that you can see here:
Here’s a little more explanation of this chart. My 9th great-grandfather John Madison (1660-1728) was President Madison’s great-grandfather. This connection is pretty straightforward; it moves through my paternal grandmother Orpha Ellefritz (#2) through her father (#3), grandmother (#4), great-grandfather (#5) and 2nd great-grandfather (#6) in Illinois and Kentucky before moving back into Virginia with the Gaines family (#7, 8, and 9) before reaching Catherine Madison (#10), whose brother (#11) was the grandfather of President Madison (#13).
I was quite certain of this connection. A few years ago, I was able to link up with another person working on this line who showed me a DNA analysis he had done to prove that this link was accurate. So I thought it would be pretty straightforward to write this week’s essay. I didn’t expect to have to do much work.
But when I asked WikiTree to show me this link as I was working on this project, I was surprised when it came up with the relationship shown in this chart (which shows the connection in reverse order):
I decided to investigate this relationship, and it was valid so far as I could tell. This also connects through my Workman family line (just like my connections to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson). My 3rd great-grandfather James Workman (#12) is the important node in this connection. The lineage continues to work backward through the Bilyeu family line (#11, 10, 9, and 8) before arriving at #7, my 9th great-grandmother Francoise du Bois (1622-1695), a member of a French Huguenot family that came to Staten Island in 1660. Her brother Louis Du Bois (#6) had a daughter Sarah Du Bois (#5), who had a daughter Rebecca van Meteran (#4). Rebecca’s daughter Eleanor Elting (#3) had a son Isaac Hite (#2) who married President Madison’s sister Nelly Madison (#1).
Phew!!
Thanks to those of you who have stuck with me through this so far. The details aren’t that important; what mattered to me was figuring out why WikiTree had taken me through this circuitous route rather than using the more direct route from the first chart. This led me to explore another feature of WikiTree that was kind of fun. I’ll take you with me on this journey.
First, I had to figure out if WikiTree even allowed for the first route – the one through the Gaines/Botts/Ellefritz/Arnold line. It did not. I had to figure out where the problem was, so I began to explore this line. As I clicked my way through the links on this WikiTree line, I was brought up short at the profile for my 2nd great-grandmother Mary Ann Botts.
Then I entered the following message on the profile page as a request to merge the two profiles.
And here’s the email I received a day or so later:
When I went back to WikiTree and asked it to show me the connection between me and President James Madison, now Wikitree gave me this connection – the one I showed you earlier. The correction I had submitted fixed my problem
This was a satisfying conclusion to my research for this week. I figured out a new function of Wikitree – merging profiles – and I discovered a new link to the Madison family of Virginia. If you can bear a few more minutes of this, I want to tell you a little about this second link – the DuBois family of New York.
Through my Workman family line, I have been introduced to the 17th-century Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. This colony was more complex and more interesting than I had realized, so I have enjoyed coming to understand it more completely over the years. It introduced me to an entirely different set of colonial experiences, so that’s always fun.
But it also sent me on an unexpected journey. If the surname “DuBois” looks familiar to you, it’s probably because we all know about the famed historian and civil rights advocate W. E. B. DuBois, the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard and the founder of the NAACP. What I didn’t know is that he is descended from the same DuBois family in New York that I have identified as part of my family tree.
Here's how that works.
A few paragraphs ago, we saw that my 8th great-grandmother Francoise DuBois had a brother named Louis. I was able to trace Louis’s descendants (through his daughter Sarah) to President Madison. But a few years ago, I made another interesting discovery about the descendants of Louis DuBois. His 3rd great-grandson, James DuBois, had a child by one of the enslaved women he held on his land in Poughkeepsie. This son was born in the Bahamas, where James DuBois had sent the woman to bear his child. This child, Alexander, immigrated to the United States to join his father, James. Alexander traveled and worked in Haiti, where he fathered a son, Alfred, with his mistress. Alexander returned to Connecticut, leaving Alfred in Haiti with his mother.
Sometime before 1860, Alfred DuBois immigrated to the United States and settled in Massachusetts. He married Mary Silvina Burghardt there in 1867. Mary’s family was part of the very small free black population of the town of Barrington and had long owned land in the state. Their son William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois was born in 1868, but Alfred followed the pattern of the men in his lineage and left Mary in 1870 when W. E. B. was two years old. The young boy attended the local integrated public school and played with white classmates, but still suffered from racism even in that enlightened community. The rest is, literally, history.
So I asked WikiTree to line out the connection between President James Madison and W. E. B. DuBois. Here’s what I found.
Isaac Hite, who was married to James Madison’s sister Nelly (Eleanor), was the 2nd great-granddaughter of Louis DuBois; W. E. B. Dubois was Louis’s 4th great-grandson. W.E.B’s grandfather James – the one who impregnated and then exiled one of his enslaved women – was James Madison’s generation peer. James Madison was born in 1751; James DuBois was born in 1750. They both lived in the United States through the pivotal years surrounding the American Revolution.
I haven’t researched this issue very deeply, but I was able to find one reference to this part of the DuBois family during the American Revolution. Mattheus DuBois, James’s father, wrote a long note to the Convention of the State of New York on May 9, 1771. I won’t give you the extended text of the letter, but essentially Mattheus was aggrieved on behalf of James, who had been badly treated by the militia unit that he joined and was subsequently dismissed from the force for reasons that Mattheus (and James) did not understand. Mattheus reported that James, who was 27 years old at the time, had done everything asked of him, and that any delays in reporting for duty were caused by mislaid paperwork and illness. James had otherwise complied completely with what he was asked to do, and Mattheus is complaining on James’s behalf that James’s reputation is damaged beyond repair. Mattheus’s second complaint was that he had spent a fair amount of money providing James with the clothing and equipment he needed for military service and that he didn’t want that expenditure to go to waste. He was requesting the convention to order an inquiry into the dismissal of James from service. I wasn’t able to find out anything about the resolution of this complaint.
President Madison is my distant cousin and W. E. B. Dubois is his distant cousin. By the transitive arithmetic property W. E. B. DuBois is my distant cousin as well – to be precise, he is my 7th cousin 3x removed. Q.E.D. Or something like that.
You may go on about your day.