James Monroe 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.

Compared to last week’s essay on my connection to President James Madison, this relationship is fairly straightforward.  The connection is through my Arnold-Ellefritz-Botts-Gaines line to Virginia in the 18^th century, similar to the Madison line until it reaches my 5^th great-grandmother Lucy Gaines, who was born in 1755 in Culpeper, Virginia.  But instead of going further back, my connection to President Monroe moves sideways, kind of – through Lucy’s sister Judith and then to her husband Thomas, Thomas’s brother John, John’s wife Jane Monroe, and her brother Spence Monroe, the father of President James Monroe.

This alternate diagram does a better job of explaining this relationship.

You can see on this chart that my 5^th great-grandmother Lucy Gaines was the generational peer of Spence Monroe, the father of James Monroe.  Lucy’s brother-in-law Thomas Chancellor was also the brother-in-law of President Monroe’s Aunt Jane Monroe.  I’d like to be able to flip this chart so that I am “down” the line from my 5^th great-grandmother Lucy Gaines, but I can’t figure out how to do that without turning the text and images upside down. So you'll just have to remember that down means up on this chart. 

This wasn’t all that hard to prove.  With a little research I was able to verify all of these connections:

• Lucy had a sister named Judith

• Judith married Thomas Chancellor

• Thomas had a brother named John

• John married Jane Monroe

• Jane Monroe had a brother named Spence Monroe

• Spence Monroe was the father of President James Monroe

Easy-peasy. This gets an “A.”

But I have also begun to mess around with Geni.com, another one-world-tree platform similar in some respects to WikiTree.  I found President Monroe on Geni and then proceeded to ask the platform if I was related to him.  Instead of a connection that mirrored the one I got from WikiTree, I got a totally different connection.

This was unexpected and interesting.  First, it’s clear that something is missing in the Geni tree because it didn’t pick up the WikiTree relationship, even though it’s much more direct than this one.  But second, this connection is through my daughter-in-law (I’ll call her “Martha” – I'm blocking out the living people on her line) as you can see on this chart.  But here’s the thing – I didn’t enter most of this information into Geni.  As I looked at the line between Martha and the earlier generations, I saw that I was identified as the profile manager through Louisa “Lulie” P. Thrash, Martha’s great-grandmother.  This means that I had entered this information somewhere along the line, although I don’t recall doing it.  But other people are additional profile managers for the rest of the people in this tree.  I didn’t put them in the tree.  The number of profile managers increases to dozens for people further back in the tree.  I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what this means – but what it means for me right now is that I have the names of a couple of dozen people who are interested in this same individual, so that gives me some sources to query if I want to verify elements of this line. 

I was particularly interested in this result because I only began an intentional exploration of my daughter-in-law’s family tree a few months ago.  She’s not particularly interested in it (narrator: she's not at all interested in it), but I wanted to explore it a bit for her children (my grandchildren).  When I saw this lineage, I recognized many of the names from my research.  This tells me two things:  one, if I had worked through Geni earlier, I could have saved myself a lot of work, and two, other researchers are also interested in this line so I might be able to find verification of the connections I had hypothesized.

Next, I decided to take advantage of the new ProTools on Ancestry to figure out more about this lineage.  I signed up for this option in December, deciding I could pay $10 a month for a couple of months to decide whether it was worth the expense.  I used the ProMaps function to produce this map.

This shows where Martha’s direct ancestors in the relevant family line lived.  Here’s the key to this map:

• One person in Louisa County, Virginia – Martha’s 3rd great-grandfather Christopher Columbus Thrash, born in 1779 in Louisa, Virginia. 

• One person in Wilkes County, Georgia – Christopher’s wife (Martha’s 3^rd great-grandmother) Mary Callaway Thrash

• Four people in Meriwether County, Georgia:

I found one surprise on this map – I did not expect to find that Christopher Thrash’s father, Jacob Thrash, had moved his family to Georgia in 1780, apparently right after Christopher’s birth.  He received a Revolutionary War land grant there in 1785.  His Find-A-Grave site contains some information that I’ll be able to use to build this tree further. 

• Five people lived in  Wilkinson, Georgia – but these are the same people identified as being in Merriwether County, so it’s clear that they moved from one of these locations to the other over the course of their lives. 

• And three more people I now recognize – they appeared in the previous two locations as well.

With a little more work on this line (clarifying some dates, including some other people) I could construct the movements of this family. 

One thing that interested me in this lineage is that Martha and my son currently live in Muscogee County, where her 2^nd great-grandfather was married in 1857.  I’m not sure she knows that.

So how does my connection to President James Monroe (through my daughter-in-law Martha) stand up to scrutiny?  Take another look at this connection:

I’m pretty confident about this line back through Martha’s 7^th great-grandfather Edward Callaway.  The next connection relies on Edward’s sister, Mary.  Neither Wikitree nor Ancestry confirms the existence of a sister named Mary in this family.  Unless I can prove that Mary existed, I can’t prove the rest of the connection.  I can’t find the next names on WikiTree either – so for now I’m going to have to rate this connection as follows:

This connection falls apart.  I didn’t rate it as “Bad,” because the link does hold up for a major part of the connection.  I did learn more about Geni and even reactivated am upgraded subscription so I could do more with this platform.  It also costs a bit, but the upgrade was on sale so I went for it.   I think if I took more time to bounce back and forth between WikiTree, Geni, and Ancestry, I could probably figure this connection out.  But not today, grasshopper.