Twists and turns Intriguing stories emerge when piecing together a family's past

By George Claxton Bulletin Contributing Writer

Published on August 15, 2008

The earliest ancestor that I have been able to find in more than 35 years of genealogical research was a farmer who lived in County Suffolk, England, at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII.

As a country farmer, George Packard did well for himself. He owned a house and land, was a member in good standing of his local church and lived to a decent age.

It was George Packard's son, Samuel, who started to get into trouble when, as a Puritan, he and his friends ran afoul of the ecclesiastic court in London and hightailed it off to the New World.

Like all families, mine has a rather varied past. Some of my ancestors were slaves and others slavers; they were farmers, soldiers, seamen, inventors and explorers as well as drunks, fanatics and bigots - as proved by the records that can sometimes be found of their activities.

As the age of the Internet has made access to historic documents easier, one can now search for the details of the lives of ancestors without even leaving home, but there is a danger to this as well. The first rule for any genealogist is to be suspicious of the work of other researchers.

Proceed with caution

Since I began the search for my ancestors at the age of 15, I have been led down any number of false trails laid by people who did research before me. Sometimes the mistakes made by other researchers are obvious, such as the woman who thought George Packard was nobility because he lived near a place called Earl Stoneham. Sometimes it takes months or even years of research to identify a piece of information that is simply wrong.

A number of researchers, for example, get the birth date of one of my ancestors, Elizabeth Hudson, wrong. They have her born several years earlier than she was because the same family had another child named Elizabeth who died in infancy. As was common at the time, the next girl born was given the same name as the dead child, but some of the researchers never bother to note that.

The further back one goes in time, the more difficult it is to discover facts and the less credence should be given to secondary sources.

Records from the late medieval period are sketchy at best and were often written and kept by clerics who were barely literate themselves. Still, one can often find a wealth of information in the archives of local parish churches and record offices.

Puritan roots

According to church records, Samuel Packard, the progenitor of the Packard line in America, was baptized on Sept. 17, 1612, in the Stonham Aspal village church.

In the course of his life, the tide of Puritanism swept through County Suffolk and, according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, he, along with half the population of his village, picked up one day and left town.

It seems that a popular Puritan preacher in Stonham Aspal had, through his teachings, once again angered the leaders of the Anglican Church, who had decided to bring him before the ecclesiastic court and, once again, throw him into jail. Rather than face this inevitable outcome, the Puritans of the village packed up and left their little town.

Stonham Aspal is an ancient village that is built on the remains of a Roman villa. Many of the houses along the main street date to the 14th and 15th centuries. When the Puritan villagers left in the 1600s, there was very little left of the town's population.

Samuel, along with his wife, daughter and the others, boarded the ship Diligent at Ipswich in the spring of 1638 and sailed off to Hingham, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They arrived on Aug. 10.

Between the lines

The advantage of having Puritan forebears in Massachusetts is that the Puritans kept a lot of records. There are long lists of births, deaths and marriages kept by the various towns from the time of the earliest settlers. Often these records are published and can be found in local libraries throughout the state.

In the case of Samuel Packard, documents are plentiful because he served as a selectman in both Hingham and Bridgewater and, in the latter town, as a surveyor of roads and keeper of "an ordinary house" or tavern. In his will he left considerable wealth to his widow and land to his sons. He also vented his opinion about one of his sons-in-law.

In referring to his daughter Jael in the will, Samuel wrote:

"Alsoe my will is that as concerning my Daghter Jaell Smith the wife of John Smith that the prte of the Mony and Chattles above Named that shalbe Due to my said Daughter Jaell after the Decease of my said wife Elizabeth Packer shall not be Delivered to the said John Smith; but shall be Desposed of to my said Daughter Jaell for her Comfort by the executors of my said Will."

Based entirely on this one historic document, one might conclude that Smith was a wastrel, or that he mistreated Jael, but other historic evidence shows that he was a well-to-do farmer who married Jael after she had a son out of wedlock, a far more common event in the 17th century than many would have you believe.

John Smith apparently cared quite a lot for his wife and her son and, when he died in 1690, left a large part of his wealth to his adopted son and named him in his will before his other children.

Unfortunately for genealogists, the generations that came after the earliest settlers were often less precise about keeping records than their forebears were.

By the 19th century, town historians were spinning fables about the "great men" of history. In genealogical terms, the so-called histories of the period are often useless for research.

Following the trail

In the 18th century, the Packard family, grown large and prosperous, began to move north and west, spreading first into New Hampshire and then into Vermont. As they moved, the paper trail that followed them became thinner and thinner. An occasional birth record, a will, a court or land record are all there is to mark their passage.

In the town of Westmoreland, N.H., there is a record, dating to 1782, of the marriage of Robert Packard to Elizabeth Hudson. After their marriage, the couple moved westward to Vermont, where they had a large number of children who are mentioned in Robert Packard's will.

In 1832, my great-great-grandfather, Artemus Packard, was born in Vermont. Within a few years Artemus' family had moved out to the Michigan territory, where his father, Nathan, was crushed while felling a tree.

Public records show that Nathan Packard's wife, Celia (Houghton) Packard, became a proprietor of the town after his death, along with one of his brothers.

When Artemus Packard left Michigan, he moved on to Wisconsin, where he is said to have run a tack shop for the Pony Express. While there, he married a woman from Kentucky, Melinda Matthews, and together they moved to a farm in Iowa.

Although Iowa did not keep vital records until the 1880s, by 1850 the national census began to accumulate more information than just the general age range of people in the household and whether they were white, colored, enslaved or free. So, it became easier to track people as they moved across the country.

In 1860, for example, Artemus Packard was a farmer in Wright County, Iowa, according to the census, with land and personal property worth around $2,100, a fair amount of money for the time.

A year later, Artemus Packard, two of his brothers and two of his cousins joined the Grand Army of the Republic to fight against the Confederates. The Packard men fought in the Red River Campaign, at Nashville, Vicksburg and Mobile Bay. Only one of the Packards, Artemus Packard's cousin Cyrenius, died in the war and he fell to disease.

Documentation of the service of the Packard men can be found in their enlistment and pay records as members of the Union Army and in their inclusion in the veterans census of 1890, which is one of the few parts remaining of that decade's census.

My great-grandmother, Dora Packard, was born in Iowa in 1866.

By 1873, despite the fact that they had already settled on adjoining farms in Iowa, Artemus and his brother, Nathan Jr., walked north to Minnesota, where they became the first settlers to homestead land in what would become Oak Valley township.

Evidence of Artemus Packard's arrival in Minnesota can be found in federal land records, from his acquisition of 160 acres, in town records, from his service on the local school board, in the 1880 census and in newspaper accounts.

What the details tell

People often forget that newspaper accounts can often provide a wealth of detail about the lives of one's ancestors, particularly those living in small towns where more details of daily life tend to be included in news reports.

One of the things noted in news accounts from Otter Tail County, Minn., in 1898, is the marriage of Dora Packard to Andrew J. Emery, a black man born in Ohio.

Unfortunately, the lack of documentation on blacks in the United States in the 19th century makes tracking Andrew Emery's ancestors vastly more difficult than tracking Dora Packard's kin.

The Packards, even though they supported the North in the Civil War, largely disowned Dora after her marriage and she and her new husband set up housekeeping in a town in Otter Tail County miles from her father's family.

According to the 1900 census, Andrew Emery was born in February 1866 and, at the time of the enumeration, was working as a farmer in Otter Tail township. He and Dora had one child.

The farm that the couple lived on in 1900 was rented, according to census records, and they had one servant, a 60-year-old widow from New York named Charlotte Bishop.

By 1910, according to the census, Andrew and Dora Emery had lost their farm and lived in a rented house with no servants, but a lot more children, including my grandmother, who was called Hazel as a child, a name she disliked and later changed to Marjory.

One wonderful thing about the federal census is that it gives more detailed information with each iteration. Thus it is that by 1930, we know that Marjory is married to a railroad dining-car waiter named Charles W. Beasley, who had been born in Shuqualak, Miss., in 1898.

According to the records, Charles Beasley was the son of Thomas J. Beasley and Camilla Jordan, both of whom were enslaved persons living in Confederate lands during the Civil War.

Thomas Beasley was a man of French, African and American Indian ancestry. Camilla Jordan, too, had European and American Indian as well as African ancestors.

Unfortunately, because of social relations in the American South in the 1800s, the only record that exists of Thomas and Camilla Beasley is a marriage record dated 1877.

Marjory Emery is the only member of the Packard line that I ever met personally, the rest of them having died decades before I was born. Obviously, at the age of 1 or 2, I was much too young to remember anything about her, let alone have the opportunity to ask her questions.

It was my paternal grandmother, Hattie (Crout) Claxton, who I was able to talk too, but to my regret, I never questioned her about her past. Thus, most of the information I have about her side of the family also comes from documents.

A rebellious lot

Someone once said that genealogy is the art of finding out more about your ancestors than you really want to know, but sometimes even knowing the bad things can be rewarding.

In my own genealogy, I found that within four generations I have relatives who fought in the Civil War on both sides of the conflict. Within five generations, I have ancestors who joined in the rebellion against the English king, George III.

One of the peculiar stories that has emerged from my research is that the Beasley line, from Mississippi, actually gained its last name from an elderly woman. One of my ancestors took her name when he was given to her by his plantation-owning father.

As I said, all family lines have bad guys as well as good guys, but all of them have interesting stories.

George Claxton is a reporter at The Recorder in Greenfield. He can be reached at gclaxton@recorder.com.