John Russell’s Family – Part 2

A few months ago, I wrote about my great*5 grandfather, John Russell (1756-1833) and his family. You can find that story here.

In that story, I began with John’s will and all that he said about his family members. However, since then I have been having ongoing conversations with one of my distant cousins who is a descendant of James Russell (1757-1806), a younger brother of John. As a result of our continuing, and very engaging(!), email conversation, I’d like to add to/correct that story.

John, like his father before him, and many of his descendants, was illiterate. Thus, we are very fortunate that he thought to dictate a will and leave us so much information about his family. Without that will, trying to construct a complete picture of this family would be very difficult if not impossible.

I am also fortunate that with the advent of personal DNA testing, I have been able to confirm DNA connections that help to confirm some of the information in this family. But, as you will see below, this information by itself, can be misleading.

Update #1 – I have written before about John’s service in the Revolutionary War (see here and here). My original story had John’s son, John Jr, born in 1776 while John was serving. That is incorrect. As we’ll see below (update #4), John Jr was born in 1783, thus after having Caleb in 1775, John and his wife did not have any other children until August 1778 - after his service in the war was completed in July 1777.

Update #2 – In the will, John makes a point that the only of his heirs that are not yet 21 is his youngest son Levi (who had just turned 20 the month before John’s passing). This is an indication that John must have made the final updates to his will fairly recently and just before his passing in November of 1833. His next youngest child, Naomi [Ganong] has just turned 21 in July of that year, and his grandchild James Smalley had also just turned 21 in June of that year. Thus, this was not a will that John had written earlier and was just now being probated, rather it was one that he probably dictated as he lay in bed in his final days.

Update #3 – One of the reasons I am so certain that Caleb Ebenezer was John’s son called “Ebenezer” in his will is that in the 1800 census for Fishkill, Caleb is the entry right next to John. Thus Caleb (age 25) with his wife and one young child are either in the house next door or possibly still living in the same house with John, but as a unique family. By 1810 he has moved to the far reaches of Dutchess County which is where he passed away in 1830. There are perhaps 100 family trees in ancestry.com for an Ebenezer Russell who died in Hartford CT in 1828, but these trees have absolutely no supporting documentation except report of the death and burial and nothing to link them back to John except another family tree that they copied the information from. Thus, I am forced to ignore these false trees as being unsupported. My having the relevant census records makes me quite confident in the tree that I have constructed. In addition, the number of DNA matches with other of John’s children is good confirmation that this is the right family.

Update #4 – In my original posting, I chose to think that “John2” was John Jr, son of this John, based on some DNA evidence tying him to me. But the fact that “John1” was listed as being from Putnam County still weighed heavily on my mind. I have now reversed that decision as I’ll try to explain here.

Factor #1 – John mentioned in his will, written in 1833, that his sons Isaac and John Jr were both in Tompkins County, NY. But while both Isaac and John1 were there in the 1830 census, John2 could not be located there until the 1840 census. Did Isaac move there first and John not follow until sometime after 1830 but before 1833? That’s a pretty short window. And if he wasn’t there, then could I find him? Unfortunately, in the NY census records for 1820 and 1830 there are literally dozens of John Russells. Trying to match the demographics of each one to the age ranges of John, his wife, and children was much too daunting a task. But it left me still discomforted.

Factor #2 – why was I so heavily influenced by the DNA matching of that one brother and sister who had a family tree that connected John2 to this family? I decided to examine the people and the information in their family tree. While the information there was all very consistent, there wasn’t a lot of supporting evidence. So, I went searching for any corroboration. First, I managed to locate the obituary for one of the children of John2, Esther [Russell] (who was the direct ancestor of the two individuals whose DNA matched mine). She had married and moved first to IL, then later to KS where she died. While the obituary did not give the names of her parents, it said that she was from Albany County, NY, [this turned out to be false as we’ll see below] as was her husband, Lewis Mead. But I had no indication that John Jr was ever in Albany County, only in Dutchess/Putnam County (Putnam County was split off of Dutchess County in 1812) and Tompkins County.

I then found another family tree for another in that family, Daniel, which had much better research and places of birth. It indicated that Daniel and his siblings were born in Elmira, NY, not Albany. And it gave Esther’s maiden name as O’Brien [which was also incorrect as O’Brien was actually the maiden name of Esther’s mother, Elizabeth, who was from Albany, NY]. This other tree also gave the name of John[2] as John M. Russell (a middle initial!)

Thus, it appears that when Esther told her story later in life, she may have said something like, “Our O’Brien family was from Albany” and people interpreted it to mean that her maiden name was O’Brien and she was from Albany. So, there were other errors in these family trees as well as in her obituary. But it gave me a new place to look – the county to the south of Tompkins County, Chemung County, where Elmira, NY, is located – right along the border with PA.

Factor #3 – I also discovered the probably reason why Isaac and John may have been drawn to Tompkins County. The building of the Erie Canal was in that period – with construction beginning in 1817 and the canal opening in 1825. The canal enabled water traffic to move all the way from New York City, up the Hudson River to Albany, then through the Mohawk Valley west all the way to Lake Erie just south of Buffalo. It ran across the northern ends of the Finger Lakes, including a water connection into some of the Finger Lakes, including Cayuga Lake. Tompkins County was on the eastern shore of that lake. With water access across the lakes to the canal, this opened up the whole area for other endeavors.

While prior to this, most of the existing railroads in the country were owned by companies for carrying materials from mines or other such endeavors, they were now being built as commercial operations that carried other people’s goods – or the people themselves. The only operating railroad in NY at the time was the Mohawk and Hudson line, but it was soon put out of business by the Canal. In 1828, a new rail line was begun, the Ithaca and Owego Railroad, which brought goods/people from Owego, NY (near the NY/PA border) to Ithaca, where they could be transported across the lake to the Erie Canal at the north end of the lake. At the time, this was the longest rail line in the country.

The resultant economic impact of the Canal, together with the railroad, meant that the area was now open for easy travel and people were needed to help with the resultant construction. John1’s son Joel was listed in the 1850 census as a “sawyer”, i.e. someone who worked in a sawmill – likely taking trees in the area and turning them into the needed construction materials for both railroad ties, homes, barns, and businesses. As noted in the history of Tompkins County, “Railroad development linked Tompkins County with the markets and destinations beginning in 1832 with the horse-drawn Ithaca-Owego Railroad. By the 1870s, there were four major railway lines running through Ithaca. Lake travel began in 1823 and continued into the twentieth century.”

All this would have become known to John Russell and his family as they lived in the Hudson River valley, and this would likely have been the draw for Isaac and John Jr to leave their home county for the opportunities in the interior of NY in Tompkins County.

Factor #4 – One of the ancestry “hints” that appeared all the way at the bottom of the list for John Jr was a link to a scanned book of a family history of the Tracy family. In it was a reference to John M Russell of Branford, CT where it noted that he “[w]ent to Central New York…”. This seemed to match the family tree in Elmira, NY, as well as matching the middle initial which suddenly showed up in this other more well researched family tree.

If this individual was indeed the John2 in my original research, then I could instead connect John1 to my family tree, the reference to his being from Putnam County a great piece of corroboration. I had uncovered a whole bunch of erroneous family trees that had it wrong, and I could report back to my distant cousin (whose detailed questions had started me off on all this research) that we had resolved John’s family (with the exception of exactly who his first wife was – see Update #6 below). All I had to do was figure out why there was a DNA match to these descendants of Esther [Russell] Mead and her father John M Russell from Branford, CT.

Update #5 – DNA Matching. The Tracy book was limited edition (only 200 copies), privately printed, book from 1933 – from a time much closer to the lives of the people I was looking at. There are only four pages devoted to the Russell family – who are just one ancestral line of the Tracy family being researched. Starting with those who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, there are eight generations of this branch of the Russell family.

1.     Rev. John Russell, came to Cambridge, MA in 1634

2.     Rev. John Russell, came with his father

3.     Rev. Samuel Russell (1660-1731), graduated from Harvard, married Abigail Whiting, one of the founders of Yale (I had written about him here)

4.     Col. John Russell (1686-), married Sarah Trowbridge

5.     John Russell (1710-), married Mary Barker

6.     Col. Edward Russell, married Sarah Maltby, his first cousin

7.     John Russell, married Hannah Plant

8.     John M. Russell, went to Central New York

So many Johns!

I was well aware of this family because of the Yale connections mentioned above, but none of the above show up in my direct ancestral tree. However, the names of the wives mentioned above are all familiar to me and seemed be the reason why I have a DNA connection to John M Russell (the John2 in my original posting). Some further research was in order.

After spending a few hours starting from the above and building out a more complete ancestral tree for John M Russell, I found not one, but several connections. Not only were there several intersections between John M’s ancestral tree and my own, but things like the note above where Col. Edward married his first cousin also played into these connections.

One of the interesting things about DNA matching is that if you have two different matches at generation X the amount of your DNA commonality also doubles, making it appear from a percentage basis that your match is at generation X-1, i.e. one generation closer.

The impact of all these multiple matches and marriages among cousins is that it’s quite easy to see why the ancestry.com DNA Thrulines made it appear that John2 in my original tree met their criteria for a match at that generation, when, in fact, the connection is a couple of levels farther up our successive trees.

Update #6 – John’s two wives. It’s pretty obvious that John had two wives. His second wife, Anna [Wixon] was only born in 1769 (based on her gravestone) and thus she would have been only six years old when John’s first child, Caleb, was born in 1775. John and his first wife continued having children for nearly 20 years – Caleb (1775), William (1778), Isaac (1780), John Jr (1783), Elizabeth (1783 – twins?), Phebe (1788), Robert W (1790), and Abigail (1794). Then there is a break in the continuity when his first wife dies and he remarries to Anna. He has seven more children with her – Lee (1800), Abijah (1801), David (1803), Margaret (1805), Sophiah (1809), Naomi (1812), and Levi (1813). That’s 15 children over a period of nearly 40 years!

There are many trees in ancestry.com which give the name of John’s first wife as Abigail [Isham]. But I believe these to be false. The Abigail Isham they link to was from a well-to-do family in CT and she died in Bolton, CT, in 1800 (again based on her gravestone). While that date might reasonable, it’s too late for John to have remarried and had a child with his new wife the same year. It’s also not in the right place and she would have been unlikely to marry an illiterate farmer from the Hudson River Valley like John.

I have seen a number of trees which give a death date to John’s first wife of 1798 and a date for his marriage to Anna of either 1797 or 1798. But, lacking any corroboration of any of these dates, they remain speculative.

Summary – With the addition of these updates, I can now be much more certain that my list of John’s descendants is accurate. Thanks to my cousin for challenging me to continue to dig deeper into all these matters.

Except for the identity of John’s first wife and the date of her death and John’s subsequent marriage to Anna, I believe that I have resolved all the issues with John’s family. But, like any good genealogist, one should always be open to new information. My work is never done!