The Smith tree is fascinating, filled with success and failure, frontiersmen and explorers, paupers and preachers; people who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, people who took other folk’s boots and made them their own. If you choose to find your way through these pages you will encounter a 32x great grandfather (Sir Roger Montgomery) who led the Norman invasion of England in 1066. You will be among the first European settlers (James and Robert Davis) at Sagadahoc, Popham Colony (Maine) in 1607 (before there was a Jamestown or Plymouth Colony). You will find others of our ancestors surfing into Massachusetts Bay on the Mayflower. You will abandon Sagadahoc in 1608 and join the seagoing Davis family as they struggle through hurricanes to defend and protect the settlement of Jamestown. Their adventures are captured in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. While in Jamestown you will also find my wife Nancy’s Whittington ancestors, including Henry Southey, Edmund Bowman, Nathaniel Littleton, John West, Edmund Scarborough and William Whittington himself. He is the man who coined the term “No taxation without representation,” one hundred years prior to the phrase going viral in the Revolutionary War. But that story belongs in Volume III, The Whittingtons Owned Wales, Didn’t They?
When George Washington and the Sons of Liberty met in Fraunces Tavern on Pearl Street in NYC, they were in a tavern previously owned as a microbrew by my 8th great grandfather, Pieter Wulfertsen von Kouwenhoven. It was the same pub in which George held his going away party when he bade his army farewell and became President.
Peter and James Smith tilled the soil which, one hundred years later, became the first battlefield in the Civil War, Bull Run. We have among us the first pioneers of Kentucky (Montgomerys, Tates, Simpsons, Smiths) and the earliest Anglo farmers of the Midwest (Stilley). We have an uncle, William Bailey Smith, who forged the Wilderness Trail into Kentucky, a trail made famous by Daniel Boone. Smith saved Boone’s daughter when she was kidnapped by tribal forces. Others among our ancestors perished in the massacre of Bryant’s Station and Fort Kincheloe.
Our Smith tree has the first European (Wulphert Gerritse von Kouwenhoven) to purchase property from the Native Americans of New England. The deed is on display in a New York City library. The place was called New Amsterdam at the time (1628). Our Smith family also contains the first of Caucasian families, the Stille clan, to purchase property from the Native Americans in Illinois, when it was the Northwest Territory (1803). And we have what I have determined to be the most interesting character among our ancestors: Olof Stille, the first of the Swedes to create the colony of New Sweden (1638) where New Jersey and Philadelphia now stand.
Hiding among the branches of our tree we find Huguenots (de la Fontaine) who fled from Catholics, leaving their vineyards in Bordeaux behind, to save their lives, and Catholics (half of Ireland) who fled from Protestants for the same reason; all killing each other in the name of God. Of course, the further we go back in time, the more we share these ancestors with many others on this earth. It is incredible to see, for example, how a 350-page book can be filled with the descendants of one set of parents who came to the New World in and around about 1638.
So. Once again, welcome to the Smith tree, the ancestors of my father, James Donald Smith, aka James, Jim, Jim Don, Donald, Don, J.D., Smitty and Dad, of course…
