If you are a Smith and reading this collection you will have to locate your place in this family tree, if you are in it at all. We may share a common great grandfather, James Monroe Smith, as an example, but which James Monroe Smith? There were several in the 19th Century. Perhaps we share Peter Smith of Westmoreland as a 17th Century great grandparent of some enumeration. That may be all we have in common if you descend from any one of his children other than James Smith and Elizabeth Presl(e)y. This is my story and I’m sticking with it. You can write your own.
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 a separate volume.
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. Ownership had changed hands a few times prior to George’s arrival on the scene. Pieter was long since departed from this Earth.
Peter and James Smith tilled the soil which, one hundred and fifty years later, became the first battlefield in the Civil War, Bull Run. Found among the branches of our family tree are 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 (Wolphert Gerretse 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, I will make every effort to delve into the ancestors of his mother, my grandmother, Mary Hughes, as well.
As this document goes forward in time my ashes will be floating in the cosmos or interred in the earth. Anyone reading in the future may wonder how this tome got started and why. Who was this guy, Steve Smith and what possessed him to delve into the myriad details found in here? I will begin with me, not because I am all that important in the history of our family, but I am important as the voice, the narrator of this anthology, for lack of a better word. You are stuck with me for an eternity. But first I need to throw a caution into this compilation, what I call a REALITY CHECK.