the genealogy book

, on Lt. Samuel Smith, Nathaniel Foote and John Deming, and the foundations of Connecticut,

On my birth mother’s side there is Lt. Samuel Smith, a third great grandfather to Martha Curtis (or Curtiss), wife of Dr. Samuel Adams UEL. Lt. Samuel Smith, the son of John Smith and Mary Gardiner, baptized September 6, 1601 in Burstall, Suffolk. How far back can one go? His grandparents, Samuel Smith (1549-1584) and Thomasin (Gardiner) Smith (b. 1553), both of Ipswich. Born in Ipswich, married in Ipswich, buried in Ipswich. Of Ipswich. Lt. Samuel Smith, who emigrated to New England during the Puritan Great Migration (1621-1640), of which I’ve only begun to properly explore. I’ve been abstractly aware that my birth mother’s family had been in New England for a number of generations before heading north and turning Loyalist, I’m still startled to realize the extent of these new threads. The question might ask itself: just what was I expecting? Clearly I hadn’t thought about it. I’d only known my birth mother’s name since 2013, with a first glance at the genealogical volume A Family Record of Dr. Samuel Adams, United Empire Loyalist of Vermont and Upper Canada a half decade or so later. In so many ways, I’d barely the time to consider any of it until now.

Lt. Samuel Smith and his wife Elizabeth Smyth, my eleventh great grandparents, who sailed from England on the ship “Elizabeth” to land in Boston with four children—Samuel, Elizabeth, Mary and Philip—in 1634, before relocating, for him to become one of the Founders of Wethersfield, now considered the oldest town in Connecticut. In 1659, they moved again, as he became one of the Founders of Hadley, Massachusetts. Of Hadley, Wikipedia offers: “Its settlers were primarily a discontented group of families from the Puritan colonies of Hartford and Wethersfield, Connecticut, who petitioned to start a new colony up north after some controversy over doctrine in the local church.” Everything is about doctrine, one might say, with those Puritan relocations. I’m not happy here, or here, but all referred to with such moral imperiousness. Can’t we all agree to disagree? At what point do they finally land? Within a few years, well before the Salem Witch Trials, a Wethersfield local was even accused and acquitted of witchcraft.

It was the local Wangunk, sometimes referred to as the Mattabessett, who first originated around what became Hartford and Wethersfield, and were displaced due to the settlers. They were known as the “River people,” given their settlement around the Connecticut river valley. It was they who knew the area as Pyquang, or “cleared land,” which the settlers renamed as Wethersfield in 1637. “Ye Most Auncient Towne,” said the English. It was Nathaniel Foote (1592-1644) who originally surveyed the boundaries between Wethersfield and Hartford. Foote and his wife, Elizabeth Deming (1595-1683), were born in England, and were also part of the settlement party of ten families (focusing on the ten men, as the history offers, citing the “Ten Adventurers”) that founded Wethersfield. Ten men, suggesting Foote and Smith and eight others, including Elizabeth’s younger brother John Deming (c. 1615-1705), who has been referred to as one of the “fathers of Connecticut.” Nathaniel and Elizabeth are my eleventh great grandparents as well, as their son Nathaniel Foote II married Lt. Smith’s daughter Elizabeth. As the Foote Family Association of America notes, “there are an estimated one million living United States nationals who are descended from Foote and his wife, Elizabeth Deming.” The website Historic Buildings of Connecticut writes of the “Nathaniel Foote House (1702),” offering that:

The oldest house in Colchester is the Nathaniel Foote House, which has been moved several times, but is now located on Norwich Avenue. The house was begun in 1699 by Nathaniel Foote of Wethersfield, who was involved in the development of Colchester as a new community. Foote intended to settle in town, but ill health prevented him from completing the new house, which was finished in 1702 by his son, Nathaniel, shortly before his father’s death. It was soon occupied by the elder Nathaniel’s widow and four youngest children. In the early nineteenth century, the house stood on the Hartford Turnpike and was used as a post office. In 1896, the then neglected house was on Broadway and was bought by Mrs. Frederick G. Bock, who repaired it and gave it to the Colonel Henry Champion Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The D.A.R. moved the house to its present site in 1925 and restored it for use as a historical museum and chapter house.

The Colchester History website offers: “The original deed to the land was purchased by Nathaniel Foote from Owaneco, Sachem of the Mohegan Indians, to establish a settlement. Nathaniel’s grandfather, having emigrated to this country, had previously been a resident of Colchester, England, hence the town’s name. Early settlers’ lives typically centered around religious life, and in 1703 Colchester received permission from the Colony’s General Assembly to organize as an ecclesiastical society, and in 1706 hiring the Reverend John Bulkeley as their first minister.”

John Deming, it would seem, was the original patentee of the Connecticut Colony. John and Elizabeth’s parents, Jonathan Deming (b. c. 1574) and Elizabeth Gilbert (1595 – 1683) of Essex: my twelfth great grandparents. And through Elizabeth and John Deming, how I’m apparently and newly distantly related to such as Bruce and Laura Dern, Louisa May Alcott, Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte, Tennessee Williams, Archibald MacLeish, Cole Porter, B.F. Goodrich, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nancy Reagan and probably a million or so others. Does this mean anything?

The number of times director Rian Johnson had to reshoot Laura Dern for Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), as the actress unaware of how she spoke “pew pew” with every blaster shot. I delight in such nerdy and dorky behavior, especially from an actor of such talent and poise. And now she a ninth or eleventh cousin, thereabouts.

As one speaks of Wethersfield: this conflict in New England that erupted between colonists from the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth and Saybrook colonies and the Pequot locals from 1636 to 1638 that erased the Pequot, with their few survivors sold into slavery to colonists in Bermuda or the West Indies, or dispersed as captives into tribes allied with those same colonists. The Wethersfield website, as part of their “History” page, offers this brutal dismissal of the attempted and near-extermination of an entire group: “The Pequots were crushed by the end of the decade. The Wethersfield settlement grew.” Seriously, cringe.