What historical Carver family are we descendants of?

Franz Carver says, "Robert Carver, who was in Plymouth Colony by 1638, was, as far as is known, the second male of the name to come to America. Genealogists agree that Carvers who can trace their lineage to Carvers present in New England at the time of the 1790 census are descended from Robert Carver.

 While we are defiantly not descended from John, it is possible that we are related to him. Caleb Carver says,

"The claim that Robert Carver of Marshfield, Massachusetts was either a brother or a nephew of Governor John Carver does have some antiquity (the nephew claim being published as early as 1760, the brother claim as early as 1767). These claims remain unverified by genealogists, and there is no published documentation to show that Robert and John were indeed related. Research in English records to investigate the possibility of a relationship is certainly warranted, however. "

Frederick Carver Fox's mother, Sarah Britton Carver, was a descendant of Robert Carver.

For more info see the Mayflower question below and the Web site The Carver Connection

Who was Gratia Housler's Native American ancestor?

Family legend is that Rubie's tribe was Blackfoot. That seems highly unlikely. The Blackfoot are a Plains tribe who live in Montana, Saskatchewan and western Canada. More likely is the Brothertown or other small Indian tribes of New York State.

Rubie's mother appears to be Sarah Crafts, born in 1776 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Other researchers have found references to a Native American woman marrying a Crafts man.

Rubie's father apparently was Joseph Hamilton, perhaps born in 1778 in Brookline, Massachusetts.
His historical trail is hard to follow which often indicates an ancestor that a family preferred to mask, in this case perhaps a Native American.

Why the legend of the Blackfoot tribe? It is possible that Gratia confused a little known tribe's name with a tribe commonly heard of in the West, when they lived in Colorado in the late 1800's.

We're still working on this one.

What's the origin of Gratia Housler's story of being cheated out of a Mayflower rocking chair as a child when some older female relative died?

First, I had to find what female relative of Gratia's died when she was young. I used my genealogy software to narrow the list to her female relatives who died between 1883 - 1895 and found only one, her grandmother Amanda Hastings Bowerman. Amanda, a widow for twenty-five years, died in 1891 when Gratia was seven. This should not have taken rocket science to determine, but it did.

I was more sure of the identity of the deceased when I found a fictionalized story that Gratia wrote about a little girl cheated out of a farm. The child is under her dying grandmother's bed, when she hears her grandmother state her bequests to an aunt and uncle. In the story, that aunt and uncle later lie about what the grandmother said, and cheat the child and her mother out of their rightful land and money. The names given to that mother and uncle in the story are similar to Blanche, Gratia's mother, Lucius, Gratia's uncle and other family members on her mother's side.

Next I had to figure out what Mayflower ancestor Gratia had. The only Mayflower ancestor we knew of in our family had heard of was John Carver, first Governor of Plymouth, thought to be an ancestor of Gratia's first husband, Frederick Carver Fox. This does not work well with her story because if her husband and her grandmother were directly related, she was married her own first cousin. Other Carver problems are explained above.

Gratia's grandmother's Amanda Hastings Bowerman did have kin that came over on the Mayflower. Apparently this can be traced via the Aldens and the Littles to the Hastings, although I'm not positive yet where our specific Hastings comes in.

So at this point we know Gratia thought her grandmother had had this rocking chair and that her aunts and uncles stole it.

Now to figure out if there was any Mayflower furniture in this family. To this end, I have obtained the will, probate, family records for Amanda Bowerman (1818 - 1891) from the Cass County Michigan Probate Court. Also included was an inventory of Amanda's household:

The rocking chairs listed in the inventory above are priced about the same as the cans of fruit. Their price would seem to suggest that they were not valuable antiques.

This story is beginning to seem a bit suspicious. There are several other problems with the rocking chairs in Gratia's story.

Problem One: Rocking chairs apparently weren't invented until the early 1700's.

Benjamin Franklin is said by some sources to have invented rocking chairs in about 1760.
Rocking Chairs, a store in Marin County, California says, "Rocking chairs were probably invented in the early 1700's That is about all we know. They probably were not invented by Benjamin Franklin--although he did invent a system whereby a fan is powered by the rocker. Rockers may have appeared in France before they did in America but nobody is really sure. An earlier Lancashire origin is also sometimes claimed."

Problem Two: Almost no wood furniture was brought on the Mayflower.

According to the authors of the Then there is the problem that almost no wood furniture was brought on Mayflower. According to authors of Mayflower Web Pages,

"One of the popular conceptions of the Pilgrims is their wholesale importation of would-be heirlooms on the Mayflower. However, few of the pieces of furniture attributed to the Mayflower crossing actually made the voyage. Each of the chairs in Pilgrim Hall connected with a Mayflower leader, such as Carver, Bradford, and Winslow, has been proven to be made of American wood. A survey of the many "provisions lists" (lists of supplies, tools and clothing published to advise potential emigrants what to bring to America) reveals an almost total lack of furniture except for chests and boxes. Apparently wooden furniture was something the Pilgrims felt they could easily make once they found their new home."

Although a chair thought to have been owned by John Carver is preserved in the Pilgrim Hall Museum. The list of supplies suggested by Capt. John Smith, Such things as men ought to provide when they goe to Virginia", for the Pilgrims does not include furniture.

What was the original name for the Jaco/Yaco family?

Jaco is not an authentic Russian or Russian Jewish last name. In searching for what the real family last name might have been, I've found that most Jews from Russia/Poland did not have family or last names before 1800. So when our ancestor Mr. Morris Jaco was born in 1850, his family may have only had the name "Susloff", for example, for fifty some years. 

Before that time, Susannah Juni, a family member and genealogist with JewishGen, points out that Jews often used patronymic names like Benjacob, meaning son of Jacob. (Other ethnic groups would use Jacobson as the patronymic name.)

For example, Isaac Benjacob was a Hebrew scholar circa 1850.

How did Benjacov/b become Jaco? It is possible that Jaco was written by a non-Jewish clerk who skipped the "Ben" and dropped the "b/v" at the end. Jaco, then, may have been the officially recorded family name since secular last names were assigned to Jews.

BenJacob is a relatively common Jewish last name.  After all, there are many fathers named Jacob. The chances that we could connect the Jaco family with a specific Benjacob/v are slim.

So we need to go back to concrete evidence about our family.

A Jaco researcher, Allen Jaco, emailed me to say that Ltr 30 Oct 1957 Lilian (Mrs. Albert JACO), #15: ...my husband Albert's father, Morris Jaco, came to this country about 90 years ago from a province in the Ukraine, which is now a satellite of Russia. The name which is unpronounceable was shortened by using the first 4 letters. Some of the family use a Y instead of J because it is pronounced like that.

Morris Jaco, his wife, Anna and their children came to the US in 1891 and applied for naturalization using the last name Jaco. That naturalization form does not list an original family name nor ship he sailed on nor departure city.  This hampers our efforts to track him back overseas.  

If they had arrived in the U.S. in 1892 or after, we could use the wonderful Ellis Island Passenger Search which has been put on-line.

Other Web sites are indexing passenger records for other years and other ports. We'll just have to wait...

Morris Jaco's death certificate from the State of Ohio gives Morris's father's name as "Unknown Jaco" and his mother's name as "Anita Unknown".

Genealogy experts think that "Unknown Jaco" means that the informant didn't know the first name, but that the last name was indeed Jaco. This still doesn't rule out the possibility that Jaco or Yaco was Jacob/v with a letter dropped off somewhere along the way, either in Europe or in America.

The informant for the certificate was listed as Sophia Jaco. This is Morris's daughter Miss Sophia Jaco, not his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Sophia Jaco.

Unfortunately, the birthplaces for Morris, his father and mother are all listed as "Russia", without a state or region.

Several of Morris and Anna Jaco's sons were in the World War I. We are hoping to track the family name through draft and military records for Canada and the U.S.

We're still working on this one.

Hiram Morris spoke of  an ancestor that opened their door during the French Revolution (1789) and was shot. What family might that have been?

The only known French ancestor was through Hiram's mother Nora Gowdy. Nora was the daughter of Avery Pelham and Phebe Vermilya. The Vermilya and Pelham families apparently were both Dutch and lived in Delaware County, New York in the early 1800's.

In Eighty Plus, page 13, Lydia Fox says, "[her family] ... came up to Jefferson County, which had been opened for settlement. ... They settled in the town of Clayton, at Depauville.
This part of the country had been settled by the French, many of them having fled there after the French Revolution. The [town] names were nearly all French. There was Chaumont, Depauville, Lafargeville, Lorraine, Theresa and a host of others."

We don't know of any of specific Vermilya or Pelham relatives that were killed in the French Revolution so it may be that only their neighbors' families lost members during that very bloody time period in France.

What family had six or seven brothers who fought in the Civil War?

George Washington Morris
Henry Clay Morris
John Harrison Morris
Joshua Clint Morris
Silas Thomas Morris
Simeon Lovel Bearce Morris
William Ninian Morris

In the History of Brown County, Ohio, Albert Tingley Morris says

"Six came home safely and one[Henry Clay Morris] lies in Statesboro. GA, having been cut down by Rebel Cavalry"

Joshua Morris' granddaughter, Sarah Elizabeth Morris, was a nurse in the War as well.

Was Hiram Morris's family Mormon?

The family's ties with the Mormons may have been off and on. When Love's father, John W. Morris and wife Hulda Samantha Wills married, a Presbyterian minister officiated, according to John's Civil War Pension records.