New Branches in the Family Tree

I have discovered another ancestral home that now serves as part of an historic site: Huguenot Street in New Paltz, New York. This is the Freer-Low House where a ninth great-grandfather, Hugo Freer, once lived.

Regular visitors to this blog will have noticed my genealogy hobby and my pride in Mahaffie family history.  I have written a few times about The Mahaffie House, now a museum in Olathe, Kansas.  It was home to my great-great-grandparents JB Mahaffie and Lucinda Henderson who were among the first settlers of that town.

But that was in the mid-1800s. Hugo Freer came to the New York colony sometime before 1677 as part of a wave of religious refugees -- Huguenots -- who had fled France, stayed for a time in Germany, and eventually came to the colonies. Hugo Freer was one of a group of twelve men (the "Duzine") who purchased land from the local Esopus tribe and received a patent to settle the town of New Paltz in the 1670s.

At the very end of his life, Hugo Freer replaced his original wood home with the stone structure that stands today. He died in 1698. The house passed through various family members and served different functions before being purchased by the Huguenot Historical Society in 1955 and made part of the Huguenot Street Historic District of New Paltz.

"My great-grandmother, of French Huguenot ancestry"
I am related to Hugo Freer through my maternal grandmother, Isabel Cooper Mahaffie, another frequent subject of this blog. Towards the end of her life, she had inventoried her home (filled with a wonderful collection of treasures and art).  Reading through that inventory the other day, I found her reference to "an especially fine small colonial covered pitcher with the dragon finial, which belonged to Joanna Freer, my great-grandmother, of French Huguenot ancestry."

That led me to renew genealogical searching along that branch of the family tree, which had been stopped at Joanna Freer and her husband, Nathan Myers.  The renewed searching led me to a new treasure trove,  the Freer-Low Family Association, which provided six more generations of family, back to Hugo Freer (who appears in some records as "Hugo Freer Patentee").

So now, allowing for possible error over more than 300 years, the generations look like this:

1. Hugo Freer and Marie de la Haye
2. Hugo Freer, Sr., and Maria LeRoy
3. Simon Freer and Marytjen Vanbommell
4. Zimeon Freer and Catrina Vanbenschoten
5. Simeon Freer and Anna Maria DuBois
6. Elias Freer and Arreantje Veley (Viele?)
7. Joanna (Johanna?) Freer and Nathan Meyers
8. Isabella Meyers and Thomas Cooper
9. James Cooper and Honora Henry
10. Isabel Cooper and Charles D. Mahaffie, Sr.
11. Charles D. Mahaffie, Jr. and Judith Farrar (my parents)

And, because I keep all these records on geni.com, additional connections are made as data in other family trees is compared to data from my tree. The Freer-Low Family Association records start with Hugo the Patentee, but geni connections suggest at least another five generations back in time.

And so I am once again happily wandering among my ancestors in the near and distant past.

Echoes From the Past: The Season at New London, 1909

I go on occasional kicks of historical and genealogical searching. This is part of my hobby of maintaining an extensive family tree at geni.com that encompasses my Mahaffie, Farrar, Cooper, Becker, Kelly, Bartlett, Williams, Redmond, and Harrison heritage. (To name just a few generations)

This morning, while searching among the New York Times' archives, I came across a society-page article from 1909 that likely mentions my paternal grandmother. It doesn't add anything to my genealogical knowledge, and the Isabel Cooper mentioned may not be my grandmother, but the time and place are right and the subject matter is charming in any case.

The article, Midshipmen Give a Tea at New London (PDF), is from July 18, 1909. It details the summer social scene at the Hotel Griswold, on Eastern Point near New London, Connecticut, which lies across either Long Island Sound or Block Island Sound (depending on how you look at it) from the easternmost tip of Long Island.

New York City, in the days before air conditioning, could be a lousy place to be in the summers. Those who could adjourned to beaches and mountains for much of the summer. Resorts became centers of summer social activity and newspapers reported on the comings and goings and recreational doings of society. It was, I think, somewhat like our present fascination with the personal lives of television, movie and music stars -- except much more G-rated.

In July of 1909, the midshipmen of the warship Tonopah gave an afternoon tea for the guests of the Hotel Griswold "and to a large number of those who make up the summer colony at Eastern Point." It is described as "the red letter day of the season.

The afterdack (sic) of the warships (sic) had been polished until it was as smooth as a ballroom floor and under the gaily colored awnings and flags the young people danced the afternoon away to the music of the Hotel Griswold Orchestra, while the chaperons looked on, nodding approval at the pretty picture.

Along with tea with the Navy, there were tennis tournaments and amateur theatricals. The young woman who may have been my grandmother is listed among the doubles players, paired with a Miss Van Vleck.

Isabel Cooper is also listed as portraying Mrs. Muriel Crosby in a comic opera composed by an Arthur E. Cushman to be sung in the hotel on August 6.

It is called "The Tourists" and the songs are to include only the most popular airs of the day. The first act shows the lawn of the Griswold, with Summer girls flitting about. The second shifts the players to the Prada in Cuba, and this setting gives the actors a chance to wear picturesque costumes, and the men a chance to look mildly ferocious.

The article includes a lengthy listing of who has arrived, who has taken a cottage, and which yachts are in the harbor.

And, in a nod to the latest technology, there is a paragraph of "automobile arrivals" at the hotel. There were four Packards, and one each of Mathewson, Stevens-Duryea, Columbia, Chalmer's Detroit, Stearns, Buick, Hotchkiss, Palmer-Singer, and Winton. Of this random sampling of early automobile makes, I recognize only two.

I am not certain that the "Miss Isabel Cooper" mentioned here is in fact the Isabel Ruth Cooper who later married Charles Delahunt Mahaffie, Sr. and raised Charles Junior (my father). But I think it may be.

My grandmother would have been just a month shy of 17 years old in July of 1909. She was raised in New York and may have summered in Connecticut. She was, by all accounts, a beautiful young woman, and artist and later a model.

She briefly attended Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia, before starting a professional career as an illustrator that found her, starting at age 25, painting tropical fish and fauna as part of a series of scientific expeditions.

I can see her taking part in the summer social scene of New London in 1909; a slim, athletic young woman dancing with midshipmen, playing tennis and performing for other guests. She would have taken it all in with a detached, amused, but friendly air, storing the experience among her catalog of people and places and ways of living that molded the fascinating and broadly interested older woman that I knew, all too briefly.

Meet Cousin Arthur

Astonishingly, I have found a connection, albeit a very distant and tenuous one, between my family and that of one of my cultural heroes: Arthur Adolph Marx, known professionally and with great affection by millions as "Harpo."

As I'm sure I have mentioned in the past, I use geni.com to manage my genealogical research. Geni allows users to create databases of their family trees and is set up to allow linking of trees that have common members. In that way, family trees grow via crowd-sourced genealogy.

And Geni posts daily featured profiles of popular figures from history or popular culture. Users can check to see if there's any connection between the family trees of those personalities and their own.

This weekend, they posted the profiles of four of the five Marx Brothers. Since I am a huge fan, I clicked-through to check. I was shocked to find a connection.

I discovered that Harpo Marx is my first cousin nine times removed's husband's seventh great niece's husband's ex-wife's ex-husband's ex-wife's ex-husband's ex-wife's sister's ex-husband's brother.

As I said,"very distant and tenuous."

The connection goes back to my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother on my father's side, Wibroe Griggs, who was born in 1593 in Buckinghamshire, in England. Wibroe's  niece, Sarah Pierson, was my first cousin, nine times removed. Sarah's husband's seventh great niece was Frances Seymour, a New York City socialite and the second wife of the movie star Henry Fonda. She was mother, by the way, to Peter and Jane Fonda.

This is where the connection depends on the serial marriages of Hollywood folks. Henry Fonda was also married to the actress Margaret Sullavan (Later married to a Kenneth Wagg) who was also married to the agent and producer Leland Heyward who was also married to the socialite Nancy "Slim" Gross who was also married to the Director Howard Hawks who was also married to the actress Dee Hartford whose sister the actress Eden Hartford was once married to Harpo's brother Groucho Marx.

I realize how absurd this "connection" really is, but I have to say I have always felt an affinity for the Marx brothers.

It Seems Possible That I Could Look Dignified

My brother John has turned up a small collection of pictures of our grandfather in the online collection of the Library of Congress.

Our father's father, Charles Delahunt Mahaffie Sr., was a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) from 1930 to 1955 (he was appointed by President Hoover). At some point during that time, I believe, he sat for this portrait. I think he would have been in his late forties or in  his fifties here.

He's very dignified in this photo, and in all others that I've seen. Perhaps there's hope for me?

Of course, my grandfather was a really remarkable man. He was born in 1884 in Olathe Kansas, but moved to Oklahoma as a homesteader as a boy. He graduated from Kingfisher College in 1905 and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After practicing law for a few years, he came to Washington DC and worked for several agencies before becoming an ICC commissioner.

He also married Isabel Ruth Cooper and fathered my Dad, for which I am most grateful.

Fun With History

From time to time I come across a bit of family history out on the great web. This evening, I found a page from Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate of July 18, 1835, announcing a family wedding.


Here on page 232, the first entry under "Marriages," is the announcement of the marriage of one set of my great-great-great-grandparents.

Harrison Otis Henry and Phoebe Maria Gibson were wed on June 18 of 1835, in Rome, New York. Their son Harrison L. Henry married Susan Tucker and fathered Honora Henry, whose brief marriage to James Cooper produced, in 1892, my grandmother Isabel Ruth Cooper.

Purple Prose Enlivens a Tale of the Emerald Diamond

I've been checking through old newspapers at the Library of Congress' Chronicling America site. I'm searching for references to my various forebears; it is a low-return fishing expedition, but great fun.

For example, a search for references to any Mahaffies in California in newspapers from around the turn of the 20th Century has turned up several sports-page notes about a baseball umpire named Mahaffy. I doubt that he is a direct relative, though he may be a very distant cousin. What's great about this, though, is the prose in which I find him.

Here are two paragraphs from Page 42 of the September 30, 1906, edition of the San Francisco Call. William J. Slattery writes about a game between the Portland Beavers and the San Francisco Seals (in first and second in the standings at the time).

Neither team played anything that looked like high art. Errors happened frequently and did a deal of damage. Neither pitcher was there any too strong and and both of them delayed the game as much as possible by indulging in a series of senseless winding ups and warming ups between the rounds.

Maybe it was because of the banishment of Cousin Park Wilson that San Francisco did not perform according to the tips of the wise brigade. Cousin Park assayed to engage in an oratorial contest with Umpire Mahaffy in the eighth spasm and before he realized that the worst was yet to come, the indicator man had already made a mysterious high sign and given Park notice to skidoo. He also informed the leader of the Seals that his pay envelope will be shy five dollars when the next day of reckoning with Cal Ewing is at hand.

The Seals were not doing well in their season series with the Beavers in 1906. The Beavers won this game, 3 to 1, moving to a record of 98-47 and a won/lost percentage of .697. The cellar-dwelling Fresno team, by contrast, was at .335 percent at 51-101.

Field Trip Needed: Mahaffey, PA

I need to make a visit to the Borough of Mahaffey, in western Pennsylvania, somewhat southeast of Punxsutawny. I'm adding it to my list of places to visit to learn more about family history.

View Larger Map

Mahaffey is the only populated place in the US that I know of that is named for a relative of mine. There is a small lake named Mahaffie created by the US Farm Service out in Oklahoma.

I had been aware for some time that there is a place called Mahaffey in Pennsylvania, but it is only recently that my genealogical wanderings led me to a reference to the person it was named for, Robert Mahaffey, who was the grandson of my great-great-great-great-grandfather's brother. That makes him my second cousin, four times removed. It's probably more useful to say he was second cousin to my great-grandfather, Doc Mahaffie.

Back around 1750, a group of Mahaffeys emigrated from Ireland to Pennsylvania, settling originally in Cumberland County. There were either two sets of two brothers who were cousins, or more likely there were four brothers. Records are sketchy; our best source is a family history from the early 20th century.

In any case, one of those original American Mahaffeys was Charles, whose son Andrew changed his name's spelling to Mahaffie and produced JB, who produced Doc, whose son Charles was my grandfather. The elder Charles Mahaffey's brother Thomas, meanwhile, fathered William, who fathered Robert Mahaffey, who appears to have founded the settlement that now bears his name.

I had already shown Robert Mahaffie (1815 - 1900) in my family tree, but it wasn't until I found an extract from Twentieth Century History of Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, and Representative Citizens, by Roland D. Swoope, Jr. (published by Richmond-Arnold Publishing of Chicago in 1911), that I had a reference to a founder of Mahaffie:

Robert Mahaffey equaled his father in enterprise. He engaged also in lumbering and later cleared up a large farm in Bell township and also conducted a general store and in addition, operated a mill. His various enterprises prospered and each one assisted in the developing of the other and ere long many settlers had been attracted to his neighborhood, a village resulted and in his honor was named for the man of energy and progress, who had had the foresight to select this certain section of the wilderness as his place of investment.

Today Mahaffey is something of an also-ran among the many municipalities and boroughs of Pennsylvania. I couldn't find a town government in my Google-searching. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doesn't link to one. And I couldn't find anything via the Pennsylvania League of Cities and Municipalities or the Pennsylvania State Association of Boroughs.

The 2000 US Census found 402 residents; all of them white with a median age of between 39 and 40 years. According to the Bell Township/Mahaffey Borough Joint Comprehensive Plan (found via the PA County Planning e-Library) prepared in 2000, population at Mahaffey reached a peak of 801 in 1920. A lack of economic opportunities, likely tied to the shift away from an agrarian economy in the eastern US, led to high levels of out-migration.

But Mahaffey looks like an interesting place. It sits among the hills and along a mid-sized stream. There are some recreation areas nearby and a Mahaffey Camp, "A Christian Center for Spiritual Growth," up the road.

I think I may need to take a field trip to see the place for myself.

Where I'm From

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking into my genealogy, playing around on a site called Geni which is an on-line family-tree tool. I've looked into family past before, of course, but now that I've started working on the family tree I've found a great deal of material on-line.

As part of this, I've put together a map of the birth-places of my direct ancestors; at least those whose birthplaces I could determine.

The earliest Mahaffies I could find -- they were Mahaffeys back in the 1700s-- were from northern Ireland. There were Beckers, from my Mother's side of the family, born in Germany in the 1800s.

In the US, there was a steady progression west by my branch of the Mahaffie family. They were in Pennsylvania, then Ohio, then Indiana. My Great-Great Grandfather JB Mahaffie started his family in Indiana and then settled in Olathe Kansas in 1857. He was one of the original settlers.

My Great Grandfather George Mahaffie had been born in Indiana. He started his family in Olathe, where my grandfather Charles was born. George took his family west to Oklahoma as homesteaders.

My grandfather was a Rhodes Scholar, studying at Oxford for a time. He became a lawyer and lived and practiced in Oregon before going to Washington DC, where my Father was born. My Grandmother had been born in Washington State, but raised in New York City, where many of her forbears were born.

On my Mother's side, Farrars, Beckers, Bartletts, and Redmonds were mostly around New York. I also had forbears in upstate New York and in Vermont.

If any of these names and dates match names and dates in your family tree (and you are not already part of my family tree), let me know. I'm always eager to expand the tree.

A Look Back at Family History

I'll give some credit this evening to Microsoft and the beta version of their new MSN Search. Though it looks for all the world like an imitation of Google, it did turn up something of great interest to me when I tried the obligatory vanity search on "Mahaffie." The regular search returned the usual plethora of Mahaffie House and Stagecoach Shop hits, so I tried an Image Search on "Mahaffie."

The search returns gave top ranking to a JPEG copy of an old (and unfortunately undated, but likely from 1958) newspaper obituary of Ella Mahaffie, my great-great-aunt (I think). To be fair, this image also turned up in a Google image search, but lower down the page.

The obituary features this photo of the Mahaffie House in Olathe, Kansas, apparently taken before the house became a managed historic site.


I was already, of course, aware of the Mahaffie House and of its status as public property in Olathe. I had also heard mention in the family of "Aunt Ella". I'm not sure I'd seen this clipping, however -- at least not as an adult -- and it has been a pleasure to read through it.

Ella Mae Mahaffie was born in 1869, on the Mahaffie farm at Olathe, one of eight children of J.B. and Lucinda Mahaffie. She apparently grew to be a well-rounded woman and served as an educator all of her professional life. She taught in a "country" school in the last part of the 19th century (one-room schoolhouse?), she taught 3rd and 7th grades in the public schools and served from 1913 until her retirement in 1939 as principal of Park Elementary School, in Kansas City. She also served on the Kansas State Board of Education.

The obituary mentions no college degrees, but notes that Ella Mahaffie continued studying at various universities throughout her career and traveled extensively in the US and Canada and somewhat in Europe as well.

One of Ella's brothers left the farm and took his family, including Charles D. Mahaffie (my grandfather), to Oklahoma. Charles grew up in Oklahoma, studied there and in England and became a lawyer out west. He came to Washington DC for a government job in the early part of the 20th century and eventually gave the world a son, Charles Jr., my Dad. I'm damn glad he did too!

The clipping is part of an on-line collection, History of the Public Schools of Wyandotte County, Kansas - 160 Years Enriching the Minds of Children. There's plenty of good stuff in there, including a set of images of Park School that includes the Plot Plan of the school. Note the careful separate of the girl's and boy's out-houses.