Hacking Away at the Family Tree

Sunny days at the back end of winter generally find me heading out to the woods laden with chainsaw, gasoline and bar oil, looking for fallen trees, broken branches and other dry timber to augment our dwindling woodpile.

This winter’s bad weather pastimes, however, included scrounging around for an altogether different sort of deadwood; in the wake of the recent television series Who Do You Think You Are, my husband and I have been researching our family trees.

In case you’ve been hibernating, or perhaps vacationing in someplace completely lacking technology (and where exactly is that, in this day and age? Even the nomads of outer Mongolia have satellite dishes), each episode of Who Do You Think You Are - which is essentially a glorified infomercial for the genealogy website Ancestry.com –researches the family of a famous person, the kind of celebrity you might run across in the pages of People magazine; so far we have learned that actress Sarah Jessica Parker is descended from a woman who survived the Salem witch trials; country singer Tim McGraw’s colonial ancestors rubbed elbows with George Washington and - in a delightful coincidence - the ancestors of Elvis Presley; and comedian/talk show host Rosie O’Donnell’s family immigrated from a Kildare workhouse after surviving one of the worst plagues in history, the Irish potato famine of the mid 1800’s.

Pretty thought-provoking stuff. Who are we? We took the bait and signed onto the Ancestry.com website for our two week free trial. Keith wanted to learn anything he could about his family; however, being a consummate Anglophile, I had a definite goal in mind: I hoped to find at least one link to Britain.

So to our respective computers we retired on a recent cold and windy Saturday. On the website’s blank family tree, I typed in all the ancestors I knew – the Sicilian grandfather on my dad’s side, the German great-grandparents on my Mom’s side.

Grandpa Ippolito – who changed his name to Burk when he came to America in the late 1800’s - never listed his parents so that line was a dead end for the present. Family legend has it that he may have come to America to escape something or someone. Do I really want to go there?

In any case, the rechristened Frank Burk became a grocer in 1920’s Middletown. He owned Burk’s Grocery on the corner of Broad Street and Girard Avenue, and married a gal of German descent whose maiden name was Buerkle. I followed the Buerkle line as far back as Switzerland in the 1600’s. That was interesting, and probably explains my penchant for chocolate (now at least I have an excuse).

Mom’s mother, who grew up in Rockport Indiana, was German through and through. Great-great grandfather Balthazar Wetzel came to this country in the mid-1800’s from Baden-Baden, I learned, on a ship called the Duetschland. Baden-Baden is located on the edge of the famous Black Forest, and I’m entertained by the thought of being a daughter of that primeval woodland. Bonus: I actually have a relative named Balthazar. I just like how it sounds.

Balthazar’s son Jacob was a pastry chef who studied the art in St. Louis before coming back to Rockport. As seems appropriate for a baker, he was a rather robust individual, and after his funeral – which was held in the old family home in Rockport – the pallbearers, coffin and contents all went crashing through the porch when the wooden floorboards, literally in this case, gave up the ghost under the strain. This is stuff you don’t find on Ancestry.com, but it was another family legend I remembered when I ran across Jacob’s name in the records.

What did all these people have in common? To my chagrin – not one of them was English. That left Mom’s father, whose last name was Cape.

Sidney Newton Cape was a papermaker who was born in Lincoln Nebraska and raised in Coffeyville Kansas; he came east and met Rose Wetzel, my grandmother (who worked in the family bakery in Rockport as a kid, and could wrangle a big pan of yeasty dough into a mean loaf of bread well into her 80’s). In their old age, when they lived next door, Granny would wheel Gramps out to the patio in his wheelchair where he would smoke his daily cigar allotment -two, on a good day- and reminisce. He remembered seeing the notorious Dalton Gang “layed out on the street” after they attempted to rob a bank in Coffeyville and met with a crew of outraged citizens who collectively uttered the 1890’s equivalent of “oh no you didn’t, ” ambushed the Dalton boys outside the bank and blew them away (if you google Coffeyville and go to the town website, you can learn all about the Dalton Defenders museum).

Sidney’s parents were Charles Edward Cape Sr. and Jennie Hinch Cape and..that…is..where…it…stopped. There I was – floundering around in the mid-1800’s with nary a Brit in sight. The little green “hint” leaves beside the names on the Ancestry.com family trees waved mockingly at me. I was Germanic, I was Sicilian…but not a Celt. I had no link to Shakespeare, Robin Hood, William Wallace, Sir Walter Raleigh, William B. Yeats, either Queen Elizabeth, Lily Langtry or Jack the Ripper, for that matter. Rats.

I tore myself away from Kansas and wandered over to Keith’s corner of cyberspace. He swung his computer around to face me, and I beheld a veritable forest of family trees. To make matters worse, they were all…ALL! British!

Honestly, the guy is so WASP-y it’s a wonder he doesn’t buzz when he walks.

Not only that – the branches of his tree were loaded with some really succulent fruit – great names like William Tell Lewis and Truthful Lewis; a family member who began as a missionary and ended up a pirate and even a famous ghost, Ocean Born Mary (yes, you can google her, too).

I retired to the living room couch in defeat. Eventually Keith joined me, not defeated. We watched television, and I stewed. Ghosts. Hmpf. I replayed his oh-so-british family names in my head. He’d gotten back as far as Cary or Carey in the 1500’s, and I knew that name from somewhere. Then it hit me. Anne Boleyn, the unlucky second wife of Henry the Eighth – and the first one beheaded –had an older sister named Mary, who had been Henry’s mistress before he fell in love with Anne. Mary was married to – wait for it – one William Carey. And if contemporary reports can be believed, neither of their two children resembled Mr. Carey.

I sat up in dismay, staring over at Keith as he sprawled dozing on the couch. Could it possibly be that my lanky, easygoing WASP-y husband was related to the evil, megalomaniacal Henry, my least favorite English monarch? I was intrigued and horrified at the same time, and spent the rest of the weekend addressing him as “your Majesty.” He took it well.

As of this writing, I’m still in 1800’s Kansas; a real, not virtual, trip to Coffeyville is probably in my future if I’m going to figure out my past. In the meantime, around my husband at least, I’m going to watch my neck.