William Alexander Smith

He was three years old when his parents made the long wagon journey from Conway, Massachusetts, to the Western Reserve of Ohio in 1817. In 1856 he moved his own family on to Marshall County, Iowa, where government land was still to be had, and broke a farm on the prairie east of Marshalltown that remained in the Smith family for three generations. He was a founding trustee of his rural school district.

A wheelwright of Maidstone, in Kent, he emigrated with his bride in 1849, sailing from London to New York and going inland to Licking County, Ohio, where English acquaintances had settled. In 1857 he moved on to Marshalltown, Iowa, where he opened a wagon shop on Main Street that he kept until his retirement. He never lost his Kentish speech, and his grandchildren remembered him reciting the names of the Maidstone church bells.

He was born at Trois-Rivieres into a family that had farmed the St. Lawrence shore for five generations. Like many Quebecois of his generation he looked to the United States when land at home grew scarce, and in 1867 he brought his family first to the French-Canadian colony at Kankakee, Illinois, and then, in 1871, to a farm of his own near Leon, in Decatur County, Iowa. He is buried in the Catholic cemetery at Leon.

Born Marie-Louise, she was the daughter of an old New France family whose line reaches back to the earliest settlement of the St. Lawrence valley. She crossed into the United States with her husband and children in 1867 and spent her last four decades on the Iowa farm, where she was the family's link to the old language and the old faith; she said her rosary in French to the end of her life. Her portrait, taken at the Ellinwood studio in Leon about 1900, shows her in her seventies. Through her the line runs back to Nicolas de Rousse, who came from Perche to New France in 1665, and his wife Marie Aubert, a King's Daughter.

Born into a Pennsylvania-German farming family in Lancaster County, he took his young family west by stages in the late 1850s, spending a decade at St. Joseph, Missouri, where he freighted goods for the overland trade, before settling for good on a farm near Panora, in Guthrie County, Iowa, in 1871. He farmed there thirty years and was known as a great teller of stories of the freighting days. His portrait, taken at the Carpenter studio in Panora in his old age, shows the full white beard he wore for his last quarter-century, and it is signed "Joseph Boyer" in his own hand.

She was born at Hummelstown, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, of Pennsylvania-German stock, and married Joseph Boyer at Harrisburg in 1851. Her portrait taken about 1875 shows her at mid-life, shortly after the family settled at Panora, Iowa. She bore six children, four of whom lived to adulthood, and was remembered for doctoring half the township with herbs from her garden.

He was born into slavery in Williamson County, Tennessee, about 1842; as with most who were enslaved, no record of his birth was made, and his story can be documented only from Emancipation forward. He and Harriet solemnized their marriage before a Freedmen's Bureau official in 1866, among the first legal marriages of the county's freedpeople. He came to Nashville with his family about 1885, worked as a drayman, and by 1890 had bought the lot on Jefferson Street where the family home stood for sixty years. The records that survive show a man who could not be made to sell that lot in any hard year.

She was born into slavery in Williamson County about 1846. The Vaughn surname appears first in her 1866 marriage record; who her parents were, the surviving records do not say, and the line cannot yet be traced further — a silence that is itself part of the family's history. In freedom she took in laundry, raised four children, and was a founding member of a burial society among the women of her church.

He was born into slavery in Davidson County about 1835 and learned carpentry as an enslaved craftsman. After Emancipation he worked as a carpenter in Nashville, where the trades he had been forced to practice became his living on his own terms; city directories list him at his own address on Gay Street from 1870. He and Celia had married under slavery, a union the law then refused to record, and they registered it formally in 1866.

She appears in the records only as Celia, the name she carried out of slavery; whatever family name her parents bore was never written down. She washed and sewed for pay, raised three children, and lived to hold her great-grandchildren. Her granddaughter remembered that she would not speak of the years before freedom except to name them "the old times."

He was born in the Molotschna colony a generation after his father's family helped found it, and he farmed its black earth for fifty years. At fifty-four, rather than see his sons conscripted, he sold the farm and led the household to America in the emigration of 1875, taking land at Mountain Lake, Minnesota. He served the new congregation as its first song leader, lining out the old hymns from memory.

He was born in Ross County, Ohio, and moved with his father's household to Page County, Iowa, in 1856, when the county was raw prairie. He planted one of the early orchards of the district and later worked propagating stock for the great nurseries at Shenandoah, whose catalogs carried Page County fruit across the plains states. His portrait, taken about 1880, shows the patriarchal beard by which the whole township knew him. He served two terms as a county road supervisor.

He was born on the family farm at Conway, in the hill country of western Massachusetts, and in 1817 joined the stream of New England families moving to the Western Reserve of Ohio, taking up land at Ashtabula. He drove the whole way with two ox teams, his wife, and three children, and in later life he liked to say the journey took thirty-one days and cost him one broken axle.

He was born into the Mennonite community of the Vistula delta near Danzig, in West Prussia, where the family name was written Rempel. When he was a boy of eleven his parents joined the migration of Prussian Mennonites to the newly opened Molotschna colony in South Russia, arriving in 1804 among the colony's founding wave, and he farmed at Halbstadt for the rest of his life. It was his grandson Heinrich who carried the family on to America seventy years later.

He was born in Ross County, Ohio, four years after his parents came over the mountains from Virginia, and farmed there until 1856, when he took his household on to Page County, Iowa. His tintype portrait, made about 1865 when he was in his late fifties, is the oldest photograph the family possesses. He helped organize the first Methodist class in his Iowa township, and meetings were held in his front room until a church was built.

He was born at Hadley and removed as a young man to the new hill town of Conway, where he cleared a farm and was chosen deacon of the church in 1788, an office he held for thirty-six years. In the autumn of 1777 he marched with the Hampshire County militia to reinforce the Continental Army in the Saratoga campaign, and he drew a soldier's pay for forty-two days' service. The muster roll bearing his name survives, and his powder horn, carved with his initials, remained in the family into the twentieth century.

He was born at Batiscan and moved down-river to Trois-Rivieres, where he farmed and carted for the parish. The Marchand line before him reaches back four further generations at Batiscan and Champlain, to the first years of the seigneurial settlement; those earlier generations are recorded in the parish registers of New France but are not carried individually in this pedigree.

He was born in Loudoun County, Virginia, where his people, of English Quaker descent, had farmed since the mid-1700s. In 1804 he took his family over the mountains to the newly opened lands of Ross County, Ohio — a move made by many Virginia Quaker families who wished to farm free soil. He was received into the Fairfield Monthly Meeting there, though his grandchildren drifted to the Methodists.

A vine-dresser's son of Edenkoben, in the Rhenish Palatinate, he emigrated with his wife and infant daughter in 1738, sailing from Rotterdam to Philadelphia and taking the oath of allegiance at the courthouse there that September. He took up land in the Oley Valley of Berks County among his countrymen, and the farm he cleared stayed under Sterner names for four generations. He was a founding subscriber of the Oley Reformed church.

He was born at Tourouvre, in the Perche — the small French province that, for its size, sent more settlers to Canada than any other — and crossed to New France in 1665 as a hired man under a three-year engagement. When his term was out he took a concession of riverfront land in the seigneury of Batiscan, married, and cleared his farm from the forest. Nine generations of this family's line descend from the household he and Marie Aubert established on the St. Lawrence.

Orphaned young at Rouen, she crossed to New France in 1669 as one of the filles du roi — the "King's Daughters," young women whose passage and fifty-livre dowry Louis XIV paid to people his colony. Within three months of landing she had married the Perche emigrant Nicolas de Rousse before the notary, and she raised seven children on their riverfront farm at Batiscan — one of the roughly eight hundred women from whom the great majority of French Canada descends.

She was born at Rouen, in Normandy, and orphaned young. In 1669 she sailed for New France as one of the filles du roi — the "King's Daughters," young women of small means whose passage and dowry were paid by Louis XIV to people his new colony. She carried a royal dowry of fifty livres and a small chest of goods, and within three months of landing at Quebec she had married Nicolas de Rousse before the notary. She bore ten children on the Batiscan farm, of whom seven lived, and died there a grandmother many times over — one of the roughly eight hundred women from whom the great majority of French Canada descends.

A clothier's son of Marlborough, Wiltshire, who joined the Great Migration of Puritan families, sailing from London in 1635 and settling at Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he served the church as deacon for thirty years. Through his mother, Elizabeth Thornbury, the family's line passes into the English gentry and the medieval nobility beyond — he is the gateway generation of this pedigree.

A clothier's son of Marlborough, in Wiltshire, he joined the Great Migration of Puritan families to New England, sailing from London with his wife and infant daughter in the spring of 1635 and settling at Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There he was granted a house lot and planting ground, was admitted a freeman in 1638, and was chosen deacon of the Ipswich church in 1652, an office he held for thirty years. His will, proved in 1689, disposes of the farm, the loom that had crossed the ocean with him, and "my great Bible" — the book, with his births and deaths entered in the flyleaf, was still in family hands when the nineteenth-century town history was written. Through his mother, Elizabeth Thornbury, his line — and so this family's — reaches back into the English gentry and the medieval nobility beyond.

The earliest documented bearer of the Smith name in this line — a clothier of Marlborough, in Wiltshire, under Elizabeth I and James I, who bought wool off the downs and put it out to the town's weavers, and served as churchwarden of St. Mary's in 1619. The surname itself, England's most common, began as the occupational name of the smith at his forge; this family's particular line can be carried no further back than Richard.

A clothier of Marlborough, in Wiltshire, in the last years of Elizabeth I and the reigns of James I and Charles I, he bought wool off the downs and put it out to the weavers of the town. He is the earliest documented bearer of the Smith name in this line — the surname itself, England's most common, began as the occupational name of the smith at his forge, and this family's particular line can be carried no further back than Richard. He served as churchwarden of St. Mary's, Marlborough, in 1619, and his signature stands in the vestry book.

She was the daughter of Henry Thornbury, gentleman, of Marlborough, and Anne Ashfield, and she is the gateway through which this pedigree passes from the town families of Wiltshire into the armigerous gentry — and, through her mother's Ashfield and Neville descent, back to the earls of Westmorland, the house of Lancaster, and the medieval royal lines of England and Europe. Gateway marriages of just this kind, a gentle daughter marrying into a prospering trade family, are how most documented royal descents reach ordinary American families.

Knighted in the reign of Elizabeth I, he served as a justice of the peace for Oxfordshire and twice as escheator. The Ashfield arms — argent, a fess between three ash keys vert — hung in the Tetsworth church until the eighteenth century.

First Earl of Westmorland, created by Richard II in 1397, and one of the great magnates of the English north. He backed Henry Bolingbroke's seizure of the crown in 1399 and was rewarded with the office of Earl Marshal. By his two marriages he fathered more than twenty children and married them so widely that historians call the web of his descendants "the Neville connection"; through his daughter Cecily he was grandfather of Kings Edward IV and Richard III. His tomb, with its alabaster effigy, stands in the church at Staindrop near Raby Castle.

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Countess of Westmorland, she was the daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, by Katherine Swynford — born before their marriage and made legitimate, with her Beaufort brothers, by royal patent in 1397. She was thus a granddaughter of King Edward III and half-sister of King Henry IV. A patron of books and of the poet Thomas Hoccleve, she raised at Raby one of the largest noble households of the age, and from her children descend the houses of York and, through her granddaughter Margaret Beaufort, Tudor. She is buried beside her mother in Lincoln Cathedral.

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Duke of Lancaster, third surviving son of King Edward III and the richest nobleman in England, he dominated English politics in the last years of his father's reign and the reign of his nephew Richard II. By his first marriage he was father of King Henry IV, and the royal houses of Lancaster, York, and Tudor all descend from him. His long liaison with Katherine Swynford, whom he at last married in 1396, produced the Beaufort line through which this pedigree runs. He is buried beside his first wife in Old St Paul's Cathedral, London.

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Duchess of Lancaster, born Katherine de Roet, daughter of a Hainault herald in Queen Philippa's service; her sister Philippa married the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Governess to John of Gaunt's daughters, then his mistress through two decades of scandal, she became his third wife in 1396 — the only governess in English history to become a duchess, and, through the legitimated Beauforts, an ancestor of every English monarch since 1485. She is buried in Lincoln Cathedral.

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King of England for fifty years — victor of Crécy and Poitiers and founder of the Order of the Garter. So many of his descendants married into the gentry that genealogists reckon him the ancestor of most people of English descent with a documented medieval pedigree; this family descends from him through his son John of Gaunt, Joan Beaufort, and the Nevilles of Raby.

King of England from 1327 until his death fifty years later, one of the longest and most consequential reigns of the Middle Ages. He restored royal authority after the disaster of his father's deposition, opened the Hundred Years' War with France, won the great victories of Crécy and Poitiers, and founded the Order of the Garter about 1348. So many of his descendants married into the English gentry that genealogists reckon him the ancestor of most people of English descent with a documented medieval pedigree — this family among them, through his son John of Gaunt.

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Queen of England, daughter of Count William I of Hainault. She was beloved in England for her gentleness and her charity; the chronicler Froissart, who served in her household, tells how she knelt before the king at Calais in 1347 to beg the lives of the town's six burghers. The Queen's College, Oxford, founded by her chaplain in 1341, is named for her. Her tomb is in Westminster Abbey.

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Queen of England, daughter of King Philip IV of France. Estranged from her husband, she led, with Roger Mortimer, the invasion of 1326 that deposed him — the only successful invasion of England between 1066 and 1688 — and governed as regent until her son Edward III took power in 1330. She lived out her last decades in honorable retirement and is buried in the Greyfriars church, London.

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King of England from 1272 to 1307, called "Longshanks" and "the English Justinian" for his great statutes. He conquered Wales and ringed it with castles — Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech — summoned the Model Parliament of 1295, and spent his last years in the Scottish wars against Wallace and Bruce. He died on the march north, within sight of Scotland.

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Queen of England, daughter of King Ferdinand III of Castile. She accompanied her husband on crusade to the Holy Land — tradition says she sucked the poison from his wound at Acre — and their marriage of thirty-six years was, by royal standards, a love match. When she died at Harby the grieving king raised a memorial cross at each place her funeral procession rested on the road to Westminster; three of the twelve Eleanor Crosses still stand, and Charing Cross in London keeps the memory of another.

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King of England for fifty-six years, from 1216 to 1272 — the longest reign of any medieval English king. Crowned at nine in the midst of civil war, he grew into a pious, art-loving, politically maladroit ruler whose quarrels with his barons produced Simon de Montfort's parliament of 1265. His greatest monument is Westminster Abbey, which he rebuilt in the Gothic style as a shrine for Edward the Confessor; he is buried there.

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Queen of England, daughter of Count Raymond Berengar IV of Provence; her three sisters were also queens, of France, Germany, and Sicily. Cultivated and strong-willed, she was devoted to her husband and children and deeply unpopular in London, whose citizens once pelted her barge from London Bridge. She ended her life a nun at Amesbury.

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King of England from 1199 to 1216, youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. His reign lost Normandy to France and drove his barons to revolt; at Runnymede in June 1215 he set his seal to Magna Carta, the great charter of liberties from which the tradition of limited government descends. He died in the midst of civil war and is buried in Worcester Cathedral, where his tomb effigy is the earliest of an English king to survive.

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Queen of England, heiress of the county of Angoulême, married to King John when she was perhaps twelve. Widowed in 1216, she returned to France and married Hugh de Lusignan, to whom she had been betrothed before John carried her off. She took the veil at Fontevraud, where her effigy lies near those of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

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King of England from 1154 to 1189, first of the Plantagenet kings, ruler of an empire that ran from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. His legal reforms — itinerant royal justices, trial by jury, the common law itself — outlasted every conquest; his quarrel with Thomas Becket, ending in the archbishop's murder at Canterbury in 1170, shadowed his reign. He died at Chinon, warring with his own sons, and lies at Fontevraud Abbey beside Eleanor of Aquitaine.

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Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right and the most powerful woman of the twelfth century — queen first of France and then of England, mother of Richard the Lionheart and King John, patron of the troubadours, and, into her eighties, the working matriarch of the Plantagenet empire. Her effigy at Fontevraud Abbey shows her reading a book.

Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right and queen, successively, of France and of England — the most powerful woman of the twelfth century. She rode on the Second Crusade, had her first marriage annulled, married Henry Plantagenet within eight weeks, and bore him eight children, including two kings. Imprisoned sixteen years for backing her sons' revolt, she emerged in her seventies to govern England for Richard the Lionheart and ranged across Europe arranging royal marriages into her eightieth year. Her effigy at Fontevraud shows her reading a book — fittingly, for the great patron of the troubadours.

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Daughter of King Henry I of England, married as a child to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V — whence her lifelong style of "Empress" — and, widowed, to Geoffrey of Anjou. Named her father's heir, she fought her cousin Stephen through the long civil war remembered as the Anarchy, held London briefly as "Lady of the English," and lived to see her son crowned as Henry II. Her epitaph at Rouen reads: "Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring."

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King of England from 1100 to 1135, youngest son of William the Conqueror — called "Beauclerc" for his learning. An able, ruthless administrator, he founded the Exchequer and gave England thirty-five years of peace. The drowning of his only legitimate son in the White Ship disaster of 1120 left his daughter Matilda his heir, and his death — of "a surfeit of lampreys," the chroniclers say — opened the civil war of Stephen and Matilda.

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Queen of England, born Edith, daughter of King Malcolm III of Scotland and Saint Margaret. Her marriage to Henry I joined the Norman kings to the ancient royal house of Wessex — through her mother she descended from Edmund Ironside and Alfred the Great — a union contemporaries celebrated as the healing of the Conquest. She was a noted patron of music, architecture, and the poor, washing the feet of lepers in her own chambers.

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Duke of Normandy who invaded England in 1066, defeated King Harold at Hastings, and was crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day — the last successful conqueror of England. He remade the kingdom with Norman lords, castles, and cathedrals, and the great survey he ordered in 1086 became the Domesday Book. The line reaches him through his youngest son, King Henry I.

Duke of Normandy who invaded England in 1066, defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, and was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day — the last successful conqueror of England. He remade the kingdom with Norman lords, castles, and cathedrals, and in 1086 ordered the great survey of his realm that became the Domesday Book. He is buried at Caen in the abbey he founded.

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Queen of England and Duchess of Normandy, daughter of Count Baldwin V of Flanders and granddaughter of a king of France — and herself a descendant of Alfred the Great and of Charlemagne, the two great streams this pedigree follows upward from her. She governed Normandy ably in William's long absences and was crowned queen at Westminster in 1068. She is buried at Caen in the Abbaye aux Dames, her own foundation.

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Queen of Scots, born in exile in Hungary, granddaughter of King Edmund Ironside of England. Pious, learned, and charitable, she reformed the Scottish church, fed orphans from her own table, and founded the ferry across the Forth — Queensferry — for pilgrims to St Andrews. She died three days after her husband and was canonized as Saint Margaret in 1250; through her the blood of the West Saxon kings, back to Alfred the Great, returned to the English throne in her daughter Matilda.

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Son of King Edmund Ironside, carried into exile as an infant when Cnut conquered England, and raised at the courts of Sweden, Kiev, and Hungary. Recalled in 1057 as heir to Edward the Confessor, he died within days of landing in England; his daughter Margaret fled to Scotland, and through her the line of the West Saxon kings — Edmund Ironside, Æthelred, and behind them Alfred the Great — descends into this pedigree.

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King of England in 1016, son of Æthelred the Unready. In one furious year he fought the Danish invader Cnut in five pitched battles — the byname "Ironside" was his soldiers' tribute — before defeat at Assandun forced him to divide the kingdom. He died within weeks, leaving Cnut all England, and his infant sons were carried abroad; from the elder of them this pedigree's West Saxon line continues.

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King of England from 978 to 1016. His byname is a pun lost in translation — Old English "unraed," meaning ill-counseled, set against his given name, "noble counsel." His long reign buckled under renewed Danish invasion, bought off with ever larger payments of Danegeld, and he died in London with Cnut's army at the gates. He was the father both of Edmund Ironside, in this line, and of Edward the Confessor.

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The Viking chieftain — Norse tradition names him Hrolf the Walker, too big for any horse to carry — who raided up the Seine until, by the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte about 911, the king of the Franks granted him the lands at the river's mouth that became Normandy: the land of the Northmen. He was baptized, took the name Robert, and founded the ducal line that produced William the Conqueror in the fifth generation. Through him this pedigree reaches back into the Viking age.

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Count of Flanders from 879 to 918, called "the Bald" after his grandfather the king of the Franks. He held the county through the worst of the Viking storm, ringing it with the fortress towns — Bruges among them — from which Flanders' later greatness grew. His marriage to a daughter of Alfred the Great joined the blood of Wessex and of Charlemagne in one line: the line this pedigree follows.

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First Count of Flanders, called "Iron Arm." A minor Frankish official, he eloped in 861 with Judith, the twice-widowed young daughter of King Charles the Bald — she was carried off, the annals say, "at her own instigation." The furious king relented after the Pope interceded, married them properly at Auxerre, and set Baldwin to guard the coast against the Vikings: the beginning of Flanders.

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Daughter of Charles the Bald, King of the West Franks, and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne. Married at twelve to the aging Æthelwulf, King of Wessex — stepmother, briefly, to the boy who would be Alfred the Great — then to his son, she scandalized two kingdoms by eloping at about seventeen with Baldwin Iron Arm. Through her the Carolingian line runs into Flanders and so down this pedigree.

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King of Wessex who saved his kingdom from the Viking "Great Heathen Army" at Edington in 878, fortified England with a network of burhs, founded a navy, issued a law code, and began the written English prose tradition — the only English monarch remembered as "the Great." The family descends from him through his youngest daughter Ælfthryth, who married Baldwin II of Flanders.

King of the West Saxons from 871 to 899 — the only English monarch remembered as "the Great." He saved Wessex from the Viking Great Heathen Army, winning the decisive battle of Edington in 878, fortified the kingdom with a network of burhs, founded a navy, issued a law code, and taught himself Latin in his thirties so he could translate the books he thought "most needful for men to know" — beginning the written English prose tradition. From his line came the first kings of a united England, and through his daughter Ælfthryth his blood runs down this pedigree to the present day.

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King of the Franks and Lombards who united most of western Europe under one rule and was crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day, 800 — the first emperor in the West since the fall of Rome, and the figure from whom nearly every documented medieval royal descent, this family's included, ultimately runs. The line reaches him through the Beaufort and Neville descent of the paternal Smith gateway, forty generations from the subject.

King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and, from his coronation by Pope Leo III in St Peter's on Christmas Day of the year 800, Emperor — the first in the West since the fall of Rome. He united most of western Europe under one rule, drove the revival of learning remembered as the Carolingian renaissance, and stands at the head of European royal genealogy: nearly every documented medieval royal descent, this family's included, passes through him. He was buried in his own octagonal chapel at Aachen, where his throne still stands. He is the deepest firmly documented ancestor in this lineage but one — his father and grandfather close the line.

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Duke and prince of the Franks and mayor of the palace — the effective ruler of Francia for a quarter-century, though he never took the title of king. His byname, "the Hammer," was earned at the battle of Tours in 732, where his army turned back the Umayyad advance into western Europe. Grandfather of Charlemagne, he is the deepest documented ancestor in this lineage — forty-two generations, by the reckoning of this report, from the subject.

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