I have heard some very interesting stories of my maternal ancestors and it really makes me curious to find out whether or not they are true. The ancestor pictured at the left, my great-great-great Grandfather George H. Williams, married three times, and it is from one of the children of the first wife, Mary Ann Rogers, that I am descended, that being William Rogers Williams, my great-great Grandfather. All in all, this man had 12 children by three wives (Mary Ann Rogers, Maria A. Shaw and Harriet M. Thomas), and I heard a tale of one - or maybe it's both? - wives not being inclined to be terribly friendly to the children of the first wife. I seem to recall hearing that those kids were sent off to work in the mills where so many children labored under horrific conditions. Two of those sons would eventually enlist to go fight the Civil War and it seems to me that I also heard that my great-great grandfather also tried running away to enlist but was found to be too young, and so he was sent back home. Not sure how true these stories are, but they certainly make for fascinating family stories. Great-great-great Grandfather Williams was the only offspring of John and Sarah Ball Williams, who married in 1814. In 1815, John supposedly died of yellow fever in New Orleans en route to England to settle a family estate. What he was doing in New Orleans when he lived in Portsmouth, NH is beyond me. Sarah would eventually remarry someone named John Matthews and gave birth to 8 more children, so somewhere, we no doubt have some Matthews relatives with whom we share the same four times great grandmother but have different four times great grandfathers. An old letter written by my maternal grandmother's cousin Anna Mae said that this four times great grandfather's name was also George Henry Williams and that he married someone named Georgianna Ball, daughter of the Governor of New Hampshire, and that he was a ship's captain in His Majesty's Royal Navy in the War of 1812 and was taken prisoner at Portsmouth. The story has it in Anna Mae's letter that he decided to stay in America because of his marriage, and in so doing, gave up "substantial land holdings in England". Well, she obviously got the names wrong, either that, or the information that I am getting from a web site detailing the Ball family genealogy is incorrect. I do not know. More questions than answers at this point, to say the least........and the fact that John Williams was en route to England to settle an estate when he died also leaves me wondering: whose estate? How much could it have been worth for him to travel so far from home to settle it? Was he named as an heir or executor of a will? What's that story all about and how on earth did he end up in New Orleans, bound for England?
These are my great-great Grandfather Williams's two older brothers, John Thomas Williams and George Henry Williams, Jr. They apparently fled one of their father's not so nice step-mothers to go fight in the Civil War. John, as photographed here, rose to the rank of Corporal. George fought for a year and left. George would eventually end up in Cleveland, where he apparently suffered some kind of industrial accident and he would eventually follow the rest of the family to Oregon, where they had moved after the Civil War. I try to picture what life was like in Beaverton, Oregon in those days. Was it sort of the Wild West? My guess is that what brought people out there was lumbering, since trees were abundant and the west was growing rapidly after the war years. It was probably a very different life from what they knew out east in New Hampshire, far more
rough and tumble and full of lumberjacks and watering holes, as one would expect of such a place. Still, it must have been exciting to migrate out west and start a new life after the war. Eventually all but my great-great grandparents would relocate out there. Someday I would love to go out to Beaverton and see the city where my ancestors relocated and lived the rest of their lives. John T. Williams co-founded the Beaverton Bank in a building that still survives now as the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Here is a photo of that building on the left. I would love to walk in and say that this building is a part of my ancestral heritage, albeit not
a direct relative, but still, to know that this building still survives to this day is pretty neat. This branch of the Williams family seems to have enjoyed some success and I do not know if there are any descendants of them still alive, something else I would love to find out and meet them, since they would be distant cousins of mine. Williams is a fairly common name, admittedly, so it would be tough to track down any surviving relatives unless I knew the names of the children of my great-great grandfather's siblings who moved out there. Their sister Georgianna married a Civil War veteran named Elisha Jordan, who served in the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery, and his story seems most curious because when I got his Civil War records, it said that he was not born by that name, which again begs more questions like, well, by what name was he born? Who are his relatives and what were his parents names and why does it say that he was not born by that name? Well, a search for another time. For now, I am very curious to know more about my maternal grandmother's people, probably the one grandparent I know the least about genealogically, and that has me wanting to do more research into her family history to find out who they were, where they came from and why. Fascinating what I have been able to come up with so far, but so much more to learn.
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