Tracing the Family History

    Genealogy is a fascination for many people. Starting with the three most important people—me, myself and I--the researcher starts tracing his or her tiny branch back to ever larger offshoots with the goal of finding their roots. But, of course, there are a lot of branches to follow in this pursuit when you start factoring in the paternal and maternal sides of the equation. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents—all of the related kin--and pretty soon it seems that everyone’s a shirttail relation. Like the chronologies in the Old Testament, there’s a lot of begetting.

   My own view is that a family tree is only neat, orderly, and easy to follow back in time if you limit the search to a single thread, confining your sleuthing to one namesake. Otherwise, the different family trees soon become a tangled forest. Those who share this view would, I suspect, follow the path of their last name, giving the patriarchal side a preference it might not otherwise deserve. Case in point. I’m a Horton, yet once I get past my great-grandparents the allegiance falters. As it did with them.

    My great-grandfather, Rollin Horton, was sired by Stephen and Elizabeth. She was a Duncan and that maternal affiliation seemed to have had a strong pull with him. It’s not a bad tree to be part of. In the history of our fair community, the offspring this generation of Duncans—Elizabeth, her sister Sarah (Grant) and three brothers (John, James and George) would sprout such illustrious last names as Benjamin, Copeland, Dillingham, Finlan, Haire Clark, Backhuus, BeVier, Reyhl as well as the original moniker Duncan.

    My great-grandmother, Blanche Horton, started off as a Huck, with her maternal grandparents being the Durfee clan. The death of her father when she was young resulted in her being raised by those grandparents, hence her great affection for them. Growing up, I heard a lot about the Durfees. Her mother, Helen, meanwhile married a Cheney, while her older sister, Pearl became a Jeffrey.

    If I wander over to my grandmother, Ila Mae Horton’s tree—Bements and Coffeys—or my mother’s Amo branch, I’m in a different part of the genealogical forest.

    But getting back to the Horton paternal side--through no effort on my own, I learned (as I mentioned in an earlier column) that my paternal bloodline has been traced back to Peter Horton, an enterprising Englishman who arrived on the shores of eastern Long Island in the year of 1640.   

    (Note: the adjective enterprising was a liberty I took with no valid research to back it up. I just figure anyone getting on a boat back then and taking off to a new and unknown world, unless the King’s justice was on his heels, had to have been enterprising. If not, then naïve. Anyway, I prefer to think of my original American forefather as a stout-hearted chap, not an inept and incompetent fellow.)

    One night while surfing the internet, suffering from curiosity, I clicked on an icon that promised me a peak at my ancestry. I typed in the name HORTON in answer to the question ‘what does this last name mean?’ and ‘where did your family originate?’

    As I did so, I harbored a secret hope that a few of my distant kin were illustrious; might even be part of the nobility.

     What I learned is this: “Horton is an Anglo-Saxon surname, deriving from the common English place-name Horton. It derives from Old English horu 'dirt' and tūn 'settlement, farm, estate', presumably meaning 'farm on muddy soil'.”

   Well by God, so much for pretension. I know all about farming on muddy soil. A little further research indicated that there were a few Hortons in merry old England who rose above these circumstances and became gentry, meaning they had others who did their farming for them. So perhaps there is a long-ago branch of the tree where the idle rich can be found. However, I suspect if I were to trace my specific parentage back to the mother country, it would be mud rather than manor that I found.

     But the reality of my more recent ancestry—that which I am aware of--is that we were (are) tillers of the soil. Beyond that, I don’t know what the earlier generations of my forefathers and mothers did, or who they were. I presume, though, that as the family migrated westward out of Long Island, a trek I assume was taken in search of brighter prospects, farming was (for most of them) their stock in trade.

     But then agriculture is a common heritage for many families. Most of us during the past two-to-three generations have gradually moved away from that connection. Yet it remains, lingering in the background, a common bond that we share; an elemental link.  While I’ve spent most of my adult life as a newspaperman, I grew up on a dairy farm in Conway Township. The acorn, in this instance--despite initial youthful vanity to the contrary--didn’t end up falling too far from the oak.

     Yet that’s OK. I learned, even without the effort of genealogy, that if we go back far enough, we’re all tangled up in some way or the other in our shared or similar roots. And while we may have an impulse to connect ourselves to the manor house, however slim the thread may be, it might be wise for us to remember that the life which sustains and nourishes us —our food and substance--springs forth from the soil.

    And despite all of our pretensions—despite a desire to exalt ourselves above others, to think our ancestry superior, to imagine our family tree possessing a better vintage—there is this humble reminder, found in the King James Version of the Bible that once belonged to my great great-grandparents, Stephen and Elizabeth Horton, she of the Duncan line and he the son of Aaron.

    “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a live soul.”

   When all is said and done, we’re all a bit muddy.