Founder of Hartford Connecticut

After my posting yesterday on the Lee family I was going to write today about the Indians and how my ancestors affected and were affected.  That story is going to have to wait.  After opening the mail last night from my Uncle Arthur Howie and receiving the genealogy sheets on the Smith family I was awake almost all night.  I was first excited by the relationship with Benjamin Wright and his wife Thankful Taylor.  Benjamin was a Captain and son of Samuel Wright who was killed by Indians.  As I researched more, what I have found is Andrew Warner and his wife Mary Humphrey.  Andrew Warner was a maltser, born in Great Waltham in Essex, England.  He and Mary immigrated to Cambridge Massachusetts in November 2, 1631 along with their son John; daughter Mary; son Robert and son Andrew.  He took the freeman's oath in Cambridge in 1632.  On May 14, 1634 he joined Thomas Hooker's trek to Connecticut to found Hartford where Andrew was a surveyor.  Here is a link to the founders of Hartford.  The records show that he owned large plots of land as he went on to help settle Farmington.  He had become a deacon of the church and due to a dispute with other church leaders he removed with his new wife Esther Wakeman to Hadley.  The Warner family were prominent in the area and are listed in the book, "The History of Northfield.  Here is my genealogy connection to the Warner's and the Humphrey's of England and Hartford Connecticut.  They are my 7th Great-Grand Parents on my fathers side:

Here is a page from the book, "History of Northfield"

Ancestors of Rev. Clarence Philo England & Nettie Martha Smith

Today I received a letter from Arthur England Howie who turned 90 years old on July 30, 2010.  He thanked me for sending him the newspaper article on the author George Allan England and said that he and his wife Jeanette are in the process of down-sizing over 50 years of genealogy collection that includes photos and other memories.  He sent me a letter he kept from Arthur Emerson England and a genealogy of the Smith family.  There are 10 pages in all.  I hope by down-sizing I am to take it that he is passing on these treasures to one of his children.

Page 1 Smith

Page 2 Smith Genealogy

Page 3 Smith Genealogy

Page 4 Smith Genealogy

Page 5 Smith Genealogy

Page 1 England ltr

Page 2 England ltr

Page 3 England Ltr

Page 4 England Ltr

Page 5 England Ltr.

General Robert Edward Lee (1807 - 1870)

In search of my ancestor Robert Edward Lee.
This story has been past down through generations that we are related to Gen. Lee.  It has only been 200 years since his birth, however the link has been very difficult for me to make.  So that I am not recreating the wheel, if anyone has already made the link to our family through Dorothy Ann Lee please take the time to comment to let me know and help me out.  I have made a few trips to the library and I am sure I will make a few more.  Here is a story I found on another blog out there that I found interesting.

Robert E. Lee was born Jan. 19, 1807, at Stratford Plantation on the Northern Neck of Virginia and was the seventh child of Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee. He attended West Point and never received a demerit. By all accounts enormously handsome, tall, charismatic and humble, he had a long and illustrious career in the U.S. Army. In 1861, as Southern states contemplated secession, Lee privately ridiculed the idea. Still, when he was offered command of the Union Army, he turned it down once Virginia -- his "country" -- seceded.

During the Civil War, Lee's troops were often vastly outnumbered but managed to win or fight to a stalemate for years. Once the war ended, Lee resisted calls to continue the fight in the hills as a guerrilla and instead encouraged his soldiers to go home and begin rebuilding the nation. He retired to what was then Washington College, where he set about innovating the offerings, including the first classes in the country in business and journalism.

In other countries, leaders of failed civil rebellions are often reviled. But a strange thing happened to Lee after he died. He became beloved by many. Over the years, he has been praised by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had a picture of Lee hanging in his office.

Northerners, seizing on Lee's early ambivalence about the war, his gentlemanly sense of honor and duty, and his distaste of slavery -- he once wrote that it was a "moral and political evil" -- embraced the Confederate general as a way to foster reconciliation, said John Coski, a historian at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. In 1901, he was one of only 29 Americans inducted into New York University's Hall of Fame. Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the lyrics for the Battle Hymn of the Republic, composed a poem in Lee's honor.

At the same time, his former generals wrote of him as so perfect and his cause so noble that Lee became fixed as the tragic hero of a romantic "Lost Cause" and that cause became synonymous with white Southern identity.

"There's an old saw in the South of a little girl asking, 'Mommy, is Robert E. Lee from the Old Testament or the New?' " Coski said. "Lee has been so praised and distorted that they made him more than human, and in so doing, made him less than human. He's a complex figure. If we want to understand history in its complexity, we have to understand Robert E. Lee."

Like many military hero's there are many families out there pointing their family genealogy toward Robert Edward Lee.  Here is a link to Robert the Bruce of Scotland who was able to make his link.