ancestry

While we were up in Massachusetts visiting my husband's family last weekend, my mother-in-law gave us a painting. Actually, she gave it to us for Christmas last year, but we hadn't claimed it before now.

It's a painting of one of my husband's ancestors, painted circa 1830 to judge from the clothing. The man's name is Herman LeRoy. I asked my husband, "So how are you related to Herman LeRoy?" I know that in his family a number of male children were christened "Herman LeRoy ______ " (including Steve's father) but who was this guy they were all named after? And Steve said, "I dunno."

I wasn't prepared to have people ask, "Who is that old guy hanging on your wall?" and have to respond with some version of "I dunno." So I googled him.

Google is an amazing thing. Yeah, I think it returned some 17,000 entries, only 50 of which I looked at, and only about 20 of which were relevant to our Herman LeRoy. But it told me who he was. (You're just dying to know, aren't you?)

Herman LeRoy was born in 1758 in New York, NY, and he became an owner of a LOT of land in New York state. There are streets named after him in Manhattan and New Rochelle, and there's a town named after him up in Genessee county (near Rochester, NY). He bought a tract of land up there known as the "Triangle Tract," we suspect because he anticipated the construction of the Erie Canal, but we don't know when the purchase occurred. I know the Erie Canal was completed in 1828, and Herman LeRoy didn't die until 1841, so he may have made a bundle if he owned part of the land that the canal was built on. It appears that his office owned deeds to over 800 parcels of land in that area alone. We discovered that he once owned part of what is now Pelham Bay park in the Bronx, and we figured out how my husband's family ended up in New York state when they were originally from Pennsylvania. Herman LeRoy's daughter married my husband's fifth-generation grandfather. When great-great-great etc grandfather Thomas died three years into their marriage, she moved back to Pelham with her two children (and a third in utero) and successive generations of my father's family were born in New York.

There's still a lot more research we could do on Herman LeRoy, after all, we're in New York City, where he lived and died, and we have some of the largest library collections in the U.S. But the fact that I found all this out via the internet really pleases me. We're going to see Herman LeRoy's burial place this evening. It's in St. Paul's Chapel churchyard in Manhattan. (You might know it because it was the church where the rescue workers at the World Trade Center site went to rest and find sanctuary.) We were glad to find out that we could visit the place where Herman LeRoy, our benefactor, is buried. It's nice to learn we had a benefactor all those years ago. And we hope that the Herman LeRoy in our painting is glad to be back in New York.

Now, if we go back another generation on another branch of my husband's family tree, you get to Thomas Jefferson. The one who wrote the Declaration of Independence and was the third president of the United States. His great-great granddaughter married my husband's great-grandfather. If you count in both directions that's seven generations.

In our front foyer we now have Herman LeRoy and Thomas Jefferson in a face-off across the room. I guess it's a darn good thing that I don't have any famous ancestors, because we wouldn't have any place to put them! (On my Dad's side of the family six generations back or something we are cousins of General Sam Houston, as in "remember the Alamo." But I don't have any genealogical charts or material to trace that link, and that's ok.)