Chris Garrigues

Ancestors

Contents 1 My Genealogy Journey 1.1 James Ralph 1.2 Haphazard Sloppy Genealogy 1.3 My Mother's Family 1.4 Eskridges 1.5 Garrigues Name Study 1.6 Where are the black Quakers? 1.7 Reverse Underground Railroad 1.8 Presidential Relations 1.9 What Ben Didn't Write 1.10 What's Next?

My Genealogy Journey

My interest in genealogy started when I was a teen in the 1970s when my uncle George gave my sister and I a copy of the family tree that he'd put together. Most of the ancestry was in the US, but it went back to the original Hugenot Garrigues ancestor as well as leading back to Ireland and England by way of some notable or semi-notable families.

James Ralph

The character that both he and I were most intrigued by was James Ralph Esq (abt.1705-1762). I have since gone deep on his profile and have concluded that contrary to documented biographies, he most likely was not born in the colonies, but was actually born in England. As such he does not belong in the Dictionary of American Biography.

Haphazard Sloppy Genealogy

Like many people, I then kinda haphazardly added to the tree with a terrible lack of sourcing. Eventually, I found myself on wikitree with a tree that I'd uploaded from a Gedcom with a lot of uncertain data.

When COVID happened I finally decided that it was time to fix all those questionable records on Wikitree, so I started walking backwards through the tree cleaning things up. Turns out I didn't have too much fiction in there and since I'm a WASP, there are a lot of very full branches of the tree. Many of them are Quakers and even the southern branch of the family ties back to the Quakers.

My Mother's Family

My mother is the daughter of immigrants. Her mother was Swedish and her father was Swiss German with both of his parents being from Germany. When I first got my admixture from Ancestry, it all looked about what you'd expect, but then Ancestry updated their admixture analysis with new data and suddenly my German estimate shrunk to 18%. Given that I also have some known German on my father's side, this was very concerning, so I got an ancestry DNA test for my mother, and the admixture of this woman who is supposed to be half Swedish and half Swiss-German looked like this:

this led to a bit of a panic and discussion to figure out who her real father was as you might imagine.

It got stranger when I found actual DNA matches with people on my mother's father's side of the family through shared ancestors who are documented as being in Auingen, Germany.

Eventually I noticed that Ancestrty's map of "England & Northwestern Europe" looks like this:

Auingen is slightly outside that strange disconnected blob on the map, but at least it explains what we're seeing.

I gotta find out why there's this strange pool of "English" DNA in Switzerland one of these days.

I also learned to my surprise that my Grandmother was not the first member of her family to move to the states from Sweden. She followed two uncles here. If my mother had ever told me this, I had forgotten it. One of these uncles (Charles Artur Berndtson (1894-1948)) was even of some note. I've done a zoom call with Swedish cousins who still live in the ancestral home and they have sent me the English transation of a book they've written on the familhy.

Eskridges

There was one branch that had a huge question mark on it. That's my great grandmother Ella Gertrude (Eskridge) Dickey (1875-1955). Her father was unknown other than his last name and that he was from "MI" which was probably Mississippi. Her mother, Pink Kennard (abt.1858-abt.1880), died at the age of 22 when Ella was 5 years old and was the descendant of all my known lines of slave owners. (Also, probably not coincidentally, my only line where cousins intermarried.)

I decided to use Ancestry.Com to try to match my DNA against people named Eskridge and determined that I'm descended from one of the sons of Samuel Burdett Eskridge (1809-bef.1842). Working on this, i made several new genealogy friends and discovered a marvelous book titled Akee Tree written by Stephen Hanks, a black genealogist who found that he had to study the white Eskridge genealogy to learn about his own family.

One thing that jumped out at me from his book is that in 1880, his ancestors fled from my slave owning ancestors to where my Quaker ancestors lived: Osage, Kansas. No evidence that they're paths crossed there, but still striking.

I got as far as I could get researching the Eskridges without driving to East Texas to search for documents that can't be found online. It's on my list to do a road trip at some point post COVID and see if I can finish determining which of Samuel's sons was Ella's father.

Garrigues Name Study

I then went back to documenting my other branches back in time. I got as far as my 7th great grand parents (roughly late 1600s) and started to get tired of cleaning up and expanding backwards down lines that were increasingly unfamiliar to me and were alreadly mostly pretty well cleaned up by other wikitree members. About this time I found out about the one name projects on wikitree and decided that I was more interested in documenting other Garrigues branches, so I started working on the Garrigues One Name Project.

Where are the black Quakers?

About this time, I also became interested in the question "If the Quakers were so good for black people, why aren't there more black Quakers?" and found a fasinating book entitled Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship by Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to understand what happened between Quakers and the black community.

Reverse Underground Railroad

While working my way through the other Garrigueses, I discovered Samuel Parker Garrigues (1793-1835), my 3rd great grand uncle. and got totally obsessed with investigating the people he had been investigating. Samuel P. had been High Constable of Philadelphia in the 1820s and along with Mayor Joseph Watson (abt.1784-1841), rescued a number of kidnapped black children. After several months of obsession, I had created this free space profile:

• Reverse Underground Railroad Victims

and wrote profiles for all the victims and perpetrators. Working on this has led me to meet a few black genealogists and black history professors.

Presidential Relations

Well, it doesn't get much more american than this...I'm apparently related to 31 different American Presidents.

George Washington and I are 9th cousins 9 times removed.

John Adams and I are 6th cousins 9 times removed.

Thomas Jefferson and I are 8th cousins 6 times removed.

James Madison and I are 10th cousins three times removed.

John Quincy Adams and I are 7th cousins 8 times removed.

William Harrison and I are 9th cousins 6 times removed.

John Tyler and I are 13th cousins five times removed.

Zachary Taylor and I are 11th cousins twice removed.

Millard Fillmore and I are 8th cousins five times removed.

Franklin Pierce and I are 12th cousins 8 times removed.

James Buchanan and I are 13th cousins five times removed.

Ulysses S Grant and I are 15th cousins five times removed.

Rutherford B. Hayes and I are 10th cousins four times removed.

James Garfield and I are 13th cousins five times removed.

Grover Cleveland and I are 9th cousins 6 times removed.

Teddy Roosevelt and I are 14th cousins four times removed.

William Howard Taft) and I are 15th cousins once removed.

Woodrow Wilson and I are 15th cousins three times removed.

Warren G. Harding and I are 7th cousins four times removed.

Calvin Coolidge and I are 11th cousins four times removed.

Herbert Hoover and I are 6th cousins twice removed.

FDR and I are 10th cousins twice removed.

Harry Truman and I are 14th cousins twice removed.

LBJ and I are 12th cousins five times removed.

Richard Nixon and I are 9th cousins.

Gerry Ford and I are 13th cousins four times removed.

Jimmy Carter and I are 10th cousins once removed.

George H.W. Bush and I are 15th cousins once removed.

Bill Clinton and I are 15th cousins three times removed.

George W. Bush and I are 7th cousins once removed.

Barack Obama and I are 12th cousins.

What Ben Didn't Write

I have temporarily set aside my ongoing research to focus on writing a novel about the first generation of American Garrigueses. The story is narrated by Mary (Garrigues) Stewart (1764-), who recounts tales told by her grandfather, Samuel Garrigues (1719-abt.1783), and family friend Deborah (Read) Franklin (1708-1774). The narrative weaves a multigenerational saga exploring themes of abandonment and intergenerational trauma, highlighting the parallels between her namesake grandmother, Mary (Ralph) Garrigues (1724-1788), who was abandoned by her father, James Ralph Esq (abt.1705-1762), as an infant, and her own abandonment 40 years later.

The story also delves into the Garrigues family’s friendships with notable figures such as Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and Antoine Benezet (1713-1784), exploring issues of slavery within the multicultural environment of Colonial Philadelphia.

What's Next?

When I get back to genealogy research, I intend to:

• continue the Garrigues One Name Study
• continue going back in time on all my lines
• look into Samuel P.'s brother William Henry Garrigues Sr (1795-1858) who is my direct ancestor and was deeply involved with the Philadelphia Abolution Society.
• finish proving my connection to the Eskridges
• Dig deeper into my step-father's tree. My step dad was black. I've done the easy genealogy on this tree and got it back close to the slavery era, but I want to use my brother's DNA to try and get deeper. I know it'll be a challenge.

not necessarily in that order.