52 Weeks – Week Five

Branching Out

With a new month and new week comes a new theme for the 52 Ancestors Challenge. The theme for February and the first week of the month is “Branching Out”.

Frankly, at first this one had me stumped. (By the way, my theory is that all puns are intended.) While Amy offers gentle suggestions as to what a theme might mean, she leaves it to participants to decide what we think it means. Many people are taking this as an opportunity to talk about their collateral branches. Others are sharing that while many genealogists look up their trees, they are in pursuit of the downward branches of a specific ancestor. There have also been many discussions of research strategies involving genealogy FAN clubs – “Friends, Associates, and Neighbours”, a term coined by Elizabeth Shown Mills describing a method of cluster research.

These forms of branching out didn’t speak to me for the challenge. For the most part, I’m primarily climbing up my tree, looking for direct ancestors. I keep track of their FANs in pursuit of that goal. I also have a couple of ancestors for whom I am tracing all their descendants. Yet I found no real inspiration there for this post.

For me, a significant moment of branching out for me was when I got married. By then I had already spent many years on my own tree, and by that point in time it was becoming a lot of work to make little progress. However, with my wife, there was a whole new set of branches to explore with all sorts of low-hanging fruit ripe for easy picking. Besides, I considered her family to be my family, so it was like researching my own tree. Moreover, as we planned to have children some day, I simply saw it as getting a head start on their family tree.

To my great pleasure, our eldest child shares my interest in genealogy. I even bought him a membership to the BC Genealogical Society as a birthday present. Much of my branching out has been in pursuit of questions he has put to me.

There are all sorts of fascinating things about our children’s maternal line. For example, they are direct descendants of Heinrich Stief (“Steeves”) and Regina Stahlecker. Originally from Baden-Württemberg, they emigrated to Pennsylvania, where they had seven sons. The family relocated to New Brunswick in 1766. If you’re a “Steeves” in Canada or the United States, odds are you’re one of their direct descendants. In 2016, there was an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for largest gathering of individuals with the same last name. Unfortunately, the attempt fell short.

Notable Steeves descendants include the Hon. William H. Steeves (one of the “Fathers of Confederation” of Canada), Jack Layton (late Leader of the Opposition in Canada’s parliament), Laurence J. Peter (author of The Peter Principle), and Janette Oke (author). A few years ago I gave a presentation on “Law and Genealogy”, using my sons’ Steeves connection as a research example. Through sheer serendipity, the presenter who spoke before me was also a Steeves descendant, John Steeves, a judge of the B.C. Supreme Court.

The interesting connection is to Manoah Steeves, who later in life dropped an “e” from his surname and became “Steves”. In 1877, he and his wife moved west and bought land on Lulu Island in British Columbia, where they established a dairy farm. From this grew Steveston, a fishing village that is now part of Richmond, B.C., where we now live. Manoah’s descendants still operate a farm here. The streets in our neighbourhood share the names of Steeves relatives and places in New Brunswick, 4300 kilometres away. Taking our kids to school is like a daily trip through their family tree.

Another branch on which I have spent more hours of research than I ever expected to do came from a seemingly random question my son asked about a name on his maternal line that he saw in my database, Francis Barclay LeCain. It also turned into a great way of showing him what genealogical research really entails and that not everything can be found with few clicks online. Years later he still asks to do research on Francis and the LeCains.

Francis is our childrens’ great x8 grandfather. He was born Francois Le Quesne around October 1723 in St. Helier Parish, Bailiwick of Jersey. The connection to the Channel Islands alone was an immediate point of fascination. The Le Quesnes appear to go back on Jersey for many centuries.

Francis came to Annapolis Royal with the British army as a “Master Artificer” or “Armourer” in the employ of the Board of Ordnance, which among other things was responsible for the manufacture and supply of weapons for the military. Francis’s obituary noted that he had lived in Annapolis for 64 years, which puts the year he came to Nova Scotia as being about 1742. In 1745 he married Alicia Maria Hyde, a daughter of a military man who also hailed from Jersey. Our children are descended from Francis and Alicia’s youngest daughter, Mary. Alicia died in 1758. Francis married again in 1761, to Elizabeth Foster. The blacksmith shop he established remained on the same site for over 100 years. Francis died in Annapolis Royal in March 1806.

Next week’s theme is “Maps”. I’m looking forward to that. I love maps. Atlases of historical maps I found in grade eight fostered my love of history, which was my major in university.