Welcome to the Hall Smucker Family History Blog!

Historical Hall-ways and more....

Welcome to my family history blog! For the past several years, my cousin Karen and I have played with the idea of starting a family website or blog to share our research and stories with family members and cousins near and far. While Karen is well-versed in web design and management, I am a technological dinosaur. Earlier today I stumbled on Google's Blogger and impulsively (because ADD runs in the family) I dove right in. We will all see together how this goes.

My goal is to use each blog post to tell the story of a particular ancestor or family group - one post per week. I will share photos, documents, newspaper clippings, links, mysteries, and further research ideas. "Share the fruits of thy labor" is my philosophy with respect to genealogical findings and research. My hope is that distant cousins discover this blog and share their information in the comments section. 

I plan to organize the blog posts by each of my grandparent's families (Hall, Smith, Smucker, Huber) and my husband's family (Sliwicki). Please be patient with me as I learn and grow with this process. You may be interested in some family lines and not others - that's OK. I hope you're entertained, informed and that your curiosity to know more is ignited by our family stories.

I was bit by the genealogy bug.............

I have always been eternally curious about family stories. I attribute it to listening to my mother's parents (David Emery Smucker and Henrietta Kathryn Huber) share their family stories of growing up surrounded by numerous cousins in Bellefontaine, Logan County, Ohio. After graduating from Michigan State University and moving to Dallas, Texas, I found the family connections I longed for through genealogy research. 

The Smucker family is Amish-Mennonite and uncovering family history information was easy in the pre-digital age given the strong ties and uniqueness of this community. I wrote letters, subscribed to magazines, read books and more. I even took up quilting!

My Huber line was short as my grandmother's paternal grandparents (George C Huber and Johannah Heinrike Schwilke) immigrated to this country from Germany in the late 1840s. I photocopied the Huber -Miller family Bible pages (but not the title page!) and her grandfather Abednego Miller's "Marriages and Deaths" notebook (he was a Brethren minister). I'm so glad I did because after their deaths, we could not locate these items. Mystery #1 - Did my grandmother give them to another family member back in Bellefontaine, and if so to whom? Or given her dementia in her later years, did she destroy or throw them away?

My father's brother Jim (Harold James Hall, Jr) was the keeper of Hall family  records (being an accountant, he was very organized!) and he generously copied and sent me everything he had back in the mid-1980s. I discovered that my Grandpa Hall (Harold James Hall) had been married and divorced  before marrying my Grandma (Alice Louise Smith). In fact, he married Alice twice because the first wedding was before his divorce was finalized, so he had to marry her again to make it all legal. Apparently, his first wife, Catherine V Jacque, was physically abusive. The divorce petitioner was Harold and the reason given was "cruel and unusual punishment".  Apparently because of the divorce, he was ex-communicated from the Catholic Church in which he was raised. 

Another family record that was surprising was the marriage certificate of Edward Sexton Hall and Jennie Benson Kyle. My paternal great grandparents were married in 1894 in Havre, Chouteau, Montana - a very long way from Detroit, Michigan! I know that Edward was in the Army and stationed at nearby Fort Assiniboine. But what was 19 year old Jennie doing out in Montana so far from home. I'm eager to share more of her stories and mysteries in future posts.

More Hall Family Mysteries.........

My father (William Jon Hall) told me back in the mid-1980s several things about our Hall family that stayed with me and prompted my second wave of genealogical research in the digital age of Ancestry, beginning in 2014 - unfortunately after he had passed away. Maybe he was my Guardian Angel on my genealogical journey and helped me uncover his family history!

• Our Hall family goes "way back" in Detroit history.  
• Détroit was founded in 1701 and our French Canadian family history includes Great Lakes fur trading and travel before then! Pierre Meloche was known to have led a fur trading expedition to Detroit from Montreal shortly after his marriage to Jeanne Caron in 1729. The Original Detroit Land Grant #47 on 8 July 1734 was issued to him. This land was along Parent Creek, also known as Bloody Run, and is now today the home of Historic Elmwood Cemetery.  Chief Pontiac staged his 1763 siege of the British Detroit Fort from there since Pontiac and Pierre were known to be friends. Another example of early settlement was Francois Gastinon dit Duchesne and Marie-Joseph David who married at Détroit on 29 Jan 1739 and were among the first settlers (habitants) of present day Grosse Pointe, Michigan. 

• Our family name isn't really Hall. Our family was French Canadian but no one can remember what the "real" family name is. He thought Hall might be the name of a boss that an ancestor wanted to honor but he couldn't say that for sure. 
• Hall was actually the name of a step-father who married into the family in 1803 Amherstburg. Benjamin Hall appears to be a Late Loyalist and was originally from Connecticut. I believe his step-children and grandchildren adopted the very British Hall name to honor him and/or to minimize ethnic discrimination when trying to find work, especially when they crossed the river to Detroit during the 1860s. I will save our original surname for a future blog post - so stay tuned!

• Someone came from a wealthy Baltimore family. 
• Jacob Rogers, my 5th great-grandfather, was a wealthy hat manufacturer in the early to mid 1800s in Baltimore. Seth Sweetser was a successful shoe and boot manufacturer and more. Their children married in 1812 - William Rogers and Mary Sweetser. Unfortunately, the family fortunes were mostly gone by their grandchildren's generation.

• Someone was a judge from Cincinnati. 
• Henry Taylor Kyle, originally from Mifflin County PA, established his early law practice in Cincinnati. By 1850 he was practicing in Keokuk, Iowa. During the Civil War he was in Washington, DC and eventually was enrolled to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. More to follow in future blog posts and mysteries to share.......

Ancestry.com and the Digital Age of Genealogy.......

In 2014, the Lincolnshire (IL) Review posted an article about a friend who traced her family history to Laura B Sprague, the woman who was the first school teacher in our area and after whom our elementary school was named. I asked her about it and she told me about Ancestry.com. It took me less than a week to create an account and start entering the information I had compiled back in the 1980s.  

My first genealogical mystery in the Ancestry.com era was finding my great grandmother Jennie Benson Kyle in the 1880 census in Baltimore showing her as an INMATE of the Home for the Friendless - at age six.  What?!?? This fascinating and sad story will be unveiled in detail in a future post. 

Using Ancestry.com and AmericanAncestors.com (New England Historical and Genealogical Society) I was able to trace our family line back to John Sprague, one of the three Sprague brothers who were born in Lincolnshire, England and were part of the Puritan Great Migration, arriving in 1729 and founding the settlement of Charlestown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. How fun - I'm also related to Lincolnshire's beloved teacher Laura B Sprague!

Lineage Societies..........

I've enjoyed compiling the research and documents necessary to join several lineage societies and plan to submit many more in the coming years. Currently, I'm a member of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) through Patriot John Britten, VA & NJ, Private. Shortly after his death, his sons John B Britten and Richard Britten, moved from New York and in 1837 received original Land Patents in Livingston County, Michigan. They are ancestors of Alice Louise Smith's mother, Pearl Alice Britten.  I also hold a Trailblazer Certificate of pioneer settlement from the Livingston County Genealogical Society.

Discovering French-Canadian ancestry is like hitting the genealogical lottery. The Catholic Church kept meticulous records of baptisms, marriages and burials and most records have been digitized and are accessible. Several priests have meticulously studied and compiled detailed family records, especially in Quebec. Once you identify a French Canadian ancestor, you will be able to fan out and document all your FC ancestors back to their immigration - and beyond! I am a proud member of La Societé les Filles du Roi et Soldats du Carignan through Anne Dodin and Pierre Mouflet dit Champagne. They were tragically and horrifically killed by the Iroquois, along with several of their children, in the Lachine Massacre of 1689. I have other known Filles du Roi and Soldats and will cover them all in future posts.

In process are applications for the Michigan Pioneer Certificate using Pierre Meloche, The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America using Gerrit Van Sweringen and the Logan County, Ohio Pioneer Society using Jacob Miller and Diana Huber, along with her mother Margaret Stottlemeier.  I also have plans to apply to Maryland Founding Families, the Jamestowne Society, Tavern Keepers Society, and more. The only society I can't nail down (yet!!!) is The Mayflower Society. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my William Rogers (d 1784 Baltimore) brick wall will come tumbling down and lead me back to a Mayflower Pilgrim, perhaps Thomas Rogers??

Please subscribe............

If you've read this far, please consider subscribing to my blog post and sharing it with other family members, young and old. Please add a comment and share any thoughts and ideas that you may have, who you would like me to write about, etc. I'm excited to connect with you and to share our family history.