Our Shared History
Hello Family!
Welcome to my current hyperfixation! Over the last year, I’ve been stalking our ancestors and I’ve created this page as a place to share some of what I’ve discovered.
This is very much a work in progress. There’s so much more to discover! I’ll keep adding as I filter through documents, books and sites – but I thought this would be an easier way to share what I’m exploring with all of you. And a better way to keep track of our family history than random late night texts.
Love you all!
Lins
Backstory
Last summer, I visited Jane, and she shared this photo of Heywood Sanford French as a baby as well as his father’s (Charles Heywood French) obituary.
Two things that interested us:
Baby Heywood was being held by a black woman – a bit unusual for Bangor, Maine in the 1860s
Charles’ obituary suggested he died suddenly in Wilmington, NC when he was just 30 years old
This was all completely new information to me. I had always believed that our family was born, bred, and died firmly in New England. But since Charles was buried in Bangor, that is always what appeared on our family trees as his place of death.
Jane told me that towards the end of her life her grandmother (Helen, Heywood’s daughter) had mentioned something about the family owning a “farm” in the south in the 1800s. She and I both had the same slightly nervous idea about what the family business could possibly have been.
I was intrigued and started researching.
Thankfully, I quickly discovered that our family were NOT antebellum plantation owners who made their fortune from slavery (whew!)
What I found is between 1865 and 1904, nearly all of the sons of George and Ann Sophia French settled in and around Wilmington, North Carolina.
The French Brothers were huge Yankee carpetbaggers in the very best way. They were influential during Reconstruction, with close connections to state and national political leaders. They were also staunch (Lincoln) Republicans and Fusionists who worked to reestablish the area’s economic structure and encourage the involvement of freed slaves in all areas of society. The eldest, George Zadock French, was so hated by the anti-Reconstructionist white community in Wilmington that he was one of the top four white leaders they were determined to banish from the city during the Wilmington Coup of 1898.
Grandpa Bill’s grandfather, Heywood Sanford French, being held by an unknown woman
A Mysterious Connection…
Luke, Morgan, and I have a few distant connections on 23andMe that show up as being related to both our maternal and paternal sides of our family. When I first noticed it, I thought it was some weird and amusing discrepancy. All our research on Mom was from New England, and Dad’s family was from North Carolina and did not move North until the 1940s.
A few more folks showed up over the years and now 23andMe approximates how far out the connection is — 3rd great-grandparents.
George Z never married and all but one of his brothers came south with him…and my dad’s family was from the area a bit north of Wilmington…and my 3rd great-grandparents would be born around the end of the Civil War…so… *cough* I’m currently trying to build out both sides of our family tree to see where the ‘overlap’ could have taken place.