Like most people, I have 32 strains of Great-great-great Grandparents. However, for as long as I can remember, only two of those were generally spoken of. That would be Solomon H Smith and Helen (Celiast) Smith. I suspect that they were always considered the most historically significant of my ancestors… Plus most of their lives were spent near where I was raised, so they were actually convenient as well. They also were the only ones, so far as I knew, who were featured in a book.
Well, who were they then, you ask? Well, they were the parents of my father’s, father’s, mother’s father. That would be Bruce, Tudor, May, Silas and then Solomon and Helen.
What significance that they had was that Solomon was the first European descended farmer in the Clatsop plains area of Oregon Territory, and also an early teacher in the area. He came to Oregon ten years before the Oregon Trail started and ended up being involved in the early politics of Oregon Territory in the 1840’s. His wife, Helen, was a local native american. She was a daughter of Coboway, a chief of a small tribe of Clatsop Indians. Coboway’s claim to fame is that he is named-dropped in the journals of Lewis and Clark as being one of the two friendly neighborhood chiefs by Fort Clatsop, which is where L&C wintered after making it the Pacific Coast. I was raised visiting their graves, seeing the display about them in the Clatsop County Historical Society, and reading about them in the book Clatsop County Oregon.
Also, their son Silas and his wife Mary would come up as well. Even more recent and also written about a bit.
As I got older I heard a few more tidbits… Solomon was born in Lebanon, New Hampshire in 1809 (a world away to me at the time, now only about an hours drive) and his parents may have been named Alpheus Smith and Mehitable Leach. And, well, that’s all I knew. As that’s as far back as I could go, I was very curious about these Alpheus and Mehitable people and where they came from…
Today I stumbled on an interesting page on Solomon Smith which had a lot of info that I had heard already… But also had something new!
Firstly, it has a link to a biography of Helen/Celiast, which also discusses her family.
Secondly, it has this bit about Solomon’s early life…
He came of Revolutionary stock, his maternal grandfather having been a soldier in the war for Independence, and a relative of the Greeley family. His father was an assistant surgeon in the war of 1812, and died at Plattsburgh, New York, in 1813.
The boy Solomon was afforded good advantages, receiving his academic education at Norwich, Vermont; and he studied medicine with his uncle, Doctor Haven Foster,
That was certainly more about his ancestry than I have ever heard… A grandfather in the revolutionary war, his father Alpheus was in the war of 1812 and died in NY in 1813, he studied in Norwich Vermont, and has an uncle named Doctor Foster (did he too go to Gloucester)?
I then found an article about Solomon’s brother, A D Smith. It says that their father, Alpheus, was born in Rhode Island and that, after he died, the family moved to Hartford, Vermont. I searched around for the mother, under both Leach (I assumed her Maiden name) and Smith (I assumed her end of life name), but then I found here, The Reverend Smith, that both were wrong. Her maiden name was Foster (hence the uncle)! Leach and Smith were the names for her first two marriages, but her final marriage was to a man named Wilson. And then this page corrects Alpheus’s place of death from Plattsburgh to Chateaugay NY, and also lists all of Mehitable’s marriages.
At that, the quest led away from the Smith’s and down the other line… I found Genealogy of the Greely-Greeley Family from 1905, which Shows Mehitable and a line of her ancestry all the way down to 1617!
In short…
Solomon Smith (6071) is descended from:
Mehitable Foster (2309, Born Salisbury, NH March 25th, 1783) and Dr Alpheus Smith
Mehitable Foster (2309) is the daughter of:
Mary Greeley (826, Born Salisbury NH, December 18th 1760) and Jonathan Foster (Born Salisbury, NH, Oct 17th, 1758, son of Hezekiah Foster).
Mary Greeley (826) is the daughter of:
Shubal Greeley (240, Baptz North Yarmouth Maine 1731-2) and Hannah Pettingill
Shubal Greeley is the son of:
David Greele (50, Born Salisbury, Mass, December 1st 1700) and Mary Stevens
David Greele (50) is the son of:
Jonathan Greele (9, Born Salisbury Mass, Feb 15th, 1672-3) and Jane Walker
Jonathan Greele (9) is the son of:
Philip Grele (2, born Salisbury Mass, Sept 21st, 1644) and Sarah Isley (born Salisbury Mass, June 30th, 1644 Dau of John and Sarah Isley)
And Philip Grele (2) is the son of:
Andrew Greele (1, where the book starts, born about 1617, somewhere in England) and Hannah Moyse…
Andrew, seemingly, would have come over as part of The Great Puritan Migration of 1620-40… Well, that’s certainly farther than I had expected to go today…
This book also has a lot about the Greeley’s.
Military notes…
I wasn’t able to find anything definite on Alpheus in the war of 1812, but I did find this document which states that there was an Alpheus Smith in the service of Captain Charles Follet in New York in 1813. Could that have been Solomon’s father?
Based on the Greely book. It looks like the Revolutionary War grandfather would be Jonathon Foster, as that’s his maternal grandfather. But this page says that Shubal’s son David died in the revolutionary war. So that would be Solomon’s Great Uncle (his Grandmother’s brother), not grandfather. It also looks like another of Shubal’s sons, Matthew, also fought, but did not die. So implies Revolutionary Graves of New Hampshire.
As a Side note, I don’t know if the Smith side has any Revolutionary Warriors, but this page lists an Alpheus Smith from Scotland who was in the Rev War and died in 1791. Not much info, but it’s the right generation… That that would also give them at least three generations in a row of Alpheus Smith’s. This page also shows the same Scottish Alpheus.