While I was busy rehearsing and performing Mendelssohn all weekend, Markus and Miriam spent some time looking at the file. A neat tracing of the Vodosek line, in my father-in-law's handwriting, formed the basis of Miriam's project. I later found a piece of scrap paper in Markus' hand showing the mathematical progression backwards into a staggering number of ancestors: 1 Miriam, 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, then 32, 64, 128, to 256 direct ancestors 9 generations back. Being a pragmatist, Miriam was satisfied taking each grandparent back one or two generations (her great-greats and/or great-great-greats) and copying 10 generations of the Vodosek line back to Stefan Vodosek I. Stefan Vodosek I (1647-1707), Jakob Vodosek I (1693-1762), Martin Vodosek (1745-1816), Gaspar Vodosek (1762-1843), Jakob Vodosek II (1795-1857), Stefan Vodosek II (1831-1889), Stefan Vodosek III (1872-1953), Alfons Vodosek (Markus' grandfather, whom I knew, 1912-1996), Peter Vodosek (Miriam's grandfather, 1939-), Markus Vodosek (1966-), Miriam Craig Vodosek (1999-)! Of course, each of these men had a mother with names like Katharina, Jena, Mezo, Maria, Rosa. The one great-grandparent whom Miriam met in person was Marianne Kollik Vodosek (1914-2006), married to Alfons.
Although I had run out of time to help Miriam decipher the Craig/Williams side of the family for her assignment, I couldn't resist taking a closer look into the file anyway. I knew of the pride and fuss in both my grandmothers' families as descendants of the Lee family of Virginia. It is part of the family lore that General Robert E. Lee is the most famous ancestor in our predominantly Southern family tree. With organizations like the Society of Lees of Virginia, one has access to considerable information.
As for my grandfathers, the family roots are more humble and scantily recorded. My paternal grandfather, David Norman Craig (1898-1986) of Massachussetts, was son of David Craig, Jr., who arrived on a boat from Ireland as a child around 1887. This is the one branch of my family tree that is decidedly non-Southern, having been established in the U.S. in the North after the Civil War. We lose track of the Craigs in Ireland before his father, David Craig, Sr. (1835-?). There are a lot of David Craigs--including my brother!
My maternal grandfather, the Reverend Melville Owens Williams, Jr., stems from Virginia's middle class (e.g., an architect, a soldier "In Lee's Army" and tax collector, a butcher (on his mother's side)): Melville Owens Williams, Sr., David A. Williams, Edward Williams, Wilson Williams (one generation after the Revolutionary War).
Teasing out the Lee pedigree, traceable through both of my grandmothers, became the most interesting part of trawling the various photocopies of handwritten and typewritered documents. Because here is what I found.
In the mid-1600s, a man named Richard Lee "The Immigrant" came with his wife, Anna (Constable?), from Britain to the Virginia Colony. The second eldest of their eight children, Richard Lee II, married Letitia Corbin, and they had seven children.
One son, Colonel Thomas Lee (1690-1750), had a son named Thomas Ludwell Lee (1730-1778), who had a son named Thomas Ludwell Lee, Jr. (1761-1807), who had a son named Francis Ludwell Lee (1786-1848), who had a daughter named Nancy Eveline Ludwell Lee (1808-1884), who had a daughter named Sara Frances Wills (?), who had a daughter named Sallie Lee Angle (1855-1931), who had a son named George Osby Young (1877-1949), who had a daughter named Annie Lee Young Williams (1899-1996), who was my maternal grandmother.
The Robert E. Lee connection for my Granny traces through a brother of Colonel Thomas Lee in that first Virginia-born generation. I think that means Col. Thomas Lee was a great-great uncle of the famous general.
While puzzling over the document that traces the two lines (the one leading to my maternal grandmother alongside the one leading to General Lee), I noticed a name in the general's line that I thought I had seen before: Edmund Jennings Lee. And indeed I had.
Letitia Corbin and Richard Lee had a son named Henry just one year younger than Col. Thomas, and here's one of the lines that flow into the present day from Henry. Henry Lee (1691-1747) had a son also named Henry Lee (1729-1787) who had a son named Edmund Jennings Lee (1772-1843). Edmund was the younger brother of another Henry Lee, nicknamed "Lighthorse Harry Lee," whose many claims to fame include being the father of Robert E., which establishes this Edmund as the general's uncle, just by the way. Edmund Jennings Lee had a son, the Reverand William Fitzhugh Lee (?-1884), who had a daughter named Mary Morrison Lee (1830-1891), who had a son named Robert Allen Castleman II (1857-1936), who had a daughter named Frances Funsten Castleman (1897-1981), who was my paternal grandmother.
So, Thomas and Henry Lee, born one year apart in 1690 and 1691 in the middle of a pack of second generation Virginian Lees, gave rise to both sides of my family. I imagine the two of them arguing over a toy or angling for the last slice of pie. According to a small write-up on Wikipedia, they lived near each other as adults. At one point, after a fire destroyed the home of Thomas, Henry took the family in until Thomas could rebuild. What would the two of them think about my generation's random re-intersection of the Lee line? I say random because there are other more obvious intermarriages in the Lee line--cousins, I believe.
I knew all of this, vaguely. That my family has the lap desk used by William Fitzhugh Lee around the time of the Civil War (a dark wooden box that looks like a silver chest). That my parents had a common ancestor at some point. But it was a thrill when I spotted old Edmund Jennings Lee's name on the document about my maternal grandmother and figured out the connection to my paternal grandmother's line. Interestingly, the Castleman/Craig side takes only 12 generations to get back to Richard II and Letitia, whereas the Young/Williams side follows 14 generations. It appears to be a function of parental age, with many of the fathers in the Craig line being over 40 and many of the mothers on the Williams side being in their twenties.
Miriam's family tree was pretty impressive even without the copious material from my side of the family. She'd assembled seven sheets of paper and gone back to an ancestor born in 1647. Her teacher had set the assignment as a competition to see who could go back the farthest. I figured European families would know their lineages back to Charlemagne at least. But it turns out that the Austrian-American girl in class, with a historian grandfather of Slovenian origin, won the distinction of longest family tree.
Stefan Vodosek I was born 13 years before Richard Lee I died in 17th century Virginia. Wouldn't it be fun if they could see Miriam.
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