Genealogy for fun, if not profit

But no one knows where he has gone.

No one ever heard the song

That good ol' boy set wingin'."

P.F. Sloan

The Association

The other day I asked co-worker Mike Ellis if he was aware of an Ellis in the mid-19th century who married a distant relative of mine.

His response was negative, though he did allow that a legend about an Ellis ancestor stated that he came to the United States in a ship carrying livestock. That story, however, has been put down by other family members as simple fiction.

Such is the way of family histories -- never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

My genealogical interest has revealed some curious facts, such as me being a distant cousin of George Washington, and being attached to Scotland's House of Stewart, and thus authorized to wear the Stewart plaid, even though those ancestors on my mother's side were French and Irish.

But I got interested in my genealogy for purely mercenary reasons. You see, years ago, in the early 1960s, I was in the smoke house at the family farm going through an old camelback trunk that my grandparents used to move here from Pullman, Wash., and Stella, Mo. Inside that truck was a lot of personal items of my Grandmother Long's, including correspondence from the 1930s from a cousin by the last name of Oog in eastern Tennessee.

That letter discussed the common relationship between the Oogs and Boruffs (my grandmother's maiden name) to one Pelham Humphrey, a bachelor soldier of fortune who homesteaded property in what became the Spindletop Oil Field near Beaumont, Texas. He was killed in a barroom shootout in California, apparently during the Gold Rush,

As he died without children, his estate should have gone to his brother and half-sister, my multi-great-grandmother.

But that did not happen, and a few years later squatters by the name of Meadors settled on the land, and were there when the Spindletop Oil Field strike came in. Uncle Pelham's land was right in the middle of it. Since ownership of the land was in question, the oil companies paid royalties into a trust for the legal owners.

I asked my father about the letter in the old trunk, and he basically said it was a pipe dream of his mother's, and that nothing would ever come of it.

So I forgot about it.

That is, until the early 1980s when the Wall Street Journal reported on the successful effort of distant cousin Brown Peregoy, a lawyer in Knoxville, Tenn., to confirm his relationship to Pelham through Burkes House of Peerage, a British genealogy concern specializing in the royal family.

I showed the story to my father, and he suddenly developed an interest in it, as it was estimated that the windfall at his generational level was estimated at $300 million, before taxes.

I telephoned Peregoy, who admitted that while the relationship had been proven, documentation showing title to the land in the Spindletop Oil Field was missing, apparently due to a courthouse fire, and that the Meadors and another family were also involved in trying to prove legal claim.

So, this more than century-old legend, for all intents and purposes, is just that -- a legend. Still, it makes for a good story.