"Celebrity" Ancestors & Cousins

While I have not yet found us closely related to any current celebrities you would recognize (although the odds are good, considering the size of our family), we have a few notable ancestors who were famous in their time:

Wallace Stevens - Pulitzer prize winning poet and insurance professional. We share a common ancestor, our 9th great-grandparents on our father's side, Jacques James Sellaire (Zeller) and Clothilde de Valois (who was famous in her own right). More on the Zellers in a future entry.

George DeBinder - personal physician of the Marquis de Lafayette, and served with Lafayette in the American Revolution. His son, Joseph DeBinder married the native American (Mohawk), Mary Bill. Their daughter, Ann, was Mary Dempsey Monaghan's mother.

Joseph Wambaugh - author of many true-crime and fictional crime books; his family and ours share the Wambaugh paternal grandfather, Louis "Napoleon" Wambaugh/Wambach who arrived in America in 1848 or thereabouts.

The Goodyears (originally Gutjar) - by marriage in the Buzard/Buzzard family.

 

Speculated but unconfirmed: The House of Valois - through as yet unsubstantiated claim by the Zeller family, though they are still quite enthusastic about it after 300 years!

The Terrible 1920s

In the decade of 1920, at least ten important people died in the Cook family as well as Mary Theresa Dempsey Monaghan, wife of Marcus Gage Monaghan, who had outlived seven of her children and her husband, and had raised her grandsons, Don and Frank Ranney when her daughter, Mary Bernadette, died of tuberculosis in 1911 at age 30.

In 1920, James Cohen, second husband of Mamie Cook's mother, Frances Neathammer, died at age 57. Frances' first husband, Charles Noonan, had died before 1900, and we find Frances living in Cleveland in the 1900 census, having moved up from Niles, Ohio, with two teen-aged daughters, Sadie and Annie. We are not certain when exactly Charles Noonan died, or how, but he must have been very young, since he would only have been 36 in 1890 and he disappears before 1900.

The move to Cleveland by Frances Noonan at least explains how Mamie met Bernard Cook, since she grew up in Niles, at least 50 miles south of Cleveland. We are not sure how Mamie met Bernard, but we can speculate that her father, Charles, visited the saloon operated by J.J. Cook and Mamie could have been sent by her mother to fetch him. There may be a more innocent explanation, of course.

The Smith - Wambaugh Family

After much searching, following many red herrings, and barking up the wrong family trees, I finally determined Katie (Catherine E.) Smith Cook's parents were Charles Francis Smith and Mary Eva (called Eva) Thekla Wambach/Wambaugh, from Somerset County, PA, which is just north of the Maryland border. Charles Smith was born in Bavaria in 1824 and was most likely Schmidt when in Germany. (That name is not much easier to research.) Charles Smith had a large orchard on land that he purchased from his father-in-law, Louis "Napoleon" Wambach/Wambaugh. Charles and Eva Smith had 12 children from 1848-1873. Here is an excerpt from the book "The History of Early Settlers of Allegheny Township":

Charles F. Smith, a native of Germany, born in 1823, came to America at the age of sixteen, and commenced work in Bedford County, near Mann's Choice. He afterward purchased of his father-in-law, Lewis Wambaugh, the farm in Allegheny Township on which he now resides. Mr. Smith has the best orchards in Somerset County; indeed they will compare favorably with any in this section of the state. He raises all kinds of fruit in great quantities, and ships to local markets as well as to Altoona and other points. Twenty-two years ago, his farm of one hundred and fifty acres, of which eighty are cleared, was a dense forest. Mr. Smith, by industry and careful management, has today one of the finest and most productive farms in this section.

Eva died six years after her youngest child Marcellus (Mars) was born. I found a cemetery record from St. John’s in New Baltimore PA., and her headstone says she died June 30, 1879. Eva Wambaugh Smith was only 48 when she died, and with 12 kids, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and no servants, that's no surprise. Within a year, Charles Smith remarried a widow, Elizabeth Reed Baldwin, who had also been the second wife of a widower, Benjamin Baldwin. She not only raised Benjamin’s children when he died, but two of her own, plus four or five of Charles’ children. We kindly refer to her as Second Hand Liz.

The Cook Kids & The Mysterious Regina Smith

Joe and Katie Cook sort of alphabetized their children's names, but not quite; we have Anna, Albert, Bernard, Bertha, Charles, Delbert, Elroy, Louisa and....Sebastian. Where Uncle Bass's name came from, who knows? Louisa was named after her paternal grandmother, and there was a Sylvester in the Wambaugh family (Katie Smith's mother's maiden name was Wambaugh, but more on that later). In 1916, Katie's youngest brother, Mars (Marcellus Janora Smith) b. 1873 who was close in age to his nephews Bernard and Sebastian named his youngest son Bernard Sebastian Smith.

These are just some of the trivial but amusing things you learn while researching your genealogy!

Having The Wrong First Names Can Really Mess You Up!

(click on photo to enlarge: Joseph "J.J." Cook in center, next on right, Bernard Joseph Cook)

In times long past, the tradition of our ancestors was to document the family history in the family Bible and pass that along to future generations. Alas, we had no such marvelous resource, so we had to rely on my eldest sister Eileen's baby book where my mother had dutifully listed her recollection of the names of four generations of the family tree. My sister read the names to me over the phone: on my mother's side was Marcus Monaghan, Berthalia Jacquet, Herman Fertig and Maude Waldeck. On our father's side was Bernard Cook, Mamie Noonan, Henry Dillemuth, Albert Cook, Katherine Smith, Patrick Noonan, Frances Neithammer, Lydia Hawk, someone named "Cape" and someone named "J.J."

It was a good start.

First, I searched for an Albert Cook in the census records and only found one in Staten Island married to a woman named Kate, but he was an Irish immigrant living with his Irish parents, so that ruled him out. We knew he was German and likely the original spelling was Koch or Kuch. I never found another viable census record for an Albert Cook. I had to conclude that either “Albert Cook” of our family never in his entire life participated in a census, or his name wasn’t Albert. Similarly, I couldn’t find any “Patrick” Noonan married to someone named Frances, so I had to assume we had the wrong first name for him as well; which, it turned out, we did.