A Brief Dip in the Gene Pool

This blog was kind of instigated by those commercials on TV about finding where certain of your traits comes from by finding out about your ancestry

My mother's mother's people migrated to Texas in the 1800s from Germany, including 3xgreat grandpa J. Adam Neuthard who supposedly was raised Catholic and at some point, either before or after he received his degree from Heidelberg University in Germany, converted to Lutheranism, whereupon his family disinherited him and marked his name out in the family Bible. That probably explains why he immigrated to Texas in 1864. A great many of his fellow Germans were already there. After his arrival, he committed matrimony with Emma Bauer, whose father, Carl Sigismund, had immigrated to Texas from Saxony some years previously. (I have a photograph of Emma in my bedroom.) Adam and Emma's daughter Mary Martha married Mr. Paul Helmecke, who was the foreman of the Schiege Cigar Factory. The house Mr. Schiege provided for his foreman, and where my mother's mother was born, is now a B&B known as The Hideaway. Martha Helmecke married Mr. Jamison -- which implies his people were Irish, Scots, or English (there were many Jamies and their sons were legion). (One of Mr. Jamison's sisters was the first woman to work in a bank in Houston.) The last of their 12 children was a girl, Florence, -- and her first child was yrs trly.

My father's father's people were supposedly from Coffee County in south Georgia, and his paternal grandfather worked as a conductor on the M-K-T ("Katy") Railroad. My father was born in 1922, so that will time-frame it for you. His father's mother was neé Molly Bailey and supposedly she was named after and related to Mollie Bailey, who owned and operated a traveling circus. Mollie Bailey was not the "Bailey" of "Barnum and Bailey"as some folks would have you believe--that was James Bailey. "Our" Baileys were brothers Gus and Alfred. I suspect that Molly was Alfred's daughter, and it was supposedly Molly's mother who was a Dalton and was supposed to be related to the infamous Dalton Gang. (Father says his grandfather used to tell her not to be talking about her family tree since most of her relatives were hanging from it!) Father's mother was neé Mabel Lee (who, along with half the South, was supposedly related to Robert E.) and her mother was a Windom, referred to as "Grandmither." "Grandmither" Windom was cared for as a child by a black "Mammy" and I suspect that "Grandmither's" family had a good deal more money before the Civil War than they did after-- they were not alone in their reduced circumstances. She may have lived in Magnolia Springs, Tx, where I believe her son Theodore ("Uncle Teddy" also lived). My father was the fourth child of five, and the third boy.

I discovered yet another checker in my checkered ancestry only last Friday when my father let slip that one of his uncles was married to a woman of the Scandinavian persuasion named Sieglisa Eric?-something-or-other, AKA "Aunt Shug" (as in "sugar"), who lived in SE Texas and had pomegranate trees planted on either side of her front gate, from which my father would pilfer pomegranates during his boyhood visits. He mentioned this little tidbit during a conversation with a mutual friend about AriZona Pomegranate Green Tea, so it was not entirely off topic. I assume he used the pomegranate seeds for ammo in his pop gun, since he professed not to like eating them, yet never seemed to depart her premises without heisting one. I suspect "Aunt Shug" was married to the paternal side of daddy's family. I will have to see what I can find out.