I recently passed my first anniversary here at NEHGS, a year during which I spent a lot of time reflecting on my own ancestry as I researched the forebears of people with deep colonial roots in the United States. My mother emigrated from Ireland in the ‘80s and my father’s ancestors are almost entirely nineteenth-century immigrants. The Gaggiolis and Mordinis from Italy, the Beires and Umdenstocks from Germany, and the Sages from England all made their way to the Midwest, and by the beginning of the twentieth century they had coalesced in Libertyville, Illinois, where my grandparents, Richard Gaggioli and Anita Sage, married. These immigrant ancestors shaped my life: the food I eat, the religion I practice, the countries where I travel. The colonists were people I only studied in school; they weren’t my ancestors.
However, I remembered an off-hand comment about part of my grandmother’s family being here in the seventeenth century, so a few months ago I decided to look into it. My grandmother’s grandmother, Isadora Gertrude Wells, was my link to the East Coast. She married Thomas Sage, the son of an Englishman and an Irish-Canadian woman, in Lake County, Illinois on 3 April 1883. Izzie Wells was the daughter of George Washington Wells and Helen Yard. My grandmother remembers Izzie and told me that George was from New York and moved to Illinois shortly before 1860; he broke with his family, so Izzie never knew any of her relatives out East. Thanks to the internet it only took me an evening to find them.
I found George, his wife Helen, and their eldest children (all identified from the 1860 Census in Illinois) in both the 1850 United States Federal Census and the 1855 New York State Census in Johnstown, Fulton County, New York. Also living in that town was an Eleazer Merrill Wells, old enough to be George Washington’s father. Vital records turned up nothing and so, crossing my fingers, I looked for Eleazer Wells’ probate file. Fortune smiled upon me and Eleazer, who died in 1860, had left a will. In it he gave to his son, John Wells:
“the farm & piece of land in the County of Lake and State of Illinois on which my son George now resides … that the said John shall hold the said land during the life of the said George and lease the same and receive the rents and profits thereof … and after the death of said George I give the said land to his children and hereby direct my son John to execute to said children such deeds and do such acts as shall be necessary to put them in full ownership and permission of said lands.”
I don’t know what caused Eleazer to exclude his son from any inheritance or if John Wells actually ensured that the land went to his nieces and nephews, but connecting George Washington Wells in Illinois to Eleazer Merrill Wells of Johnstown, New York (originally from Hartford, Connecticut) introduced me to a whole new set of ancestors I am still discovering. I recognize names from past research cases and find many families that came during the Great Migration, a topic I wrote several papers on in college; these days I feel a little more connected to the work I was doing. I will always identify as an Irish-Italian from the German Midwest, but maybe it’s time I visit Hartford...
