Twenty-four years ago, NEHGS published Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 1742-1998 by Franklin A. Dorman. I have written about families treated here before, including the family of civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter. A friend of mine appears in the section on the Butler family of Boston, which also has a connection to early Native American families of Plymouth, Massachusetts – my friend’s great-great-great-grandfather, William George Butler (1837-1919) of West Medford, Massachusetts, received a pension from Massachusetts regarding his Wampanoag heritage. My friend and I were both interviewed by the late Bryan Sykes about our early New England ancestry for his book, DNA USA. All interesting stuff, but what does this have to do with Clarence Thomas?
When our publication came out in 1998, I checked the index for various African American families of central Massachusetts that I had researched. While the chapters focused largely on families of the greater Boston area, I found one person in the index who also appeared in my genealogical database: Mary Estella Hazzard, who was born in my grandfather’s hometown of Woodstock, Connecticut in 1915, daughter of Edward Prentice and Maud Lillian (Brown) Hazzard, both of whom were Nipmuc, and ancestral to a few childhood friends. Maud’s great-great-great-grandparents (in two ways, see chart below), Christopher and Roba (Coffee) Vickers, were the subject of an 1810 Massachusetts Supreme Court Case regarding the legality of their interracial marriage. Roba’s parents, Ishmael and Hannah (Gay) Coffee, were also the subject of an 1819 case for similar reasons, all summarized in this post from several years ago. Again, you might wonder, what does this have to do with Justice Thomas?
Mary Estella Hazzard (1915-2009) is only treated briefly by Dorman. She was the second wife of Nelson William Ambush (1915-2012) of Worcester, Massachusetts, who descended from the William Kellogg family that was subject of the tenth chapter of Dorman’s book. Mary and Nelson both had earlier marriages and had no children together. Nelson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moved to Worcester with his first wife, Shigao Gladys Sato (1917-1984), who was the daughter of Takayuki Yaokawa Sato, a native of Katsurahama, Japan, and his wife Grace Virginia Woods, a native of Cambridge whose parents were from St. Croix and Virginia.
Echoing a recent post on how between 1907 and 1922, when a U.S. citizen woman married an alien, she lost her citizenship, such was the case for Grace after her 1915 marriage to Takayuki. However, unlike the subjects of that post, Grace was aware that she lost her citizenship, and tried to obtain U.S. citizenship again in 1922 on the grounds that she could not acquire any other nationality; she was apparently successful after her husband’s death in 1939.
Okay, so how this relates to Thomas: Nelson and Shigao’s daughter, Kathy Grace Ambush (born 1950), was the first wife of Clarence Thomas, and the mother of his only child Jamal Adeen Thomas (born 1973), and the family is treated on pages 263-64 of this NEHGS publication. Mary Estella (Hazzard) (Barden) Ambush ends up being my eleventh cousin in four ways through our respective double descents from John and Joanna (Hooker) Gay of Dedham, Massachusetts. Of course I can’t say that Mary was even Clarence Thomas’s former step-mother-in-law, as Mary did not marry Nelson until 1987, and Clarence Thomas and his first wife divorced in 1984. So, this post really is a series of minimally connected genealogical tangents. Thanks for the indulgence!
