Rough draft


Scroll to ...Bottom (Grave List)

1. The Erdmanns Vs. The Erdmans Three Erdmanns married three Arndorfers. They did this in a very German section of the Upper Midwest, to this day filled with farms and good schools and good memories, despite the de-population troubling many rural areas. Finding someone good and kind, who could "work hard"? It was not always easy. What if you ALSO wanted a marriage partner who agreed with you as to which jokes were funny, whether dancing or playing cards or singing was a better pastime at weddings or on Sunday afternoons? If one friend "found a good thing", the "lucky one" wanted to share their luck with their best friends. In the large rural German families, whether Catholic or Lutheran, siblings and cousins who lived in the same towns and went to the same schools and churches would often be those "best friends". And so it was, a marriage between one Arndorfer and one Erdmann was followed by two more.

The modern Erdmans and their ancestral Erdmanns were just one of the many types of Germanics to populate the upper Mid-West. Some came pre-Civil War. Most came between the Civil War and the 1880 Census, with stragglers continuing to migrate here even after 1900. The last would find lots of the good farmland already snapped up, would witness immigration gates slamming shut as what historians called "nativism" grew.

The first immigrants kept the Erdmann spelling until they died. The younger generations very often would re-fashion themselves as Erdman as soon as the parents died. Sometimes were so bold as to put that new spelling on their Erdmann parents' stones.

Their ancestors might sigh from the grave if that were possible. A changed spelling would mean Erdmann relatives "left behind" in the home country "might never find them" should they "come to America looking".

Findagrave searches:
Double-n Erdmanns, Kossuth County, IA
Single-n Erdmans, Kossuth County, IA

(2) John William Linzee, Sr. married Anne B., also known as Anne Brigette, in Calcutta, India, a city now known as Kolkota. How does an Episcopalian-leaning gentleman born in Boston end up marrying a French Catholic whose cradle was rocked in India? It's a good story, started as a debt repayment, but turned out to be too interesting to let go with merely finding the dates and places.

Our debt to the Linzees?

Their son, John William Linzee Jr., traveled a wide circuit to document Freedom Kingsley and her husband. Freedom married one of three Puritan John Frenches early to Massachusetts.

Linzee followed the wide geographic see-saws the couple made trying to please two sets of Puritan-era parents who leaned in different religious directions. This John French's tailoring family? Their first burials are located at the top of Massachusetts, in Ipswich, Mass., by the Maine border. Perhaps they went there to follow the Rev. Rogers from their hometown in England?

Freedom's Kingsleys would follow their ministers: First, Rev. Richard Mather to Dorchester, now a part of south Boston. Next, Rev. Samuel Newman, down to the bottom of Massachusetts, near its future border with Rhode Island. Then, some more Mather ministers, westward, to Northampton and Deerfield, along the Connecticut River, above Springfield MA and thus Connecticut.

(3) Freedom Kingsley and That Other French Woman. Will the real daughter of John Kingsley please step forward? Oh, Freedom Kingsley, how we love you, as Linzee proving your existence freed the Grace who married a bit older John French to be her true self, no longer given your maiden name.

Just who was Grace French of Braintree, with maiden name unknown? We know her mainly by her many children. They, in turn, had large families, and so on, and so on, allowing their DNA of Frenches to stay in Braintree for several hundred years. Those not staying spread across the US, going along the Canadian border, with a jaunt to California, where a few more people named their children Grace.

If she was not a Kingsley, then who was Grace? One set of Braintree Frenches did business in Chicago around the time of the Great Fire. One, Orvis French, maintained that the original Grace French was an Alden of Plymouth. Once the so-called "Old Colony", its northern part is now Plymouth County, Mass, maybe 8 or 9 miles south of old Braintree. Outside Chicago, up in NH, a Rev. Jonathan French, descended from Grace' son Samuel French, claimed Alden relatives on two of his grandparents' sides. (He did not name Grace, but she was the grandmother of his grandfather, Moses French. Moses married Esther Thayer, whose grandmother was Ruth Alden. ).



By Julia Brown, Austin, TX, copyright Aug., 2015. Revd. Dec, 2015, July, 2016. Permission granted to Findagrave to use at this page.
==========================================================