My interest in geneology has slowly grown over the years. I had heard my parents talk about ancestors, distant and near, and the stories surrounding them. Recently, I read Charles Palliser's Victorian-style novel "The Quincunx", where a young boy unfolds his future by discovering the ancestors that have created the constraints and opportunities of his life. When a co-worker started talking about the extensive geneological resources available here in Southern California, I decided to devote some time to determining my family tree. The goal of the research is to determine the complete tree to 5 generations by year-end, and to verify against the original sources the ancestral information that existed in the family history. This is a work in progress. I am definitely an amateur, but I have started to appreciate how much I will learn.

My ancestors through four generations, based on family oral history, are shown in the following graphic.

After four generations, holes start to appear in my family's oral history. Information exists regarding only three lines, stemming from John Riley Decker, William Howland Beach and Alwilda Dozer. But the details of my family are not important to this article. The goal of this article is to relate the problems of life during my ancestors' times to current times. The specifics of my family tree form the fingerposts for the historical research.

One lesson learned about geneology is to verify, verify, verify. Another is to document, document, document. Much of the research about my family has been from the oral history passed on by my parents. The birth of the Internet has given rise to an equivalent to the oral history - the Internet history. But both can (and have) been mistaken. So I am in the midst of the painstaking effort to obtain copies of birth, death, and marriage records. This is what will take most of my time on this project. If it's just assembling paperwork, then where is the fun?

The answer is this: one of the most pleasant aspects of this research is placing my family in history. I have found it very enjoyable to try to picture historical events occurring through the eyes of my family. These history lessons are what I have detailed below. And please keep in mind, this is a work in progress that may take decades.

One of the patterns of investigation that has formed is that about every fifty years a nexus of information forms about historical events and my ancestors. Four generations gives a pretty clear picture throughout the twentieth century. I have informal records of my ancestors from 1900 to the early 1600s. Taking steps fifty years in length, we travel a walkway through history into the distant past.

1900

The years around the turn of this century saw the birth of my father's parents (both of my mother's parents were born after 1908). Detroit would be home for my grandparents, and city life during this period would be told in stories written by the ex-con William Sydney Porter - known as O. Henry. William McKinley was president until shot by an anarchist. His vice president Theodore Roosevelt then became the first of the Roosevelt presidents. Louis Pasteur had been dead for 5 years. Henry Ford would be starting the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The United States was in transition - recovery from the Civil War, growing industrialization, moving towards a greater role in the world. With the demise of the Napoleonic Era, the sunset of Victorian England, and the saber rattling of Kaiser Wilhem II, cracks were appearing in the world's political structure.

1850

This was the first year of the new type of census in the United States, where the entire household was documented. The ancestors of William Howland Beach had settled in Michigan. His father, who would later fight in the Civil War in the 10^th Michigan Cavalry, was nine years old; his uncle was five. One of William's grandfathers was a mason, working in Detroit. William's great-grandfather, a 72 year-old farmer from Rhode Island, was living out in the country north of Detroit. That 72 year-old farmer, Hozial Howland, living with one of his sons in Lapeer Michigan, would later die during the Lincoln administration. William's grandfather on his father's side was also a farmer in the same district. William's mother is just a girl at the time, recently adopted into her family. William's mother would later spend the last years of her life telling her great-grandson - a young John Decker, my father - stories of the family.

Michigan in 1850 was an interesting place. A sense of the time is well-described in Burtom Folsom's book "Empire Builders". It was before the automobile industry, before the Civil War, but life was hardly primitive. Michigan had just revised the state constitution to become more laissez-faire. Land was being sold cheap in order to foster the harvest of timber. Henry Ford's father had just arrived from Ireland, and with the recently privatized railroad there was plenty of work to do.

The Dozers were becoming quite a presence in Zanesville, Ohio. By 1850, Solomon Dozer, the youngest son of Henry Dozer, patriarch of the family, had been married to Mary Swingle for five years and had moved from Zanesville to a farm just down the Muskingum river, near Gaysport, Ohio.

James K. Polk, who had followed the Whig John Tyler, had just ended the term of the last of the Jacksonian presidents. The Whig Zachary Taylor, the general under Polk who was to bring California to the US, was to die a few months into his term, with Millard Fillmore taking over. Fillmore quickly reached the Great Compromise of 1850, and brought California into the Union as a free state. Fillmore was to begin a sequence of presidents known mostly for their weakness, and their ability to delay the inevitable - a conflict between the States concerning the morality of slavery.

Tocqueville's Democracy in America would be in its twelth edition. Henrick Ibsen was writing his plays. In France, Louis-Napolean would lead a coup-detat and thus begin the end of the Napoleanic Era.

1800

Hozial Howland would be married to Waty Warren during the beginning of the Jefferson administration of the young United States. Ebenezer Zane had cut his way through Ohio and founded Zanesville just a year earlier. Henry Dozer, an orphan from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, would turn 17, and in five years marry Mary Zircle at Massanutten He would then move to Zanesville, in the two year old state of Ohio, where the Dozer family would proliferate into over 1000 descendants by 1905. Noah Webster would soon celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with a memorable oration. Luke Decker, who had served under William Henry Harrison in the Army, would be settled in Indiana. William Henry Harrison had recently resigned his Army position and was settling in as Governor of the new Indiana territory. He would become the ninth president under the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too", die in office, and be succeeded by John Tyler. In the Michigan Territory, the fur business would grow rapidly in a few years when John Jacob Astor started the North American Fur Company.

1750

The American colonies were listening to voices from Europe, like Rousseau and Voltaire, who were driving a shift in beliefs. The radicals in the colonies calling for seperation from England would come to the surface later in the next decade, but the seeds of discontent were being sown. Jefferson was a child in Virginia learning his native language, and would soon be learning Latin and the Classics that would open the doorway to the writings that would form his political thinking, and his young country's philosophy. Ben Franklin was publishing his Pennsylvania Gazette.

In England, the race to solve the longitude problem was coming to an end. John Harrison's inventions were being tested in various forms. Before Harrison's famous watch, mariners had only a reliable method of knowing how far north or south they were sailing. But how far east or west they had sailed? Now, by keeping track of time and boat speed, the distance from a friendly harbor was known. This would have an enormous impact on emigration to the American colonies, and later the United States.

In 1750, Tobias Decker, father of Luke Decker, was just a babe, the son of John (De)Decker. There were numerous Howlands in New England at this time, many with the same name. Three prolific Howland brothers had come to New England in the 1600's and their descendents were flourishing.

1700

Locke's Second Treatise on Government was 11 years old. Principia had been in print for 13 years. The accusation of witchcraft had led to executions in Salem during the previous decade. But in another six years the accusers would repent. Cotton Mather's sermons dominated New England's Puritan thought.

In seven years a navigational blunder would cause a massive shipwreck by British warships. This tragedy would launch a major effort to solve the problem of reckoning the longitude. Sailing for the emigrants coming to the New World was an experience frought with danger. Scurvy, starvation, and shipwreck all were common in ocean travel because there was no reliable method of knowing how far east you were. Dead reckoning, a mash of tricks and guesswork, very often resulted in death.

1650

Jamestown Colony was 41 years old. Plymouth Colony was 30 years old. The Puritans had established the Massachusetts Bay Colony twenty years earlier. Cromwell was in power in England, with Charles the First's beheading occuring only a year earlier. The Eighty Years' war between Holland and Spain had recently ended, leaving commerce and society restructured in the Netherlands.

John Gamston DeDecker would marry Gretyen Westercamp around this time in New Amsterdam.

Galileo had recently died, and his method for determining longitude would be adopted by cartographers for land-based measurements. It would take another 100 years before mariners had an acceptable method for longitude measurement.

The perspective I have gained is a perspective of the world I live in, the world my ancestors helped to make. Some of the problems of life faced by my ancestors have been solved, others remain. Global positioning systems allow travelers to know where they are to within a few feet. The automobile and the airplane dominate travel. There is serious talk of colonizing Mars. Information is inexpensive and quickly available. I have lived through the presidencies of both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

The problem is, finding the truth is more than just gathering data. As time goes on I hope to learn more about the past, to gain a greater appreciate for the problems faced by my ancestors, and at the same time learn more about the present.

William J. Decker, PhD

31878 Del Obispo #118-314

San Juan Capistrano, CA 92675

wjdecker@pobox.com

Ibsen, Henrik, Ibsen: Four Major Plays, Signet Classic, 1965.

Morris, Richard B., Witnesses at the Creation, Mentor New American Library, 1985.

Sobel, Dava, Longitude, Penguin, 1995.

Boorstin, Daniel J., The Discoverers, Random House, 1983.

De Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, Harper & Row, 1969.

Hyneman, Charles S. and Lutz, Donald S., American Politcal Writing during the Founding Era, Volume II, Liberty Press, 1983.

Folsom, Burton S. Jr., Empire Builders: How Michigan Entrepreneurs Helped Make America Great, Rhodes and Easton, 1998.

Koch, Adrienne and Peden, William, The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Random House/Modern Library, 1972.

Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom, Norton, 1969.

Henry, O., 41 Stories by O. Henry, Signet Classic, 1984.