Can you help me identify the other family members in these photos? Just add to the comment section. Thank you!
More Horseracing Photos
The Andrews Family – A New England Heritage
What was Ruth Martha Andrews’s story? We knew very little about the family’s history, and there were few people to talk to when we began the search for answers. We knew that Ruth’s mother had died at a young age, and Ruth had been raised by her grandparents. We did not know her mother’s name. We did not know who Ruth’s father was, but we did know that her mother had been assaulted by a white man, resulting in a pregnancy. Son Jimmy, who lived with his great grandparents while growing up, told us the family was part Native American, and that he had gone with his great grandparents to “pig roasts” in Connecticut. Son Richard remembered the Civil War artifacts in the attic, and knew that one of his ancestors had fought in the Civil War.
What our search found out was astounding. Ruth has deep roots in New England. Not only did her great grandfather, James Wallace, fight in the Civil War, so did many of her uncles. Her ancestor, Ned Carter, fought in the Revolutionary War along with several of his sons. This family also had roots in New England slavery, which was quite prevalent but never discussed like slavery in the South. Continue reading “The Andrews Family – A New England Heritage”
Horse Racing – The Family Business
Thoroughbred horse racing is the DeBoise Family Business! At least three generations of the DeBoise family have owned, trained, or rode horses throughout New England and East Coast race tracks. Here are a few of the pictures that we have of the DeBoise family with their winning horses.
David Perkins and Rose Grimes Families
I believe that when our ancestors want to be found, they will lead the way. That has happened so many times in my search for their stories. I could find very little on the parents of Patience Perkins over the years that I searched. I found Rose, Patience’s mother, in Newport from about 1900 until 1911, and then she disappeared. Patience’s father was also hiding. I knew he was from North Carolina, and that was it. A few years ago, I searched again for records on Rose, and found her death certificate! Woohoo! From the information on the certificate, I verified where she was born; found out her maiden name, her husband’s name, and the daughter that she lived with the last few years of her life. She was ready to be found! From that information, I was able to find both the Perkins and Grimes families in North Carolina, and began to learn their stories.
Slavery is part of the history of most African-Americans. However, actually finding those connections, and looking at the slave schedules and knowing that this is probably the family I am looking for is sobering and disturbing. The Perkins and Grimes families are from Pactolus in Pitt County, and Little Washington in Beaufort County, North Carolina. Continue reading “David Perkins and Rose Grimes Families”
Elias DeBoise and Rose Anderson
Elias DeBoise, Frank’s father, was born about 1852 in Columbia, South Carolina to Marcus and Delia DuBose. (DuBose is the most common spelling of this family from South Carolina. DNA matches our DeBoise family with the DuBose family.) Elias was probably born into slavery, as were his parents. According to oral history passed on by Elias’s granddaughter there were two brothers of the DeBoise family who came from Canada. They argued, fought, and separated, never reconciling. Elias is one of those brothers. Documentation has not been found yet to support this story, and might never be found, but it is very probable. Columbia, South Carolina was an active port of the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, and escaped slaves fled to the Northeast and Canada either over land or by water, departing from Charleston. The first record found for Elias is the 1874 Worcester City Directory, where he was living and working as a waiter.
Worcester was a northern city which welcomed freed African-Americans from the South after the Civil War, as well as those escaping slavery before the War. Worcester was very active in the anti-slavery movement, and many African-Americans had positive interactions with soldiers and teachers from Worcester during the Civil War. Continue reading “Elias DeBoise and Rose Anderson”
Frank DeBoise and Patience Perkins
Frank Henry DeBoise, the father of James, was born December 10, 1884 in Worcester, the son of Elias and Rose (Anderson) DeBoise. Frank was 13 when his father died from pneumonia, leaving him an orphan. His mother was already dead at the time of his father’s death. Frank was adopted by Joseph and Jane Collins. Joseph and Jane were from North Carolina, and had no other children. Joseph was a brick mason and Jane was a laundress. In 1900, they were 69 and 60 respectively.
Frank had two sisters who were still living at the time of their father’s death – Agnes and Bessie. Agnes was 21 years old when she married John Paxton in 1903, was a widow by 1912, and probably died before 1930. It appears that she did not have any children. Bessie was 16 years old when she married (1) Charles E. Reese in 1905, and 33 years old when she married (2) Isaiah Wilbur Smith in 1922. Bessie lived in New Haven, Connecticut. She did not have children of her own, but she and Isaiah (Uncle Billy) became guardians of her brother Frank’s two youngest children, Theodore and Barbara, upon Frank’s death. Continue reading “Frank DeBoise and Patience Perkins”
Introduction to the DeBoise Family Tree (originally shared January 4, 2018)
I first met James DeBoise in the fall of 1974. I was dating his son and Jim had come to Rhode Island to visit Richard. I remember Richard fixing fried smelts and cream corn for his dad, a favorite of both of them. They both added sugar to their cream corn, mirroring each other in their eating styles. I also remember sitting with Jim in the back of the car and as he was talking about Ruth, his wife who had died the previous year, he began to tear up. It was obvious that he had loved and deeply missed his wife.
Over the years Richard and I spent a lot of time with him. He would frequently drive down from Springfield, in his red Cadillac convertible with the large cattle horns on the front and lights flashing around the license plate, to spend the weekend with us. I remember he always wanted to look sharply dressed, and he enjoyed going to the strip clubs. He wore a suit and his cowboy hat and boots when he went out. On a trip with us to Salem, Massachusetts he went through the Witch Museum for the first time, and laughed at me as I wandered through the cemeteries seeing if I could find any of my relatives buried there. On a trip to Plymouth and the Plymouth Plantations, he walked away, shaking his head, from Richard who kept trying to get the actors out of character. On a trip to Old Orchard Beach, Maine he bought a large stuffed gorilla, dressed it in his suit, and set it in the back of his convertible with the top down, turning heads and causing a lot of laughs. Richard took his dad to New Orleans a few years before his death, and the stories they came back with would make you roll on the floor with laughter.
We also had some serious discussions. During dinner at a local Chinese restaurant, he told us about being an orphan at 12 years of age. His youngest brother and sister went to live with his Aunt Bessie in New Haven, Connecticut. Jim, Harry and Joe were placed in foster care in Boston. Jim said he was being abused in his foster home and he ran away. He went to his brother Frank, who was only 15 and trying to survive on his own, and his sister Rose, who was newly married and only 17, but neither were able to give him a place to stay. He was on his own from that point on.
He traveled to New Orleans, New York, and other places seeking work. He worked at racetracks riding horses during part of this time. With little education, he became a very skilled mechanic. He drove trucks, rode show horses – equestrian and jumpers, worked hard and played hard. He told us about first seeing his future wife. He was driving a truck through Palmer, Massachusetts and saw Ruth coming out of the movie theater. He stopped the truck, introduced himself, and the romance blossomed from that point forward, much to the disapproval of Ruth’s grandmother.
I never knew Ruth Martha Andrews, but have heard stories about her. I cannot imagine having a family as large as hers – seventeen children with two dying at birth. She and Jim also made a home for four of her daughter Dorothy’s young children after Dorothy and her husband John died in a car accident in 1959. Ruth grew up as an only child, probably in a fairly quiet home. Her home as an adult was anything but quiet! It seems as if she was a very giving woman, with a lot of patience. When I asked her sons to tell me more about her, they said she was a “homebody”. She stayed home and took care of the children. Richard remembers picking wild grapes on “the hill”, and bringing them to his mother, who would make grape jelly. She also enjoyed listening to the detailed description of movies when Richard came home from seeing the latest movie at the theater.
Ruth did have an independent streak. She wanted to learn to drive, but Jim did not want her to. He was gone most of the week and wanted her to stay home with the kids. That way he knew where she was! However, she was determined she was going to learn. She snuck out Jim’s car keys when he was sleeping and had a duplicate made. He would leave on Sunday nights to go to work driving a truck back and forth to New York. He would leave his car parked at Haskell Trucking, his employer. She, and her son Billy, would take the extra key and go get the car, and Billy proceeded to teach her to drive. She gained her independence! I found a newspaper article where she was stopped for speeding in Ware and subsequently paid a speeding fine.
Once the children were older, and Richard was working on the racetrack, he convinced her to come with him to the horse races. She saw the horses and fell in love with horse racing, determined that she was going to have a racehorse. This was in the early 1960s, and she and Jim bought several horses which they raced throughout New England.
I have taken my passion for genealogy and have been tracing the DeBoise and Andrews families since the 1970s. I believe it is important to pass our family history, stories, and traditions on to future generations. I will share what I have found out about this family’s ancestors. I hope that family members will continue to add to the stories so that they are not lost and will track the new generations that have descended from these families.
Some of what I will be sharing with you includes information on the DeBoise and Perkins families; the Andrews and Wallace families; the Cortis/Remington family; family origins based on DNA; as well as ancestral charts. I have information on the many family members who fought in the Civil War, as well as the Revolutionary War and most of this country’s major conflicts. I hope you will enjoy, will add to the information, and will share the stories of your family with your children and grandchildren so they will know their history.
Teri
Climbing Our Family Tree: The Ancestors of James DeBoise and Ruth Andrews 