The Roots Of My Tree

My dive into the ancestry rabbit hole started in 1987 when I inherited this cross-stitch piece. It was in a box of family heirlooms my parents were cleaning out, and I was doing cross-stitch at the time. Cross-stich “samplers” were done by young girls as a way to learn sewing. Some of the stitching is traditional “cross-stitch” while others are more complex. This piece was done on hand-loomed linen fabric with naturally colored thread. While some of these works could be extremely fancy, with detailed pictures, this one is  more simple. It depicts the alphabet (no “J”!), numbers, strawberry vines and “Eliza Hutchinson Hir Sampler 1789” done in stitching. I had it professionally framed in archival material and it is displayed in our home.

The question, at the time, was who was Eliza Hutchinson? Clearly she was alive in 1789, but our knowledge of the family tree did not include a Hutchinson family. So, I began to dig through the boxes of family papers. My research included a trip with a friend to the Newberry Library in Chicago, as well as an Antiques Roadshow filming (they indicated it was worth around $2000 in 1996).

As I began to trace my ancestry, I drafted a somewhat unusual tree – I started with my father, and worked backwards, with only parents noted (with dates when known). The result looks more like the roots of a tree, showing the line of my ancestry through my dad going back into the 1600s. It is a remarkably useful chart, and I refer to it often when doing family research.

The first problem I needed to tackle was if the cross-stitch came down from the Strong family (my paternal grandmother) or the Humphrey side (my paternal grandfather). The two collections had merged over the years, and so it was unclear. The papers I have from the Humphrey family indicate they were living in Michigan in the early 1800s, and the Antique Roadshow folks felt the piece was from New England, likely New York or New Jersey. Thus, the Strong side.

Researching genealogy in the early days of the internet was not as easy as it is today. No “23 and Me” or data bases readily available. However, the Church of Latter-Day Saints was – and still is – a huge source of genealogy information. Between contacting distant relatives, and requesting data from the Church, I was able to locate a Hutchinson family on our tree! Anne B. Hutchinson (1786-1830) married John C. Schenck. She is my 6th great grandmother.

You likely noticed her name is Anne and not Eliza. Research uncovered that Anne had an older sister Eliza, who died in 1813 at the age of 33 without children. Eliza was 9 when she made the cross-stitch. Anne was 27 when Eliza died and she saved her sister’s sampler. Anne then passed it down to her son William Schenck (1817-1903). He in turn gave it to his daughter Adeline Schenck (1844-1935). And on down to my great grandfather Benjamin Strong (1872-1926), my grandmother Katherine Strong (1904-1987) and then to my father (1927-2010). I find it interesting that this path went from Anne to son-daughter-son-daughter-son and then to me (1963)! I will give this to my son (1991) to pass on to our granddaughter (2021) – she will be the 9th generation to care for the work of Eliza Hutchinson, a woman whose roots live on in my family tree.