Category: Genealogy

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English Origin of Henry Luce

The English Origin of Henry Luce
by Justin (Howery) Durand
Copyright 1989, 2006

Henry (1) Luce was an early Massachusetts immigrant and progenitor of a large family on Martha’s Vineyard. His origin is unknown, but it has been suggested that he might have come from Horton in Gloucester. I believe there is some reason to believe he might have come from Chepstow in Monmouth.

He first appears indisputably on November 13, 1666 as a juror at Scituate. He married Remember (2) Litchfield circa 1666, probably at Scituate. In 1668 he owned land at Rehoboth. He moved to Martha’s Vineyard before February 1, 1671, where he and his wife raised a family of ten children[1].

There is no proof of Henry’s antecedents, but an early tradition points to a Welsh origin for the family[2]. A descendant born in 1800 wrote, “My great great great great grandfather Israel Luce lived and died in Wales. My great great great grandfather Henry Luce was born in about 1645 and brought up in Wales. He married Remember Munson. He sailed with his wife and three children to America in 1676, and landed and settled at Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. where he reared a family of seven children”[3]. This statement contains many inaccuracies, but is broadly consistent with the known facts.

There is no reason to doubt that Henry came from a Welsh family, although contrary traditions exist[4]. The surname Luce is found along the Welsh border, and Banks himself accepted the Welsh origin of the family. In 1990 I obtained a list of all telephone directory listings for the surname Luce in southwest England[5]. The name is not common; there were only 118 listings. I found that these listings fall naturally into two groups: one to the north and northwest of Bristol, and the other in the Channel Islands. There were 52 listings in the Bristol area, most of them concentrated in and near Amesbury, Bristol, Bath, Cirencester, and Plymouth. There were 66 listings in the Channel Islands, most of them in Jersey. This listing did not include Wales.

Banks argued that Henry (1) Luce was probably born in or near the parish of Horton[6] in Gloucester, 16 miles from the Welsh border. In reaching this conclusion, Banks looked for earlier evidences of the name Luce in New England. He found a Harke Luse named on a muster roll at Scituate in 1643. On finding a marriage October 8, 1604 between Abraham Luce and Cecily Darke at Horton, Banks came to the conclusion that “Harke” was probably a copyist’s error for “Darke.” He then used the hypothetical Darke Luse to suggest a link between Henry (1) Luce and the Luces of Horton[7].

In further support of this theory, Banks pointed to a contemporary of Henry (1) Luce, also resident at West Tisbury: Arthur (1) Bevan, who first appears on Martha’s Vineyard in 1677. Bevan’s antecedents are unknown, but his surname is Welsh. An Arthur Bevan is named in the parish registers of Yate in Gloucester[8]. Banks’ theory about Henry (1) Luce is considerably strengthened by this demonstration that two men, both apparently Welsh, and living in West Tisbury, might have come from villages only four miles apart in Gloucester.

However, Caroline Lewis Kardell, sometime Historian General of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, has since shown that Harke Luse is more probably an otherwise unknown Archelaus Lewis, brother to George (1) and John (1) Lewis of Scituate[9].

Without the existence of a hypothetical Darke Luse, the theory that Henry (1) Luce came from Horton is considerably weakened[10]. In the light of Ms. Kardell’s theory, the origins of Henry (1) Luce must be re-examined.

Peter Coldham Wilson’s book, The complete book of immigrants, has undoubtedly provided many exciting clues for those researching the origins of immigrants. In the case of the Luce family, there is one intriguing entry:

November 4, 1659, Henry Lewes, tanner, of Chepstow, Monmouth, bound to serve Thomas Bickford, planter, for three years.[11]

Savage does not show another Henry Lewis or Luce who could be this Henry Lewes[12], except Henry (1) Luce[13]. The dates are consistent with the known facts. Henry (1) Luce is thought to have been born about 1640[14]. If he was indentured to Thomas Bickford in 1659, he would have been about 19 years old. The date of immigration is no problem. Henry Lewes was bound in 1659, while Henry (1) Luce is known to have immigrated before 1666. Unfortunately, we have no evidence that Henry (1) Luce of Martha’s Vineyard was a tanner, or had any other skilled trade.

Assuming that the ship on which Henry Lewes departed Bristol landed at New England and not in some other area, such as Barbadoes[15] or Virginia, this begins to create a pattern which suggests that Henry Lewes, a tanner, of Chepstow might have been Henry (1) Luce.

The same document which records the indenture of Henry Lewes also names William Weekes of Salisbury, Wiltshire to serve Augustine Greenwood for four years. The names Weekes and Greenwood are also connected with Martha’s Vineyard. The Greenwood family even became connected with the Luces in the generation following Henry (1) Luce. Samuel (1) Allen of Braintree had a daughter Mary (2) Allen who married 1656 at Weymouth to Nathaniel (1) Greenwood, of Boston[16]. Samuel (1) Allen’s children later settled at Martha’s Vineyard. His granddaughter Sarah (3) Allen married a son of Henry (1) Luce[17].

There was also a William Weekes at Martha’s Vineyard[18]. His origin is unproved, but he seems to have been from a Middlesex family of that name and not from a Wiltshire family[19].

If the Henry Lewes of this indenture is to be identified with Henry (1) Luce of Martha’s Vineyard, the question becomes one of locating a Thomas Bickford in the New World and testing whether there is any reason for believing that Henry (1) Luce, later of Martha’s Vineyard, might have come to America as his indentured servant. The answer, intriguing as it is, is not conclusive.

A John(1) Bickford immigrated from Devon circa 1623 and settled at Dover, New Hampshire. He was married twice and had nine sons, among them the eighth Thomas (2), born at Dover in 1640[20], and the ninth Samuel, born [at Dover?] in 1642[21].

Thomas (2) Bickford would have been only 19 at the time of Henry Lewes’ indenture. At this age, it is unlikely that he was conducting business at Bristol on his father’s behalf or that he would be described as a “planter.” However, the siblings of John (1) are unknown. It is plausible to suggest a hypothetical brother Thomas [22], uncle and namesake of Thomas (2), and to suppose that the older Thomas might have been conducting business on behalf of his brother John (1) in North America.

Even more intriguing is the Bickford connection with Martha’s Vineyard. Samuel (2) Bickford was in Marblehead by 1666 when he married (1) Christian Rand[23]. He later married (2) Mary Cottle, and lived briefly at West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard. He was mentioned in a land transaction of 1678[24]. He was at Tisbury in 1680, as son-in-law of Vineyard resident Edward (1) Cottle.

We have, then, a document recorded at Bristol in 1659 which names a Henry Lewes, Thomas Bickford, William Weekes and Augustine Greenwood, among others. Then at Martha’s Vineyard we find a Henry (1) Luce whose origins are unknown but who might have been Welsh, a Samuel Bickford, a William Weekes, and a Nathaniel Greenwood. I suggest that the circumstantial evidence is strong enough to warrant a new hypothesis: that Henry (1) Luce of Martha’s Vineyard is identical with the Henry Lewes, a tanner from Chepstow, Monmouth, who was indentured at Bristol in 1659. This tentative identification has some interesting possibilities, opening new avenues of research for the Bevan, Bickford, Greenwood, and Weekes families, as well as for the Luce family.

I have not yet been able to identify the Henry Lewes of Chepstow in local records[25]. The same statement which gives Henry (1) Luce’s origin as Wales, says that Henry’s father was Israel Luce[26]. If Henry Lewes the tanner is found to have been son of an Israel Lewes, or to have been connected with a Munson family (tradition gives a connection with the Munson family: Henry’s wife was not Remember Munson as stated, but his mother might have been […] Munson), this identification would be much strengthened.

There was Lewes family at Llysnewydd, Cardigan. They adopted the surname Lewes as a contraction of ap Lewis, temp. James I[27].

—–

[1]Charles Edward Banks, History of Martha’s Vineyard (Baltimore, 1966), 2 (West Tisbury):55.

[2]The different Luce families discussed have often claimed descent from the famous Norman family de Lucy, although none of them has been able to show the intervening generations in the 400-500 years between their earliest known ancestor and the ancestor of the de Lucy family.

The de Lucy family originated with Richard de Lucy (d. 1179), Chief Justiciar of England, under Henry II, a hundred years after the Norman Conquest. He took his name from the commune of Lucé, outside Chartres in the French province of Maine. He was a self-made man and assembled a barony for himself, composed of primarily of fees in southeastern England (Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk, Devon, Essex), and to a lesser extent in southwestern England (Gloucester and Cornwall). See Douglas, The reign of King John, XX; and Complete peerage, 8:257n.

Leslie Pine considered it unlikely in the extreme that the surname Luce could be derived from Lucy, although Lucy is easily documented as a variant of Lucé [Private Communication, July 19, 1985].

Finally, it may be added that there is no connection between any branch of the Luce family on the one hand, and Luce Bay and Glenluce, Scotland on the other. Those places take their names from a Gaelic word meaning “light.”

[3]Banks, 3:246-247. Although Banks does not give the name of his informant, he adds that the descent was through Eleazar (2) Luce.

[4]In fact, there is a vigorous tradition of French descent, but this has become mixed with claims to a descent from the de Lucy family.

Wilmot (5) Luce, born 1788, a descendant of Robert (2), changed his name to d’Luce (Vineyard Gazette, June 26, 1959.

The descendants of Eleazar (2) have given us the tradition that their ancestor was a “Count Eleazar de Lucé”, a Huguenot.

It been suggested that the Luces came from the Channel Islands, where there is indeed a Luce family. Many of the settlers at Marblehead and Gloucester, Massachusetts came thence (see David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed (New York, 1989), pp. 152, 785), so this suggestion is not implausible.

In this connection, it is interesting to note that Benjamin Masury, of Salem, Massachusetts, married April 2, 1671 to Mary Luce, originally of Guernsey in the Channel Islands (Martha McCourt, The American Descendants of Henry Luce of Martha’s Vineyard 1640-1985 (Vancouver, Washington, 1985), 4th edition, p. 11.)

The family of Luce, settled in the parish of St. Lawrence [Jersey] prior to 1500, claims to have migrated from Wales, and to be a branch of the famous Norman house of Lucy, or Lucie, settled in England since the Conquest (see J. Bertrand Payne, An armorial of Jersey (London, 1862), pp. 259ff). This source traces the descent of this family from Perrin Luce, living 1510, and his wife Alice Gibault. The information given does not seem to be comprehensive, but it should be noted that it shows no “Henry” or “Israel”, names which we would expect to find if there were a close relationship with the Martha’s Vineyard family. Indeed, the only name this family has in common with the Martha’s Vineyard family is “John.” The names “Perrin”, “Martin”, “Raulin”, and “Helyer” which appear in the Channel Island family are not used by the Martha’s Vineyard family.

Despite the claim that the Jersey family descends from the de Lucys, this family does not use the de Lucy coat of arms (Gules three pikes or luces hauriant), but uses Azure a crescent Argent. This difference suggests a separate origin for the two families. The names in this family also differ significantly from those in the Vineyard family, however.

It may be noted that a number of Channel Island Luces settled in Canada in the 19th century.

[5]My thanks to Rodney Neep for downloading this information for me from a computerized database available in the United Kingdom.

[6]Since Banks wrote, it has come to the attention of Luce genealogists that the family of Admiral Sir John Luce (1870-1932) and of Admiral Sir John David Luce (b. 1906) originated in Pucklechurch, 10 miles distant from Horton. Leslie Pine, in a 1989 letter to the author, stated his opinion that the Luces of Horton and Pucklechurch probably have a common origin. The Pucklechurch family traces its ancestry to a John Lucie, a contemporary of the Abraham Luce who married Cicely Darke. John Lucie lived a Tytherington, Gloucester. His son, John Luce, removed to Pucklechurch.

The Luce family of Pucklechurch also claims a descent from the Norman family of de Lucy, but also uses the coat of arms Azure a crescent Argent.

[7]There is no way to positively prove or disprove this hypothesis as it stands. The baptismal records of Horton are missing for the years 1624-1653. Henry (1) Luce would have been born during this period, as probably would Harke Luse. If Harke was born at Horton, then he must have been 19 years or younger when he was named at Scituate. The register shows a 1605 baptism for an Israel Luce, son of Abraham Luce and Cicely Darke. Most Luce genealogists have assumed that this Israel was the father of Henry (1), in accordance with the family tradition given above, and have supposed Harke (1) Luce was an uncle of Henry (1).

[8]Banks, 3:522.

[9]Caroline Lewis Kardell, Letter dated July 2, 1990 to Mrs. James E. McCourt.

[10]The reciprocal identification of Arthur (1) Bevan, of West Tisbury, with the Arthur Bevan who appears the parish registers of Yate, Gloucester, is also weakened, but not destroyed.

[11]Peter Coldham Wilson, Complete book of immigrants (Baltimore, 1987), p. 444, citing Bristol Records Office.

[12]The difference in spelling need not trouble us. Banks makes the point that the spelling of the name in America has been uniformly “Luce”, but he cites a contrary example from the Tisbury records where the name is spelled “Lewes” (see Banks, 2 (West Tisbury):55). This is precisely the spelling we see here. The records of Horton, Gloucester also show the name spelled “Lewes”, “Lewce” and “Lewis.”

[13]James Savage, A genealogical dictionary of first settlers of New England (Baltimore, 1965), 3:86, 127.

[14]Based on the birth of his wife Remember Litchfield circa 1644. Henry was probably a few years older. See Banks, 2 (West Tisbury), 55.

[15]Barbadoes would be an interesting alternative to New England. A Luke Luce, merchant, of London, is mentioned in 1668 as owning a plantation in Barbadoes (see Wilson, pp. 399, 475). Burke attributes the same arms used by the Jersey family to a Luce family “of London, formerly of Antwerp.” This cannot be taken as conclusive of a relationship, but suggests that some claim of relationship was made.

[16]Savage, 2:311. He was born at Norwich, son of Miles.

[17]Banks, 3:3.

[18]Banks.

[19]Banks identifies him as a son of William Wickes of Staines, Middlesex, and therefore a brother of John Weeks of New England.

[20]He deposed that he was age 36 in 1676.

[21]Mahlon C. Bickford, The Bickford Family Association, Letter dated May 14, 1991.

[22]Recent research by Mahlon Bickford suggests that John Bickford of Dover, originally from Devon, indeed had a brother Thomas. Mahlon C. Bickford, email dated Jan. 7, 2005.

[23]Bickford (1991).

[24]Banks, 2 (West Tisbury), 68n.

[25]Chepstow records are missing for the relevant period. There is a Welsh family with the surname Lewes, who took their name from a 17th century ancestor. They claimed descent from Ednowain ap Bradwen, and used his arms. However, this cannot have been the family of Henry Lewes of Monmouth.

[26]Henry Luce named one of his sons “Israel.” This might have been after his wife’s brother of that name (Israel Litchfield). If it was also the name of Henry’s father, then it might be significant that the given name Israel is also used by the Lewis family of Westerly, Rhode Island. That family and the Luces of Martha’s Vineyard share the given names Israel and David, but the names are common and nothing firm can be adduced from the fact. Henry Luce and John Lewis (1669, of Westerly) both had sons by these names (see Banks, p. * and Savage, p. 87). Perhaps coincidentally, Williams Weeks of Edgartown operated a ship between Rhode Island and Martha’s Vineyard (see Banks, 2 (Edgartown), 119, 120.)

[27]Burke’s genealogical and heraldic history of landed gentry, (London, 1937), H. Pirie-Gordon ed., pp. 1368-1369.

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Remembering Conrad

Grant, O Gods, that the earth may lie soft and gently upon the shades of our ancestors, and may their urns be filled with a perpetual springtime blooming with the sweet scents of crocus. – Aulus Persius Flaccus, Satura VII, 207-8

On this date each year, I honor the memory of Conrad Hauri, the founder of my patrilineage. He was a wealthy peasant in the village of Steffisburg, in the Interlaken district of Switzerland. I know about him only because his lord, Werner von Steffisburg, leased some lands to the church at Interlaken 723 years ago, on 8 February 1282. The lease mentioned Chuondradus dictus Hovri (Conrad called Hauri), who owed 9 shillings per year for his lands. The fact that he owed a rent for his land tells us that he was a peasant. The amount he owed, a percentage of his holdings, tells us that he was very well-to-do. (In the absence of a genuine money economy, he probably paid his rent in produce and labor.) His by-name, Hauri, meant loud or boisterious in the Alemannic dialect of Switzerland, giving us a fleeting glimpse of Conrad as a person. Conrad’s by-name became the surname of his lineage, a family that came to specialize in those most lucrative (and shady) of medieval occupations, miller and bailiff. They profited by the explusion of the Habsburgs from Switzerland, and by the time Napoleon unified the Swiss in 1798 the Hauris dominated local politics in a dozen Swiss villages. Their ancestral mansion at Reinach, called Schneggen, is now a hotel.

There was probably nothing remarkable about Conrad; he just happened to live at a time when by-names were becoming hereditary surnames. So, he became the ancestor of the Hauris. He lived at a time when Switzerland was solidly Christian and had been for centuries. The area in which he lived had been home to the Helvetii in the 1st millenium BCE. Their La Tène culture was an Early Iron Age culture of the continental Celts. Roman incursions began as early as 107 BCE, and the area was conquered by Julius Caesar in 58 BC with his victory at Col d’Armecy during the Gallic Wars. The region became the Roman province Helvetia, and was a favorite area for retired soldiers. The Romans withdrew and in 406 the area was overrun by the Alamanni, who had previously been settled north of the Rhine. The Alamannian kingdom was conquered by the Franks in 496. (This was the victory that led to the Frankish king Clovis becoming a Christian). The Franks divided Alamannia into Gaue (districts) such as Aargau and Thurgau, which they ruled through royal deputies (counts). The Alamannians were converted to Christianity in the 7th century by the Irish missionaries, Saints Columba and Gallus. The Frankish king Charles Martel incorporated Alamannia into the Frankish realm in the 8th century; thereafter, it was part of the Eastern Frankish kingdom. It became briefly part of the Kingdom of Upper Burgundy when Rudolf the Welf founded that kingdom in 888, but was incorporated into the Duchy of Swabia, one of the stem duchies of the German kingdom, in 912. In 1033, it became part of the Holy Roman Empire. In Conrad’s time, the Duchy of Swabia was disintegrating, and this area was coming the control of various local dynasties. It was ruled by the Counts of Zähringen until 1218, by the Counts of Kyburg 1218-1264, and by the Counts of Habsburgs thereafter. This area was controlled by the Imperial Free City of Berne, founded by Berthold V, Duke of Zähringen in 1191 and made a Free Imperial City in 1218.

Once upon a time, genealogists thought that Conrad was an illegitimate son of one of the Counts von Reinach, who in turn were supposed to be a branch of the Counts von Habsburg. Such tidy explanations for the devolution of power are now out of favor. In 1960, one of my distant cousins in Switzerland wrote an article purporting to prove that Conrad was one of a group of Russian merchants given a license to settle at Steffisburg. I suspect that personal politics had a bit to do with that theory, too. It’s interesting, but I don’t buy it. I prefer to imagine Old Conrad as a descendant of the Alamanni, or perhaps of the Romans, just another man of his village, high-spirited enough to merit his nickname, with a healthy dose of the slyness and acquisitiveness that were said to characterize the medieval peasant.

Whoever he was, I honor his memory, and with him, the memory of all the other members of my patrilineage, known and unknown.

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Families are constructed culturally

I’m always a bit surprised at the number of people I meet who don’t realize that kinship systems are cultural constructs. There is a biological connection, of course, but order is imposed by systems that vary across cultures.

In some cultures, cousins of a certain type are assimilated into the same kinship class as brothers and sisters. In other cultures, a person might belong exclusively to the family of the father or the mother, while the other parent is only a relative by marriage. I imagine most of us have some idea of the astounding number of variations from what we remember of Anthropology 101.

If we’re not careful, we might think about these other systems and feel just a bit superior because we use don’t have any such quaint ideas. Our system is an irreducible universal, based on biology. Whatever other systems our ancestors might have used have been eroded away. We now use a simple system that divides relatives into the two categories of relatives by blood (consanguinal) and relatives by marriage (affinal). We calculate kinship bilaterally, taking paternal and maternal relatives equally into account, but use an elaborated system to weigh the distance of a biological relationship (1st cousins, 2nd cousins, and so on).

Forget all that.

The reality might come as a surprise to amateur anthropologists who are used to picking up second-hand reprints of 19th century texts at the local used book store. In fact, there is no evidence that the cultures who use all those quaint systems are any less sophisticated than we are when it comes to envisioning biological relationships. The difference between us and them, is that they have elaborated cultural systems overlaying biology, and those systems play significant roles in their culture.

Moreover, despite the erosion of our older Germanic kinship systems, we do have one vestigal survival of a cultural system — the surname. Each of us officially belongs to one, and only one, family. Our family name is our badge of membership in that lineage group. It’s not a coincidence that the surname is often called the family name. (Of course, since we use a bilateral kinship system, we end up with culturally significant relatives in other families.)

An easy way to see this point is to think about the inheritance of surnames. We all have eight great grandparents. All of them are equally our ancestors, but we inherit a surname from only one of them. There’s no biological reason to privilege one line of ancestry; it’s merely a cultural artefact. Such cultural systems always interact with other parts of a culture, however trivially. In our culture, some preference rule is arguably necessary if we are to have use surnames at all. It would become very cumbersome to use the surnames of all your ancestors, or even of your eight great grandparents — I would hate to go through life as Justin Howery-Alloway-Horn-Quillen- Swanstrom-Fyrsten-Luce-Wilson!

The residual significance of surnames becomes clearer when we look at our European cousins. In America, changing your surname is a relatively simple matter of appearing before a judge and making a case that there is nothing improper about the change. But, in some European countries it is illegal to adopt a surname that did not belong to one of your great grandparents. And, in Iceland, it is illegal to adopt an hereditary surname.

Although I’m primarily interested in surnames, it’s interesting to note that our supposedly logical kinship system does become a bit untidy at the edges, particularly when it comes to adoptions, relationships by marriage and relatives we don’t know. There is an interesting book, David M. Schneider, American kinship: a cultural account (University of Chicago Press, rev. 1980) that reports the results of a study of American kinship patterns. According to author, Americans become confused when asked about the cultural component of kinship. For example, is a woman your aunt if she is your uncle’s wife but you’ve never met her? Is she still your aunt if your uncle divorces her? If they get a divorce, does it make a difference if she is the mother of your cousins? Does it make a difference if she was your aunt when you were a child, or if she is someone your uncle married late in life? Is your sister’s husband’s sister your sister-in-law? Is her husband your brother-in-law? Where do you draw the line? What about a half-sibling that you’ve never met? Does it make a difference if the half-sibling is a child your mother gave up for adoption, or the by-blow of your father from a one night stand? What about the adopted child of a cousin? The collective answers to such questions show that, as a whole, Americans use a complicated and highly subjective system of biology, marriage, fosterage, adoption and acquaintance to define kinship, while stubbornly insisting that they are using only biology and marriage.

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One big family

Everyone has trillions of ancestors. If you’ve never thought about this before, it might come as a surprise.

Nevertheless, the number of ancestors doubles each generation back. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so on. Assuming an average of 25 years per generation, if you were born about 1950 you would have 256 ancestors in the generation born about 1750, the generation that fought the American Revolution. The number quickly increases. Going back 20 generations to the generation born about 1450, the generation that fought the Wars of the Roses, you would have over a million ancestors. Going back 40 generations to the generation born about 950, when northern Europe was converting to Christianity, you would have over a billion ancestors — more than there were people in Europe. Seventy-eight generations back, the generation born at the time of Christ, you would have some 302,231,454,903,657,000,000,000 ancestors — far more than there have ever been humans on the earth. You can play with these numbers by assuming a different average length for each generation, but you won’t change the result; inevitably you end up with a particular number of ancestors in a given generation.

It should take only a moment to understand that one implication of the large number of ancestors we have is that each of us is descended from many marriages of distant cousins, so that the number of distinct persons in our ancestry is considerably fewer than the theoretical number of ancestors. Some experts believe that the vast majority of marriages throughout history have taken place between people no more distantly related than 2nd cousins. In fact, in about one-third of all human cultures the preferred marriage is between first cousins. Another third of cultures have no preference, and the final third disfavors marriages between cousins. In European cultures, the prejudice against cousin marriages goes back to the rules of the medieval Catholic church. Despite the church’s ban on marriages between relatives, some studies of medieval villages suggest that the normative marriage was between 3rd or 4th cousins; a relationship just distant enough to be deniable.

Because of the large number of theoretical ancestors, and necessary prevalence of marriages between cousins, some statisticians argue that every person in England must be descended from William the Conqueror; every person in western Europe must be descended from Charlemagne; and every person in continental Europe, western Asia and north Africa must be descended from Mohammed. Modern scholarship has even provided some conjectural links from Charlemagne back to the Anicii of the Late Roman Empire.

It is not at all uncommon for quite average people to have documented descents from these people. From doing genealogy, I’ve known hundreds of ordinary people with proven royal descents. (I have a few myself.) At the turn of the 20th century, there were an estimated 500,000 descendants of Edward III in Britain and America, and hundreds of thousands more descendants of Edward I. These English kings had the kind of diverse ancestry I’m talking about. Not only were they descended from William the Conqueror and Charlemagne (and perhaps from Mohammed), they were also descended from the earliest Norwegian kings, who lived in the 11th century and in turn had a legendary descent through the kings at Uppsala from the god Freyr.

In a lyrical passage, the historian Henry Adams wrote about the English, “If we could go back and live again in all of our two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors of the eleventh century, we should find ourselves doing many surprising things, but among the rest we should certainly be ploughing most of the fields of the Cotentin and Calvados; going to mass in every parish church in Normandy; rendering military service to every lord, spiritual or temporal in all this region; and helping to build the Abbey Church at Mont-Saint-Michel.” I think it was Alex Shoumatoff who wrote that if we (people of English decent) could have a bird’s-eye view of England and western France in the years following the Black Death (1348), we would see that we are descended from every farmer tilling his field and every lord in his hall.

It should take only one further moment to realize that each of us also belongs to an extraordinarily large group of kin, more than we could ever keep track of. One expert asserted, “no people of English descent are more distantly related than 30th cousins.” Another study theorized that white Americans whose ancestors have been in America since before about 1850 are one of the largest, most closely related groups on earth – probably no more distant than 13th cousins to one another, because of their likely descent from a relative handful of early immigrants. For example, many of them (perhaps most of them) are descended from at least one of the the 30,000 immigrants to Massachusetts during the Great Migration 1620-1630. In short, we are all part of a huge inbred and interconnected kinship network.

Not only does our ancestry link us all together, it gives us an ancestral diversity far beyond what we see from looking only at our recent forbears. A person of English descent will probably descend from all the different ethnic groups that touched that country’s history, from the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and the Normans. Each of those groups had its own cosmopolitan ancestry. The Roman soldiers stationed in Britain, for example, were drawn from all over the Empire. Modern genetic testing has now begun to provide proof of what statisticians have believed for years. For example, a man in Norway has mitochondrial DNA that shows his matrilineal ancestry to have been Korean. I have no doubt that he has some distant ancestor who came across the Indian trade routes, or perhaps came in the company of the Mongols in Russia. From Russia, it would have been an easy step to Sweden in the company of Norse traders.

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A Woodruff Connection?

There is a persistent idea among older generations that Wilford Woodruff Luce, Sr. (1838-1904) was a son of Wilford Woodruff (1807-1898), the 4th President of the LDS Church. Others of the same generation find it necessary to vehemently deny the story.

This is almost certainly nothing more than a confusion of names, compounded by the fact Woodruff converted the Luces to Mormonism, and led them from Maine to Nauvoo. In fact, Wilford Luce was born in November 1838, during that journey. Nothing would be more in keeping with human nature than to name the baby for the leader of the company. Moreover, Woodruff was newly married to his first wife (April 1837), and there is no evidence he knew Joseph Smith had begun to preach polygamy. Woodruff did not marry his first polygamous wife until 1846.

Those who doubt circumstantial evidence respond that Woodruff was physically present in Vinalhaven in February 1838, so could have been Wilford Luce’s father.

This is exactly the type of question that can be easily settled by genetic testing. The yDNA signature of Wilford Woodruff is known from the Woodruff DNA Project, and there are half a dozen male-line descendants of Wilford Luce who could be tested.

We finally ended up doing that in 2020, but we knew the answer even before that. Wilford Luce was almost certainly a son of Stephen Luce and not of the Wilford Woodruff. We reached that conclusion because the descendants of Wilford Luce who had autosomal tests had cousin matches to the descendants of Stephen brother Ephraim Luce. This level of genetic matching would have been highly unusal if Wilford Luce had not been Ephraim’s nephew.

In 2020, we cinched it. A 2nd great grandson of Wilford Luce agreed to have a yDNA test at the 37-marker level. He matched exactly other male-line descendants of the immigrant Henry Luce. (See Luce Surname DNA Project at Family Tree DNA).

We can therefore say conclusively Wilford Luce was named for Mormon President Wilford Woodruff, but was not his son.

Revised March 10, 2020, July 11, 2025.