Family Tree

Here is a family tree that I cobbled together. I did none of the primary research; rather, I put together information found on the internet:

http://www.myheritage.com/FP/family-tree.php?s=60935052

The Thomases were German Protestants from Alsace. They emigrated to Muskingum County, Ohio, in the 1850s.

The Gadds are descended from Thomas Gadd, who was born in Hackney (now part of London). Thomas Gadd seems to have been a (minor) criminal - he spent some time in a penal colony in Jamaica. He arrived in Baltimore ca 1668 and married Elizabeth Swaine.

William Gadd (1759-1835) fought in the Revolutionary War.

After moving westward through Pennsylvania to Ohio, this branch of the Gadds intermarried with Kings, Kinneys, Lanes, and Swopes, among other families prominent in the history of Muskingum County.

My grandmother, Ada Ellen Gadd Thomas (1886-1988), was very proud that her father's mother was a Lane. I had no idea why this was so important to her, but now that I've done some research on the internet, I understand:

The Lane family traces its ancestry back to Adam de la Lone, a Norman who came to England with William the Conqueror. The Lanes were prominent both in England (where they intermarried with the Parrs, thus earning a place in the English Peerage), and in the colonial United States (where the first governor of Virginia was Sir Ralph Lane, born 1530).

(A CAVEAT concerning the family tree: fascinating as it has been to trace my ancestry back 26 generations to Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare (1024-1090), I'm skeptical - not because I doubt the historical records that professional genealogists have so painstakingly pieced together, but because modern DNA testing reveals that a surprisingly high percentage of people are in fact not the genetic offspring of their legal fathers. On the other hand, I'm confident that just about anyone living today is indeed descended, in one way or another, from kings and conquerors, soldiers and criminals!)