Note: WorldConnect family trees will be removed from RootsWeb on April 15, 2023 and will be migrated to Ancestry later in 2023. (More info)

Individual Page


Family
Marriage: Children:
  1. Stephen Smith: Birth: 7 SEP 1939. Death: MAR 1986 in Connecticut


Family
Marriage:
Notes
a. Note:   rt attack. His father died at age 62 of a heart attack. My father blamed his intense and violent tempered temperament. He was a physically heavy, though not obese, man, with a waistline that suggested metabolic syndrome. My father scrupulously watched his diet and his weight, and lived to die of cancer at age 81.
  Willard was scapegoated by his family. I never knew him; I met him at his open casket at his funeral. My father told a number of stories about him. His intense temperament and violent temper killed him. My father claimed that he feared he might have beaten the spirit out of my brother when he was two years old and having terrible two temper tantrums that I thought at the time copied his mother's, because Willard had an extremely violent temper and he was scared to death my brother was developing it.
  My father also told stories about his father's scary violent temper, and his best friend my godfather told some of the same stories. The violent temper turns out to run in the Smith family. That doesn't necessarily mean something wasn't different about Willard, as I think it may well have been. But their parents did neither child any favors by not sharing the truth, if they were going to label and mistreat Willard as soundly as they did.
  The daughter of Willard's son Steven told me that he also had an intense and violent temper, though they don't seem to have had a bad father, and that they knew next to nothing about his family, because he never talked about them. Their father died when they were teenagers of combining alcohol and sleeping pills. Problems with alcohol run in my Smith line big time. My father however regulated his drinking strictly, to one beer in the afternoon and wine at Christmas, and stopped drinking when his doctor put him on valium on account of the underlying mood disorder.
  My second cousin Dorothy, was the daughter of my father's mother's 1st cousin, who was fast friends with my grandmother, Bessie Mae, and visited often, as did Dorothy, who attended boarding school nearby. Dorothy and Willard often played. My father was both considerably younger and constantly absorbed in his books. My father was introverted and didn't have much of a social life, though there survives a single photo of a childhood friend. My father's parents are described by their neighbors and his father's coworkers in Carlisle as unfailingly polite but never interacted with other people beyond saying hello and what was required for my grandfather's job as a vice president of a small bank. My grandfather did interact normally in the business social clubs he belonged to.
  Dorothy told me that Willard was a normal boy who liked to be with other people and have friends, and he was also a fish out of water in his family, where everyone else was quiet and introverted.
  As a teenager, Willard got involved briefly with a gang. Normal parents would have reacted harshly and punished him, probably by letting him get into trouble and spend a night in jail among other things, and that would have been the end of it. My grandfather got out his belt and whipped Willard, and then sent him off to military school. This is a treatment that has always had a tendency to backfire, as Willard would have been provided with sound discipline but terrible role models and little positive socialization.
  After that, his parents refused to send him to college. Later, they sent my father to college. My father, when he told us this, said that Willard always held this against the rest of the family. He claimed that Willard, who was financially successful, could have put himself through college if he wanted to, which is beside the point. My father says that the depression hit his family about that time, his father had lost his banking job and didn't find another until my father was 16, so there was no money to send Willard to college. He also said that inheritances from relatives helped him to afford college while living with his mother, his father having died soon after he started college. I looked into the truth of the no money claim, and, well, maybe. Willard finished high school about when the stock market crashed, and the Depression actually took a couple of years to affect his family. There would have been money for him to start college, especially if he lived at home.
  Willard married several times, while my parents married just once, for life, despite an often troubled marriage. I heard from my parents that he always married whoever was his secretary at the time. I've never verified that, and I think I personally know of two wives.
  Tehre is a photo of Willard as a young man, with the woman he married. What immediately struck me was how very different his personality was from anyone in his family. It had me wondering if there was any chance his father wasn't his biological father. He appeared smart alecky. His hair was spiked. He also looked considerably shorter than anyone else in his family. He was visibly showing off both his car and his girl. On the other hand, a different photo shows him and his father demonstrating the same nervous brand of wanting to think they liked each other. And he'd have learned the smart alecky hair spiked thing in military school.
  My parents scapegoated me, and it further looks as though Bessie Mae was scapegoated by her mother, and her mother in her turn by her own mother. It seems to be a family dynamic.
  There is also a bad history of fathers not being very involved with their sons. My father seems to have been "the boy", in his first year of college, who was sometimes convenient to have around, and otherwise he was not at all involved with him. "Played golf in the morning. Then the boy drove me to work". This lack of involvement with sons seems to be a pattern between Smith men and their sons going back several generations. Smiths are characteristically and quite stereotypically Scotch Irish in temperament. Among other things there is a tendency to be very independent, and to refuse to ask for help when needed, as well as to give help when needed. So my emigrant Smiths, who were extremely poor and barely kept their small farm, took out a loan against it, and never paid on it. Years later the son of the man they took the loan from foreclosed. I've an idea this is when their sons learned their aging parents had a mortgage they couldn't pay. Two of the sons had become quite successful and more than had the money to help. One of them bought the farm for the amount due on the mortgage, and then sold it. But their daughter whose descendants match my DNA was still living with them at this point; she married soon after that.
  My father had just one good friend, and began attending their Episcopal church. His parents took an active interest in neither part of that. My godparents said they were inside my father's house just once for a birthday party, and it was impressively way too clean. Third cousins who traveled to visit my parents one day said they didn't seem glad to see them and never had them in the house. They took photos of three very unsmiling people; my father, his mother, and his grandmother who had had a stroke and lived with them.
  My father fell afowl of his father's temper when he left the family car downtown at church one night, and when they lived in Philadelphia, one day he rode around the city on the trolley system to see where it went. His father specifically couldn't imagine why anyone would want to ride around on "those dirty old trolley cars". I thought his father sounded an awful lot like my father. My father thought his father was perfectly normal, and his best friend did not think his father was at all normal. Only Willard's violent temper was not seen by his family as normal.
  Willard's paternal line grandson recently turned up among my 23andMe matches, as my 1st or 2nd cousin, as he should, but barely in range for a 1st cousin once removed. He has matches in common with me with shared Dehart and Moore line relatives on 23andMe. That is consistent with sharing common grandparents, or atleast, with shared descent from Bessie Mae, my grandmother. However, he does not match in common our Smith 2nd cousins, a number of whom have tested at 23andMe, which is remarkable. He also does not match in common with Thompson and Dehaven line matches at 23andMe. What is more, his endpoint Y DNA SNP is inconsistent with sharing my brother's Y DNA. I suggested several ways of verifying that, and my cousin appears to be ignoring the matter and atleast never responded to me, which is fairly normal, and also too bad. I think we're looking at critical family history that has affected descendants' welfare.
  I have always found my brother's Y DNA suspect, because his close matches don't share his surname and belong to four races, and match two other families with still different surnames back in Scotland. This caused me to have already thoroughly checked my Smith line autosomal DNA matches before I learned that Willard didn't share my line's Y DNA. My brother is my full sibling; specifically, we share half our DNA, and many of the shared segments are fully identical. That proves we inherited DNA from both of the same parents. Only full siblings have fully identical DNA segments. I match my Smith 2nd cousins as 2nd cousins. That proves I descend from my grandfather's mother. Lots of matches involving Thompson line ancestors also prove that. I match around a hundred Dehavens, which is remarkable, and it proves I descend from my Smith great grandfather's mother. I also match about seven descendants of four of the children of a sister of my Smith 2x great grandfather, which proves I'm a biological descendant of his mother, Isabella Smith. It doesn't prove I'm biologically descended from her husband as well. Our Scotch Irish family history is the only family history of the four people whose Y DNA closely matches, taht is at all consistent with the Scottish Y DNA. Two of them have African American Y DNA and one can just imagine where a Scotch Irish European ancestor fit into that picture.
  What I can definitely conclude beyond any doubt, is that my brother and I are biological descendants of my Smith grandfather. Willard, therefore, was not his father's biological son.
  I've a strong idea that this does not call Bessie Mae's honor into question. One must look at all of the evidence. Bessie Mae was an extremely serious, quiet and introverted person who dressed attractively but plainly from childhood through middle age. Something was very wrong in her family that noone ever wanted to tell me. I did get the idea that her sister was more snobbish than she was. When they were small children, her sister was far more stylishly dressed and seductive in pose. At age maybe 5. Her father was a steelworker, which has little to do with his behavior at home. My grandparents' wedding photos include every member of the Smith family with all of the husbands and wives, and possibly Bessie Mae's sister. There was an unidentified female who looked similar to her sister at age 5. However, Bessie Mae's parents were notably missing. They did not attend their daughter's wedding, or gave her husband's family the cold shoulder. They married in front of a justice of the peace, and the whole family was formally dressed in the white dresses favored at the time. They may have worn the same white dresses later to visit the family members who moved to Utah. Bessie Mae was wearing a white dress. But it was a normal white dress and no veil. Bessie Mae looked very tired, which may be typical of brides at their wedding; my mother looks as tired in her wedding photos. Neither of them was bubbly and outgoing.
  Willard was conceived five months after my grandparents married. At that stage in a marriage even someone far more likely to have slept around than Bessie Mae ever was, would not have likely been sleeping with someone besides her husband. Either there was a longstanding pattern of sexual abuse by her father, which is far too common and too consistent with the evident parental anger over her wedding, or her employer took advantage of her, or she was raped in the street. Smiths were as rigid and careful as the tale of the blowup over my father riding the trolley suggests, and she would have been careful about her personal safety. She and my grandfather met at work; they both worked in the same bank, and I don't know at what point she stopped working.
  It is possible though seemingly unlikely that her father couldn't get off work, but her mother wasn't at the wedding either. Cold distant mother, at the very least. She had no use for her daughter at all. Years later she and her cousin took turns caring for her mother after she had a stroke, but by then her father was long dead, and her mother would have been in bad shape if kin hadn't taken her in.
  This Moore family has a long history of simply dissolving. It looks as if one of her father's brothers went to jail and then no further record of him. Theirs is one of the few families I've encountered in recent history that it's hard to find even genetic traces of them. I've heard from several descendants of her father's grandfather, and found in the databases DNA matches who descend from a single line of descent from that man who stayed in the area where the family lived. I'd love to find out if this Moore male line and Willard's grandson even have the same Y DNA SNP, but, it seems that no male line descendants of this family know they descend from it! Not even one, though Charles Moore had several brothers.
  In any case, it looks very likely that Bessie Mae was raped, and no call to hold it against her.
  However, I think this had drastic consequences for how Willard was treated. His temperament differed radically from his parents', and they clearly did not understand him. They treated him like something about him was dangerous. There is no knowing what Bessie Mae may have told her husband about what happened to her, and Smith men don't treat their biological sons like their sons, but something was clearly more wrong than usual for this family. In a family full of violent tempered people, Willard's temper was somehow perceived as dangerous. Willard by acting like a normal adolescent, albeit in a family that wasn't normal, seemed to just keep fulfilling his parents' negative predictions for how he might turn out. More backstory keeps coming in from things my father said; for instance, he kept talking about his family telling him that adopted children never turned out well, when talking about boys in the small village where I grew up who were adopted. If Willard was the product of his mother's rape, that would have been the same thing. As for Bessie Mae, she'd not have been normal if she didn't worry that Willard would turn out like his biological father. With his entire outlook, that would have been what her husband expected as well. There was no need for them to have intended to abuse Willard, and that may not have been their intention. They probably thought they gave him every chance, he just turned out evil.
  Willard actually grew up to be somewhat emotionally troubled but honest, sound of character, hard working and successful.
  I was abused as a child, and so was my brother. I believe that this sad story and his lack of knowledge of the truth that lay behind it, certainly colored my father's beliefs about how parents treat children. He outright said it shaped how he treated my brother. It appears that like with us, just one of Willard's son's three children have had any children at all. I was afraid I'd treat my children like I was treated, not knowing how to treat children differently.

Note:   He had an intense and volatile personality, and died at age 57 of a hea


RootsWeb.com is NOT responsible for the content of the GEDCOMs uploaded through the WorldConnect Program. The creator of each GEDCOM is solely responsible for its content.