Stories about my Father - 34
My family tree looks a little bit like an ancient apple tree in a wildly overgrown neglected orchard. Some of the branches are strong and true and hold a lot of informational fruit and some have only scattered leaves of vague dates near the end of their scraggly branches. In one of the straightest, most complete branches I have, I can trace the strict patrilineal Hester line back to my 14th great-grandfather who was born a little more than 500 years ago.
Whether we were adopted, orphaned, born out of wedlock, conceived in a petri dish, exchanged at birth, or just born into a family, two people had to come together to create the person we are. Each of our biological parents required two people to create the people they are or were, and so on and so forth. Every human being, indeed, most life on this planet follows this same pattern. In each generational ring, as we move away from our own, the number of people required to come together doubles. We have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. By the time you get out to my 14th great-grandfather Johannes, he is just one of 65,536 people in that distant ring. That number is even more mind-blowing when you realize that this only goes back into history for about five hundred years. Modern humans have walked the earth for about 200,000 years.
How many little decisions and accidents had to happen over the millennia for us to exist at all? Five hundred years ago 32,768 couples had to meet and have sex at exactly the right time. Out of the several hundred million sperm in each of those 32,768 ejaculations, only one of them made it to each egg. If even one of those 32,768 triumphant little Olympian swimmers had been beaten by another one, we wouldn’t be here at all. Now start going back even further and those happy little victories grow exponentially.
Out of all those 65,536 men and women who are my 14th great-grandparents, however, only one of them passed down my name.
Johannes Hester was born in about 1490 in Bavaria - the tiny village of Staudach-Egerndach in the district of Traunstein, to be exact. This past summer, Michael and I drove right by it on our way to Neuschwanstein Castle when we left Salzburg, Austria. If only I had known all this then, we could have stopped there. In 2022, Staudach-Egerndach has a population of 1,146 people. Notable residents of the town over the years, besides the Hester family, include Theresa “Rosi” Brandl, an Auschwitz camp guard who was executed for war crimes in 1948, and Adolph Kroher who invented the first cement roof tile sometime in the late nineteenth century. But I digress.
Johannes married a woman named Mary Launder Andrews who was two years younger than he was. She was born in Schleswig-Holstein in Germany which is over 600 miles away. What on earth brought her or her family so far south through all those mountains? Did Johannes meet her there and bring her home?
They had at least two children. According to the genealogy already online, my 13th great-grandfather Andrew Hester was born in 1538 in Staudach-Egerndach. His sister Anne was born two years later. If the dates are right, that means that both parents were in their forties when their kids were born. I have to say that I doubt that is true. I think that it’s far more likely they were born earlier. Andrew would probably have been born sometime in the 1510s. Some other enterprising genealogist has put the date 1517 in his record with a question mark and that rings true to me. The reason I think that is that I found a record that Andrew had become an apprentice to a printer in London and in 1538 was made free, or, in other words, allowed to work on his own. I think that’s where the early birth date mistakenly came from. After finishing his apprenticeship, Andrew started his own printing business. In 1550 he issued a Bible in quarto. That means that full sheets were printed with eight pages – four on each side – then folded. The next year he printed a book called Preservative against the poyson of Palagius by one W. Turner. The citation at the end of the book states “Imprinted at London, for Androw Hester dwellyng in Powles Churchyarde, at the wytt horsse next to Powles scole. An. 1551. the 30 of Ianuarij. “
Andrew was a member of The Stationers’ Company also known as the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers. The Company started in 1403 but in 1557 it was granted a Royal Charter by Queen Mary I (Bloody Mary). This gave them a monopoly on the entire English publishing industry. Andrew was one of the original members who secured the Charter but died soon after. There is a note that “an Anne Hester widow, citizen, and stationer took an apprentice in 1564.”
Johannes Hester died in Bavaria, but his wife Mary died in Suffolk, England in 1558. My guess is that when he was young, Andrew went to London to apprentice. He married a woman named Mary in 1551, but she passed away in 1552. Alone, therefore, when his father died, he brought his sister and his mother over from Bavaria. Andrew and his mother, if the dating is accurate, both died in 1558 leaving Anne in England on her own and, therefore, in need of hiring an apprentice for the firm.
Andrew and Mary Hester had a son named John. John and Mary Hester then had a son also named John. John Jr. and Anne Hester then had a son named William. William and Joyce Hester had a son named Francis in 1644.
Ten years later in 1654, New Kent County was established in the Virginia Colony. A few years later, Francis Hester and his wife Elizabeth would make the Atlantic crossing from England and settle there. From there on, this entire branch of the Hester family stays in America.
Francis and Elizabeth have a son named Robert. Robert and his wife Rachel Hester have a son named Francis after his grandfather. Francis and Agnes Elizabeth Hester have a son that they name Robert after HIS grandfather. Robert and Elizabeth Hester have a son that they also, very unhelpfully, name Robert. Robert Jr. and yet another Elizabeth Hester have a son that they name William Henry Hester.
William Henry’s nickname was Buck. We heard about Ol’ Buck Hester all the time growing up. He was born on January 27, 1780, in what is now North Carolina. It was right at the end of the American Revolution. In 1805 Buck married Amy Malone who, at the time, was only 16. They would go on to have sixteen children – eight boys and eight girls. Their oldest son, Roling Hester, was my 3rd great-grandfather.
In the spring of 1818, Buck and Roling, who was then eleven years old, lit out for Alabama and settled on a farm just east of Russellville near Tharp Springs. They cleared a few acres of land and grew a small crop of corn. Seeing that the land was good, in the fall of that year, the two went back to North Carolina and brought the rest of the family down in an ox cart. Some years later, they outgrew that initial plot and moved further out to where the boundary of Franklin County met up with the Chickasaw Reservation.
Roling would marry Lucendy Richardson in 1828. They, in turn, would have nine children. Most of Roling’s brothers and sisters also had enormous families. The descendants of Buck and Amy were legion. In a book by Robert Leslie James titled, Distinguished Men, Women and Families of Franklin County, Alabama, he quotes a couple of local sayings. “If you shake a tree on Cedar Creek a Hester will fall out,” was one. “Why he married a Hester of course,” was another.
I think that Roling is the first Hester that was photographed.
Roling and Lucendy’s second son was my great-great-grandfather John Chesley Hester. John Chesley and his wife Mary Ann had a pack of kids of their own and their fourth son was my great-grandfather Albert Sidney Hester. Albert and his wife Ormond then had my Grandfather Morris. Morris and Eunice then had my dad and then my dad and mom had me.
As messy as my tree is it is a precision topiary compared to what trees are going to look like in the future. My Uncle Michael did a lot of work on his and my mother’s side of the family. When it came time to share the tree, though, he refused to include my husband, Michael. There really isn’t even a way for me to include him properly on the online trees I’ve been adding to. He’s on there but he’s in the female slot next to my name. How are genealogists in the future going to track all the same-sex marriages and gender transitioning that is rapidly becoming normalized?
There are, as I see it, two ways to view a family tree – biologically and emotionally. Biologically, I can see why Uncle Michael wouldn’t want to add my Michael. We are not going to have kids. Even had we adopted one, in terms of genetics, we would likely not have been a part of that kid’s tree. Genetically, the online trees are strictly binary. They don’t even allow for second or third marriages. They are only meant to include the actual person responsible for passing along their DNA.
Say one of my 9th great-grandmothers had been raped by a stranger, My true genetic tree would need to trace back the rapist’s line and not the one belonging to my 9th great-grandfather. It doesn’t matter if he may have adopted whichever 8th great-grandparent had resulted, there is no genetic connection there. Emotionally, however, the rapist would not have been included and the adopted 9th great-grandfather would have. They may have even kept the fact of the rape secret.
When the skeleton was discovered under the car park in Leicester, England in 2012, DNA testing proved that it belonged to King Richard III. It also revealed that there had been a break in the genetic line some generations before which made the entire Plantagenet line illegitimate. Either some male in the line had been cheated on or, to ensure an heir, had allowed his wife to become pregnant by another.
As far as I know, the Royal family tree has been allowed to remain as it was which renders it an emotional tree rather than a scientific one.
My great-grandfather Albert Sidney Hester sired my grandfather with his first wife Ormond Hamlet. She died before my father was born. Emotionally, Miss Jean, his second wife is who my father would have considered his grandmother since he had no connection with Ormond. Scientifically, that doesn’t matter. There isn’t a space for Miss Jean in the tree.
If what I am trying to do is to learn who my family was, then I think it’s important to have access to both trees. A strictly trimmed genetic tree as well as a shaggy, running wild, emotional one. There are important things to be learned from both.
Thankfully human memory is short. There may be some record somewhere in an old German ledger that shows who Johannes Hester’s father was. Until I find it, though, the only thing I can say for sure is that his surname was Hester. Sadly, I am the last Hester along this branch of the tree. My Mom is a Hester by marriage only. My sister, who was born a Hester, is now a Pendleton. Her son’s middle name is Hester, but that won’t pass down. I don’t know how many branches away you’d have to go to find an actual Hester who is closely related to us. I’m the last leaf on the branch, which is one of the reasons I think I feel compelled to write about all this.
I recently got my 23 & Me genetic testing results back. It’s all completely unsurprising – my chart is almost all Western European genes – English, Scottish, Irish, French, and German. An anomaly that pops out though, is the fact that I am .8% Southern Indian or Sri Lankan. That means that one of my 128 5th great-grandparents was Southern Indian or Sri Lankan. This is not as surprising as it might sound given that branches of my mother’s side of the family were part of the Raj in India for generations. What is a bit surprising is that my 5th great-grandparents would have lived in the mid-1700s before the actual British colonialization of India took place. Possibly some relative of mine in the British East India Company who traveled there took home quite the souvenir.
Whoever that person is, I am, of course, desperate to be able to find both of their trees – the genetic one as well as the emotional one. The strict genetic one is only the structure of the house – the empty framework. If human beings weren’t so endlessly irrational, there wouldn’t need to have anything other than the scientific one. The facts by themselves don’t begin to scratch the surface of what we make of our lives. It’s when we try to hide the facts or distort them that the overall presentation begins to get interesting. That basic collection of studs and joists starts to take on some color and design. Suddenly what might appear to be a dry brutalist industrial building becomes something much, much more – a fully decorated, quirky, and individualistic home.
I will always include Michael as well as my step-great-grandmother Miss Jean and any other people who buck the strict binary form in my family tree. History will show that the people existing outside the graph will have had as much effect, if not more, on the direction this family has taken. My father learned life lessons from his step-grandmother that have come down to me even if I can’t recognize them. Our genes may have come from Ormond, but the other stuff, the stuff that ultimately matters, came down from Miss Jean. It’s a messy place, but the Hester house is full of incredible people and remarkable stories.
As to what happened 250 years ago in India; I can’t wait to find out. I know there’s got to be a good story in there, somewhere. Genetics is a great place to start, but I want to know everything.
Richard, I just came across this and enjoyed reading it. Just got home today from a Hester reunion in Abilene, TX... Family Reunion for branch from Elijah Hester (1841-1907), buried in Flintville TN. His lineage tracks back to Johannes Hester as well.
I LOVE these stories!!