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Another very informative set of files on the early Dehavens
by Don Shockey and Joe Patterson is
at the USGENWEB archives at ROOTSWEB for Pennsylvania; Montgomery
and Philadelphia Counties; biography:
Montgomery County PA biography
Philadelphia County PA biography
These are the seal of Evert and his son Peter Dehaven, and the
mark of Jesse Dehaven and is illiterate wife's rendition of it.
Evert and Peter Dehaven's seal Right center image appears to be letter A, possibly H. Came out better in second image I scanned from.
Jesse's and his wife's marks.
Does anyone recognize them, is anyone able to make sense of
or read them, and does anyone know how to pin down Evert's
German-French or Walloon Huguenot seal?
The Dehavens have preserved the story of an ancestral loan
by Jacob Dehaven to the Revolutionary War effort, never repaid
by the repeatedly bankrupt new government, and a legend of three
brothers, Jacob, Peter and Samuel, who came from France before
the REvolution, having gotten wealthy variously as grape growers
and wine merchants. Amazingly, it seems most Dehaven descendants
know the tale, as it was passed down their families. Thousands
of people were financially ruined one way or another by the
Revolution, and inability of the new government to repay war
loans accounted for alot of it. Only Dehavens remember that this
affected their family. What is more, Dehavens as a group have
not stopped trying to collect on that loan yet. Ever since
the early l9th century Dehavens ahve repeatedly organized and
made efforts to lobby Congress or sue to recover the $425,000
or so debt. Since Jacob Dehaven had no direct descendants, all
of his collateral descendants, I'm not sure if descendants of
his father Peter I or all Dehavens, both groups now number in
the thousands, who cared to collect would split this amount if
it were ever recovered.
The latest such effort was around l990. My fourth cousin,
Thelma Lunaas of Texas, with whom I share descent from Jesse
Dehaven of London Britain, PA, son of Samuel (II) Dehaven of
Horsham and Whitpain, Montgomery County, filed a lawsuit in
Federal Claims Court and appealed it to the U.S. Supreme Court
from the U.S. Court of Appeals in l992. (It lost.) See front
page article on the lawsuit, Sunday New York Times, 5/27/90.
Mrs. Lunaas explained that she had promised her father on his
death bed that she would recover the family honor. Many other\
Dehavens added that it wasn't the money, as Charles Dehaven,
a Texas Baptist minister, put it, "my father said one day...
people will know what this family WAS."
One can see it can't reasonably be about the money, both because the
amount per person recovered would be a few dollars, and because it stands
little chance. The lawyer, fresh out of law school, took the case for a
percentage of anything recovered. They had material help from the Dehaven
Club, which provided genealogical and historical research. The Dehaven
Club publishes all of its financial statements, charges $10 annually in
dues, and has a low budget, no more than $500 per year goes to this
attorney for any reason, usually for "research".
OK, so I'm trying to trace a family history of mental illness?
Particularly given that a particularly intense temperament
with multiple symptoms of general anxiety disorder and various
sorts of personal and family dysfunction came down two lines of
descent from William Smith and Mary Dehaven, where would one think
I would start?
The true Dehaven story is far better than the family legend
about vineyards and brothers from France, and goes far to explain
much about Dehavens. The first generations of Dehavens in this
country confused each other and nearly lost the trail of their
history by interchangeably using a dozen or more radically
different versions of their name. We aren't talking about names
that match up on the Soundex, like the confusion in one of my
lines by John Burkhart Dehart apparently named for his mother
whose family couldn't make up their minds if their name was
Borgert or Borkert, but VERY different versions of their name.
Examples; Inderhoff. Ten Heuven. Imhoff. DeHoven. DeHaven. Ten
Heaven"!" Inderhoeven. Hoven. This is how come the vague and
incorrect tale about three brothers from France where there were
vineyards. The only elements of truth is that the Dehavens were
from France, albeit in ancient history, and they may have been
merchants. There is some evidence that the Dehavens in this
country were merchants among other things; Peter Dehaven is listed
in Philadelphia as a merchant, and a Dehaven merchant ship was
sunk by the British near Britain and France, with a Dehaven
family member on board. Clearly the Dehavens were involved
as merchants, and there is no reason to think their business
wasn't legitimate, but they preserved no record of it as if
they didn't want this part of their story known!
I can't see what was the reason for such variation in their name unless it
was to deliberately make themselves hard to find or trace. Some of them
also kept bags of money hidden in their homes. There is no evidence that
they were involved in criminal activity that would explain it. Further,
about half of them fail to turn up in the first censuses - which confused
people trying to trace them. That made no sense to a local historical
society archivist until I told him I am trying to trace family mental
illness.
They seemed a constitutionally
pathologically anxious group. This behavior would make sense
inlight of their history as religious refugees if it were
confined to the first two generations in this country, but this
was Peter's grandchildren, the third generation, at the time of
the American Revolution, a century after they got here. Peter
was either not born yet or a small child when his parents came
to this country. These people were behaving as if they were
somehow pre-programmed to think someone was going to come for
them in the middle of the night, or thatthey might have to flee
some danger with no notice. In other words, to think like my
father; that they live in a scary, dangerous world and must
hide. Such behavior makes sense however if considered from
the perspective of current knowledge and theory of the genetics
of anxious temperament and anxiety disorders, and in light of
the Dehavens' actual history. They and most of the people they
initially married in this country went through a several hundred
year long period in which any genetic tendency to conceal
themselves would have saved their lives.
Their story came to light when the German nobleman husband
of a Dehaven, whose father had been ambassador to Switzerland,
came to Pennsylvania to settle her estate. He didn't share
whatever the family problem with concealing their name was, and
he straightforwardly told the entire family story with all
aliases to a local justice of the peace, and wrote out a
complete genealogical history of the family to that time, which
was 1894. This chart was published and later expanded on, and
readily available from genealogical sources and from Dehaven
family clubs. By that time the strangely recontructed Dehaven
family histories were legion.
The Dehavens actually are all descended from Evert Inder-
hoffen, who came from Muelheim, Germany, around 1690, and was
one of the first settlers of Germantown, Philadelphia. He
married Elizabeth Schippbauer inMay 21, 1675 in the Reformed
Church, Mulheim. (Schippbauer means shipbuilder; Muelheim at
the junction of the Ruhr and Rhine Rivers is an inland deep
water port and a site of much shipbuilding.) Most known Dehavens
are descended from his son Peter, who married the daughter of
an Anglo-Dutch couple also immediately from Muelheim. Noone
knows where the tale about vineyards came from. I find attri-
buting it to the myth-history (very oversimplified) of the
pre-Reformation radical religious sect the Dehavens belonged to
when they really did leave France before 1500, as good a guess
as any. Others, pointing to the fact that the name is Germanic,
and also that there are vineyards in the regions that changed
hands between Germany and France, think they may have come from
that area. Maybe it was part of the story of some other family
the Dehavens crossed with in marriage on their journey. The
"brothers from France" were sons of Peter's, and grandsons of
Evert. There was a false French ancestery tale about the
Leverings, too. I think that alot of people simply don't want
to admit that their ancestors were German. My DEHART ancestors,
also German and Dutch, who settled in Brooklyn in the 1650's,
ALSO have more legends about three brothers from France, complete
with the Revolutionary War and the Marquis de Lafayette.
Efforts to trace the pre-Pennsylvania history of the family
have yielded the following. The Dehavens were members of a
pre-Reformation radical Protestant religious sect, called
Waldensians, and were driven from France in the 1400's. You've
got that - pre-Reformation, 1400's, radical Protestants. Their
beliefs were consistent with those of the most radical Protestant
sects after the Reformation. The Dehavens were emotionally
unusual people to begin with. The Waldensians spent the next
several centuries being driven around Europe in circles and
burned at the stake whenver they came up for air or tried to
settle down.
Peter Dehaven's Dehaven family seal provides a vague sort of
clue to what and who the Dehavens were; they were probably an
established and well-off, but not aristocratic family. Countess Ada Von
Hardenburg, daughter of teh Count Von Alt, said when she saw the
seal that this is something that in her country (Germany) nobility, or
established families, atleast, ahd, and they were very old, the family
must date from the l2th or l3th century.
I don't know to what extent that is true. In reality, in late medieval
and Renaiisance times, and into the Enlightenment, anyone who conducted
any sort of financial or other important business used a seal. That did
not include peasants, poor laborers, or paupers; seals were used by
prosperous, middle class and aristocratic, families. I don't know if any
given seal must date from the l2th or l3th century. It is possible that
something about the design on the seal that the countess recognized
inspired that statement. I do know that everyone in Germantown signed
documents with seals like that. That ws a select group of people; mostly
craftsmen from a small section of Germany near the Dutch border that
included Muelheim.
But one can see tht in the late feudal society in which the Dehavens
whoever they were had thrived, it would have paid to have a somewhat
feudal temperament,
a la Spock's World. To the sort of people that the Dehavens were,
their established, prosperous, respected family position may have
been everything, and a very basic part of their concept of honor.
According to Jehu Dehaven in a l9th century article on Dehavens
turned up by a Dehaven researcher in a book or encyclopedia in
the Carnegie Library in Pittsburg, PA, (my efforts to pin that
down have not so far proven successful), the Dehavens went to
Walloon Belgium, which was an area in which there was RELATIVE
religious tolerance, to which religious refugees were particular-
ly likely to flee in that time, especially from France. He wrote
that they specifically spent time in Flanders. (Dehaven Club
Newsletter, Fall 1994) The only
other fact I have yet found that supports Jehu Dehaven's report
is that the name Dehaven is common in Walloon Belgium. (It is
a form of a common German name common all over Germany and the
German regions of France, and I'm told also in Normandy. The
name is hove, hoven or hoff, and means farm, manor, and also the
sort of urban manor, or house on a walled lot, that minor
aristocratic and well-off families typically built in the cities
that were built by the Franks, whose territory covered the entire
region where this name is common.) I have no evidence the
Dehaven family didn't originate in Walloon Belgium, but if they
are there they are very likely to have been religious refugees
from somewhere else, especially France.
I DID establish that most of the initial settlers of GErmantown
EXCEPT Evert Dehaven and Wigard LEvering WERE Waldensians who
came through Flanders. Most of the initial settlers of Germantown
in reality belonged to a closely interrelated group, that is, they
had intermarried for several generations before coming to German-
town, who were weavers, and a mixture of Mennonites and Quakers
who shifted back and forth, with strong Anabaptist heritage and
sentiment. There were Waldensian communities around Flanders.
They were weavers. Groups of Waldensian weavers moved from
Flanders to HOlland. They evolved into Anabaptists, and from
thence into Mennonites, and an assortment of Baptist groups.
One of these families, OpDenGraef, contained an important
Mennonite leader and a Mennonite bishop, two generations before
the move to PA. (Joe, Dehaven list).
They also fed into and merged with the Swiss and Dutch/ German
Reformed movement. (Remember that.) Muelheim was just over the
German border form HOlland; many radical Protestants of one
sort and another moved across the border; Levering, a pietist,
was one of them. The group who went to GErmantown were mainly
weavers; that is most of what the initial settlers of Germantown
did (they couldn't properly farm), and Mennonite with an
Anabaptist heritage.
And the Dehavens mostly married members of this group for three
generations, the exceptions beging Wigard Levering and the
members of the colongy of New Sweden, who were actually
temperamentally and genetically representative of the population
at large. Even William's wife Hannah Cramber was probably of
that group. So they mostly married into a genetically homogenous
group. Get the significance of this - they married with a group
of clones of themselves. They didn't all QUITE carry the same
clone genes. THey had a variety of genes with similar effects
on temperament. As they married each other, they collected genes.
Our line of Dehavens were just over the German border in Muelheim,
Germany, by the 1550's, when family researchers first see their
name turn up there. Dehaven researchers, including Baron Von Alt
and James Dehaven, find in Muelheim City ARchives that a Wilhelm
in den Hoven lived in Menden, a suburb of Muelheim, in 1556, and
that Wilhelm In den Hoven m Grete Aufon Kampfe in Muelheim in
1626. They were using the name Dehaven as well as
Inderhoffen, etc. Since the Reformation began in the 1520's,
the fact that they migrated to Muelheim in that time
rather suggests that their migration began before the Refor-
mation. People in Walloon Belgium before the Reformation are
very likely to have been Waldensians from France. Also supporting
this story is that it isn't the sort of tale Dorothy Bertine
is likely to have made up. It also appeared in a club
newsletter, which tells me neither she nor the other older
members of the group have their details mixed up, which I have
seen happen in quite dramatic ways!
But in the meantime a book called something like The Book
of Martyrs contains a copper engraving of a young woman named
Dehaven being buried alive in Walloon Belgium for being an
Anabaptist. One way to see this is that the Dehavens seem to
have just been in whatever radical religious groups were around!
However, in the history of the l9th and 20th century Primitive
(Welsh and Old School) Baptists, which the Jesse Dehaven daughter
who links to Bonnie Bunce joined, I found evidence of historical
links between the Waldensians, the Anabaptists - and the
Primitive Baptists.
Here is the elderly-Dehaven version of this tale. It includes
elements of another tale about the sinking of a Dehaven merchant
ship, which happened to have a Dehaven - an adult man - on it at
the time, by the British.
"And you know, a Dehaven girl was a martyr! Those evil
British (the ones the Revolutionary War era Dehavens with
absolute and ferocious patriotism helped fight off) sank a
Dehaven ship off the coast of France. And the Dehaven girl
was on it. Then they TOOK HER TO FRANCE and buried her alive!
This Dehaven was elderly, but his temperament makes that of a
British aristocrat look rather tame! You know, like in how they
haven't dropped it yet about Americans being uncouth colonists.
I read a recent book about someone's experiences as a Yankee
at first a British "prep" (upper class primary school) and
then Eton in the l970's. "This is our new friend from the
colonies".
The simple existence of that Dehaven merchant ship off the coasts
of France and Britain is the only solid evidence I have ever
seen that the Dehavens were merchants. Maybe this tale is the
one aspect of the whole business the family didn't conceal!
The Dehavens would have married other members of radical Protes-
tant sects among whom they moved and with whom they associated.
Peter Dehaven, the son of the emigrant Dehaven I am descended
from, married the daughter of a German Pietist family, who were
cousins of one of the wealthy pietist circle who founded
Germantown, and both of these families came to Germantown from
Muelheim in its first years.
The German Pietists were in doctrine very similar to the Quakers,
and in worship and practice there were similarities, but they
were more evangelical. They were very mystical and believed that
people could know about God intuitively and not primarily from
the Bible. That got them on the outs with the established
moderate Protestant churches of their countries, especially with
the straight-laced, established, German Lutheran Church, which
was the official church of Germany. The severely Calvinistic and
rather evangelistic German/ Dutch Reformed Church had trouble
with the Lutheran established church, too.
Wigod Levering came as a poor laborer from Muelheim, though family
connections to the wealthy Frankfurt Company help to account for why and
probably how he came. He quickly bought 500 acres if land from the
Frankfurt Company on credit. I think but am not sure he also owed them
for his and his family's passage. He refused to pay. When they sued him,
he hired EVERY lawyer accessible - I couldn't find the tale again in the
Levering genealogy where I know I found it, but our rootsweb Dehaven
researchers say it was all four lawyers in Philadelphia County, which in
those days was basically the state of Pennsylvania - much to the dismay of
his opponents, and won his case. Levering's nervous failure to leave
ANYTHING to chance as well as his supreme obstinacy leave one wondering
whether all of the notoriously obstinate as well as nervous DeHaven
temperament came from the Dehavens! There is ample evidence in these
lines of genes converging from repeated marriages between families of
similar temperament.
He reminds me of me successfully standing off ghetto punks who repeatedly
firebombed the house where I lived last summer, and of how I handled the
violent certified psychotic who moved into the rooming house where I lived
then. My father really wouldn't have stood for the legal and political
nonsense I success- fully negotiated; he would have been in the window
with a shot- gun. Characteristic Dehaven impatience, short fuse and
capacity to get extremely angry also have their uses. My father saved his
family's lives a couple of times with his guns. Like the time we were
travelling on vacation, and punks attacked our trailer. Me - I'm
terrified of guns, as I am of violence, as I experienced too much of it
from my father! It is important to realize that these genes have their up
side AND their down side. So my strategies have never included guns. Give
me something deadly enough in the hands of someone as characteristically
angry and determined as I am - like a set of keys. I'm one of the few
people I've ever encountered who could actually kill someone with a set of
keys.
A descendent of Harmond Dehaven, another son of Evert and Peter
(I)'s brother, told me she thought the extremely intense and
obstinate temperament that runs in HER family came from the
father of the Op den Graef he married! Apparently the Op den
Graff's were another case. The Op den Graef's were also part
of that closely interrelated group.
The Dehavens were devout German Reformed when they came to
Germantown. Evert and Elizabeth married in the Reform Church -
in "Evangelical Parish", Muelheim. They belonged to a succes-
sion of German and Dutch Reformed churches where they settled
in Philadelphia. According to the Levering family genealogy,
Evert was a Ruling Elder - and not a casual attendee - at
Skippack Reformed Church in 1698. According to an article in
the Summer 1996 Dehaven Club newsletter, Skippack Reformed
Church was founded in the house of Evert's son Harmon in his
house in the Mennonite settlement not built until 1702-1706,
"and Rev. Phillip Boehm came on circuit to hold services." But
a historical note in the August l990 Dehaven Club newsletter
aragues that "until they could afiliate with their own group
they affiliated with the Low Dtch Reformed inWhitmarsh Twp, and
pastored by the Rev Paulus Van Vlecq, and Evert was an elder
there in 1710." Soon after that, Philip Boehm led a Reformed
Congregation at Blue Bell, in Whitpain TWP, using the Heidelberg
Catechism, "the form preferred by the Dehavens" and Evert and
Peter at least transferred to his church. Interestingly, Boem
got into trouble because he wasn't an ordained minister (he was
a schoolteacher). Don Shockey also writes that Evert actually
helped organize a number of Reformed churches in the area. Then,
Peter Evert's son was an elder at Boehm Church.
The German Reformed Church was the most radical and strict of the
mainstream Calvinist sects. Both in Europe and in the U.S. it
had its roots in and was closely tied with the Dutch Reformed
Church. The Heidelberg Catechism was the mildest of its main
theological statements of doctrine. It was written by or under
the direction of one of the kings of Prussia who hoped to unify
the German Protestant sects. The document tries to water down
the more radical and theologically problematic doctrines of the
German Reformed Church to make them
palatable to Lutherans and others. Unfortunately it is not
possible to water down such doctrines as predestination and the
concept it is logically necessary and sufficient to support, that
of the Elect, such that they are no longer the doctrines they
are. Other documents of the German REformed Church are far
more explicit and more radical on these doctrines. Indeed, they
are the most radical and explicit statements of these doctrines
I have ever seen. I don't know exactly how Dehavens came to be
noted for their attachment to the Heidelberg Catechism; whether
it means that the Dehavens were relatively tame for German
Reformed or that they were German Reformed in religious orienta-
tion in a Presbyterian world.
Here is basic predestination, from the documents of the Christian
Reformed Church of North America: God knows everything;
therefore he has always known everything that would happen from
the beginning of time. This means that at the beginning of time
he knew, and therefore decided, who for all eternity would go to
heaven, and who to hell. People who God decided at the beginning
of time would be saved do not differ in any way from the damned.
Further, people can do nothing to save themselves, since they are
corrupted and evil as the result of original sin. BEcause man
are corrupt and evil as the result of original sin, noone has
any right to complain abaout their lot. Because God is all-good,
all-just, and all-merciful, he chose (seemingly at random) some
people out of all those who exist to be saved and to go to
heaven, not because of what those people deserved, what they
did, or any attributes of those people, but simply because it
pleased God to do so! The Calvinist God makes Satan seem
benign!
The historical documents that define Reformed theology can be
found at
www.crcna.org/creeds/index.html
Some history of them is
included, too. THey include the Belgic Confession, the Canons
of Dort, and the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Athanuasian
Creed (held to be heretical by most branches of Christianity -
along with the doctrine of predestination).
Such a doctrine HAS to say something about the mental health of
the people who came up with it and those who could be attracted
to a church that taught it. It both came from and contributed
to massive mental health problems. Someone with depression,
general anxiety disorder or clinical obsessive compulsive
disorder is likely to be inclined to worry about pinning down
the fine theological points that these people worried about.
Some, like Martin Luther, are known to have had classic obsessive
compulsive disorder. Martin Luther was plagued by uncontrollable
blasphemous thoughts, and sought to confess multiple times a day
as a monk.
John Calvin waas a ruminator, and he realized it. He discussed at
length the problems his temperament posed for faith and spiritual
development. Of the several strands of religious thought that
prevailed in his time, he is recognized to have chosen the dark
one.
All three of these problems run in my family and I have them, and I know
them well. THese trends of thought in the Reformation are part of how the
genes for these mental disorders got concentrated in the lines of my
ancestors. Then they all got driven to Pennsylvania and Massachusetts,
where there were mostly only other people just like them around to marry.
And the worst of them quickly formed into a new governing and economically
dominant middle class. Then I think that the fact that they became the Old
Middle Class perpetuated the endless pattern of only marrying descendants
of these two original groups of people. Like, my father left
south-eastern Pennsylvania, and my mother's people left Massachusetts, and
then the engineer's daughter married the Anglican minister in Glens Falls,
New York, and that was exactly the sort of marriage she had been raised
and expected to make!
LIke so many of my ancestors before me,
I have all my life been unable to think that I was good or that
things I did or planned to do were good enough, I went through a
several year bout of doing little ritual dances 20 hours a day
to undue "evil" thoughts I couldn't control that I thought were
going to send me to hell, as well as constantly sticking out my
tongue to make sure I wasn't swallowing it and asking repeated
questions abaout every bite of food to make sure it wasn't
contaminated, and I went through a bout of clinical mental
illness that was never diagnosed or treated as an adolescent
durding which I covered my windows to keep out the demons that
I thought were trying to get in, had physical symptoms of
anxiety and hyperventilated constantly and thought I was variously
dying or possessed by the Devil, was acutely depressed with
guilt over sexual feelings and thoughts I just couldn't firmly
conclude weren't sin even though I intellectually knew that the
fundamentalists were full of shit (inability to conclude that one
is safe when one knows one is is the fundamental mental glitch
of obsessive compulsive disorder) and was nearly as anxious over
general belief that I must be going to hell as I didn't just
"know in my HEART that I am saved"! My father, generally a
perfectly sane Episcopalian, who made the world's vaguest
attempts to explain sane Episcopal theology on such matters to
me, had gotten caught up in the Evangelical movement, and for
a few years in the early l970's, we were just surrounded with
it, everywhere. An evangelical nut who taught high-school
English and got involved in my church was no help.
Most of these uncontrolled thoughts, tics and glitches in my ability to
think straight on certain kinds of issues still trouble me a bit, but I
now know that I simply have a part of my primitive emotional brain that
malfunctions and am not really going to hell, and because obsessive
compulsive disorder is a very limited brain disorder in scope it is often
pretty easy to cope with once you know you have it.
Many evangelically oriented people weren't actually that
troubled by predestination and its logical implications for
how and what one thinks because they simply paid little
attention to it or managed to handle it in a psychologically
constructive way - well, I believed that I am saved! People
who have made that decision tell me that they just decided to
believe that! No logic to it! But predestination was one of
the central theological issues of the Reformation; back then
everyone was aware of it and thought about it ALOT.
In fact, the entire born-again movement to this day subscribes to
predestination! THat is why it is so important for those people to "KNOW
in my HEART that I am saved!" The Evangelical movement came out of the
Southern Baptist Church, and from some splinter and old extreme Baptist
splinter groups, like the Primitive Baptist Church, which in fact operates
several of the more popular religious programs on radio and TV. Billy
Graham himself came from, and is still a member in good standing of, the
Southern Baptist Church. And the Southern Baptist Church, like all modern
evangelical churches, teaches predestination.
My father said to me, being saved is a matter of faith. But
I constantly heard Evangelicals preaching and saying that whether
you are saved is something you OBJECTIVELY "just" KNOW in your
heart - if, that is, you are saved. If you don't know that,
than you don't have Christ in your heart, and you aren't saved.
Faith, they insisted, is something you have if you ARE saved.
I understood them correctly, and my father, who found their
intense style emotionally appealing and never looked at them
very hard, incorrectly read his own theology into what they
were saying. In fact, in spite of he must have studied the
history of these denominations in Seminary, he may not have
known that Billy Graham was Southern Baptist, I hardly knew
what a Baptist was and there was nothing in the media at the
time particularly about Southern Baptists, and he probably
would have been SHOCKED to realize predestination underlay
this stuff - if he even cared, since his religious preference
to him was a matter of emotional choice. He was able to make
sensible decisions about what to think for himself, but not
to tell me what I needed to know to be able to.
This line of thought comes directly from and is founded on
Evangelicals' belief in Predestination and the Elect. Whether
one is saved is an objective fact one knows, if one is saved,
and faith is something God gives to the people he has chosen
to be among the elect. In fact, basic to the doctrine of
Election is the notion that Man plays little or no role in
his own salvation; faith is not a choice he makes. It is
a gift from God, a product of Grace. The only choice the
Elect make is to follow Jesus. This requires that someone
TEACH them about Jesus, etc. Little about predestination is
quite logical. Hence, both knowledge of one's salvation AND
faith are characteristics that people just have if they are
really saved.
That isn't my father's theology; the Episcopal Church denounces
Predestination as a "particularly dangerous heresy". I was never taught
what predestination MEANS; I could recite the passage from the Episcopal
catechism about it, but my father, who was of course my church school
teacher, dealt with ideas he considered evil by refusing to talk about or
teach about them. I thought this was another evil thought one musn't
think, whatever it was, like the Arian heresy that St Francis repitively
played around in snow to keep from having this evil thought just take
control of his mind, saying the Lord's name backwards, etc.
All my father had to do was clearly explain this stuff to me. ALL of his
ancestors would have instinctively appreciated my need to think this
matter through, and would have explained it completely to me in a minute.
But my father wasn't real big on intellect or logical and analytical
reasoning, and clear explanations. In fact, my entire family constantly
mocked me for insisting on thinking in this way about things. In fact, my
father's telling me to have faith had little credibility with me, because
he AND my mother ALWAYS said that to support the most superstitous and
ignorant, usually traditional or folk, notions that you can imagine or
ever heard of. My father telling me to have faith inadvertently supported
in my mind what I was hearing from the fundamentalists, because my father
NEVER, in my experience, said to take something on faith unless the matter
was in fact objectively or logically knowable. Further, if I argued with
him, I often got thrown around the room until I pretended to repent of my
evil thinking and suddenly become convinced that he was right in order to
avoid being seriously hurt or killed by a man violently out of control.
Actually, my father acted this way in the sort of panic he was capable of
over the notion that "evil" ideas, the dangerous scary world, etc. was
moving in on his tightly controlled and protected family. And, highly
intelligent and very well educated, he pretended to an intellectual
orientation while actually he had a very emotional style of thinking and
of knowing things. I not unreasonably THOUGHT that my father didn't KNOW
as much as the average neanderthal! In fact, my parents really destroyed
the whole concept of faith forever for me. If my father had said
unequivocally that thinking one is saved is one of the emotional decisions
that emotionally healthy people make in order to stay that way, THAT is
something I would have understood.
This movement came from the Southern Baptist Church;
the Southern Baptist Church teaches predestination. But
predestination was one of the central issues of the Reformation;
people were certainly paying attention to it then! And what
sort of people would have been worried enough about the whole
issue of salvation and inclined enough to think in dark and
scary directions to come up with it?
Noone taught me about it, or that this thinking underlies the necessity of
believing in one's heart that one objectively knows one is saved that
troubled me so greatly. Evangelical preachers themselves never publically
preached about predestination or the Elect. Discussions about the subject
appear in their own church school and educational material, in a Southern
Baptist youth home teaching magazine, for example, but not in material
intended for public consumption. I think that only Jehovah's Witnesses
are forthright about their belief in Predestination. The Born-Again
movement is power oriented; whehter it believes it can massively save
men's souls or not, that issue having been decided at the beginning of
time and not favorably for the human race, it depends for its efforts at
social control on convincing people to buy into it. Noone would
see any point in being a born-again Christian!
Weber's early sociological work on the Protestant ethic and the
development of Capitalism demonstrated that the fantastic
emotional pressure people felt to produce objective signs of
being in a state of grace and in favor with God drove the
Industrial Revolution and the development of Capitalism.
The doctrine of predestination was also the central driving
factor in the hysteria that swept Massachusetts and culminated
in the Salem Witch trials. The Puritans were also a Calvinistic
sect. THey believed that the communion of the godly should be
reserved for the Elect, or those in a State of Grace, and
required people to demonstrate that they were in a state of grace
to be admitted to Holy Communion. As one would logically expect,
the Puritans suffered from religious scrupulosity, one of the
basic forms of obsessive compulsive disorder, and all over Massa-
chusetts the most devout members of the congregations were
refusing to come to Holy Communion because they could not
convince themselves that they were in a state of grace! This was
the adults. The teenagers and children were working themselves
into acute anxiety attacks over the notion that they were
possessed by Satan. My mother's people were New England
Puritans, and her anxiety disorder comes in part from a line
that comes from 1690's Salem. Interestingly, in a television
special on modern Salem, several people cited physical
symptoms of general anxiety disorder as evidence that they
were under the effect of curses the witches put on their
ancestors!
There are strong parallels between Calvinist/ German Reformed
history and Dehaven family history.
A very large portion of what was left of the Waldensian movement
at the time of the Reformation merged with Swiss Calvinists.
In fact, the Primitive Baptists, whose doctrine is radically
Calvinist Fundamentalist and who adhere to the same historical
statements of doctrine as the Reformed Church, and who claim
both Waldensian and Anabaptist roots, argue that Calvin himself
had Waldensian roots. Calvinism began in Switzerland.
The issue of predestination vs free-will was one of the
sticking points that Waldensians had with merging with
Calvinism, but the Waldensians were trying to upgrade into
status as respectable Christians, if of one of the more severe
quasi-respected sects around, and they eventually adopted the
doctrine of predestination. Swiss Calvinists then played a
formative role in the Dutch/German Reformed movement, which
developed from teh direction of Holland, and also was carried
by Swiss migrating into and through Germany in large numbers.
William, grandfather of Jesse and brother to Samuel, Jacob and
Peter the notorious "brothers from France", married a woman who
appears to have been the daughter of Mennonites; they also were
extreme Calvinists in an Anabaptist direction.
Jesse Dehaven, the father of Mary and Phoebe, travelled with his
family twelve miles, a long ways in a horsedrawn wagon, to wor-
ship in the calvinistic Presbyterian Church, as did my Smith
ancestors, though other churches were closer to them. In time,
two offshoot Presbyterian churches were built that were closer
to them. Over time, the people in these churches drifted toward
Methodism, which was evangelical and very conservative at the
time of its origin, and those churches, and my Smith ancestors,
became Methodist. But Jesse Dehaven and wife stayed with the
New London Presbyterian Church, and are buried there. Moreover,
while I don't know what authorization he had yet, he PERFORMED
his daughter Phoebe's marriage. This suggests he was very
involved in his church! The New London Presbyterian Church says
that their records from before 1835 that would verify it were
lost in the fire in which they lost most of their records. But
their guess is as mine - he must have been an elder or a deacon.
He wasn't a minister - complete lists of who they were exist
all over teh place.
In what begins to look like genetic memory, Jesse Dehaven's
daughter Catherine who married James Kennedy, and lived in
London Britain, possibly after a stint in northern New Castle
County Delaware, was "a prominent member" (from a son's
obituary) of teh Welsh Tract Old School Baptist Church, and
then belonged to the London Tract primitive or Welsh Baptist
church in London Britain.
THe Welsh Tract Baptist Church is
still active and is located in Newark a few miles south of
the Pennsylvania border near New London Road, on Welsh Tract
Road. New London Road is College St at that point. There
is only one of it in Delaware - there is enough confusion
about it. Catherine's son's obituary placed it in Mill Creek
Hundred! (a few miles northeast.) The best information I
can get from area Primitive Baptist ministers is that there
is no Primitive Baptist Church in Mill Creek Hundred and there
has never been one there. Welsh and Old School are synonymous
with Primitive Baptist. The Primitive Baptist denomination
is the joint product of the Welsh Baptists and a European
and English juncture of radical Calvinism with Anabaptist and
Waldensian theology. The Welsh Tract church was founded by
a Welsh Baptist congregation from Wales who settled there as
a group, and many other area churches including the London
Tract Church are spinnoffs of it though it wasn't long before
most people at any of these churches weren't Welsh.
It is reasonable to suspect that the current members of a small
extreme sect are the descendants of the early l9th century
followers of that sect in the same place. I thought that the
tale of the battle over the London Tract Church building
sounded like evidence that Dehaven descendants are still there,
because it sounds like a fight Dehavens must have done! That
story is actually quite complex, and the people who the evidence
as I now have it (I don't have every piece of the story) acted
the most Dehaven-like say they migrated from North Carolina
around the time of WWI to find work! THis is a sect likely to
attract people who are Dehaven-like in temperament, which the
elder's (elder is what they call their ordained ministers) wife
I talked to said her family is.
Here is the story as I currently have it. It could change
with new details. I have heard from both sides of the dispute.
The original congregation of London Tract Church largely died
out by the l920's, and no longer held services. The building
was not abandoned, but was administered by a Board of Trustees,
consisting of some local people and seemingly mostly people
from other area Primitive Baptist churches. A Primitive Baptist
group from
nearby in Maryland leased the church to hold services. They
were required to select a different name for their congrega-
tion, as it wouldn't do for them to use the name of the earlier
congregation that still owned the building, so they took the
name Landmark Baptist. Then in the l960's, Dupont Corporation
planned to dam White Clay Creek, a big creek with branches that
flows through the entire area, and turn northern Newark and the
township of London Britain into a lake, and they bought up alot
of land in the area and leased it back to the people who owned
it! This got all of the people of the White Clay Creek region
up in arms, and is the root of much environmental, cultural and
historical organization that now exists in that area. Half of
the United States is descended from Southeastern Chester County
and Newcastle County Delaware; I don't know how Dupont CAN have
thought they were going to just make a lake out of the whole
area. Uh-uh. Noone waas going to let it happen. Except
apparently Trustee Charles Osborne, whatever was going on in
his mind! Dehavens sometimes get very strange things stuck in
our minds - and when that happens we are dangerous. But
apparently Dupont hadn't yet bought London Tract Church,
because the dispute centered on the Trustee's efforts to sell
it to them! The trustee who most wanted to sell the building
to Dupont was Charles Osborne, who lived just north of Baltimore.
This is curious, because CAtherine Dehaven Kennedy's son bears
the middle name Osborne, though he didn't inherit it from his
mother's line, but it looks as though James Kennedy's family may
have been involved in that church for atleast a generation. I
don't know if there is any family connection here, or not. The
Landmark Baptist group, who say they put alot
of work into fixing up the church, which must have needed it
as teh sexton's house across the street and the barn were
both falling down, resisted this. The wife of the current
elder of Landmark Baptist, who may not have been in the area
at the time, and may have heard heated and short versions of the
story, says they just came one Sunday and found them-
selves locked out! One of the trustees says they evicted the
Landmark Baptists after a protracted battle during which the
Landmark Baptist group sued them claiming that they were the
"original" owners! This sounds like the sort of emotionally
exaggerated way of describing something that a Dehaven would
make. It seems more plausible to me taht the Landmark Baptists
claimed they were the owners, and the Trustees, seeing that
as an affront, tacked on they claimed to be owners from the
beginning. During this dispute, someone stole the deed to the
church building from the county office! Neither party to the
dispute currently wants to discuss who stole the deed, which
is probably to their credit, but if one would expect a
Dehaven descendant to do something of the kind, it seems to me
that since the ownership of the building was historically well
established in the minds of the people of the area and the
matter could easily be proven since histories of the London
Tract church are everywhere, and further local people which
the Landmark Baptist group weren't would have immediately
realized that, that only the Landmark Baptist group would have
stood to benefit from stealing the deed. Get the picture
here - both groups were behaving classically like hillbillies,
which is pretty much how Dehavens with their inherently feudal
temperament and middle-America ways act! The end of the
matter seems to have been that, logically necessarily all at
around the same time, Dupont gave up on its dam and lake
plans and turned all the land it had bought up over to the
states of Delaware and Pennsylvania to be used for a jointly
run state nature preserve, and the Trustees or the disputants
in joint settlement turned London Tract Church over to the
State of Pennsylvania as part of this park, on the condition
that no group ever worship there again. Actually, another
Primitive Baptist group from Washington DC that had peacably
used the church twice a year for some time peacably
continues to do so. But the church is now the ranger station
of the White Clay Creek Preserve, and a ranger is stationed
there - who has the churches cemetery records and will check
them for people, and also check the graves in the graveyard
outside.
But the Primitive BAptists are still very much alive.
Suspiciously, they have congregations in EVERY town in Texas,
large or small, including San Antonio and Denton, where key
Dehaven Club members live, I don't know if that is coincidence
or not, or if it is part of a complex and important set of
Dehaven history, where some factors common to both patterns of
migration account for both of them. Here are
some good Primitive Baptist web links.
Check these out. I'm not kidding you. This story is GOOD.
Church History Committee
some Appalachian primitive Baptist history and color
main Primitive Baptist library
A large Texas
Primitive Baptist Church with much information on the denomination
The central Primitive Baptist web site
You will find even more Calvinistic and historical documents on
these sites than on the German REformed Church of North America's
excellent web site. You will quickly realize that besides being
a very intensely evangelical church with an obsessive-compulsive
style of thinking (singing hymms of praise in church services is
ordained in the New Testament but musical instruments are banned),
this is an extremely radical Calvinistic sect
with Waldensian AND Anabaptist roots! Catherine Dehaven Kennedy
found THAT church and came home!
*****************************************************************
The Dehavens must have been very emotionally intense and
exceptional people to begin with. And stayed that way over time.
Even the club president says that Dehavens as a group are
extremely obstinate people as well as being by nature hiders of
genealogical information. Obstinate is a nice-nice code word
for emotionally intense, and one of the attributes of emotionally
intense people. One of her in-laws got eaten alive by
his wife for giving club researchers some old army documents!
What could reasonably be thought wrong with that? It looks like
Dehaven hider instinct again.
But the historical experience of extreme religious persecution
is very consistent with
researchers' theory of why a recently identified gene for
anxiety disorders is common. People with anxious temperaments
perceive and handle danger more realistically than do people with
calm or happy temperaments. During the course of human history,
people have often faced extreme danger. Researchers haven't been
thinking of the fires of the Protestant Reformation; they tend
to think more about Caveman days. Man versus Saber-toothed
tiger. But after several centuries of anyone who ever relaxed
died, what were likely to be the temperament genes of the
people left alive? There have been many long periods in history
when large groups of people, often whole populations, faced
extreme danger that was social in both cause and nature.
There is some reason to believe the Dehavens were fiercely
patriotic during the Revolution. Pennsylvania Dutch were
generally fierce advocates of and fighters for the Revolution,
far more likely than anyone else to feel and to act that way.
Many of them served in the Revolution. And Jesse's line were
almost entirely German, except for Samuel's wife who may have
been part French. It isn't established that Jacob loaned money
and supplies to Washington voluntarily; in fact, Washington and
the Continental Congress had grave difficulty extracting money
from people and from the states to pay for the war, and ended up
more or less coercing and even seizing money and supplies from
people. Washington, being an extremely honorable and high-
principled if somewhat Clintonish man, and not in reality a
strong leader, though simple fire and obstinacy at which he
excelled often got him through where someone else wouldn't have
succeeded, ordered that people be issued notes or bonds payable
after the war. But the new government was weak and unstable, and
repeatedly bankrupt, and though it tried to offer people some-
thing on those loans it was a pittance, and a great many people
were financially ruined. Only the Dehavens remember that this
happened to one of their ancestors 200 years ago let alone
haven't given up trying to collect yet! But neither is it
established that Jacob had to be coerced or forced to contribute
his money and supplies. There is no way to know how he actually
felt about the situation; the same family members who carried
the story that he died bitter and heartbroken also helped form
the propaganda about Washington's troops barefoot and starving
at Valley Forge! A number of Dehavens lived near Valley Forge,
and their tales are as vivid and myth-filled as anyone's. Why,
they saw the lines of soldiers miserably tramping right by their
door in a state in which they never were! But Jacob's brother
Peter operated a gunpowder mill and supplied Washington's troops,
and that was something it was much harder to force a person to
do, or atleast do at all well.
Part of the basis of the stories about Jacob going broke in the
war and "someday, someday, the DeHaven family will be known for
what it really did" from the father of a __?__ Baptist minister,
may be that this
matter is symbolic. It is possible that the Dehavens of the
time thought because it was loans it was the one thing they put
into the Revolution that they might recover. It seems that
atleast Peter Dehaven and his sons, which included Jacob and
Peter of the powder mill, did at one time have a good deal of
wealth. They were international merchants. There is little
documentation of that and little is known about it. There is
enough evidence that it was so. It took some amount of wealth
to manage that. That more is not known is partly a function
of Dehaven hider instinct at work again, they seem to have
taken particular care to conceal their activities, though no
reason for that is known of, and partly simply a function of
how the Pennsylvania Dutch characteristically were.
The Pennsylvania Dutch were
the original status ambiguous people and have remained so to
this day in my Dehart line. They were the original ENERGETIC
people; when they did exclusively farmed they typically worked
in the fields from 4AM to dark and then feasted and danced until
midnight, and they literally made as much money as possible any
way they could, and often had several livlihoods. My Dehart
ancestors were characteristic; they owned and worked huge farms,
in their spare time working 14 hour days as factory laborers;
meanwhile they each owned huge portions of the nearby city of
Reading. They were known as factory laborers! But they left
huge bequests that are often very difficult to account for.
The latest to do so, in 1995, left nearly a million dollars to
all collateral heirs as he had no wife, no children and no
will, and noone has a CLUE how he got it. "He worked for the
phone company." In what capacity, I asked. Did he OWN it, or
was he merely CEO?
But people who have investigated the story of Jacob's loans
often simply can't believe it. The members of the family were
farmers, though like many prosperous farmers and most Pennsyl-
vania Dutch farmers and like Peter Dehaven they sometimes
operated mills or industrial enterprises on their farms, and
a number of my ancestors became truly wealthy through this
combined use of resources, and all anyone can varify about Jacob
is that he owned and ran a tavern.
But there is evidence that a number of things went on with the
Dehavens that was never documented. They and the Leverings came
as poor laborers from Muelheim. Levering quickly aquired
500 acres of land on credit and got out of paying for it! With
a quantity of land, people could quickly become exceedingly
prosperous, and the Pennsylvania Dutch excelled in getting the
most out of large parcels of land, setting up mills and small
industrial operations on them beside their farms.
But Levering's wife's uncle was a wealthy Dutch Van de Walle, of
Heyden, Holland, and one of the members of the Frankfort Company
that bought the land for and organized Germantown. When he
died, Wigod Levering got a share of the wealth, and this formed
part of the beginning of a family fortune. Some lines of the
Levering family are wealthy industrialists to this day. There
was also a family connection, I don't know whether of the
Dehaven family or of the Leverings, to Francis Daniel, "a learned
man", of "a family of prominence and influence in Germany" who
was a friend and partner of Penn's, and also an organizer of the
Frankfurt Company. Wigod Levering's daughter Sidonia married
Peter Dehaven. They all lived in close proximity, though Peter
no longer lived in Germantown, they had all lived there together
once as a group of maybe 50 or 60 families, if that. It might
have been 50 or 60 PEOPLE. My notes aren't that good. So they
are likely to have closely worked together on all that they
happened to work on. Wigod Levering's will left Peter Indehaven
and his wife collectively 20 pounds. But I bet Peter Dehaven
actually acquired substantial wealth through his interactions
with the Leverings and may even have worked for or with their
wealthy relatives, who would have been in an excellent position
to start Peter on a career as an international merchant.
And all of the wealth the family seems to have had seems to have
just been gone at the end of the Revolution, as if the family
had sunk it into the Revolution. Except that my 3X great
grandfather, Jesse Dehaven of London Britain, somehow had a total
estate worth $10,000 dollars, WAY more than that typical of the
farmers of his time; he died in 1835 or 1838. So there is
ambiguity here, too. But I bet that if someone looked into the
activities of those wealthy family connections and of Germantown
itself, one might find out "what the Dehavens really were".
(information on Leverings from Levering genealogy - I forgot to
take down author and title! Large genealogy, done by a Levering
family researcher.)
More recently, Dehavens have overwhelmingly tended to be
upper middle class, often professionals, and also have at times
done things a bit off the beaten track, like explore the North
Pole. They have about a half dozen published genealogies, which
is a large number for one family group, and currently have three
family clubs. What is more, all of the genealogical interest is
heavily concentrated in about half of the lines of descent from
the original ancestor, which is how a genetic trait would be
likely to behave. I think that it takes some degree of an
emotionally passionate nature to want to know or to preserve
one's family history.
Ms. Bertine,
president of the Dehaven Club, seems a little quirky. For
instance, she repeatedly insists that libraries don't let you
zerox from books, in club newsletters as well as repeatedly to
me. She is well-educated and has done much library research.
How could she get such an idea. It is not unlikely that at some
point the staff of one or more special collections that hold
many books that are old and falling apart wouldn't allow her to
zerox from them. Usually one can make arrangements for the staff
to do it, in that circumstance. How she generalized it to all
libraries and all books, given that whenever one walks into any
library one sees people zeroxing from books, seems to require
obsessive compulsive disorder, or the kind of severe obsessive
compulsive personality disorder that is usually the result of
some underlying mental disorder.
It also seems as if atleast in some lines of descent the
emotional climate of the Smith family changed after the marriage
to Mary Dehaven. I don't know what was the emotional climate in
this family BEFORE that marriage, except that I do know that
William the son of John and Isabella was described as ambitious,
but lively and active and a leader at sport, good at getting
along with other people, and popular, and not as high-strung or
moody, or at all as someone who kept to himself and kept things
to himself. It seems as if the Smith temperament abruptly and
forever did a 180 degree change when Mary Dehaven married into
it.
I do know that this marriage wasn't the beginning of the
family flying apart. Smiths acted as if they lacked strong family
bonds. All of the sons of John and Isabella but
one dispersed, apparently to the four winds, it appears some of
them to Ohio, and neither my nor James P's line of descent from
William, nor the line that came from the marriage to a
Montgomery, knows what happened to them. It is possible the
daughters of John and Isabella married locally and their descen-
dants are still around, and we don't know it. Of the seven sons
of William and Mary Dehaven, only two stuck around for any time
at all, and only three of the boys seem to have kept track of
each other at all. The three girls married locally, and I now
know that descendants of two of them stuck around, and also that
they kept good records of their ancestry, though in one case
only via DAR references. The third daughter left no descendants;
she and her husband adopted a boy!
That pattern continued, but after the marriage to Mary Dehaven,
one can identify definite antagonisms and cracks in the family.
When my great grandfather, William
Henry Sr, wrote his family sketch, in which he very carefully
listed all children of everybody, he left out his youngest
brother! My father kept up with only one of his father's
siblings. Another is known to have died when my father was only
six. My parents had no idea there were descendents of William
Smith still living on the ancestral farmland in White Clay Creek
until they went there to try to locate the property markers.
My father's family split, and my family has split.
That picture
of the Smiths in front of the farm house absolutely advertises
lack of belief in family togetherness and closeness. It is the
first Victorian photo I have ever seen in which family members
were not posed together as a group. Everyone over 12 is atleast
halfway across the yard from anyone else, and the grown eldest
boy is posed as not quite part of the family - and all but the
youngest children are carefully and deliberately posed. But the
father in that family was the son of Mary Dehaven, and he further
is posed in a classic German patriarchal stance complete with
staff as well as physical distance from his family!
In James P's family, his wife, Emily Henderson, and Mary
Dehaven vigorously did not get along, and his wife wouldn't stay
in the same house with his mother, so he was obliged to build a
second SMith farmhouse across the road. The eldest boy and a
daughter didn't get along with "a sibling", so they moved with
their mother, Emily, to Raleigh North CArolina, where the son
and daughter continued to live with their mother and never
married. The son had graduated from college, which meant quite
alot in those days, and he first went into business picking
ferns for the Raleigh funeral industry, then had a coca-cola
franchise and a used car business. My brother and I have also
rather seriously failed to perform up to potential. That is
usually a sign of something wrong. The son is said to have been
a supremely unlikable character, and his sister cold, stiff and
prissy - atleast in the way she came across.
Understand, I believe the remaining siblings of the large
family were fine, and my SMith 3rd cousin's family seems
close-knit. But something was definitely wrong with those
two. And my 3rd cousin says the remaining sibling who was his
father had the ferocious temperament that came down his line.
Neither the Thompson-Chambers-Miller clan families nor
the Dehavens seem to have been prone to dispersing, splitting and
drifting apart like this. I think the
Dehaven emotional intensity often creates or helps maintain
strong family bonds, and it may be no accident that
all Smiths I have so far ever heard of are descended from William
and Mary Dehaven, any more than it is an accident that Dehavens
have six published genealogies and three family clubs and still
remember an unrepaid debt from two hundred years ago. Possibly
when the ferocious, not particularly stable, Dehaven temperament
got into the Smith family that lacked strong family bonds the
family began to fly apart.
Chester County Quakers including the Thompson-Chambers-
Miller clan were prone to frequent migrations to other parts of
the state and the country. No doubt family tensions helped to
determine who joined them. If people were not getting along
some could leave without appearing to break with family. But
these were mass migrations of
groups of usually closely related people. They didn't drift
away like leaves blown in the wind the way Smiths seem to have.
Further, it is known where these groups moved from and where they
moved to. Someone kept track. Smiths didn't. There also has
been more bitterness involved in Smith family splits than with
Quaker family separations; whatever was the reason why any
individual Quaker joined their organized migrations, they were
peaceful, someone just decided to leave, and family bonds and
communication were maintained.
Another pattern that seems to either begin with Mary Dehaven
or predate her is that of Smith men marrying emotionally intense
and unusual women. My father calls them, "remarkable women".
I get the idea that this characterized the women in my father's
line back to Mary Dehaven, and it sounds as if it characterized
two marriages in Jim McVey's direct line, too. Emily Henderson
certainly wasn't a more mild-mannered person than Mary Dehaven.
Jim McVey is Smith-Henderson on his mother's side; she inherited
the family temper.
That kind of pattern of marriages also occurred in my mother's
lines. It both perpetuated this set of genetic traits, and
led to an entire collection of genes. About 16 genes for an
anxious temperament or anxiety disorders exist. A little anxiety
is often a good and helpful thing. By themselves, most of these
genes don't cause clinical anxiety disorders. But they each have
quite different discrete effects on brain chemistry, and that
means that they can gang up. Someone with a whole collection of
these genes is likely to have a clinical anxiety disorder.
Of course, some of these genes, and also some of the genes for
the neurochemically similar disorder depression, exert mendelian
dominance! For instance, if a parent had major depression, one
has a 50% chance of having major depression. And the pattern
that I found when I mapped signs of Dehaven emotional intensity
on Baron Von Alten's chart is that one has a 50% chance of
inheriting the Dehaven temperament, and it has come right
straight down roughly half the lines of descent from Peter
Dehaven!
This hasn't happened in my family, but then in my family there
is clear evidence of four or five different genes, each of which
came from different lines of the family, at work. My
sister behaves similarly to my brother and me but in very
different ways, and a key one is that unlike my brother and me
she doesn't appear to be depressed. Same hyperanxious, high-
strung, people-shy, pathologically a hider traits, the most
seriously obstinate person in the family except my mother, the
same serious problems with self-esteem that appear to come from
nowhere, but far less depressed.
Another very fascinating and telling element of the Dehaven
temperament is what I call the hider trait. Dehavens
seem to
be characteristically shy or suspicious or afraid of people.
Another thing that Thelma Lunaas did that attracted my attention
is that, while she filed a high public interest lawsuit that
she took to the sU.S. Supreme Court, and even put her own name
on it, Thelma Lunaas Weasenforth vs the United States, she
insisted that noone know her name OR her lineage, not even
of what early Dehaven line she was! This is from Dorothy
Bertine, who tries to keep Dehaven genealogical informaiton
secret and has been known to lie in that cause, and Thelma
Lunaas must be a veritable gold mine of it if one talked
to her. But certainly Thelma would have been well known to
club members if she had wnated to be, and noone but her
own close relatives have a clue who she is. Not even
people who ent to the big Dehaven reunions at the time when
the lawsuit happened, and the lawyer was there, and everything.
THey had never met her, or anything. Didn't recognize her
name. And Dorothy Bertine contributed money (since returned)
toward a gigantic effort I an done of Thelma's own cousins
were supposed to make to trace her family's lines, which I
actually learned by talking to other members of her family.
This makes no sense if Dorothy Bertine knew this stuff.
I wrote to Thelma Lunaas, whose name and address and phone
number are in the phone book, one of the few people named
Lunaas in the U.S. and certainly the only one of her name
near Houston, Texas, which is strange if she doesn't want
people to know who she is, but then my father is a privacy
nut who won't let anyone give out his name, address, etc.,
for any reason, and he has it fully listed in the phone
book, and asked her, and also said I'd like to know more
about her and trade information with her. She never
responded, which supports the conclusion that Dorothy
Bertine is telling the truth.
Dorothy Bertine also said that NOONE of Samuel II's line
(that is Jesse's father) has given her their genealogical
information but me. I know that one or two have since then
or close enough to then that she didn't know it yet, and her
file that I saw had just one new line of descent in it.
It sounded as if Samuel II's line are SUPER hiders! One must
take into consideration that I have since learned (the hard way)
that alot of people simply won't give their genealogical
informaiton to Dorothy Bertine. I've met other Dehaven
researchesrs on the web who won't give their information to
Dorothy Bertine. Not because it's secret. In fact, SI got
that entire family's Dehaven lineage from other members of
that line in a few phone calls.
Dorothy Bertine is an author,
she views the Deahven Club as a source of material for her
books, she tries to keep genealogical information secret, and
she bullies and manipulates people and throws legal threats
around, and did all of this to me. Alot of older Dehavens
and immediate relatives of hers really don't mind or care,
the rest of us feel strongly about sharing genealogical
information.
Also, I do have a very anxious temperament, and
I don't want my genealogical information entangled with
someone who throws legal threats and potentially dangerious
misinterpretations of a confusing law everyone is confused
about around. My immediate relatives may feel the same way.
My pathologically distrustful parents would never have
gotten involved in the Deahven Club at all. But anxious
people are quicker than other people to scent and react to
danger. I don't know that the people who have given her
their information have put themselves and their informaiton
in mortal danger; in fact, most of her threats and lectures
are such pure bluff it's ridiculous. It is actually
significant that my own Dehaven line have apparently been
particularly reluctant to involve their information with
her.
Too, another reason why I have reacted as I have is
that I feel particularly strongly about the free availability
of such basic information about a family, and strong feelings
is another hallmark Dehaven trait. My other fourth cousin
Bonnie Bunce, who feels the opposite way to the way I feel
about it, and I have had proper Dehaven sparks flying across
the web about it.
The hider trait survives in my family. In my father's case, his
overwhelming obsessive fear of the world and everyone in it underlies
extreme hider behavior. His own children often don't know the most glaring
or important things that are going on with him. He wouldn't allow my
brother and me out of the house even when I was l8 and in college (and
required to live at home) except for school, church and selected work
unless he was with us because "I trust you, but I know something will
happen." Guess who my prom date was? Usually he wasn't ambitious enough,
though, to for instance drive us to a school activity if he was afraid
something would happen. My sister had a better time of it because by the
time she reached her teens, my mother had recovered from a long bout of
clinical depression she had when I was a child that caused her to act as
bad as my father! But she still had to find a ride to school activities
because something would happen if she walked, and our parents lacked the
ambition to take her - not as if they were occupied or busy! My father
has little interest in people and has ever had just one good friend, who
for all but a couple of years of his life has never lived closer than 500
miles away. And my third cousin of another Smith line my father's
temperament came down tells me he is exactly the same way.
My sister conceals EVERYTHING about herself.
She told me nothing about the man she lived with for two years
until they announced their engagement, and then refused to tell
me a thing about him. Finally I called him up and introduced
myself! She refused to tell me what she was doing in terms of
what is your current occupation or job title at IBM. She trained
as a computer programmer and worked as one for IBM for some time.
My brother thought what she does was a trade secret! Finally at
her wedding her co-workers told me. They hadn't had any reason
to think it was a secret. My sister is project manager for the
new update of one of IBM's major computer operating systems!
Why didn't she tell me that? Purportedly, because she doesn't
like to blow her horn! And trying to get her to tell me WHAT IS
the OS/2 operating system! Or how well is it doing? She jumped
down my throat at both questions - which she interpreted as
threatening questions. My sister appears to think that if she
says anything about herself or what she does, no matter what,
someone will attack her!
Another very important thing I have learned about Dehaven mental
health is that Dorothy Bertine says that alcoholism runs in the
Dehaven lines "from somewhere" and is quite a problem. There is
strong evidence that a gene for alcoholism or genetic traits that
contribute to alcoholism by making drinking alcohol a particular-
ly pleasant experience exist. But the leading cause of
alcoholism is known to be untreated and often unrecognized
mental illness, most often mood and anxiety disorders like what
runs in my family. Both are leading causes of family breakdown
like that which seems to run in my Dehaven lines. And I would
say that "from somewhere" led somewhere pretty close to Dorothy
Bertine; she also said that "That is why I WILL not allow
alcohol to be served at Dehaven family reunions" and I'm also
suspicious of where Dorothy Bertine got her hard, grim, Miss
Minchin ala A Little Princess outlook on life.
But I got a similar report from someone descended from Harmond
Dehaven who married an Op den graef. William of my line of
descent married a Cramer, possibly of a family of the same
group.
Email me at dorasmith24@hotmail.com
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