I’ve always been facinated by genealogy and people’s life stories. It’s interesting to see what your ancestors may have done, where they came from and what diverse backgrounds they have. I spent some time with my maternal grandpa and grandma looking into my mom’s ancestry and really enjoyed having that knowledge as we travelled to Sweden and Norway in 2002. The highlights of the trip for me was seeing the farmsteads where my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather called home. I still have all the information on the maternal side, but haven’t gotten to all of that yet.
Instead I’ve been focusing on the Newell side of the family and I’m going to post the information I have here in several posts that won’t be interesting to anyone except for maybe my dad. My uncle Darrel was the one who really got me interested in genealogy and I wish I had taken the time to compile all of the information he sent me earlier – unfortunately, he passed away this past February. He had done a ton of work on the Newell genealogy starting in 1997 through 2005. After he realized my interest, he sent me a lot of information and I wasted/spent tons of hours on the Internets trying to take it further. Unfortunately, I really haven’t been able to extend the information he had gathered – hopefully I’m able to compile it in a way that makes it most useful.
The Newell family came to America from England in 1634 with the patriach Abraham Newell who had been born in Ipswich, England in 1581. We can trace our descendancy back to a Layton Newell who was born in Rhode Island in 1774. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to tie Layton to any of Abraham’s ancestors – but I have a post coming with my educated guess on that. Darrel had compiled the information from Layton to the present including some very interesting tidbits like the fact that my great-grandfather was one of the only all brother baseball teams which played together in Plankinton SD around the early 1900s. There is apparently information about this in the National Baseball Hall of Fame – something I hope to check out soon. Also, one of our relatives appears to have spent considerable time in the Andersonville, GA prison during the Civil War. I don’t have a lot of details on the life histories at this point, so I’ll be focused on laying out the descendants.
Also, we are descended from Roger Williams, the reverend who started the Rhode Island colony. Becky and I visited his center in Providence back in 2006 and found he has a whole historical society dedicated to him. On that trip we were also able to visit the grave of Jacob and Sarah Newell (born in 1704 and 1708 respectively) who are buried in the Newell Burying Grounds in South Attleboro, MA.
The information is overwhelming and potentially confusing, so I hope you can get something out of it. I used OneNote for the descendancy charts which may make it hard to follow, but I thought it would be easy to get the information into another format from there.
Eric's space 