Making fun family connections

Mitch Conover, who has been studying the histories of many south Louisiana families for a long time, tells me that aside from the “straight genealogy” establishing who begat whom, as the Bible would put it, he’s had fun following the lines of folk who weren’t major branches on the family tree — sometimes with surprising results.
“In my research over the past 65 years I have found a great deal of interesting tidbits,” he writes. “Many Acadian descendants in Louisiana have famous cousins. Numerous individuals are cousins to the Roosevelt Family, to Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, and others.”
For example, Charles Hanks, progenitor of the Hanks family in Louisiana, was born about 1770 in Virginia, the fifth of nine children of Joseph Hanks and Nancy Anna “Nanny” Lee. After the Revolutionary War, Joseph and Nanny moved to Kentucky, and Charles apparently moved as a young man from there to St. Martinville. He married Christine Hargrave, daughter of Benjamin Hargrave and Rebecca Gwaltney, in St. Martinville in February 1798.
According to a Hanks family genealogy, they had 15 children: Joseph (1799), Celeste Sarah (1800), Jean-Baptiste (1803), Charles Jr. (1805), Thomas (1807), Nanette (1809) Benjamin (1811), Melanie (1814), Hilaire Eli (1818), Jefferson (1819), Nathaniel (1819), George (1820), Jean D. (1822), Christine (1825), and Ralph (1827).
Charles died in St Martin Parish in 1829, leaving a passle of grandchildren, all of them with a famous ancestor.
Charles’s sister was Lucy Hanks Sparrow. Her daughter Nancy married Thomas Lincoln and was the mother of Abraham Lincoln. That means Charles was Honest Abe’s uncle and that his myriad Louisiana descendants are Lincoln’s distant cousins.
There’s a fellow with the fancy name of Willem van Couwenhoven in Mitch’s family tree. His son was Albert van Cowenhoven, and after him the name began to change — on Mitch’s side to Cowenhoven, then Covenhoven, then Conover.
Albert’s brother was Cornelius van Couwenhoven. His daughter, Rachel, married a Van Cleve, and several generations later one of the Van Cleve daughters married Daniel Wright, who was the grandfather of Orville and Wilbur Wright. That makes Mitch a sixth cousin twice removed to the famous aviators.
The search for long lost cousins, is a little bit different, but it tends to substantiate the theory of six degrees of separation, which holds that everyone is six or fewer steps away from any other person in the world.
I’m not aware of anyone rich or famous in my family tree, but Mitch said he’d poke around to see who might be there.
He hasn’t reported as of this writing. I’m hoping for a Rockefeller or someone who just happens to have several million stashed away for Long Lost Cousin Jim. Why not? The odds on that are probably better than on winning the lottery.
But then the odds are probably even better that he’ll find someone like Al Capone, and that the IRS has been looking for a long lost cousin to pay the taxes he evaded.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.