What'chu Talkin' 'Bout, Willis?

My mother was born Violet Joyce Willis in Chepstow, Monmouthshire. There is a long-standing controversy over whether Monmouthshire is truly part of England or Wales -- the joke being that the Welsh claim it is English and the English claim it is Welsh! She was conscripted (what Americans call "drafted") into the British Army shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War and assigned to duty with the American Army, Ordnance Division, in Ammunition Supply. That is where she met my father. Following the War she immigrated to the United States in 1946 and married my father, making her my immigrant ancestor on my maternal side.

For purposes of Michaela's school project on immigrant ancestors, that was the end of our research on the Willis side of the family. Of course, growing up I had heard stories about my English and Scottish ancestors, so I knew that her father was my namesake, Leonard John Willis, and her mother was Winnifred Violet Kerr of Clan Kerr in Midlothian, Scotland. I had also been told that my great-grandfather, William Willis, had been a barrister (we call them lawyers in the U.S.) and that William's father had been a Queens Counsel judge. On two trips to England, I had met quite a few of my Willis and Kerr aunts and uncles, as well, but for the first 57 years of my life that was all I knew of my Willis ancestry. But once aroused, my curiosity was no longer satisfied with that mere smattering of information.

When my daughter and I started our ancestral research, I was certain that tracing our British ancestry would be easy. After all, the British had been keeping meticulous records since the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Domesday Book. And to govern an empire that had spanned the entire globe since the 16th century, surely the British maintained birth, marriage, property, and death records second to none. Well, once I turned my attention to my mother's side of the family I was again reminded of what happens when you assume ...

As it turns out, the British do have meticulous records of births, marriages, property transactions, and deaths. Unfortunately, they have no workable system for searching and locating those records! None of those functions were centralized until the 20th century. So, if you want to locate the birth record of someone born before 1900, you must not only know what county and city or town they were born in, you must also know which parish it was. That's roughly equivalent to knowing the Zip Code of someone's birthplace!

When you've waited until everyone who might have remembered what parish your great-great-grandfather was born in has died, the task takes an ugly twist! If I had had the sense to ask these questions while my grandparents and great-aunts and uncles were still alive my research might have been made vastly easier. Let that be a lesson to you younger readers!

Once again, I was spending two or three hours a night a couple of nights a week, and months went by without a breakthrough in researching my Willis ancestors. It was then that my mother came to the rescue! Knowing of the new found interest my daughter and I had developed in genealogy, my mother decided that one of the best gifts she could give her son and grandchildren was her memoirs. So, she prepared a book for each of us containing the story of her life and all that she could recall of her family. And in those memoirs I found a vital clue.

As had been the case with the Jenner side of my family (see "A Tale of Two Samuels"), one of the keys to unraveling the Willis line was realizing that there had been two William Willises: William Willis the barrister, and Judge William Willis, QC. In all the years my mother had talked about her grandfather and great-grandfather I had never realized they were both William Willis. It wasn't until I saw the information written down in her memoirs that I understood this. Still, I had googled "William Willis" and "William Willis QC" countless times and never found anything helpful. But, as I read Mum's spare recollections of the two men's lives a thought occurred to me: there might be an obituary on a Queen's Counsel judge, since he would have been a man of considerable prominence. And I was right! But it was not to be found in the London Times archives or somewhere you would ordinarily expect.

When I googled "William Willis obituary" in April 2009 the first UK result that Google returned was a PDF document posted on the website of Toddington Baptist Church. I clicked it and there it was: my great-great-grandfather's obituary! Of course, I wasn't certain of it at first, but once I read the entire article and compared it to Mum's memoirs there was no doubt. The funeral notice mentioned F. H. Willis ("Uncle Frank" in Mum's memoirs) and a son-in-law named H. S. Saunders, who had married my mother's "Aunt Trissie." All of the pieces fit the puzzle perfectly! And by visiting other pages on the Toddington Baptist site I was able to trace back three more generations! A page entitled "Roots" listed Judge William's father and grandfather: another William Willis and Thomas Willis. The obituary and funeral notice also provided several other bits of information we had not previously known, including the maiden names of both Judge William's and Barrister William's wives and the fact that Judge Willis was elected to Parliament in 1880 representing Colchester.

Every bit of additional information -- dates and places of birth, names of spouses and children, vocations, titles, achievements, etc. -- allows a researcher to refine searches in the various online databases. Names like William Willis are commonplace, but there are far fewer Judge William Willises who were born in Toddington, Bedfordshire, the son of a strawhat maker named William, and married first to Annie Outhwaite, then subsequently to Marie Elizabeth Moody, served as a Queens Counsel judge under Queen Victoria and a King's Counsel judge under Edward VII, and even served as a Member of Parliament. In fact, only one that I've found so far!

The Ravages of War

For months, the name William Henry Pellman seemed like little more than a genealogical dead-end. Family records indicated that he had been born in 1827, but not where he had been born. There were records on Ancestry.com of at least a dozen Pellmans born around 1800, any one of whom might have been William Henry’s father, but no documents linking him to any of them. There were also hints that he might have been a descendent of some of the Pennsylvania “Dutch” Pellmans or Amish Pellmans, but again no documentation. We even found some speculation that his parents – or at least his father – had been one of thousands of Hessians who had fought on the side of England during the American Revolution.

After countless hours chasing unproductive leads, I finally gave up on finding the parents of William Henry Pellman and moved on to easier lines of research. As if to mock me for my impatience, two significant documents came into my possession within a couple of weeks of my giving up on William Henry Pellman. One was a copy of the book, Four Trails to Texas by Walter L. Robertson, the other was a copy of some research done by other descendents of William Henry. Together, the two documents creating a moving portrait of a pioneering ancestor.

William Henry Pellman had been born Wilhelm Heinrich Pöhlman in Lűtesburg, Preussen (Prussia) on September 29, 1827. His early life was that of a lowly tenant farmer in the Prussian feudal system. He was not yet 21 when he joined in the March Revolution of 1848 and fought for a parliamentary form of government in the German Confederation. For the next three years he fought in the First War of Schlesswig. His earnings as a soldier and a brief lull in the hostilities gave him a chance to board the ship Harvest in late 1852 bound for the U.S.

When he arrived in Baltimore Harbor on December 14, 1852, William Henry was young and strong, and had just arrived in the Land of Opportunity. He must surely have believed that his days of warfare and tenant farming were behind him. Sadly, this was not to be the case.

Overnight, Wilhelm Heinrich Pöhlman, Prussian tenant farmer and soldier became William Henry Pellman, American pioneer. We don’t know what course his life took during the next five years that led him down the Ohio River to finally settle in Aurora, Indiana. But during this time, he met and married his wife, Elise Meier, and they had their first child. They next appear on the 1860 federal census as a tenant farmer on the property of James and Adda Gould in Aurora. And just a year later, he would be embroiled in another civil war.

Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities in April, 1861, William Henry Pellman joined the 45th Indiana Volunteers, a unit that was later reorganized as the 3rd Indiana Regiment, where he served for the next two years in the U.S. Civil War. Nine months after his return from the war, his daughter, Maria Louisa (“Louise”) was born. The Pellmans remained as share-croppers in Indiana until mid-1868, when they moved to Farley, Missouri, where the majority of Elise’s family had settled. Surely, their move was motivated in part by the hope of achieving more than just being tenant farmers. His children recalled that he had often stated that his dream was to “someday own a place of my own.”

Missouri proved to be a land of both joy and heartbreak for William and Elise. William was one of 13 men who founded the Lutheran Church in Farley, and it is said that he loved that church. He and Elise had four more children in Farley between 1868 and 1875. But William remained a share-cropper during his entire stay in Missouri. The winters of 1888 and 1889 were particularly cold and bitter, and took a terrible toll on the Pellman family. Louise died of pneumonia in February, 1888. In 1889, both Elise and their daughter Lizzie also succumbed to pneumonia.

In the aftermath of these tragic losses, the first Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 must have sparked William’s imagination with the possibility of finally owning land of his own. As additional land runs were announced in subsequent years, the allure must have steadily grown stronger. In late 1892, William – now 65 years old – set off for Oklahoma with his youngest sons, John and Guss. At high noon on April 16, 1893, William Henry, John, and Guss Pellman were lined up with an estimated 100,000 other dream-filled or desperate contenders for the 40,000 available tracts of Oklahoma land being offered in the Cherokee Strip Land Run -- the most dramatic pursuit of land in American history!

The exact details have long been forgotten, but it is likely that the Pellmans were ill prepared for this adventure. The going price for land was only about $10 per acre, so the fact that William Henry was racing for land instead of buying it suggests that he could not scrape together the price of a fast horse -- and certainly not the price of a team of fast horses to pull the family wagon. They found themselves pitted against men who had invested everything they had in sturdy wagons and fast horses for the race, as well as rifles to defend the land they claimed -- or in some cases to drive others off their rightful claims. And they probably weren't prepared to deal with men who were willing to cheat or kill for a scrap of land, like the "Sooners" who hid out in the prairie and stole the claims of many honest contenders. We will never know whether the Pellmans fell victim to Sooners, a broken wheel, if their wagon was just too slow, or if -- at age 66 -- William Henry was just too old for the rigors of the race. We know only that the Pellmans were not successful in staking a claim in the great Cherokee Strip Land Run.

William Henry Pellman, a man who had lived through five years of fighting in two civil wars and endured the hardships of tenant farming for over 50 years, would never fulfill his long-held dream of owning a piece of the Land of Opportunity. Nevertheless, he lived a life that exemplified faith, courage, perseverence, and fortitude in the face of daunting hardship -- a legacy I would be proud to live up to!

Despite his failure to obtain a homestead, William Henry lived out the rest of his days in the Oklahoma Territory. Following the Cherokee Strip Land Run, he and his sons, John and Guss settled in Kay County, Oklahoma. William Henry died in 1901 and is buried in the Oak Grove Cemetery in Ponca City.