The Lee - Borton - Clark - Ladd Connection

My paternal Great-grandmother, Martha Jane Lee was born in 1860, and married Francis (Frank) Gray on Feb. 4,1875. Her only surviving child was my Grandmother, Sarah (Sadie) Elizabeth (Gray) Newcomer. Martha had just turned 26 years old when she died on Feb. 12, 1886. Little Sadie Gray was only 4 1/2 years old when her mother died. Her father remarried, and she was raised by her step-mother.

Martha (Lee) Gray had an older sister Mary Ann Lee (1844 - 1923) who waa married to Silas Borton. Mary and Silas had a daughter, Ella May Borton (1870 - 1943), who married Edwin Elmer Clark.

It was through Edwin and Ella's daughter Ida Jane Clark (1897 - ????) the connection was made to the Ladd family. Ida Clark married Ernest Efflin Ladd.

Ernest and Ida's son, Ernest Lavoy Ladd married Elizabeth Wiederkher. This is the Ladd family that lives near Waldron, Michigan on the Meridian Rd. (US-127). If I have this figured out correctly, Ernest Lavoy Ladd is my third cousin.

I know Ernest and Elizabeth's sons, Stephen and Mark, through our time together at the Waldron High School. I had been told we had some "shirt-tail" cousin relationship, and it was a desire to pin down that relationship that led to this posting. If you are keeping score, I and my siblings are related to Stephan and Mark as 3rd cousins, once removed.

What is This About?

A number of strands have come together that have resulted in creating this blog. This blog will be focusing on family history and geneology. Along with that, to a lesser degree, will be some focus on the local history of the area where I grew up.

The family history and stories will focus on the four families of my own ancestory; Newcomer, Gray, Bavin, and Britton, and also the families of my wife Nancy's ancestory; Williamson, Clarke, Jidov, and Morar.

The local area where I grew up is the part of Hillsdale County, Michigan known as Wright Township which includes the communities of Prattville and Waldron. One of the focal points of that local history is the Michigan 18th Infantry Regiment and that regiments connection to the steamship Sultana which in late April of 1865 exploded and sank in the Mississippi River just north of Memphis, TN.

I will be bringing together in this blog a number of things I have previosly published elsewhere on the WWW. Some of those were on my Geocities pages and with Geocities going defunct, I need a new place for those items, thus the creation of The Neukomment Files.

Neukomment is the English transliteration of the German family name we now carry as Newcomer. And with that introduction, here we go....