Quick! Prove That He is Related to Benjamin Franklin!

My phone beeps to notify me of a text message from my nephew; he needs proof that he is related to Benjamin Franklin. Albeit not an unusual request from him, my niece, or from my kids, for that matter.

I may live for these requests.

I love when they ask, and I love being able to produce the proof for them. It is nifty that we have such a distinguished early American in our family tree. I don’t remember ever being unaware of this extraordinary fact about my family. Further my younger sister has been plagued with us teasing that she has Ben Franklin’s forehead her whole life.

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Years ago, when I tagged along for one of my kid’s class trips to Philadelphia, I heard for the first time that Franklin likely had ADHD.* He was one of the early heroes of ADHD when people started pushing back on all the negativity around such a diagnosis. Our docent talked about some of the behaviors Franklin was known for through that lens, which made sense to me.

I wonder if my ADHD could have come down the old family tree from a bright, inventive guy like him. 

My sister is married to a first-generation American whose parents came from Nigeria and Liberia, so my niece and nephew are biracial. When they ask me for the relationship chart, it is not about ADHD.

I imagine myself as a genealogy superhero responding with lightning speed and a tremendous WHOOSH. My emergency family tree text traveling across the ethers to the bustling spot in Manhattan where someone has dared to doubt their lineage. 

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I find strength in learning about hardship in my family tree.

People who left everything they knew to start over in another place, people who suffered a catastrophic loss in the death of a spouse or a child, or both. Each name represents an entire life; I can imagine their hope, intellect, love, challenges, joy, and sadness. 

My grandmother was researching her connection to Benjamin Franklin when joining the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) was fashionable. Available resources and methodology also would have limited her ability to expand research beyond one line. Consequently, her emphasis was on pedigree and bloodline only.

I am who I am in large part because of growing up with my siblings; I always look sideways in our tree. 

For example, my older sister and I raised our children together in New Jersey. Despite the hour-long drive between us, we celebrated birthdays and New Year and often managed to combine our trick-or-treating. Our sons are a year apart, and our daughters are seven months apart. We had the kids take swimming lessons together and swapped babysitting the four of them to give us much-needed couple-time. 

Researching the “Kansas Years” I studied my maternal great-grandfather’s letters back to his family in Alderson, West Virginia. I discovered remarkable similarities between my sister and me and the branch who moved to Kansas. 

My great-grandmother and her sister, Sydney Hill, raised their families in the same community in the 1850s.

Suddenly a whole new dimension of their time in Kansas was available to me.

I scoured old publications on newspapers.com and researched vital records on ancestry.com for the Hill/Argabrite family. I found them leaping off pages everywhere I looked.

Cousins were baptized in the same church, performed in choral events, and attended school together. Fathers and uncles were on the school board, involved in business ventures, and grew strawberries. The two sisters rescued kittens from train tracks and supported local causes.

Proving my nephew’s familial roots

Proving my nephew’s familial roots stretch to the birth of our country and in a straight line to Benjamin Franklin hopefully serves as more than a parlor trick. Knowing a young man, who appears to be black, is a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin could expand the doubter’s mind, making them unlikely to be a skeptic on the grounds of skin color again.

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