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Searching out extended family without leaving home

By Carl Heintze

I had lunch the other day with a couple of my cousins. It's a first. All four of us have never gotten together before even though we have lived most of our lives in the Santa Clara Valley.

No big deal, we are third cousins, a couple of times removed. We had common great-grandfathers. Or something like that.

They're Lesters, and despite my legal last name I'm a Chapman. That's important because once, a long time ago, the Lesters and the Chapmans, or rather our ancestors, lived in the same town, Ledyard, Conn., which seems and is a long way from where most of the Lesters and the Chapmans ended up: Northern California.

For half a dozen generations, almost from the Mayflower's landing, there have been Chapmans and Lesters in Ledyard. And there still are.

But in the 1860s there was a mass migration of the two families from Connecticut to California, mostly over the Isthmus of Panama. It was part of a general westward movement by New Englanders, a kind of interior migration that went on all through the 19th century.

It wasn't easy. Maybe it wasn't as difficult as getting from Guatemala to Wisconsin or California, but it was no jet journey.

To get out here one sailed down the Atlantic Coast to Colon, Panama, more or less walked or in later years took the train to Panama City and there caught a northbound ship headed for San Francisco.

Some of the Chapmans actually predated that. Like a lot of others, my great-grandfather and two of his brothers sailed around Cape Horn with a party of other young men from Ledyard in 1849 to look for gold in California. For reasons unclear, my great-grandfather left behind a pregnant wife (my soon to be born grandfather) and eight children.

It was an unfortunate decision, as it turned out. He and one of his brothers died of cholera after they got here. Shortly thereafter, my great-grandmother also died, leaving my grandfather an orphan.

In due course one of my grandfather's uncles took him across the Isthmus to California. The clan headed north from San Francisco to Napa where, as has been the case with many immigrant families since, they found friends and relatives. My grandfather never left Napa. He spent the rest of his life there, mostly as a grocer.

The Lesters got their start in the same way, though perhaps without as much trauma. They ended up in the Santa Clara Valley, where most of them became farmers. And so, in spite of many reasons not to be, so are my Lester cousins today. They farm in the Coyote Valley. Other branches of the Lester family have owned land near San Jose, Los Gatos, Cupertino and points north. Some of what was once their ranches is now occupied by such well-known landmarks as Valco Fashion Park, IBM's research facility, Good Samaritan Hospital and Highway 101.

So my cousins and I had a lot to talk about: The valley the way it once was, how it has changed, how we have all grown older and, especially, who is related to whom and how. This part of the conversation depended a good deal on Cousin Ron, who now lives in Mariposa but who soon will move to San Juan Bautista.

He's spent a good part of his retirement researching the connection between the Lesters and the Chapmans, their friendships and relationships (Lesters married Chapmans and vice versa, especially in the old days back in New England) and what happened to various branches of the families.

He's got a pedigree chart which shows all the members of the two families he has been able to track down and their relationship to one another: first cousins, second cousins, or, as in my case, third cousins, a couple of times removed. The chart fills up a dozen or so pages of single-spaced entries. That's interesting.

But even more reassuring is that both the Lester and the Chapman families seem to have remarkably long-lived members. One cousin is 97 (he's a Lester) and another lived to be 102. Most Chapmans stayed around into their 90s.

If nothing else, genealogy makes you feel like you've got not only an extended family, but an extended lease on life.