My Cousin Georgie

There was a suggestion dropped somewhere in my reading to the effect that my ancestor Abraham Clemens, who in 1818 settled on the land where Hespeler was eventually built, was a distant cousin of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. I have searched every Clemens genealogy on every family tree site I can find, and I can’t manage to see where these guys might be connected.

I now know that the version of Abe Clemens’ ancestry that I recounted way back in “Settlement in Block 2,” which links him to the puritans who beheaded Charles I in England, is suspected of being bogus, invented for a Clemens family reunion sometime in the early twentieth century. But even that one doesn’t link our Abe up with old Mark Twain.

I did pick up a tip, however, from my virtual third cousin Peter Hoover, about Abraham Clemens’ wife, Mary “Polly” Custer. Yup, you guessed it: I’m distantly related to the most infamous Custer of all time, US General George Armstrong, the loser at the Little Bighorn.

The guy had a fairly impressive career fighting for the North in the American Civil War, including accepting the first flag of surrender from a Confederate force. Then, during the so-called Indian Wars, on November 28, 1868, Custer’s 7th Cavalry attacked a Cheyenne settlement on the Washita River, killed numerous men and boys, and took 53 women and children captive.

It appears that Custer had a “relationship” (yeah, right) with one of the captured women, 18-year-old Mo-nah-see-tah, daughter of Chief Little Rock, who was killed in the raid. Mo-nah-see-tah bore a child, Yellow Bird, in 1869, but it isn’t clear who the father was, George or his brother Thomas (who was his aide and, I guess, also raped her).

In 1874, Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota, after which he announced the discovery of gold, leading to the Black Hills Gold Rush of 1874 and the establishment of the notoriously lawless Deadwood, South Dakota. But Custer really screwed up at the Little Bighorn, where on June 25, 1876, his troops were annihilated and he himself killed by the combined force of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors, who completely outwitted him. You know the story, have probably seen the movie.

Anyway, my and George’s common ancestors are Paulus Küster (1644-1708) and Gertrude Doors (1648-1708), who arrived in America around 1693 from Crefeld in the German Rhineland. They were among the Germans from the Palatinate who settled in what is now Germantown, in north Philadelphia. They had 9 children, all born in Germany before they emigrated. It appears that Paul and Gertrude were Mennonites, though some of their children may have become Quakers or members of the Reformed church.

Paulus and Gertrude’s eldest child, Arnold (1669-1738), and his wife Elizabeth Rebecca Nuzom (1670-1739) are the ancestors of George, while their sixth child, Hermanus (1681- 1760), and his wife Isabella Conrad (1685-1760) are my ancestors. Three generations later, we have third cousins John Custer on George’s line and Mary (Polly) Custer on mine. Mary married Abraham Clemens, and their son Nathan and his wife Veronica Bechtel had a daughter, Mary (Polly) Clemens. This Mary Clemens, who married “Indian John” Weber, was fifth cousin to George Armstrong Custer and my great great great grandmother.

That makes me and George fifth cousins five times removed. I figure that’s almost far enough removed from that asshole. How did someone with Mennonite heritage become a war hero, Indian killer, and sexual-exploiter of captive young Native women anyway? As Peter Hoover comments on the subject of cousin George: “’Who take the sword,’ Jesus said, ‘will perish by the sword.’”

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Sources:

Peter Hoover, “Watching Waiting When the Lord Shall Come: Markers in Pennsylvania,” The Rainham Settlement (http://rainham.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/200-Franconia-with-page-numbers.pdf: viewed Dec 27, 2020).

Rod Michael Johnson, “Paulus Van Haren Kuster (Küster),” Geni (https://www.geni.com/people/Paulus-Kuster/6000000003797372822: viewed Dec 27, 2020). From this record, you can trace the lines down to George and to my grandmother Lovina.

“George Armstrong Custer,” Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Armstrong_Custer: viewed Dec 27, 2020).