A while ago I submitted DNA samples for a genealogical database. It prompted me to post my family information online for the benefit of anyone who is interested. I had done some research in this area when I was a graduate student, and thought that there might be others who would want to know what I learned. So I will post here what I can from memory. The bulk of my research is stored with my son in Texas. I plan to retrieve it this summer and add it to my website. In the meantime, here is what I know:

Todd Family:  Todds are originally Lowland Scots, from the border region between Scotland and England. Todd is an Old Scottish name meaning “fox.” Old Scottish is actually Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic. In the 16^th century we were probably mostly cattle and horse thieves. When John Knox brought the Reformation to Scotland, many Todds took to the Reformed faith and eventually became Covenanters. After the battle of Bothwell Bridge, Todds were sent on convict ships to Ireland or America. One James Todd was on board a convict ship which wrecked on the coast of Ireland. I suppose the Todds were transported to Ireland where they retained their Scottish heritage and the Presbyterian faith. I know we have always called ourselves Scots-Irish. Around the 1730s the first of my ancestors came to America, landing at Philadelphia, and heading down the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, where – according to oral tradition – he already had some relatives. His name was James Todd and he had a son named James who fought with the Virginia militia at the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774 during Lord Dunmore’s War. That James Todd has his name engraved on the battlefield monument. He died in 1799 and left a will in the courthouse in Staunton, Virginia. He had four sons: George, James Jr., Nathan, & Samuel. While James (d. 1799) is my great-great-great-great grandfather, I am not certain which of his sons my direct ancestor is. I have reason to believe it is George, as I know George had a James H. Todd and an Addison Todd as sons, and I know my great grandfather had an Uncle Addison. But three of the brothers had sons named James H. Todd, so there were three James H. Todds living in Augusta County, Virginia, at the same time. All were first cousins.

Regardless of who was his father, my great-great grandfather, James H. Todd, was born in 1817 and married Mary Henderson in 1842. She was not yet 14 when they married. My grandfather knew her as a child and says she was a very tall woman, while her husband was very short. Apparently she grew on him after marriage. They had 14 children. Their first was James Preston Todd, born 1845, my great-grandfather. James H. Todd disappeared around 1868, while carrying the payroll for the railroad. One theory is that he was robbed for the payroll. Another theory is that he was killed because he had been a damnyankee, and anti-yankee sentiment was still very strong in parts of West Virginia in those days. My personal theory is that he took off with the payroll and headed west, never to be heard from again. No one really knows.

James Preston Todd joined the 2^nd West Virginia Volunteer Cavalry in 1863 when he turned 18. His father had tried to enlist, but was rejected for being too short. The rest of his siblings, except for brother Will, remained loyal to Virginia and the Confederacy. My grandfather once told me he had visited an aunt in Kansas City around 1905, and she had given him a tongue-lashing because of the treason of his father. James P. was once comparing notes with a neighbor who was a former Confederate, and they both agreed that during battles they fired high so as not to kill anyone. After the war James P. was a town sheriff or deputy. Once he caught a guy robbing a store and shot him dead. He was so sickened by that event that he turned in his badge and never again worked in law enforcement. He had a son William (who was struck by a car and killed in Rockford, Illinois, in the late 1950s) by his first wife. They also had a daughter Kate. After his wife died, he married Margaret Coulter, whose father and grandfather were both named Andrew Coulter. They had three sons: Virgil, Cecil, and Lloyd.

Cecil Amos Todd was born on May 1, 1890, and is my grandfather. Around 1900 the family moved to Illinois because it had better schooling. My grandfather graduated from high school in 1905 and went to work in the foundry. He worked in Canton, Illinois, for Parlin & Orendorff, which I believe became part of International Harvester. He also became a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, probably because they won the World Series shortly after the family moved to Illinois.

In Canton, the Todds were neighbors with the Witchers. Joseph Love Witcher had served in the 101^st Illinois Volunteer Infantry. He was shot at Holly Springs and taken prisoner. The Confederate surgeon inserted one or two coins into his skull, which caused him trouble the rest of his life. Grandpa said his father-in-law had to live in a cabin in the woods sometimes to keep the sunlight from affecting the surgical implants. I believe he was exchanged after about six weeks or so. He was later offered a position in the Invalid Corps, which he rejected. (His documents were the inspiration for the article I wrote for Civil War Times Illustrated, which was published in December, 1985. Besides being paid for the article, I also received the Joseph Ward Swain Prize for best graduate student publication for that year at the University of Illinois History Department. I finished my Ph.D. shortly after the article was published.) It appears that his unit did provost duty in Atlanta, and had some responsibility for burning down the city. Family tradition claims also that Witcher was on hand at the liberation of Andersonville. Years later he was still haunted by the memories of the soldiers in the camp, although he probably didn’t realize that their starvation was more a result of Lincoln’s policies than anything the Confederates did.

Joseph Witcher was married to Talitha Sherrill, a descendant of Adam Sherrill who led the first white settlers into the Catawba River Valley in North Carolina in 1747, and who founded Sherrill’s Ford. Extensive genealogical work has been done on the Sherrill family and has been published in at least three volumes. Talitha was the daughter of Isaac Sherrill and Keziah Bryant. Isaac had served with the 108^th Illinois Infantry and had died during the Vicksburg Campaign. He was buried “at sea,” that is, in the Mississippi River. I heard once there was a newspaper article describing an explosion aboard a river boat and that it was this explosion which killed him. I cannot confirm this. Isaac was the son of Alexander Sherrill, who also appears on Illinois census records.

Grandpa married Joe Witcher’s daughter, Iva Leola Witcher, in 1910. She had been born on May 8, just a week after he was born in 1890. They had five children: Mae, Dean (my father), Charlotte, Betty, and a son who died about age one (possibly killed in an auto accident). He later moved to Rockford, Illinois, where he and his brother Virgil were foreman & assistant foreman at Rockford Brass works. He retired in 1967 at age 77. Grandma died in fall of that year, but Grandpa lived to almost 91.

My dad was born October 30, 1916, and named Floyd Dean Todd. In the 1950s he legally dropped his first name and was known thereafter as Dean Todd. He worked as a machinist before starting college. World War II interrupted his college career, so he enrolled in flight training. He married my mom in 1942. They lived in Texas for the nearly two years of basic and advanced flight training. In 1944 he shipped out to England, where he flew the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt for the 9^th Army Air Force. He flew 75 combat missions with the 389^th Fighter Squadron of the 366^th Fighter Group, earning several Air Medals and a Presidential Unit Citation for destroying 40 German locomotives in a 36-hour period. He flew close air support missions, destroying tanks, locomotives, and whatever else they could find on the ground. Once he blew up a facility for manufacturing rocket fuel. The Germans had disguised it as a hospital with a Red Cross prominently displayed on the roof, and all the way to the mission the squadron sweated over whether they would be killing patients or trashing a legitimate target. When they dropped their bombs, the “hospital” blew sky high, much to their relief. His good friend and wingman was Captain Lee Rorex, from whom I received my middle name. After dad passed away in 2000, Captain Lee sent me some short stories he had written about their combat missions. They are really good, so I will eventually put them up on my website.

After the war dad finished at the University of Illinois and did some graduate school, before taking a job as a newspaper reporter in New Castle, Indiana. Then he moved to Sterling, Illinois, where I was born in 1949. Then it was Belvidere, Illinois, where we lived at 1215 Whitney Blvd. In 1954 he took a job in Rockford, Illinois, with the Rockford Register Republic, where he became Business and Aviation Editor until his retirement in 1981. He wrote regular columns entitled “Flight Lines” and “Strictly Business.” He went to Cape Canaveral to witness the space program, and broke his arm in a jeep accident covering the war games of the 101 Airborne Division’s Operation Bright Star Pinecone III at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was a good friend of pioneer aviator, Bert R.J. “Fish” Hassell, and was the editor/writer of Fish’s autobiography, A Viking with Wings. He was on the Greenland ice cap when Fish’s airplane, the Greater Rockford, was recovered and brought back to Rockford. Fish and the plane had begun what was supposed to be a Great Circle Route pioneering flight from Rockford, Illinois, to Stockholm, Sweden, until the plane ran out of fuel. Fish and his co-pilot Shorty Powers spent two weeks on the icecap before being rescued. As a child, I spent a lot of time at Machesney Field and Greater Rockford Airport, while my dad was gathering information for his aviation articles. I also saw a lot of EAA Fly-In events at Greater Rockford Airport, before the Experimental Aircraft Association moved its annual convention to Osh Kosh, Wisconsin.

In 1983 dad suffered a massive heart attack while swimming at the YMCA. He was pronounced “dead on arrival” at the hospital, but they shocked his heart a number of times, and it finally worked. He lived another 17 years after that. All during his life he had been something of a religious skeptic. His near-death experience effected a major change in his life. He said afterwards that he no longer feared death. Even more amazingly, he joined the Presbyterian Church where he had been married in 1942, and faithfully attended right up to his death in 2000.

Even though I always thought of my dad as a hero for being a World War II fighter-bomber pilot, I think what I respect most is what he did near the end of his life. In the 1990s my mom became seriously ill. She was a brittle diabetic, and then contracted Alzheimer’s Disease. Dad took care of her for several years, until just a week or two before her death in 1996. For any shortcomings he might have had in raising me as a child, he more than overcame them with this example. He was beginning to show the symptoms of Alzheimer’s himself, when a heart attack took him away four years after mom’s death.

Giertz Family: The Giertz family comes from the village of Schlammern in Ost Preussen, about 8 or 10 km from the Baltic. East Prussia is now largely a part of Poland, Lithuania, or even Russia, and no one seems to know for sure exactly where the family lived. One of the “dirty little family secrets” is that “Grandma Adler” was a Jew. My mother was in contact with her great uncle, a composer, before the war, but that part of the family disappeared in the Holocaust, most likely at Auschwitz. Even though my mother had all the characteristics of a Jewish Mother, the family never talked about that part of their heritage. They only emphasized the German Lutheran Peasant part.

Theodor Giertz was a woodcutter on the estate of a German graf in Ost Preussen. His son, Frederick Christian Giertz, was born in 1853. He was a pacifist, and during the Franco-Prussian War (or shortly thereafter) he stowed away on a boat to avoid being drafted into the German army. He came to America by 1873, where he eventually settled in Champaign County, Illinois. He learned English by reading newspapers. He married Caroline Martens, daughter of Jacob Charles Martens. Caroline died in the great influenza epidemic in 1918 or 1919, but they had quite a few children before this. My grandfather, Alfred Albert Henry Giertz, was born in 1897. In 1919 he married Myrtle Letitia Nave, born in 1889, the daughter of James D. Nave and Martha Jane Redding. They had three children: Helen (born December 2, 1919), Mary, and Buddy, who died when he was around 14. Grandpa was a mailman before the war. He built a house on North Prospect Street in Champaign, Illinois, but the bank repossessed it during the Great Depression. He enlisted in the Army and volunteered to go to Germany as a German translator. But he was told they could not send him because he looked too Jewish, and might not be treated as a prisoner of war if captured by the Germans. (This is an intriguing anecdote in that it implies the U.S. had a far greater knowledge of the Holocaust than it admits.) He was later commissioned in the Adjutant General’s Corps, and spent the war censoring mail. Sometime before the war he divorced my grandmother, which was a fairly unusual thing in those days. Later he married Bula, and after she died, he married Myrtle Green. He died in 1961 in Champaign, Illinois.

My mother, Helen Louise Giertz, was born on December 2, 1919, and grew up in Champaign, Illinois. She was accepted into college, but never attended. She met my dad when he was a student at the University of Illinois, and they got married in Rockford in 1942. She worked as a telephone operator when she was young, and was a professional seamstress most of her life. I was born in Sterling, Illinois, September 8, 1949. I had an older sibling who died two years before me, and my mother miscarried around 1957. So for all practical purposes, I was an only child. I wish I could have changed that. I got married in 1972 and had three sons: Nathan James Todd, born November 24, 1976, Marcus Preston Todd, born November 22, 1980, and Zachary Evan Todd, born December 9, 1983. In 2003 my wife left me to marry a man she met a year earlier on the Internet. I married Rosaminda (Amy) Aldemita Estrebilla on August 2, 2003, in General Santos City on the Philippine Island of Mindanao. She works with me in China, where I am a history professor at a university near Zhengzhou. http://picasaweb.google.com/GaryLeeTodd/OldFamilyPhotos#

http://picasaweb.google.com/GaryLeeTodd/HenanProvincialMuseum2010TangSongJinYuan#

http://picasaweb.google.com/GaryLeeTodd/HenanProvincialMuseum2010HanFollowing#

http://picasaweb.google.com/GaryLeeTodd/HenanProvincialMuseum2010WesternZhouToQin#

http://picasaweb.google.com/GaryLeeTodd/HenanProvincialMuseum2010NeolithicXiaShang#

http://picasaweb.google.com/GaryLeeTodd/BulkFreightersShipsOfTheGreatLakes#