Reply #15: Recently Disovered I'm Part Dutch [View All]

One family name had been assumed to mean Steven's Man (we're mostly Welsh, so having a slave name is not unusual) but I found records proving the name was a corruption of the Dutch Steenmann (stone mason). We'd always known that that branch of the family was in the US in the late 1600s, but even with the big clue of them settling in Rhinebeck, Dutchess County, we weren't sure where there were from.

My family's biggest claim to fame was raising William Tecumseh Sherman after his father died. I like to think he got to be the way he was from hanging out with us. His foster father was the Secretary of the Interior under Lincoln, and his foster-brother issued Order No. 11 blocks from where I used to live (in the town that was founded by other ancestors and later became part of Kansas City, MO).