The large family of Enoch and Delilah Bowden included six sons who fought in the Civil War. The 1850 Census indicates that Enoch was born in North Carolina, and Delilah in Tennessee, so one might assume that the Bowden brothers were Confederates.
Not so. All six fought for the Union, which actually is consistent with the fact that the Bowdens had moved to Indiana in 1836 from Tennessee, explained Skip Gates, host of “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” on PBS.
“They left their native state on account of slavery there,” which would have made sense given their Methodist faith, Gates told Stephen King on the Sept. 23 episode.
Yes, that Stephen King. Author Stephen King. Our Stephen King, as many Mainers think of him.
King was interested to learn that his Civil War ancestor was William T. Bowden, who served in the 128th Infantry, Indiana Regiment — and seemed pleased that Enoch and his wife had moved to Indiana for noble reasons.
I write about the genealogical findings now because King chose to be public about them. Though I had thought of looking into his ancestry for this column before, I didn’t because it seemed right that he get a little more privacy here in Maine than he gets on the world stage. We can be cool about him because we saw him last week at the movies or the game.
The focus of this “Finding Your Roots” was ancestry from the father’s side of the family, since King, actress Gloria Reuben and actor Courtney Vance knew almost nothing about that side of their families. King was just 2 when his father, Donald Edwin King, left home.
So it was neat to learn the story of the Civil War ancestor and the Bowden family, ancestors of King’s paternal grandmother, Helen Bowden Pollock. She was widowed at 21 when husband William E. Pollock, an engineer on the Lake Erie, died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Their son, Donald Pollock, was just 4 when his father died.
Are you confused yet? Yes, the Kings were originally Pollocks who were descended from James Pollock, who was born in Ireland but came to this country in the 1700s because of famine. But Donald was Donald King by the time he came from Peru, Indiana, and married Stephen’s mother in Maine.
“Finding Your Roots” also had Stephen King take a DNA test through Ancestry.com, provoking him to great laughter when Gates told him the results showed him to be 99 percent European, which pretty much correlates to Caucasian ancestry.
Gates didn’t say what the other 1 percent was, if it was identified, but I’m guessing it would be “Not of This World.”
The show also used DNA to rule out one possible father of Courtney Vance’s father, who was unknown. But using a database of men who had had their Y-DNA line done, what we think of as the surname line, geneticists had found a match to a participant with the surname Arrington, which gates told Vance was a common name in the Chicago area.
Gloria Reuben has no memories of her dad, who was 73 when she was born in Canada. She did know that he was white and that he possibly was Jewish, and “Finding Your Roots” was able to confirm that. Her family in Jamaica had been members of a synagogue there, according to records of what was labeled as an English and German synagogue.
Reuben was very touched to have proof of her Jewish heritage to go along with her African ancestry. Gates was equally thrilled that Jamaican records also showed the name of an ancestor of hers that actually came from Africa: Leonorah.
Athletes will be featured on the next episode of “Finding Your Roots” at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 30, on MPBN: baseball player Derek Jeter, tennis player Billie Jean King and basketball player Rebecca Lobo.
For i nformation on researching family history in Maine, see Genealogy Resources under Family Ties at bangordailynews.com/browse/family-ties. Send genealogy queries to Family Ties, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04402, or email familyti@bangordailynews.com.