° Roots Long Form °
Katherine "Katie" Knowles
Growing up, I longed to have a more colorful background than my family did, which is 100% English. I remember being particularly jealous of one of our classmates (was his last name Caine?) whose ancestors came from the Isle of Mann. My father’s family has traced their roots back to 1623, when John Knowles arrived on Cape Cod. We have a huge book, five inches thick and 18 inches long, that includes all the “begats” since then.What makes that huge tome fun is that it includes letters from the American Revolution, the Civil War, first person accounts of hiding in woodpiles to avoid scalping, plus the fun fact that it was actually possible to survive a botched scalping for a time. Our most illustrious ancestor was on my father’s mother’s side, Thomas Macy, who was a member of the nine families who originally purchased Nantucket from Native Americans. Fun fact: Thomas was fined 30 shillings by the Puritans of Massachusetts for providing shelter to Quakers during a rainstorm in 1657. History is full of fun facts like that.
More recently, my family has close connections to Mexico. When I was at Glenbard I found a Congressional Record in our attic from 1846, when Lincoln was a Senator. In it, he argues against the Mexican-American War. I actually wrote a paper about it for history class. Both my parents grew up in Mexico. They met each other at ages 3 and 4. I still have a children’s book that my father gave my mother for her birthday in 1910, when she was four. My mother’s father managed a silver mine there and my father’s father managed a huge 500 square mile cotton plantation that had whole towns and railroad lines running through it.
This is where my family’s history gets really interesting. My parents lived there during the Mexican Revolution. Legend has it that one grandfather narrowly escaped from the banditos by running into the other grandfather’s family compound. But there are more grisly memories. My father was deeply traumatized by the revolution. Routinely, the various revolutionary factions would raid the plantation for food. First Villa, then Zapata would arrive on horseback and my father’s family would flee to the hills, only to return to find their Chinese cooks had been murdered because they would not reveal where the gringos were hiding. Sometimes they were left with only watermelon to eat, because it was too bulky for the horsemen to carry off.
Imagine how my father felt when he was five, and before his nanny could stop him, he ran out into the road to find the various body parts and blood from 250 Chinese that Villa had drawn and quartered the night before, If you don’t know what that term entails, the poor victim is tied to four horses who are driven off in opposite directions. At the age of six he was sent to Texas by train alone to go to school there. The banditos blew up the tracks and shot the engineer and my father was saved by a kind Mexican woman who pretended to be his mother. My father’s parents actually divorced because my grandfather loved Mexico so much that he refused to leave. Apparently he was so reckless that he didn’t even carry a gun.
But the most amazing tale involves my mother’s uncle, Frank, who was rumored to have been held for ransom by Pancho Villa. Frank, who also managed a silver mine, was supposedly kidnapped and held for ransom for gold by Pancho Villa. The story was that the night before the deadline was up, Villa got drunk and apologized to Frank, saying that sadly, his credibility was on the line and that the next day they would have to go “hunting.” Uncle Frank knew what that meant. He would be shot in the back. At dawn the next day, miraculously on the horizon, a lone burro was spotted bearing the requisite gold buillon.
One day I was substitute teaching a high school Spanish class and I regaled them with the colorful story, qualifying it as possibly a tall tale. The next day a sophomore boy came running up to me with a big book entitled REVOLUTION in his hands. “What was your mother’s uncle’s name?,” he asked. “Well,” I answered, “His name was Frank and my mother’s maiden name was Knotts, so it would have been Frank Knotts.”. The boy beamed as he opened his book to an account of the kidnapping and ransom just as I had recounted it.
Just last month, I had told an Hispanic bank officer the story and she had looked at me in disbelief, So I went home and googled “Frank Knotts held for ransom by Pancho Villa.” Up came four pages in a huge history of Mexico, stating that not only had Frank been held for ransom for $600,000 in gold. He had been able to talk Villa into lowering that amount. But once the donkey with the bullion had arrived, Villa held him longer until $300 worth of flour and sugar was delivered for his banditos.
History is fascinating. It’s just taught the wrong way. It should be taught with original source materials, colorful stories, letters and diaries, a la Ken Burns. For the truth is truly more colorful than memorized dates. In the high school German class I taught I tried to bring World War II alive with original source materials from Jackdaws, a British company that sells packets of reproduced source materials.The packet on the Battle of Britain included enemy aircraft identity cards, handwritten RAF pilot accounts of dogfights with the Luftwaffe, and a copy of the pamphlet that a victorious Hitler planned to drop over Britain to encourage surrender. I’m surprised I wasn’t a history major.
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° Roots Long Form °
Genealogy of Thomas Marvin Chandler, with thanks for the research done by father Marv Chandler
My parents, Carmen Arguedas Chandler (b:1916, d:2013) and Marvin Chandler (b:1910, d:2007), were married on February 17, 1939 in Forest Hills, Long Island, New York, and honeymooned at the 2 year old ski resort in Sun Valley, Idaho and remained married for 68 years.
Marv grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, an urban area of Boston, where the family lived at 117 Clinton Rd. from 1916 to 1939. Marv was the middle brother of three born to his parents, Leslie Hill and Dr. Thomas Evans Chandler. Marv attended Phillips Exeter Academy for a post-graduate year after graduating from Brookline HS. He went to Dartmouth College, graduating in 1932, where he played freshman football, lacrosse, and became a competitive skier. (I have a certificate showing he was the 8th member of the National Ski Patrol). After graduation, he went to Harvard Business School while living at home, and graduated in 1934. He began his working career in Manhattan as a financial analyst. He moved to Forest Hills in Queens and as a 24 year old, he lived with his aunt's family at 116 Ascan Avenue.
Marv's aunt happened to live two doors down from the Arguedas family at 112 Ascan Ave., which included Carmen, two older sisters, a younger brother, plus an adolescent daughter who died in the US and an infant brother who died in childbirth in Bolivia. The entire family was born in Bolivia, making their home in the capitol, LaPaz. Carmen's father, Arturo, who had attended classes at the Sorbonne in Paris, worked for Simon Patino, whose tin mining business made him the wealthiest man in the world at the time of his death in 1947. Arturo and Esther wanted their children educated in the U.S. and Arturo was able to move to New York as a representative of the Patino mining interests when Carmen was 6. A courtship ensued in the late 1930s and Carmen at age 22 and Marv at age 28 were married in 1939.
In 1941, Marv's age of 31 prevented him from being drafted but he worked with Cayuga Construction Company as head office manager which built a U. S. Air force base in Cuba as part of the war effort. The following year he moved to join the Reis brothers (Reis & Chandler) as V.P., specializing in rate cases for utilities, where he served as an expert financial witness in front of many public utility commissions. He left Reis & Chandler in November 1954 at the age of 44, moving to Glen Ellyn, where he had been invited to take over the gas division by Commonwealth Edison which had been ordered to divest itself of it by the federal government. He was the first President of what became Northern Illinois Gas Company, leaving a three man firm for a company of 2,000 employees, a bit of a gamble for someone with minimal line experience managing people. He retired as CEO at the mandatory age of 70 in 1980 and they moved from 626 Forest Avenue in Glen Ellyn to Carmel, California where they enjoyed golf while continuing to winter at their condo in Tequesta, FL where he was able to fish almost every day.
His older brother, Thomas Evans Chandler Jr. (b:3/6/1908, d:2/21/1988), attended Williams College and left after junior year for a job with the Boston Herald where he worked his entire career as an editor. He served as a medic in the South Pacific campaign of WW II. Their younger brother, Edward (b:8/4/2014, d:6/6/1984), graduated from Amherst College and spent his career as an Episcopalian minister in New York City and Cincinnati, and was a chaplain in WWII. Neither brother ever married.
Marv's mother, Lesley Hill was born in Hutchinson, KS in 1884 where she remembered buffalo scratching their backs against their home and a man who stopped at their farm asking if they would be willing to trade his piece of land in Indiana for a horse as he needed a horse to participate in the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. She died at 99 in 1983, living through the Wright Brothers first flight and our astronaut's landing on the moon. She had eight siblings, six of whom survived to adulthood. A niece, Frances, died at the age of 12 along with her father in the flood in Galveston as a result of the deadly hurricane of 1900, chronicled by Erik Larson in Isaac's Storm. Her family moved to Lawrence, KS where she attended high school and conveniently, the University of Kansas, which was located there, from which she graduated in 1905. After moving to Boston, she and Dr. Chandler were engaged on Centerville Beach in Cape Cod and they were married on June 5, 1907 in Lawrence, KS, she at 23 and he at 36. One announcement stated "the bride is prominent among both town and university people and is an heiress." Marv added a note saying that her inheritance was "one sewing machine."
Dr. Chandler was born on July 21, 1871 in Brownsburg, Indiana to William Edward Chandler (b. Lancaster, PA) and Margaret Stott Chandler (b. Philadelphia). He graduated from Boston University and was Professor of Surgery at the B.U. School of Medicine. He was commissioned Major and served as a surgeon in France in the World War from April 7, 1917 to June 2, 1919. As a prominent Boston surgeon, Dr. Chandler employed a housekeeper and chauffer, and was able to purchase a vacation home in Somesville, Maine on Mt. Desert Island where the boys enjoyed the outdoors, fishing and boating for many summers as Dr. Chandler combined work in Boston and weekends in Maine each summer. He died Dec. 2, 1929 at the age of 58. Marv was still a sophomore in college and Edward had yet to begin. Leslie was only 45, and remained a widow until her death 54 years later. She eventually moved into apartments in Brookline and after the sale of the Somesville summer home (Wild Acre), in 1940 she bought some land in Osterville on Cape Cod and had a home built where she spent most of her summers along with her son Tom, and sister Gertrude. The home remains in the family and has been owned since 1988 by Thomas Marvin Chandler, inherited from Thomas Evans Chandler.
Carmen and Marv had two sons, who were in 8th grade and 7th grade respectively when moving to Glen Ellyn in November, 1954. Thomas Marvin, Glenbard class of 1959, continued his education at Dartmouth graduating in 1963, and earning an MBA at the University of Chicago in 1966. He has two children from his first marriage, Kimberly Evans Schoenknecht, who lives in New Jersey and who has three sons, Erick, Chandler and Kyle, and Dr. Thomas Marvin Chandler, a pulmonologist living in Pawley's Island S.C. with his wife and 1 1/2 year old daughter Birdie. His son from his first marriage, Thomas Marvin Chandler III (called Trip) is a freshman at the University of Tennessee. Tom and Francie have been married 42 years and live in Palos Verdes Estates in Southern California. One daughter Ashley lives in San Francisco, and a second daughter Alissa Looney lives in a Boston suburb with her husband Ryan and three children, Ty (6), Jake (4) and Lucy (1).
Tom's brother Dick, Glenbard '60, Princeton '64 and Univ. of Chicago '66 lives in Rancho Santa Fe in the San Diego area with Linda, his wife of 52 years. They have three daughters, Laurie Rush, Christy Wadia and Karen Cain. Christy and Karen each have two young sons.
Earlier Genealogy
The parents of Marvin'smother Lesley were Eben Marvin Hill, born in Highgate, VT in 1828, who died when Lesley was 20 and Sarah Jane Full, born in England in 1838 who died in MA when Lesley was 30. Eben's service in the Civil War was preserved in a book published by the Lakeside Press from a manuscript written from recollections by his wife, titled Mrs. Hill's Journal: Civil War Reminiscences, including some first-hand observations which added to the history of General Grant and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Lesley's grandparents were Ebenezer Hill (b:1789, d:1875) and Sarah Townsend (b:1800, d:1844), and their gravestones still stand at the cemetery in Highgate, VT, just south of the Canadian border. Her great grandparent's on her father's side were Uriah Hill (b:1746, d:1820) and Rowena Marvin (b:1767, d:1834). Matthew Marvin arrived in America from England in 1635 settling in Highgate, VT. One of Matthew's descendants was Ebenezer Marvin (b:1741-d:1820) who was a physician, lawyer, judge and soldier of the Revolution, fighting with Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold and the Green Mountain Boys at the capture of Fort Ticonderoga.
On the Chandler side, the earliest ancestor traced was John Chandler (b:1602, Wiltshire, England, d:1684), followed by his son George who was lost at sea in 1687 but his son William (b:1678, d:1745) emigrated to Chester, PA. He had a son Thomas who remained in Chester County from his birth in 1724 until his death in 1796. He had a son, also Thomas, born in 1773 who also lived in the area until his death in 1817 in Philadelphia. He and his wife Margaret Evans had a daughter, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler (b:1807, d:1834), who was a highly regarded American poet in her brief life as reflected in this comment from Michigan Women: "first poet in America to make the abolition of slavery her major theme; co-founder of the first women's anti-slavery society in the Old Northwest, the Logan Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1832; inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame, 1983."
Their son William Guest (b:1804, d:1873) was Marv's great-grandfather and he moved to Indianapolis. His son, Marv's grandfather, William Edward Chandler, was born in Chester in 1837 and died in Indianapolis in 1923. Marv's father, Thomas Evans Chandler was born in 1871 in Brownsburg, IN before moving to the Boston area for his medical education, thereafter Dr. Thomas Evans Chandler.
Carmen's family history can be traced to General Don Fernando Alfaro de Arguedas who was born in 1663 in the region of Tudela, Navarra, Spain. General Arguedas came to Peru as Regent of Moquegua, a post he was named to in 1688, Bolivia being part of Peru at that time. Don Casto Arguedas, a Bolivian General ascended to the Presidency of Bolivia for a short time in the 1860s. Carmen's father Arturo had a brother, Alcides (b:1879, d:1946), who was a famous Bolivian historian and author who remains well-known to this day.
