The Fullerton Line

A Note Before the Names

We set out to trace your family as far back as the records honestly reach, and they reach a very long way. On one line your ancestry is documented, by modern scholarship, to the barons who forced the Magna Carta in 1215. On another it runs to a man who kept the ferry across the Connecticut River in the 1600s, and on your mother's side to a young Englishman who crossed the ocean in the early 1700s and settled Long Island. In between stand a president of Harvard, a Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, the advertising man who sold America the Southwest, a wounded Civil War major, and a Revolutionary quartermaster. This is the whole of it, branch by branch, with the sources laid out so you can trust every name.

Your Deepest Line, at a Glance

The furthest-reaching thread, through your grandmother Mariquita, oldest to youngest.

Your Parents

Baxter Tracy Fullerton (born July 24, 1915 in Cleveland; died December 25, 2002) married your mother on May 25, 1940 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. He retired as a company vice president; the family lived in Cleveland Heights and, around 1950, in Avondale Estates, Georgia.

Elizabeth Gregory “Eba” Fullerton, born Beale (born November 1, 1915 in Roanoke, Virginia; died July 18, 2003) was a 1933 graduate of Cleveland Heights High School, then studied at Flora Stone Mather College at Western Reserve. She belonged to Fairmount Presbyterian Church, loved animals and crossword puzzles all her life, and, as her obituary put it plainly, her life was her children.

Your Grandparents

Hugh Mitchell Fullerton (1885, Kansas City, to 1931) married Mariquita Clarke Simpson (1888, Topeka, to 1961) on May 8, 1912 in Chicago, and they settled in Cleveland Heights. When Mariquita's younger sister Marjorie died just eighteen days after giving birth in 1926, Hugh and Mariquita took the baby, Marjorie “Midge,” and raised her as their own. Decades later it was Midge's obituary, naming “Daddy Hugh, mother Polly, and brothers William and Baxter Fullerton,” that opened this entire search.

The New England Spine, Back to Saybrook

Your great-great-grandmother was Mariquita Elisa Anita Whittelsey (1863–1947), and the Whittelsey family is documented, generation by generation, in a published 1898 genealogy back to the first of the name in America. That immigrant was John Whittlesey (about 1623–1704), who crossed from England and kept the ferry across the Connecticut River at Saybrook, the colony where Yale College was first located. He married Ruth Dudley (1645–1714) in 1664. From him the line runs through three generations of Yale-educated ministers: Rev. Samuel Whittelsey (Yale 1705, pastor of Wallingford), Chauncey Whittelsey (Yale 1738), and Chauncey Whittelsey (Yale 1764).

A Major and a Patriot

Maj. Franklin Ward Whittelsey (1827–1893), of Middletown, Connecticut, enlisted at Detroit in 1861 as a captain in the 1st Michigan Infantry and rose to major. He was wounded in the right knee, which lamed him for life, and again at the Battle of Gaines' Mill, and served as provost marshal at Alexandria and at the Norfolk Navy Yard. He married Sarah Elizabeth DuVal of Bladensburg, Maryland, from whom the family's Duval name descends.

One generation earlier stands the ancestor who most likely earns you your Sons of the American Revolution membership. Chauncey Whittelsey (born 1746) was, in the words of the family history, “appointed by the state to be the active purchasing agent” during the Revolution, the officer who bought and moved supplies for the war. That is exactly the service that qualifies a Revolutionary patriot, and he is the strongest candidate for your patriot ancestor.

The Harvard President and the Magna Carta

The name Chauncey enters your family because Rev. Samuel Whittelsey married Sarah Chauncey in 1712. Sarah was the granddaughter of Rev. Charles Chauncy (1592–1672), the second president of Harvard College, born at Ardeley in Hertfordshire, England.

Here the line reaches as far back as an American family can go with real evidence. Charles Chauncy is a recognized Magna Carta gateway ancestor, documented in Douglas Richardson's Magna Carta Ancestry and Royal Ancestry and formally badged by the Magna Carta Project. The proven trail runs from Charles Chauncy back through the Chauncy lords of Skirpenbeck in Yorkshire, through Joan Bigod (born 1339), to the Magna Carta Surety Barons Hugh and Roger le Bigod, two of the twenty-five barons who compelled King John to seal the charter in 1215, and through them into medieval English royalty. That is roughly twenty generations and eight hundred years above you.

Your Mother's People: the Beale Line

Your mother, Elizabeth Gregory Beale, was born in Roanoke, Virginia, but her people were New Englanders who had drifted south. Her father was John Daniel Beale (1890–1950), of Williamsburg and then Cleveland Heights, buried at Arlington; her mother was Esther Frances Gregory (born 1895), whom he married in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1915. Her middle name, Gregory, is her mother's.

The Beale line then climbs north and back in time:

So your mother's Beale line is colonial Long Island Congregational stock, reaching back to an English-born ancestor of the early 1700s. You carry not one New England line but four: the Whittelsey, the Chauncy, the Beale, and the Marvin, all planted in the same Puritan soil.

The Names That Traveled Down

What We Know, and What We Are Still Chasing

How We Know This

• FamilySearch tree and record profiles for the Fullerton, Simpson, Whittelsey and Beale families, with United States Censuses, the 1912 Chicago marriage, and World War I draft cards attached.
• The obituaries of your parents on cleveland.com, and the 2014 obituary of Marjorie “Midge” Meuer.
• The World Biographical Encyclopedia entry for Rev. Baxter Ptolemy Fullerton, and published histories of the Santa Fe Railway advertising department for William Haskell Simpson.
• The Genealogy of the Whittelsey–Whittlesey Family (Charles Barney Whittelsey, 1898) for the New England line to Saybrook.
• Douglas Richardson's Magna Carta Ancestry and Royal Ancestry, and the Magna Carta Project, for the Chauncy descent to the Bigod Surety Barons.
• Your own 2016 family oral history, which confirmed the living details of your story.