Welcome to the Hodgesworld Genealogy Project. Started as a way to pass some time during my daily commute on the Long Island Railroad, it has turned into an unexpectedly rewarding experience. I have met some wonderful and generous people, a few of whom have turned out to be relatives I never knew existed. I have enjoyed a serentity that comes from examining the lives of ancestors who lived in “simplier” times when life moved at what seems to be a slower and saner pace. Yet I’ve also marvelled at the strength of these people who undertook journeys and overcame tradegies that most of us today would be ill-equipped to endure.

My name is Jonathan Hodges and I was born in 1958 in New York City and raised in Queens and on Long Island. My paternal side of the family includes the Hodges and their cousins the Drews who immigrated in the middle to late 1800s from Gloucestershire in England. They were from Littledean and Cinderford, Tewkesbury, Hereford and Minsterworth. Their roots are tied to the ancient Royal Forest of Glen, a place where Druids and Romans came to mine for iron and where my great-great-grandfather and his brother did the same.

In America they settled in Massachusetts and Connecticut. My great-grandfather married into the Peck family whose ancestors were among the founders of New Haven. The Pecks grabbed their muskets when the shots rang out in Concord; they died at Mound City during the Civil War; they tilled a family farm for six generations and at least one — my great-great grandfather — went to sea and brought back a bride from Chile.

On my maternal side, the Pinskys are Jewish immigrants from present day Belarus, who lived in a village outside of Minsk. The family arrived in New York over a three year period from 1909 to 1911. It is the Pinskys I think of as my extended family growing up — the holidays with my Uncle Norman and Aunt Nicky, barbecues in Massapequa with the Mortons, playing games at Uncle Jack’s McGuinness’s amusement park. Theirs is the quintessential American immigrant story — from Joseph and Jennie Pinsky and their nine children have come a cantor, several doctors and dentists, successful businessmen and caring members of their communities. Yet they always counted themselves lucky — my grandfather, Irving, liked to refer to the Statue of Liberty as his girlfriend and I can only imagine what it must have been like on that day, January 17th, 1911 when the S.S. Birma sailed into New York Harbor and Irving (then called Srol Pinskaja) saw America for the first time.

Since the recent passing of my in-laws, Charles William and Catharine Audrey (neé Lewis) Heacock, my wife has also become interested in her genealogy and we’ve started to unwind threads that lead to Scotland and Germany, England and France. Sheila Marie (neé Heacock) Hodges was born in 1954 in Columbus, Ohio. While both sides of her family were in Ohio for at least three generations, on her maternal side she traces back to Glasgow, Scotland in the mid-1800s when Peter Muter brought the family to America. Yet her mother is also related to the Wicks and Matters (and through them, the Buffingtons and Rombergers) who lived in Pennsylvania for generations since Johann Matter arrived aboard the Edinburgh on Sept. 16, 1751 on a voyage that began in Altdorf, Alsace, Bas Rhin along the border of France and Germany.

Her father’s roots lie with Oliver Cromwell and his conflict with the Quakers. Heacocks left England for William Penn's colony in America. Three generations later Jonathan Heacock 3d and a group of siblings and cousins headed north and crossed into Canada. Two generations later, Sheila's great-great-grandfather George Heacock emigrated back from Canada to Tonawanda, New York where he raised seven children. His son, Thomas, became a master mechanic at a steel mill in Canton, Ohio, where the next three generations were born. Sheila’s father was also related on his mother’s side to the Heumacher family who came from Germany in the 1700s and settled in Pennsylvania and later Ohio.

Please wander the site and drop us a line either via e-mail or by signing the guest book. And don’t forget to stop by the Hodgesworld blog — in addition to my addled ramblings, I am placing excerpts from my great-grandfather’s journals which were begun in 1926 and were faithfully continued through to 1940. Hopefully, it’ll be interesting to juxtapose two men of approximately the same age writing about their lives almost 80 years apart. And if not, my apologies — I do this to share the facts and stories I uncover and to hopefully prompt others to tell me tales I haven’t heard. At present, my children have absolutely no interest in this and whine when I drag them to graveyards throughout the Northeast; my father is indifferent at best and with true Connecticut WASP reserve refuses to tell me any dirt about his family; and my mother has grown weary trying to identify relatives in grainy, faded Poloraids. To all of them, but especially my wife, Sheila, thank you for your patience.