Jeff Carter (3) (1952–)

Jeff Carter, youngest son of President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter, attempts to trace each of his ancestral lines back to the ancestor who migrated from Europe to North America. As is typical of most white families in the rural South, Carter is often led back into the seventeenth century. In no case, did an ancestor come to this country after 1800. The Carter line itself goes back to Jamestown, Virginia in the 1620s. President Carter is a co-lateral descendant of Robert “King” Carter, thought show more to have been the wealthiest man in the English colonies of North America in the seventeenth century.
Genealogical research is no easy task concerning people who lived in the south in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Written records are sparse, and many have been lost. Unless a rare family Bible has survived 200+ years, one has to rely on wills, deeds, headright petitions, and military records. Startlingly high death rates, frequent re-marriage, and re-use of the same few given names generation after generation make it very difficult to identify with certainty to just which individual a given record refers. Jeff Carter has done a remarkable job of disproving the conjectures of some earlier genealogists about the early Carter line and positing more likely connections. He gives us not just names and dates but interesting stories about direct ancestors and their siblings. In the appendices, Carter explains in a clear manner how to properly classify cousins and how “pedigree collapse” occurs in subsequent generations when related individuals marry each other.
All of President Carter’s European ancestors came from the British Isles. Many were English, but many others were “Scotch-Irish” (Ulster Presbyterians). Rosalynn Carter, too, has many English and Scotch-Irish in her family tree, but she also has a considerable number of Palatines—German-speakers from the upper Rhine who immigrated to the American colonies in the eighteenth century. Many of Mrs. Carter’s Palatine ancestors came at mid-century directly to the “Dutch Fork” settlement in South Carolina. There, these Lutherans from Wuerttemberg and neighboring German states remained largely endogamous for five generations—something not untypical of Germans in rural America. Jeff Carter notes the possibility of an eighteenth century Native American ancestor, and there is another that he fails to mention. Some accounts have Johann Sebastian Hamiter (from whom the reviewer’s wife also descends) marrying a woman at least partly of Native American blood.
For all its interest and strengths, this book is problematic. Mr. Carter often uses dates to aid in establishing genealogical relationships, but he and the presumed editor seem largely innocent of a knowledge of historical dates. Carter notes (p. 150) a German ancestor who arrived in Charlestown, South Carolina in 1750 and filed a land bounty claim in 1751. This man is characterized by Carter, apparently on the basis of family legend, as “a former Hessian soldier who had fought against Napoleon.” Not likely! Napoleon was not born until 1769 and did not head the French state until 1799. Nor could Carter’s ancestor have been “sent by the Crown to help subdue the revolting colonists” since the first of British Crown’s Hessian mercenaries came to America in 1776.
Concerning the Palatine immigration as a whole, few modern sources support Carter in attributing the movement to Louis XIV’s military depredations on the upper Rhine near the turn of the eighteenth century. The first large group of Palatines came to London in 1709 in response to false rumors about free land and free transportation to America. And by the time most of Carter’s ancestors came to South Carolina, Louis XIV of France had been dead for more than 3 decades.
Carter’s casual attitude toward historical dates also appears in his account of a will being lost in a courthouse fire in 1830 (p.37). “The fire was started by a citizen enraged by the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner,” we are told. But the rebellion did not begin until August 24, 1831. Again, if Carter ancestor Edward Isaac came to Maryland in 1670, he could not have done so in order to accompany “Scottish political prisoners exiled by Cromwell” (p. 147). By 1670, Cromwell had been dead for a dozen years and Charles II had been enjoying his restoration to the British throne for a decade.
The text of this book also contains many dates that are probably simply misprints instead of historical misunderstandings, but are nonetheless disconcerting to the attentive reader: line 30, p. 131 (1753, not 1853); fourth line from the bottom, p. 139 (“Mother Allie” could not have been married before she was born); last line, p. 160 (George B. Smith, according to the endnote, was killed in 1870, not 1790).
The book’s index is also a concern. Although Gottlieb Mittelberger’s name is reversed in the index, the primary concern is that many names and places in the text are unindexed. This is unfortunate and unusual in a good genealogical work.
So, ya give us a real interestin’ book here, Cousin Jeff, but ya gotta be more kerfull ‘bout them dates! show less

My head is spinning. I have never read a genealogy book before and was astounded by the amount of information provided by Jeff Carter. He must have been researching for years and it is evident when he traces his ancestry back to 16th century England and Ireland.
That said, it was a difficult book to read because it was information dense. Because I am not related at all it was hard to keep all the names straight without a family tree diagram. The stories about fighting in the Revolutionary show more and Civil Wars and other family issues were very interesting but not nearly enough to keep me glued to the book.
If you are doing research on any of these families, this book would be extremely helpful because it includes footnotes, bibliography and index. If you just want a good read, this is probably not the book for you. show less

To me the greatest value in this book was the social history tied to each of the many ancestors reported, spread across several eastern seaboard states. A couple of the people mentioned are folks I recognized as being the same people as appear in my own family's history - something to add to my own research, in Maryland and North Carolina. Much of the social history from Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia was new to me, and I learned a lot and found it extremely interesting.

I have worked show more on a number of family history books, and thoroughly appreciated the great effort (and love) that went into this great work. Some researchers have nit-picked details that may or may not be correct. Those are the least of my concern. This extremely detailed, very complex report is a valuable contribution to the family and all of the people with whom the extended families reported have come in contact. The documentation is exceptional in quantity and sets a high standard for other families that may want to create such a book of their own. If you haven't actually done a complete book, such as this one, you cannot have sufficient understanding to criticize the work, in my opinion.

Thanks to Jeff, and those many folks who assisted him, and who went before him in the research, for sharing this bit of social history for the general public. show less

Jeff Carter, son of President Jimmy Carter, has done a wonderful job of documenting his numerous ancestors but I wonder who he thought his audience would be. The endless listing of documents would only be of interest to a genealogist doing serious research but the same genealogist would be put off by the lack of any pedigree charts or numbering system to sort out how these people are related to each other. There are some wonderful pictures and some great stories, especially for those who show more lived in the most recent 150 years. A casual reader would have difficulty in trying to find these stories amid the rather dry listing of each person's vital statistics and records about them. show less