A Family Record · Compiled from Public Documents
Seven generations, every link documented — farmers, electricians, paper-mill men, choir singers — traced through census pages, marriage licenses, and death records to the early 1800s. This record isn't a list. It's a road. Pick a line and follow it.
URBANA · CHAMPAIGN COUNTY · OHIO
Every documented person, generation by generation — the bird's-eye view. Tap any name to open their record and start walking from there. Boyd line in green; Eleyet line in brass.
The family's Virginia roots run on two documented threads. Levi Elliott, born in Virginia about 1820, came west and married in Champaign County in 1842 — and his common surname slowly hardened, in Ohio courthouse ink, into the rare one this family carries: Elliott → Elliot → Eleyet. And on the Fourth of July, 1836, Daniel Kennedy — himself Virginia-born — married Sarah Bear in Berkeley County, Virginia; within a decade they too were in Champaign County. Both of Brook Eleyet's grandfather lines lead back over the mountains.
One Virginia-born son of this migration, Levi Elliott, closed his own story not in Ohio but in Tennessee: he enlisted in the Union Army in 1863 and died at Nashville in 1864. The family that came west over the mountains sent one of its own back south, in uniform, a generation later.
A theory, retired
An earlier version of this record proposed that the Eleyets themselves came from Clarke County, Virginia, through one John Eleyett of Berryville (1806–1878). The documents said otherwise: Brook's father was Nathan Eleyet of Champaign County, son of Levi Eleyet, married here in 1842 — an Ohio family all along. The deeper irony arrived later: Levi himself WAS Virginia-born — but as an Elliott, with no documented tie to Berryville. Virginia came back through the right door. This note stays as a reminder of how the work is done: theories are held loosely, and the record gets the last word.
The documents reach back to the early 1800s. DNA reaches back further — past the edge of any record, into the deep migrations that carried these families across continents. This is what a 23andMe test reads from the genome itself, and it agrees with the paper: a family overwhelmingly of the British Isles and the German-speaking lands, met in Ohio.
Part I · Composition
The surnames predicted this almost exactly: a British-Isles majority (Boyd, Elliott, Kennedy, Cox, Smith, Wall, Downing, Adams, Warner) over a strong German-speaking minority (Bear, Derr, Singer, Smail, Santemier, Bowman). The small French and Northern Italian traces are deep-time echoes from the Rhineland and Alpine borderlands — not a French or Italian ancestor you could name, but the genome remembering older neighbors.
Part II · The Two Deepest Lines
Two lineages pass down nearly unchanged across thousands of years — the Y chromosome from father to son, the mitochondrial DNA from mother to child. They are the one part of your ancestry that surnames can never reach.
Paternal · the Boyd Y-line
R-Z159
Father → father → father, back through Levi Elliott and beyond.
A branch of R-M269, the dominant male lineage of western Europe — descended from the Yamnaya steppe herders who swept off the grasslands above the Black Sea around 5,000 years ago. It is the signature of the Atlantic-facing British Isles: over 80% of men in Ireland and Wales carry it.
❖ Shares a common ancestor with the House of Bourbon — King Louis XVI of France — some 10,000 years back.
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Maternal · the mother-line
H
Sandra ← Ruth Cox ← Lucy Bowman ← mother to mother, back and back.
The great matriline of Europe — carried by over 40% of all Europeans. Haplogroup H sheltered in Ice-Age Iberia while glaciers covered the north, then repopulated the continent when the ice withdrew. The deepest maternal thread of the whole family.
❖ Shared with Marie Antoinette and Nicolaus Copernicus.
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The documented moments, in order.
Daniel Kennedy born — the oldest documented ancestor in this record.
Daniel Kennedy marries Sarah Bear on the Fourth of July in Berkeley County, Virginia. Within a decade the family crosses the mountains to Champaign County, Ohio.
Levi Elliott born in Virginia — the man whose surname will become Eleyet.
Levi Elliott marries Eliza Jane Adams, January 5, in Champaign County. The 1850 census finds the household — spelled ELLIOTT — in Union Township with sons Reuben and Nathan.
Levi Elliott enlists in Company K, 113th Ohio Infantry, on December 28 — about forty years old, with a wife and four children at home.
Pvt. Levi Elliott dies August 12 at Nashville, Tennessee, on Union service. He is buried in Nashville National Cemetery, far from the Champaign County farm — the reason no Ohio death record of him ever existed.
Catharine Jane Kennedy born April 12 in Champaign County, daughter of the Virginia Kennedys.
Nathan Eleyet born June 6, son of Levi and Eliza Jane.
John S. Boyd born in Darby Township, Madison County, son of Pennsylvania-born Daniel Boyd and Ohio-born Mary A. Boyd.
Nathan Eleyet marries Catharine Kennedy, November 9, Champaign County. Sons follow: Edgar (1872), Richard "Dick" (1874), and Brook (1885).
John S. Boyd marries Clara J. Smith, January 20, Union County. The census that year finds the Eleyets farming in Concord Township.
Wilmore Lester Boyd born January 10 at Plain City, to John S. Boyd and Clara Smith.
The census at Springhills finds Catharine heading her household with fourteen-year-old Brook — she and Nathan have parted; he would die in Cleveland in 1915.
Alva Lewis Derr (March 23, Salem Township) and Marguerite Ferris (March 19, Marysville) born nineteen days apart — they marry in 1926, in East St. Louis, Illinois, of all places.
Brook Eleyet marries Margaret Downing on February 13 — the day before Valentine's Day — in Champaign County. Nathan dies that November.
Wilmore Boyd marries Pauline Chrystal Warner, May 26, Logan County — weeks after America enters the First World War.
Catharine "Kate Jane" Eleyet dies February 21 in Adams Township, aged 71.
Robert D. Boyd born 1923 near Mingo; David Lee Eleyet born 1935 in Logan County; Ruth Anne Cox born ~1940 in Urbana — the grandparents' generation arrives.
Robert Boyd marries Nancy Derr on Valentine's Day, February 14, Logan County — thirty-eight years almost to the day after Brook's February wedding. The marriage lasts 65 years.
David Eleyet, a young salesman of 21, marries seventeen-year-old Ruth Anne Cox, June 30, Champaign County.
Gregg Alan Boyd born August 26 in Bellefontaine — son of Robert and Nancy, and the father whose marriage to Sandra Eleyet would join the two halves of this record.
Gregg Alan Boyd dies February 15 at sixty-five — Brandon's father, and the reason this record was set down.
Ruth Anne Eleyet (2017), Robert D. Boyd (Feb 22, 2018), and David Lee Eleyet (Mar 20, 2020) pass — three of the four grandparents within three years.
This record compiled — six generations, every link documented. The search continues.
Every fact in this record traces to a public document — and where the documents disagree, the disagreement is noted rather than hidden. Citations below; the honest gaps below that.
Know something? Tell Brandon — this record will grow.