Don Sagatun-Edwards: family history

Paper by Don on his family history.  If you want to know the Edwards family history, read this.  His teacher gave him a grade of 209 out of 200!

I. Introduction.

My parents are IngerJohanne Sagatun and Leonard Perry Edwards II.  My mother is from Kragero, a small seaside town on the southern coast of Norway, and a famous summer resort. Both her parents grew up in the same farming area, not far from the town. Her mother’s maiden name was Haavet, which in the old Nordic language meant a place to worship the (pre-Christian) gods. Old church records indicate that her mother's side of the family had lived on the same land since the 12th century. The farm is on a hill at the mouth of a fjord, and a very likely place for the Vikings to pull up their ships and worship their gods. On her father's side, records only go back for a few generations. My mother was the only one in her family to come here to study and later become a US citizen. And this paper I will focus mostly on the American side of the family because of its closer relation to US history.

On my father side, all of his ancestors originally came from Ireland or England. However, on my grandfather side, the Edwards side of his family arrived in the US via Tasmania, an island south of Australia. They immigrated to California during the gold rush. Also on my grandfather side, the Haven branch of the family goes back to the Revolutionary War. On my grandmother's side, men from both branches of the family on her mother's side also fought in the Revolutionary War. One was a colonel and one was a common soldier. The family tree from the Butler side of the family can be traced back to the 1100s when the family first came to England fom France with William the Conqueror to serve as “wine butlers” to the English king. They later took the name Butler because they had been butlers for so long.

My paternal grandmother‘s father‘s family (the Dyers) came from Chester, Pennsylvania, which first had been settled by Swedes.

II. The Revolutionary War, 1775-1784

According to an old family Bible that belonged to my great great grandmother on my father side, Mary Amanda Haven, the first entry under births reads “Eli’s Haven Sen. Was born 1765. His father fell at Lexington, one of the eight men who were killed there at the shedding of the first blood of the revolution. “ After reading this, I decided to go to the Los Altos library to find a book on the American Revolution, and to see if I could find my father‘s name in the book. I found a book entitled The Pictorial History of the American Revolution by R. Furneaux.

As described by Furneaux the original settlers came to America to escape intolerance and injustice. At the end of the French and Indian war in 1763 the British government attempted to force the colonists to pay for the cost of the war, which had benefited England more than the colonies. While most colonists had been loyal to the British king, many objected to being taxed without representation. In 1773, the British government imposed taxes on tea imported into the colonies.  In December 1773  the “Boston tea party” occurred, when all the tea was thrown overboard, and the revolution had begun. The British government punished the Bostonians by closing the port and by imposing other intolerable acts. The Americans began to organize against the British. One of the first actions against them came in 1775 in Lexington, Massachusetts.

I eagerly read the section on the first shots fired in Lexington, hoping to find a Haven name among the names of the first eight men who were killed there. The book lists the names as Jonas Parker, Jonathan Harrington, Isaac Murray, Robert Monroe, Caleb Harrington, Samuel Headley, John Brown, and Asehel Potter.  Either Elias Haven’s father was named something other than Haven, or the family Bible is wrong.

However, on my paternal grandmother's side, fathers in both branches of her mother‘s family fought in the Revolutionary War. My grandmother‘s mother was Ruth Reynolds, and her maternal grandfather was John Butler Reynolds. One of the forefathers on his side was Zebulon Butler, who was a colonel under General George Washington. John Butler Reynolds was married to Emily Dane.  One of her for forefathers was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. He was in the Battle of Saratoga. He was a regular soldier, and he wrote a diary of his experiences; my grandmother‘s cousin in Pennsylvania, Monica Reynolds, still has the diary.

III. Family in Tasmania, Australia, and immigration to California.

Tasmania is an island south of Australia, which belongs to Australia. The main city in Tasmania is Hobart. It has an excellent port. According to Australia: The Quiet Continent,  Hobart was first established as a settlement around 1800, and became a fishing and whaling base around the 1820s. In 1833 whale products accounted for half the exports from New South Wales. Later in the 1850s shipping became another main business in Hobart, with ships bringing in more immigrants. Ships were also used to trade grain, sheep, wool, and other products. Convicts who were shipped to Australia for punishment were also sent to Hobart, because the narrow neck of the Tasman peninsula made escape difficult.

My great, great, great, great grandfather, George Wilson, was born in Cornwall in 1801.  We have a copy of his obituary printed in a Hobart newspaper in 1882.  It says that Mr. Wilson, his wife, and their are two little girls left London for Tasmania, on route for Sydney. He was so pleased with the climate and prospects of the colony that he decided to remain there. He shortly afterwards opened the first snuff and tobacco shop in Tasmania. Later, he was the first to engage in the shipping trade between Hobart and Port Phillips, now Melbourne.  He owned the ship called “The Flying Squirrel“ and another called “The Flying Fish “. The obituary says that George Wilson was the first to build a house on a hill and had the road to his residence made by prison labor. He was much mourned in the city after he died at the age of 81.

His daughter, Sarah Wilson, married George Edward (the first Edwards we know of in the Edwards family).  According to his will, he was born in Devonshire, England, in 1825. His occupation is listed as sea captain. Perhaps he was a captain on one of the “flying ships “, and then married the owner’s daughter. We don’t know for sure. We do know that he and Sara had 11 children, of which my great great grandfather (who later married Mary Haven) was the second oldest.

Apparently, George Edwards decided to sail to California during the gold rush in the 1860s, and then stayed on in San Francisco. Family legend has it that Sarah Edwards got tired of waiting for her husband back in Australia. She got passage for herself and her (then) nine children and surprised her husband in San Francisco. Their last two children were born in San Francisco.

IV. The Gold Rush in California.

How and why did the Edwards branch and the Haven branch get together in California? It looks like both families came there because of the Gold Rush.

The book “The Gold Rush: the Forty-Nines” by W. W. Johnson describes the beginning of the Gold Rush. It says that “The California gold rush was a grand adventure for a generation of brash, young men." The Gold Rush began in 1849, and men swarmed to the California Hills and mountains by the thousands in search of a fortune in gold.

The Haven brothers, James M. Haven and Philo Haven, somehow arrived in California from Illinois. James M. Haven was my great great great grandfather. He married four times, and his daughter, Mary Amanda Haven Edwards, was the daughter of his marriage to his first wife, Amanda EmmerJane Fisk. We have an old letter from his son, Philo, by another wife, Julia Parker, who was born at Gold Lake.

James M. Haven later practiced law in Downieville and in San Francisco. But before then he was a gold miner and also ran a sawmill at Gold Lake, which is high in the mountains close to Greyeagle and Sierraville in the Sierras. It was really James‘s brother, Philo Haven, who first homesteaded at Gold Lake. Philo Haven was one of the founding fathers of Downieville, and there is a plaque with his name on the main street there. We have a letter from James‘s daughter, Mary Amanda Haven, written when she was 13 and living in Downieville. It is dated December 24, 1865.

There is a funny story about Gold Lake, which explains how it got its name. It is written up in several of the books I found in the library on the Gold Rush. On June 20, 1850, after a long and hard winter, there was a rumor about a lake of gold with walnut-sized nuggets on it's shore that swept the gold camps. The lake was said to be high in the mountains at the bottom of a gorge so steep that the lake was visible only from the adjacent peak (named Indian Head).  The miners thought that the source of the smaller nuggets that they found in the rivers further down might come from this lake. A man named Stoddard was spreading these rumors, and he led a party of several dozen men to search for the lake.  Hundreds and thousands of men followed. Stoddard led them to a lake, but there was no gold, just lots of rocks on the beach glinted like gold in the sunshine.  The men were ready to lynch Stoddard on the spot (from Gold Dust by D. Jackson, 1841).  It is true that Gold Lake even today has a very rocky beach.

Mary’s uncle, Philo, never married, and when he died, he gave Gold Lake to his favorite niece, Mary.  A part of it still belongs to the family today, and we go there every summer for an extended family reunion. You can still see traces of the old gold lines. It is one of my favorite places in the whole world.

Another of the Haven men, Thomas Haven, Mary’s brother, also became a lawyer and a judge who later served on the California Supreme Court. There is no record of any of the family, either George Edwards or James Haven, ever having found any gold, or at least enough to take notice of.

V. The Civil War.

In her letter of 1865 Mary Amanda writes to her aunt that she is so happy that “the war is finally over“.  She was of course speaking of the Civil War. Far away, in Mississippi, another of my ancestors, William Don, whose daughter or granddaughter was later to marry Mary‘s son, Leonard Perry Edwards, had signed up for the war on the confederate side, at the age of 14. Fortunately, he signed up just as the war ended, and did not see much action. Later his family moved to California. When he died, however, he was buried as a veteran of the civil war. My grandfather, Don Edwards, was christened William Donlon Edwards after him

The Civil War started in 1861 and ended in 1865. I have seen the battlegrounds in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and couldn’t believe the number of gravemarks there. It is sad to think of all the people who died. As far as I know, William Donlon was the only one of our family who was directly involved, maybe because so many of them were already in California at this time.

VI. Missionaries in Hawaii (around 1870)

My great, great grandmother, Mary, Amanda Haven (b. 1853) must have been an interesting lady. At a young age of 20 she went to teach geometry at the Punahou school in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1873. There is a chapter about her in the book "Punahou 1841-1941" by Alexander and Dodge. Punahou is a well-known school in Hawaii, and this was a writeup of the first 100 years.

Missionaries had come from the US to Hawaii many years before Mary arrived, and Punohu at the time was a school for the missionaries' children.  A minister from San Francisco had persuaded her to take the position. The book tells about the life and culture in Hawaii during her stay at the school, and it was quite different from what it is today. The chapter ends by saying that “Miss Haven was sailing, not to return. She had decided to give Mr. Edwards of California a favorable answer to his suit. “

There was another interesting lady on my grandmother side of the family, about the same time. Her grandmother, my great, great grandmother, Emily Dane, was one of the first women to graduate from Vassar College in 1874. Not many women went to college in those days, and she was one of the first. She was from Peekskill, New York. My cousin, Lisa Edwards, who is now a Junior at Vassar, found some old letters written by Emily Dane in the college library. 

VII. The Depression Years.

The crash of 1929 had a big effect on my grandmother‘s family in Lexington, Kentucky.  Her own father, Samuel Dyer, had died of tuberculosis soon after graduating from Yale. She was just a baby when he died. Her mother remarried a businessman and horse trader from Kentucky, when Nancy (my grandmother) was six years old. In 1929 they lost almost everything, and Nancy was never able to finish college. Instead, she had to take a job.

In Norway, my mother’s family also had no money. Her father had to beg the richest man in town to lend him money to go to a teachers college, and her parents waited for almost 10 years before they felt they could get married and start a family.

According to my great aunt Patty Twist, the Edwards family did not suffer during the depression. By then the family was well established with a title company in San Jose, and she said that the real estate business just didn’t seem to be hurt by it.

VIII President Hoover‘s administration (1930s)

My grandmother remembers that one of her family members on her father side, Walter Hines Page, served as an Under Secretary of State under President Hoover. She is not sure about the exact relationship, but thinks that he was an uncle. Her grandfather on her mother side, John Butler Reynolds, had also been active in politics, but only on a local state level. John Butler Reynolds was the fourth generation of his family who lived in the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania. Over time, the family came to acquire a great deal of land there.  In the second generation coal was discovered under the family land, and from then on the family made money from the royalties paid to them by the coal mining companies.  John Butler Reynolds was a county commissioner for many years, and also unsuccessfully ran for the state Senate in Pennsylvania.

IX.  The Second World War.

John Butler Reynolds' brothers had served in the First World War, but no one else in my family was involved. In the Second World War, though, my grandfather served in the Navy in the Pacific. The war in Europe started just as Don Edwards and Nancy Dyer had gotten married  (they were both good golfers and had met in a national amateur golf tournament).  On May 4,1941, they had a baby boy, my father, Leonard Perry Edwards II, named after his grandfather. My grandfather was serving as an FBI agent at the time, first in Michigan, and then in New York. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he decided to sign up with the Navy. The whole family moved to San Francisco, where Don was assigned to naval intelligence. After a short while he was stationed on a big ship in the Pacific where he stayed for the rest of the war. My grandmother, who then had two little boys, stayed behind in San Francisco and volunteered with social activities for soldiers on leave.

My grandparents were very active in an organization called the United World Federalists. As a result of her work in this movement, my grandmother was present when the United Nations charter was signed in San Francisco in 1945.

My family in Norway had a tough time during the war. In 1940 the Germans invaded Norway, and the country was occupied for five years. My grandfather, Jens Sagatun, was a teacher at the time. The Germans wanted all the teachers to take a pledge of allegiance to the new German government. My grandfather, along with thousands of other teachers, refused. As a result, he was fired from his position, and could not work as a teacher for the remainder of the war. Luckily, he was not thrown in jail. My grandparents were very poor throughout the war, and could only get food by growing potatoes and other vegetables on a plot at the old family farm. They had to row back-and-forth for hours to get there as there was no gas or any other transportation.

X. Congress.

In 1962 my grandfather, Don Edwards, was elected to, Congress as a Democrat. He had started his political life as a Republican, and once was the president of the young Republicans in California. Later, he switched to the Democrats. In my interviews with family members, I learned that his first primary election for the Democratic nomination was very close, and there even had to be a recount of the ballots. Since that first shaky start, Don has had no trouble with his elections, and served in Congress for 33 years before retiring at the end of the year

Don Edwards has had many accomplishments in Congress. He has always been very interested in civil rights, and for many years he had been the chair of the Civil Rights Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. In that committee has had to take decisions on many issues related to civil rights, such as abortion and free speech. Men have called him the “congressman from the constitution“ because of his work in this area.

He also served as the chair of the FBI Oversight Subcommittee. This committee is supposed to see to it that the FBI does not do anything wrong. Don has been especially interested in making sure that there is no illegal wiretapping by the FBI, and no discrimination. He says he himself had his phone tapped when J. Edgar Hoover was the FBI Director. He was also been the Chair of the Veteran Affairs Subcommittee. Don sometimes jokes: “as you get older, you like seniority more and more!”

Don Edwards also served as the dean of the California delegation. He is the oldest member of the leading party. California has more delegates to Congress than any other state, and every week they have breakfast to discuss how they can best help California

Don was on the Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings on President Nixon. Even though he was opposed to Nixon, he insisted that Nixon should have all due process rights during the hearings. I have read a little about the hearings now and all the funeral notices about Nixon.

Some years ago, People Magazine had an article about Don where they called him “our man in the house “. The article was referring to his support of the Equal Rights Amendment. The Equal Rights Amendment was supposed to make men and women equal under the law. It never passed. This year, he sponsored an amendment to the crime bill which addressed the problem of racial bias and death penalty convictions.

XII. The Civil Rights Movement.

My father was very active in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Martin Luther King came to speak at his school at Wesleyan in Connecticut, and later, during law school, he decided to go down to Mississippi and work with voter registration. He was there during the summer of 1964. Don joined him there for periods of the time, and together they visited several towns in an effort to persuade blacks to vote. My dad was often followed by the police and received death threats from angry whites in the area. One time, when he and Don were asleep, the Ku Klux Klan blew up the other side of the house.

XIII. The International “Peace Movement “

After law school, my father, Leonard Perry Edwards, decided to join the Peace Corps. The new Peace Corps, started by President Kennedy, had received a lot of publicity, and there was a feeling that young people could work towards world peace by going to other countries to work and live. My father ended up going to Borneo for two years, where he lived in a remote jungle town in the Sarawak province. He says he loved it, and once he and his brother, who also was in the Peacer Corps in Malaysia, hiked in the interior of Borneo with the natives for 30 days. Many people had never seen whites before. He worked as a teacher in a secondary school while he was there.

My mother was also caught up in the international movement. As a teenager, she had worked in several international volunteer camps arranged by the United Nations, and when she was in high school, she was an American Field Student (AFS) foreign exchange student here in California in 1962/63. At the end of the year, she and the other foreign students were invited to the rose garden to meet President Kennedy (just a few months before he was killed).  Later, my mother came back to California as a graduate student at Stanford, and that’s where she met my dad.

XIV. Family and children’s issues.

My father, who is a Superior Court judge in the Juvenile Court, has been very active in children’s issues and juvenile justice for many years. He has tried very hard to make changes in the way children and juveniles are treated in the courts and in the welfare system.He is the president of the California Juvenile Court Judges Association, and he is a trustee of the National Council for Juvenile and Family Court Judges. He is always going all over the country, giving speeches and making suggestions. He has received a lot of awards, and it’s very dedicated to his work in this area.

XV. Conclusion.

It was very interesting doing this project, and learning how much history has affected my family’s lives over time. Historical events, such as wars and depressions, have an immediate effect upon people who happen to live during those periods. One of my early ancestors even gave his life to a war. All of those events, even though they happened without our control, shape our lives forever

As for the effect of my family on history, Don Edwards probably had the greatest effect on history as a long-term member of Congress. His decisions have affected what has happened in civil rights legislation and other important issues. My father, through his work as a civil rights worker in the south, and later in the area of juvenile and children’s legal issues, has also had an impact. It is interesting to know that at one point my great, great grandfather, William Don lawn at the age of 14 signed up to fight in the Civil War in Mississippi, and many years later, my father was there on the “opposite“ side. Maybe many of the other family members also had an effect on history in their way.