The origin of the Semer family in America had remained a mystery for many generations. I always thought that my grandmother, Marietta Semer, had been a lifelong resident of Bettsville, Ohio. I knew she came from a large family, and that her father died tragically at a young age, leaving a widow and ten young children. As a boy, I remember a framed portrait of a young man in military attire proudly hanging in the home of my grandparents. I was told it was my grandmother’s father, William Lampson Semer. He had served in the United States Army during the first part of the twentieth century. I also remembered reading a clipping about his tragic death after a fire at the Kennedy Refractories plant in Bettsville in 1920.
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| Framed portrait of William Lampson Semer, my great grandfather |
My grandmother passed away in 1993, just one year after losing her husband of almost 65 years, Vernon Bramel. It was almost two decades later when I became curious about the Semer story, the family’s country of origin and how they had made their way to Ohio. Sadly, there were few clues to be found. Marietta’s siblings, Hazel Semer Hartsel of Bettsville, and others who I don’t recall meeting but remember being referred to only by nicknames like Sonny, Gassy, Hob, Buck, Ruck and Chick, also were all gone. I hoped my father and his four living siblings might be able to provide me with some insight.
But first, I turned to electronic records for clues, the United States Census and others, and quickly found many surprises. I learned that my grandmother was not born in Ohio after all, but New York. Additionally, several of her siblings were born in New York, and the others in either Florida or Ohio. As it turns out, she was born into a military family in 1910. Her birthplace was the military barracks in the Bronx, New York, at what was at that time known as Fort Schuyler.
The Semer family moved there in 1908 from Key West, Florida, where William Lampson Semer, an enlisted man from Van Wert County, Ohio, had been assigned to Coast Artillery since 1902. Shortly after his enlistment and deployment to Key West, William met Nettie Blanche Russell. She was a descendant of one of the original Key West families who arrived there from the Bahamas in the 1830’s, the daughter of John Thomas Russell, Jr. and the granddaughter of John Thomas Russell, Sr.
William and Nettie married on Christmas Eve in 1902, and before the Army assigned William to New York in 1908, they had become parents to three children, Florence, Hazel, and Charles (Chick). After their arrival at Fort Schuyler, Nettie gave birth to Joseph (Buck) in 1908, Marietta in 1910, Nettie in 1911, and William, Jr. (Sonny) in 1912. Aside from the 1910 Federal Census, there is no record of the first daughter, Florence, nor is there any family recollection of her; it is presumed that she died at a young age. Perhaps she was the namesake for Chick’s daughter, Florene Semer, who was born in 1932.
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| W.L. Semer family, Ft. Totten, NY ca.1914 |
The Semers then returned to Florida after William’s reenlistment, this time to Pensacola. James (Hob) was born there in 1915. William retired from military service in 1917 and moved his rather large family to Ohio, settling near the town of Bettsville. Three more sons were born in Bettsville, Burl (Gassy) in 1917, Ray in 1918, and Russell (Ruck) in 1920.
My father, Vernon Bramel, Jr., was born in 1935, the fifth son of Vernon and Marietta. He shared with me some of his memories of Grandma Semer, the former Nettie Blanche Russell of Key West, Florida. In her later years, Nettie suffered from migraine headaches and other health issues. Dad remembers spending time with her at her home in Bettsville during his school years, after her sons were grown and moved away. He suggested that I contact his oldest brother, Richard Bramel, who was for all practical purposes raised by Grandma Semer and was thus very close to his Semer uncles. Richard had lived with the Semers until he enlisted in the Army in 1946 after his 18th birthday, and then again after he returned from his tour of duty in 1948 to complete high school.
In the meantime, my dad’s younger sister, Sally Darlene Bramel Kear of Lantana, Florida, hinted to me that someone from her Uncle Chick’s side of the family, she thought perhaps one of his sons, had done some extensive research on the family’s roots back to Key West. I was anxious to get my hands on that document.
In November of 2011, I was fortunate enough to spend a week’s vacation at a resort in Orlando with my dad, as well as his brother Richard and Richard’s wife, Madonna. Richard was always known to me as “Uncle Tuffy.” My family was always close to Tuffy and Madonna’s family, as we were neighbors in Bettsville for many years during my childhood, so it was great to catch up with them. They had retired to the Fort Myers, Florida area several years ago, but they have remained in close contact with my parents over the years. Tuffy and Madonna left Bettsville in the 1970’s, relocating first to Upper Sandusky, and then to Bryan, Ohio, before retiring to Florida. Our family moved to Kentucky in 1979, a job transfer for my dad.
Tuffy and Madonna provided me with a cache of valuable information and insight, and they were able to fill in much of the Semer family tree. The last surviving offspring of William and Nettie, Russell “Ruck” Semer, had died in 2005. Tuffy remembered that Grandma Semer was an excellent cook, and that many of the skills she taught him came in useful when he later served in the Army as a cook in Korea during the late 1940’s.
He recalled her talking about living in Key West. There was no highway or railroad connecting the keys in those days, and she remembered taking a ferry boat back and forth between the islands. She also passed along her understanding that her Russell ancestors had once been slave owners, possibly providing a clue as to which Russell clan she descended from, and there were dozens of them in Key West, then and now.
I delved into more electronic records, Federal and Florida State Census documents in particular, to learn more about the Russells. Along the way, I corresponded and collaborated with a few individuals who had become experts in Key West genealogy by dedicating untold hours researching the subject. One of those was the self-proclaimed “Conch Genie,” Ms. Margaret McClintock of Mississippi, a descendant of the Albury family who grew up in Key West. Through these efforts, I learned that Nettie’s father was John Thomas Russell, Jr., and that her grandfather was John Thomas Russell, Sr. The senior Russell and his family relocated to Key West from the Bahamas in the 1830’s. They were one of the original Bahamian Key West families, “Conchs,” as they came to be known, named after the mollusk that became a staple of their diet.
A year after my visit with Uncle Tuffy, I was visiting with my parents at their home in Danville, Kentucky. While researching and scanning some old family photographs and documents for my research, my father presented me with a most interesting find. It was a seven-page document entitled, A Brief Story about the Semer Family and its Ancestors. The story was written in 1994 by a Wayne Gales, who was the husband of Laura Jo Fuller Gales. Laura is the daughter of Florene Semer Fuller and the granddaughter of Charles “Chick” Semer. It seems the author was a genealogy enthusiast who struck an interest in his wife’s Russell ancestry, which ultimately evolved into a passion for all things “Key West.” THIS was the document Aunt Sally had mentioned!
Before the end of my visit with my parents, I convinced my dad to participate in a DNA project. I assured my dad that there was nothing to worry about, unless of course he had been involved in any unsolved crimes, and he assured me that he did not know of any. He reluctantly filled the vile with saliva, and off it went to the laboratory for analysis. I returned to my home in Baltimore with Mr. Gales’ story and many more questions.
After studying the document for about a month, I found that it had very little to say about William Lampson Semer’s ancestry, other than he came from a place called Semerville, Ohio. I had also seen “Semerville” listed on some of William’s military records that I had stumbled upon, and just for the record, there is no town in Ohio named Semerville. I suspected it was an informal term perhaps referring to a family farm or possibly even a cluster of farms.
I also discovered some discrepancies between Gales’ research and my own findings regarding which Bahamian Russell family John Russell descended from. The document referred to an attached Family Tree, and invited any corrections or additional information, but my dad’s copy had no attachment. I felt the need to reach out to Mr. Gales. But it had been nearly two decades since he had penned this story, and I had doubts as to whether or not I would find him. But in short order, I was able to find an email address for Wayne Gales and reached out to him.
Wayne responded that he had passed copies of the story to attendees of the annual Semer Family Reunion in Bettsville back in 1994. Wayne and Laura divorced many years ago, both having since remarried, but they had a daughter and a son together. He said that after spending time researching in Key West, he decided to move there, and it was his home for seven years. He lived on a houseboat for a time and worked as a marketing director for the Ocean Key House, while boating, fishing, diving, and playing bass guitar in some local bands. Wayne explained that his son Matt “really feels his Conch roots.” Wayne recently published two fictional books loosely based on some of his experiences in Key West, with his son and many old friends serving as the inspiration behind some of the primary characters.
Meanwhile, I received a report about my father’s DNA analysis. It stated that his genealogical makeup is about 90% British Isles. I had already made an assumption that the Russells originated in England. Some of the Russells who settled in the Bahamas were part of a mass migration of British Loyalists, “Tories” as they were known, who fled the United States, mainly coastal areas of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. Most of the Tories went to eastern Canada or back to England. But about 9,000 of them went to the British West Indies, mainly the Bahamas, some receiving land grants there as a show of appreciation from the British Crown. Many took slaves with them, but most of the slaves were quickly freed, and slavery in the Bahamas was abolished altogether in 1834. This explains why many family surnames are shared by both black and white Bahamian descendants, including the Russell name.
A number of “matches” to my dad’s DNA connected me to a few distant cousins, descendants of Nettie’s sisters. We’ve exchanged some old Russell photographs and theories along the way, and confirmed what modern science had already told us. But none of these initial matches confirmed anything about the Semer side. The Semers did not simply show up in Ohio. Unless they were part of a native tribe, Ottawa, Wyandot, or maybe Seneca, they had to have come from somewhere else. But where?
There were a couple clues that led to Pennsylvania. William Lampson Semer reported to the census taker in 1910 that his father had been born in Pennsylvania. Now, I’ve found many, many mistakes on census records, so I was not too shocked when my search for Semers in Pennsylvania came up empty. But I knew from other research projects that a great number of early Ohio settlers did come from southeast Pennsylvania. Most of these pioneers were of German heritage, the “Pennsylvania Dutch,” more commonly. The Pennsylvania Dutch were a proud and industrious people, stubborn in their ways, slow to adapt to mainstream culture and reluctantly converting to the use of the English language, but not until late in the nineteenth century, and only then in their own unique dialect. After World War II, use of Pennsylvania German dialect faded except among the more insular and traditionbound Anabaptists, such as the Old Order Mennonites and Old Order Amish. However, a number of German cultural practices continue to this day, and German Americans remain the largest ancestry group in Pennsylvania.
If the Semers did indeed migrate to Ohio mid-century from Pennsylvania, then there is a good chance they still spoke German or Pennsylvania Dutch. This increases the likelihood that the Semer surname evolved from something else and was likely “created” by a hurried tax collector or census taker. After expanding my search to include Pennsylvania Church and Town Records, I found the clue that I had been hoping to find. Baptism records, handwritten in German, from Allegheny Union Church in Alleghenyville, Berks County, Pennsylvania have memorialized the baptism of three boys, William born in 1843, Henry born in 1845, and John born in 1847. Their parents are listed as John Ziemer and his wife Cazia. This family also appears on the 1850 Federal Census for Cumru Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania, but it also includes newborn daughter Catherine Ziemer and mother-in-law Catherine Matz, age 69. John H. Ziemer, age 29, listed his occupation as “Innkeeper,” and his wife, Keziah, was age 31. 1850 was the first year the census included the names of all persons in each household; until then, only the head of household’s name was listed. This was indeed a lucky break!
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| Baptism record for William, Henry, and John Ziemer (Semer) |
With this new information, I cross-referenced some records of interest I had held onto, including the 1860 Federal Census for Van Wert County, Ohio. Living there at that time, in Jackson Township, was a Catharine Seymore family. Her children were William, age 16, Henry, age 15, John, age 13, and Catharine, age 11. These documents provided what I needed to make a definitive link between the Ziemer family of 1850 Berks County, Pennsylvania and the Semer/Seymore family of 1860 Van Wert County, Ohio. The 1860 Census also enumerates six more children born to John H. and Keziah Ziemer, including twin girls and a one year old. But John H. Semer is not listed in 1860, and I assumed he died around that time at about the age of 40 from causes unknown. On the 1870 Census, the name is recorded as Semore, and in 1880, it is Seamer. Regardless, I now knew where the Semer family came from, and with this discovery, I now had a steady flow of new information to explore.
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