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Family History/living descendants

How Big is the Simmon Family in 2022?

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I recently began a project of trying to identify as many living descendants of Peter and Eva Catherine Simmon as possible. I opened a spreadsheet and started typing in the names I know of. I entered info for my immediate family, then my cousins, aunts and uncles, my cousins’ children, etc. Then I entered the members of the family Facebook group (just focusing on direct descendants, not spouses), plus anyone on the annual newsletter mailing list (if different from the Facebook group), and anyone I had encountered on Ancestry.com or via email or direct message. That yielded about 50 names. Next, I started making specific inquiries to family members I’m connected with to help me fill out their portions of the family and included as many names as I could find. I’m still in that process, but I’m up to a little over 70 names now (in April 2022). 

It got me thinking. Just how many living descendants are there in the world today? How large of a task had I undertaken?

The more I learn, the more convinced I am that the actual number of living descendants of Peter and Catherine Simmon is huge. I’m just over 70 names right now and it feels like I am just barely scratching the surface.

There are seven lines of descendants — one for each of Peter and Catherine’s children who had children of their own: Phillip, Jacob Henry, Caroline Louisa, Charles, Catherine Phillipian, Henry Jacob, and Elizabeth. Just looking at the line I have the most info about, Henry Jacob Simmon’s (the line I am descended from), there are easily hundreds of people I haven’t found yet.

And of the 70 some-odd living direct descendants I currently know about, only 24 of them are not descended from Henry Jacob.

Henry Jacob had seven children of his own. Of these, I’m most familiar with the Arthur Eaton branch (because it’s my branch), but even there, I don’t know about all the living descendants — I probably don’t even know half of them! Arthur Eaton had five children, who all had children of their own. I know about all nineteen living descendants from his son Orville (my grandfather) and I am getting a more complete picture of the living descendants from my great aunt Mary Jane, but there are three other great aunts whose children and grandchildren and great grandchildren are not on my list at all!

And that’s just my grandfather’s generation. Go back another generation and the problem is compounded many times over. I am aware of some of the descendants of three of Henry Jacob’s sons, (my great grandfather and two of his brothers). Their sister Isabel never married or had children, but there are three other children who did. George William Simmon (1863–1934) had six children, Albert Joseph Simmon (1866–1943) had two, and Catherine Eva (Simmon) Couch (1870–1936) had two.

Bear with me here. Henry Jacob Simmon had seven children. The number of children that each of those siblings had was as follows: 4, 6, 2, 0, 2, 7, and 5. That’s 26 grandchildren for Henry Jacob and Mary Allemang Simmon. Divide 26 grandchildren by the seven siblings and you get an average number of 3.71 children per sibling (which is close to the average number of children per family in the US in 1900, which was 3.56). So we should be able to infer a number of living descendants today by extrapolating from that average. 

The tricky bit is, the average number of children per American family has dropped in the decades since 1900. The rate looks like this (Source):

1900 – 3.56
1920 – 3.17
1940 – 2.22
1960 – 3.62 (baby boom)
1980 – 1.84
2000 – 2.05
2018 – 1.73 (this is when the report was published but I checked and numbers since 2018 appear to be very similar)

There are seven data points, so again, if we add those rates and divide by seven, we can get the average number of children per US family since 1900, which turns out to be about 2.6. So…

  • Henry Jacob and Mary Allemang Simmon had seven children.
  • Those seven siblings had 26 grandchildren. This is my grandfather’s generation and most of that generation has passed, so we will not count them in our estimate of living descendants.
  • 26 grandchildren x 2.6 = 67.6 great grandchildren (my parents’ generation). 
  • 67.6 great grandchildren x 2.6 = 175.76 gr-gr grandchildren. (my generation)
  • 175.76 gr-gr grandchildren x 2.6 = 456.976 (let’s just say 457) gr-gr-gr grandchildren (mostly millennials and zoomers today, some of whom are entering family-raising age)

If we add those last three results together, we get an estimate of about 700 living descendants just from Henry Jacob Simmon’s line in 2022. I have identified less than one tenth of that number!

The number is probably actually a bit lower than 700 because the bulk of people in that estimate were born in the last 25-30 years, when the average number of children per family was a bit lower than 2.6 (though not much lower, in 2000 it was 2.5).

Henry Jacob is just one of seven lines descended from Peter and Catherine Simmon, though he had the most grandchildren of all the siblings. I went ahead and applied this exact same method to the other six lines of Simmon descendants, added them all together, and came up with 2,370 estimated living descendants of Peter and Catherine Simmon, alive today (in 2022).

That’s just counting generations 5 – 7 (Peter and Catherine were generation-1, their nine children were generation-2, and so on). I believe there is only one generation-4 descendant (a great grandchild or Peter and Catherine) still living (I could be wrong but I have good reasons to think so). I do know of a small handful of generation-8 kids and there are almost certainly more of them out there, especially in the Caroline Louisa Deifenbach and Phillip Simmon lines, as they started their families earlier than the other siblings. But because generation-8 is in the process of being born, I can’t make a reliable estimate of who is currently living based on this method. 

So, I have identified 70 some-odd living descendants of Peter and Catherine and I only have 2,300 more to go!

Family History/Family member profile

Henry Jacob Simmon (1831–1910)

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This is a slightly edited version of a post that was published on the Descendants of Henry Peter and Eva Catherine Simmon Facebook group  on July 24, 2020.

Henry Jacob Simmon in 1897

Henry Jacob Simmon was born in December of 1831. He was the seventh child of Peter and Catherine’s, and the last one to be born in Europe before the family journeyed across the Atlantic. Young Henry was just 16 months old when the family departed Meisenheim in April of 1833 (the oldest of the seven children, Phillip, was 14).

After the Simmons arrived in the U.S. (their journey is quite a story, for another time), they settled in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, and lived there for about nine years.

In 1841, the eldest daughter, Louisa Simmon, married a German immigrant from Tuscarawas County, Ohio, and a year or so later the whole family (except for the eldest son, Phillip, who remained in Bedford and got married) joined Louisa there. By the late 1840s, Phillip Simmon and his young family had relocated from Bedford, PA, to Rock Island County, Illinois. Peter and Catherine then moved their family from Ohio to join Phillip in western Illinois (Louisa remained in Ohio with her family). Henry Jacob was 19 years old when the family landed in Rock Island at the end of the 1850 (HJ’s obituary says he was 17 when he arrived in Rock Island, which could be incorrect, or it could be that he preceded the family in order to join his older brother, who operated a draying business in the county).

Henry Jacob became a farmer, like his father. The family began working a piece of land in Rural Township along Mill Creek. In 1852 the land was officially purchased and the original Simmon farm was established.

Henry Jacob Simmon married Mary Allemang on February 23, 1860 in Rock Island. HJ was 28 and Mary was 18 years old. Henry Jacob and Mary Simmon had seven children together. They were:

  • Henry Peter Simmon (1862-1950)
  • George William Simmon (1863-1934)
  • Albert Joseph Simmon (1866-1943)
  • Catherine (Simmon) Couch (1870-1936)
  • Isabell Simmon (1868-1946)
  • Perry Louis Simmon (1874-1959)
  • Arthur Eaton Simmon (1880-1961)

Family of Henry Jacob and Mary Allemang Simmon, ca. 1905


In 1871, before Perry or Arthur were born, Henry Jacob purchased a 160-acre parcel of land just south of his father’s farm, on Mill Creek in Rural Township.

Later in life, Henry Jacob would talk his youngest son, Arthur, into taking over the farm (Arthur had wanted to be a mortician). Henry Jacob continued to own the farm until shortly before his death in 1910, but for a few years around the turn of the century, he resided in the city of Rock Island and was the town’s tax collector for a time. In the last few years of his life, Henry and Mary had a house in Bowling Township.

Henry Jacob Simmon died at home on May 7, 1910. He is buried with his wife, Mary, and their daughter, Isabel, at Chippiannock Cemetery in Rock Island.

Arthur Eaton Simmon officially purchased the Simmon farm from his father in February of 1910 (just three months before HJ departed this world) for the sum of $5,600. He would go on to raise his own family there (his wife, Mary Jane, and their four girls and one boy). The land would finally leave the Simmons’ hands for good in 1969, after having been in the family for 98 years.

I still have a small collection of Indian arrowheads that were found on the farm by my grandfather, Orville Simmon.

Family History/Family member profile

Gustave Carl “Charles” Simmon (1826–1908)

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Rachel Ann (Wilson) & Gustave Carl “Charles” Simmon

Charles Simmon was born in Meisenheim (in what is now Germany) on July 26, 1826. His father Peter was 33 and his mother was 31 years old. Charles was the fifth of Peter and Catherine’s nine children. He was seven years old when the family emigrated to the United States.

At the age of 29 Charles married 18-year-old Rachel Ann Wilson on December 20, 1855 in Rock Island. Rachel was the daughter of Mr. Lewis Wilson, who owned the farm adjacent to the Simmon Farm in Rural Township.

Less than a year after Charles and Rachel were married, Rachel’s father Lewis married Charles’ younger sister, Catherine Phillipian Simmon. This made Catherine both Charles’ little sister and his mother-in-law.

Charles and Rachel Simmon had eight children together. They were married for just over 52 years and died just four days apart in early 1908.

 I don’t know who the baby is in the photo with them, though I presume it’s a grandchild of theirs.

Blog/Family History

A Grave Discovery

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In September of 2021, I spent 24 hours in Rock Island County, Illinois. I had never been there before as my immediate family no longer lived in the area after I was born. I missed my grandmother’s funeral, which was in Rock Island in 1996, and that was the only occasion I ever had for going there. I never knew about the annual Simmon reunions that were still going on until I was at least 18 — my family wasn’t involved in those. But I was in Illinois last September visiting some family and it was the first opportunity I had to visit the Simmon family homeland since my research into family history began in the spring of 2020. 

While in the county, I visited the Rock Island County Historical Society (it was Labor Day and they were closed but a volunteer genealogist by the name of Orin Rockhold graciously met me and guided me through the archives for a few hours). I met and had meals with a couple of distant cousins, and I toured three cemeteries that contain Simmon family graves. This little video essay is focused on one of those grave yards in particular — Beulah Rural Township Cemetery.

Blog/Family History/Family member profile

Nothing Runs Like a Deere

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This is a slightly modified version of a post from the Descendants of Henry Peter and Eva Catherine Simmon Facebook group, posted on November 11, 2020.

This week at my job, I’m editing a short recruitment video for a John Deere sales/parts/service outfit headquartered in northern Maine. You’re no doubt familiar with the iconic green and yellow farm equipment made by Deere & Co., which is headquartered in Moline, IL. But did you know a Simmon was a prominent early member of the Deere team?

Founded by blacksmith and inventor, John Deere (who was born in Rutland, Vermont), in the early/mid 19th century, Deere & Co. was a fast-growing presence in Moline by the time Peter Cana Simmon was born in February of 1855. (Wikipedia has the details of the early days of the company if you’re curious, but it was 1853 when John Deere bought out his early partners and struck out on his own in Moline with his son, Charles Deere.)

P. C. Simmon was the son of Phillip Simmon (the eldest of Peter and Eva Catherine’s nine children) and Phillip’s second wife, Cornelia Jane (Hitchcock) Simmon.

P. C. graduated from the Davenport (Iowa) Business College in 1873, and in 1876, at the age of 21, was hired by Deere & Co. as an invoicer and assistant bookkeeper. About a year later P. C. was promoted to be the cashier for the company and he held that job for almost 50 years.

P. C. was the company treasurer for a period (1891-1894) and was succeeded in that position by Mr. William Butterworth, who went on the be the president of Deere & Co. for many years.

There is evidence (in newspaper announcements and articles) that P. C. knew Charles Deere personally and he may have known John Deere himself, though Deere had left day-to-day business oversight to Charles in the mid 1850s.

In addition to being a long time member of the Deere team, P. C. was heavily involved in Boy Scouts leadership, Y.M.C.A. mentorship, and a local “militia” in which he held some leadership roles. He was also an “active official” at the First Methodist Church.

P. C. Simmon married Anna Dixon Richards (1861-1913) on September 10, 1883 and they had two daughters: Gertrude R. Simmon (1888-1973), and Anna May (Simmon) Eichstadt (1890-1964).

Peter Cana Simmon died suddenly from complications from a cold on May 1, 1928 at the age of 73.

Nothing runs like a Deere.

Blog/Family History

Nine Aged Survivors

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In July of 1896, all nine Simmon siblings sat together for a family portrait at a photo studio and gallery in Rock Island. The occasion was noteworthy enough to warrant an item in the newspaper. 

Peter and Catherine Simmon had nine children, seven of whom were born in Germany and made the transatlantic journey with their parents in 1833. The other two were born after the family had settled in the U.S. 

Of these nine Simmon children, seven had children of their own (Christian and Maria never married or had children).

The photo and accompanying news article are interesting for a few reasons:

  • It remains the only photo I have ever seen of all nine children together.
  • The article incorrectly states that all nine siblings lived in Rock Island County, but Louise (Simmon) Diefenbach remained in Ohio with her family when the rest of the Simmons relocated to western Illinois, and must have been visiting when the photo was taken.
  • Maria, the youngest sibling (aged 60 in the photo), would pass away just under a year after this photo was taken. Despite being the youngest child, she was the first to die.
  • The article inexplicably states that Henry Peter Simmon was a native of Hamburg, but he was almost certainly born in Meisenheim, some 600 km from Hamburg. I say “almost certainly” because I have not seen an original birth or baptism record for him, but many documents refer to his birthplace as being Meisenheim. 
  • The article is guilty of some bad math. It says Peter and Catherine had 11 children and that “three passed away in infancy.” But there are nine in the photo, so one of those numbers must be wrong. I have one other document that claims three children were lost in infancy, so there must have been 12 children in total, not 11. 

The Argus article says the photo was taken at “Hakelier’s gallery.” The Rock Island Public Library website says: “From 1888 until 1903 a Rock Island photographer named Oscar Hakelier worked from his studio in downtown Rock Island. He called it the “Vienna Photographic Studio,” and it was located at 1722 Second Avenue. As he worked he took many photographs of Rock Island, the Arsenal Island, riverboats on the Mississippi River, and other activities that show how life was lived in the 1890s.”

 

Blog/Family History/Family member profile/Johnson

Isabel Ida Simmon (1868–1946)

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The following essay was submitted by Mrs. Nellie (Simmon) Johnson to the Rock Island County Historical Society in 1976 along with genealogical information and documents supporting an application for descendants of Henry Peter Simmon (1793–1875) and Eva Catherine Simmon (1795–1874) to be included in the “Pre 1877 Rock Island County Pioneer Family Program Index,” a program that was part of the Rock Island County Bicentennial Commission.

Ironically, despite this detailed and lovingly written essay, Aunt Belle’s name was not included in the Pioneer Family Index when it was published, though Nellie’s was, as were Belle’s parents’ and brothers’ names.

Isabel Ida Simmon 1868–1946

Many generations have passed who have helped, each in his or her own way, to build and glorify their chosen part of America. The ancestors of the Simmon family chose Rural Twp., Rock Island County, Illinois. Most of them had large families who in turn can at this Bicentennial year of 1976, research and speak out for their forefathers.

There is one among the Simmon family that was not fortunate to have someone speak out for her, because she remained unmarried her entire life. Her name is Isabel Ida Simmon, better known as Belle Simmon, born March 4, 1868, daughter of Henry Jacob Simmon. She was one of the two daughters of the family of seven. She was born in Rural Twp., on the homestead farm. She was an intellectual, an artist, a secretary and a homeowner.

In the years 1890 through 1895, she taught at the school near her home, Dist. #7, later known as Dist. #87. Her pay was $30.00 per month and usually only five months to a school year. The reason for her not teaching longer was due to the possible lack of funds or lack of pupils. The census for that year showed only 21.The transfer was made for Dist. 7 to go to Dist. 4, which was the schoolhouse beside the Rural Town Hall.

The following years are slightly vague except she did attend art school at Valparaiso, Indiana, graduating with the class of 1897. She set up her own studio in Rock Island. Possibly this was not so lucrative and she must have taken some business college training because she became secretary to John P. Hand, whose offices were located in Davenport. She apparently rode the ferry each day across the Mississippi, otherwise the streetcar, known as the Bridgeline. She spent the rest of her working years with this company until Mr. Hand retired and closed his office.

Aunt Belle had always worked independently, she had her own home at 917 21st St., Rock Island. In her life, she traveled, played piano, worked with her art and had an overwhelming love for her mother. I believe she sent her a card daily and never missed a holiday card, including July 4, St. Patrick’s Day, Memorial Day. The cards were beautiful. I have a stack of them that I muse through occasionally.

During the years when our family was finishing grade school (1924), it was virtually unheard of for country parents to send their children on to higher education. They were supposed to be at an age when they would be most useful on the farm. My father, Arthur Simmon, did not see it that way so he asked Aunt Belle if and when we were ready for high school, would she take care of us. Dad promised to supply all the things from the farm plus $2.00 a week for anything needed from the store. This was plenty of money, even in 1924. One by one, the four of us descended upon her but she was very strict. We had a deadline for supper and a curfew of 9:30 PM for bedtime. We could study until 9:00 and the 30 minutes were for social and/or exercise. She was very good to us though she was strict, we all learned much from her, especially to tell time!

She was sad but proud when we finally all departed as graduates but we never forgot her. Dad and mother kept right on bringing her produce from the farm as well as canned goods that mother made. Years later I roomed and boarded with her when I worked at the Rock Island Arsenal, before my marriage. She was so happy to have one of us come back. I was treated royally, with a key to the house to come and go as I pleased.

Aunt Belle stood tall, straight, proud and physically fit until the age of 78 in November when she was forced to go to the hospital with what she thought was appendicitis. The doctor operated only to find deadly cancer. He could do nothing for her but she never knew anything other than her appendix were removed. On one of my visits during her short period in the hospital, she asked, “do you think I will be home for Thanksgiving?” And I answered, “Yes, Aunt Belle, I think you will.” and the warmth of the handclasp will always be felt. We were talking of two different homes, but it was the easiest question she could have asked me.

So in this farewell in the life of Miss Isabel I. Simmon, born March 4, 1863, she did a great share in educating the families. All the years of her life she was a very good Christian woman. She attended faithfully the Memorial Christian Church on the corner of 15th St. and 3rd Ave. in Rock Island. She walked both ways winter and summer.

Among the Rural Twp. folks in her class at Dist. #7 (87) as nearly as records show, probably were: John Wilson, Cleveland Wilson, Edna Wilson, Arthur E. Simmon, Harry McNeal, Frank Wilson, and James Dhuyvetter. There were probably others but the school records do not show the attendance prior to 1896. In this particular school, some college courses were also taught to those who cared to continue longer.

Lovingly submitted by:
Mrs. Nellie Simmon Johnson,
Her niece.

Blog/Family news/Housekeeping

The Simmon Family Weblog

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This blog is intended to be a place where some of the content that gets posted in the Descendants of Henry Peter and Eva Catherine Simmon Facebook group gets re-posted, so that people who aren’t on Facebook or who are searching for family information on Google will be able to find it.

For more regular updates and info, please join the private Facebook group, and be sure to subscribe to the annual newsletter. 

Please note this is a “sticky” post, meaning it always appears at the top of the posts page. All other posts appear in reverse chronological order below this one.