FAMILY LORE

Lore and Other Stories seeks to share the Meehan-Freeman-Anderson family history that has passed orally from generation to generation. Some Lore has been substantiated, and some has not. 

• Livas Anderson jumped from a ship in Charleston Harbor during a fire in 1821. His escape was aided by a British sailor who helped Livas onto his boat that sailed to Nova Scotia. Livas took the British sailor's name.
• Livas Anderson was never enslaved.
• Livas Anderson's wife, Mary, was of European descent.

• STORY ORIGIN: I first heard the story of Livas Anderson from my dad when I was three or four. He had a picture of Livas that I prize, and he would proudly tell the story of his great-grandfather. Saxonia Harris Shadd, an Anderson cousin from Canada, shared the same story with me. Conversations with cousins from the Dennis Meehan and Rose Meehan Speese families reveal that the story of Livas has been widely shared among family members.

• Robert Freeman drowned in Lake Erie near Rondeau Harbor in Ontario while looking for work at the docks. His death in 1867 left his five children orphans. His wife preceded him in death in about 1865.
• Robert Freeman was part Indigenous/Native American.
• Robert Freeman, born in Canada about 1819, may have been from a family of Loyalists.

• STORY ORIGIN: My dad originally shared this information with me, but it was not written down. Cousin Ava Speese Day, Rose Meehan's daughter, shared some of this information in her research notes. Finally, a Canadian historian suspected that Robert may have descended from a Loyalist family.

• Charles was born in Detroit in 1856 to Robert Meehan and Hannah Leonard.
• Robert Meehan was born in County Tipperary, Ireland. He divorced or deserted his wife and son not long after Charles was born,
• Hannah Leonard was born in County Fermanagh, Ireland about 1823. Left alone with a toddler, she left Detroit for Canada, where she met and married Samuel Hayden, a black man who lived in Ontario's Elgin Settlement (Buxton).
• All accounts of Charles's life refer to him as Irish.

• STORY ORIGIN: Bill Meehan, my dad, and his siblings claimed that Charles Meehan was Irish. He and his siblings also told of a divorce or abandonment of Hannah and Charles by Robert Meehan. Dad wrote the Irish counties of Robert's and Hannah's Irish birth locations in his record of family births. Several documents and articles report that Charles was Irish.

• Hester was born in Rondeau, Harwich Township, Ontario.
• Hester's father, Robert Freeman, had indigenous ancestry. Her Anderson grandmother was white.
• Hester and her siblings were orphaned after her mother died about 1865, and her father died a year later.
• Hester and her siblings were separated, and she was raised by Thomas Brown and Margaret Walker Brown in Buxton (Elgin Settlement), Raleigh Township, Ontario.
• Charles and Hester met when they were about eight years old. He was a friend of her adopted Brown brothers.

• STORY ORIGIN: Bill Meehan and Ava Speese Day both insisted that the wife of Livas Anderson was white.

• Osborne Perry Anderson, an abolitionist and only surviving member of John Brown's Raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, VA/WVA, was the cousin of Hester Freeman Meehan's mother, Catherine Anderson Freeman. Anderson family members and other sources substantiate the story.

• STORY ORIGIN: When Dad told me about Livas Anderson, he shared the story of Osborne Perry Anderson. Years later, Saxonia Harris Shadd shared the same story. Although the family connection has not been verified with records, more than one Canadian storyteller has reported the relationship between Osborne and Mary Anderson Smith, grandmother of Saxonia and sister of Catherine Anderson Freeman (my great-grandmother).

Bill Meehan claimed that Matthew Henson, an African-American explorer with Robert Peary at the North Pole in 1909, was an Anderson/Freeman family cousin.

• Hester Freeman Meehan was asked not to attend her daughter's wedding in 1906, presumably because her presence would have revealed that the marriage was "interracial." 
• Darker-skinned family members who visited relatives from white cultures generally entered their homes through the back door.
• Some family members lived duel lives. They were black in their neighborhoods and social encounters but white when working.

• STORY ORIGIN: These stories came from various family members and a set of documented state records.