A month ago in Mount Union Cemetery’s Northeast section, 70-year-old Davey Hulse knelt between two flat grave markers situated side-by-side to feel the engraved names and dates.
“I was on the strip of grass between the two of them and had my hands on both of them at the same time,” he said. “The sun was shining, the air was still, it was comfortably warm.”
Buried there in the historic Philomath cemetery are Tobias and Melissa Lytle, his great-great grandparents.
A blind man from Salem who was adopted at birth, Hulse reached a significant moment on the May 18 visit in his developing connection to what he calls “blood kin.”
“The grass was well cared for, it had been recently mowed around those graves,” Hulse mentioned. “I don’t know who did that but I was very appreciative.”
Hulse will be back this weekend for a Lytle-Sherwood reunion at Philomath Museum. His biological grandmother married a Sherwood.
Explained Hulse, “If I had not been adopted, I would have been a Sherwood.”
The reunion will take place this coming Sunday, June 23, between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. at Philomath Museum. A 90-minute morning program on the Lytle family is scheduled along with an explanation on how DNA fits into the research. There will also be details shared about the life of Tobias Lytle and others.
“From like 11:30 to 2 will be an informal time — go drive by the Bethers House, go up to the cemetery, wander around, have lunch at the museum, we’re catering that in,” Hulse said.
Then at 2 p.m., a talk will begin on the Sherwood side, a family story that includes connections to an archbishop that served the Jamestown Colony in 1615 and even includes stories connected to Sherwood Forest in England, which plays into the Robin Hood legend, and ancestors that arrived in Connecticut and New York and fought in the Revolutionary War.
Other lines that fit into the reunion are Bethers, Lillard, Minton and Newton. Anyone who believes they may have a connection to the family is invited to attend.
Rik Vigeland, 63, is a Lytle family researcher whose great-great grandfather was an older half-brother to Tobias. He is among the recently discovered cousins for Hulse and amazingly lives close to him in Keizer..
“The head count is getting close to 50,” Vigeland said last week about the reunion. “I just had a call from a first cousin who left me a message this morning and said ‘we want to come’ so we’ll see how many they will bring.”
An interesting twist to the complex Lytle story is that Tobias Lytle was the grandson of an emancipated North Carolina slave named Frank Lytle Sr. DNA testing has connected family members to the West Coast of Africa and the Soninke people.
And Tobias is buried in a cemetery established during his years in Benton County in part through a land donation by a freed slave named Reuben Shipley, who wanted there to be a burial ground for Black people in addition to whites. It’s not even out of the question that Lytle knew Shipley through family-and-friend connections.
Neither Hulse nor Viegland had any idea before their respective genealogical journeys that they had African-American ancestry.
Lytle family history
Vigeland is a descendant of Luke Lytle, half-brother to Tobias. Their father, Frank Lytle Jr., had multiple marriages and fathered up to 28 children between 1818 and 1861 in North Carolina and Indiana.
“In the 1830 census in North Carolina, Frank Jr., and all of his children were enumerated as ‘free color.’ When they moved to Indiana, they crossed the color line so to speak and they were in all subsequent censuses listed as white,” said Vigeland, who first became interested in genealogy at age 14 and was around age 18 when he discovered the family’s “free color” references in his research.
Frank Lytle Sr. (1773-1869), the paternal grandfather of Tobias, was enslaved as a young man until set free in November 1794 following the death of his father and owner, Thomas Lytle. Tobias’s great grandmother had been a slave and DNA testing revealed that she may have been born to a neighboring slave owner, Vigeland said.
DNA testing also filled in other blanks.
“By the time you get to Frank Lytle Sr., he was seven-eighths European and one-eighth African,” Vigeland said. “Interestingly, that still shows up — dozens and dozens of males who think they’re white, almost all of them show 1 to 4% African (ancestry), myself included.”
DNA test results opened up several avenues, brought people together and answered some long-held questions about relationships.
For example, Vigeland created a composite of the white relatives, submitted it to a testing company with an extensive African database and received results that showed they were descendants of the Soninke people.
“Anybody today who is still African American likely has ancestors from lots of other countries and their DNA test will show five or six or eight different regions — we showed exactly one,” Vigeland said. “So all of that fits together that yeah, we had one African transported in the early 1700s.”
Leaving North Carolina
When Tobias was an infant, possibly just a year old, Vigeland said there was a large slave sale in 1829 that included 38 Lytle relatives.
Said Vigeland, “As far as we know and the county historians agree with us — that was the largest single slave sale ever in the history of Randolph County, North Carolina.”
At the time, the residents with the label “free color” had to endure various political pressures and other restrictions, including those involving marriages. Family researchers suspect the family moved to Indiana when Tobias was around 6 years old so his father could marry the woman who would become his second wife.
By the time the 1850 census was taken, Tobias could not be found in Indiana. But he had an established connection to California and Vigeland suspects he was out west during the time of the gold rush.
Tobias was well into his 40s when he married Melissa Bethers in 1873.
Vigeland said he finds it interesting that Melissa’s father, George Bethers, and maternal grandfather, Abiathar Newton, assisted Reuben Shipley in the founding of Mount Union Cemetery, where they are all buried.
“The first thing that Rik guided me to was the Abiathar Newton monolith, which is the way he described it — it was taller than me,” Hulse said about last month’s visit to the cemetery. “I can feel the etchings but it’s really difficult for me to figure out what they say in print. I was sighted until I was 7, so I know my letters. … I felt that one and thought, ‘man that is really well taken care of — there isn’t much moss on it or lichens or anything.’”
Vigeland and Hulse then walked to the location of Tobias and Melissa Lytle’s grave site.
“All of my life as an adopted child, I had the feeling that I was absolutely where I needed to be … adoption was a way of life in our family,” he said. “So when I decided to look at my matches on Ancestry (genealogy website), what I initially wanted to know was whether my birth mother had a good life.”
The journey progressed to learning about his “blood kin.”
Hulse’s own journey
Hulse was given up for adoption at birth.
“When I started looking, there was only one person that knew about me,” he said. “My birth mother had passed in 2019 so it was like the stories you read about the angst that an adopted person goes through before making contact — did all of that.”
Hulse had researched prospective blood relatives online and a new DNA match led him to make contact.
“I said to her in a message, ‘you won’t recognize my name, I was an adopted child, but I think I know how we connect,’” Hulse said to the woman, who turned out to be a half-sister. “Long story short, she contacted her mom, her mom contacted grandma and grandma said, ‘oh my God, he’s alive.’”
That reaction comes from the thought that Hulse would’ve been the right age to fight and possibly be lost to the Vietnam War — a legend that had been built up from his birth mother.
Those episodes led to Hulse falling down the rabbit hole into extensive research to find out more about his blood relatives. Vigeland was among the first contacts on the Lytle line.
“With Tobias Lytle being my great-great grandfather and nobody really knew anything about him, that fascinated me,” Hulse said. “So I really started doing the digging.”
Tobias’s life in Oregon appears to begin in the 1850s, maybe heading north after the gold rush died down. Hulse found that he had enlisted in the Army and fought in the Indian Wars at Rogue Valley in the mid-1850s. He also showed up in Jackson County records getting paid for work that he had done.
“Then five years later, he shows up driving a wagon and stagecoach with his future brother-in-law from Corvallis to Yaquina Bay,” Hulse said. “When I found out that George Bethers, Tobias’s father-in-law, had been involved in establishing Philomath College, I thought, ‘that’s leaving your fingerprint on history.’”
Bethers was a Philomath College trustee for several years before his death in 1878. The George W. Bethers House, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, dates back to 1873 and is located on the corner of Eighth and College streets.
Neighbors in 1870s Pioneer
Melissa Bethers and her second husband lived on a donation land grant at a place called Pioneer, located between Eddyille and Toledo.
“At some time or other, Tobias built a house in that area and that house was the polling place for the Pioneer precinct,” Hulse said.
Melissa and her husband divorced in the spring of 1873 and by that fall, Melissa and Tobias had married.
“Now they had been living probably within a few hundred yards of each other and Tobias was probably still driving coach and wagon and stuff back and forth,” Hulse said.
After getting married, Tobias and Melissa immediately moved to Roseburg, which was on the far end of an established mail run operated by George Bethers.
Not long after George Bethers died, Melissa, her children and other family members are listed as living in the Philomath house. However, Tobias is not listed in the household, which is a mystery.
A child in the house was Marion Lytle, who is Hulse’s great grandfather.
Tobias was a member of the Masonic Order, grange and involved in government-related activities. The Masons provided needs for his family after he died and interred his remains at the cemetery.
Hulse said he finds it fascinating that Mount Union Cemetery is the final resting place for many of his family’s forbearers.
“It was fitting that Tobias, the grandson of an enslaved man, would be buried on land donated by emancipated people,” he said in an email days after his visit to the cemetery, later adding, “This moment brought all the facts, dates, stories, conflicts and love home in a deeply personal way.”