8. RE: O'NEAL AND SORENSEN DESCENDANTS ANCESTRY

The De Lyon Inheritance

If you are the son or daughter of Dorothy de Lyon Harvey O'Neal or one of her grandchildren, this directly affects you.  Same if you are a son or grandchild of Lenora Harvey Sorensen.

Here is a daguerreotype of the de Lyon sisters in the 1850's in Savannah, Georgia.  Our ancestress is Josephine de Lyon, the youngest one shown clutching her doll.

The de Lyon family were Sephardic Jews who were being hunted and burned at the stake in Spain as "Marrano Jews".  They escaped to Portugal and were not treated much better there.

We are all descendants of Dr. Samuel Nunez, whose daughter, Esther married family friend (also with the group that escaped from Portugal), Abraham de Lyon.

A short narration of the history of Samuel Nunez follows but you can find more here and here.

Josephine de Lyon Harvey Poole, our (Dodies and my) grandmother.  She died long before we were born.

Background: The Spanish Inquisition and Marrano Jews

Official, bloody persecutions in the year 1391 were the beginning of the destruction of Spanish Jews. Jews were faced with the bitter choice: forced conversion or execution. Many Jews chose to die for their faith; while others became "Christians" in name only, secretly practicing their Jewish faith. The number of those who had embraced Christianity, in order to escape death, was very large. They were called 'Marranos' (pigs) by the Christians and Crypto-Jews by historians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrano). As the persecutions against the Jews increased, the number of Marranos grew.

The persecution was followed by the [Inquisition] which, ninety years later, was introduced as a means of finding and killing the converted Jews who still remained loyal to Judaism. The heads of the Catholic Church established a religious court, the Inquisition, where suspected Marranos were tortured to force them to confess their loyalty to their Jewish faith. All of their wealth would be confiscated, with a large reward to whoever had denounced them; and they would be burned alive publicly.

Nevertheless, the secret Jews showed wonderful tenacity and courage and continued to practice their faith in the cellars of their homes. They married only among themselves and remained faithful to the religion of their ancestors. When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain united all Christians under their rule in 1492, they were persuaded by the Inquisition to drive the Jews out of their land. In 1492, the remaining Jews of Spain were driven out of the country and many of them went to Portugal where they were heavily taxed and generally treated abysmally. A few years later, they were driven out of Portugal or forcibly converted to Christianity.

The Marranos continued to lead their lives as before, and the Inquisition had its hands full for hundreds of years afterward.

The Nunis Family Caught by the Inquisition

Such a family was the Nunez family. For many generations, this family kept up its Jewish faith in secret, and some family members met a violent death at the hands of the Inquisition. (A Clara Nunis was burned in Seville, Spain, in 1632; and in the same year, Isabel and Helen Nunis also were condemned to death for loyalty to their Jewish faith.)

One branch of the family, living in Portugal, was among the most distinguished of noble families. Although it was a little more than 200 years after the Expulsion from Spain, this family secretly still observed the Jewish religion. Born in Portugal, Diogo Nunes Ribeiro (later known as Samuel Nunis) was the head of this family who became a great physician. He was appointed Court Physician to the King of Portugal and even served as the physician to the Grand Inquisitor, also a member of the Royal Family. In addition to his services to the Royal Family, all of the nobility considered it a privilege if he attended them.

Dr. Nunis was still quite a young man when he attained success in professional and social circles. His prominence naturally created jealousy among his competitors and the Inquisition gave them an excellent opportunity of trying to get him into trouble.

Although on the surface, Dr. Nunis was as good a Catholic as any churchgoing Christian, the leaders of the Portuguese Inquisition took note of the warnings given to them by the doctor's enemies. They managed to smuggle an "agent" into the household of the Nunez family in the guise of a servant so they would be informed of what went on within the family circle.

Eventually, the agent reported that the Nunis family definitely was practicing the Jewish religion in secret. Every Saturday, they all retreated to a synagogue in an underground part of their mansion on the Tagus River in Lisbon. There they threw off their pretense of being Christians and worshiped in true Jewish fashion.

Dr. Nunez, his mother Zipporah, his wife Gracia (later known as Rebecca); their three sons Joseph, Daniel and Moses; their three daughters Rachel, Esther and Zipra; and servant Shem Noah were apprehended by the "Familiars of the Inquisition" during a Passover Service, "while seeking the Lord according to their prohibited faith."

Thrown into jail, they were tortured repeatedly and soon would have perished except for the intervention of the Grand Inquisitor. The Catholic Ecclesiastical Council reluctantly agreed to release Dr. Nunez so that he could treat the Grand Inquisitor who was afflicted with a prostate obstruction of the bladder.

There was one condition, however, which marred the happiness of the Nunez family in their release from prison. Two officials of the Inquisition were to take up residence with the Nunez family to make sure they would not practice their Jewish faith. This imposition led Dr. Nunez to contrive a daring escape plan for himself and his family.

Escape to London[edit]

Dr. Nunez hit upon a brilliant, bold idea. He arranged a Banquet and Ball to which he invited all of the important people of the city. His guests included many high-ranking officials.

One evening he was host to the captain of a British brigantine anchored in the Tagus River. When the party was in full swing, the captain invited the guests and the Nunez family (accompanied by their unsuspecting Inquisitor keepers) to visit his ship.

What the guests did not know was that a surprise awaited them. About an hour or so after they had boarded the ship, they suddenly became aware that they were moving! Yes, they were, in fact, sailing away from the shores of Portugal at full speed, heading for the friendlier shores of England. Dr. Nunez had every detail arranged with the help of his relatives, the Mendez family, one of whom married Zipra, one of the lovely daughters of Samuel and Rebecca Nunez. Dr. Nunez secretly had succeeded in selling part of his estates and possessions and had transferred the money to England through secret couriers. Thus, he had been able to enlist a British captain to bring his brigantine to the Tagus River on the night of the banquet for the surprise voyage to London in August 1726.

Once in London, Samuel and his sons underwent circumcision to identify themselves as Jewish. Diogo and Gracia remarried in a Jewish ceremony and changed their names to Samuel and Rebecca. Early in 1727, Rebecca gave birth to their seventh and last child, a son who died as an infant.

A few years later in 1733, the Nunez family was among several mainly Sephardic Jewish families from Portugal who left London for the colony of Georgia. Also joining them on the William and Sarah was a small group of Ashkenazi Jews with German origins.

London Jews had been contributing liberally to the Oglethorpe scheme, providing new homes for impoverished Christians in the new colony of Georgia. In 1732 there were 6,000 Sephardic Jews living in London having lived as Crypto-Jews, publicly practicing Roman Catholicism and secretly preserving their Jewish heritage, prior to their departure from Portugal. The Bevis Marks Synagogue, still a Sephardic Jewish congregation in London today, helped finance the trip of their congregants.

All but eight of the original 42 Jewish colonists to Georgia were among these Spanish/Portuguese Jews who had arrived in London seven years earlier. They chartered two boats and sent a total of 90 Jews to Savannah in one year. Sailing on the first of these boats was Dr. Nunez and some of his family. On their voyage, an infant died and the ship nearly wrecked off the North Carolina coast. They arrived in Savannah on July 11, 1733 - five months after General James Oglethorpe and his first 114 colonists. The other boat arrived on November 12, 1733, according to the Sheftall Diaries, a primary source document with entries from Mordecai Sheftall, a German Jewish passenger on the William and Sarah.

These Jewish colonists were the largest group of Jews ever to sail on one vessel for North America in colonial times, wrote Jacob R. Marcus in his study of The Colonial American Jew. They brought with them "a Sefer Torah, with two cloaks, and a circumcision box, which was given to them by Mr. Lindo, a merchant in London, for the use of the congregation they intended to establish." Their first order of business was to establish Congregation Mickve Israel in Savannah, the third oldest Jewish congregation in America. They also established a Jewish cemetery on Bull Street on the northern end of downtown Savannah.

When Dr. Samuel Nunez arrived in Savannah, Georgia, there was an outbreak of yellow fever and many people were dying. After this ship landed, Captain Thomas Corain, one of General Oglethorpe’s aides, wrote, "Georgia will soon become a Jewish colony." Captain Corain feared that if this news leaked out, rich Christians would not support the colony and poor Christians would not settle there. The London Trustees urged Oglethorpe to remove them. They had no legal basis for this request as Georgia’s charter permitted all persons “liberty of conscience in the worship of God” except Catholics.

General Oglethorpe almost did not allow the Jewish immigrants to land. Dr. Nunez assured Oglethorpe that he was a doctor of infectious diseases and could help the colony. The Georgia colony had lost their doctor in April of that year, William Cox, and were much in need of a physician. Oglethorpe realized here was an opportunity for good help during this epidemic in Savannah, and he let the Jewish families remain. He also knew some of these Jews had a knowledge of agriculture acquired in Mediterranean lands. He wanted to use them as tools to create in Georgia a "Mediterranean colony of wine, olive oil, silk and indigo."

Dr. Nunez’s arrival was very timely as there was an uncontrolled epidemic of "bloody flux" and "malignant fever" raging. Of the original 114 settlers, three more had died in June after their doctor's passing in April followed by four more in early July prior to Dr. Nunez's arrival. Although ten more died during July, those numbers rapidly diminished to two in August, four in September and one each during the last three months of that year.^[2]

The formal remedies at his disposal were limited and soon exhausted, but Dr. Nunez's training in botany helped him make use of indigenous plants and with great success. He used laudanum (opium) to control the "bloody flux" and lemon extract to treat the scurvy which appeared in debilitated patients. He employed ipecacuanha (emetine) empirically without knowing that it had a specific action on the amoeba histolytica. With infusions of cinchona bark (quinine), Dr. Nunez treated the "malignant fevers" considered in the medical texts of the period to originate from the evil night miasmas of the marshes (malaria =mal aria= bad air).

When his supply of chinchona bark was exhausted, Dr. Nunez used as substitutes the bark of white oak, red oak, and dogwood. He used tartar emetic to produce vomiting in patients with food poisoning, jimson weed smoked in a pipe for asthma and sassafras root tea as a "purifier of blood."^[3]

The epidemic subsided, the colonists returned to their work, and Dr. Nunez at 65 built his home and settled his family. General Oglethorpe sent to the Trustees of the Colony a report of the help rendered by the first active practitioner of medicine in Georgia who also formed Georgia's first pharmacy. The Trustees instructed him not to give the Jews land grants, but Oglethorpe ignored them. One of Dr. Nunez's sons-in-law, Abraham De Lyon who was married to his daughter Esther, was experienced in "cultivating vines and making wine." Also, being a farmer who grew peas, grain, and rice, De Lyon used his training as a viticulturist to raise "beautiful, almost transparent grapes" in Savannah from choice cuttings he brought with him from Portugal. He and the other colonists helped develop a 10-acre (40,000 m²) tract as a Botanical Garden (Trustees Garden) near the southern end of Broad at Bay Streets near the Savannah River. They introduced to the colonists foreign plants with valuable medicinal properties and developed herbs which were native to Georgia.

Playing Detective:

Dodie and I knew absolutely nothing about this until we decided to track down our family history back in the 1990's.  All we knew about our father, Leonoreon de Lyon Harvey, was that he had been born in Hempstead, Texas in 1877 and that he was named after his mother, Josephine de Lyon.  Later we learned that the name Harvey, was the name his father had changed to after arriving in Texas with the last name of Harby.  We also found out that the Harby's were also Jews and several of the Harby brothers fled from Savannah to Houston and on to Hempstead at the end of the Civil War.  Lee Harby became quite famous in Texas as you will find in a section of the Texas State History Handbook online.  

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fhaem

So now we find all of this information in Hempstead, Texas, along with stories of those 'wild Harvey boys' from whom the town had earned the nickname of Six Shooter Junction Texas.  We discovered that Leonoreon's sister, Bessie Harvey Connor had married and moved to Beaumont, Texas.  After digging everything we could find out of court records in Hempstead, we headed to Beaumont.  There we found grandchildren of Bessie's who told us about the family originating in Savannah, Georgia.

We eagerly pursued that lead and immediately went to Savannah, Georgia, where Dodie became a local celebrity.  But that deserves a post of its own in this blog.  Be sure to go on to read " Dodie becomes a local celebrity".